Of Ethics and God: To What Extent Is Simone Weil a Christian Thinker?

ABSTRACT Simone Weil both embraces and fundamentally alters Christian doctrine to suit her own phenomenological experience of the world. Three major issues to consider in reading Weil as a ‘Christian thinker’ are divine Creation, Christ's Resurrection, and mysticism or the possibility of an embodied union with the divine. This essay will examine all three and ultimately argue that, for Weil, Christianity is foremost among a number of sources that she filters and adapts through her own phenomenological experience of the world. These adaptations forefront ethical action in the natural world but are buoyed by a background of supernatural divine love through divine absence. The fundamental Christian dogmas of Creation and Resurrection are altered to such an extent that it is questionable whether Weil should be read as properly Christian. However, her deep engagement with Christian thought suggests a radically altered, Christian‐inspired supernatural layer of human life. At times Christian, at times Platonic, this supernatural layer offers a possibility for rich Christian engagement in her thought, despite her fundamental differences from Christianity.