Simone Weil was a woman of many afflictions. She was born a Jew in pre-World War 2 Europe with chronically poor health, eventually dying young of tuberculosis in an English sanatorium. She also seems to have had persistent bouts of anxiety. Weil was philosophically trained, a sensitive thinker, and also an agnostic. She nevertheless – like so many others – had a bracing run-in with the Church while visiting the monastery at Solesmes while listening to the monks chant.
Here are excerpts from a letter written in 1942 to her friend Father Perrin about what she considered a life-altering mystical experience. It traces a winding path from chronic migraines to monks to the English metaphysical poets:
In 1938 I spent ten days at Solesmes, from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, following all the liturgical services. I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all.
There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance — for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence — made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called “Love”. I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me…Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.
Here’s the poem in question. It’s one of Herbert’s most famous, deservedly so, and if I remember correctly comes from The Temple.
LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning 5
If I lack’d anything.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.’ 10
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’
‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’ 15
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit and eat.
Herbert’s poem is a picture of the overwhelming force of love, one that deeply affected Weil and became for her a sacred mantra. She then moved from memorizing and reciting Herbert’s poem to memorizing the Greek text of the Our Father:
Until last September I had never once prayed in all my life, at least not in the literal sense of the word. I had never said any words to God, either out loud or mentally.
Last summer, doing Greek with T-, I went through the Our Father word for word in Greek. We promised each other to learn it by heart. I do not think he ever did so, but some weeks later, as I was turning over the pages of the Gospel, I said to myself that since I had promised to do this thing and it was good, I ought to do it.
I did it. The infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time. A week afterward I began the vine harvest I recited the Our Father in Greek every day before work, and I repeated it very often in the vineyard. Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep, in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention.
Sometimes it comes about that I say it again out of sheer pleasure, but I only do it if I really feel the impulse. The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition. At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence. Sometimes, also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me.
Grace has no boundaries and it breaks through where it will. What I find so interesting, though, is that in the life of Weil a mystical experience was wont to break out through persistent attention to beauty – the plainchant of the monks, the poetry of Herbert, the power of the prose in The Lord’s Prayer. To those who are seeking truth, beauty helps us see more deeply. This is the power of art.
Reminds me of Solzhenitsyn ‘s words :
“Beauty will save the world.”
Dear Michael,
Thanks for this. Simone Weil has always interested me, but your comment about beauty seems especially well placed here. It would seem impossible to speak of beauty without the aid of Keats, and yet my own experience of it pre-dates any acquaintance with the poet and his famous lines.
Perhaps because my stunted intellect is philologically bent, I see beauty as a *language*, a truly universal one, our comprehension of which requires nothing more of us but our willingness to comprehend–not unlike love, impossible to receive in an unwilling heart. He communicates in the language of beauty, and those who have ears to hear comprehend his Word. Like Simone.
Very nicely done. Simone Weil is always a little terrifying to me. She seemed to come off the assembly line like an amalgamation of Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Marcus Aurelius, a little Marx and Lenin, little flashes of St. Catherine of Siena, and a crazy person. I imagine her holding her hand over a candle in an attempt to force a theological or philosophical breakthrough of some sort. Her God seems to be an It. Pascal’s does too—it must be Jansenism or other things you guys could explain better than me. A sort of terrifying prophetess like a scary aunt you try to avoid at a family gathering as a child. Am I way off? I’ve only read a fraction of what she’s written so I don’t know her particularly well.
I think your description of her has some validity. She was definitely fighting demons much of her life and the concept of a personal God, as she admits, became real to her very late in life. She seems to think, though, that there is a marked difference in her spiritual condition after Solesmes. I’m not expert enough on her either, though, to have pinned down if there’s a real change in her writing that reflects such an interior change.