Letter to a Priest

by Simone Weil
Penguin Books, 2003


Simone Weil was born in 1909 to an upper-class Jewish family in France, but spent much of her life performing manual labor and working in factories to try to understand the needs of the poor. She was a "philosopher, political activist, social critic, and mystic" and has been considered "one of the most original and rigorous thinkers of the twentieth century." She was highly attracted to the life of St. Francis of Assisi, a man who like herself rejected a life of wealth to live in poverty. She converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1938, but she struggled to reconcile her belief in Christianity with Greek philosophy, and was never baptized into the Catholic Church even though she attended mass often. She died in 1943 at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis and the effects of ascetic living while she was working for the Free France movement. Sixteen of her works were published after her death.

Letter to a Priest was originally published in France in 1951. Weil wrote it in 1942 during a temporary stay in New York while she was waiting to join the Free France movement. It is a series of questions that illustrate her spiritual struggle which had been going on for several years. She desired to be baptized, but had difficulty with some of the tenets of Catholicism. It is not believed that she ever received a reply to her letter before her death a year later.

The bulk of her questions deal with comparative religions. She questions why the Israelite God in the Hebrew scriptures is such an angry, vengeful God while Zeus in the Roman tradition and the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" portray higher powers who are kinder and gentler, more in keeping with the Christian scriptures. She has difficulty with the condemnation of idols when in the Christian tradition there is a similar devotion to statues of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. She believes that idols may have been used in a similar vein as today's statues, as reminders of an unseen God. She believes that it is possible Christ came to Earth in other incarnations in other times and places, and that in every faith tradition it is the Holy Spirit who provides inspiration. She questions the value of Christian missions, believing that "for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn out a success, but it can also have disastrous consequences," and maintains that "the various authentic religious traditions are different reflections of same truth, and perhaps equally precious." Her primary argument is that all wisdom in the world, including both Greek philosophy and the Christian faith come from the same source.

Despite its brevity (less than 90 pages), this is a challenging book to get through. It is helpful, although not necessary, to have some basic knowledge of classic philosophy and world religions. The questions that Weil raises, however, are very thought-provoking. Although some have been answered by the changes of Vatican II, many are still important to ask. It would have been interesting, had she lived longer, to see how her thought would have progressed and whether she ever would have made the full commitment to the Catholic faith that her heart seem to have desired.


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