My Take on Simone Weil

I'm a Christian who doesn't believe in God.

I keep the morals I grew up with and I throw out the magic. I don't think God exists. I don't think Jesus was the son of anything - I think he was a man, probably one who came to believe what people kept telling him about himself, and a revolutionary whose teaching changed the moral shape of the world without a single miracle needing to be real. I read the Gospels for what's usable and I leave the supernatural on the page.

I read Simone Weil the same way.

That matters, because Weil is a mystic all the way down. God, grace, the soul's contact with something past the world. So what follows is me doing to her what I already do to the religion she's writing inside: keeping what survives once you stop believing in the magic.

I'm not a scholar. I came to her because she put words to something I'd been trying to name on my own - how people get ground down and looked past, and what it would take to actually see them. I read her for the parts I can use.

Attention

The first thing I keep, and the thing I hold longest, is what she calls attention. She means something close to waiting: you go quiet and empty and let the thing in front of you arrive, instead of forcing it. She thought this was why study matters at all - that working at a hard problem trains the attention itself, whatever the subject, whatever the grade. A geometry problem you never solve still builds it.

And the training has a target. The attention you build on the problem is the same one you turn on a person. She says loving your neighbour comes down to being able to look at someone in trouble and ask what they are going through - to see them as a person and not a case. I'd been circling that for a long time before I found her saying it straight.

What surprised me is that she didn't need me to pull her out of the church to use it. She says it herself, that this attention to the suffering holds apart from any religious belief. On the one idea I lean on hardest, she walked toward me.

For Weil the attention is good in itself, because it points at God, even when it changes nothing. I can't go there. I build things. The attention matters because of what it does - it lets you see the person the system flattened, and the seeing is what protects them. Attention that helps no one is half a thing.

Gravity

Her other half is gravity. People fall toward the worst of themselves the way a stone falls, by a kind of law, with no malice in it. The strong lean on the weak with no more cruelty than water has running downhill. We pull back from someone in real need almost before we've decided to, the way you flinch from something. That is the most clarifying thing she gave me, because it means the cruelty I write about is mostly not villainy. The systems that crush people are gravity with the friction taken out - they take a flinch we already have and make it efficient.

She also names the trap I keep hitting: the low motives have more staying power than the high ones. Cruelty and self-interest refill themselves; mercy runs out. One act of kindness can cost everything you have while a system of indifference costs nothing to keep running.

For Weil the one thing that beats gravity is grace, and grace comes from outside, from God. I don't have her God. If the strength to be good has to come from outside the worn-out person, and there is nobody above to send it, then it comes from the people beside them. The crowd is the secular version of her grace - other people are what refill you when you've got nothing left. Grace we make ourselves, on purpose, because it's the only kind there is.

Camus

This is where she runs into Camus, and it's the part I think about most.

Camus said the real question is whether to leap. The world gives you no meaning, and you can kill yourself, or take the leap of faith that sneaks the meaning back in - and he called that leap a dodge, a way of refusing to look at the thing straight. The honest path is to stay in front of the meaninglessness and keep going without pretending it's something else.

Weil leaps. Her whole answer to gravity is grace from past the world. By Camus's measure that's the dodge - the most beautiful version of it, and still a way of not staying in the room.

Take the leap out of Weil and you're left with her diagnosis and none of her cure. That's where I want to stand: you see how heavy it all is, you don't reach for the comfort, you keep going.

But I don't stop where Camus stops either. His version is one man alone, keeping his dignity by refusing to pretend. That isn't enough, because gravity doesn't come for people one at a time. It comes for them by the million, through the way things are built. So the answer can't be one defiant man on a hill. It's a man who organizes. You don't wait for grace, you build the thing that spreads the weight, and you build it knowing it might not be enough. Doing it anyway, without the guarantee, is the whole point.

Affliction

This is where I break from her hardest, and the break is why my own thinking has "humanist" in front of it.

Her account of affliction - the deep kind, the sort that doesn't just hurt but takes a person apart - is the best I've read. She sees that it collapses your sense of time until you can't picture it ending, that it turns you against yourself, that it makes people recoil from you exactly when you need them most. I keep all of it. It's the most exact description I've found of what the systems I write about actually do.

Then she does the thing I refuse. She gives affliction a use. For her it's a way through to God, and she's careful to call it a use and not a cure, because she isn't trying to end it. She's trying to make it holy.

No. Keep the description, refuse the use. A person being crushed doesn't need their pain to mean something - they need the weight off them. Telling the suffering that their suffering is meaningful is the oldest trick the comfortable have ever run, because a meaning is cheaper than a change. The work is the change. Affliction is real, it can be described exactly, and most of what causes it was built by people and can be taken apart by people. Refusing to make suffering holy, and going after its causes instead, is the humanist part. I make it against the writer I learned the most from.

And I say it from the floor. Weil spent a year in the factories in 1934 and 1935, a philosopher on leave to feel what the work does to a person. I work at Costco while I build sovereign cloud infrastructure. She chose the floor and could leave it whenever she wanted. I'm there because rent is due, which earns me nothing. But it does mean that when she writes about what gets done to workers, I'm not reading her from a desk.

Where she troubles me

I'm not going to clean her up.

Weil was hostile to Judaism in a way that crosses into something ugly, which is its own dark thing given she came from a Jewish family. The same mysticism I find beautiful in the writing on attention can harden, in the writing on affliction, into something that sounds like a reason to endure what should never be endured - the quietism I just spent a section refusing. And her promises can't be tested: wait in the dark, she says, and a light in proportion to your waiting will come. There's no way to check that, and no way to hold her to it.

I read her anyway, as a reader and not a believer.

What I keep

In the end I do to Weil what I do to the religion she belongs to.

I keep the moral core - attention, the face, the honest map of why doing right is so heavy - and I leave the God who is supposed to make sense of it. She points everything up, toward a grace that comes down from above and a suffering that gets redeemed somewhere out of sight. I point it sideways, at other people, because that's the only direction I can stand behind.

She would tell me I stopped one step short of the real answer. I'd tell her the last step, the one up to God, is the one that lets the world off the hook - it takes the weight that people put on other people and hands it to heaven to sort out. I keep her diagnosis and I keep her attention, and I spend them down here. That's the same argument I have with the faith I was raised in. Weil is only where I have it most clearly.

Sources

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. First published 1950 as Attente de Dieu. The attention material and "what are you going through?" come from the essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God" in this volume.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. First published 1947 as La Pesanteur et la grâce, edited by Gustave Thibon. Gravity, affliction, and "a use, not a cure" are from here.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien. First published 1942 as Le Mythe de Sisyphe. The leap, philosophical suicide, revolt, and Sisyphus.