Within a decade of Simone Weil’s death, the titles “saint” and “mystic” were already trailing behind nearly every mention of the French writer, teacher, and activist. “Was She a Saint?” asks a 1951 piece in Time magazine. One of the first studies on Weil, by the medievalist Mary-Madeleine Davy, displays its stance in the title: The Mysticism of Simone Weil (1951). The following year, T.S. Eliot appraised Weil as “a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” The halo affixed to her name is always, however, just off-center; most accounts of her life confirm that Weil, notably born into a Jewish family, never entirely converted to Christianity. She remained until death on the “threshold of the Church,” as she wrote – hence the label, given to her by André Gide, “patron saint of outsiders.” 

This characterization of Weil as (basically) Christian saint and mystic is the deliberate result of a very particular publication process: as literary scholar Anna Kelner argues, Weil was posthumously moulded by her editors in the image of a medieval Christian mystic. And just as with these medieval figures, popular writing and scholarship on Weil frequently focuses on her biography––and her body specifically—at the expense of her philosophical and theological work. The corporeal metaphors of her work are often assumed to refer to her physical body, an error made even by such incisive thinkers as Anne Carson and Chris Kraus. This, too, is a connection between Weil and medieval holy women: the corporeal metaphors of the thirteenth-century Flemish writer Beatrice of Nazareth were similarly literalized, resulting in a hagiography that nearly disregards her theological work in favor of extensive descriptions of her body. “There is no new thing under the sun,” laments Ecclesiastes 1:9. Such bodily readings of Weil do more than diminish her vast and creative intellectual output–they also create the conditions by which Weil’s philosophy is now introduced to new readers as a how-to for hunger. 

*

In Beatrice of Nazareth’s thirteenth-century treatise Seven Manners of Loving–her only surviving work and the earliest extant piece of Dutch prose—the Cistercian nun renders the soul’s love for God in the medieval medical vocabulary of lovesickness. “The heart is wounded again and again,” Beatrice writes, conjuring visions of veins bursting, blood spilling, marrow withering. The treatise is in the third person and does not claim to be an autobiographical account; Beatrice, like earlier Christian theologians such as Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius, allegorizes the soul’s various modes of knowing as its sense organs, its eyes and ears. She never writes  “this happened to me,” nor does she declare, “the heart-organ literally bursts.” Rather, she qualifies her images with the verb “seems”: the affective experiences are so overwhelming that “it seems to the soul” these physical sensations are taking place. 

The primary historical source for Beatrice’s life is a hagiography—a biography of a saint or holy person intended to, as defined by Jesuit scholar Hippolyte Delehaye, “edify” through “exemplarity.” Beatrice’s hagiography was written by an unknown male author and likely posthumously commissioned due to the holy reputation she had achieved in her lifetime. The Life of Beatrice depicts Beatrice as ceaselessly suffering the high drama of unbearable bodily sickness: “Her heart… gave off a sound like that of a shattering vessel…the blood diffused through her bodily members boiled over through her open veins.” In her 1999 essay “Inside Out,” feminist historian of religion Amy Hollywood reads Seven Manners alongside the Life of Beatrice to demonstrate that the hagiographer transcribes the treatise onto Beatrice’s body. He takes for granted that when Beatrice writes about the soul, she is really writing about herself, and externalizes her metaphors as her physical condition. Where the treatise uses the image of an overflowing vessel to describe the soul's experience of overwhelming love, the hagiography uses the same image to describe Beatrice literally overflowing with tears, trembling, languishing, and sick in bed. The Life of Beatrice is undergirded by the assumption that sanctity is primarily legible and legitimate when it is written on the body. 

*

Seven centuries later, Simone Weil also writes of God’s wounding love: “If we want to have a love which will protect the soul from wounds, we must love something other than God.” Like Beatrice, Weil is concerned with the soul’s love for God—its aspiration to “dissolve and be with Christ,” as Paul writes in the epistle to the Philippians. Also like Beatrice, Weil never directly relates her description of the soul’s love for God to her personal experience. Weil’s universe of images differs greatly from the blood-and-veins affective overload of Beatrice’s treatise—and yet, as I will show, Weil’s metaphors come to be similarly transcribed onto her body by many of her readers. 

One motif lacerating Weil’s pages is the boundless void. For Weil, within each of us is a void; the human condition is horror vacui, fear of that void. The created world must contain a void, or else there would be no need for God. She even describes God as a void, because God is infinite and unknowable; God is the void that is not empty, however, but is “fuller than all fullnesses.” In lines collected in Gravity and Grace (1947), Weil writes that we, as created beings, are nothing. In the context of all space and time, we “occupy the position” of nothing; we possess nothing “except the power to say ‘I.’” We abuse this power by constantly affirming that we are something: I am a powerful world leader, we say, I am rich, I am beautiful. Weil calls this the “imagination” that works to fill our voids, writing, “Marius imagined future retribution. Napoleon thought of posterity. William II wanted a cup of tea.” But for Weil, retribution and posterity and a cup of tea are all “in a sense imaginary,” because none of these are truly able to fill our interior voids. Only God can do this. Weil argues that, for us to be lifted up to God, to “touch the absolute good,” we must clear away the haze of our imaginings. We must give away the “I” that is all we possess. We must imitate God—because God, in the act of creation, renounced being everything, as she puts it, “we should renounce being something.” This is Weil’s famous teaching of “decreation”: we created beings should understand that we are nothing, and should thus pursue this nothingness. We must accept our interior void as that which is. We must “will the void,” rather than cower from it, in order that God may fill it–and in order that we may focus our attention on others, instead of on our solipsistic fears.  

*

Weil is typically introduced as a philosopher, a theologian, a teacher, or an activist —each appellation is true, and each is on its own insufficient. Her brief life, bookended by the First and Second World Wars, was so ambitious in its scope that most writing on Weil ends up reading like a montage of newspaper headlines spinning across the screen in a 1940s film: Prodigious Agrégée of the École normale supérieure! Marxist revolutionary! Clumsy would-be heroine of the Durruti Column! George Herbert-reading farmworker experiencing the presence of Jesus Christ! Popular focus on her biography often obscures both the content of her writing and the fact that the most famous books published under her name were not written start-to-finish as complete volumes and edited by Weil herself. 

The majority of Weil’s writing was published posthumously. Weil, fleeing the Vichy regime, entrusted her stacks of notebooks and letters to Gustave Thibon, a Catholic philosopher, and Joseph-Marie Perrin, a Dominican friar. Perrin was Weil’s spiritual advisor and introduced her to Thibon, who owned a vineyard, when she was in search of agricultural work; despite initial friction, Weil and Thibon became intimate friends. Thibon and Perrin edited and arranged her papers into Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God (1950), respectively, two of the first books published under Weil’s name. These neat volumes hardly  resemble Weil’s wide-ranging notebooks, in which tendrils of ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics knot into each other, her intricate ideas conveyed a few paragraphs at a time and interspersed with reading notes, equations, and drawings in the margins. Notably, they are rarely diaristic. Yet Thibon and Perrin’s editions of Weil’s work heavily emphasize her personal experiences, citing these to support their framing of Weil as a medieval mystic. In this, Thibon and Perrin set the stage for the repetition of the very medieval move made by Beatrice’s hagiographer: like him, chroniclers, scholars, and hagiographers of Weil have doggedly insisted on conflating her textual body of work with her physical body . 

Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God each open with extensive biographical introductions; the latter includes a long personal letter, written to Perrin by Weil, which he titles “Spiritual Autobiography.” In her essay “Medieval Mysticism and the Making of Simone Weil” (2022), Anna Kelner demonstrates how these texts shape Weil into a medieval saint or mystic, thus legitimizing and making legible both a complex writer and her complex work. Thibon, in his introduction to Gravity and Grace, for example, situates Weil within what he calls the “true mystic tradition,” evidencing this claim with his attestations to the “authenticity” and “purity” of her “inner experience”--in her “bare and simple” texts, he writes, “no padding is interposed between the life and the word.” (It is worth noting that the writings Thibon assembles into Gravity and Grace include no first-person phenomenological accounts of such “inner experience,” in the letter titled “Spiritual Autobiography,” however, Weil does write of experiences she recounts in terms familiar to the reader of Christian mystical literature: “real contact” with God, “rising above” her body, repeatedly encountering Christ’s “presence.”) 

Kelner also points out another crucial similarity tying Weil’s writings to those of the medieval women mystics, though this is left unspoken by Thibon and Perrin: these texts are often born of the relationship between a woman writer, who possesses singular spiritual knowledge, and her male editor (typically also her scribe and confessor), who possesses institutional authority. Hildegard of Bingen drafted works such as her Scivias (12 c.) on wax tablets, which were then copied onto parchment by a monk named Volmar, among other monks and nuns; Angela of Foligno spoke her visions to a friar known as ‘Brother A,’ who translated them into Latin to produce a volume called the Memorial (13 c.); Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue (14 c.) was dictated to several young secretaries and disseminated by her confessor. 

Kelner argues that, because so many writers famous as ‘mystics’—including several of the above women—found themselves in ideological conflict with the institutional church, Thibon and Perrin’s mystic-framing both authorizes Weil as a teacher of spiritual truth and excuses her ideas that seem at odds with doctrine. Thibon anticipates Catholic readers’ shock at Weil’s articulation of the nothingness of the created being, for instance, knowing this statement would seem to negate the Catholic affirmation of the reality of the world made by God. Indeed, Thibon compares Weil to Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century canonized saint (and now Doctor of the Church) who vocally criticized Church leaders and called for reform, because Catherine also wrote of the created being’s nothingness. “[Weil’s] vocabulary is that of the mystics and not of the speculative theologians,” Thibon cautions, assuring that Weil’s writing “does not seek to express the eternal order of being,” but expresses the relationship between “the soul” and God. Drawing on the long-standing distinction in Christian thought between experiential knowledge (that of the mystics) and rational knowledge (that of the speculative theologians), Thibon implies that Weil’s knowledge comes from the experiences of her own soul. He thus urges readers to access Weil’s teachings through her personal experiences. 

As neither the text of Gravity and Grace nor Thibon’s introduction detail any of Weil’s recognizably ‘mystical’ experiences, Thibon’s claims that Weil possessed an intimate “familiarity with religious mysteries,” and that a “limpid mysticism emanated from her,” are largely supported by his accounts of her behavior as she lived and worked at his vineyard, behavior he characterizes as “asceticism.” Like Beatrice’s hagiographer, Thibon assumes that sanctity is written on the body–that bodily practices of discipline, abstemiousness, and discomfort are immediately recognizable to his readers as proof of someone’s holiness and thereby her spiritual wisdom. He thus explicitly compares Weil’s behavior to the “eccentric practices of certain medieval saints,” marveling at Weil’s commitment to physical labor, her refusal to live in comfortable quarters, and, above all else, her sparse diet.

*

It is this—Weil’s diet, her thinness—that is arguably most read into her body of work. Writing on Weil has exhausted her motifs of voids, weightlessness, and especially her food and hunger metaphors, typically understanding these as inextricable from and illuminated by her repeated bouts of fasting and restrictive eating. These biographical episodes are by now so well-known that it’s almost too dull to rehearse them here: as a child, she gave up sugar in solidarity with French soldiers during World War I; while working in an auto factory and in Thibon’s vineyard, she ate only what was available and affordable to those on relief; during the second World War, she limited her consumption to the rations allowed in occupied France. And, of course, the hunger metaphors are there when you command-F for them. In Gravity and Grace, for example: the lowest parts of the self should love God “like hunger and thirst. Only the highest has the right to be satisfied.” Or, in Waiting for God: “The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry.” This language must chiefly be there because Weil was physically hungry, readers assume. In “Decreation,” (2002), her essay on Weil, Sappho, and the thirteenth-century French writer Marguerite Porete, Anne Carson quotes a famous passage included in Gravity and Grace: “Man’s great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.”

Her gloss reads as follows: 

Simone Weil had a problem with eating all her life. Lots of women do. … So she creates in her mind a dream of distance where food can be enjoyed perhaps from across the room merely by looking at it, where desire need not end in perishing, where the lover can stay, at the same time, near to and far from the object of her love. 

Food and love were analogous contradictions for Simone Weil. She did not freely enjoy either of them in her life and was always uneasy about her imaginative relationship to them.

Carson interprets Weil’s articulation of the chasm between looking and eating as the product of what she calls Weil’s own “problem with eating,” assuming that Weil desired food but did not let herself have it. She imbues this chasm with the specific anguish of the dieting or ‘eating disordered’ person who stares into bakery windows but never considers stepping inside–indeed, Carson relates Weil’s definition of “eternal beatitude” to the fantasy so frequently assumed to be a woman’s deepest desire that it was used as the pilot episode of 2021’s rebooted Fantasy Island: to eat whatever she wants, and however much she wants, without any consequences (read: without gaining weight).

But this reading not only overemphasizes Weil’s assumed “problem with eating,” it also obscures the lines immediately following the initial quote. Weil goes on to write, “That which we look at here below is not real, it is a mere setting. That which we eat is destroyed, it is no longer real. Sin has brought this separation about in us.” Weil’s distinction between looking and eating isn’t about the tragedy of denying oneself desired food, because one’s “desire” would “perish” if she were to eat it, nor is her articulation of “eternal beatitude” about a “dream of distance” in which ‘dangerous’ food can be ‘safely’ enjoyed. Weil uses “looking” and “eating” to describe how our fallen state separates us from God, preventing us from fully enjoying truth and life. The difference between looking and eating is not that the former is an experience of good desire, while the latter is an experience of bad satisfaction–it is that when one looks at food, she sees what is necessary to her but she is distanced from it; when one eats, she incorporates the lifegiving sustenance, but can no longer see it. We can’t have both at once. Moreover, because sin separates us from God, the food we look at and eat is “not real”--recall Weil’s depiction of worldly pursuits as “imaginary”--we are sustaining ourselves on insufficient unreality. But in the state of “eternal beatitude,” we can simultaneously look at the truth and be made one with it; we can sustain ourselves on God, the true reality.

Carson’s too-easy reduction of Weil’s food and hunger language to the latter’s purported “problems with food” is the line of thought pursued by countless other writers, among them Chris Kraus in Aliens and Anorexia (2000), Toril Moi in her review of Robert Zaretsky’s Weil biography (2021), Emmeline Clein in Dead Weight (2024), and by scholars of religion Mary Jo Meadow in a 1991 article entitled “Simone Weil: Waiting in Hunger,” Alec Irwin in a 1999 article entitled “La chrétien comestible: nourriture et transformation spirituelle chez Simone Weil,” and Nejra Salihbegovic in a 2023 article entitled “Simone Weil et les dimensions mystiques de la nourriture.” The list goes on.

Readings of Weil that foreground her relationship with food perpetuate, and are perpetuated by, the decades-long frenzy to label Weil ‘anorexic.’ When she died at 34, the oft-cited coroner’s report judged that, “The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed”; reporting on her death ran under salacious headlines screaming “starves herself to death,” “death from starvation.” Posthumous psychiatric evaluations seek to explain Weil’s behavior within the neat boundary lines of DSM diagnoses: Weil was “clearly a borderline personality disorder who… committed suicide by refusing to eat,” wrote psychoanalyst Richard D. Chessick in 1977; she “reaffirmed her Platonism through the relay of an eating disorder,” wrote literary scholar Neal Oxenhandler in 1994, in an article which diagnoses Weil with hysteria and pseudo-anorexia. 

Oxenhandler does not pathologize Weil in order to minimize her ideas, rather presenting anorexia as the great challenge against which she, in her tragic heroine-ism, struggled. Other authors deploy the anorexia diagnosis, but laud her supposed condition as morally and politically righteous, rather than decrying it as a lamentable illness (this is especially the case in Kraus’ book, a 2002 article by philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker, and a 2019 New York Times op-ed by philosopher Mariana Alessandri). Occasionally, Weil scholarship rejects the anorexia diagnosis, though only because this work regards eating disorders as the pathologies of frivolous women, which Weil, anything but unserious, couldn’t have been. “Her hunger was for God, not a slim waistline,” Robert Coles snidely remarks in his 1987 biography of Weil. What all of these interpretations have in common is a desire to chain Weil to discourses of weight loss, thinness, and putative mental illness, about which she herself never wrote.

Beatrice’s hagiographer inscribes her corporeal metaphors for love between God and the soul onto her physical body; Thibon and Perrin’s hagiographizing of Weil opened her work up to readings which inscribe her physical body directly onto her corporeal metaphors for love between God and the soul. This critical and editorial  move is a disservice to Weil as it was to Beatrice. These critics insist on the centrality of the woman writer’s material body, thus reifying both the ancient association of women with body and matter (where men are associated with mind and spirit), and the persistent assumption that women are only capable of writing about themselves. 

They reduce Weil’s vast symbolic world to a single metaphorical domain: the kitchen. Food and hunger are unambiguously important allusive devices in her work, true, but so are doors, blindness, trees. This sort of critical reduction contributes to the widespread dilution of Weil’s thought, as was recently noted by religion scholar Jack Hanson in his article “Whose Weil?” Yet the stakes of this reduction are much higher than the tarnishing of Weil’s intellectual legacy. The stakes are, in fact, our material bodies. 

*

In this essay against biographical readings, I will now tell you something autobiographical. Because I have a history of restricting and binging, compulsive exercising, food obsession—my serpent in the garden, my demons in the desert, my numbingly dull loser situationship—every day, my phone insists on showing me the best and brightest in fifteen second clips covering the hottest new ways to agonize over calories-in-calories-out. No matter how many times I click “I’m not interested,” the social media platform formerly known as Twitter is convinced that I must be kept up to date with ‘edtwt,’ the corner of the internet where users anxiously log their step counts and weigh-ins, post flash photos of their carefully-constructed safe meals. (Edtwt is different from the ‘wellness’ and ‘fitness’ content that dominates all social platforms and much of legacy media only in that it does not lie about what it promotes: disordered eating.)

On an afternoon this past July, scrolling and eating, I succumbed to the clickbait of a suggested thread: “stop looking at it as Discipline and start looking at it as Devotion.” It promised to contain the secrets to a “mindset shift that would help me achieve my goals.” Illustrated with Pinterest-pulled photos of yogurt bowls and desks artfully strewn with books and papers, vague and platitudinous advice posting like this is almost always a dog whistle: when they say “goals,” they obviously, obviously mean weight loss. I am in my late twenties and I fall for it every time. “Honor your goals,” “fall in love with failure,” read the tweets, The Secret-isms entirely familiar—and then a shock. “Esoteric girlies,” wrote the poster, “learn about attention & prayer in Simone Weil’s writing and apply this to your self devotion. care for yourself so u can do the same for others.” 

For years I’d seen Weil moodboarded and quoted by users floating about in the Red Scare listener extended universe (which significantly overlaps with edtwt—if I were a tacky YouTube video essayist I might even call it a ‘pipeline’), but this was different. The poster’s profile was the expected stream of daily logs, the crawl spaces of the restrictive eater I so-well know to be self-soothing: meager meals, exercise, readings from the philosophy and religion shelf of the chain bookstore. But they pointed to Weil as the motivation for all of this, interpreting her argument for academic study as the highest preparation for prayer, and thereby for love of neighbor (“prayer consists of attention… It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God... Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance,” Weil writes in her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies,” included in Waiting for God), as applicable to weight loss. 

I know that in writing about this I risk boomer hand-wringing—but do not misconstrue me. I am not accusing a (likely very young) “X” user of besmirching Weil’s serious body of work by relating it to the supposedly unserious work of diet and exercise. I am saying that in a “profoundly sick society”—to quote the Jiddu Krishnamurti line beloved by Sinead O’Connor and Luigi Mangione—diet and exercise are, in fact, deadly serious. I am saying that this user is performing serious practical philosophy with Weil, following the popular emphasis on Weil’s own practices and thematics of food and body to its logical conclusion. If she wrote about hunger so beautifully because she was herself righteously, romantically, pathologically hungry–if weight loss is pedestaled as virtuous by every major American institution and industry–if Weil is again and again upheld as not only the “patron saint of outsiders,” but the patron saint of the putatively ‘eating disordered’--if the young and online are in search of education and meaning in a world that no longer bothers to teach people how to read–that writes most of us prescriptions for disordered eating before we are even born–why wouldn’t they reach out to her philosophy, and ingest it as a how-to for hunger? 

I’m not sure that affixing one’s wholehearted attention to macronutrients and Pilates can never serve as preparation for devotion to God and to others, but I’ve never been more solipsistic than when I spent every night doing elaborate equations in the blue calorie app. I know that Weil, who embraced theodicy and the terrifying necessity of evil and suffering, didn’t seem to want anyone to make themselves miserable; in 1933, she writes, “I believe in the value of suffering, so long as one makes every [legitimate] effort to escape it.” I know that Weil’s intricate motifs, metaphysics, and mysticism are infinitely more sophisticated than the diagnosis ‘she was hungry and thus figured desire as hunger’ allows—far more complex than I’ve even begun to gesture towards here. 

A writer’s physical body and biography will likely always be resources from which we draw in the pursuit of understanding her work. But to filter Weil’s writings primarily through the lenses of her known life and visible appearance is to collapse her articulations of the soul’s reaching for the unknowable, invisible God into the eating disorder narrative we all-too-quickly assume we do know and can see. If the “esoteric girlies” picking up copies of Waiting for God take too literally Weil’s injunction to self-empty, God willing they—God willing I—also take seriously her injunction to empty the “I” of its selfishness. Weil asks us not only to accept our interior voids, but to make our empty selves the dwelling place of the just Christ who turns all his attention towards the man half-dead on the side of the road. She asks us to listen to the suffering, to give them bread and meat.