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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2022
This article examines biblical allusions in Simone Weil's “On the Right Use of School Studies,” in which she argues that study can train our attention to God and neighbor. Focusing on Weil's use of Jesus' teachings that mention bread, meals, and table service, this article reveals an underlying theme of Eucharist (communion) in Weil's essay on study. Together with Weil's comment that studies are “like a sacrament,” this analysis suggests that Weil offers a “eucharistic pedagogy” shaped by her mystical theology of Eucharist, a theology itself shaped by George Herbert's English-language poem “Love.” Throughout, the article compares Weil's original French with its English translation, noting where the translation obscures her use of the Bible or her theology, and it also examines the Greek biblical text, since Weil read the New Testament in its Greek original. The article concludes with a critique of Weil's educational vision, which relies on a dyadic vision of eucharist, and suggests that a communal vision of eucharist can support a social vision of education.
1 When citing “On the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” in English, I use the version that appears in Weil, Simone, Waiting for God (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2009)Google Scholar. When citing her essay in French, I use the version that appears in Weil, Simone, Premiers Écrits Philosophiques, French ed., vol. 1, Oeuvres Complétes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988)Google Scholar.
2 See Roberts, Peter, “Attention, Asceticism, and Grace: Simone Weil and Higher Education,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 10, no. 3 (July 1, 2011): 315–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rytzler, Johannes, “Turning the Gaze to the Self and Away from the Self: Foucault and Weil on the Matter of Education as Attention Formation,” Ethics and Education 14, no. 3 (July 3, 2019): 285–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970)Google Scholar.
3 See Kent Eilers, “Simone Weil on Study, Prayer, and Love,” Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion blog, August 8, 2018, https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2018/08/simone-weil-on-study-prayer-and-love/; Jessica Hooten Wilson, “Simone Weil's Christian Approach to Education,” The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal blog, February 1, 2019, https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/02/simone-weils-christian-approach-to-study-and-education/.
4 To my knowledge, Christine Ann Evans offers the only sustained discussion of Weil's use of biblical parable in Evans, Christine Ann, “The Power of Parabolic Reversal: The Example in Simone Weil's Notebooks,” Cahiers Simone Weil 19, no. 3 (1996): 313–24Google Scholar. Thomas Nevin briefly discusses Weil's use of Scripture, noting her preference for the Gospel of John (Nevin, Thomas, Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-Exiled Jew (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 274–75.Google Scholar) Endre J. Nagy describes Weil's preference for the New Testament, arguing that her prejudice against the Old Testament limited her understanding of Jewish religious resources for political action; Nagy, Endre J., “Simone Weil: The Mystical Ascetic,” European Journal of Mental Health 5, no. 2 (2010): 181–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Robert Chenavier also discusses Weil's dismissal of the Old Testament, seeing in it a “distortion in Weil's method,” a refusal to bring her usual “intelligence and love” to Judaism; Chenavier, Robert, Simone Weil: Attention to the Real, trans. Doering, Bernard E. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 53–54, 56–59Google Scholar.
5 See Kotva, Simone, “Gilles Deleuze, Simone Weil and the Stoic Apprenticeship: Education as a Violent Training,” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 7–8 (2015): 101–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yvana Mols, “Weil, Truth, and Life: Simone Weil's Pedagogy as Auto-Philosophical Therapy of the Soul” (master's thesis, Institute for Christian Studies, 2007); Kazuaki Yoda, “Simone Weil on Attention and Education: Can Love Be Taught?” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014); Bingemer, Maria Clara Lucchetti, “Theology as an Intellectual Vocation: Some Thoughts on the Theo-Logical Vision of Simone Weil,” International Journal of Public Theology 6, no. 1 (January 2012): 37–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; von der Ruhr, Mario, Simone Weil: An Apprenticeship in Attention (London: Continuum, 2006)Google Scholar; Rytzler, “Turning the Gaze to the Self and Away from the Self.” The scholarly commentary on her essay in the French Oeuvres Complétes simply notes her references to the gospels in several places, without explication; Weil, Simone, Premiers Écrits Philosophiques, French ed., vol. 1, Oeuvres Complétes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 255–62, 548–49Google Scholar.
6 Hollingsworth, Andrea, “Simone Weil and the Theo-Poetics of Compassion,” Modern Theology 29, no. 3 (July 2013): 203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Leslie A. Fiedler, introduction to Waiting for God by Simone Weil (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2009), xviii. Fiedler explains that Weil's use of myth reflects her apprenticeship to Plato, as well as “her conviction that the archetypal poetries of people everywhere restate the same truths in different metaphoric languages,” and “her sense of myth as the special gospel of the poor” (xxix). Marie Chabaud Meaney has elucidated Weil's Christological interpretations of ancient Greek myths; Meaney, Marie Chabaud, Simone Weil's Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretation of Classic Greek Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008)Google Scholar. Cristina Mazzoni has explored Weil's use of folklore and myth, noting that Weil believed these stories function like scriptural parables. See Mazzoni, Cristina, “The Beauty of the Beast: Fairy Tales as Mystical Texts in Simone Weil and Cristina Campo,” Spiritus 11 (2011): 157–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Simone Kotva sees this assumption as a reflection of Weil's occultism. See Kotva, Simone, “The Occult Mind of Simone Weil,” Philosophical Investigations 43, no. 1–2 (December 2019): 122–41Google Scholar.
8 Weil, Simone, Waiting for God (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2009), 127Google Scholar.
9 Weil, Waiting for God, 23.
10 Weil, Waiting for God, 23.
11 Weil, Waiting for God, 27.
12 Balla, Borisz De, “Simone Weil, Witness of the Absolute,” Catholic World 179, no. 1070 (1954): 101Google Scholar.
13 Judith Van Herik, “Looking, Eating, and Waiting in Simone Weil,” in Mysticism, Nihilism, Feminism: New Critical Essays on the Anti-Theology of Simone Weil, ed. Thomas A. Idinopulos and Josephine Zadofsky Knopp (Johnson City, TN: Institute of Social Sciences and the Arts, 1984), 59.
14 Van Herik, “Looking, Eating, and Waiting in Simone Weil,” 59.
15 Evans, “The Power of Parabolic Reversal,” 324.
16 Hellman, John, Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982), 78Google Scholar. Hellman writes, “With her strong feelings about the wisdom and virtue of the Greeks and the perverseness of the Romans, she could not wholly embrace the writings of the Fathers of the Church, or even of Paul, with the same rapture with which she encountered the word of Christ” (78–79).
17 Loades, Ann, “Eucharistic Sacrifice: Simone Weil's Use of a Liturgical Metaphor,” Religion & Literature 17, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 46Google Scholar.
18 I offer sincere thanks to Marie Meaney for personally verifying how little research discusses Weil's use of the New Testament and for her encouragement in this project.
19 Weil, Waiting for God, 58.
20 Weil, Waiting for God, 58.
21 Already we can hear echoes of the New Testament. The apostle Paul claims that Christians are saved “by grace through faith” (Ephesians 2:8-9)—an idea developed by Protestant Reformers into “sola fide,” or “faith alone.” Weil's image of a “stormy faith” also echoes Jesus’ description of the life built on his teachings as a house built on rock that stands amid torrents (Luke 7:24-25).
22 Weil, Waiting for God, 58.
23 Weil, Waiting for God, 24, 58–59.
24 All English Bible translations from here forward are from the New International Version, chosen because it renders the Greek New Testament verb γρηγορέω as “keeping watch” rather than being “alert.”
25 Weil, Waiting for God, 29. In the section of her commentary on “daily bread,” she writes, “Christ is our bread. We can only ask to have him now. Actually he is always there at the door of our souls, wanting to enter in, though he does not force our consent” (Weil, Waiting for God, 146). She interprets “bread” as signifying all “sources of energy” that come to us from outside ourselves and comments, “There is a transcendent energy whose source is in heaven, and this flows into us as soon as we wish for it … We should ask for this food. At the moment of asking, and by the very fact that we ask for it, we know that God will give it to us” (Weil, Waiting for God, 147). In saying, “We know that God will give it to us,” Weil links the Lord's Prayer to Jesus’ saying about fathers giving bread instead of stones.
26 Weil's fascination with food and eating is well established, including her concern for others’ lack of food, her habit of eating very little, and her distinction between “looking” and “eating.” See Irwin, Alec, “Devoured by God: Cannibalism, Mysticism, and Ethics in Simone Weil,” CrossCurrents 51, no. 2 (2001): 257–72Google Scholar; Herik, Van, “Looking, Eating, and Waiting in Simone Weil”; Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 297Google Scholar; Fiedler, “Introduction,” in Irwin, Alec, “Le Chrétien Comestible. Nourriture et Transformation Spirituelle Chez Simone Weil,” Autres Temps 62 (1999): 40–50Google Scholar.
27 Snyder, Graydon F., “Judaism and Christianity in First-Century Rome,” in The Interaction with Jews and Non-Jews in Rome, ed. Donfried, Karl P. and Richardson, Peter (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1998), 69–90Google Scholar.
28 Weil, Simone, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Rees, R. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 289Google Scholar.
29 Wolfteich, Claire, “Attention or Destruction: Simone Weil and the Paradox of the Eucharist,” Journal of Religion 81, no. 3 (July 2001): 363CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 See Loades, “Eucharistic Sacrifice” for a further exploration of Weil's view of the Eucharist as contemplation of suffering and sacrifice.
31 Weil, Waiting for God, 59. The commentary in the Oeuvres Complétes indicates that Weil took the tale from Knud Rasmassen's 1929 Du Greenland au Pacifique. See Weil, Premiers Écrits Philosophiques, I:548. Like the son asking his parent for bread, here is another figure who is hungry, now not only for food, but also for the light that would allow him to find food. In Weil's telling, Crow has not seen light, but he longs for it. As he desires it, it appears. This same tale of Crow appears in Weil's notebooks, where she records quotations about Eskimo culture and refers to Crow as the “most intelligent” of creatures; Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills, vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 589–92. French intellectual Georges Bataille met Weil in her twenties and described her “always black, black clothes, raven's wing hair, pallid skin …”; Gray, Francine du Plessix, “At Large and At Small: Loving and Hating Simone Weil,” The American Scholar 70, no. 3 (2001): 6Google Scholar.
Biographer Palle Yourgrau likewise calls her “the raven, with her black cape covering her body from head to toe,” who “kept apart from” others; Yourgrau, Palle, Simone Weil (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 88Google Scholar.
32 Jean Vianney (1786–1859) was a French parish priest known for the transformative effects of his ministry, now the patron saint of parish priests. As a youth, he had to practice his Catholic faith secretly amid the French Revolution. Desiring to be a priest, Vianney struggled through his early years to finish his studies, which were constantly interrupted by the Napoleonic wars and illness. In his persistence, Vianney modeled attentive study and longing for God, developing remarkable spiritual discernment; Rutler, George, The Curé d'Ars Today: St. John Vianney (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1988)Google Scholar. See also Trochu, Abbé Francois and Graf, Dom Ernest, The Curé d'Ars: St. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2013)Google Scholar. In his sense of personal mediocrity, his secret faith, his experience of war and physical weakness, and his mystical powers of discernment, he serves as a cipher for Weil herself. Vianney allows her to offer a human—and Christian—model for the journey she commends, without referring to herself.
33 Weil, Waiting for God, 60.
34 Weil, Waiting for God, 62.
35 Weil, Waiting for God, 62.
36 When insight comes, it is a “fragment” of the “unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared, ‘I am the Truth’” (a reference to Christ's claim in John 14, “I am the way, the truth, and the life”).
37 Weil, Waiting for God, 63.
38 A parallel to this section of her essay appears in “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” where she writes, “In the parables of the Gospel, it is God who seeks man”; Weil, Waiting for God, 2009, 127. She offers examples: “The role of the future wife is to wait. The slave waits and watches while his master is at a festival. The passer-by does not invite himself to the marriage feast, he does not ask for an invitation; he is brought in almost by surprise; his part is only to put on the appropriate garment. The man who has found a pearl in a field sells all his goods to buy the field; he does not need to dig up the whole field with a spade in order to unearth the pearl; it is enough for him to sell all he possesses” (128).
39 Weil, Waiting for God, 63.
40 The English translation makes the reference clearer by capitalizing “Bridegroom.” The French reads: “la lampe bien garnie d'huile, attend son époux avec confiance et désir.”
41 Luz, Ulrich, Matthew 21-28, trans. Crouch, James E. (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 178Google Scholar.
42 Luz, Matthew 21-28, 184.
43 Luz, Matthew 21-28, 184.
44 Luz, Matthew 21-28, 235ff.
45 Luz argues for “torches,” but Weil seems to have understood it as “lamps” (Luz, Matthew 21-28, 229).
46 Luz, Matthew 21-28, 232.
47 Luz, Matthew 21-28, 232.
48 Luz, Matthew 21-28, 219.
49 Weil, Waiting for God, 63.
50 The image of the someone knocking on a door also appears in Matthew 24:33, James 5:9, and Revelation 3:20.
51 The New Testament includes other passages where servants await masters. In Matthew 24:45-47, a wicked servant takes advantage of his master's long absence, beats his fellow servants, and “begins … to eat and drink with drunkards” (verse 49). That is, in contrast to the servant who faithfully served and was then served by the master, the wicked servant serves himself. When the master returns, the servant is punished. Another master–servant scene appears in Matthew 25:14-30, the Parable of the Talents, and in slightly different form in Luke 19:11-27.
52 Weil, Waiting for God, 128.
53 Weil, Waiting for God, 25–26.
54 Weil, Waiting for God, 63.
55 I thank Etienne Achille for offering this wording, as well as Rachel Smith and Brett Grainger for weighing in on this question of French translation.
56 In her papers, Weil writes a little story of a stranger, presumably Christ, who invited her to follow, “bade me be seated,” and who gave her bread and wine; Weil, Simone, The Notebooks (London: Routledge, 1976), 638Google Scholar. Ann Loades ponders whether this is Weil's “attempt in prose to re-express Herbert's poem “Love.” See Loades, “Eucharistic Sacrifice,” 47.
57 Herbert, George, The Temple (Westminster, MD: Penguin Classic, 2018)Google Scholar.
58 Diogenes Allen notes, Herbert's poem is “an allusion to the final banquet in heaven, as found in Luke 12.37, in which there is much rejoicing.” See Allen, Diogenes, “George Herbert and Simone Weil,” Religion & Literature 17, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 28Google Scholar.
59 This is symbolically the case even in Protestant traditions that do not confess transubstantiation.
60 Weil, Waiting for God, 63.
61 Bovon, François, Luke 2: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 9:51-19:27, trans. Deer, Donald S. (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2013), 497Google Scholar.
62 Chenavier, Simone Weil, 64.
63 Weil's reference to a master who loves his servants invokes other New Testament passages of reversal. In Luke 22:26-27, Jesus urges his disciples to serve one another, saying, “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” In John 13, Jesus dresses himself as a servant and washes their feet. After doing so, he mentions servants and masters and asks his disciples to wash one another's feet. In John 15:12-17, Jesus speaks of himself as changed from his disciples’ master into their friend who loves them and tells them they will “bear fruit.” In Philippians 2, Paul writes, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.” The hymn then refers to Christ, who “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God highly exalted him to the highest place.”
64 This is deeply problematic in the context of actual oppressive situations. As Van Herik notes, Weil's work tends to glorify “the situation which contemporary feminists find so cruelly limiting to living women”; Van Herik, “Looking, Eating, and Waiting in Simone Weil,” 80. Weil's larger project can frame such statements with her conviction that slavery is a crime.
65 Weil, Waiting for God, 64.
66 Weil, Waiting for God, 64.
67 Joshua J. Mark, “Grail Legend,” in Ancient History Encyclopedia, April 16, 2019, https://www.ancient.eu/Grail_Legend/.
68 The translation “What are you going through?” is poignant but not sufficiently strong.
69 Weil's adaptation of Parzival resonates with Jesus’ depiction of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. The parable tells of a judgment scene in which a king declares that whatever the faithful did for “the least of these,” they did to the king. Food and drink appear here also: the faithful fed the hungry and gave drink to the thirsty, without knowing whom they served. Suffering ones are mysteriously the king in disguise or his representatives. Like the Grail-seeker who receives the grail by attending to the wounded king, the faithful in Jesus’ parable are rewarded for serving a God they did not know was there. Likewise, in study, we may cultivate a capacity for love without knowing it, simply by desiring and waiting on truth.
70 Weil, Waiting for God, 65.
71 This seems to be the way she recalled the gospel text because it appears again in “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” (Weil, Waiting for God, 128).
72 Osborne, Kenan, Community, Eucharist, and Spirituality (Ligouri, MO: Ligouri Publications, 2007)Google Scholar.
73 Dykstra, Craig and Bass, Dorothy C., “Times of Yearning, Practices of Faith,” in Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, ed. Bass, Dorothy C. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2019), 8–9Google Scholar.
74 Rasmussen, Larry, “Shaping Communities,” in Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2019), 128Google Scholar.
75 Bieler, Andrea and Schottroff, Luise, The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 127Google Scholar.
76 McGann, Mary E., The Meal That Reconnects: Eucharistic Eating and the Global Food Crisis (Collegeville, MN: Order of St. Benedict, 2020)Google Scholar.
77 Smith, Joanmarie, Teaching as Eucharist: Take, Thank, Bless, Break, Give (Totowa, NJ: Catholic Book Publishing Corporation, 1999)Google Scholar.
78 Uelman, Amy, Masters, Thomas, and James, Michael, Education's Highest Aim: Teaching and Learning through a Spirituality of Communion (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
79 Walton, Julie A. P. and Walters, Matthew, “Eat This Class: Breaking Bread in the Undergraduate Classroom,” in Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2011), 80–101Google Scholar.