Simone Weil

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

God is love that withdraws in creating: personal and impersonal at once

Both personal and impersonalStated explicitly

Simone Weil, raised in agnosticism, recounts in her Spiritual Autobiography that in 1938 Christ himself came down and took her, without her having sought it. Her God is love, but a love that shows itself as renunciation: in creating, God withdraws, abdicates, ceases to be everything so that something other than him may exist, and the world is handed over to necessity. In the Notebooks and in The Love of God and Affliction, the cross is the infinite distance between God and God crossed by love. Weil insists that God is at once personal and impersonal: personal in Christ and in the relationship of love; impersonal in the order of the world, in beauty, and in the sacred that dwells in every human being.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

We own only the power to say «I»: it must be surrendered

The ego is a construction of thoughtStated explicitly

Simone Weil does not look for a true self to discover, but for a self to undo. In Gravity and Grace, the «I» is what a human being believes to be their own and which actually belongs to gravity: psychological necessity, the imagination that fills voids, the will to be the centre. The only thing that truly belongs to us is the faculty of saying «I», and that is what must be offered to God. She calls this process decreation: undoing in ourselves what is created so that God may love himself through us. In Human Personality she adds that what is sacred in each human being is not their person, but something impersonal that expects good.

Why do we suffer?

Affliction is distance from God that love can cross

Separation from GodStated explicitly

Simone Weil distinguishes mere suffering from affliction (malheur), which strikes body, soul and social standing at once, and marks the one who undergoes it like a slave. In The Love of God and Affliction she maintains that affliction is not punishment: it is the effect of the mechanical necessity to which God handed over the world when he withdrew so that it could exist. That is why it makes God absent for a time. But the cross reveals that this distance is the one separating God from God, and that love crosses it: if the soul goes on loving in the void, even if only by wanting to love, affliction becomes the place where God touches it.

What happens after death?

Belief in immortality robs us of the use of death

Silence or reserveStated explicitly

Simone Weil distrusts hope in another life as consolation. In the texts gathered in Gravity and Grace she writes that belief in the immortality of the soul is harmful, because we cannot picture the soul as truly incorporeal: it becomes belief in a prolongation of life and takes away the use of death. What matters is to love God without expecting reward, to consent to necessity and to one's own disappearance, and to accept the void without filling it with imagination. She does not deny eternal life, which in her Spiritual Autobiography she associates with grace, but refuses to speculate on it: death teaches renunciation of the self here.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Only grace escapes gravity; ours is to wait

Through grace and loveStated explicitly

Simone Weil frames the question with a physical image: all the natural movements of the soul are governed by laws analogous to those of gravity, and grace alone is the exception. The human being cannot rise by himself; every effort of the will to be good returns him to gravity. What is his to do is attention and waiting (attente): to look, to desire, not to fill the void with imaginings, to consent. In her Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies she argues that a geometry problem solved with true attention prepares for prayer. Salvation is grace descending into the soul that has emptied itself to receive it.

Is a teacher necessary?

Intelligence needs total freedom, even before the Church

No spiritual authorityStated explicitly

Simone Weil stresses that no human being played a part in her encounter with Christ: neither in her reasoning nor in her reading had she foreseen the possibility of a real contact, person to person, with God. She had decisive interlocutors, such as the Dominican Joseph-Marie Perrin and Gustave Thibon, but declined baptism. In the Spiritual Autobiography and the Letter to a Priest she explains that the proper function of the intelligence demands total freedom, implying the right to deny everything and the absence of all domination; the Church's anathema sit, as an instrument of collective power, seemed to her incompatible with that freedom. No authority can take the place of personal attention to truth.

Is the world real?

Love the order of the world and consent to necessity

Natural order in transformationStated explicitly

Simone Weil sees the world as a fabric of necessity: blind forces, mechanical laws, gravity, to which God handed it over when he withdrew to let it be. That necessity crushes, produces affliction and takes no account of anyone. And yet it is beautiful: in Forms of the Implicit Love of God, love of the order of the world and its beauty appears as one of the ways in which the soul loves God without knowing it, and Weil links it with the Stoic tradition of amor fati. The sea is no less beautiful because it sinks ships. The right attitude is consent: to obey necessity as the stars do, without rebellion and without imagination, until one recognises in it the world's obedience to God.

What is love?

To love is to give attention to the afflicted

Boundless compassionStated explicitly

For Simone Weil, love of neighbour begins with attention. In the Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies she writes that the afflicted need nothing else in this world than people capable of giving them their attention, and that to ask the other «what are you going through?» is to recognise them as a fellow being, not as a specimen of the category of the afflicted. In Forms of the Implicit Love of God, love of neighbour is one of the ways God is loved without being named, and she describes it as a creative love which, like the Samaritan's, gives existence to one whom affliction had reduced to a thing. That love requires renouncing being the centre: it is attention emptied of self.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

The soul obeys a gravity; only grace is the exception

We are machines until we awakenStated explicitly

Simone Weil opens the selection Gravity and Grace with a thesis that sounds like physics: all the natural movements of the soul are governed by laws analogous to those of physical gravity, and grace alone is the exception. The human being, left to himself, does nothing but fall: he seeks compensations, fills voids with imagination, yields to force. What we call will changes hardly anything essential. The only true freedom is consent: accepting necessity and desiring the good without claiming to reach it by one's own effort, leaving a void through which grace may descend. Apart from that consented obedience, the soul is mechanism.

Why meditate or pray?

Attention, at its highest, is prayer

Being presentStated explicitly

For Simone Weil, prayer consists in attention. In the Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies she argues that attention consists in suspending thought, leaving it available, empty and open to its object, and that this capacity, exercised even on a geometry problem, prepares for prayer; elsewhere she writes that attention, at its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. In the Spiritual Autobiography she recounts that she made herself recite the Our Father in Greek each day with absolute attention, and that sometimes, during that recitation, Christ was present in person. To pray is to stop filling the void and to look without appropriating.

Can reason know the ultimate?

Intelligence must go to its limit, where contradiction opens the way

Faith and reason help each otherStated explicitly

Simone Weil, agrégée in philosophy and a pupil of Alain, always defended the honesty of the intelligence. In the Spiritual Autobiography she recounts that, even after Christ took her, she continued to think that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for truth, because Christ likes us to prefer truth to him, since before being Christ he is truth. The intelligence must be exercised with total freedom and go to its limit; there it meets contradictions —necessity and the good, justice and affliction— that it cannot resolve, and which, held with attention, open it to the supernatural. Faith does not cancel reason: reason pushed to the extreme makes way for mystery.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

Share the condition of the oppressed and think through rootedness

Engage with the worldStated explicitly

Simone Weil carried engagement into her own body. A philosophy teacher, she was active in trade unionism, took leave to work as a labourer in metalworking factories in 1934–1935 —an experience recorded in the Factory Journal and The Workers' Condition—, enlisted in Durruti's anarchist column in the Spanish war and, in London, worked for Free France. There she wrote The Need for Roots, a programme for the reconstruction of France based on the needs of the soul and on obligations toward the human being. But her engagement was never merely political: in The Iliad, or the Poem of Force she analyses the force that turns people into things, which only attention and grace can counter.