Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil: A Question of Sympathy

John F. Desmond

Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Volume 8, Number 1, Winter

2005, pp. 102-116 (Article)

Published by Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/log.2005.0005

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177641

[ Access provided at 22 Oct 2020 12:05 GMT from Shahjalal University of Science & Technology ]
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John F. Desmond

Flannery O’Connor
and Simone Weil
A Question of Sympathy

The full story of the intellectual relation between Flannery

O’Connor and Simone Weil has yet to be told. While critics such as
Robert Coles, Sarah Gordon, Lee Sturma, and Jane Detweiler have
explored their relationship from the standpoint of comparative biog-
raphy, little had been done by way of examining O’Connor’s com-
plex reaction to Weil’s thought and how it may have helped shape
O’Connor’s writing. O’Connor would have found much to agree
with in Weil’s religious views, just as she found much to admire in
Weil’s courageous life. At the same time, she rejected Weil’s hyper-
intellectualism and the extreme asceticism that led to Weil’s pre-
mature death, due largely to self-starvation. But more important
than O’Connor’s response to Weil the person was her interest in
Weil as a representative figure in the central debates over religious
belief in twentieth-century Western society, especially among writ-
ers. As a representative figure, Weil challenged orthodox Christian-
ity and, in so doing, challenged and helped clarify O’Connor’s own
religious beliefs. The challenge posed by Weil’s thought reverberates
throughout O’Connor’s later fiction, especially in her second novel,
logos 8:1 winter 2005
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flannery o’connor and simone weil 

The Violent Bear It Away. Weil was a powerful and contentious shap-
ing spirit in O’Connor’s struggles to dramatize the conflicts over
faith in a culture that both she and Weil found to be hostile or indif-
ferent to the hard demands of belief.
O’Connor read and heard much about Weil before actually read-
ing her, and she found the Frenchwoman fascinating. Her first direct
exposure to Weil came through her friendship with Betty Hester
when they began corresponding in July . Hester wrote a sym-
pathetic and insightful letter in which she asked O’Connor about her
Catholic beliefs and her acceptance of Church dogma and their effects
on her writing. In response, O’Connor characterized her general
audience as one in which “the moral sense has been bred out of cer-
tain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off cer-
tain chickens to produce more meat” (Habit, ). Later, she added,
“One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is
that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reali-
ty is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is,
nobody in your audience” (Habit, ). Hester was not a Catholic at
this time, though she later joined the Church but then subsequently
disaffiliated. Her questions to O’Connor about the writer’s accep-
tance of dogma were prompted by Hester’s own concerns about
intellectual freedom within the Church. O’Connor had no illusions
about the Church as a flawed institution and said,“it seems to be a fact
that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it” (Habit, ).
Nevertheless, she maintained that “the individual in the Church is, no
matter how worthless himself, a part of the Body of Christ and a par-
ticipator in the Redemption. There is no blueprint the Church gives
for understanding this. It is a matter of faith and the Church can
force no one to believe it” (Habit, ). Near the end of this letter, she
added, “I am wondering if you have read Simone Weil. I never have
and doubt if I would understand her if I did; but from what I have read
about her, I think she must have been a very great person” (Habit, ).
O’Connor clearly saw in Hester’s intellectual misgivings about
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the Church a mirror image of Simone Weil’s adamant resistance to
institutional Catholicism. In her next letter to Hester, O’Connor
remarked, “I have thought of Simone Weil in connection with you
almost from the first,” and then added a warning: “your effort not to
be seduced by the Church moves me greatly. God permits it for
some reason though it is the devil’s greatest work of hallucination”
(Habit, ). What struck O’Connor in Hester’s case were the mys-
teries of both God’s will and the work of the devil. In linking Hes-
ter and Weil, O’Connor implied that both women’s fear of seduction
by the Church was a mask blinding them to the deeper seduction of
spiritual pride. But at this stage (August ), O’Connor had yet
to read Weil’s writings. That situation was remedied a month later
when Hester sent her some of Weil’s books, which O’Connor read
over the next seven years.
O’Connor’s initial response to reading Weil’s Letters to a Priest and
Waiting for God was a mixture of condescension and shrewd insight.
Speaking of Weil in her next letter to Hester, she said,

The life of this remarkable woman still intrigues me while

much of what she writes, naturally, is ridiculous to me. Her
life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible,
which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In
my own experience, everything funny I have written is more
terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or
only terrible because it is funny. Well Simone Weil’s life is the
most comical I have ever read about and the most truly trag-
ic and terrible. If I were to live long enough and develop as an
artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel
about a woman—and what is more comic and terrible than
the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch
by inch with ground teeth. (Habit, –)

O’Connor may well have seen something of herself as well as of her

friend Hester in Weil’s personality, notwithstanding their difference
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in attitude toward the Church. Yet despite branding Weil’s writing
as “ridiculous,” O’Connor would have agreed with Weil’s belief in
the cross as the only path to salvation and in the Eucharist as the real
presence of Christ and not just a symbol. Nonetheless, O’Connor
certainly would have rejected Weil’s rationalizing of religious mys-
tery, while still feeling a strong kinship with a woman writer who,
like herself, reacted fiercely against a disbelieving, conformist, and
violent age.
Moreover, O’Connor would have recognized some uncanny par-
allels between Weil’s thought and life and many of the themes she
had already addressed in fiction. For example, in O’Connor’s first
novel, Wise Blood, the character Hazel Motes’s bizarre quest to cre-
ate a “Church without Christ” seems almost an obverse image of
Weil’s desire for a “Christ without Church.” Haze rejects Christ as
historical redeemer as Weil did. In addition, Haze’s extreme asceti-
cism, motivated by his personal sense of sin, leads eventually to self-
starvation, sickness, and death, not unlike Weil’s own fate. At issue
for both women is the meaning and value of the body, asceticism,
suffering, and salvation. Furthermore, in her short story “A Good
Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor’s character The Misfit, like Weil,
refuses to believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection. And in “Good Coun-
try People,” O’Connor created the figure of a “proud intellectual
angular woman” in Hulga Hopewell, though she is a woman who is
still a long way from “approaching God inch by inch with ground
teeth.” In Weil’s writings, then, O’Connor would have discovered
many themes that were much her own: an emphasis on suffering and
self-denial as the path to God; an insistence on the tough demands
of love; a focus on the problem of vocation and obedience to God’s
will; and a focus on divine grace as a violent, mysterious force in
human affairs. In addition to their similar thematic concerns,
O’Connor would have found Weil’s style of thought and writing—
using shock, contradiction, and paradox—to be much like her own
practice, as both women labored to revitalize conventional and stale
patterns of religious thought.
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After reading more of Weil, including the Notebooks, O’Connor
struck a more appreciative note in a December  letter to Hester:

The Lord knows I never expected to own the Notebooks of

Simone Weil. This is almost something to live up to; anyway,
reading them is one way to try to understand the age. . . .
These are books that I can’t begin to exhaust, and Simone
Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it
more than most. Also she’s the example of the religious con-
sciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I
will be able to write about. (Habit, )

O’Connor had given some indication of what she meant by “the

religious consciousness without a religion” indirectly in her first let-
ter to Hester, in which she described herself as “a Catholic peculiar-
ly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing [Carl] Jung
described as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty” (Habit, ). Simone
Weil certainly exemplified such a consciousness. As Thomas R.
Nevin’s superb study shows, Weil rejected the historical claims of
Christianity, exulted in her own solitariness, and was plagued by a
deep sense of personal unworthiness and guilt. O’Connor was not
without a religion, of course, but she still recognized in herself
something of the modern predicament they shared. But O’Connor
accepted it as a challenge to faith within the Church. Thus she said,

To possess this (consciousness) within the Church is to bear a

burden, the necessary burden of the conscious Catholic. It’s to
feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think
that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the ter-
rible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that
makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of
Christ and that on this we are fed. (Habit, )

In calling Weil “the example of the religious consciousness with-

out a religion,” O’Connor pointed to the central issue R. W. B.
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Lewis defined many years ago as the problem of the separation
between the human religious impulse and faith in traditional Chris-
tianity. Lewis saw this issue dramatized in the novels of Alberto
Moravia, Ignazio Silone, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, and others.
He could well have added O’Connor and Weil to the list. The prin-
cipal modern example of this separation, as Lewis noted, is Ivan
Karamazov, whose anguish over the suffering of children is a dra-
matic focus in Dostoevsky’s novel. Ivan tells his brother Alyosha that
he cannot accept God as long as one innocent child suffers pain.
Ivan’s is the voice of human sympathy, a sympathy registered with
intense, indeed religious, passion. The conflict between religiously
intense human sympathy and belief in Christianity seen in Ivan has
become, as we know, a central debate in our culture, reflected in the
general concern for victims, in the struggles over abortion, euthana-
sia, genetic engineering, the use of fetal tissue, and so on. Ivan’s
refusal to accept a benevolent God in the face of a child’s suffering
reveals the ultimate question involved. Simone Weil and Flannery
O’Connor had sharply different reactions to Ivan’s argument. Here
is Weil’s response:

Speech of Ivan in the Karamazov’s. “Even though this immense

factory were to produce the most extraordinary marvels and
were to cost only a single tear from a child, I refuse.” I am in
complete agreement with this statement. No reason whatev-
er which anyone could produce to compensate for a child’s
tear would make me consent to that tear. Absolutely none which
the mind can conceive. (Gravity, ) (Italics mine)

Weil goes on to say that she would consent to the child’s suffering if
“God willed it . . . and for that reason I would consent to a world
which was nothing but evil as readily as to a child’s tear,” but then
adds that this is only intelligible to “supernatural love.” Unlike Ivan,
Weil does not reject a benevolent God, but, in her view, God created
by abdicating Himself from the created world. He is deus absconditus
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and His ways are incomprehensible to human beings. What Weil
omits here is the possibility of an incarnated God-man whose death
and resurrection might transform the meaning of human suffering.
O’Connor’s response to Ivan’s argument and to the larger debate
it signified was quite different. In her Introduction to A Memoir of
Mary Ann (), speaking of the mystery of a young girl’s death by
cancer, she said,

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of chil-

dren to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have dis-
credited his goodness, you are done with him. . . . Ivan
Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment;
Camus’s hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of
the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark
our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt
less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind,
prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say,
of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by ten-
derness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the
person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is cut
off from the person of Christ, its logical outcome is terror. It
ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas
chamber.

For O’Connor, the mystery of suffering and compassion is centered

in the belief in the historical Jesus who died and was resurrected in
body as savior. In contrast, Simone Weil saw Jesus as a model of the
suffering slave, the self-sacrificing victim of crucifixion: “In order
that we should realize the distance between ourselves and God it
was necessary that God should be a crucified slave” (Gravity, ). But
she rejected the claim of Jesus’ historical resurrection; or as Thomas
Nevin states, she upheld Good Friday without Easter (Portrait, ).
In short, Weil theorized Jesus according to her own constructed
self-image of a suffering, self-emptying victim. Indeed, her coura-
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flannery o’connor and simone weil 

geous personal life bears witness to this and was certainly one of the
reasons O’Connor admired her. But her rejection of Jesus as the Son
of God who entered history to redeem it fostered Weil’s deep sense
of estrangement from God (Portrait, –). She could not resolve
the felt conflict between her human religious impulse vis-à-vis suf-
fering, the mysterious divine will, and the claim that Jesus alone is
savior.
O’Connor recognized the dangers of such antihistorical theoriz-
ing. Without belief in the risen God-man Jesus, O’Connor argued,
human compassion can quickly become secularized, and when cut
off from its divine source, it often issues in sentimentality and ter-
ror. Apropos this point, Nevin argues persuasively that Weil was a
romantic sentimentalist who conjoined her version of “Christianity”
(that is, Jesus as slave-victim, not resurrected redeemer) with his-
tory’s victims (Portrait, ).
As noted, O’Connor read Weil over a period of seven years
(–), and the impact of that encounter can be seen, I believe,
in her fiction of that period. Specifically, I want to focus on her con-
cern, contra Weil, with the Ivan Karamazov issue of the suffering of
children as O’Connor dramatized it in the novel written largely
during those years, The Violent Bear It Away (). For example, the
novel addresses several Weilian themes found in the Notebooks and in
Waiting for God. In the latter, Weil proclaimed that her vocation was
to refuse to join the Church and to reject baptism. In O’Connor’s
novel, the struggle over vocation and the question of the need for
baptism are both central themes. In a letter to her friend Hester, we
recall, O’Connor argued—thinking of both Weil and Hester—that
refusal of the sacraments and the Church on the grounds of person-
al autonomy was “the devil’s greatest work of hallucination.” In The
Violent Bear It Away, the devil appears in the guises of the many
strangers who are bent on dissuading young Tarwater from his voca-
tion to baptize his retarded cousin Bishop, by appealing to his right
to personal freedom. O’Connor’s response is to dramatize young
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Tarwater’s struggle in a violent and paradoxical fashion that leads
ultimately to the shocking baptism-murder of the innocent child
Bishop, a cruel murder that nevertheless mysteriously affirms the
need of baptism.
Simone Weil upheld the idea (or theory) of the sacraments, espe-
cially the idea of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (Wait-
ing, –). But she rejected the doctrine to which the Eucharist
and the other sacraments are intrinsically linked, that is, the Church’s
doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ. Weil found this doctrine
repugnant because she saw the Church as an example of collectivism
against which the free-thinking individual must always stand. Thus
she said,

The image of the Mystical Body of Christ is very attractive. But

I consider the importance given to this image today as one of
the most serious signs of our degeneration. For our time dig-
nity is not to be parts of a body, even though it be a mystical
one, even though it be that of Christ. . . . This present-day
importance of the image of the Mystical Body shows how
wretchedly susceptible Christians are to outside influences.
(Waiting, –)

In contrast, near the end of The Violent Bear It Away, a chastened Tar-
water has a vision in which he sees a crowd of people, including his
dead great-uncle Mason Tarwater, being fed loaves and fishes, the
biblical miracle that represents Christ’s feeding of the Mystical Body.
The vision reveals to Tarwater “the object of his hunger,” and that
“nothing on earth would fill him.”
Hunger, food, and starvation—both in a physical and spiritual
sense—are dominant themes in O’Connor’s novel, as they were in
Weil’s life and thought. Significantly, Weil implied that her own rad-
ical asceticism and self-starvation were linked to her refusal to par-
take of the Eucharist. In typically paradoxical fashion, she argued that
a refusal of food—natural or supernatural—would be “purer” than
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flannery o’connor and simone weil 

the actual partaking of sustenance. Thus she proclaimed, “It is per-
haps not inconceivable that in a being with certain natural propen-
sities, a particular temperament, a given past, a certain vocation, and
so on, the desire for and deprivation of the sacraments might con-
stitute a contact more pure than actual participation” (Waiting, ).
She apparently missed the irony in her belief that she wasn’t “pure
enough” to receive baptism, ignoring the fact that Jesus himself was
baptized by John, in fulfillment of the law.
While these parallels and differences between Weil’s writings and
O’Connor’s novel are highly suggestive, the more important point of
comparison, I believe, can be seen in O’Connor’s response to the
issue of the suffering of children about which she and Weil differed
so strongly. The issue was crucial for O’Connor because it went to
the heart of the matter of modern belief and disbelief, as R. W. B.
Lewis recognized. In The Violent Bear It Away, the issue is dramatized
explicitly in the struggle between Tarwater and his uncle Rayber
over the question of whether the child Bishop is to be baptized.
Rayber insists that baptism is a meaningless rite, an insult to
human dignity. He tells Tarwater, “The great dignity of man is his
ability to say: I am born once and no more. What I can see and do
for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m
content with it. It’s enough to be a man” (Violent, ). Rayber’s
immediate fellow men are his retarded son Bishop and his nephew
Tarwater, and his actual relation to them belies his high-minded
humanism. He regards Bishop as “an X signifying the general
hideousness of Fate.” As for his nephew, Rayber wants him to be
“born again” in his own agnostic image, and he tries to undermine
Tarwater’s freedom to answer the call to be a prophet.
Rayber is a pseudointellectual and certainly not simply a portrait
of Simone Weil. However, he is, I believe, a portrait of the modern
“religious consciousness without a religion,” as O’Connor charac-
terized Weil. Rayber was baptized as a child; the “seed” of belief in
Christian redemption was sown in him by his uncle, Mason Tar-
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water. Rayber has spent his adult life trying unsuccessfully to root
out the seed. But he is, as O’Connor said of her native South,
“Christ-haunted.” Despite his rejection of Christ and a benevolent
God, Rayber’s religious impulse threatens to erupt as an irrational
love, first for his son Bishop and then for all creation: “It was love
without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to
exist only to be itself, imperious and all-demanding, the kind that
would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant” (Violent,
). The threatening love Rayber feels is focused specifically on his
father figure—old Mason Tarwater: “He always felt with it a rush of
longing to have the old man’s eyes—insane, fish-colored, violent
with their impossible vision of a world transfigured—turned on
him once again” (Violent, ). Afraid of this deep longing, Rayber
displaces the love/hate he feels for Mason Tarwater onto his retard-
ed son Bishop, whom he once tried to drown, and onto his nephew
Tarwater, whom he plans to paganize. Thus O’Connor links the
meaning and destiny of both Bishop and young Tarwater to old
Mason and the God who commands baptism for redemption.
Rayber’s religious consciousness becomes an affliction that splits
him into an “intellectual” and an “emotional” self. To avoid any irra-
tional outburst, he practices a self-lacerating asceticism, a denial of
the body and natural impulses that is certainly suggestive of aspects
of Simone Weil’s life. In her paradoxical fashion, Weil argued egois-
tically that the path to God was through annihilation (that is, “de-cre-
ation”) of the ego-self. We must become as “nothing” (Gravity,
–). For his part, Rayber denies the flesh, exalts the intellectual
ego, and affirms the bodiless, abstract idea of what he calls “human
dignity.” In their perverse asceticism, Weil and Rayber are examples
of an impulse that O’Connor recognized clearly as radically anti-
Christian because it amounts to a refusal of the incarnate human
being that Jesus came to redeem. Although Weil claimed allegiance
to Jesus, she argued that “the cross of Christ is the only gateway to
knowledge,” not to redemption (Gravity, ). O’Connor shows the
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outcome of this negative asceticism when Rayber, after ruthlessly
controlling his impulse to love the world, comes to feel “nothing”
when he hears the howling death cries of his son Bishop.
Yet Rayber claims to have compassion for children and, in a cru-
cial scene, O’Connor addresses the Ivan Karamazov issue directly.
Rayber tracks young Tarwater at night to a storefront revival where
a child-preacher, Lucette Carmody, is proclaiming the gospel of
Christian redemption. As he listens to her preach that “Jesus is love,”
Rayber feels pity for her as just “another child exploited.” His so-
called pity is in fact a masked self-pity because he sees in her an
image of himself when he was, he believes, “exploited” as a child by
old Mason Tarwater. Listening to Carmody affirm the resurrection
of the dead, the enraged schoolteacher has “a vision of himself mov-
ing like an avenging angel through the world, gathering up the chil-
dren that the Lord, not Herod, had slain” (Violent, ). Rayber
imagines himself as a savior who would lead all “exploited children”
to an “enclosed garden” where he would teach them his truth—that
the dead don’t rise and that Christian redemption is a hoax.
The child-preacher refers directly to the massacre of the Inno-
cents and puts the responsibility where O’Connor believed it right-
ly belonged. Carmody says, “The world hoped old Herod would
slay the right child, the world hoped old Herod wouldn’t waste
those children, but he wasted them. He didn’t get the right one.
Jesus grew up and raised the dead” (Violent, ). Then, looking
directly at Rayber, she affirms that “Jesus is coming again!” and cas-
tigates the schoolteacher as “a dead man Jesus hasn’t raised” (Violent,
–).
In this scene, O’Connor puts the matter of compassion for suf-
fering innocent children in the context of Jesus’ death and resur-
rection and the hope of final resurrection. Throughout her writings,
Simone Weil emphasized the need to emulate the sacrifice of Jesus
on the cross, to empty or “de-create” ourselves as he did. But unlike
O’Connor, Weil rejected the historical Jesus and the belief in bodily
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resurrection. Given her theoretical and personal asceticism, this is
not surprising. For Weil, the body is a veil that separates us from the
ideal “God.” But as theologian Karl Rahner has argued, to affirm the
sacrificed Jesus without his bodily resurrection is to mythologize him
as one like many other sacrificial figures, denying his unique histor-
ical identity and meaning. Simone Weil saw Jesus as an example of
the divine logos as expressed in many religions and saw the “spirit of
Christ” in Dionysius, Tao, and Orestes when he saved Electra (ignor-
ing Orestes’s later matricide [Portrait, ]).
The separation of Jesus’ crucifixion from his bodily resurrection
has a second and more far-reaching consequence, as O’Connor’s
response to the Ivan Karamazov viewpoint makes clear. In her Intro-
duction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, O’Connor pointed to the danger
of separating tenderness from the source of tenderness—the cruci-
fied, risen Christ. What happens to tenderness when it is not cen-
tered in Christ? One result, as O’Connor argued, is that the
passionate humans, filled with humane pity, elevate themselves to the
role of sacrificial savior, displacing Christ and his redemptive act. The
one who pities assumes the savior role but in purely human terms,
such as Graham Greene’s compassionate hero Scobie in The Heart of
the Matter. Pity then becomes a mask for power, as when Rayber fan-
tasizes himself to be a savior of all the children of the world. But
when the standard becomes human judgment rather than the mys-
tery of God’s will, pity may come to be used to justify many forms
of destruction, even on the theory of creating a better or more puri-
fied world. This is the terror O’Connor predicted. In theory, Ray-
ber would save all the children, but, in fact, he once tried to drown
his son Bishop, and when he can’t break young Tarwater’s spirit, he
wants to be rid of him.
Rene Girard saw the same conjoining of an ersatz “Christianity”
and a concern for victims that Nevin recognized as a flaw in the
romantic sentimentalism of Weil. Girard understands this to be the
work of Satan masking as a liberator of mankind. What Satan
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offers, Girard says, is the illusion of the autonomous human will
without God or Christ—exactly what Rayber and the other demon-
ic figures in the novel offer Tarwater. It takes being raped by a
stranger to teach Tarwater otherwise. Rayber’s so-called concern for
the children and his plan to “liberate” them has as its real target
Christianity itself. As Girard says, “We are living through a caricat-
ural ‘ultra-Christianity’ that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christ-
ian orbit by ‘radicalizing’ the concern for victims in an anti-Christian
manner. . . . The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one
that takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the concern for victims in order to
paganize it” (Satan, –). Girard’s statement accurately describes
George Rayber in his role as “savior” of the world’s children.
Simone Weil would have been horrified to be connected with a
cold egoistic rationalist such as Rayber. Nevertheless, in reading
Weil, O’Connor recognized and honored Weil’s heroic life and her
intelligence. But at the same time, she saw the dangers of Weil’s
attempt to reduce faith to thought, and to rationalize Jesus and the
mystery of suffering and divine mercy. Insofar as Weil’s views typi-
fied certain tendencies of the age, O’Connor confronted them with
the mystery of evil, violence, and grace in The Violent Bear It Away.
Yet reading Weil over seven years, absorbing and contending with
her views helped O’Connor define and deepen the dimensions of her
own faith and her art. As O’Connor said, Simone Weil is a mystery
whose life and work can “keep us all humble.”

Notes
1. See Robert Coles, “Flannery O’Connor: A Southern Intellectual,” The Southern
Review , no.  (): –; Lee Sturma, “Flannery O’Connor, Simone Weil, and
the Virtue of Necessity,” Studies in the Literary Imagination , no.  (): –;
Jane Detweiler, “Flannery O’Connor’s Conversation with Simone Weil: The Violent
Bear It Away as a Study in Affliction,” Kentucky Philological Review  (): –; and
Sarah Gordon, “Flannery O’Connor, the Left-Wing Mystic, and the German Jew,”
Flannery O’Connor Bulletin  (): –.
2. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ),  (hereafter cited in text as Habit).
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3. See O’Connor’s well-known statement about the Eucharist—“If it’s only a symbol,
I’d say to hell with it.”—in The Habit of Being, . See also SimoneWeil, Gravity and
Grace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ),  (hereafter cited in text as
Gravity).
4. Weil, Gravity and Grace, –.
5. Thomas R. Nevin, Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-Exiled Jew (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, ), – (hereafter cited in text as Portrait).
6. R. W. B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippencott, ), .
7. Flannery O’Connor, “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,” in Collected Works of
Flannery O’Connor (New York: Library of America, ), .
8. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Harper and Row, ), – (hereafter
cited in text as Waiting).
9. Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away, in Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor
(New York: Library of America, ),  (hereafter cited in text as Violent).
10. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. XVII (New York: Crossroads, ),
–.
11. Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, ), 
(hereafter cited in text as Satan).