Cosmetic surgery in the United States today is a multibillion-dollar industry—smoothing out wrinkles and plumping up lips is no longer limited to Beverly Hills. With the proliferation of cosmetic alterations and filters for our socials, never have we come to appear so radiant and attractive. Nor, it seems, have we been so tormented by how we look. In 2018–19, approximately 10,000 in the United States died from body image-related disorders, while professional medical care exceeded $4 billion. Whatever the correlation may be between cosmetic alteration and body dysmorphia, beauty seems to be a source of oppression for us, not joy.
Meanwhile, we continue to reckon with patriarchal and racist definitions of beauty, rightfully asking, “whose facial symmetry, whose notion of bodily proportion?” Yet even as we aspire towards an individually defined “inner beauty,” why is it that we continue to judge the dark bags beneath our eyes or the soft flesh around our midsections? Why alter or filter our appearances when it would be easier—and cheaper—to simply define ourselves beautifully?
For our beauty-confused times, Simone Weil—philosopher, social activist, mystic—offers some clarity. “The soul’s natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it,” she writes in Gravity and Grace (Routledge), recasting beauty away from the cosmetic and toward an intimate encounter between the soul and God.
Born to an upper-class Parisian family in 1909, Weil’s parents were assimilated, upper-class French Jews who provided every educational opportunity to her and her elder brother, André, an eminent mathematician. Both were early prodigies—as children they spoke ancient Greek to each other in a sort of secret code. Simone Weil was, however, defined by contradictions, which indeed she would claim as “the only realities, the criterion of the real.”
Weil was by all accounts brilliant—both Albert Camus and Pope Paul VI would name her a significant influence to their thinking—but struggled against feelings of inferiority to her genius brother. She dressed like a man, socialized with the working class, and threw herself with brutal abandon into factory and farm work as if trying to overcome her posh upbringing and fragile health.
And Weil was not unproblematic. She forsook her Jewish roots (ironically, one of her most important works would be translated into English as The Need for Roots (Routledge)), castigating Old Testament Israel alongside ancient Rome as “Great Beasts” of totalitarianism, reminiscent of the regimes of Hitler and Stalin she would not live to see the end of; her writings reflect little interest in or awareness of the public persecution of European Jews—which runs counter to the passionate solidarity she otherwise sought with the humiliated of the world.
Her relationship with the physical world was clearly fraught with challenges. She struggled with anorexia, hated to be touched, and neglected her physical well-being as if it was a passion. When she died at 34 in an English hospital, the coroner reported that it was largely due to self-starvation.
Yet there is a hunger for beauty throughout her writings. “Through joy the beauty of the world penetrates the soul”—like seeing a sunset or loved one as if for the first time. Beauty can temporarily close the distance between creature and Creator, affirming the fundamental goodness of creation.
Beauty also reveals the paradoxical rhythm of distance and intimacy between the soul and God. “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence,” she writes in Gravity and Grace. This sense of distance gets softened, however, by language evocative of the Song of Songs. “The beautiful takes our desire captive.” Beauty, she writes, “is almost the only way by which we can allow God to penetrate us…[It] is Christ’s tender smile …like a sacrament.” This language of intimacy casts light on what we might consider “inner beauty.”
Previously agnostic and having thoroughly rejected her Jewish heritage, it was another characteristic contradiction that a young woman who rubbed shoulders with Leon Trotsky and shouted him down in her family’s home would later explain to a priest friend, “Christ himself came down took possession of me.” Though she refused baptism into the Catholic Church, an institution she viewed with equal parts admiration and misgiving, the series of mystical encounters that occurred in the 1930s would seal her life—and her understanding of beauty—with the mark of Jesus. “The longing to love beauty,” she discovered, “is essentially the longing for the incarnation.”
For those of us who have been taught to associate beauty with conventional standards of shape or proportion, this is quite a jump.
For Weil, it was necessary to train oneself to see this kind of beauty. She conceptualized a type of “attention” that was ultimately a prayerful “waiting for God” (one of her book titles) but which consisted of focusing on everyday things. “The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is.”
How does this work? As the Good Samaritan in the parable drops everything to go to his neighbor’s aid, this kind of attention means putting aside every motive and becoming totally present—whether to an algebra equation or a grocery store cashier. “The attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful.”
Weil distinguishes between attitudes of “looking” and “eating.” Instinctively, she thinks, we “consume” things because we have some egocentric agenda in mind, like scrolling through TikTok to fight boredom or listening to a person because we want something from them. The “looking” of attention is different. “Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.” The beautiful, according to Weil, resists our attempts to make it our own, as if beauty were something that could be manufactured or possessed. Beauty simply is and requires only a willingness to look and wait for it: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” What a contrast to a culture that values power and takes for granted next-day deliveries.
From an early age, Simone Weil wrestled with a contradiction both personal and philosophical: She longed for the beautiful yet believed herself so unattractive as to be invisible. “I am the color of dead leaves,” she wrote a friend, “like certain unnoticed insects.” This was likely rooted in the suffering of anorexia, but Weil nonetheless paid close attention to this contradiction in a way that allowed her to profoundly explore the nature of beauty. The result is a powerful alternative to our obsession with pixel-deep beauty, our fixation with social comparison, and techno-capitalism’s message that beauty and youth can be possessed for the right price.
Simone Weil on beauty can offer us some alternatives to our anxieties around appearance. First, she helps us articulate a spiritual explanation for why our narrow and distorted understanding of beauty is detrimental not only to our wallets but also to our mental wellness. If the beauty of God is infinite, why would it be limited to the appearances of a select few that the rest must model themselves after?
We need to challenge the tendency toidentify what is immediately attractive with beauty. What sort of beauty are we paying attention to when we scroll through our socials? As Christians, how does our faith in Jesus, who focused on those the mainstream considered socially repellent, shape our understanding and advocacy of the beautiful?
Secondly, Weil challenges us to pay attention, because the depths of God’s beauty are usually obscured, at least at first glance—hidden within a tree, a song, an unexpected conversation, even one’s own face. To see mystery and wonder in the world we have to train our vision to look with curiosity and patience.
Relatedly and perhaps most importantly, Weil helps us to see the importance of holding this attention for ourselves, as well. This may initially seem counterintuitive, given pop culture’s obsession with image. But are we honestly paying attention to ourselves, in our woundedness and vulnerability—or are we participating in a culture of superficial beauty and comparison even as we long to escape it?
For Weil, true attention is prayer: looking for God in whatever we happen to be looking at. This requires practice. I’ve been attempting to do this. Awkward as it may feel, I have started, when I brush my teeth at night, to look at myself in the mirror as curiously and patiently as I can, until what initially feels uncomfortable or narcissistic becomes something more mysterious. If we are all created in God’s image, seeing the beauty of the world begins with the eyes staring back at me. I let go of worry about whether my appearance is attractive or not, because I am focusing not on what I see but how I see. I wait for my eyes to be filled with light, as Jesus taught (cf. Mt 6:22). Beauty is always there, but first we have to be willing to look.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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