Solesmes Abbey
Simone Weil was educated at a number of schools, eventually studying philosophy and then going on to teach the subject. She aligned herself with various leftist causes, sympathizing with the plight of the workers, and between 1934-1936 worked in factories, including the Renault car factory so as to understand the conditions and be alongside the workers. Becoming ill with pleurisy she was brought back home by her parents to recover. She travelled to Spain in 1936 to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but stepped in a pot of boiling oil and badly burned had to return to France.
In her Spiritual Autobiography, part of a correspondence with her spiritual director Fr Perrin, Simone Weil writes about her back story and how she has been led to her deep religious truths. Around 1937, she became seriously religious. While visiting St. Francis Chapel in Assisi she felt for the first time in her life an uncontrollable impulse to kneel. The next spring, attending Holy Week services at Solesmes Abbey (she was drawn by the beautiful Gregorian chanting there), Weil experienced one of the most formative events of her life. She was suffering from an excruciating headache. By an effort of extreme attention, however, she writes, she “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 worship”.
A young Catholic Englishman introduced Weil to the work of the sixteenth-century metaphysical poet George Herbert, and Weil reported that during a recitation of Herbert’s ‘Love bade me welcome,’ Christ ‘came down and took possession’ of her. It was from the same young man that she gained her ‘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.’ While Weil was deeply attracted to the Catholic faith, she found the institutional church problematic, and it is unclear that she was ever baptized.
In 1941, Weil continued her ascetic disciplines and worked in a vineyard of southern France, living near the writer and philosopher Gustave Thibon, and getting to know Fr Perrin. Her parents brought her to the United States in May of 1942 for safety during World War II. Yet Weil yearned to aid those fighting in WW2 and looked for an opportunity to return to Europe. In November of that year, she travelled by sea to England to serve the French provisional government there. Her long trip to England probably contributed to her contracting tuberculosis in April of 1943. She was prescribed rest and hyper nutrition, but refused to eat much at all and on August 24, 1943, she died in a sanatorium in Kent. The coroner called her death a suicide. Part of the certificate read: “The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.”
The way she died reflects her attitude to food throughout her adult life – she ate very little imposing a life of food deprivation on herself. A psychotherapist might suggest that Weil suffered from anorexia nervosa. One commentator writes: “I am persuaded that Weil expressed an experience which was similar to that which anorexic girls express. But she transformed it.”
It is clear that for Weil eating became deeply connected with religious imagery, and this psycho-spiritual connection is explored in the next post.
A brief over view of Weil’s philosophy is described in this you tube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-8uvrcPkTk