Hidden Holiness

6 Holiness, Hidden, Ordinary, Yet New

chapter six Holiness, Hidden, Ordinary, Yet New Simone Weil wrote on May 26, 1942, a letter to her friend Fr. Perrin titled “Last Thoughts.”It offers typically insightful yet provocative observations about holiness in our time. We are living in times that have no precedent and in our present situation universality, which could formerly be implicit, has to be fully explicit . It has to permeate our language and the whole of our way of life. 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 also without precedent. Maritain said this, but he only enumerated the aspects of saintliness of former days, which, for the time being at least, have become out of date. He did not feel all the miraculous newness the saintliness of today must contain in compensation. A new type of sanctity is indeed a fresh spring, an invention. If all is kept in proportion and if the order of each thing is preserved, it is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny . It is the exposure of a large portion of truth and beauty hitherto 125 HIDDEN HOLINESS 126 concealed under a thick layer of dust. More genius is needed than was needed by Archimedes to invent mechanics and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvelous invention. Only a kind of perversity can oblige God’s friends to deprive themselves of having genius, since to receive it in superabundance they only need to ask their Father for it in Christ’s name. Such a petition is legitimate, today at any rate, because it is necessary . 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, as a famished child constantly asks for bread. The world needs saints who have genius , just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors. Where there is a need there is also an obligation.1 This quotation perhaps can serve as a book end, as it were, along with the short, playful poem that started the first chapter, “Saints,” by Matthew Brown. The passage is vintage.Weil, full of her brilliance and urgency, has absolute clarity but also is reluctant to spell out this new saintliness in detail . Of course, as was the case most of the time, I believe she was thinking about her own life, about herself. It would never have been too proud or presumptuous for her to think about becoming a saint. Not to do so, in Léon Bloy’s words, is the only real tragedy in a person’s life. Simone Weil, as singular and personally difficult as she was, would resonate with many of the others we have met and heard here. After all, she inhabited the same historical period as most of them, even the same countries . Though a classicist, she read many of the same authors who challenged traditional faith both in the past and in the twentieth century. She experienced firsthand,like many of them,the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II. For her, as for them, despite all sorts of foundations and certainties and civilities being shaken, even shattered, she nevertheless embraced the swirl of modernity, the rush of changes, terrors, and hopes that characterized the twentieth century many of us would come to know. Weil recognized the value of the tradition of faith in the past. But she was also herself in profound struggle with religious tradition, whether the Judaism which her family never practiced, the Christianity that surrounded her in France, and the thought of the ancient Greeks which she revered, not to mention the many more recent social and philosophical movements, including Marxism. For all her complex relationships and estrangements , ideologically and personally, she was able to glimpse what would be new and different in living the life of holiness in our time. Something of an outsider, a marginal person given to a solitary life, she kept herself outside the borders of ordinary family life and romantic connections . She rejected the ordinary career path for a top graduate of the leading school for humanities, École Normale Supériere.2 She had mystical experiences at Assisi and Solesmes, felt the presence of Christ in her heart as she recited...