The Conversion of Simone Weil – Claremont Review of Books

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was one of the great souls of the 20th century. Faulty in many ways, she possessed a rare and admirable sensitivity to spiritual matters. Although she came from a comfortable bourgeois family of French Jews and was a graduate of the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, she sympathized deeply with the plight of the poor. As a result, she combined teaching and political activism with (clumsy) periods of trying to work in factories or live with French farm workers. The English man of letters Malcolm Muggeridge, who deeply admired her, could not deny that her “passion to identify (herself) with the oppressed and the oppressed” contained elements of farce, given her “absent-mindedness and innate clumsiness.” But despite seeming to embody the tendency of wealthy Marxists to assuage their guilt by clumsy and often unwanted expressions of solidarity with the poor, Weil would not remain left-wing for long—at least not in any simple or unqualified sense. Unlike many of her colleagues, she had recognized early on that Marxist ideology and its rigid materialism had sinister totalitarian tendencies. And she embodied admirably a genuine, non-ideological concern for the poor and “afflicted,” as she called them.

As the Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz noted in