"…I think the course of the modern world would have been very different if women, in seeking models for womanhood and thinking, had turned to Simone Weil rather than her intellectually dishonest and confused contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir. The tragedy of feminism lies just here. Simone de Beauvoir’s vacuous arguments and self-subjugation to that sexual predator, Jean-Paul Sartre, speaks volumes about the level of thought in feminist circles. And in essence, this is my main objection to feminism: in the guise of hating the patriarchy, it rejected the teachings of the Christian Church and the labors of philosophy and of learning how to think, and instead followed the siren-song of people like Freud, Marx and Nietzsche – a truly diabolical ‘patriarchy.’"

In thinking about Simone Weil again, after a lapse of so many years, I saw a collection of her writings in the "Modern Spiritual Masters Series," a general series edited by Robert Ellsberg, a Catholic convert and disciple of Dorothy Day. It was at the Ludington Library; I checked it out. I once possessed quite a collection of Simone Weil’s writings, in my younger days, but in a strange fit of housecleaning one day I sold them to a used bookstore. I had, you see, so thoroughly read and digested Simone Weil that I felt I no longer needed her books. Her writings had so much become a part of me that I thought I no longer needed the extra baggage.

It was a strange mistake, and one I have later regretted, though I am glad to say that Christopher Bamford, later head of the Rudolf Steiner Books Press, saw my books in that bookshop and bought them. So at least they went to a worthy home!

I am particularly taken, at the moment, with Simone Weil’s letter to Joe Bosquet, reproduced in the volume I checked out of the library. Bosquet was a paralyzed veteran of World War I to whom Weil wrote a long letter from Marseille, date May 12, 1942. "You are especially privileged in that the present state of the world is a reality for you," Weil began, in a letter that was to talk a great deal about suffering, affliction, and reality. I will get to this later, but for the moment I wish to focus on a couple of paragraphs in Weil’s letter where she talks about "a kind of virginity of the soul as regards good." I have therefore entitled my piece the "virginity monologues" – as an ironic challenge to a contemporary vulgar feminist work about which I have nothing to say.

She begins: "When you say that you do not feel the difference between good and evil, your words are not serious if taken literally because you are speaking of another man in you who is clearly the evil in you; you are well aware … which of your thoughts, words and deeds strengthen that other man in you at your expense and which ones strengthen you at his."

So far I think I understand. "Two souls within my breast." We all know of this. It is idle to speak of good and evil with mere words – and perhaps this is something which Simone Weil means here. We know good and evil within ourselves, although it is not a kind of knowledge such as that of mathematics, for instance, or of empirical science, directed at matters of the external world. And because it is not this kind of externally-directed knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil we possess of ourselves is painful to acknowledge. Indeed, we literally cannot ‘face’ it. We cannot ‘mirror’ it, for to take it out and ‘look’ at it in that way would be to acknowledge its reality and its hold over us. We would perhaps become mesmerized by it. I am reminded here of the story of Perseus, who was given a mirror by Athena in his confrontation with Medusa. To look at the Medusa would be to turn to stone. Perseus is able to slay her because he holds up the mirror and looks into the mirror rather than directly at Medusa.

Anyway, to continue: "What you mean is that you have not yet consented to recognize this difference as the distinction between good and evil."

Remember, she is talking about the effects of good and evil: the good strengthens man, the true man; evil strengthens the ‘other man,’ the ‘other’ who is strengthened at the expense of the good. I don’t think she is arguing here that man is ‘naturally good.’ There is more here than that. Indeed, the silly idea of ‘natural good’ blurs over entirely the necessity for consent. But let us continue:

"It is not an easy consent to give, because it commits one irrevocably. There is a kind of virginity in the soul as regards good, which is lost forever once the soul has given this consent – just as a woman’s virginity is lost after she has yielded to a man."

Perhaps what Weil alludes to here is a type of "innocence" that can be so often the cause of the most appalling blindness and cruelty. It is the state of the soul before the consent – before the knowledge that consent is what is needed, that consent is called for. The good demands an action. It demands thought. It demands consent.

We have all known people like that – the innocent. The world is full of them. But I want to get to her next, and crucial, paragraph:

"For every human being there is a point in time, a limit, unknown to anyone and above all to himself, but absolutely fixed, beyond which the soul cannot keep this virginity. If, before this precise moment …it has not consented to be possessed by the good, it will immediately afterwards be possessed in spite of itself by the bad."

I think this is quite astonishing and powerful – if by powerful we understand the most subtle movements of the soul, and therefore alien to all ‘power’ as the worldly concept means by that. What particularly amazes me in this passage is how Weil juxtaposes the concept of a time limit, a fixed moment, with that of moral knowledge. Normally we do not think of moral consciousness in such a precise way, for we are always, -- or at any rate, most of us most of the time – weaving in and out between degrees of good and bad, and there is this wavering quality in the life of the soul. But perhaps it is this very ‘wavering’ that leads us to ignore, postpone, forget, overlook, the moment when consent will be called from us. And so we are back to the original point of the correspondent, who said "he did not feel the difference between good and evil." As I believe that Weil will soon argue, we imagine that we do not feel the difference. But let us see how she gets there:

"A man may yield to the bad at any moment of his life, because he yields to it unconsciously and unaware that he is admitting an external authority into his soul; and before the soul surrenders her virginity to it she drugs herself with an opiate…"

Let me pause here for a moment. The idea that the bad becomes an ‘external authority’ is notable, also the idea that the soul, before surrendering her virginity, ‘drugs herself with an opiate.’ In this case the idea is evidently that the soul surrenders without consent. But let me continue:

"To be possessed by the bad, it is not necessary to have consented to it; but the good never possesses the soul until she has said yes. And such is the fear of consummating the union that no soul has the power to say yes to the good unless she is urgently constrained by the almost immediate approach of the time-limit which will decide her eternal fate."

Is there a soul within a soul – a soul that lives, weaves back and forth between the degrees of good and bad, loves and dislikes, wills and refrains from willing, acts or refuses to act, yet somewhere, within, feels the ‘approach’ … of the ‘time-limit’ – the sense that this cannot go on forever? Indeed, is this sense the very meaning of mortality itself? For it is not enough merely to say that we know we shall die. Death, for the living, is an abstraction, unless one is in the grips of a severe illness or other misfortune. But the sense of limits to being, limits of being, is real – or at least, I think it becomes real to those who have this soul within the soul. It is more than a sense of time or temporality, it is perhaps less than a sense of vocation or of being called to something. It is more, I think, the sense of – "It matters!" What a world of expression is hidden within this tiny phrase – we have built the whole world of substance, of nature, of matter, right there upon the moral sense. Or rather we have constructed the entire moral world upon an edifice of matter, like an overhang of substance. "It matters!" And this sense of the time-limit burrowing right down into substance itself gives the entire feeling for incarnation, and all of thinking and philosophy is but the echo or resonance of this experience in the soul.

"For one man this time-limit may occur at the age of five, for another at the age of sixty. In any case, neither before nor after it has been reached is it possible to locate it temporally; in the sphere of duration this instantaneous and eternal choice can only be seen refracted. For those who have yielded to the bad a long time before the limiting moment is reached, this moment is no longer real. The most a human being can do is to guard intact his faculty for saying yes to the good, until the time when the limiting moment has almost been reached."