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Reviewed by:
  • Simone Weil As We Knew Her, and: The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil
  • Clare B. Fischer
Simone Weil As We Knew Her. By J. M. Perrin and G. Thibon. Translated by Emma Craufurd. Routledge, 2003, 160 pages. $26.95.
The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. Edited By E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted. University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, 252 pages. $27.50.

Simone Weil's contribution (1909–43) to modern Christian spirituality is well known particularly for the lucidity of her expression and the depth of her quest. Equally important and increasingly recognized is Weil's theological and philosophical work. Although the French thinker and activist died when she was only 34, she left a prodigious corpus of work that has been translated, edited, and compiled in a number of anthologies over the decades. Her influence on literary figures, on liberation theologians, and political theorists is notable both for the diversity of interests in her contribution and for the interrogations her texts have inspired. Two major Weil societies were established more than three decades ago, encouraging serious engagement with Weil's ideas through annual meetings in France, the United States, and Canada. The international association publishes a journal of essays, fostering interest in and scholarship about Weil's life and work. The American Weil Society provides opportunity for presentations [End Page 992] of works in progress and focused dialogue. One of the books considered in these pages, edited by Doering and Springsted, is the product of an unprecedented collaboration of members from both societies who participated at a special gathering at the University of Notre Dame dedicated to the title of the volume, The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. The reissue of the classic testimony of Perrin and Thibon provides an excellent context for the essays in the Notre Dame volume.

Participants engaged in serious conversation agree on most of the factual detail of Weil's biography, including her birth as a French national, her exemplary performance as a university student, the profound influence of Alain on her development as a philosopher, her departure from France, and death in London. Furthermore, the recognition of her experiences as a teacher of young women at several Ecole, her year-long labors at two factories, and her brief participation at the front in the Spanish civil war generate negligible debate. But many facets of her life and her writing have been scrutinized and contested. One source of conflict in interpretation has been associated with Weil's spiritual journey in relation to religious identity: was she an anti-Semitic Jew? Did she eventually accept the sacrament of baptism? How are her experiences understood in the tradition of western mysticism? Other critics have attended to the character of her political allegiances and ideological stances: Was Weil a romantic conservative? An anarchist? Marxist? Still others have focused on her psychological "pathologies" arguing that a life of self-denial was consistent with the coroner's conclusion of death by suicide. Ironically, Weil rejected sensationalism and the reduction of ideas into "capital letters" that concealed truth. Neither of the volumes discussed here contributes to the distortions of uncritical hagiography or superficial reading of her ideas. Both volumes are the product of considered reflection and scholarship representing trustworthy friendship and disciplined reading, as Weil would have it.

It is this effort to distill and simplify Weil's person that the Perrin and Thibon "testimony" emphatically rejects. They recall, in their respective accounts of meeting with Weil ten years earlier in late 1941, a brilliant searching woman whose quest for a "universal synthesis" (5) of truth, good, and beauty was both compelling and daunting in depth. Neither author allows for hasty conclusions, and both advance an affectionate recognition of Weil's complexity and their tolerance for contradiction in her expression. Eleven short chapters by Father Perrin record his experiences as her spiritual advisor and the intensity of their conversations about the institutional Church and Weil's resistance to a complete and final commitment to Roman Catholicism. Thibon's essays, constituting both the general introduction to the volume and three compelling accounts of their exchange, add to Perrin's assurances of friendship that surpasses the geniality of...

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