A Question of Sainthood

...They will remain, I am sure, of permanent value as critiques of the aberrations men are liable to once they are in a position to improve the lot of other people by means of politics...

...a person who steps into the heart of life relying on his or her integrity and humility (the humility modifying the pride that might come from a sense of total integrity) and seeks to change it as much by presence as by action...

...I suppose all that entitles her to the saintly accolade...

...That, I would suggest, is supererogation, and it brings us to the psychological questions of sainthood...

...To begin with the contradictions, fearless action was offset in her by an almost hysterical desire for shelter...

...Her periods of overindulgence in ascetic practices were—until the circumstances of her last years made this impossible—varied by periods of recuperation in Swiss resorts and French spas...

...Nobody can deny the intellectual courage of Simone Weil's writings...

...Simone fell foul of the Communists over these issues...

...Here a comparison with a man who also inhabited the world of the French extreme Left during the '30s may be in order...

...Yet Petrement, like her friend a professional philosopher, admits that along with many other people she thought Simone Weil a saint...

...Simone Weil probably had something of this presence...

...Moreover, what she has given us is a biography that somehow manages to embrace all the elements of a hagiography, except for the miracles...

...The Simone Weil whose life course was inexorably set for an early and pathetic death was a psychopath, saint or no saint...

...It marked her later religious phase, too, when a surprising number of people were let in on the often useless sacrifices she was making in all professed humility?climaxed by her death from self-starvation that helped no one and hurt those who might have benefitted had she stayed alive...

...Yet I can see no sense in enduring the painful and unpleasant for their own sake, in deliberately starving myself when no one would benefit, in sleeping on floors—as Simone Weil did —when beds were available...

...The temptation to showmanship that afflicts every would-be saint emerged in her early days as a teacher...

...she fled from all personal contacts that became demanding and, as far as Petrement can tell, she died "the red virgin" that her critics had branded her...

...We must therefore decide whether Weil really merits the designation, and then whether we find it congenial or relevant...

...Prudhommeaux drew fire from other anarchists when he insisted on publicly discussing how anarchists fighting in Spain had produced their share of murderers...

...The saint who is of the world is inevitably beset by contradictions and by "the manifold temptations/That death alone can cure...

...The result is an indispensable study not only for those curious about Weil, but also for anyone interested in the strange relationship between the pre-World War II French independent Left and the radical fringe of Catholicism that she inhabited...

...Perhaps another definition of a saint is a person willing to sacrifice completely and courageously for the sake of others without regard for his or her own comfort or happiness...

...And despite the generosity of spirit, the sheer love that pervades the writing, she does not fail to include a great deal of the kind of evidence needed to make an objective judgment...

...author, "The Writer and Politics" this is a work of piety as well as a highly informative biography of one of the extraordinary personalities of our time...

...The only complete saints, at total peace with God, are, one suspects, the hermits, who never act but merely sit radiating the benignity of their presence and effecting miracles by osmosis...

...We are compelled to ask if there was a pathological aspect to Simone Weil's life and death...

...Simone, on the other hand, the brilliance of her analyses of modern totalitarianism on the Left and the Right notwithstanding, became a self-destructive penitent...

...Though she wanted to inspire love, she was never able to love anyone fully—either physically or emotionally...

...And intellectually, I believe, Weil was and will continue to be relevant: She asked moral questions of political radicals that had to be asked, and she tried to establish some pattern of behavior that would allow justice to be done without loss of mercy...

...Emotionally, though, I see her as trapped in a neurotic and unreasonable desire to solve the tragedies of mankind —from poverty to dying—by undergoing them herself...

...I am not sure what constitutes a saint...

...The Simone Weil who appeared in her best essays was a notable moral philosopher in the great French tradition...

...In sum, by most standards Simone Weil probably was a saint and Petrement is right in presenting her as such...

...As for the temptations, most prominent was Weil's inability to resist extreme behavior regardless of need...

...Indeed, there is no reason to doubt that she committed suicide, that the English coroner's verdict when she died in a Kentish sanitorium was correct: "The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat while the balance of her mind was disturbed...

...Knowing that if she were dismissed from one school employment was virtually certain elsewhere, she encouraged the jobless to protest and carried the red flag prominently in their processions...

...We became friends in 1947, four years after Weil's death, and I can understand what drew them together: their immersion in radical activities during the Great Depression, an involvement in the miseries of the unemployed and the persecuted, the trek they both undertook to Civil War Spain, and a common inclination to castigate the Left whenever it abandoned morality in the name of expediency...

...Weil changed only herself—and by the workings of ordinary natural laws...

...Nevertheless, for all of Prud-hommeaux's idealism and intense moral passion, he was a very well-balanced individual, enjoying the pleasures life afforded him...

...For example, she lived without heating because she believed the unemployed were similarly afflicted, and upon learning that they invariably contrived some way of keeping warm, continued to leave her stove unlit out of sheer cussedness...

...She was certainly willing to carry out sacrifices regardless of the personal cost, and she appears on several occasions to have enjoyed genuine mystical experiences...

...Andr6 Prudhommeaux, who appears in Simone Weil—she called him in her letters "my pal Prudhommeaux"—was for many years the editor of the anarchist paper Le Libertaire...

...I must confess, however, that I feel uneasy about saints, and I do not think this is entirely the reaction of I'homme moyen sensuel made to feel guilty in the face of self-abnegation...

...A radical Catholic, she depended heavily on the support of her free-thinking middle-class Jewish parents...

...Asians place a more explicit stress on the virtue of holy presence than we do: Kunden, the word Tibetans often use to refer to the Dalai Lama, means precisely "presence," and Hindus have a counterpart notion in darshan, being in the presence of a holy man...

...I—and I imagine most readers of this magazine—have been willing to undergo prolonged discomfort and disruption of my normal existence for a cause I considered just or valuable...

...otherwise the memories of so many people, Catholics and non-Catholics, would not be so haunted by the image of this frail and clumsy girl with her frequently embarrassing intensities and her stubborn insistence on self-mortification...

...In addition, she has researched painstakingly, interviewing as many witnesses as possible over a period of what must have been years...

...The author, a close friend of her subject at the ecole normale until Weil's death in 1943, has first of all kept her memories very much alive...

...The Church demands miracles, as evidence of spiritual powers strong enough to change or affect the phenomenal world...

...Yet at least some of her agonies came from not being able to understand what even those with a small amount of moral perception understood—that all action is pregnant with evil as well as good consequences...

...That, it seems to me, is what the Greeks called hubris and theologians call spiritual pride...

...Even a figure like Gandhi, hovering on the borderline between sainthood and politics, was believed capable of giving people spiritual strength via darshan...

...And Weil was torn by contradictions and temptations...