The causes Simone Weil espoused as a social activist and the faith she professed as a mystic were urgent to her and, as she saw it, to humanity. Little of her work was published in her lifetime, but since her death, it has inspired an almost cultlike following among readers who share her hunger for grace and for what she called "decreation"—deliverance from enthrallment to the self.
Weil herself might have objected to these consecrations as a form of "idolatry," which she defined as a misguided thirst for "absolute good." Nothing is so absolute about her as the difficulty of parsing her contradictions. Her writing radiates a cosmic empathy that coexists with a strain of intolerance blind to life's tragicomedy.
She resists any system that enslaves the individual to a collective, but her own vision of an enlightened society is an autocracy modelled on Plato's Republic. Weil would gladly have died fighting the Nazis. Yet even as her Jewish family fled the Final Solution, she condemned Judaism with what her biographer calls "hysterical repugnance."
It’s a conundrum of Simone Weil’s biography that most basic human needs were alien to her. She shrank from the touch of another body and considered her own "disgusting."
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