What did Weil mean by 'affliction'?

She distinguished between ordinary suffering — pain that can be endured and recovered from — and affliction, which she called "malheur" (from the French for misfortune, sometimes translated as affliction or wretchedness). Affliction is suffering that attacks the soul itself, not just the body or circumstances.

It is the kind of suffering that makes a person feel contemptible to themselves, that destroys the capacity to hope or imagine being otherwise, that makes those around the sufferer want to look away. It is the suffering of slavery, extreme poverty, serious illness, social exclusion — conditions that degrade the person's sense that they are a person.

What happens to those who experience affliction?

They lose what she called the "I" — the sense of being a self capable of choice and dignity. This is why Weil saw affliction as spiritually significant: it strips away every false support. The person who has experienced it and survived knows something about the foundations — or absence of foundations — that others do not.

She connected it to the cross: Christ's cry "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" is the voice of affliction — the complete experience of abandonment in which no consolation is available.

What does this mean for those who try to help?

That they must not look away. The refusal to witness suffering — the social impulse to avoid the afflicted, to not know — is itself a form of violence. Weil argued that to truly attend to someone in affliction — to sit with their reality without flinching — is a form of love that requires immense strength and is rarely given.

Her framework has influenced theology, social work theory, and trauma studies, though often without direct attribution.