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". . . To Simone Weil [Jesus' cry of despair from the cross] is more precious than the Beatitudes. 'The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in its not seeking a supernatural remedy for suffering . . .' she has said, and we remember that this was once, with perhaps more right, the boast of Judaism, before we swapped Job for Joshua Loth Liebman and the Prophets for 'community service.' Indeed, Simone Weil insists, his ability to suffer gives to man a superiority over God that would have been a cosmic scandal except for the 'incarnation.' "
Misery, according to Simone Weil, has the virtue of stripping the individual of the comforts and security which insulate him from God's grace. Atheists, through their unhappiness, may paradoxically be nearer spiritual reality than smugly contented believers. "Between two men who have no experience of God," she once wrote, "he who denies Him is perhaps closer to Him."
Terrible Purity. Simone Weil, Professor Fiedler writes, "desired desperately to be able to enter the [Roman Catholic] Church," but could never quite bring herself to do it. She is said to have helped convert others, however. A monk once told her: "You are like the church bell which calls others into the church, but itself must remain outside."
Though she excoriated all the Jewish elements in Christianity in favor of the Greek, Fiedler finds her "note of zeal, the willingness to scream, to be ridiculous, to offend the standards of decorum and good taste" make her "like Christianity in general, less Greek than Jew." She is in the tradition of "the prophet Hosea, the holy fool who married the harlot he had bought in the market place and called his son 'Ye-are-not-my-people!' The absurdity, the absolutism, the incandescence of the prophets survive in Simone Weil, and for all her blemishes, their terrible purity."
* Even though she is known in the U.S. chiefly for a few long essays, e.g., The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (TIME, Dec. 17, 1945).