In Our Time - Simone Weil

Episode Date: November 15, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil. Born in Paris in 1909 into a wealthy, agnostic Jewish family, Weil was a precocious child and attended the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, achieving the top marks in her class (Simone de Beauvoir came second). Weil rejected her comfortable background and chose to work in fields and factories to experience the life of the working classes at first hand. She was acutely sensitive to human suffering and devoted her life to helping those less fortunate than herself. Despite her belief in pacifism she volunteered on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and later joined the French Resistance movement in England. Her philosophy was both complex and intense. She argued that the presence of evil and suffering in the world was evidence of God's love and that Man has no right to ask anything of God or of anyone whom they love. Love which expects reward was not love at all in Weil's eyes. Weil died of TB in Kent at the age of only 34. Her strict lifestyle and self-denial may have contributed to her early death. T.S Eliot said "she was not just a woman of genius, but was a genius akin to that of a saint"; Albert Camus believed she was "the only great spirit of our time." With:Beatrice Han-Pile Professor of Philosophy at the University of EssexStephen Plant Runcie Fellow and Dean of Trinity Hall at the University of CambridgeDavid Levy Teaching Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of EdinburghProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. U.K.S.R. Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford, Kent, lies the grave Simone Vé, the French philosopher and social activist,

described by her compatriot as the only great spirit of our time. A simple tombstone states that she died at the age of 34 from tuberculosis. Not long after her death, an unknown admirer added a small plaque bearing an inscription in Italian, which translates as, My solitude held in its grasp the grief of others till my death. A quotation which reveals a great deal about the life of a woman whose central philosophical tenet and focus in life was to emphasise with the sufferings of others, always at her own expense. Simone Vale's life may have been short but achievements are vast.

An inspiration to a pope, several writers, and philosophers, she's been dismissed by some as a mystic. So who was she really, and how is her philosophy and writing view today? With me to discuss him on Vaitreys Han Pyle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, Stephen Plant, Runcie Fellow and Dean of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge, and David Levy, teaching fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Beatrice Han Pyle, Simone Vale was born in 1909 in Paris. Could you give us a sketch of her background?

Sure. She was born to a fairly well of non-practicing Jewish family. Her father was a medical doctor, and she had a slightly older brother, André, who was three years older than her. And her mother wanted to do medical school, but she was discouraged from doing it, and so she focused on her two children. Now, two things struck me when I read about Simon's childhood. one is that even from a very young age, she elicited an incredible ability to empathize with the suffering of others. And so when the First World War was declared, she was five, and she said she would forego eating sugar because it wasn't available to soldiers on the front. Now, the other thing that really struck me is her relation with her brother. She was by no means stupid, far from it, but her brother was incredibly gifted.

apparently age 12 he was able to solve doctoral level mathematical problems. His idea of relaxation was to read the classics in Greek. So Simone grew, she could have grown jealous, but she grew terribly depressed. And she says in her notes that when she was about 15, she experienced months of inward darkness. But these were rewarded by the discovery of something which was to stay with her the rest of her life, and that is the importance of attention.

She says in her notes that she realized that not everybody had the gifts of her brother, but that through genuine focused attention, the realm of truth was open to everyone. So after that, she did the standard thing for gifted French students. She took the entrance exam to the Economist Superio, the elite French school. She passed it. She took the aggregation philosophy, the qualifying exam for French teachers, and passed it too. Now, during all that time, and she went on teaching, and during all that time she was also a political activist. Apparently, her fellow students said that every time they saw her, she wanted them to sign something, some kind of petition.

And when she started teaching, she very much tried to live according to her beliefs. And so she was a left-wing political activist, and so she didn't want any heating in her rooms because it wasn't available for the unemployed. she lived on almost nothing, she had very little, she always tried really to practice what she preached, so to speak. So we have, thank you very much, but I think that in saying she wasn't as clever as her brother who became an very informational mathematician, she did learn several languages when she was a young girl.

She did beat Simone de Beauvoir in exam. She was one of four women only in the second year when they took women to get in the place. She was in her own way, although not as clever, her brother, an stunningly brilliant woman. That's fair enough, isn't it? Of course she was, yes. So let's start that. And the social activism, thread union marches, and right from the beginning this business has determined to empathise, not only empathise with, match the living conditions of the poorest people around her. That was sort of, that was just part of her character

from extremely early on. The far end of that in a ways, having done brilliantly at university or in a very fine school and got on with her writing, she went to work in a car factory for quite a while. Yes. When she was 25, she decided to take a year off sabbatical, but instead of going to, you know, somewhere in the sun, she decided to enroll in a car factory. And this had a profound effect on her life. Well, one thing, she worked in three car factories, in fact,

because after a few months in the first one, she was in such a state she had to stop, recover, and then start again. But I think two, at least two things are really striking about that. And one is how she made the decision, because she didn't do it for fun. And she didn't do it either, she says, out of, you know, carefully rational, considered deliberation. She said that she felt a peculiar impulse, which was such that having felt it, even though it seemed to demand the impossible, it would have been the greatest of evils not to follow it. So it was a choice and not a choice at the same time.

And I think it's the first time she experienced something that was really important to her later. It's her sense of freedom as obedience as, you know, doing what is required. Now, the other thing, sorry. Can I move on to them? I'm sorry. David Levy, her philosophy, someone who is a unique in many ways. But who were her major influences? Well, I think in almost everything she did, Plato was by her side.

Plato was, in one sense, her master, I would have said. And I think it's important to understand that her formation, her educational formation, was philosophical. I mean, that was really the milieu in which she felt most comfortable. So Plato was certainly her master, and I would have said her antagonist was probably Descartes. So she wrote her dissertation on Descartes. She was very often responding to the kinds of problems that she felt we had inherited from him. Of course, as a beneficiary of a very fine French education, she had also had other philosophical influences.

Kant, Spinoza. She was very interested in Marx at one point. Although she said, pointed out that Marx and the Leic had never worked in the car factory. Indeed, she actually became very critical of Marx and Marxist ideology. But I don't think that hides the fact that they were influential in her philosophical formation. The other person who is not very well known, but who was a very big influence on her, was her high school, I suppose you'd say her high school teacher of philosophy Alain, who kind of gave her the idea that the problem philosophically that we faced was a question of,

of what to do with our wills, what kind of action to undertake. And it was this that she opposed to Descartes in her dissertation, where she replaced the normal, I think, therefore I am, with I will, therefore I am, or I want, therefore I am. And that gave her an idea that was to stay with her philosophically, that man is a kind of creature of activity. So she's from quite a young age, she was willing not only to take on, but to challenge some of the greatest philosophers in the Western canon.

You say she was influenced by Plato. Now, Plato's a mountain. Which bits particularly was she influenced by? Well, I think, I mean, I think, first of all, she also was reading Greek at a relatively young age. She certainly read Greek well by 12. She was very familiar with all of Plato's writing. Different things. What did his idea of the shapes, the other world?

I wouldn't have said that was the soul one. So, for example, in the symposium, Diotomah speaks of love, Iros, as a kind of demon. And she didn't mean demon in the kind of demonic sense, but as something between our world and the world of the gods. And this was the first example of how love was a kind of intermediary between our world and the world of the divine. So that would be an example of something she took from the symposium. Did she go to anything of an ideal person from Plato, Him? himself or from what Plato had written? I wouldn't have said so.

I mean, she was certainly influenced by the Republic. So, for example, she often talked about the Great Beast, which was the kind of the danger of the collective, of the group. And that's something that Plato spoke about in the Republic. But I think the idea of an ideal person is probably not something she got, but she did pick up a problem that the Greeks really wrestled with, which is the problem of being, if you like, incarnated, or as they would put it, as being hyalomorphs.

So creatures that have a body with a particular form and shape and a particular presence and space and time, that problem, the problem of what kind of creatures we are because we have substance, was a problem that she wrestled with and that really was a vehicle for her to engage in Christianity and religious thinking later. Now, I have to give a balance between our philosophy,

which is very serious and at a very high level that's enough for one life, but also her social activism which is enough for one life. And the way she treated herself, which might come to the mysticism and the denial of food and so on. But now we turn to the social active. She previously embraced pacifism,

but in the Spanish Civil War she went to Spain to be on the side of the Republican Party and wanted to go to the front and so on. Had an accident didn't make, but still, can you describe that change of mind? Yeah, to some extent, I mean, you're quite right to say she was formed philosophically,

but what moved her was her political engagement. And in particular, something that Beatrice said, her ability to relate to those who were unprivileged, those who were being oppressed, those who were being turned into things by the collective. And in this case... She's very good on that, being turned into a thing in lacerated, so even your imagination was driven out.

Absolutely, and that's one of the things she learned in the car factory. She often spoke of having been branded, of having been marked, of having been turned into a... slave by her work there. So that was an important thing. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she first of all was moved by the compassion that we've already heard about, but also by the idea that those who were privileged ought not to be separated from those who are going to suffer. As you also said, she had come out of university a pacifist. Shortly after university, she'd gone to Germany to see the trade union movement there, which was the most advanced in Europe,

and concluded that they were no match for the fascists. So from an early point, she had a kind of doom-laden view of how things were likely to go with fascism. And accurate. And accurate. She was one of the people who was probably the least surprised by how the world went. And so it was her recognition of the way that fascism could crush people, in particular could extinguish human dignity, that moved her initially to say the use of violence in the Spanish Civil War

in a controlled way could be right. But that's not what she learned there. Briefly what you learned there. What she learned is that there's no way safely to use force. Force corrupts those who use it and those who suffer from it. And that's what she was able to express in her brilliant article,

the Iliad or the poem of force. Did this seal her distrust of Marxism and the Communist Party? I certainly would... Yes, it would be fair to say that it sealed it, but it was pretty well broken before then. Stephen Platt, we've talked about a little, this is the introduction of her philosophy,

and a little about her social activism. But then it's her struggle with herself, isn't it? So that's a third thing, over to you then. Now, for instance, a greaterversion to physical, intimacy, her tutor who thought she was brilliant, which indeed she was and her fellow students dubbed her as the Red

Virgin at the school at the university and so. Can you tell us about that part of her personality and how it played in what she did and wrote? Well, we're entering some choppy waters here because in discussing anybody whose life is as intimately tied up with

their thinking, there's a danger that we start to psychoanalyze somebody who we don't have available to us as a living person anymore. That's always a problem when you deal with the biography of great thinkers, but it's particularly a problem with Simon Bay, whose life and thoughts are, as it were, illustrations each of the other with art-imitating life and life-imitating art. And you mention her aversion to intimacy.

This is quite a good example of the way in which her thought and her life feed upon or feed each other or feed upon one another. Her biographer is Simon Petriman, who was also a friend and fellow student at the Ecole Marmal reports an incident when she was a child, which presumably her biographer had from Simone's mother, in which a relative had kissed, very innocent gesture, kissed Simone's hand, and she had become horrified by this and rushed off and scrubbed at her hands with carbolic soap, aged about five or six. Now, she grew up in a medical household, so microbes in a period before antibiotics would have been present to the family's imagination, but there was something rather

exaggerated in their horror of germs, which she seems to have picked up on, which may have been exacerbated by a period in hospital. Where it gets interesting is the way in which that intersects with her life. She was, from pretty much the outset, a kind of walking brain. Another of the nicknames used for her in her student days was The Martian, after a science fiction film of a creature

with a very large brain. The micon. Indeed. And I think Alain coined that nickname for her and described her as a purely intellectual being and she rather played up to that. In her defence, she was, as Beatrice said, in the second year of women admitted to the Ecolnomal.

I mean, what was a woman supposed to do in this context where there were very few women and when women were struggling to compete in a world which was dominated by men? None of her teachers were men. So what was she to do? All of her teachers were men. That's right, sorry, all of her teachers.

were men. So one of the way she does that is to play up to this asexual, rather masculine identity in the way she dressed. She wore flat shoes, berets rather than hats, rather d'oe tweedy suits, and this was the dress that she affected throughout her life, no make-up. Her biographer again reports the possibility she may have a crush on one of her student peers, but in general terms, she resisted these kinds of intimate relationships in spite of having a very happy family background in which there was closeness, there was affection and there was laughter. Now this feeds into her thinking in that she believed that truth was something essentially impersonal. If I say to you two plus two equals four, that's not a truth which has to do with my opinion.

It's simply an impersonal truth. And she believed that the deepest kinds of truth had that kind of quality. the kind of quality of geometry. And she felt that therefore personal relationships had in them a corrupting imperfection and that aiming at personal intimacy was in a sense of distraction or a blind alley with respect to the perfection of God.

Can you do a big switch for us here, Stephen Plant, because it's important that now we go on this track. She was born into a Jewish family, which were not Orthodox Jews, and they didn't behave in any way like Orthodox shoes, yet she didn't quite soon she didn't consider herself a Jew but she turned away from that very emphatically is there any one reason why this is one of the most difficult aspects of Vase life and thought to talk about you're right she she did reject both any

racial connection to the Hebrews of the period before the exile and she also said in a letter to a Vichy official in 1940 that she had never been to a synagogue, never seen any religious ceremonies and that she had no connection to Judaism as a religion. If that were all that were there was to it, we perhaps wouldn't need to talk about it very much, but she goes far deeper than that.

And there's a shrill, rather hysterical character to her rejection of Judaism, which leaves a bitter taste, actually, relative to her other aspects of her thought. She believed that there were two kinds of God, and two kinds of religion, a good God, as it were, and an evil God, a God of force, as David said, and also a good religion, a religion of mysticism and of truth, and an evil religion, one of force and of nationalism and of self-assertion.

And she believed that Judaism was the archetype of that bad sort of religion. And she went to extraordinary lengths to make this point. She said, for example, that in the Bible, only some of the books of the Bible were worth preserving. thought that Job, bits of Isaiah were preservable because they were essentially Egyptian. She said some bizarre things, for instance, that Jesus must have said the Lord's prayer in Greek, because Greek is the real big influence on Christianity and not its Judaism. So we have to turn now to Christianity, Beatrice Handpile, where she was attracted passionality to Christianity and particularly to the idea of Christ on the cross and the idea that God had abandoned the world.

but this can you and this was reinforced sorry to have been more in but there's a lot to say by her two or three powerful mystical experiences can you bring that together in an answer which takes the listener in the direction we want to go which is her philosophy through this this Christian passion okay I can try possibly the first thing to say is that she repeatedly says that she never sought God that she was found and when she had these mystical experiences she hadn't even read the mystics, so it came as a complete surprise. And the first one happened when she was in a CISI. She says that she felt a power stronger than her will compel her to her knees. And a year later, she was in a Benedictine monastery in Salem. And there she suffered one of her

splitting headaches because all her life she was plagued with these terrible migraines, which gave her a daily acquaintance to suffering. And she says she was able to leave a flesh huddled in a corner and to rise to the ecstasy of the music. And it's then that she didn't discover it. She was given a poem by a 17th century poet called George Herbert on love. And she took to reciting that poem. And during one of these recitations, she says that Christ came down and took possession of her. So she had a very direct experience of the divine.

And it's very significant, I think. that this experience happened at the height of suffering, you know, when she had these terrible headaches. And so then God, she says, became a person as opposed to being a problem that was best left alone. So the incarnation for her is extremely important because she has this conception of love as radical self-sacrifice. And there are several instances,

of that for her in biblical text. One is creation in Genesis and the other is incarnation. And the thought there is that in the case of creation, God expressed his love for us by accepting to be less than he is, by making room for us, so to speak, by creating space, time, and us, all imperfect things, and accepting to withdraw from there so that we could come into existence. So there's the sense that the utmost of love is self-denial, self-sacrifice. And of course, that's what she sees in the incarnation as well,

because, again, God the Father first accepts to be less than what he is by taking human, you know, finite in perfect form. And secondly, that finite form is sacrificed for us, for the redemption of our sins. And she sees the incarnation, and in particular the moment on the cross where Christ, you know, Christ to God, why hast thou forsaken me? That's the depth of abandonment. And for her, that's paradoxicony, the moment where you can see, you know, the height of God's love. David Levy, sorry. David Levy, can you tell us how this featured in our ideas about doing good in the world? Well, I think. think the first thing to be clear about is a kind of difference between good in the world and absolute good. So in the world, good and evil, as we ordinarily think of them, were sort of opposites that created a unity. And so in that sense, absolute good was something quite different from ordinary mundane good. And, and

In practice, what that meant was that one was not going to, let's say, make it to heaven, if that's the way you wanted to think of it, by doing good acts. So morality, as we ordinarily understand it, was not her conception of doing good in the world. So what was her conception, as the same plan? Well, she thinks that you engage the world by means of what she calls forms of the implicit love of God. she thought that you could not love God and this was a point that she derived not just from Christian mysticism which we've mentioned but from an epistemological point to point about the theory of knowledge that God is not

you want human beings could not love God. Could not grasp God in that way. Did she believe the reverse as well that God could not love human being? No, she shouldn't believe that. And she didn't believe either that God wasn't a real, wasn't real, it's just that the human imagination isn't the kind of thing that can grasp God in that way. But she did believe that there were forms of what she called implicit love of God. She includes in them beauty, friendship and even religious ceremony.

And she thinks these are things which you engage, and that though they are imperfect, they can in a sense lead you towards the perfect good. And that we encounter the world. She used as a very imaginative simile. of a cell wall between which two prisoners bash out messages to each other, you know, by Morse code or something. And she thought that there was a possibility of communicating between humankind and God through these implicit forms. She uses the wall, doesn't you? She uses the blind man's stick.

But can you say a little more about why the wall is significant? It's a very good metaphor. You've said it, but can you say more about it? Well, I mean, if you imagine two prisoners in a cell that are divided by a wall, they can't see each other, they can't speak to each other. So how are they to communicate? Well, one classic way of communicating is by banging messages on a pipe using a primitive form of Morse Codes. This is one way that prisoners communicate.

And she uses this as a metaphor. By the way, metaphor is a very interesting device very frequently uses to convey her meaning. She uses this metaphor to speak about the ways in which human beings relate to each other and relate to God, that you can't actually grasp the other, but the universe that stands between you and the other is something through which you nonetheless can communicate. David Leab. It's a brilliant metaphor. Yeah, and I just wanted to amplify that.

The idea I take it is that, though we're separated, we're not out of contact. So even though God has removed himself from the world, that doesn't mean that, as it were, he's inaccessible to us. There are these intermediaries of which the wall is an example. There are other intermediaries as well, which give us an intimation of God. And so even though he's absent from our world, he is accessible in some sense. Beatrice Hanpah, how does her, how does Simone Valle's conception of love and God,

and differ from orthodox, excuse me, differ from that of Orthodox Christianity? Right. Well, one way to see this is to oppose it to perhaps the two most usual, models to think of love. And one is erotic love. And the other is what you might call parental love. So in the first case, you want to possess the object. And in the second, you want to nurture it. You want to nurture it for its own sake. And that is often, that second sense is often used to understand the relation of God to the creation. You know, God as a father who knows every hair on our heads and who nurtures us through history in spite of evils in the world by means of Providence. Now Simon Vei completely rejected that. She doesn't think that very such a thing as providence. There's only necessity, she says, and both sun and rain come from God.

What does she mean by necessity? Well, she meant also what she calls the realm of force. The idea that the universe is sort of left to its own devices. So everything happens in it through causality. It's only spiritual things are not affected by. by this mechanical necessity. And it expresses, she says we experience it as blows. So most of the time we experience it as a cause of suffering. Now, so she doesn't think that, you know, God is nurturing in that way, nor that he looks after the creation in that way.

And she's certainly not like many philosophers who present the odysses. You say, you know, there's evil in the world, but it's not that bad or it's all for a good cause. It's quite the opposite. it. She fully recognizes how awful quite often a human situation is and she really empathizes with it. So her idea of love is quite iconoclastic. It's really the sense that love is this radical self-denial, radical self-sacrifice that you have to make room, let the object be. And

she thinks that God loves us in that way and that this is the way we have to love God through the theme of what she calls decreation. David, Libby, Decreation, that's the word I'd like you to address, if you don't mind. Can you explain what she meant by decreation? Well, it's a term of her own and it has very specialized meaning and a kind of system of concepts that constitute her cosmic view. So it's difficult to give it in brief. But I suppose it's easiest to see the sense of decreation

by understanding it as being related to the act of. of creation and specifically God's act of creation. So as we heard earlier, when God created us, he limited himself. He, if you like, created the space, the space for us. And he limited himself in his perfection and in his power to create the space for us. The act of decreation becomes possible because of his act of creation. And what we're trying to do when we decreatate our, ourselves is in some sense reverse some of that act of creation. So we are trying to reverse

God's act of giving us the ability to say I, of God's ability for us to think of ourselves as a self with a body, with desires, and with interests in particular. And by extinguishing the if you like, by relinquishing the ability to say I, by taking a different sort of perspective, we would be reversing the act of creation and coming closer to God, would be one way to put it. Does that bring in Stephen Plant the notion of attention? It does, because one of the things she does is to say that in order to achieve this decreation, in order to stop saying I, but instead to become a part of this universal universe, one needs to pay attention. And another of the terms that she uses to describe how to affect this decreation is affliction.

She has the notion that affliction is a distinctive concept for her. She uses a word maléret in French which she asserts doesn't have an equivalent in other languages. which sometimes has translated affliction, sometimes woe, and the point about affliction is that it's total. It has no relief. So is the person afflicted? The person who is afflicted has no possible hope. They're demolished by the experience of affliction.

It's more than suffering. Does she mean that everybody is afflicted? Everybody is potentially afflicted. But affliction, normally suffering is alleviated in some way, so a toothache or something. You know, it's there, and then you sort it out and it's gone. It doesn't affect your soul. She thinks affliction as something which potentially affects everybody,

which penetrates right down to the very depths of you, demolishing you as a human being. So what she experienced in the factory is what she experienced when she had her migraine headaches, a kind of deconstruction of yourself as a person. And it connects also with the idea of necessity because she asserts that this kind of affliction can be an avenue or a route to not. of God. She thinks that if you embrace necessity, much as one might clasp in the hand a keepsake from a lover, you know, clasp it so tightly that it actually hurts you. You embed by that

experience of affliction an encounter with the world, which can also be an encounter with God. And that though affliction is something one must never seek, it's completely unnatural to seek affliction. She says that it can be a way of experiencing contact between creation and God. David, David. I wanted to try and make this seem a little bit more mundane in the sense of how we might imagine what she's getting at. That's exactly what I was going to ask. Oh, good. Well, and the sort of, I think one way to put it is this, imagine the sort of melancholy that sets in, for instance, after a love affair has gone, has ended and gone badly wrong. And, in that moment of melancholy, one is often rather more lucid about one's situation, about one's

faults, and so forth. As it were, that experience of the kind of suffering of which melancholy is a symptom is an opportunity to see that actually, you know, you are selfish or you are self-serving in various ways. And what she would say is that, as it were, in that moment, we stop putting our own readings on the world. We stop sort of interpreting the world to our own advantage to serve our own ego. At that moment we become ego-less insofar as we are unable to put those spins on things.

The suffering in the wake of the love affair, as it were, makes us momentarily lucid. Beatrice, Chris Ann Pahl, she came, she went to New York in 1942, then came back, then came to this country, with the view to, well, she did join the organisation that DeGaldeGal had set up here and wanted to be parachuted into France with a troop of nurses and had very strong ideas. He asked her to help write a constitution, which was full of spiritual notions,

which he couldn't accept. Can you tell us about her political work at that time, what you was aiming for politically? Well, she had this sense that our relations with, sorry, with others shouldn't be based on rights paradoxically enough. But that we, you know, she took very seriously the idea of love of a neighbor in the Christian tradition as a form of non-preferential. love. So it's not like loving your friends or your family or anything of that kind. The thought was that there is something in other people just by virtue of being human, just by virtue of sharing the spiritual child that we get from God, so to speak, that was per se reason enough for us to be obligated to help others and to have a duty to do that. And she felt very strongly that this was

something that we could only do to go back to the theme of decreation that David was talking about. She felt very strongly that this was something we could only do if we somehow did not do it in our own name because otherwise it would be tantamount to sort of taking possession of the author. She says at one point, you know, who but Christ can give meat to the famished? And so the thought was that in that realm

too, the eye had to disappear and that we had to reach that sort of level where supernatural love and justice take hold of human affairs. Stephen Plant, she's entering into realms here

which are Gide and Camille talked about her spiritual quality. DeGle thought she was mad because of them, as it were. She wrote this book, which British has referred to, the need for roots, rights and obligation, which seems to be very sensible. So we're running spirituality and mysticism against an esteemly recognisable French sense, as it were.

Can you just dwell on that? Well, the need for roots is a very mixed bag. I mean, it's got some things in there, which are completely sensible, which would be recognised as potentially important politically. But there are other things, for instance, the relationship between love of Christ and love of country which she explores, which you can see why De Gaulle thought these things were not really sensible.

But there is another reason why De Gaulle disliked the book, which was that she distances herself from the idea that states are something that people can really love. Because they're kind of penultimate, because they're imperfect, you can have a conditional love for your country. but not an unconditional love. God is the only thing that she has all the way back from her philosophical training in Plato. The only thing that you can love perfectly has to be perfect itself, which is God. So she develops this in terms of another metaphor, the metaphor of roots and of uprootedness, which she explores in relation to concrete historical developments in France,

in which she sees ironically and unusually that the moment when French identity is created is a great moment of uprooting. which is to say the revolution in 1789, which uproots France from all its previous traditions and recreates it as an object of love. She explores that and then concludes in the book with some arguments about how you might achieve rootedness, which again recapitulate a theme we haven't touched on very much, which is the theme of education.

She was very interested in one of the ways in which you deal with injustice in the world is to educate people rather than simply bringing about a revolution. You teach them poetry. and this is what humanises people and the way overcomes the process of affliction. I'm very grateful to all of you because it's a short life, it's extraordinarily packed

and it's on different levels. But David Lee, we haven't given the listeners any idea. Did she, she's been, we've been isolated by her thoughts, as it were. Were people around, do we have Camus and a near contemporary, the Beauvais, near contemporary, people that, were she, did she talk to them, correspond with them? Was she part of that group in Paris at the time and so on? I think it would be fair to say that her notoriety while she was alive wasn't that great.

I mean, she published in a couple of radical, not academic journals, more like journals of radical politics or perhaps literature. She was frequently teaching in provincial areas. She took time off to work in the car factory. She took time off to go to the Spanish Civil War. So in that sense, I wouldn't have said. said it was right to say that she was part of the intellectual milieu at that time. She was making a contribution, but she wasn't particularly well known. There were people that she spoke to, especially latterly, she spoke to more than one Dominican,

Dominican, where she was able to have discussions. She spent quite a bit of time on Gustav Thibon's farm and spoke to him. He was a kind of Catholic autodidactan author. she was tremendously engaged with other people. Everywhere she went, she tried to teach people. And it didn't matter whether they were the least educated formally. She was prepared to try and teach them Greek philosophy or literature or poetry, whatever it was.

Yeah, she published her works in Workers' Journal, didn't she? In some cases. One of them, the Iliad of the poem of force was published in not so much a workers' journal as a kind of journal of radical thought. Although it's a name's not widely known, she influenced Mugridge, who quoted her a lot,

Rowan Williams, Gordreder a lot, T.S. L.E. did an introduction, Nairis Murdoch, we know. So her influence has permeated through the century. I think there are two sorts of influences. One influence that she has

is on Christians, like Malcolm Muggridge, that you already mentioned, Rowan Williams, for whom, though she is not herself, orthodox and she wasn't baptized and indeed

opted not to be baptized because she didn't want to identify with the institutional church because it might limit her freedom of thought which she felt was a very bad thing to do she had an influence nonetheless as a spiritual writer so you mentioned Pope John 23rd

Pope Paul the 6th both read her and cite her as a big influence on their spiritual autobiography but the second group that she has influenced are what you might call literary philosophers or perhaps philosophical writers people like Murdoch Elliot

Camus people for whom the world of philosophy is something that you want to carry out as it were as part of the conversation that is literature and because of her interest in literature and the way she integrated thinking about literature with philosophy

she has a particular attraction for writers of that kind finally I'm afraid Beatrice Han Pyle she died of TB, some people said aggravated by malnutrition, almost a form of anorexia

in 1943. You put your hand, you wanted to say something. Oh, it wasn't about that, but I'll say something about that because there is... I'm afraid we've got just a few seconds. Right, okay, well, there's a big debate about whether she was an anorexic. And I don't know, I'm not a psychiatrist,

but one thing I would say, it's a bit like asking, you know, if Christ had schizoid delusions. What I mean by that is that there's possibly some cases which defy the applicability of medical and standard categories, and she might have been one of them. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Beatrice Handpile, David Levy, Stephen Plant. Next week, the Borgias. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free.

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