Simone Weil and her brother

Carl Jung’s thinking on individuation and the importance of the second half of life doesn’t hold when someone’s life ends before middle age. In the next couple of posts there are reflections on the life of Simone Weil, who died aged 34. The focus is on how her emotional disturbance affected her religious beliefs – for good and for ill.

For some people, epiphanies and experiences can propel them very quickly into a life that had not been imagined, either for them, or by them. The extraordinary account of the life of Simone Weil is an example. She was born in Paris in 1909, and died in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent in 1943. Reading about her life there are varied and highly conflicting interpretations – not so much about what she did, but about the meaning of what she did – interpretations ranging from saintliness to insanity. Indeed, she was someone characterised by contradictions. One biographer writes, ‘she was as illuminating in her thought and in her quest for spiritual purity as she was unrelenting in her need for martyrdom.’

It seems that from a young age Weil felt that as a person of privilege she was then part of the problem of injustice and oppression. Her apparently loving parents (whom she too apparently loved), were Jewish agnostics, and could not understand her constant attempts even as a young child to immolate herself for the love of a God she believed in. For example, at the age of five she refused to eat sugar, as long as the soldiers fighting on the front during WW1 were not able to get it. The idea of denying herself what the most unfortunate were unable to enjoy stayed with her all her life. A little later in her childhood, according to one account of her life, she declared she would no longer wear socks whilst the children of workers had to go without.

‘Throughout her career, there was to be a touch of the absurd in her efforts to identify herself utterly with the lost exploited groups in society … and being continually “rescued” from the suffering she sought by parents and friends’.

At fourteen, she felt pushed towards suicide by a sense of her own absolute unworthiness. This was compounded by migraines that became very intense and never seemed to leave her, and that she felt were a physical manifestation of her inmost misery. She later thought that her headaches, intensified by the physical hardships she pursed, were some sort of special gift. She felt that intimations of Divine Love came to her strained through the ever-present pain which attacked her, she said, ‘at the intersection of body and soul.’

It’s hard to understand why she felt quite so self-destructive, and whilst framing it within religious fervour. It’s been suggested that her sense of inferiority came from comparing herself with her brilliantly clever brother. Apparently, Weil never forgot what a visitor to her mother said, when Weil was quite young and commenting on the brother and sister:

‘“One is genius itself”, the woman had said pointing to the boy, and then indicating Simone, “the other beauty!” it is hard to say whether she was more profoundly disturbed by the imputation of a beauty she did not possess, or by the implicit denial of genius. … forever afterward, she did her best to destroy what in her was “beautiful” and superficially charming …’

Weil wrote towards the end of her life that she could never read the parable of the ‘barren fig tree’ without a shudder, seeing in it some semblance to herself, naturally impotent ‘and yet somehow, in the inscrutable plan of God, cursed for that impotence.’