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Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil: A Study in Christian Responsiveness

Vivienne Blackburn read

The book is the first major study to bring together the two early twentieth-century theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran pastor, and Simone Weil, French philosopher, and convert to Christianity. Both were victims of Nazi oppression, and neither survived the war. The book explores the two theologians’ reflections on Christian responsiveness to God and neighbour, being the interdependence of the two great commandments of the Jewish Law reiterated by Jesus. It sets out the common ground and the differing emphases in their interpretations. For Bonhoeffer, responsiveness was the transformation of the whole person affected by faith (Gestaltung), and the responsibility (Verantwortung) for one’s actions which it implies. For Weil, responsiveness was the hope and expectation of grace (attente) reflected in attention, the capacity to listen to, understand, and help others. Both Bonhoeffer and Weil faced a world dominated by aggression and horrendous suffering. Both endeavoured to articulate their responses, as Christians, to that world. The relevance of their thought to the twenty-first century is explored, in relation to perspectives on grace and freedom, on aggression, suffering, and forgiveness, and on the role of the church in society. Conclusions are illustrated by reference to contemporary theologians including Rowan Williams, Daniel Hardy, Frances Young and David Tracy.

Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2004
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Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other

J.P. Little, ed. & trans. read

In 1931, Simone Weil read an article by Louis Roubaud in the Petit Parisien that exposed the Yen Bay massacre in Indochina. That article opened Weil’s eyes, and from then until her death in exile in 1943, she cared most deeply about the French colonial situation. Weil refused to accept the contradiction between the image of France as a champion of the rights of man and the reality of France’s exploitation and oppression of the peoples in its territories.
Weil wrote thirteen articles or letters about the situation, writings originally published in French journals or in French collections of her work. J. P. Little’s fluid and clear translations finally introduce to English-speaking scholars and students this important element of Weil’s political consciousness.

J.P. Little, ed. & trans., New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003

J. P. Little, one of the world’s most respected scholars of Simone Weil, is the author of Simone Weil: Waiting on Truth and numerous articles and conference presentations on Weil’s life and work. She is lecturer in French (emerita) at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin.
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Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred

Alexander Irwin

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press
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A Saint for Outsiders: A Biographical Novel

James D. Yoder

Xlibris Corporation
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Book Review: Waiting for God

Ronald Collins read

Excerpt

Enter now Francine Du Plessix Gray and her Simone Weil. This concise biography is the latest installment in the remarkable Penguin Lives series. Gray, a respected novelist whose last book was an in-depth study of the Marquis de Sade, offers up her biography of Weil in a commanding and balanced birth-to-death manner. It is a sophisticated introduction to Simone Weil, to the complicated life and mind of a paradox quartered in an emaciated frame clad in ragtag clothes. Gray admirably covers much basic history — from Weil’s years at the Lycee Henri IV to her employment in heavy-industry factories to her involvement in the Free French movement — in a short space.

This fairly well-documented biography (which taps some French sources) ably captures several sides of Simone Weil: the “red virgin,” the “categorical imperative in skirts,” the “sergeant-major angel,” the estranged Jew, the first “postmodern theologian.” In one of her last letters, to her parents, Weil wrote: “There is within me a deposit of pure gold which must be handed on.” Indeed. Her genius spanned much ground from the contextual to the universal, the political to the spiritual, and the scientific to the aesthetic. With her, the personal was cerebral. Her life was her thought and vice-versa.

Washington Post, May 27, 2001 (book review). Reviewing Simone Weil: A Penguin Life by Francine Du Plessix Gray (2001)
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The Mystical and Prophetic Thought of Simone Weil and Gustavo Gutierrez

Alexander Nava read

Two Christian thinkers—philosopher Simone Weil and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez—are brought together here. While very different in background, situation, and in their writings, Weil and Gutiérrez display striking points of contact in their lives and work. Author Alexander Nava finds that together the two provide a philosophical and theological vision that integrates the mystical and the prophetic, two dimensions of the Christian tradition that are often considered mutually exclusive. Exploring the thought of Weil and Gutiérrez, this book shows that both are suspicious of forms of mysticism that minimize the harsh reality of suffering and violence, and that both have a serious mistrust of prophetic traditions that deny the contributions of mystical interpretations, practices, and ways of speaking to and about the Divine mystery. Nava proposes that dialogue between the thought of Weil and Gutiérrez and between the mystical and prophetic traditions can lead to a more authentic understanding of the diversity and creativity of religious thought.

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001
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Simone Weil

Francine Du Plessix Gray read

From Publishers Weekly

Gray, who as novelist and biographer has illuminated the mystery of human suffering (most recently in At Home with the Marquis de Sade, 1998, a Pulitzer Prize finalist), was the perfect pick to write a volume on Simone Weil (1909-1943) for the admirable Penguin Lives series of short, popular biographies. Weil, the Jewish-born but Christ-loving, intermittently blue-collar author of brilliant political essays and breathtaking spiritual aphorisms, was a complex of suffering on all levels. She suffered from a profoundly negative self-image, incapacitating migraines and self-starvation, voluntarily assumed factory labor of the most grueling kind, endured the defeat of France in WWII and distance from God. The paradox in this panoply of ills is that, while superficially humbling, they reveal Weil’s enormous force of personal will. Gray is a wise and compassionate Virgil to the bewildered reader who chances upon this transfixing, even seductive inferno (or purgatory, or heaven the boundaries blur) of largely self-imposed pain. She clarifies the gradual transition in Weil’s life from left-wing political activism to world-renouncing spirituality, and critiques what she sees as “priggish” and “perverse” tendencies in Weil’s moral idealisms, from her Francophile fervors to her gnostic anti-Judaism. In some ways, Weil was simply a “spoiled brat,” Gray notes. Finally, Gray absolves Weil of her excesses by revealing the intense spirituality beneath them and the love and admiration she elicited despite them.
If Gray herself tends to excess, it is in her multiple citings (at least 13) of anorexia as medical cause of her subject’s extremes. But her fine selection of perfectly apposite anecdotes more than compensates. The result is a virtuosic achievement, possibly unique among popular treatments of Weil: a short, measured biography of a short but startlingly unmeasured and unmeasuring life.

New York: Viking, 2001
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Simone Weil

Palle Yourgrau

Reaktion Books, UK, reviewed by Marie Cabaud Meaney, French Studies: A Quarterly review, vol. 66, no. 3, (July 2012), pp. 419-420.
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Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944

Jeffrey Mehlman

Baltimore: MD: John Hopkins University Press
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Simone Weil, 1909-43: The Patron Saint of Outsiders

Bob Bloomfield

Catholic Truth Society