Justified True Belief

(●) A French philosopher who worked in factories to learn what suffering does to a person, met Christ while reciting a poem, and then refused to be baptized. + Simone Weil was thirty-four when she died, and almost nothing she is known for had been published. She left notebooks. Friends who had taken her in during the war sorted them out afterward, and the books that came from that sorting have been in print ever since: Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, The Need for Roots. T. S. Eliot, introducing the last of them to English readers, told them not to start by deciding whether they agreed with her. What mattered, he said, was to make contact with a great soul. Two things make her worth the attention of a Christian reader. The first is that she wrote about suffering better than almost anyone has, and she wrote about it from inside. She spent a year at a power press and an assembly line to find out what factory work does to the mind of the person doing it, and what she learned there became a doctrine of affliction that Christians have been drawing on ever since, when the problem of pain stops being a seminar topic and becomes somebody’s life. The second is harder, and it is why her name keeps coming up in arguments about faith. She believed in Christ, she believed the Catholic Church held the truth, and she would not be baptized. She died outside the visible church on purpose, and she wrote long letters explaining why. Christian readers have been arguing with those letters for eighty years, which is another way of saying that they are worth arguing with.

(●) 1909 AD: Born in Paris to Jewish parents, a doctor and his wife, in a house where nobody prayed and everybody argued. + Simone Weil was born on 3 February 1909, the second child of Bernard Weil, a physician, and Selma Reinherz. Both parents came from Jewish families; both had left religious practice behind. Simone grew up, as she later put it, entirely outside any religion, and was not taught to pray. What the house did have was books and talk. Her brother André, nearly three years older, was a mathematical prodigy who would become one of the great mathematicians of the century, and growing up next to him was not comfortable. In her twenties she told a friend that as an adolescent she had gone through a period of real despair over it: not because she wanted fame, but because she thought the gift for mathematics she lacked was the door into truth itself, and she believed she had been shut out. Family stories from the war years show the temperament early. As a small girl during the First World War she is said to have refused sugar, on the ground that the soldiers at the front had none. The anecdote may have been polished in the retelling, but nothing she did later contradicts it. Every serious choice of her adult life had the same shape: find out what other people are bearing, and then bear it.

(●) 1931 AD: She qualified as a philosophy teacher and kept turning up at the head of the unemployed. + She had studied at the Lycée Henri IV, one of the Paris schools whose preparatory classes drill the country’s strongest students for the entrance examinations to its most selective colleges, and there her teacher was Émile Chartier, the essayist who wrote as Alain. Then came the École Normale Supérieure, the school that trains France’s academic elite. In the examination for the certificate in general philosophy and logic she placed first; the student who placed second was Simone de Beauvoir. In 1931 she passed the agrégation, the competitive national examination that licenses a teacher for the state schools, and was posted to the girls’ lycée at Le Puy in the mountains of the Haute-Loire. She lasted a few months before the trouble started. In the winter of 1931 the unemployed men of Le Puy were breaking stones for relief wages, and the new philosophy mistress walked into the town hall at the head of their delegation. It reached the newspapers. The authorities moved her on, and kept moving her on: Auxerre the next year, then Roanne, then Bourges and Saint-Quentin once the factory year was behind her. She gave much of her salary away, keeping for herself no more than a labourer earned, and slept in unheated rooms. Colleagues called her the Red Virgin, and not always kindly. She was a serious political thinker in these years, not merely an enthusiast, and she was willing to say what her own side did not want to hear. In December 1933 Leon Trotsky, in hiding, used her parents’ flat in Paris for meetings; Weil, twenty-four years old, spent an evening arguing with him that the workers’ state he had helped build was not a workers’ state at all but a new bureaucratic oppression. He shouted. She did not withdraw the point, and the essay she wrote the next year, on the causes of liberty and social oppression, says it in cold print.

(●) 1934 AD: She left teaching for a year in the factories, and came out of it, she said, marked as a slave. + In the autumn of 1934 she took a year’s leave and went to work with her hands, telling almost no one who she was. She spent the winter at an Alsthom electrical works in Paris on a power press, then at a small firm stamping metal, then on the line at Renault. She was clumsy, slow, and constantly ill with the headaches that never left her after her twenties, and she lived in fear of being sacked. That fear is the ordinary condition of piecework, where the wage follows the count of finished parts and not the hours, and being inside it was the point. What she found was not what her politics had prepared her for. She had expected solidarity and anger. What she met was exhaustion so complete that it emptied the mind of everything, including the wish to protest. A woman running a machine at a fixed rate for eight hours does not go home and think; she goes home. Weil concluded that the deepest injury of that life is not low pay but the destruction of the worker’s attention, the thing in a person that thinks and prays and loves. "There I received for ever the mark of a slave," she wrote years later to Joseph-Marie Perrin, the Dominican friar who became her friend in Marseille, "like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves." In the summer of 1935, worn out, she went with her parents to Portugal, and walked one evening into a fishing village on the day of its patron saint. The wives of the fishermen were going round the moored boats in procession, carrying candles and singing hymns of what she called a heart-rending sadness. Watching them, she wrote, the conviction was suddenly borne in on her that Christianity is above all the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and that she was one of them. She was not yet a believer in any sense she would have accepted. She had found out what she was.

(●) 1936 AD: She volunteered for the Spanish war, stepped into a pot of boiling oil, and came home sickened by her own side. + In August 1936 she crossed into Catalonia and attached herself to an anarchist unit on the Aragon front, the Sébastien Faure Century of the Durruti Column. She was a pacifist by conviction who had decided that staying home while others fought was a comfort she had no right to. She was also extremely short-sighted and a hopeless shot, and her comrades were reportedly more frightened of her rifle than of the enemy’s. Her war lasted less than a fortnight and ended in a cooking accident. A pot of oil was heating in a pit dug in the ground, hidden from view; she stepped into it and burned her leg badly. Her parents, who had followed her to Spain and were waiting in Barcelona, took her out and got her home. What she carried back was worse than the burn. Writing in 1938 to the Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, who had denounced the atrocities on the other side, she told him she had recognized in his book the smell of civil war and blood and terror, because she had breathed it herself. She told him about a boy of fifteen, taken prisoner, given a day to change sides and shot when he refused, and about men at table counting up with a warm brotherly smile how many priests they had killed. In all her weeks there she never saw anyone, even in private, show disgust at blood spilled for nothing. That letter is the hinge of her politics: she never again believed that the justice of a cause protects the people fighting for it from becoming what they are fighting.

(●) 1938 AD: Reciting an English poem through a splitting headache, she found that Christ had come for her. + Three things happened in those years, and she set them down later in a long letter to Father Perrin, written as she was about to leave France. In the spring of 1937 she was in Assisi, in the small Romanesque chapel where Francis used to pray. She had no intention of doing anything devotional. Something stronger than she was, she wrote, compelled her for the first time in her life to go down on her knees. The next year she spent Holy Week at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, following the Gregorian chant through ten days of migraine so severe that every sound hurt. By an effort of attention she found she could set the pain to one side and leave it in a corner of her body, and what she found on the other side of the effort was, in her words, pure and perfect joy. During those services, she said, the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into her once and for all. At Solesmes she met a young English Catholic who introduced her to the seventeenth-century poets of his country, and among them George Herbert. She learned Herbert’s poem "Love" by heart, the one in which Love takes a guest who is sure of his own unworthiness by the hand and sits him down to eat, and she took to reciting it at the height of her headaches, holding her attention on the words. She thought she was saying a beautiful poem. "I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem," she wrote, "but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me." She had read no mystics and had never imagined such a thing was possible. Neither her senses nor her imagination, she insisted, had any part in it. She had simply not known that there could be, here below, a real contact between a person and God.

(●) 1941 AD: Barred from teaching under Vichy’s Jewish laws, she picked grapes in the Ardèche and left her notebooks with the farmer. + The family fled Paris in June 1940 as the Germans came, and settled in Marseille. In October the first Jewish statute of the Vichy government, the French regime that took power after the defeat of 1940 and collaborated with the Germans, barred Jews from the teaching service. That ended her profession. She wrote instead, filling notebook after notebook, and published in the local review Cahiers du Sud under the pen name Émile Novis, an anagram of her own name, because her own would no longer pass. One of those pieces, an essay on the Iliad written while France was falling, is still the best-known thing she published in her lifetime. Marseille is where she met Perrin, a nearly blind Dominican priest who became the friend she argued with about baptism, and through him Gustave Thibon, a self-taught Catholic philosopher who farmed in the Ardèche. Thibon did not want her. A letter had warned him that a Jewish graduate in philosophy and extreme-left militant needed somewhere to work on the land, and he agreed out of reluctant politeness, then found her impossible for a fortnight and unforgettable thereafter. She would not sleep in the comfortable house, and moved into a half-ruined farm building by the Rhône. She worked the grape harvest of 1941 with the labourers, ate blackberries from the hedges when she remembered to eat, sent half her ration coupons to political prisoners, and in the evenings taught Thibon Plato in Greek. When she left in 1942 she handed him a dozen notebooks and told him to do as he liked with them. It is not clear that she expected anything to come of it. Much of what most people have read of Simone Weil comes out of that bundle.

(●) 1943 AD: She reached London by way of New York, wrote a plan for rebuilding France, and died at thirty-four. + She left Marseille in May 1942 with her parents, sailing by way of Casablanca to New York, and she was miserable there from the day she arrived. She had gone to get her parents to safety and had promised herself it was a staging post. In November she sailed alone for Britain. By the new year she was working in London for the Free French, the movement that had kept France in the war from exile, reading and assessing the reports smuggled out of the occupied country. What she wanted was to be sent back. Her proposal was a corps of front-line nurses, women who would go in with the first wave and tend the wounded where they fell, under fire, unarmed; she argued it would be worth more than a division, because it would show that the side fighting for a decent world could spend itself as freely as the other side spent other people. It was refused, and Charles de Gaulle is reported to have said of her, "She is mad." She went on writing at night instead. The report the Free French had asked her for grew into L’Enracinement, published after the war as The Need for Roots: a diagnosis of what modern life does to human beings, and a proposal for what a France worth restoring would have to look like. In April 1943 she collapsed and was found to have tuberculosis. She was moved from the Middlesex Hospital to a sanatorium at Ashford in Kent, and she would not eat more than she believed the ration in occupied France allowed. She died on 24 August 1943. The inquest returned a verdict of suicide, in the formula of the time, that the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed; her friends and her biographers have contested that reading ever since, pointing to the tuberculosis, the lifelong headaches, and a refusal of comfort that had been consistent for twenty years. She was buried at Ashford, with a handful of mourners present.

What She Taught

(T1) Affliction is not the same thing as suffering, and it is the one condition that can put a person at the foot of the Cross. + Begin with a toothache. An hour of real pain from a bad tooth is unpleasant and then it is over, and it leaves nothing behind in the person who had it. Now think of someone who has lost the job, and the house, and the standing that went with them, whose body hurts and whose phone has stopped ringing, and who has begun to suspect that the world is right about him. Those two things are not the same size of the same thing. They are different in kind. That difference is what Weil is naming. Her word is the French malheur, which her translator renders "affliction" for want of anything better; "unhappiness" is far too weak, and the French word carries a sense of doom, of a thing that has fallen on you and will not be got off. Affliction in her sense is physical pain and distress of soul and social degradation all at once, and its mark is slavery: it takes hold of the soul and stamps it. The afflicted person does not merely hurt. He agrees with his own humiliation, and starts to despise himself, and that is the part that damns it. She was describing something she had lived at the Alsthom press, and she refused to sweeten it. Affliction, she says, makes God appear absent, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in a windowless cell; the soul goes on loving in emptiness, or it stops loving. And then she says the thing that makes her a Christian writer rather than a chronicler of despair. The Cross is the place where God himself went through exactly this: not pain only, but the full mark of slavery, condemned, stripped, mocked, and crying out to a Father who did not answer. The distance between God and the afflicted soul is the distance Christ crossed. Weil pictures affliction as a nail whose point is driven into the center of the soul, and says that a soul that keeps its face turned toward God while the nail goes through finds itself fastened at the exact point where the arms of the Cross meet. The idea has a limit worth stating. Scripture treats affliction as an enemy that God defeats and turns to account, "this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4:17), and it never asks anyone to seek it out. Weil agreed on the first half and pressed it further than most: we should do everything we can to avoid affliction, she wrote, so that whatever affliction does reach us may be perfectly pure and perfectly bitter.

(Q) "In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery." + Source: Simone Weil, "The Love of God and Affliction," in Waiting for God, opening paragraph (Emma Craufurd translation, 1951). The essay was written in Marseille in 1942 and left with Father Perrin. Her translator adds a footnote at this very sentence to say that no English word carries the French malheur, which has inevitability and doom in it (T1).

(T2) Attention held long enough, and emptied of self, is prayer, and the same attention turned on a person is love of neighbor. + A child is stuck on a geometry problem. He frowns, holds his breath, grips the pencil, and after twenty minutes of visible effort has produced nothing but a dent in the paper and a headache. Weil, who taught teenagers for years, says that what the child did was not attention. It was muscular effort mistaken for thought, and the mistake is the same one we make about prayer when we screw ourselves up and call it devotion. Attention, in her account, is the opposite of straining. It is holding the mind open and unhurried and empty, refusing to snatch at the first answer, keeping everything you already know within reach but not in the way, and waiting for the truth to come to you. She puts it in a sentence worth memorizing: attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. And that, she argues, is exactly the muscle prayer uses, which is why she thought Latin translation and geometry problems were spiritual training whether or not the schoolboy doing them ever noticed. A quarter of an hour of attention, she wrote, is better than a great many good works. Then she turns it on people, and it becomes something else. There is a scene in the oldest of the Grail legends where the vessel goes to whoever asks the wounded king the right question, and the question is: what are you going through? That, says Weil, is the whole of the love of neighbor. Not pity for a category, the unfortunate, the homeless, the case; attention to this person, who exists exactly as I do and has been stamped by affliction. Almost nobody can do it, because affliction repels attention the way a foul smell repels a face, which is why the priest and the Levite kept walking. Christ makes the same identification from the other side: "as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40).

(Q) "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love." + Source: Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, the chapter "Attention and Will" (Emma Crawford translation, 1952). The note sits a few lines after her complaint that we tighten our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem, and that attention is something quite different (T2). The fuller working out is in her essay on school studies, written for Father Perrin in 1942 and printed in Waiting for God.

(T3) The soul falls the way a stone falls, and grace is the only thing that ever moves the other way. + Watch what happens when somebody is humiliated in front of colleagues. Within the hour he will find someone junior to be short with. The energy does not vanish; it runs downhill, and it runs downhill as reliably as water. Weil noticed the same mechanics everywhere she looked. We are cruel to the weak after we have been made to feel weak. We cannot bear a void, so we fill it: with daydreams, with grievance, with a story in which we come off better. We say we have forgiven and then quietly collect the debt somewhere else. Her name for this is gravity, and she means the word almost literally. There is a law operating in the soul that is the exact counterpart of the law that pulls a dropped glass to the floor, and it is a law, not a mood. Understanding this is what stops her moral writing from ever becoming a pep talk. You cannot pull yourself up by your own hair. The will can put a hand flat on a table; it cannot produce purity of heart, and straining at it merely tightens muscles that have nothing to do with the matter. Grace is the exception, and the word means what Christians mean by it: a movement that comes down from God rather than up from us, and that we can only consent to. Weil’s advice follows from the physics. Stop trying to lift yourself. Refuse the compensations, tolerate the void, keep your attention turned toward the good, and let grace do the one thing gravity cannot. Her account of the human material here is close to Paul’s, who knew all about willing one thing and doing another (Romans 7:18-19), and her insistence that the movement upward is not ours to make lands where Scripture lands: it is God’s doing, received, not earned (Ephesians 2:8-9).

(Q) "All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception." + Source: Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, the opening lines of the first chapter (Emma Crawford translation, 1952). Gustave Thibon put this sentence at the head of the book he assembled from her notebooks, and it gave the book its title. Everything in her moral psychology hangs off it (T3).

(T4) God made room for the world by withdrawing from it, and the creature answers by consenting to get out of the way. + A teacher who knows the answer says nothing and lets the class work. A father steps back from the bicycle. In both cases the withdrawal is not absence or indifference; it is the only form the help could take without destroying the thing it was helping. Weil built a doctrine of creation on that intuition, and it is the strangest and most beautiful thing she wrote. God is everything, she reasons, so for anything else to exist at all God must consent not to be everything. Creation is therefore not an expansion of God but a renunciation: he hides himself, he withdraws, he allows a world that runs on blind necessity and can ignore him. This is why the universe looks from the inside like a place where God is absent, and why she can say that the distance between ourselves and God is itself a work of love, since without it there would be no one standing far enough off to love him back. The answering movement she calls decreation, a word she coined and was careful to distinguish from destruction. Destruction shoves something created into nothingness, which is a cheap counterfeit. Decreation is consenting to hand back the false center we have set up in ourselves, the little god that says "I," so that what fills the space is God. We participate in the creation of the world, she wrote, by decreating ourselves. Christian readers will hear something familiar in that and something that needs watching. The familiar part is the gospel’s own arithmetic: God the Son "emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:7), and the believer says with Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). The part that needs watching is whether decreation means the self is handed over or simply cancelled, and Weil is not always on the safe side of that line.

(Q) "God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself." + Source: Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, the chapter "Decreation" (Emma Crawford translation, 1952). In the chapter that follows it, "Self-effacement," she draws the practical conclusion for the creature: God can love in us only this consent to withdraw in order to make way for him, just as he himself, our creator, withdrew in order that we might come into being (T4).

(T5) A human being has needs of the soul as real as hunger, and the first of them is roots. + London, 1943. A French exile with tuberculosis is asked by her government what France will need when the Germans are gone, and she does not answer with a constitution. She answers with a list of what a soul requires, the way a doctor would list what a body requires: order, liberty, obedience, responsibility, equality, hierarchy, honor, punishment, freedom of opinion, security, risk, private property and common property, truth. And rootedness, which she says is the most important and the least recognized of them all. To have roots, in her definition, is to take part really and actively in a community that keeps some treasures of the past alive and holds some expectations for the future, and to draw the bulk of your moral and mental life from that. Uprooting is what happens when that is cut: by conquest, by money, by an education that teaches a child nothing about the place he comes from, by work that has no meaning in it. She had seen all four, and she thought the damage spreads by itself: whoever is uprooted uproots others, because a man pulled out of his own place has one reliable instinct left, and it is to pull other people out of theirs. Underneath the list is a claim that cuts against the whole modern habit of talking about rights, and it is the reason the book keeps being read by people who share none of her mysticism. Rights, she argues, are secondary and derived. A right does nothing by itself; it works only when somebody else recognizes an obligation to you. So the obligation is the real thing and the right is its shadow, and a man alone in the universe would have no rights at all but would still have duties. Put the claim beside the parable Jesus told about a Samaritan on a road, and it becomes clear what she is after: the wounded man had no right anybody was enforcing, and two respectable travelers walked past him without breaking a single rule.

(Q) "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." + Source: Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, opening of the section "Uprootedness" (Arthur Wills translation, 1952). The book opens with the companion claim, that the notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former (T5). It was written in London in the last months of her life, as a report for the Free French on what a liberated France would owe its people.

(Q) "The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it." + Source: Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, the chapter "Affliction" (Emma Crawford translation, 1952). One sentence, from a notebook she never meant for print, and it is the sentence most often quoted back to her. It is also the best short statement of why Christians who disagree with her about a great deal keep reading her.

What Christian Readers Made of Her

(†) The two Catholics who had taken her in during the war turned her notebooks into books. + Nothing she is famous for was a book when she died. Gustave Thibon, the farmer who had housed her in the Ardèche, worked through the notebooks she had left him, chose the passages that seemed to belong together, and sorted them into thirty-nine themes: void and compensation, detachment, decreation, affliction, attention and will, beauty. He published the result in 1947 as La Pesanteur et la grâce, Gravity and Grace. He said in his introduction that he felt he was giving away a family secret. Joseph-Marie Perrin, the Dominican she had argued with in Marseille, did the same for the letters and essays she had sent him, and published them in 1950 as Attente de Dieu, Waiting for God. That is the book that carries her spiritual autobiography, her account of the three encounters, her essay on affliction and her essay on school studies. The two men later wrote a joint memoir of the woman they had known, and both were candid about how difficult she had been to live with and how certain they were of what they had seen. That matters for how she should be read. Almost everything of hers in print is unrevised private writing, arranged by editors after her death. She is not building a system and never got the chance to guard her own formulations, which is a reason to read her generously and a reason not to press any one sentence too hard.

(†) Christian and unbelieving readers alike found her impossible to file and impossible to dismiss. + T. S. Eliot wrote the preface when The Need for Roots reached English readers, and told them plainly that he could not conceive of anybody agreeing with all of her views, or of any reader failing to disagree violently with some of them. That was not the point. What mattered, he said, was to make contact with a great soul, and he thought she might have become a saint. Albert Camus, who did not share her faith, took charge of publishing her at Gallimard and called her the only great spirit of our times; he is said to have spent an hour alone in her mother’s apartment, in the room where she had worked, before leaving for Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize. Flannery O’Connor, reading about her in Georgia, wrote to a friend that Weil’s life was almost a perfect blend of the comic and the terrible, two things she thought might be opposite sides of one coin, which is the reaction of someone who has recognized a real person rather than an icon. Czesław Miłosz, exiled in Paris, made a Polish selection of her writing for the émigré press in 1958, on the ground that she was the antidote his country needed to both of the forces pulling at it. What the admirers have in common is that none of them could claim her. She is claimed by Catholics and resisted by Catholics, admired by unbelievers who find her religion embarrassing, quoted by educators, by nurses, by people writing about burnout and about prayer. A writer who cannot be recruited is usually one who was telling the truth about something.

(†) Her doctrine of attention has become part of how Christians talk about prayer and about caring for the suffering. + Two things of hers have passed into ordinary Christian use, often by people who could not name where they came from. The first is attention as the substance of prayer. Anyone who has been taught that prayer is less about finding words than about holding still and being available has been taught something Weil put into its sharpest form, and her insistence that ordinary study trains the same faculty has given generations of Christian teachers a reason to think a Latin exercise is not a distraction from the spiritual life. The second is her question. "What are you going through?" turns up in pastoral training, in hospital chaplaincy, in books about how to sit with the bereaved, precisely because it refuses to convert a person into a case. Her account of affliction has done the harder work. When the problem of evil stops being a debate and becomes a diagnosis in a family, the argument that God permits suffering for good reasons is true and is not yet enough, because the afflicted person does not want a reason, and can barely hold a thought. Weil supplies what the argument leaves out: God is not at a distance from this, he has been inside it, and the soul that goes on facing him in the dark is at the intersection of the arms of the Cross. Christian writers on suffering have drawn on that ever since, and it is a debt worth naming.

(†) Where her own teaching parts company with the gospel: Israel’s Scriptures, the baptism she refused, and a self that decreation would erase. + The ledger has another column, and it is substantial. These are her own positions, argued in her own writing, not things done with her words later. - Israel’s Scriptures. This is the worst of it. Weil held that almost everything in the Hebrew Bible before the exile is corrupted by a false idea of God, excepting Job, the Song of Songs, some Psalms and a few others, and that Israel’s history is a record of national violence rather than revelation. She looked for God’s preparation of the world in Greece, in Egypt, in the Bhagavad Gita, and largely refused to look for it where the New Testament says it was. Her Jewish contemporaries were being deported while she wrote it, which makes it uglier, though she was writing as someone who had never been given the book as her own. Christ is blunt in the other direction: "You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22), and Paul lists what belongs to Israel, the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises, and the Christ himself according to the flesh (Romans 9:4-5). The gospel she loved is unintelligible without the Scriptures she rejected. - The baptism she refused. She wanted it, believed the Church held the truth, and would not come in. Her reasons were partly noble: she thought God had given her a vocation to stay with the immense mass of people who are outside, and she would not join a body that had said anathema sit, let him be accursed, over so many heads. But the New Testament knows nothing of a Christian who stays outside on principle. Baptism is how one enters, and the church is not an association of the like-minded that a believer may decline: it is where believers are told to be, "not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some" (Hebrews 10:25). What she called faithfulness to the outsiders looks, from inside Scripture, like a refusal of the ordinary means Christ appointed. - A self that is cancelled rather than given. Decreation at its best is the gospel’s own demand, and at its worst it is something else: a wish to stop existing, so that God may have the space back. Scripture asks for the death of the old self and then raises the person, body and all. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" is a sentence Paul writes about himself, still speaking, still named (Galatians 2:20). Weil’s starvation at the end is not a doctrine, and it is not fair to read her theology out of her death certificate. It is fair to say that a teaching about self-effacement needs the doctrine of the resurrection of the body next to it, and hers does not always have it. - The goodness of matter. She loved the beauty of the world and wrote about it wonderfully, and she still inherited a suspicion of the flesh as such, partly from Plato and partly from the Cathars, the medieval sect of southern France who held that matter was the work of an evil power and that the soul’s whole business was to get free of it. Genesis calls what God made good, and the Word became flesh rather than escaping it (John 1:14). None of this is a reason to put her down. It is a reason to read her the way she read everyone else: with complete attention, and without agreeing in advance.