Robert Coles

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Simone Fasted, Dorothy Fed

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SOURCE: "Simone Fasted, Dorothy Fed," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 13, 1987, p. 23.

[In the following review, Dietrich examines the figures at the center of Coles' biographical studies Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage and Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion.]

One woman spent her entire life feeding the hungry, while the other died a premature death of voluntary starvation. Though Dorothy Day and Simone Weil were Christian mystics who developed a remarkably similar critique of modern Western culture based upon their deep spiritual integrity, they were radically different personalities, representing radically different strains of Christian spirituality.

In the tradition that he has established in such previous work as Children of Crisis and Women of Crisis, Robert Coles, Harvard psychologist and social critic, offers an illuminating perspective on the moral climate of our culture through the examination of the spiritual journeys of these two modern saints.

Of the two, Dorothy Day is certainly the more personally appealing, while Simone Weil is quirky and just a little neurotic. In fact, Coles admits that he wrote the book to "try to figure where (Weil) was saner than some and where she was probably a little loony."

Before she was 25, this precocious and brilliant, though little-known philosopher, had composed articles that pierced to the core of our cultural contradictions. Her work has been compared to that of Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre and was to be extravagantly praised by the French existentialist Albert Camus, who likened her to Karl Marx in her analysis of oppression and economics.

Since her untimely death in 1943, Weil has steadily emerged as one of the few strong Christian voices in Western philosophical thought. It is her grounding in Christian spirituality that makes her unique and sharpens her incisive critical analysis of Western cultural modalities. Because she writes from a vantage point outside of man-made cultural constructs, she is quick to perceive the false gods of 20th-Century humanity: the idolatry of science and industrialism and the civil religion of nationalism and militarism.

During the dark days of World War II, she went so far as to write that the whole of Western culture was based on the use of force, a legacy she believed came from our Roman forebears. The conflict for Coles is that her intellectual perceptions were so precise while at he same time, she was, as already noted, "a little loony."

"She could do without sleep, without food … she had no sex life. It is said that she cringed when touched and, in general, she took poor care of her body."

Though her intellectual life was firmly grounded in numerous experiences in the real world—a year on an automobile assembly line, some months as a volunteer with the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War, participation in labor strife and agricultural work with peasants in the fields—Simone Weil never quite fit in.

Her time in the Renault factory left her with migraines. Her experience in the Spanish Civil War ended in a freak accident: stepping in a pot of boiling oil. Even her conversion to Christianity grew out of an experience of pain: "In a wretched condition physically, I entered the little Portuguese village … on the very day of the festival of its patron saint…. The wives of the fishermen were in procession, making a tour of all the ships … singing ancient hymns of sadness. There the conviction bore in on me that Christianity was pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others."

For Simone Weil her time here on earth was a time of "slavery," a time of "waiting for God" and the "liberation" that he would bring. Thus, in 1943 when she contracted tuberculosis and continued to eat no more than the rations of workers in occupied France, one cannot help wondering whether this was an act of high morality or an act of suicide, a final liberation from the awkwardness of this world into mystical union with her only true love, God.

If Simone Weil's mystical vision was based on Platonic dualism, the separation—some would call a false separation—of a divine pure spirit from an earthly, corrupt flesh, Dorothy Day's vision of mystical union is based on an embrace of the divine incarnate in the poor and suffering of the world.

Hers is a practical asceticism that finds its objective not in a nether realm but in the direct service of the poor and suffering, here and now. If Simone Weil thought of herself as a helpless slave before God, Dorothy Day thought we should "pray as if everything depended upon God and work as if everything depended upon ourselves."

We are indebted to Robert Coles for adding this unique contribution to the growing volume of literature on the life of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, of hospitality house and farming communes that she founded more than 50 years ago.

Dorothy Day was a socialist, a Wobbly and a bohemian. She lived in Greenwich Village in the early days of this century, and her friends and drinking companions included Eugene O'Neill, Jack Reed, Emma Goldman and Max Eastman. She had a legal husband, a common law husband, an abortion, a baby and at least one wild love affair.

Upon her conversion to Catholicism and her subsequent meeting with Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker, a movement of lay people which combined her passion for social justice and political action, with centers of service and hospitality to the poor.

Dorothy's 50 years of humble service to the poor have had an incalculable impact on Christians and non-Christians alike. The movement that she founded operates today more than 100 soup kitchens and hospitality houses throughout the country and continues to have an ongoing effect on the church that Day, unlike Weil (who never actually became a Catholic), embraced in full knowledge of its sinfulness and corruption.

What strikes one most in Coles' book may be the human, virtually sensuous quality that emerges so keenly in Day's description of the common-law husband from whom she separated when she converted to Catholicism: "I loved him for all of the things he knew and pitied him for all he didn't know. I loved him for the odds and ends I fished out of his pockets and for the sand and shells he brought in with fishing. I loved his lean cold body as he got into bed smelling of the sea, and I loved his integrity and stubborn pride."

Dorothy loved life. As she often said, "All the way to heaven is heaven." For her there was no distinction between heaven and earth. "Heaven is a banquet, and life is a banquet too, wherever a crust of bread is shared."

No doubt the living witness of Dorothy Day is more appealing to modern sensibilities than the spiritual asceticism and personal quirkiness of Simone Weil. Going to the banquet is much more fun than fasting. But it is nevertheless true that each woman draws on a deep though distinctly different spiritual integrity, a mystical sense of wholeness that sheds divine light on the brokenness and idolatry of our culture.

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