Summary: Imagining The Secular Saint By Simone Weil

Lecture Thirty

Simone Weil—Imagining the Secular Saint

Scope: Though less well known than her French contemporaries Sartre and de Beauvoir, Simone Weil gradually emerged in the second half of the 20th century as representing a genuinely radical and original stance toward the question of life’s meaning: a refusal to choose between the hero and the saint. Weil’s life reveals a frightening yet inspiring attempt to live the truth of both paths to meaning fully and simultaneously, with full awareness of the terrifying human risk involved. This lecture begins with a biographical sketch of Weil’s life, which reveals a complex identity full of contradictions, and then goes on to examine the principal influences on her intellectual formation and early writing. Among the factors
In this lecture we examine the saintly dimension of Simone Weil’s extraordinary identity. 2. Like Saint Augustine, Weil experienced her whole life as a search for the truth of reality as whole; the truth of that transcendent mystery beyond time, space, and matter, which shone with the radiance of perfect beauty and overpowered the heart with unquenchable desire. a. As we have seen, memories of her own childhood held premonitions of the secret she discovered and lived in the last five years of her life. b. It was not until she was motivated to read the Christian Gospels, prompted by the simplicity of faith of many of the works she taught and a few humane and intelligent clergy and friends, that she gradually came to discover what she had been searching for all her life. 3. Simone Weil completely rejects the dynamics of conversion and with it any dream of “catholicity” as universalization of the culture of faith in the secular order of society. a. Weil refused personal conversion to Catholicism and would not accept baptism despite her recognition that she had lived her whole life in the spirit that she discovered in her reading of the Christian