Hailed by Albert Camus as 'the only great spirit of our times', Simone Weil was one of great essayists and activists of the twentieth century. Her writings on the nature of religious faith and spirituality have inspired many subsequent thinkers. Wrestling with the moral dilemmas entailed by commitment to the Catholic Church, Letter to a Priest is a brilliant meditation on the perennial battle between faith and doubt and resonates today as much as when it was first written. This edition also includes one of her most inspiring and celebrated essays, 'Human Personality', where Weil offers a moving and unorthodox account of the preciousness of human beings.
With a new foreword by Raimond Gaita.
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Yes, you can access Letter to a Priest by Simone Weil in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Teología y religión & Religión. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth. When I read the New Testament, the mystics, the liturgy, when I watch the celebration of the mass, I feel with a sort of conviction that this faith is mine or, to be more precise, would be mine without the distance placed between it and me by my imperfection. This results in a painful spiritual state. I would like to make it, not less painful, only clearer. Any pain whatsoever is acceptable where there is clarity.
I am going to enumerate for you a certain number of thoughts which have dwelt in me for years (some of them at least) and which form a barrier between me and the Church. I do not ask you to discuss their basis. I should be happy for there to be such a discussion, but later on, in the second place.
I ask you to give me a definite answer—leaving out such expressions as ‘I think that’ etc.—regarding the compatibility or incompatibility of each of these opinions with membership of the Church. If there is any incompatibility, I should like you to say straight out: I would refuse baptism (or absolution) to anybody claiming to hold the opinions expressed under the headings numbered so-and-so, so-and-so and so-and-so. I do not ask for a quick answer. There is no hurry. All I ask for is a categorical answer.
I must apologize for giving you this trouble, but I do not see how I can avoid it. I am far from regarding meditation on these problems as a game. Not only is it of more than vital importance, seeing that one’s eternal salvation is at stake; but, furthermore, it is of an importance which far surpasses in my opinion that of my own salvation. A problem of life and death is a game by comparison.
Among the opinions that are to follow there are some about which I am doubtful; but were it a strict article of the faith to esteem them false, I should regard them as being as serious an obstacle as the others, for I am firmly convinced that they are held in doubt by me, that is to say, that it is not legitimate to deny them categorically.
Some of these opinions (more particularly those which concern the Mysteries, the Scriptures not of Jewish-Christian inspiration, Melchizedek, etc.) have never been condemned, although it is very likely that they were upheld in the early centuries. This makes me wonder if they were not secretly accepted. However that may be, if today they were to be publicly proclaimed by me or by others and condemned by the Church, I would not abandon them, unless it could be proved to me that they were false.
I have been thinking about these things for years with all the intensity of love and attention of which I am capable. This intensity is a wretchedly feeble one because of my imperfection which is very great; but it seems to me it is always on the increase. In proportion as it grows, the bonds which attach me to the Catholic faith become ever stronger and stronger, ever more deeply rooted in the heart and intelligence. But at the same time the thoughts which separate me from the Church also gain in force and clarity. If these thoughts are really incompatible with membership of the Church, then there is no hope that I may ever take part in the sacraments. If such is the case, I do not see how I can avoid the conclusion that my vocation is to be a Christian outside the Church. The possibility of there being such a vocation would imply that the Church is not Catholic in fact as it is in name, and that it must one day become so, if it is destined to fulfil its mission.
The opinions which follow have for me various degrees of probability or certainty, but all go accompanied in my mind by a question mark. If I express them in the indicative mood it is only because of the poverty of language; my needs would require that the conjugation should contain a supplementary tense. In the domain of holy things I affirm nothing categorically. But such of my opinions as are in conformity with the teaching of the Church also go accompanied in my mind by the same question mark.
I look upon a certain suspension of judgement with regard to all thoughts whatever they may be, without any exception, as constituting the virtue of humility in the domain of the intelligence.
Here is the list:
1
If we take a moment in history anterior to Christ and sufficiently remote from him—for example, five centuries before his time—and we set aside what follows afterwards, at that moment Israel has less of a share in God and in divine truth than several of the surrounding peoples (India, Egypt, Greece, China). For the essential truth concerning God is that He is good. To believe that God can order men to commit atrocious acts of injustice and cruelty is the greatest mistake it is possible to make with regard to Him.
Zeus, in the Iliad, orders no cruelty whatever. The Greeks believed that ‘suppliant Zeus’ inhabits every miserable creature that implores pity. Jehovah is the ‘God of hosts’. The history of the Hebrews shows that this refers not only to the stars, but also to the warriors of Israel. Now, Herodotus enumerates a great number of Hellenic and Asiatic peoples amongst whom there was only one that had a ‘Zeus of hosts’. This blasphemy was unknown to all the others. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, at least three thousand years old, and doubtless very much older, is filled with evangelic charity. (The dead man says to Osiris: ‘Lord of Truth, I bring thee the truth . . . I have destroyed evil for thee . . . I have killed no man. I have made no man weep. I have let no man suffer hunger. I have never been the cause of a master’s doing harm to his slave. I have never made any man afraid. I have never adopted a haughty tone. I have never turned a deaf ear to just and true words. I have never put my name forward for honours. I have not spurned God in His manifestations. . . .’)
The Hebrews, who for four centuries were in contact with Egyptian civilization, refused to adopt this sweet spirit. They wanted power. . . .
All the texts dating from before the exile are, I think, tainted with this fundamental error concerning God—except the Book of Job, the hero of which is not a Jew, the Song of Solomon (but does it date from before the exile?) and certain psalms of David (but have they been correctly attributed?). Otherwise, the first absolutely pure character appearing in Jewish history is Daniel (who was initiated into Chaldean lore). The lives of all the others, beginning with Abraham, are sullied by atrocious things. (Abraham starts off by prostituting his wife.)
This would incline one to think that Israel learnt the most essential truth about God (namely, that God is good before being powerful) from foreign traditional sources, Chaldean, Persian or Greek, and thanks to the exile.
2
What we call idolatry is to a large extent an invention of Jewish fanaticism. All peoples at all times have always been monotheistic. If some Hebrews of classical Jewry were to return to life and were to be provided with arms, they would exterminate the lot of us—men, women and children, for the crime of idolatry. They would reproach us for worshipping Baal and Astarte, taking Christ for Baal and the Virgin for Astarte.
Conversely, Baal and Astarte were perhaps representations of Christ and the Virgin.
Some of these cults have been justly accused of the debauches that accompanied them—but, I think, far less often than it is supposed today.
But the cruelties bound up with the cult of Jehovah, the exterminations commanded by him, are defilements at least as atrocious. Cruelty is a still more appalling crime than lust. Moreover, lust satisfies itself as readily by murder as it does by sexual intercourse.
The feelings of the so-called pagans for their statues were very probably the same as those inspired nowadays by the crucifix and the statues of the Virgin, with the same deviations among people of mediocre spiritual and intellectual development.
Is not such-and-such a supernatural virtue commonly attributed to some particular statue of the Virgin?
Even if they did happen to believe the divinity to be totally present in some stone or wood, it may be they were sometimes right. Do we not believe God is present in some bread and wine? Perhaps God was actually present in statues fashioned and consecrated according to certain rites.
The veritable idolatry is covetousness (
, Col. iii. 5), and the Jewish nation, in its thirst for carnal good, was guilty of this in the very moments even when it was worshipping its God. The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the ‘chosen people’.
3
The ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries and of those of Osiris were regarded as sacraments in the sense in which we understand that term today. And it may be they were real sacraments, possessing the same virtue as baptism or the eucharist, and deriving that virtue from the same relation with Christ’s Passion. The Passion was then to come. Today it is past. Past and future are symmetrical. Chronology cannot play a decisive role in a relationship between God and man, a relationship one of the terms of which is eternal.
If the Redemption, with the sensible signs and means corresponding to it, had not been present on this earth from the very beginning, it would not be possible to pardon God—if one may use such words without blasphemy—for the affliction of so many innocent people, so many people uprooted, enslaved, tortured and put to death in the course of centuries preceding the Christian era. Christ is present on this earth, unless men drive him away, wherever there is crime and affliction. Without the supernatural effects of this presence, how would the innocent, crushed beneath the weight of affliction, be able to avoid falling into the crime of cursing God, and consequently into damnation?
Moreover, St. John talks about the ‘Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’.
The proof that the content of Christianity existed before Christ is that since his day there have been no very noticeable changes in men’s behaviour.
4
There have perhaps been among various peoples (India, Egypt, China, Greece) sacred Scriptures revealed in the same manner as the Jewish-Christian Scriptures. Some of the texts which still exist today are possibly either fragments or echoes of them.
5
The passages in the Bible (Genesis, Psalms, St. Paul) concerning Melchizedek prove that from the dawn of Israel there existed outside Israel a service of and knowledge of God situated on the selfsame level as Christianity and infinitely superior to anything Israel itself has ever possessed.
There is nothing to exclude the supposition of a link between Melchizedek and the ancient mysteries. There is an affinity between bread and Demeter, wine and Dionysus.
Melchizedek is apparently, according to Genesis, a king of Canaan. Hence, in all probability, the corruption and impiety of the villages of Canaan either dated back only a few centuries at the time of the massacres, or else were libellous inventions levelled against their victims by the Hebrews.
6
The passage in St. Paul concerning Melchizedek, taken in connection with Christ’s words ‘Abraham hath seen my day’, might even indicate that Melchizedek was already an Incarnation of the Word.
At all events, we do not know for certain that there have not been incarnations previous to that of Jesus, and that Osiris in Egypt, Krishna in India were not of that number.
7
If Osiris is not a man having lived on earth while remaining God, in the same way as Christ, then at any rate the story of Osiris is a prophecy infinitely clearer, more complete and closer to the truth than everything which goes by that name in the Old Testament. The same applies to other gods that have died and returned to life.
The extreme importance at the present day of this problem comes from the fact that it is becoming a matter of urgency to remedy the divorce which has existed for twenty centuries and goes on getting worse and worse between profane civilization and spirituality in Christian countries. Our civilization owes nothing to Israel and very little to Christianity; it owes nearly everything to pre-Christian antiquity (Germans, Druids, Rome, Greece, Aegeo-Cretans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Babylonians . . .). If there is a watertight division between this antiquity and Christianity, the same watertight division exists between our profane life and our spiritual life. For Christianity to become truly incarnated, for the whole of life to become permeated by the Christian inspiration, it must first of all be recognized that, historically, our profane civilization is derived from a religious inspiration which, although chronologically pre-Christian, was Christian in essence. God’s wisdom must be regarded as the unique source of all light upon earth, even such feeble lights as those which illumine the things of this world.
And the same applies in the case of Prometheus. The story of Prometheus is the very story of Christ projected into the eternal. All that is wanting is its localization in time and space.
Greek mythology is full of prophecies; so are the stories drawn from European folklore, what are known as fairy tales.
Many of the names of Greek divinities are probably in reality various names for designating one single divine Person, namely the Word. I think this is so in the case of Dionysus, Apollo, Artemis, celestial Aphrodite, Prometheus, Eros, Proserpina and several others.
I also think that Hestia, Athene and possibly Hephaestus are names for the Holy Spirit. Hestia is the central Fire. Athene came forth from the head of Zeus after the latter had devoured his wife, Wisdom, who was pregnant; she ‘proceeds’, therefore, from God and his Wisdom. Her emblem is the olive, and oil, in the Christian sacraments, is symbolically connected with the Holy Spirit.
Certain actions performed by Christ, certain words of his are constantly commented upon as follows: ‘The prophecies must needs be fulfilled.’ This refers to the Heb...
