Originally published at crisis magazine
It was in early 1943, while the war in Europe continued to rage, that a young woman named Simone Weil, who would not live to see its end, set down a series of reflections on the spiritual renewal that France, then under brutal occupation, would need to undergo once the Nazi menace had finally been driven out. She called it The Need for Roots, foremost of which, she insisted, was the need for truth, the sacredness of which had lately been subject to massive devaluation at the hands of its enemies.
She was utterly uncompromising on the subject. Anyone, she said, who spoke or wrote deliberate lies, must be held accountable for their distortions. So great was her reverence for truth that she longed to see laws against historical libel enacted in order to prevent even the most famous and fastidious of scholars from committing avoidable errors. The esteemed Etienne Gilson, she said in effect, ought to go to jail for having claimed that there was no actual opposition to slavery in the ancient world. How, she demanded, could he possibly know?
Well, perhaps she was overdoing it a bit in going after a historian and philosopher who was at
