Δελτίο Βιβλικών Μελετών, τχ. 33Β, Δεκέμβριος 2018, σ. 145 – 159
Translated by Andrew Watson
Simone Weil’s most important work in the last nine months of her life in London (14 December 1942–24 August 1943) was without doubt L’Enracinement.1 Alongside this great (by any standards) work, Weil also wrote many shorter texts, working feverishly, day and night. The most important of these is, in my opinion, La personne et le sacré. It was first included in a book in 1957 in the volume Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres (Writings from London and last letters) in the Espoir series (Gallimard Publications), which Camus had founded and edited. It was probably the Weil family who gave the text its title, though it was not a random choice, as the manuscript itself included the heading “La personne humaine est-elle sacrée?” (“Is the human person sacred?”). In the place of a title, Weil had put a series of words, which in the 1957 edition were added as a subtitle: Collectivité – Personne – Impersonnel – Droit – Justice (Collectivity – Person – Impersonal – Rights – Justice).
The Person and the Sacred has not yet been published in the multi-volume edition of Weil’s Complete Works, also published by Gallimard, which began to appear in 1988 (volume V, 1, in which it will be included, has not yet been released). Unfortunately the text was also left out of the publication Simone Weil, Œuvres, by Quarto/Gallimard (1999), but in the last two years alone it has been published independently in France on three separate occasions!2
The Person and the Sacred is a polemical text. It is directed uncompromisingly against the idea of the person and especially against associating the human person with the sacred. To be more precise, at the very beginning of the text Weil selects personalistic philosophy as the target of her polemic. In her criticism she states that the concept of the person it presents is hazy and confused. There is, however, no reference to Emmanuel Mounier or any mention of his work. Even if she had read him, it is certain that she had not read him with attention. In any case this text is not an academic philosophical study, and the arguments about the use of language with which she challenges personalism are not serious. Weil is concerned with other matters.
The Person and the Sacred was not written without a stimulus. At that time a debate was taking place in France about the idea of the person, of which Weil was well aware. Florence de Lussy, one of the foremost authorities on her work, writes in her preface to an independent edition of The Person and the Sacred (see note 2), that in her opinion the text was a reaction to the lecture given by André Philip in New York (November 7, 1942), “Les fondements juridiques et moraux de la Résistance française” (“The Legal and Ethical Foundations of the French Resistance”), which Weil had attended.3 There, André Philip, who enrolled Weil in the Services of the Free French in London, spoke of “the fundamental idea of the sacred character of the human person.”4 Another text that we can with some confidence assume that she had read is the excellent essay “Personne, individu et communauté” (“Person, individual and community”) by Jean Lacroix (1900–1986).5 However, though Weil was very aware of the ongoing debate, she did not take a significant part in it. Yet from the first she was roused to oppose the idea of the person.
Weil too acknowledges that there is indeed something sacred in the human being, but this is not the person. The sacred in man is the impersonal and nothing else. The concept of the sacred for Weil does not pertain to the study of religion; the sacred is not what is set apart and forbidden, the numen or mysterium tremendum – what is sacred is the good. The only source of the sacred is the good. Within every human being is unrecognised, in the depth of his heart, the expectation of good. The sanctity of human beings is precisely in their desire not to suffer harm, the feeling of injury when they do and the expectation of good being done to them. In the long history of evil, the innumerable people who have been tormented by every sort of powerful person, the crushed and the enslaved, have not always been able to express this desire and expectation. However, it always remains irreducibly alive: a silent groan, an unspoken protest. Echoing ceaselessly within them is the unspoken cry, “why do you do me harm?” But even those who can express the deep desire not to suffer harm, cannot express it coherently. Instead they stammer, like the little thief who has stolen carrots from a field to relieve his hunger and now stands before the silver-tongued judge, who, from the height of the bench, has the satisfaction of making witty jokes. The silent groan of the unjustly treated, their incoherent words, their unspoken cry of pained surprise when someone does them harm, none of these has any personal characteristics. It is this impersonal, silent protest against evil, inseparable from the unacknowledged expectation of the good, which is the sacred.
The intensity with which Weil attacks the idea of the person is surprising, since both the word itself and the idea are above all part of Christian heritage. Christ is a person, and there are indeed countless references to, or invocations of, his person in every kind of Christian text. The Holy Trinity consists of three persons, and also every human being who participates in a Christian assembly or community is defined, already from the time of the New Testament, as a person (2 Cor 1:11). Weil knows this, but she has no difficulty in overlooking it. Furthermore, the personalism that she explicitly attacks is itself a current of thought which is Christian in its inspiration. With the idea of the person, the personalists wished to distinguish themselves from both the extreme individualism of the liberals and the collectivism of the Marxists. Indeed, the debate in France at that time raised two issues above all: first, the relationship between the person and the individual and, secondly, the relationship between the person and the community. In his Manifesto, Mounier proclaimed that a civilization of the person is a response to all forms of individualism and, at the same time, to mass society. The individual is selfishness, narcissism, greed, scattering, while the person is generosity and concentration.6 Mass society is a sum of anonymous units, while the civilization of the person guarantees the solidarity of the person and the community. The revolution – his own word – that Mounier passionately advocates is personalistic and thus communal.7 Is it not, therefore, indeed surprising, after what we have noted above, that Weil should be so deeply antagonistic to the idea of the person? What is the reason for her fierce hostility?
The simple answer is that Weil considers that “person” means privilege, social privilege (p. 21). The slave in the plantation with a chain on his leg, or another chained to the factory: these have no personhood. They are crushed bodies and souls, battered creatures. Only the privileged have a person. The rest have no personhood, and thus they have no voice. They suffer in silence. At best they stammer incoherently. What person could the prisoners of Auschwitz or the Gulag prisoners have? The wretched of the earth have neither person nor talent. Talent is not a natural grace, it is a social privilege. Only the privileged have talent. Throughout her life, Weil chose to be with those who had no person, with the persecuted, striving to identify with them, listen to and communicate their silent protest. She knew well, this graduate of the École Normale Supérieure of the rue d’Ulm, that she was not one of them, that socially her destiny had placed her on the other side, and she did all she could in order not to live as one of the privileged. This was for her a cause of intolerable inner division and pain, which she solved with her essentially voluntary exit from life. For Weil, it is an affront to talk to these people about personhood and the free development of personality; it means only that you are incapable of hearing them. In order to be able to hear their inaudible voice or their incoherent stammering requires an environment of silence and a kind of attention that is no different from pure love (p. 12).
Weil’s polemic against the person does not lead her to a defence of “we”, of the community, of collectivity. On the contrary, for Weil, collectivity has since old been a factor in the subjugation of the human being. In her first major work, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale (1934), she vehemently attacks collectivity as it designates people as its pawns. Her own ideal is something different: “a society where the life of the collectivity is subjugated to people understood as individuals rather than it subjugating them.”8 In this belief, Weil remained steadfast. The part of the soul that says “we” is infinitely more dangerous than the part of it that says “I”. The attribution of sacred character to the collectivity is neither more nor less than idolatry, the greatest crime of every age and place (p. 14). There is only one way for man to escape from the crushing power of collectivity:
by raising himself above the personal and entering into the impersonal. The moment he does this, there is something in him, a small portion of his soul, upon which nothing of the collective can get a hold. If he can root himself in the impersonal good […], then he is in a condition […] to bring to bear without any outside help, against any collectivity, a small but real force. (p. 15)
To be sure, Weil’s polemic against the idea of the person is closely associated with her criticism of human rights. It is one and the same. With her penetrating insight Weil has rightly understood, without resorting to exhaustive historical studies, that the emergence of the idea of human rights and the universal dignity of man is the result of the gradual sanctification of the person. Human rights and the sanctity of the human person are inseparable.9 The idea and institutionalization of human rights has its origin in the 18th century: they are the fruit of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, while the Catholic Church, the guardian of the idea that man is the image of God, took a stand against them. The Church, in short, was afraid, not without justification, that human rights, as the Enlightenment and the French Revolution preached them, would take the place of God’s rights, that man would dethrone God. In fact it was not until the Second Vatican Council and Popes John XXIII and Paul VI that the Catholic Church finally accepted human rights, integrated them into its teaching, and even took the lead in their defence throughout the world. However, even before this official recognition, a group of Christian thinkers in the twentieth century would claim the Gospel itself as the source of rights. Indeed they attempted not simply to reconcile Christianity with democracy, but to present the teaching of the Gospel as the main foundation of democracy. Foremost among these was Jacques Maritain. However this project not only failed to convince or move Weil, but actually filled her with indignation. Maritain and his book Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (Human rights and Natural Law) became the object of her hostility. The book was published in New York in 1942, and Weil read it and referred to it critically in The Need for Roots.10 In this book, where Maritain defended the person, both against the individual and against a society that devours persons, there is much that would have offended Weil as she read it, such as everything its author wrote about the freedom of the person and his development (épanouissement)11 or the right of each to govern and define his own life.12 What does all this have to do with the afflicted?, she would have thought angrily. Maritain is also the object of Weil’s criticism in The Person and the Sacred, even though he is not named (as Mounier is also not named). Maritain’s book is here taken to task almost point by point. The French Catholic believes, in this particular book as in other works of his, that the only possible foundation of universal human rights cannot be anything other than natural law.13 For Maritain, in complete contrast to Weil,
The concept of rights is even deeper than that of moral obligation, because God has a sovereign right over creatures and has no moral obligation to them (even if he owes it himself to provide them with what is required by their very nature).14
For Maritain, the person has rights deriving from the mere fact that he is a person and ultimately a creation of God. Every right that man possesses he does so by virtue of the right possessed by God –who is pure Justice– to see in beings the order of his wisdom respected, to be obeyed and loved with all one’s mind.15
Human rights, according to Maritain, are not an inheritance left to us from the 18th century and the Enlightenment; rather they are a legacy of classical thought and the Gospel. From classical antiquity, Maritain (as many others did) pointed to the figure of Antigone, the “eternal heroine of natural law, which the Ancients called unwritten law [italics author’s own], a name that suits it best.”16 In complete contrast, Weil, who herself identified with Antigone, stated:17
It is extraordinary that Antigone’s unwritten law should have been confused with the idea of natural law. (p. 20)
When the little fool tells the rational Creon “I was not born to hate, but to love,” he tells her to go, in that case, and live in the other world, together with her loved ones. Weil comments:
And, truly, this was the right place for her. For the unwritten law which this girl obeyed had nothing whatsoever in common with rights, or with the natural; it was the same love, extreme and absurd, which led Christ to the Cross. (p. 20)
At this point allow me to make a short digression. Weil is mistaken in identifying Antigone’s συμφιλεῖν with the love of Christ. Although she knew ancient Greek, she did not, like so many others, give as much attention to the prefix of the verb (as well as of συνέχθειν, which preceded it) as she should have. The love for which Antigone declares she was born is not directed to all, but only to her own kin, her brothers, who were born of the same womb.
Nonetheless, with the example of Antigone and Christ, Weil is simply saying that rights have nothing to do with love –can one imagine St Francis of Assisi speaking of rights? (p. 21)– and that Justice, the companion of the gods of the underworld, is to be identified with love. Weil believes that Maritain, in all that he writes about man being the master of his own life, lowers rights to a place even lower than that of claims, he degrades them to the level of desire (p. 21).
Weil opposes the idea of human rights, because rights have a real existence only when there is someone able to recognise them; in other words they are a matter of negotiation, transaction and deal-making (p. 18). Consequently they are infused with commercial and quantitative logic. Furthermore, rights are ultimately a matter of power, a correlation of forces, and only exist when those who claim them have the power to impose them on those who deny or challenge them. “By the nature of things […] rights are dependent upon force” (p. 19), they are just “a little superior to brute force” (ibid.). Rights are characterised by contention (p. 21), they have nothing to do with love (p. 20). Force gives rise to force, violence to violence, in an endless vicious circle. Rights therefore never lead to an exit from this cycle of blood; instead they form part of it.
At a time when Europe was fighting against Nazi barbarity, the reader could well wonder why Weil was taken up with a war against human rights. Indeed it demands an explanation. Weil was in London, working on behalf of the Free French of General de Gaulle (she resigned on 26 July 1943). She wanted its leadership to send her into occupied France on a secret mission, but they never did so, concerned for her safety and the safety of those who might work with her. Instead of being parachuted into France, she wrote texts (to which nobody paid much attention) for the Free French Interior Ministry (Commissariat national à l’Intérieur et au Travail). At that time a new declaration of human rights for the post-war world needed to be prepared. Thus at this particular time, as part of her official duties, Weil addressed the question of rights. She worked feverishly, but the fruit of this work was not what was expected of her, but rather The prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind (Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain)the work that became world-famous as The Need for Roots, a comprehensive proposal for a new civilization, in which the work of justice is assigned to love.
The Person and the Sacred, despite what we have said so far, still keeps its secret well guarded. To understand Weil’s polemic against the person and his rights, we need to take yet another step. We must understand the notion of affliction (malheur), as Weil conceived of it, especially during the second period of her life and work, that is to say, when she was snatched away by Christ (“Christ himself descended and took possession of me”: “le Christ lui-même est descendu et m’a prise”).18 Weil began to think about social issues from the perspective of affliction (pp. 22-23). Affliction, which is something other than pain (douleur) and suffering (souffrance), became the starting point for her social and political thought. A year before The Person and the Sacred, a few days before leaving Marseilles for New York, Weil wrote in one sitting (and sent to Fr Perrin) the disturbing and very difficult text of L’amour de Dieu et le malheur (The Love of God and Affliction).
Affliction, the only real enigma,19 is an uprooting of life, almost equivalent to death.20 Affliction seizes the soul, cuts into it, brands it with a burning iron.21 What causes affliction is the blind mechanism of necessity.
If the mechanism were not blind, there would be no affliction. Affliction is above all anonymous, depriving those whom it overwhelms of their personality and turning them into objects. It is indifferent, and the cold of this indifference, a metallic cold, freezes those it touches to the depths of their soul. They will never again regain warmth. They will never again believe that they are someone.22
Affliction strikes man in all three dimensions: in the body (with pain), in the soul (with despair), and in his social position (with ruin and scorn). The afflicted one, depending on the circumstances and the wheel of fate, is “the poor, the refugee, the Negro, the sick man, the hardened convict, and all like them.”23 Let me note here that when evil is not caused by man to man, but by the blind power of nature, incurable illness, madness, epidemic, then the unspoken cry is not “why are they doing me harm?”, such as when evil is caused by man, the unjust and mighty, but “why is harm being done to me?”, “why should I suffer?”. If in the case of the first cry (“why are they doing me harm?”) there is a chance that someone will hear it, who will hear the second?
Affliction, as the destruction of man’s personality, leads to the passing over into anonymity.24 The afflicted individual is emptied of himself, he is vacated. “As Christ emptied himself of his divinity because of love, the afflicted person is emptied of his humanity because of his misfortune.”25 Affliction is repugnant and ridiculous,26 which is why all people despise the afflicted, turn away from them, are unable to share their pain. All, that is, except those whose soul has become the dwelling-place of Christ. Pity for the afflicted is the result of a miracle, the miracle of miracles.27 And precisely because affliction is weakness, it can be salutary; it can turn our gaze to the Cross of Christ.28 “Affliction without the Cross is hell, and God did not put hell on earth.”29 We must therefore love, not the affliction itself, but the possibility of affliction, which is shared by all at any moment, precisely because it can lead man to approach the mystery of God’s love.
They often complain of Christianity that it is morbidly indulgent of suffering, of pain. This is a mistake. Christianity is not about pain and suffering, for these are feelings, psychological states, where it is always possible to look for a perverted pleasure. In fact it is something quite different. It is affliction. Affliction is not a spiritual state. It is the pulverisation of the soul from the mechanical brutality of circumstances. The transformation of a man in his own eyes from the human condition into the state of a worm, which trembles half-dissolved in the ground, is an event that not even a perverse person can accept. The wise man, the hero, the saint – none of these can accept it. Affliction is what is imposed on a human being completely against his will. Its essence and definition is that horror, that rebellion of the entire existence of man that has been overwhelmed by it. That is exactly what we have to give our consent to, thanks to supernatural love.30
It is not possible to know affliction naturally, for it requires a kind of supernatural favour. Without supernatural love, it is impossible to recognise affliction and to feel pity for the afflicted (p. 25). This supernatural love is the Cross of Christ: “The Cross is our homeland.”31 Weil’s gaze remained firmly on the Cross. The Cross of Christ exerted on her a literally mortal attraction, and she could never see the Resurrection as the supreme expression of God’s love, a love that defeats death itself.
I will quote yet another excerpt, of rare spiritual and expressive power, from the same text:
Christ recognises as his own workers for the good only those whose mercy is founded on the knowledge of affliction. The others only give on a whim, erratically, or else they give with exaggerated regularity, as a result of either habits inculcated by their education or out of conformity with social conventions, or arrogance or sympathy for the body rather than the spirit, or the desire to have an easy conscience, motivated by reasons that relate only to themselves. They are haughty or adopt a protective manner or express an indiscriminate compassion or make the afflicted person feel that they are no more than representatives of a certain kind of affliction. Whatever form their giving takes, it wounds. And they take their reward in this world because their right hand knows only too well what their left hand is doing. Their contact with the afflicted ends in a lie, for true knowledge of the afflicted requires knowledge of affliction. Those who have not looked at the face of affliction or are not ready to do so are only able to approach the afflicted person when protected by a veil of falsehood or self-deception. If by chance affliction is suddenly revealed on the face of the afflicted, they turn tail and run.
When the worker for the good that Christ recognises as one of his own is in the presence of an afflicted person, he feels that there is no distance between them – he transfers to the other his whole being – consequently the movement to feed the other is as instinctive and immediate as feeding himself when he is hungry. And it is immediately forgotten, just as the meals of previous days are forgotten. It would be meaningless to tell such a person that he was dealing with the afflicted for the Lord’s sake. It would seem as absurd to him as to say he was eating for the Lord’s sake. We eat because we cannot contain our hunger. Those who receive Christ’s gratitude are those who give in the same way that they eat.32
How alien was the idea of rights to Weil! She speaks of the supernatural grace of a love that leads us to recognise affliction and love the afflicted, while others speak of legal frameworks, negotiations, and ultimately about power. It is indeed another world. In the long history of criticism of the idea of human rights, from Edmund Burke to the present day, Weil has a paradoxically unique position: the prism through which she judges and rejects them is the supernatural love of the persecuted.
However it is not only her unwavering commitment on behalf of the afflicted that leads Weil to the stance she takes against the person. It is her mystical experience. There is, therefore, another step –the last one– that we need to take in order to understand this difficult text: we need to shine light on its mystical aspect. It is not a matter of contradictio in terminis to consider Weil, in the second period of her life and work, as being, inseparably, a mystical philosopher. Up until the end she maintained the philosopher’s intellectual rigour; at the same time she was inspired in her thoughts and actions by mystical experiences and intuitions. We often confuse mysticism with the way of the hermit and ascetic. They may converge, but they are by no means the same. Many great hermits and ascetics were not mystics, and likewise many mystics were not hermits.
The mystics of all ages, whatever religion they belong to, display great similarities. For example, they all view individuality, ego, and personal will as something negative. The soul has to be emptied of all the individual elements, to be vacated, so that God, the Truth, will come to dwell there. The ground of this emptied soul becomes the place where Truth will be enthroned. It is thus that Meister Eckhart, one of Weil’s favourite mystics, interprets the story of Christ’s violent expulsion of the merchants from the Temple. The temple of the soul must be emptied of everything, to echo only the impersonal voice of Truth.33
Weil herself revealed the mystical source of her approach in The Person and the Sacred:
Perfection is impersonal. The person in man is the place in us that contains error and sin. All the efforts of the mystics have always aimed to keep in their soul no part of it which says “I”. (p. 9)
Without this steadfast mystical hostility to the ego, to personal will, Weil’s text remains unintelligible.
* * *
Simone Weil erected her own tent in the territory of ideas. Her way of reflecting on the human condition was extreme, absolute, and uncompromising, and, above all, unclassifiable. She does not belong to any stream, group or school. Her own tent does not resemble any other. Anyone who wishes to follow Weil’s thought in its entirety, accepting all of its demands, will not be able to live in the world, as she could not live in it herself. She departed at the age of thirty-four. In the year of her death she wrote:
The ultimate choice for every soul is perhaps the choice between truth and life. Anyone who wants to keep his life will lose it.34
If you put the truth above all, and if you want to be faithful to it, you will, at some point, have to lose your life, in one way or another. She chose her own way. Weil is certainly not the only example. The same is also true, for example, of her great spiritual ancestor, Pascal (even though he was also the object of her criticism) as well as many others. Is it not also true of the Gospel? How many Christians have lived their lives keeping the Gospel’s command of love for one’s enemies?
But in that case what is the reason to read her? What do we need it for? More specifically: does anyone who reads The Person and the Sacred need immediately to cease talking about the person? Of course not. The word and meaning of the person existed before personalism, and it continues to exist after it. It is very resilient, as modern Orthodox theology also shows. Paul Ricoeur, in summarising his thought on the person and personalism, wrote aptly:
Personalism has died, the person has returned (I could perhaps say ‘let personalism die,’ meaning: ‘let it die, even if’ … ‘it is perhaps better if it dies, in order to …’).35
Perhaps we should stop talking about and defending human rights? By no means! We will continue, even after reading this little book, to speak of the person, without, of course, avoiding, let alone demonising, the words individual and individuality. We will maintain the struggle for human rights. The question therefore remains: why should we enthusiastically recommend this text by Weil? In reply to this question, which I also put to myself, I would say that Weil’s extreme thought puts our own thinking, our certainties and our complacency to the test, revealing our compromises and deceptions. More specifically, when we consider the millions of people who are not masters of their own lives and their fate, then, taking Weil into consideration, it will not be so easy to speak glibly about inalienable human rights, and perhaps –I say perhaps– we will try to listen to their voiceless groan, their silent protest. Otherwise we become insensitive and shameless. Talking to the man who is looking in the garbage to find something to eat about his sacred right to choose his work means that you have no sense of shame. What was the personhood or the rights of the detainee in Auschwitz or the Gulag? What is the meaning of the right to free personality development for the millions of people suffering from Alzheimer’s? In all these cases and in many others, what is in fact required is the attention that Weil speaks of, which is no different from love, so that you are able at least to hear a faint echo of their silent cry.
The thought of Weil, like that of many other prophets, mystics, teachers, thinkers and poets, is the thought of the impossible, and thus by definition of the unrealisable. No one has ever realised in its entirety what they have written and said, no one has followed it to its ultimate implications. But without them, if we stay only within the limits of the law, then the path to inhumanity is wide-open and even permits an easy conscience. Their voice is a recalling voice. Where we live heedlessly, in our customary indifference to the suffering of others, fulfilling only what the law requires, Weil’s voice recalls us to our humanity. It recalls us to the foolishness of love. In the Écrits de Londres, the text that follows The Person and the Sacred is entitled “Luttons-nous pour la justice?” (“Do we struggle for justice?”), where the argument –or rather the hymn– is more about love than justice. A paradox? Not at all. For Weil, these two are not just inseparable, but love is both the prerequisite and simultaneously the climax of justice:
To the extent that, at any moment, the foolishness of love (folie d’amour) exists between people, to the same extent, and not more, there is the possibility of a change in the direction of justice.36
It is not easy to fight for justice, Weil herself admits. It is not enough just to choose a side,
one must also be inhabited by the spirit of justice. The spirit of righteousness is the supreme and most perfect flower of the foolishness of love.37
Only one who loves can follow the path of justice without hatred and violence. It is to such a love that Simone Weil ceaselessly calls us again and again. This is one of the reasons we need her uncomfortable company; we need her calling and recalling voice.
1This essay accompanies the author’s translation into Greek of La personne et le sacré: Simone Weil, Τὸ πρόσωπο καὶ τὸ ἱερό. Συλλογικότητα – Πρόσωπο – Ἀπρόσωπο – Δικαίωµα – Δικαιοσύνη, µετάφραση–ἐπίµετρο: Σταῦρος Ζουµπουλάκης, Πόλις, Athens 2018, pp. 53-77.
In my translation of Stavros Zoumboulakis’ essay, the following English version of Weil’s La personneet le sacré (published as “Human Personality”) is quoted: Simone Weil, Selected Essays, 1934–1943. Historical, Political, and Moral Writings, chosen and translated by Richard Rees, with series foreword by Eric Springsted, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015, pp. 9–34. References are to the page numbers of this edition. (A.W.)
English translation: Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, transl.: Arthur Wills, preface: T.S. Eliot, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.
2The first is from the publishers RN/Ars longa, vita brevis, with prologue by Florence de Lussy (July 2016); my review of this edition appeared in Kathimerini, 3–4 June 2017 (“The Person and the Impersonal”). Unfortunately it contains errors (on p. 27, instead of the term unutile there appears its exact opposite utile!). The second edition is from Rivages poche/Petite Bibliothèque, with a prologue by Giorgio Agamben (March 2017). The third is from Alia (January 2018), without any accompanying text.
3The text of the talk is published as an appendix in: Simone Weil, L’Enracinement, edited by Florence de Lussy and Michel Narcy, Paris: Flammarion/Champs classiques, 2014, pp. 425–437.
4Ibid., p. 429.
5Cahiers d’Uriage 29 (March 1942). This text was also republished as an appendix in the edition of L’Enracinement mentioned above (n. 3), pp. 439–455.
6Emmanuel Mounier, Manifeste au service du personnalisme (1936), in Écrits sur le personnalisme, Paris: Seuil/Points/essais, 2000, pp. 67–80
7Ibid., p. 81-88.
8Simone Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale, in S. Weil, Œuvres, édition établie sous la direction de Florence de Lussy, Paris: Gallimard /Quarto, 1999, p. 326.
9Cf. Hans Joas, Comment la personne est devenue sacrée, Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2016, pp. 88–107 and passim. This book by the German sociologist (1st edition: Die Sakralität der Person. Eine neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011) is invaluable for anyone wishing to understand the origin and development of the idea of the sacredness of the human person
10Simone Weil, L’Enracinement, p. 50 and 271. See also the new French edition of Weil’s Complete Works, (Œuvres Complètes; henceforth OC), V, 2, p. 141 and 341.
11Cf. Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 7, Paris: Éditions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse-Éditions Saint-Paul, 1988, p. 647.
12Ibid., p. 690 and passim.
13Ibid., pp. 660–663.
14Ibid., p. 661.
15Ibid.
16Ibid., p. 657.
17Simone Pétrement, La vie de Simone Weil, Paris: Fayard, 1997 (1st edition: 1973), p. 644.
18Autobiographie spirituelle (letter to Fr Perrin, 14/5/1942) in Weil, Œuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy, Paris: Gallimard, 1999, p. 771. Likewise in the extended letter of 12/5/1942 to Joë Bousquet, ibid., p. 799. It should be recalled that Weil had this mystical experience while reciting the poem Love by George Herbert (1593–1633), towards the end of 1938, see Pétrement, La vie de Simone Weil, pp. 455–457.
19OC, ΙV, 1, p. 348.
20Ibid., p. 347.
21Ibid., p. 350.
22Ibid., p. 352.
23Ibid., p. 366.
24Ibid.
25Ibid.
26Ibid., p. 352.
27Ibid., p. 349.
28Ibid., p. 361.
29Ibid., p. 370.
30Ibid., pp. 368-369.
31Ibid., p. 363.
32Ibid., pp. 365-366.
33Maître Eckart, Sermons, 1, Paris: Seuil, 1974, pp. 43–49.
34“Y a-t-il une doctrine marxiste?”, S. Weil, Oppression et liberté, Paris: Gallimard/Espoir, 1955, p. 226
35Ricœur’s text has also been included as prologue to Écrits sur le personnalisme (see n. 6), p. 7.
36S. Weil, Écrits de Londres, Paris: Gallimard/Espoir, 1957, p. 50.
37Ibid., p. 56.