Simone Weil was a critic and a humanist, but one with a difference: she believed in God and in salvation through Jesus Christ. "Humanism was not wrong in thinking than' truth, beauty, equality are of infinite worth, but in thinking that human beings can obtain these values for himselves without grace."
In many ways Simone is an extraordinary and controversial figure. The ancient rule that saints should be admired, not imitated, may well apply to her. That is, if we may consider her a saint of some kind or other. Because certain decisions she took may seem so strange and paradoxical that they call for a special kind of understanding. But then, has the Christian Church not known such extraordinary figures as St Simon, who spent years of his life sitting on a pillar, or St Benedict Labre, who never took a bath ?
What upsets most law-abiding Christians about Simone Weil is her steadfast refusal to be baptised.
Simone was convinced that Christianity was a revealed religion. She believed in Jesus Christ and accepted Catholic doctrine as true. She loved Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites and ceremonies. After her conversion she used to attend Mass regularly and spend hours in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. In spite of all this, she did not want to enter the Church and so join the mystical Body of Christ.
She has explained her position in a number of letters. One of her reasons was that she had great difficulty in accepting the Church as an institution She knew that Christ had instituted a body of his followers and realised that some kind of social organisation was unavoidable. Yet, she could not forget the many injustices that had flown from the Church as a collective body in preceding centuries: the political wars fought in the name of religion, the persecution of heretics. the oppression of social classes. Coming in as an outsider she was also painfully aware of the many human aspects inherent in the present Church structure. ''I am kept outside the Church .... not by the mysteries themselves but the specifications with which the Church has thought good to surround them in the course of centuries.''
But she also had a more positive reason for hesitating to be baptised. She felt closely affiliated in thought and affection to large groups of humanity and to many human values which, she feared, were kept outside the realm of the Church.
''So many things are outside the Christian Church, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves, otherwise they would not be in existence. All the immense stretches of past centuries except the last twenty are among them; all the countries inhabited by coloured races; all secular life in the white peoples' countries; in the history of these countries, all the traditions banned as heretical, those of the Manicheans, and Albigenses for instance; all those things resulting from the Renaissance, too often degraded but not quite without value."
She argued that all such realities should be Catholic by right, but are excluded in present-day practice. She was convinced that God wanted her to express this Catholicity by refusing to be separated from them through baptism.
"You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visible christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive. I think I might even say more. The love of those things which are outside visible christianity keeps me outside the Church."
Such a stand may initially seem unintelligible to committed Christians. But on second thoughts it is strangely moving and has a compelling prophetic value.
It reminds us that our solidarity with all men and women and the universality of God's presence in all religious search precede our Christian faith. Simone may not have been right in denying herself baptism, she was right in pointing out the danger of cutting ourselves off from our more basic solidarity through a partisan understanding of the Church. Though outside the Church, Simone said, she hoped she was inside the Church in a different sense, or rather that she was on the threshold. She was convinced that this was where God wanted her to remain, being loyal to Christ but also loyal to his presence in people outside Christianity.
There are other realms of life in which Simone deserves to be our teacher. I am thinking especially of her wonderful discussion on christian suffering. As few other spiritual writers of our day, she has penetrated the mystery of Christ's passion and grasped the paradoxical reality of a loving God who tolerates suffering. It convinced her of Christ's divinity. "The proof for me, the thing that is miraculous, is the perfect beauty of the accounts of the passion, together with some brief passages from Isaiah and St Paul. That is what forces me to believe."
What we may not pass over in this short account of Simone and her experience of the divine, is her impassioned plea for a new kind of saint in the Church.
"Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness itself without precedent .... I think that under this or any equivalent form it is the first thing we have to ask for now, we have to ask for it daily, hourly, like a famished child constantly asks for bread. The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors."
Was Simone such a saint herself ? Perhaps, unconsciously she indicated through her life and convictions what kind of saint the world needs today.
It is useless to attempt a judgment on Simone's sanctity: as she is not likely to be canonised, such a judgment should be left to God alone. We should not make the mistake either of exaggerating her wisdom or taking all her statements as normative. Simone Weil repeatedly pointed out that her thoughts were often tentative and open to correction. "I do not know what they are worth" .... ''It is for others to decide what it is worth ...." She would have been the last to ascribe absolute value to them.
Whatever else she was, Simone was certainly a prophet, a spokesman for many others outside the Church, a true mystic and a witness for Christ. If we imitate her intellectual honesty, if we practise 'attention' as she did, we will certainly come nearer to Christ. With Simone we too may realise that ''only God is worth the gift of our total attention and absolutely nothing else.'' Attention and obedience to truth cannot fail to lead us to God.
''He (the divine Spirit) led me into a church (at Marseilles in 1942). It was new and ugly.
He said to me, 'Kneel down'.
I replied, 'I have not been baptised'.
He said: 'Fall on your knees before this place with love, as before the place where truth abides'.
I obeyed."Text from: JOHN WIJNGAARDS, Experiencing Jesus, Notre Dame, Indiana 1981.
