Chapter Ten - Simone Weil: Eucharistic Sacrifice – Exploring a Metaphor

Summary

My interest in Simone Weil (1909–1943) in this chapter is not primarily in her very many merits, but in what helped to bring her to her death. I would not deny that she was one of the great minds of this century, and that whatever she wrote, whether for publication or for her own needs, is marked by her own inimitable authority. We can rely on argument for her merits from writers as different as Professor D. Allen, with his critique of that egocentrism which infects our culture, and is at odds with Christianity's doctrines of co-inherence in their many forms; and Professor D. Z. Phillips, not least with regard to her hunger for the transcendent.

We may recall that terrible prayer she wrote towards the end of her life1 though she did insist to herself that one could not voluntarily demand what the petitions were for, that such prayer was despite oneself, though with consent, entire and without reservation, a movement of the whole being. The prayer included a petition to the Father to grant her in the name of Christ, ‘That I may be unable to will any bodily movement, or even any attempt at movement, like a total paralytic. That I may be incapable of receiving any sensation, like someone who is completely blind, deaf, and deprived of all the senses. That I may be unable to make the slightest connection between two thoughts […]’ She asked for will, sensibility, intelligence, love to be stripped away, ‘devoured by God, transformed into Christ's substance, and given for food to afflicted men whose body and soul lack every kind of nourishment. And let me be a paralytic – blind, deaf, witless, and utterly decrepit’.

At the very least, she is one of those who skip certain levels of contemplative religious development and start with ‘Passionist’ manifestations. Someone operating at this level presents themselves as a total physical sacrifice to the destructive elements of the world, rather than ‘hitting back’: and it is worth noticing that the next level is what Margaret Masterman identified as the ‘Hostic’ level, ‘only sacramentals portrayed’ at which the saint desires not only to be killed but eaten. And indeed we find Simone Weil noting: ‘To live the death of a being is to eat him.