Simone Weil “was French, born to a Jewish family, and lived a short 34 years, dying in 1943,” V.H. Cassler writes in Square Two. In WWII, she, active in the French Resistance, “began to fast in solidarity with soldiers at the front, weakening herself so much by daily deprivation that tuberculosis claimed her life. The doctor in attendance declared her death a suicide.” In The New Criterion, Emina Melonic is more direct: “There is nothing moderate about Weil—she lived an extreme life bordering on madness.” A philosopher and Christian mystic, she was, Albert Camus declared, “the only great spirit of our times.”

“[H]er intellectual lucidity, spiritual intoxication, and courage,” to quote Melonic, is evident in this small book. Editor Laurie Gagne, “manages in a pithy 105 pages to introduce the reader to all that is most compelling and appealing about the core preoccupations of Weil’s thought,” Mark Shiffman affirms in Front Porch Republic; these are, Publishers Weekly reports, “love, beauty, suffering, and idolatry.” It makes clear, Shiffman adds, that Weil led “a life in which intellectual and spiritual honesty are inseparable.” Love in the Void is, PW concludes, at once “beguiling,” while being an “intellectually and spiritually demanding sampler.”

Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us
By Simone Weil; edited by Laurie Gagne
Plough Publishing House, 2018