Metaphysics of the Self in Catherine of Siena and Simone Weil

Christina Van Dyke warns that sequestering female medieval thinkers into a generic “mystical” category flattens their rigorous and distinct philosophical commitments.¹ In the current study of contemplative philosophy, this marginalization can take the form of collapsing diverse thinkers into a unified tradition of “self-emptying.” Alex Dubilet’s The Self-Emptying Subject traces self-emptying across medieval theology and modern philosophy, demonstrating the appeal of suspending historical divides to construct a trans-historical ethics of the dispossessed self.² While such genealogical projects illuminate broad thematic resonances, these projects inspire a reflex that distorts the philosophical views of certain pairings. This reflex appears justified when reading Catherine of Siena and Simone Weil, as both authors prescribe the renunciation of the ego using a shared vocabulary of “attention” and “waiting.” However, treating shared terminology as proof for a shared spiritual vision masks a profound metaphysical incompatibility. Catherine operates within a teleological cosmos where the human will requires moral rehabilitation for cooperative charity, whereas Weil posits a universe of blind necessity that demands the epistemic obliteration—or decreation—of the self. Reducing Catherine and Weil to “self-denial” ignores the mutual exclusivity of their disciplines: one cannot rehabilitate the will while starving the psychological mechanism of self-assertion. This paper argues that Catherine’s focus on teleological rehabilitation and Weil’s cosmology of decreation are irreconcilable, which only becomes clear when moving past their recommendations on practice.

The resemblance appears in their texts, as both authors prescribe an inward discipline that suspends the ego. In The Dialogue Catherine tells the soul it must remain “locked up in the house of self-knowledge,” neither active in grasping at consolation nor idle in suffering, but preserving “watching and constant humble prayer” through the voice of God.³ In her essay on school studies, Weil defines prayer similarly: “Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.”⁴ Both forms of prayer depend on the emptying of selfish will. Catherine warns against “spiritual selfishness,” demanding that the soul learn “contempt for her selfish sensual passion” and “use hatred to dig out the root of [her] selfishness.”⁵ Weil argues that attention requires thought to be “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated,” noting that “we do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”⁶ At first glance their shared language of attention, waiting, and self-emptying recommends the same spiritual posture.

However, the scaffolding beneath this vocabulary reveals two different conceptions of the self, beginning with Catherine’s belief in a teleological soul. For Catherine the soul is a creature that is teleologically ordered to God from its origin. The Dialogue treats the human person as a “reasoning creature” made in the divine image, whose powers are disordered by sin but can be healed into active cooperation with grace.⁷ As a form of cooperation, prayer, or waiting, is a discipline of the will ordered toward future movement. Even Catherine’s most inward passages emphasize action: the soul crosses the bridge of Christ, acquires virtue by perseverance, and readies itself for service.⁸

In contrast, Weil operates out of a cosmology of “necessity.” For Weil the world is a web of physical and psychological determinate forces that operate on their own, like gravity.⁹ Within such a world, the self asserting “I” usurps God’s reality. Therefore, Weil’s waiting does not prepare the will for cooperation; waiting is the action itself. Weil warns against the muscular and grasping kind of attention that mistakes effort for receptivity, arguing that “the cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search.”¹⁰ Weil demands decreation, reducing ego so that God comes to the self; Catherine seeks to purify desire so the self might climb to God.¹¹

These accounts of “waiting” diverge because Catherine and Weil use self-emptying to solve two different philosophical problems: one moral, and the other epistemic. Catherine solves a moral problem; because the will remains intact even when misdirected by selfish passion, self-emptying clears away sinful attachments so that the soul is reordered toward God. Catherine’s framework rehabilitates the self. By contrast, Weil solves an epistemic problem with self-emptying. The self generates what she calls “imagination,” or consoling illusions that prevent the subject from seeing the stark reality of the world.¹² Therefore, the self must recede so that grace satiates the void.¹³

A critic might object that this moral-epistemic distinction is too simple; Catherine’s “house of self-knowledge” illuminates the nature of God, and Weil’s decreation bolsters one’s compassion. However, examining their philosophical priorities proves its accuracy. For Catherine seeking epistemic clarity about God serves to further one’s charity; the epistemic clarity serves the moral virtue. For Weil one refuses consolation and acts ascetically so that one may finally see clearly; the moral virtue serves the epistemic clarity.¹⁴

Because of this reversed priority, they are mutually exclusive as practiced disciplines. One cannot rehabilitate the will toward its proper end while simultaneously undertaking its ontological obliteration. This constitutes both a logical contradiction and a practical contradiction. In spiritual practice, if one attempts to train and perfect the will’s capacity for holy desire like Catherine, one strengthens the faculty of self-assertion that Weil insists must be starved. Conversely, if one ceases all psychic momentum toward virtue, one destroys the psychological mechanism required to actively launch the soul across Catherine’s bridge of cooperative charity.

This mutual exclusivity becomes more evident when Weil’s framework in Gravity and Grace is applied as a lens to Catherine’s spiritual economy. For Catherine self-emptying creates a literal vessel to be filled. God repeatedly assures Catherine that the soul who clears out the “filth of deadly sin” will receive “consolations” and be filled with the “milk of divine tenderness.”¹⁵ Catherine operates on an economy of exchange: the soul gives up its selfish will, and God compensates the soul with spiritual peace.

It can be inferred that Weil would view Catherine’s economy of exchange as “gravity,” the psychological mechanism by which human beings automatically seek equilibrium. Weil argues “every kind of reward constitutes a degradation of energy.”¹⁶ Thus, emptying oneself with the expectation that God will fill the resulting void substitutes a worldly attachment for a spiritual one, whether it be peace or moral triumph. True decreation requires the soul to endure the void without seeking any compensation. “To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural,” Weil writes, demanding a posture where the soul refuses the very consolations promised by Catherine.¹⁷

Uncompensated decreation creates profound contradictions within Weil’s own text that she weaponizes. Weil demands the annihilation of the self, yet her notebooks are saturated with the assertive and individuated “I” required to articulate that demand. She writes of the joy that accompanies true attention, but she insists the void must be endured without reward.¹⁸ Rather than undermining her philosophy, these paradoxes reinforce her cosmology of gravity. For Weil contradiction is the mark of reality.¹⁹ Because the human mind is subject to gravity, it must desire joy and assert the “I.” Decreation dictates that the subject must agonizingly use its own conscious faculties to hold open the void where those very faculties are crucified.

Precisely at this point of crucifixion, their metaphysics snap apart; this is first seen in Catherine’s deeply teleological account of the cross. Catherine’s account of suffering moves beyond mere ascetic trials to describe the “perfect” soul who embraces the excruciating and Christ-like suffering required for the salvation of others. This soul endures the “crucifying desire” to bear the sins of the world, mirroring the agonized death of the “spotless Lamb.”²⁰ This extreme anguish remains deeply teleological. For Catherine the suffering of the cross is saturated with purpose; it satisfies divine justice and rescues the neighbor. Because of this purpose, Catherine argues the perfect soul can “glory in the shame.”²¹ She surprisingly claims that for the perfect soul, suffering is “fattening, not distressing… because true patience kills every fear and selfishness that cause such pain.”²² Catherine’s suffering means something at its most harrowing.

Weil explicitly attacks this kind of spiritualized resilience. If suffering is mitigated by a sense of divine purpose, it ceases to be true affliction. The distinction between their vocabularies is crucial: Catherine’s discussion of suffering is highly expansive, ranging from minor ascetic distractions to total existential agony. While folding lesser annoyances into divine providence may be philosophically intelligible, Weil isolates affliction—such as chronic and degrading disability or systemic oppression—as a distinct phenomenon unjustified by providence. “I should not love my suffering because it is useful,” Weil argues; “I should love it because it is.”²³ Imagination attempts to fill the void of a meaningless pain with a comforting narrative, operating under gravity. For Weil if the soul possesses the joy of knowing it is serving divine providence, it has not yet reached the cross. “The death agony is the supreme dark night,” Weil insists, precisely because the afflicted person must feel entirely abandoned by meaning.²⁴

Unlike Catherine’s “perfect” soul who actively embraces the cross for a divine purpose, Weil’s afflicted soul is crushed by the sheer gravity of a universe operating without apparent finality. Weil insists that “the outward results of true affliction are nearly always bad.”²⁵ Claiming that one can find “refreshment” in such torment fails to grasp the degrading horror of worldly necessity. Weil believes that suffering excludes divine mercy, but the soul’s miraculous, uncomforted ability to direct its attention toward God precisely from the depths of meaningless ruin finds mercy.²⁶

These metaphysical differences—Catherine’s rooted in institutional teleology and Weil’s rooted in cosmic necessity—generate two distinct ethical visions, driving Catherine toward a theology of structural intervention. For Catherine the sign of perfect love is outward, ecclesial action because grace heals the soul into active cooperation. The purified soul “gives birth to the virtues as her neighbors need them,” working through the sacramental mediation of the Church.²⁷ This ethic is intensely structural and pastoral. Catherine’s contemplation naturally resolves into advising popes, correcting prelates, and restoring the institutional body of Christ.²⁸ The neighbor is saved by being incorporated into a divine and ecclesial order because the self is teleologically ordered to God.

Weil also centers the neighbor, but her ethic lacks Catherine’s institutional and narrative mediation. Love is the miraculous and negative effort of pausing the machine of necessity, because Weil’s universe is governed by blind necessity. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving their attention.”²⁹ Weil’s neighbor-love requires attention, and attention requires decreation. Thus, Weil requires the self-emptying of the benefactor so that the afflicted is allowed to be seen, and it is necessarily anonymous. The benefactor simply gazes upon the afflicted without projecting its illusions.³⁰

However, Weil’s ethic of pure attention introduces a practical tension. By rejecting institutional mediation, which she views as inevitably succumbing to “gravity” and the “social” imitation of faith, Weil leaves the problem of systemic affliction unaddressed.³¹ Her ethic demands that benefactors empty themselves to bear witness to the afflicted, but it offers no mechanism to structurally rescue the sufferer from the machinery of necessity. Weil’s philosophy of radical presence lacks Catherine’s theology of systemic reform. Where Catherine builds an ethic of institutional intervention, Weil builds an ethic of solitary witness.

Catherine of Siena and Simone Weil share the conviction that the self which clings to itself cannot receive God. Yet, the philosophical scaffolding beneath this conviction diverges greatly. Catherine’s selfhood emphasizes teleological repair, where grace orders the will for active cooperation and charitable intervention. Weil’s selfhood emphasizes decreation, where the soul must endure the blind necessity of affliction and practice an uncompensated, motionless attention. To reduce these distinct philosophical architectures into a generic consensus regarding “self-denial” diminishes the complexity of both thinkers. More importantly, recognizing the mutual exclusivity of Catherine’s and Weil’s metaphysics provides a vital tool for the future study of contemplative philosophy by demonstrating that scholars cannot rely on shared linguistic surface markers to group thinkers together. Rather, philosophical analysis must examine the precise mechanics of how a specific system believes a soul is broken, and exactly how it is saved, to develop a complete metaphysical account of the self.