Simone Weil and nationalism (1)

Simone Weil, a French "unbaptised Catholic" of Jewish background who died in 1943 in England, at the age of 33, is considered by many to be a brilliant writer and a saint, one of the few great spirits of the age. Her saintliness is questioned in this essay, however, which points out that she chose to impose (ultimately fatal) hardships on herself, ostensibly out of compassion for suffering proletarians and for Frenchmen under occupation; yet, when the position of French Jews became unpleasant, she reacted by protesting to the authorities that she did not deserve to be classified as Jewish. T.S. Eliot, in his introduction to Weil's The Need for Roots, admires her soul and her intellect, but also criticizes her as something of a universalist on the one hand and a Marcionite heretic on the other; that is, rather than seeing Christianity as standing out by its superiority to the other major religions, she saw Judaism—together with the religion of the ancient Romans, whom she also hated—as exceptional in its inferiority. She avoided close relationships and her personality appears to have been marked by an intense self-loathing.

The Need for Roots, which she wrote just before her death, is a wide-ranging attempt to lay the foundations for a new political order in France. It contains a great deal that seems to be unwise: for example, she wished to suppress the work of authors who published demonstrably incorrect statements, even though this would surely have had the effect of eliminating all books of any interest—in particular her own, which is full of dangerous generalizations, and has to be regarded as a fertile source of hypotheses rather than of truths. Nevertheless, even if one regards the book as nonsense, it is of significance because it represents in rather pronounced and clearly argued form some of the beliefs about nationalism which have become prevalent since World War II. Weil was admired by some of the leading writers of the postwar period (see the link to the essay above), so it is a reasonable guess that her attitudes to nationalism have been not just indicative, but influential in intellectual circles. The book also contains some interesting, though to my mind very incomplete, ideas about how one might construct a Christian alternative to traditional nationalism. I will ignore here the large amount of material in the book that does not seem to bear on the question of nationalism.