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Few would deny that Simone Weil is an enigmatic, though fascinating, figure both in the history of philosophy and in Christian thought - if only because she is all of the following: mystic, factory worker and resistance fighter in the Second World War; Platonist, labour thinker and materialist; Christian (though unbaptised), Jew and admirer of eastern thought; ethical idealist, social activist and social pessimist. And there is considerably more to this woman whose life was tragically short. Equally, few have taken her seriously in either philosophy or theology as a part of the canon of their discipline. This is a considerable shame in my view, though it is understandable.
Reading Weil's written output - which is large - can be hard work. She strikes me as less a systematic thinker than an exploratory thinker who has a broadly Greek, and in particular Platonic, intellectual framework and is engaged by her contemporary environment and the great issues of her day - and, indeed, many of ours as we settle into the next period of the last few hundred years' experiment with capitalism. Add to this her preferred literary forms - a few treatises, numerous essays, several meditations and voluminous notebook entries - and the effect can be dazzling: she often speaks with the power to convict of one who 'has authority'; for one who is no 'post-modernist' thinker, she offers frequently penetrating and disarmingly 'post-modern' insights into power and into the nature of certain kinds of institution (but without much of the guff and cant of 'Postmodernism') - both in the religious world and the broader society; one learns much about the true meaning of certain kinds of experience and idea from her reflections; and her range of discussion is breathtaking: from mathematics to the intimate connection between creation and the cross, from the intellectual's (all too frequently ignored) obligations to Truth, to the crushing effect on the body and spirit of unrelieved physical work in the factory system of production. The fragmenting effects of the conditions under which she wrote (the Second World War, moving frequently, being financially strapped much of the time) magnify the piecemeal and ununified impression one can get of her thought. There is much...