DM: First let me thank you for taking the time to talk briefly about your new book, Cynthia, The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion (Columbia, 2024), and to congratulate you on its publication.

CW: Thank you so much, David!

DM: I want to start with an obvious first question. What was the hook that convinced you to write this book, and how does it fit in with some of your abiding questions as a scholar? Or is this a new direction in your work?

CW: I love this phrase—my abiding questions as a scholar. The book absolutely emerges from my abiding scholarly questions: How does literature engage with Christianity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How does literature help us tell the truth about the ways Christian institutions have caused and contributed to enormous harms, and how does it also help us tell the truth about the ways life continues to spring up in and through and around the Christian tradition? How does literature invite us to bear witness to suffering and joy and to participate in justice and love? And how does it do all this in specifically literary ways?

I posed all these questions in my first book, Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering (Columbia UP, 2016), which forges a conversation among literary ethics, feminisms, liberationist theologies, and postcolonial theory to consider the risky power of self-sacrifice and to develop what I call “an ethics of readerly attention.” While I worked on that project, which began as my doctoral dissertation, I encountered references to Simone Weil in bewilderingly diverse places, including political writing by the radical feminist Adrienne Rich, classics of feminist care ethics and womanist theology, discussions of Emmanuel Levinas, and my husband’s assigned reading for a graduate course on the Trinity. I was so intrigued by the mystery of Weil’s wide appeal that I decided to investigate it.

I spent the next decade reading and re-reading Weil’s own writing and dozens of books and articles about her work, as well as an ever-widening collection of literary texts that referenced her. The more I sought, the more I found. I wanted to know why and how this philosopher, so hyperbolic in her discussions of self-emptying, so passionately drawn to Christianity even though she refused to be baptized, so deeply committed to an attention-based ethic and a frankly radical politics, had influenced such a wide array of writers and provoked so much poetry and prose.

DM: Have you previously done work with any of the writers you include who engage Weil, including Adrienne Rich as well as Annie Dillard, Mary Gordon, and several poets including Anne Carson and Maggie Helwig?

CW: Yes, I have, and I think this question illuminates how the book came together. I wrote about Adrienne Rich in my first book, teach her poetry and essays in my classes, and was privileged to edit a special issue of Arizona Quarterly on her later work in 2022. Annie Dillard is the writer who woke me up to the glories of creative nonfiction: I read all of her books as an undergraduate and wrote a paper on Holy the Firm, Paul Ricoeur, and the suffering servant for a grad course at Loyola University Chicago without yet realizing how much Weil fit into these themes. I stumbled into Mary Gordon’s oeuvre during my time at Loyola, too.

I say in the book that I focus on the most sustained and intensive engagements with Weil I could find in English, and that’s absolutely true: Rich spent fifty years writing poems and essays that returned repeatedly to Weil’s person and ideas; Dillard’s nonfiction trilogy is thickly woven with Weil’s influence; Gordon has written two novels and a novella in the past 20 years that are fictional reconsiderations of Weil’s biography. But it’s also true that the book I wrote is a compendium of some of my most persistent literary influences, the writers I keep coming back to. It’s probably not accidental that we have a fascination with Weil in common, but that’s not what consciously first drew me to their work.

Apart from Anne Carson, whose poetry I knew a little, the poets who have written verse biographies of Weil—sequences or whole books—are a little different in that I found them through Weil. But I worked with their writing so closely, I came to love them all too.

The book could have been three times as long as it is: I originally planned to include two or three writers in each chapter, with investigations of Denise Levertov, Iris Murdoch, and Fanny Howe, among others. But there was so much material for Rich, Dillard, and Gordon that I had to narrow my scope. There’s much more work to do here, for me and for others, and I’m keen to both do some of that work and support others in it. In academia we are often tempted into competition and scarcity mindsets, but I think that in the discussion of Weil and literary writing, there’s an economy of abundance.

DM: One might describe your book as a series of conversations between you, these writers, and Simone Weil, with your own critical voice taking part as one of the interlocutors and as well as an interpreter. As one example, you refer to Weil’s “absent-presence” in Annie Dillard’s work, and Weil as “Dillard’s persistent companion, interlocutor, and at points even implicit alter-ego in these artful negotiations” (119). How did you manage the poise required for this undertaking, perhaps at the risk of overreading, especially in those places where Weil’s presence was felt but not explicit in the work?

CW: I am always telling my students to tether their claims to textual evidence, and I try to do the same thing. An ethic of readerly attention—which I learned in part from Weil herself—is keenly committed to close reading and letting the text be the text, rather than reading into it. In a project like this, there is a temptation to become over-sensitized to possible influence and read it into the literary texts.

I really worked in the book to tie any claims about authorial intention and influence to the authors’ own archival or printed statements. Dillard, for example, doesn’t cite Weil anywhere in Holy the Firm (1977), yet she writes in another essay that she was intensively reading Weil while she wrote Holy the Firm. I don’t think I could make the claims I do about Weil’s influence on Dillard, given how infrequently she cites Weil, if she hadn’t admitted in other publications that Weil has been such an influence. But once the admission is there, I think it’s fair to look for the intertextual points of resonance and to build an argument about what they mean. And of course, at some point, for that argument to be interesting, it has to make claims that might not be immediately obvious.

I had to do similar work for an essay I wrote on Denise Levertov that was first presented at the beautiful conference on Levertov put on by the Hank Center for Catholic Intellectual Life in 2015. Levertov’s poetry struck me as deeply engaged with Weil’s thought in its aesthetic and ethic of attention and some of its vocabularies, but of course Weil is not the only figure who has theorized attention as a creative practice—Levertov was also hugely influenced by Rilke, for example—and Weil’s ethical paradigm is in many ways a rephrasing of the parable of the Good Samaritan. It wasn’t until I found a diary reference to reading Weil in Dana Green’s 2012 biography of Levertov that I felt fully justified in tracing the textual relationship.

Of course, one can always perform a Weilian reading of any text, but in this project I’ve been interested in genealogies of influence, which required more archival research and biographical investigation than I had done before. My children were very excited about “sleuthing” while I was researching and writing the manuscript—they had magnifying glasses and everything—and the thrill of investigation was its own new kind of pleasure for all of us.

DM: One of the great tensions in your book, announced in the subtitle, concerns “the challenge of religion.” You write that you are “interested in how the secularization thesis and its assumptions about religion have shaped readings of Weil, how her engagements with Christianity … appealed to and repelled various readers since her death” (19). You later ask, “Can one … embrace Weil’s ethics of attention, her assessment of suffering, force, and the need for roots, apart from their profoundly theological underpinnings?” (65). What are some key aspects of this “challenge of religion” that you attempt to put forth, and how do they illuminate our understanding not only of Weil and her literary legacy, but perhaps our own sensibilities?

CW: The original subtitle I proposed was not “Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion” but rather “Attention, Justice, and Postsecular Hunger.” The press thought “postsecular hunger” was a little too obscure for search engines, and they wanted to signal the role of gender in the book (although not all the writers I discuss call themselves feminists). I think “postsecular hunger” is helpful, though, in thinking about the challenge of religion and our attraction to Weil.

The challenge of religion in Weil is, first of all, rooted in her own experience of Judaism, which is a painful challenge that requires real care. Scholars have worked to understand Weil’s critique of Judaism and the degree to which it derived from the atmosphere of French antisemitism in which Weil grew up. Weil objected to the idea of a “chosen people” whom God particularly favored to the extent of commanding that they destroy other groups. She thought these passages of violence in the Hebrew Scriptures were antithetical to the way of Jesus but had influenced the Catholic Church to embrace totalitarian power and exercise exclusionary violence throughout history. The deep irony, as some scholars have pointed out, is that if Weil had engaged more thoroughly with the biblical tradition, including the Jewish traditions of interpretation, she would see that she was not alone in her concerns about violence. Scholars have really struggled with this aspect of Weil’s thought: why was she such a poor reader of the Hebrew Scriptures given her commitment to good reading elsewhere, and why was she so uniquely unwilling to engage with this tradition when she was open to the other world traditions? The novelist Mary Gordon is particularly interested in this question, and I think her novella “Simone Weil in New York” takes it on really thoughtfully, treating Weil with compassion and curiosity in this respect.

The second challenge of religion in Weil is, of course, her late turn to Christianity. After a series of mystical encounters with Christ in her twenties, Weil came to love Christ and to believe in many Christian doctrines—the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Trinity, and the Church as a conduit of sacramental grace. She had many conversations with priests and Catholic friends about the possibility of her baptism—in fact, she joked in a letter that she knew these conversations were hard enough on her interlocutors that she was saving some Jesuits from time in purgatory (Weil had a rich sense of humor). But she couldn’t bring herself to be baptized because she didn’t want to sacrifice her full intellectual freedom, which she experienced as a vocation (one wonders whether a post-Vatican II Church would have felt more accessible to Weil?). She also wanted to stand in solidarity with those the Church had harmed and continued to exclude, including those within the other world religious traditions. Weil was a profoundly universalist Christian. She hungered, avidly, for the Eucharist but in a refusal she characterized as obedience to God, she did not receive it.

This is a challenge! It’s definitely a challenge to Catholic teaching. It’s also a challenge to those who see her brilliance and wonder how she could turn to the Church, despite all her criticisms of it—this includes many feminists, whose mid-century critique of patriarchy was tangled with a critique of religion. And her criticisms are a challenge to the faithful who would like to turn a blind eye to the tradition’s failings.

Yet despite all these challenges, Weil’s attraction to Christianity is part of what draws people to her—even some who cannot follow her into faith—and her most developed ethical and political writing is profoundly informed by her Christian turn. In a secular age, when many people assume religion’s decline, these are hard phenomena to understand. But I understand the secular in the context of postsecular thought, which is to say, I think of the secular age as a time of wild and unpredictable and certainly complex variety in terms of religion’s role in public and private life. Our moment involves fundamentalist reactions and religiously defended power mongering but also rebirths like Richard Kearney describes in Anatheism and surprising newness like Walter Brueggemann describes in his work on prophetic imagination. Weil’s ongoing influence—the way her many hungers for justice, beauty, Eucharistic communion, and Christ himself, resonate with her readers’ hungers—makes much more sense in this postsecular frame of understanding.

DM: Our 2024 issues of Among Winter Cranes explore a Christian poetics of prose. This is not the particular focus of your book (though it does appear implicitly), but I’m curious in your reading of Weil and the prose of these writers if you can glean any insights about this interest?

CW: I love this question, and it has me reflecting on all the other books this book could have been. I think there is a book to be written about Christian poetics and Weil’s influence on literary writing, and I hope someone writes it!

A Weilian Christian poetics of prose would probably think a lot about the connections among beauty, truth, and goodness. Weil was deeply influenced by Plato, and she believed that the contemplation of real beauty led to truth and goodness. She loved proportion. She loved justice. She repeated, over and over again, that the one who seeks finds. Again, Weil was in favor of intellectual freedom, but she also had a rigorous sense of morality, and she thought truly great art led toward God.

At the same time, Weil was also deeply committed to a Stoic amor fati and amor mundi—a discipline of loving the world that is and telling the truth about it, including what’s hard in it, rather than distracting ourselves with imagination. I think a Christian poetics of prose in conversation with Weil would have a lot to say about the role of truth-telling in all its senses, including bearing witness to suffering and injustice. For Weil, those who suffer are most in need of pure beauty to contemplate; but they also need others to attend to their suffering.

This clarity of content—attention to both the most lovely and the most painful—is of a piece with a form that is minutely attentive to detail but also musical, even in prose. Weil wrote this way: with discipline and curiosity and also a kind of rhythmic spare simplicity that is poetic, even in her journals.

Finally, I think a Christian poetics of prose could think with Weil about metaxu, another concept she borrows from Plato. I write about this mostly in the chapter on verse biographies, but it’s true in so much of Weil’s own writing and the writing about her: every separation is a link. Writing about human life or about the divine, in Weilian terms, inevitably offers both illumination and also distance. Language in this poetics is neither unproblematically representational nor is it a fog of free-floating signifiers.

I think we see this poetics at work in much of the literary writing I discuss in the book. Even in literary texts that are formally demanding, there’s still a profound commitment to communication. There’s an aesthetics of attention—keen detail and description—that’s consonant with an ethics of attention understood as compassion and responsibility to the other. There’s an openness to beauty in form and content that makes the literary writing, including the prose, pleasurable to read. In quite different ways, this is true of Annie Dillard’s prose and of Mary Gordon’s, but also essays by Adrienne Rich and Anne Carson and Christian Wiman and Terry Tempest Williams, all of whom read Weil.

DM: You do say in your Introduction, regarding the “lyrical approaches” to Weil that you explore in the chapter “Decreation: Simone Weil Among the Poets,” that “These tender creations of Weil often self-consciously represent the act of attending to her―and thereby creating her in her tangle of paradoxes―in a way that is uniquely possible in poetry” (31). Can you elaborate what you mean by “uniquely possible,” perhaps by way of what Robert Alter calls in The Art of Biblical Poetry poetry’s “peculiar advantages”?

CW: Yes! Weil’s thought and her life are full of contradictions. In part, this is because she was committed to a method of following a claim as far as she could and then doing the same with its opposite. But she’s also famously contradictory herself: an agonistic Jew who turned to Christianity; a Christian who wouldn’t be baptized; a pacifist who volunteered in the Spanish Civil War; a philosophy professor who took leave to work in factories; and so on (these lists of contradictions are notoriously common in writing about Weil).

Poetry’s formal properties—like enjambment, metaphor, density of meaning, sonic overlays of meaning, and so on—offer “peculiar advantages” for representing and exploring those contradictions of Weil’s life and thought. This is one of the reasons I wish more Weil scholars in philosophy and theology departments were also reading the poetry about her: something happens in this poetry that is not reducible to paraphrase (as in all good poetry), and these specifically poetic strategies are, I think, singularly insightful when it comes to the paradoxes in Weil’s legacy.

DM: As you delved deeply into Weil’s legacy in the literary works of others, were there any surprises, whether in your understanding of Weil or in Weil’s impact on their work?

CW: I’ve been surprised and delighted by how widespread Weil’s influence truly is and how thoroughly it influenced the writers I write about here, even though at points it’s embedded. It has me thinking about other implicit influences and the abundant and often untraceable gifts that inevitably underlie all of the great literature we have.

I was also really struck by the depth of Weil’s anti-colonial writing, which isn’t as widely known. I also teach and research postcolonial and decolonizing literatures and theories, and it was fascinating and honestly encouraging to find such productive compatibility between her writing and that of others working in the field more recently. Weil’s most explicit anti-colonial writing wasn’t collected in English until 2003 by J.P. Little in Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other, so it’s not been the primary influence on her literary interlocutors, but I’m convinced her other more famous writing—about the role of force, attention, affliction, and uprooting—is of a piece with her anti-colonialism.

DM: In your own reflections on Weil, whether in reading her work directly or the appearance of its themes in the writing of these interlocutors, which of her ideas has made the deepest impression on you personally? What for us are elements of her legacy that you would hope we continue to appreciate and engage?

CW: This book is not overtly confessional by any means, but I am a confessing Christian. I mean that in multiple senses: I confess Jesus, and I also confess that the Christian tradition has done untold harm throughout the centuries and continues to harm. I was raised in a thick Independent Baptist fundamentalism and saw early how much its attractions to power hurt people—especially women and people of color—and I’ve spent two decades studying and teaching about gender and race and colonization. At the same time, I have met Christ on the road and found my heart burning within me. Or to put it in Weil’s terms (which are echoed in Andrew Root’s recent theological work), I have waited for God, and I have been found by God.

As a result, I have no patience with triumphalism: I am so allergic to coercion that I probably err sometimes on the side of criticism of religion. I believe that the Good News is truly good, in large part thanks to relationships I have had with books and people on the margins who know God as a God who suffers-with and who loves extravagantly: those liberationist and postcolonial and feminist and womanists I read in graduate school, along with a gloriously untidy ecumenical anabaptist community I stumbled into in my 20s, redeemed my faith and continue to do so.

Weil is a fellow traveler in this journey with Jesus. I can’t follow her into her full Stoicism (I need sometimes to question God with the psalmist), and I have come to a different hermeneutical peace with the scriptural canon than she did. But in Weil, I see someone who has the courage to open her heart to Divine love, known in the person of Christ—to assert and trust that this love is at the base of creation and holds all things together—while also unabashedly naming the Church’s failures. In Waiting for God, she writes about what it would take for Christianity to be “truly incarnated”—which includes frank repentance and a more rigorous discipleship following the Way of Christ. Here, she speaks my heart.

Weil is good for thinking with. I think with Weil about the problem of evil; I think with her, as I mentioned, about anti-colonial movements; I think with her about what it means to build an ethics and even a politics from responsibilities instead of rights; I think with her about chronic pain and fatigue, as I seek to live with integrity and even joy through a stack of sometimes-debilitating autoimmune diseases and degenerating joints. I think with Weil about what it means to live with attention and curiosity and openness to beauty and to the other, what it means to give up something for the sake of goodness, what it means to be hungry and trust that I will be fed. And I think with Weil about poetry, which is another source of spiritual food. I think about how abundant that food is: we have so much brilliant writing cropping up all the time, not to mention the riches of the past. What a gift!

DM: Thank you so much for taking the time to offer this window into your book, and congratulations again on your achievement.

CW: Thank you so much for taking the time to engage with the book and these ideas, David. It means the world to me to have received your kind attention in this exchange.