by
Kathryn Kopple
Bridget Bate Tichenor
One fine evening, while doing the washing up, it gloomily occurred to me: if the French philosopher Simone Weil had her way, there would be no world literature, not in the modern Euro-American sense. Over the course of Weil’s short and tortured life, the fact that so little went her way was hardly consoling. She would draft hundreds of pages but, upon her death at age thirty-four, had not finished a single book of philosophy. Instead, from the 1930s through the early 1940s, she published essays and reviews when her teaching schedule allowed. Despite fragile health, she sought out work on farms and in factories. Committed to real-world change, Weil would use her experiences to blend social critique with Christian Platonism. She wrote for the proletariat and the intellectual alike.
While a student at the Lycée Henri-IV, Weil studied under the philosopher Émile Chartier, widely known as Alain. Chartier’s politics were radical, his theory of the mind Cartesian, and his ethics Spinozist. He was also resolutely anti-Freudian — a position he refines in On Happiness, a series of reflections about joy as an act of will. “All thought is a massacre of impressions… Beware of Cassandras, souls lying down. The real man shakes himself and makes the future.”[i] This philosophy of embattlement, what Chartier called the “heroic game,” finds expression throughout Weil’s writings, most notably in her non-conforming individualism. Of equal significance to Weil was Chartier’s maxim: “Pain throws us immediately into metaphysical conceptions.” [ii] He is quick to remind his readers that these conceptions — because they arise when the mind is most inclined to morbid fantasies — are not rational, nor do they constitute a metaphysics. On the contrary, they are “bad metaphors.” Demons, angels, monsters — these are mere figures of speech. Nature is egalitarian when it comes to suffering; its indifference is absolute.
Ever concerned with matters of the soul, Weil could never resign herself to indifference. Such notions instilled in her profound feelings of emptiness. Weil also worried that secularism devoid of spiritual rigor resulted in moral laxity. By 1938, when Weil turned twenty-nine, she had already distanced herself from her mentor. Instead, she embraced a theology that directly addresses philosophies of indifference: suffering as sacrifice and self-abnegation as redemption. What Weil calls “affliction” is our inclusion in Christ’s Passion grounded in sorrow, brokenness, and love.
In 1940, while living as a refugee with her parents in Marseilles, Weil would publish the first of several articles on literature, among them “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” The essay represents her most extended Christian meditation on violence in literature. Violence, like the law of gravity, is inescapable, but not meaningless — at least not for Homer. Every character in The Iliad is subject to supernatural caprices (destiny), the blows of nature (misfortune), and the recognition of human failings (epiphany). In Weil’s essay, there is only force against which humans struggle — and sacrifice. Although Weil doesn’t explicitly reference Christ in the poem, her interpretation represents an alignment of the Homeric epic with the theology of the Cross.
Weil’s approach is at odds with prevailing interpretations of The Iliad as a great canvas depicting the full range of human experience. But that is precisely Weil’s objection; it is only through the theology of the Cross that the reader discerns the poem’s true greatness. Without the light of Christ, secular literary works risk becoming blunt instruments; they diminish intelligence and deaden the spirit. Put another way, the books we read are never as great as we’ve been taught to believe.
Does this mean great books do not exist? Weil argues as much when she dismisses greatness in favor of goodness. She was antagonistic toward the former and passionate about the latter. But goodness is, as Flannery O’Connor famously observed, hard to find — a viewpoint Weil also shared. In fact, Weil went further: most of what she read horrified her, beginning with The Old Testament. She argued that we, as readers, should be equally horrified. Should we? There are arguments and there are attitudes, and too often Weil allowed attitudes to get the best of her.
Although I am not Weil’s natural reader, I would never dismiss her out of hand. If obscurity leaves an aura, Weil is utterly steeped in it. She lived as one possessed, writing as if she held all the world’s dismal and arcane knowledge. Her powers of spiritual introspection strike us as cavernous. Susan Sontag once described her voice as forceful, but many writers produce strong impressions. Weil is different. Her signature words — gravity, grace, decreation, attention — emit profound echoes, as though we could subject them to endless repetition and never grow weary.
Writing in the 1960s, Sontag could reasonably suggest that we read Weil too vicariously, treating her as the embodiment of “the extreme in art and thought.”[iii] A life lived in extremis undoubtedly offers innumerable voyeuristic pleasures when experienced at a safe distance. But that moment has passed. Today, we keep Weil close as a philosophical companion and spiritual guide. She has become our new Plato.
Where there is literature, there is Plato. Terms like poiesis, mimesis, allegory, framing, and organic unity form the bedrock of a literary terrain that readers traverse whether or not they are conscious of it. When Jorge Luis Borges titled his 1960 collection The Maker, he invokes poiesis to delineate the idea of writing as craftwork. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” he disrupts Plato’s mimetic logic by illustrating what becomes of texts when defined as copies of reality. In “The Circular Ruins,” he leads the reader deep into Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” In “Borges and I,” he casts himself as a dramatis persona in a Platonic dreamworld. Structurally, his stories are masterpieces of textual framing and organic unity.
Weil never read Borges, of course. Nor can we portray them as philosophical companions, despite their interest in classical literature. Weil’s Plato is ethical and spiritual. Borges’s Plato is individualistic and imaginative. Unlike Weil, Borges never identified as a Christian. When questioned about his beliefs in a 1971 New York Times interview, he responded: “Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”[iv] Weil would find his response disappointing, but not because she found agnosticism abhorrent. She spoke of her nontheistic upbringing as instrumental to her spiritual growth. Raised in a home where no sacred text was taboo, she was free to read across spiritual disciplines. At one point, she taught herself Sanskrit in order to be able to read The Bhagavad Gita in the original. Krishna greatly inspired her, and she often used his name interchangeably with Christ. But, whereas Borges remained a lifelong agnostic, Weil regarded agnosticism as a stage of spiritual development. Here she diverges completely from the Argentine writer. Weil could never accept, as Borges did, the universe as the playground of the imagination. She would regard it as a moral failing
It is necessary to understand the degree to which Weil rejects imagination, and not simply in literature. Imagination, like sin, leads straight to oblivion. She is the antithesis of Borges, who considered imagination the foundation of all human experience. And yet, Borges, no less than Weil, was profoundly affected by authoritarianism — and, like Weil, he developed an abiding distrust of political parties, statism, and nationalism. Neither writer falls easily into left versus right politics. Nor did Weil wish to be pigeon-holed. She rejected oppositional binaries as a nexus of delusional thinking. But, where Weil sees intractable problems, Borges finds opportunities. In Weil’s ideal library, there would be no place for Borges.
Always sensitive to suffering, Weil constantly subjects literary works to human-cost analysis. Not surprisingly, the odds for literature are not in its favor; a book is never worth more than a life. She makes this point adamantly clear in several essays, and most famously in The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind. Weil drafted her declaration while living in London and working for the Free French Resistance. Published posthumously, it was not well-received, particularly by those for whom liberté, égalité, fraternité constituted the Republic’s imperishable and sovereign framework. Weil had no wish to restore the Republic — or rather, return to a country where political institutions went hand in hand with force. Any law that owed its existence to violence must be met with the greatest skepticism — a position that Weil held with regard to France’s judiciary, which operated under the auspices of rights.
Whenever speaking of human rights, Weil insists, we must listen to ourselves. Do I, as a literary specialist and translator, use the language of human rights to inflate the importance of my arguments? How many times, over the course of my long education, have I described literature in terms of agency, empowerment, and liberation? What is it that I am protecting when I argue in defense of literature? And, by literature, I refer to forgotten, maligned, or censored authors. The answer is that I have done so extensively, if not voluminously. My critical vocabulary is replete with defamiliarization, subversion, and transgression. I am schooled in artifice and affectation. I am on familiar, if uneasy, terms with Isidore Lucien Ducasse’s Les Chants de Maldoror. One of my operative assumptions underscores how old, queer books add meaning to our lives. I also believe I am precisely the kind of literary advocate Weil refers to when she observes: “Isn’t it high time it were proclaimed that every discernible crime is a punishable one, and that we are resolved, if given the opportunity, to punish all crimes?”[v]
At first glance, Weil seems to invoke the Napoleonic penal code of outrage aux bonnes mœurs, or affront to public decency. Under the laws, writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire were subject to censure, fines, and stigmatization. Weil, however, would have gone further, condemning any literary work as criminal that involves a crime against the intelligence. “Generally speaking, all problems to do with freedom of expression are clarified if it is posited that this freedom is a need of the intelligence, and that intelligence resides solely in the human being, individually considered.”[vi] Reading these words, I imagine Weil looking on in satisfaction as I am carted off to prison.
On matters of prestige, Weil is equally uncompromising. In The Need for Roots, she describes prestige as conquest and theft masquerading as honor: “All oppression creates a famine in regard to the need of honor, for the noble traditions possessed by those suffering oppression go unrecognized, through lack of social prestige.”[vii] Literature is not an innocent bystander. Either a literary work stands for intelligence, or it does not, and by intelligence Weil hopes to suppress imaginative excess. Is there any role for the imagination in literature, then? Weil’s response: “In no matter what circumstances (but sometimes at the price of how great a degradation!) imagination can fill the void. This is why average human beings can become prisoners, slaves, prostitutes and pass through no matter what suffering without being purified.”[viii]
Literature is not spiritually pure, nor can it be. Weil, however, is never above asking us to make impossible choices. Either we engage in radical sacrifice or subject ourselves to hapless attempts to fill the existential void. Any aesthetic mischief in a world of agony is obscene — a point she makes in “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” The essay offers a stunning defense of Greek “genius” if not literature. She is also at her most stringent when advocating for scraps of literature while she castigates Rome together with The Old Testament. In “Simone Weil, a Friend of Job,” Mark Larrimore strikes at the heart of the problem: “Weil is unsparing in her condemnation of language’s inability to convey the good.”[ix] Larrimore accepts this as a “terrible fact.” Must we?
Facts do, of course, matter; they mattered to Weil. She grew up in Paris, the epicenter of the manifesto, slogan, and advertisement. While Trotsky could defend Bolshevik propaganda with catchy phrases like “all revolutions are verbose,” Weil would not. She too witnessed chaos firsthand: Dadaists and surrealists churning out manifestoes in their sleep (literally), and littering the streets of Paris with them while commerce-driven magazines treated literature as disposable content. The sight of a poem by Paul Valéry side by side with an advertisement for beauty cream disgusted her. She detested violent rhetoric and its power to incite. We forget how young she was, only twenty-two, when she met Georges Bataille, one of the head priests of transgression. He would not be the first to write her into a novel. And he, like so many who passed her way, instilled in her a visceral and abiding sense of moral outrage. So, she spoke out.
In “Literature and Morals,” Weil argues against everything for which the avant-garde stood. The essay’s exemplary first paragraph can be traced to St. Augustine: “Nothing is so beautiful, marvelous, ever new, ever surprising, so full of sweet and continual delight, as the good.” Weil then follows Augustine’s argument straight to God, who is pure Good. Literature, on the other hand, is impure; it is mixed with evil and, therefore, offers us at best a mixed image of the good. As for attaining pure good, literature can only fail. But that hardly excuses an author from seeking out the good in its purest earthly form. To do anything less is to risk immorality. “Writers and readers for their part will passionately cry out that immorality is not an aesthetic criterion,” Weil argues. “But here they need to prove, which they have never done, that one should only apply aesthetic criteria to literature.” She goes on: “… it is impossible that literature should exempt itself from the categories of good and evil under which all human activities are subsumed.”[x] Worse yet, literature functions in the service of evil by making the good dull, unappealing, even ridiculous. The best literature, she argues, must turn our minds towards God, if only to illuminate the suffering caused by the absence of the good.
Safe to say, Weil was not a casual reader. Where faith is concerned, she read as if her soul depended on it. Weil revered George Herbert’s “Love (III).” The poem’s tenderness awoke within her a presence previously absent in her life: caritas Christi. Other literary works had a similar — if not mystical — effect on her: The Divine Comedy, The Bhagavad Gita, Prometheus Bound. Weil’s tastes were specific, but she was not unique. Literature often strikes us as transcendent, as something other and difficult to put into everyday language. Paradoxically, this thing called literature, which is after all made up of utterances, has the power to leave us speechless. It is that power that causes Weil to describe true literature as a form of prayer. The same could be said of Ducasse’s Maldoror. It’s hard to read the book and not want to go down on one’s knees. If there is a Weilian angle here, it is that we should all pray for more salubrious books.
Weil may have been enough of a heterodox thinker to allow writers certain freedoms in their pursuit of their God, but not the good. What admirers call her “Christ-haunted” rhetoric is not at all haunted, nor is it fair to describe her as such — as though she were a character in a Flannery O’Connor story. Weil was Christ-centered, even Christ-obsessed. If anyone haunted her, it was Marx. We can always argue that Weil set only the highest standards for literature, and that what she yearned for in literature she yearned for in herself. Still, literature cannot survive her — not the literature that emerged from the heavy weight of industrialization, modern warfare, and technocracy. Much of what Weil detests in literature tasks the reader to question core principles of idealism, a philosophy she held dear. To argue otherwise is to willfully ignore Weil’s insistence on eternal values and their absolute role in human affairs. It is to subject ourselves to endless readings of George Herbert’s “Love (III).” This reader couldn’t survive it, and by refusing to go along she risks being told she simply hasn’t suffered enough, that she has left the “terrible fact” of literature untouched. But then, that would be true for most anyone who disagrees with Weil. She is a formidable opponent. She deserves the seriousness she elicits. Who else but Weil could so eloquently hold our feet to the fire?
NOTES
[i] Alain, On Happiness, translated by Robert D. Cottrell and Jane E. Cottrell, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1989
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Susan Sontag, “Simone Weil,” The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963, accessed July 2, 2026.
[iv] Israel Shenker, “Borges, a Blind Writer With Insight,” The New York Times, April 6, 1971, accessed July 2, 2026
[v] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. Arthur Wills, London: Routledge, 2002, digital edition.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, Routledge Classics, 2002.
[ix] Mark Larrimore, “Simone Weil, Friend of Job,” Public Seminar, December 7, 2016, accessed July 2, 2026.
[x] Simone Weil, “Literature and Morals,” in Late Philosophical Writings, ed. Eric O. Springsted, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, Benjamin P. Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.
Pétrement, Simone. Simone Weil: A Life. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.
Plato. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.
Weil, Simone. Late Philosophical Writings. Edited by Eric O. Springsted. Translated by Eric O. Springsted and Lawrence E. Schmidt. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.
Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. London: Routledge, 2002. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Routledge Website.
