The Enigma of Simone Weil

Extract

Why was it that Simone Weil, with her intense desire for the truth at all costs, with her love of God, of Christ crucified and of the Mass, was yet kept outside the Church and died without receiving baptism? The answer to this question is to be found partly in the letters which she wrote to Father Perrin, the Dominican, and which were published in an earlier book, Waiting on God, and more definitely in the Letter to a Priest, which she wrote from New York a year before her death. It is not merely a personal question, because Simone Weil, though more intense in the ardour of her desire for truth and more uncompromising in its pursuit than anyone, perhaps, in our time, was yet typical of a whole generation of those who are apparently estranged from the Church or from any form of organised Christianity. She expresses the position both of herself and of many others in the opening words of the letter: ‘When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth. When I read the New Testament, the mystics, the liturgy, when I watch the celebration of Mass, I feel with a sort of conviction that this faith is mine. . . .’ She then goes on to enumerate all the reasons which keep her from the Church, about which, she says, ‘I have been thinking . . . for years with all the intensity of love and attention of which I am capable’.