It can be exquisite, the idea of spiritual madness, the sensation of spiritual transcendence, but the more I read Simone Weil, the Jewish/Christian mystic the less I am sure about the “facts” of her madness (although I am certain of her experience of it) and the more I think of her life, and her death, as probably the most perfect example of possession by a story that I am ever likely to know.

The fierceness of her life, the tenacity, the arrogant humility of it, her abnegation of the self, all reach deep into the underlying assumptions about human nature coded into the Western god-story. Weil’s truly fine mind and her passionate intensity and spiritual fervor led to her death in 1943 from the long-term effects of “willful starvation,” its attendant malnutrition, bodily break down and loss of the capacity to heal. In a sense, probably without clear consciousness of the implications of her denial of her own corporeal state, Weil committed a slow kind of suicide, dying in her 34th year, dying, as it were, for her absolute absorption into the story of god that shapes the western mind.

She believed, essentially, that we are the space where god is not; that god retreated in order to create the space for its creations. That is, we are a god-void, an essential emptiness, while at the same time full of the things of the causal world. This dual state is felt to be intolerable, the void itself unbearable, yet, to fulfill our purpose—to empty ourselves and wait for god to fill us with grace—we must stop trying to fill the god-void with the human endeavor. We must endure what is unendurable. These things of causality, of the human world, to which we turn to ease the unbearable sensation of the void are what she considered the two greatest idols. These were “the self and the social.”

Born in Paris in 1909 Simone Weil was a young Jewish girl of good family during the years that broke Europe. Her parents were sophisticated, well educated, middle class French citizens. Her brother was three years older than she. He had a fair share of the family’s intellect and cultural curiosity; he favored mathematics and the wonders of the mystical East. Simone seems to have been, to some degree, following his lead. She naturally took to the ideas behind Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, and in her life and writings she seems to have assessed both Judaism and Catholicism by some of the precepts she discovered in her study of the East, but it was perhaps her exposure to the First World War as her family followed her father to his various war-time postings (he was a doctor) that focused her metaphysical interests along the tracks of both society and the individual’s responsibility within and to the world of the human—and to the divine.

She would have been only five when the war began and as a teen would have been exposed to the after-effects of the social and mental devastation that the First World War wrought amongst the people. The fact that the space between the wars could hardly be called kind to the Jews deeply affected Simone and her family both physically as well as mentally. In fact, in the last few years of her life, her parents, increasingly concerned for their joint welfare, decided to leave Europe, having already been driven from Paris to Marseille by the German invasion in June of 1940. Her parents planned to go to the United States. Simone was deeply patriotic but with little sense of how much her body would tolerate: she had organized protest marches for the workers in the Auvergne (1932); she worked in various French metal factories on the line (1932-1933), jobs physically difficult and demanding, ending her stint when she was too weak and ill to continue; she fought with the communists in Spain (1936) where she was scalded with boiling water, ending her time as a freedom fighter; Simone, who had gone to work as a field hand in rural France (1941) where she acquired pleurisy because she would not take comfort when she could.

Simone was reluctant to leave Europe but her parents would not escape without her, and she was really quite physically weak by this time (illness and migraines had been life-long companions), and so she left France with her parents in early 1942. Making their way through Casablanca to New York, the parents settled in the United States. Simone could not. She left for England in late 1942 and here she stopped. She worked for the French cause from its headquarters in London. She wrote reports for them and she wrote what was to be her final book, The Need for Roots there. All of her personal work, including what would become Gravity and Grace, Waiting on God and Oppression and Liberty were published posthumously. She died in the late summer of 1943, in a sanatorium in Kent, of the combined effects of exhaustion, repeated illness, malnutrition and general self neglect.

The concept of self-destruction was what she called decreation. For her, god created humans (and the world presumably) so that we could empty ourselves out and return, selfless, to that perfect emptiness which is god. In his introduction to Gravity and Grace Thibon, interpreting Weil’s thoughts, says that “so long as man does not consent to become nothing in order to be everything he needs idols. ‘Idolatry is a vital necessity in the cave.’ And among these idols the social one of the collective soul is the most powerful and dangerous.” The self and the social: the very things which created the human being that was Weil, allowed language to be born in the social space between her and the world which she fought to save, was for her, in the grips of this story, poison. She felt that as long as she was not a perfect vacuum that she got in the way of god’s grace—and turning to any comfort, whether this was food or the idea of a helpful, friendly god, debased spiritual energy, getting in the way of god.

Simone’s obsession was god, not church, nor really social welfare, not politics, nor the state of society. She sought in everything she did to empty herself to receive grace. She disliked the Jewish religious history, disliked the Roman Catholic Church and certainly disliked what she called the Great Beast of social control. She disliked both of the religious systems because of their behavior, their actions over history, and not because of what they had to say about the nature of god and human. She attended Mass; she sought god vigorously all through her adulthood. In 1938 she had a mystical experience in a church in which “Christ came down and possessed her.” But she was not a Christian; she refused baptism.

She was a mystic, caught in a time of broken and breaking people and her story of what her experiences and life means reflect that social contingency. She was obsessed by god and she was a woman of her time. She believed that “duty is given us in order to kill the self” but she also believed that

It is not surprising then that she did not fear death, or even that she seemed to court it. “To die does not commit one to anything, if one can say such a thing; it does not contain anything in the nature of a lie…at present I have the impression that I am lying, whatever I do, whether it be by remaining outside the Church or by entering it. The question is to know where there is less of a lie.” She could see, I suspect, that the self and the social world were stories but to her that meant that they were lies. This is because her god-story tells her that there is only one perfect truth, and her meticulous and fervent mind realized that this perfect truth was alien to everything it meant to be a living human being. The only way out of this quandary, without giving up the god-story, is to give up what it means to be human. This is why I say that the story possessed her and why I say god obsessed her. She sought truth; she could feel in her mysticism, the resonant emptiness underlying life but her interpretation—her storying—of that emptiness followed the guidelines of the god-story of the Western world. In other words, she felt she had to make a choice between the truth of her living experience and the truth of the story. She could not hold both truths and learn how to walk life inside the contraction, because she could not tolerate the idea that the god-story was in fact a story.

She said: “To love truth means to endure the void, and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.” So she died at the age of 34. Death is sometimes easier than living. Committing to the idea of life, it is perhaps one of the greatest challenges faced by someone who has grown into the world shaped by this particular brand of god-story.