One morning when she was twenty-six years old, Simone Weil waited outside an unemployment office, hoping to find more factory work. She’d been fired from her previous factory job and needed to find another. That morning, she did not find the work she needed; instead, she found something “miraculous” that transcended the grim business of factory work and unemployment. She found “total comradeship” with two fellow job seekers: a fifty-eight-year-old man interested in photography and an eighteen-year-old man with a taste for drawing. Weil writes of the encounter in her Factory Journal, “Total comradeship. For the first time in my life, really. No barrier at all, either in the difference of class (since that has been removed) or in the difference of sex. Miraculous.” The three of them were able to attend to one another that morning as fellow human beings, and Weil’s experience as an unemployed factory worker opened this possibility for “total comradeship.”
Simone Weil (1909-1943) is well-known as a philosopher, activist, and mystic. She has a reputation for saintliness and is admired by folks as diverse as Albert Camus, Dorothy Day, and Rowan Williams. Her writing is at times deliberately impersonal and, as Williams notes, almost addictively compelling. It can be difficult to remember that she was a human being whose lofty ideals found expression in unobtrusively daily interactions.
Attention
In fact, this groundedness is central to Weil’s thought. As a girl, Weil had a crisis when she perceived that her intellect could never compare to her older brother Andre’s. (He was a mathematical genius.). To the young Simone this was deeply distressing, as she believed it meant the realm of truth would be closed to her because she had not the genius to penetrate it. What resolved her crisis and what served as a plumb line for her actions and for the thought she bequeathed to us is the concept of attention. Apprehending truth, she realized, does not require genius, but one’s full attention. This is a capacity we all have, and that is not contingent on one’s IQ but on willingness to behold, to wait, to attend.
The word attente in French carries this sense of attending and waiting. It is an active receptivity. This attentiveness to others, particularly in their suffering, is a major theme in Weil’s life and thought. Take, for instance, the incident above. What was Weil, a teacher from a bourgeois family, doing in the unemployment line for factory workers? From December 4, 1934 to August 22, 1935, Weil took a leave of absence from her teaching job to work in Paris’s Red Belt, at a total of three factories. Formerly a political activist, Weil had grown disillusioned with the European left for having no real knowledge of the daily life of the very proletariat they claimed to help. Instead, she sought to “make contact with this famous ‘real life,’” she wrote in a letter to a student before beginning her factory work. She realized the proletariat were not merely some abstract class, but comprised of real people. To understand the nature of their plight required actually entering their daily lives. Weil sought comradeship, not condescension.
Kinship of Affliction
Like the word translated “attention,” Weil’s use of “affliction” is robust and somewhat technical. She defines affliction as “a more or less attenuated state of death,” a prolonged state of suffering at all levels—psychological, physical, spiritual, and especially involving social degradation. Genuine attention to someone in affliction requires “a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.” Weil joined their ranks and considered her factory year an experience that indelibly marked her with affliction.
Weil’s experience of affliction through the physically exhausting and socially and spiritually degrading experience of factory work (being at the mercy of supervisors’ caprices and essentially being treated as subservient to machines) enabled Weil and the other two unemployed workers to attend to each other as human beings. Since their affliction was shared, they were able to see each other for more than their misfortune and grant each other the dignity of their full attention.
Weil’s first lasting impression of Christianity came just off the heels of her factory year. Deeply wearied from her factory work, Weil’s parents took her to a Portuguese coastal village to recuperate. While there, the villagers (fishermen and their families) commemorated the feast day of the village’s patron saint by singing a beautiful song of “heart-rending sadness.” Hearing their song in her state of exhaustion, Weil realized, “Christianity is a religion of slaves.” (She referred to herself as a slave, which in her vocabulary is synonymous with being marked by affliction.) In other words, it was precisely because of her affliction that she was able to recognize the affliction of others and recognize Christ as the afflicted one.
Miraculously Ordinary
To give the afflicted other authentic, loving attention, “The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.”
In order to attend to our afflicted neighbor, there must be a kinship of affliction. Weil knows that a kinship of affliction does not happen automatically. Affliction can crush a soul and render a person useless to help anyone else. Our natural response in the face of another’s affliction is revulsion. We don’t like facing the possibility that what happened to the afflicted one could happen to us. We find ways to push the afflicted one away so that we don’t have to confront our own vulnerability to misfortune. It requires a miracle to do the opposite, to turn toward the afflicted other. It requires nothing less than the love of God. The soul is emptied of itself through affliction, enabling the love of God to take root, and this provides the requisite love and space to genuinely love an afflicted neighbor.
While all this talk of “the afflicted other” sounds serious and saintly, the bond Weil formed outside the unemployment office reminds us that the application of these concepts in daily life can be unassuming. “Total comradeship” is fleeting and miraculous indeed, but it can be something as hidden and ordinary as talking about hobbies with those in the lineup outside an unemployment office.
Jolene currently resides in Vancouver where she happily does not have to choose between the mountains and the ocean. She recently graduated from Regent College where she wrote a poetry creative thesis. She now works as a freelance writer and editor. When she is not working with words, you can find her exploring Pacific Spirit Park.