Paying Attention To The Sky

While Gravity and Grace is one of the books most associated with Simone Weil, the work as such was not one she wrote to be published as a book. Rather, the work consists of various passages selected from Weil’s notebooks and arranged topically by Gustav Thibon, who knew and befriended her. Weil had in fact given some of her notebooks, written before May 1942, to Thibon, but not with any idea or request to publish them. Hence, the resulting work, in its selections, organization and editing, is much influenced by Mr. Thibon, a devoted Catholic. His introduction to Gravity and Grace also serves as a good introduction to Simone Weil, a Christian mystic whose epigrammatic style has made her highly quotable. The quirky title of this blog is derived from her idea of paying attention. You might want to print some of this out and stick it on the front of your refrigerator…

Introduction by Gustave Thibon
Simone Weil’s writings belong to the category of very great writings which can only be weakened and spoiled by a commentary. My sole reason for introducing these texts is that my friendship with the author and the long conversations we had together clear away my difficulties in entering into her thought, and make it easier for me to replace in their exact setting and their organic context certain formulae which are too bald or need to be elaborated. We must, in fact, remember that we are here concerned, as in Pascal’s case, with simple waiting stones set out day by day, often hurriedly, with a view to a more complete building, which alas! never came into being.

The texts are bare and simple (This is the explanation of certain repetitions and negligences of style which we have scrupulously respected throughout) like the inner experience which they express. No padding is interposed between the life and the word; soul, thought, and expression form one block with no joins in it. Even if I had not known Simone Weil personally, her style alone would in my opinion guarantee the authenticity of her testimony. What is most striking in these thoughts is the comprehensiveness of their possible applications; their simplicity simplifies everything they touch; they transport us onto those summits of being from which the eye embraces in one glance an infinity of horizons one above the other. “We must welcome all opinions,” she used to say, “but they must be arranged vertically and kept on suitable levels.” Again, ‘“Whatever is real enough to allow of superposed interpretations is innocent and good.” This sign of greatness and purity is found on every page of her work.

Here, for instance, is a thought which wipes out the ancient quarrel between optimism and pessimism — that quarrel which Leibnitz could not settle: “There is every degree of distance between the creature and God. A distance in which the love of God is impossible: matter, plants, animals. Evil is so complete there that it destroys itself: there is no longer any evil: mirror of divine innocence. We are at the point where love is just possible. It is a great privilege since the love which unites is in proportion to the distance. God has created a world which is not the best possible but which contains the whole range of good and evil. We are at the point where it is as bad as possible because beyond is the stage where evil becomes innocence.”

Or there is this other thought, which throws light onto the problem of evil and reaches to the very secrets of divine love: “All created things refuse to satisfy me as ends. Such is the extreme mercy of God toward me. And that very thing constitutes evil. Evil is the form which the mercy of God takes in this world.” And. then there is this abrupt and final refutation of all such philosophers as Schopenhauer or Sartre who argue that the presence of evil in the world justifies a fundamental pessimism: “To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value, and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us”’

Or again, we find the law of the insertion of the higher into the lower formulated thus: “Every order which transcends another can only be introduced into it under the form of something infinitely small.” This completes and deepens the law of the three orders of Pascal. The world of life does indeed appear to be infinitely small in the midst of the material world: What do living beings represent when compared to the huge mass of the planet and perhaps of the cosmos? It is the same with the spiritual world in relation to the world of life: There are at least 500,000 living species on the earth of which only one possesses “il ben dell intelleto.” And as for the world of grace, it, in turn, appears infinitely small against the mass of our secular thoughts and affections: the Gospel illustrations of the leaven and the grain of mustard seed are clear enough evidence of this “characteristic of being infinitesimal which belongs to pure goodness.”

Impregnating the whole of Simone Weil’s work is the driving force of an intense desire for inward purification which comes out even in her metaphysics and her theology. Stretching out with all her soul toward a pure and absolute goodness of which nothing here below provides her with a proof, but which she feels to be more real than anything existing in and around her, she seeks to establish her faith in this perfect being upon a base which no strokes of fortune, no affliction, no surging waves either of mind or matter can shake. For that, it is important before all things to eliminate from the inner life all forms of illusion and compensation (imaginative piety, the “consolations” of religion, a crude faith in the immortality of the self, etc.) which too often usurp the name of God, and which are really no more than shelters for our weakness or our pride: “We have to be careful about the level on which we place the infinite. If we put it on the level which is only suitable for the finite it does not much matter what name we give it.”

Creation reflects God by its beauty and harmony, but through the evil and death which abide in it, and the blind necessity by which it is governed, it also reflects the absence of God. We have issued from God: That means that we bear his imprint and it means also that we are separated from him. The etymology of the word “exist” (to be placed outside) is very illuminating in this respect: We can say we exist; we cannot say we are. God who is Being has in a sense effaced himself so that we can exist; he has given up being everything in order that we might exist; he has dispossessed himself in our favor of his own necessity, which is identical with goodness, to allow another necessity to reign, which is alien and indifferent to good.

The central law of this world, from which God has withdrawn by his very act of creation, is the law of gravity, which is to be found analogously in every stage of existence. Gravity is the force which above all others draws us from God. It impels each creature to seek everything which can preserve or enlarge it and, as Thucydides says, to exercise all the power of which it is capable. Psychologically it is shown by all those motives which are directed toward asserting or reinstating the self, by all those secret subterfuges (lies of the inner life, escape in dreams or false ideals, imaginary encroachments on the past and the future, etc.) which we make use of to bolster up from inside our tottering existence, that is to say, to remain apart from and opposed to God.

Simone Weil presents the problem of evil as follows: “How can we escape from that which corresponds to gravity in ourselves ?”  By grace alone. In order to come to us, God passes through the infinite thickness of time and space; his grace changes nothing in the play of those blind forces of necessity and chance which guide the world; it penetrates into our souls as a drop of water makes its way through geological strata without affecting their structure, and there it waits in silence until we consent to become God again. Whereas gravity is the work of creation, the work of grace consists of “de-creating” us. God consented through love to cease to be everything so that we might be something; we must consent through love to cease to be anything so that God may become everything again. It is therefore a question of abolishing the self within us, “that shadow thrown by sin and error which stops the light of God and which we take for a being.” Without this utter humility, this unconditional consent to be nothing, all forms of heroism and immolation are still subject to the law of gravity and falsehood:

“We can offer nothing short of ourselves. Otherwise, what we term our offering is merely a label under which the ‘I’ is compensated.”

In order to kill the self we must be ready to endure all the wounds of life, exposing ourselves naked and defenseless to its fangs; we must accept emptiness, an unequal balance; we must never seek compensations, and above all we must suspend the work of our imagination, “which perpetually tends to stop up the cracks through which grace flows.” Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. We must also renounce the past and future, for the self is nothing but a coagulation of past and future around a present which is always falling away. Memory and hope destroy the wholesome effect of affliction by providing an unlimited field where we can be lifted up in imagination (I used to be, I shall be…), but faithfulness to the passing moment reduces man truly to nothing and thus opens to him the gates of eternity.

The self should be destroyed in us from within, by love. But its destruction can also be brought about from without by extreme suffering and degradation. There are vagrants and prostitutes who have no more self-esteem than the saints, and whose life is confined to the passing moment. Therein lies the tragedy of degradation. It is irreparable, not because the self which it destroys is precious, for the self is made to be destroyed, but because it prevents God from effecting the destruction himself and robs eternalizing love of its prey.

Simone Weil makes a sharp distinction between this supernatural immolation and all forms of human grandeur and heroism. Here below, God is the feeblest and most destitute of beings; his love, unlike that of idols, does not fill the carnal part of the soul; to go to him we have to labor in the void, to refuse every intoxication of passion or pride which veils the horrible mystery of death, and to allow ourselves to be guided only by the “still small voice” of the Bible, which in the flesh we cannot hear and which goes unnoticed by the self. “To say to Christ as St. Peter did, ‘I will always be faithful to thee,’ is to deny him already, for it is to suppose that the source of fidelity is in ourselves and not in grace. As he was chosen, this denial was made known to all men and to himself. How many others boast in the same way — and never understand.”

It is easy to die for something forceful because participation in force produces an intoxication which stupifies us. But it is supernatural to die for something weak: Thousands of men were able to die heroically for Napoleon, while Christ in his agony was deserted by his disciples (the sacrifice was easier later on for the martyrs, for they were already upheld by the social force of the Church). “Supernatural love has no contact with force, moreover it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection against the coldness of steel. Armor is made of metal in the same way as the sword. If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.”

The hero wears armor, the saint is naked. Now armor, while keeping off blows, prevents any direct contact with reality and above all makes it impossible to enter the third dimension which is that of supernatural love. If things are really to exist for us they have to penetrate within us. Hence the necessity for being naked: nothing can enter into us while armor protects us both from wounds and from the depths which they open up. All sin is an attack against the third dimension, an attempt to bring back onto the plane of unreality and painlessness an emotion which seeks to penetrate to the depths. This law is inexorable: We lessen our own suffering to the extent that we weaken our inner and direct communion with reality.

At the extreme limit of this process, life is entirely stretched out on the surface: We suffer no more except in a dream, for existence, reduced to two dimensions, becomes flat like a dream. This holds good for consolations, illusions, boasting, and all the compensatory reactions by which we try to fill up the hollows bitten into us by reality. Every empty place or hollow does in fact imply the presence of the third dimension; it is not possible to enter into a surface, and to fill up a hole is equivalent to taking refuge in isolation on the surface. The adage of ancient physics, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” is strictly true in psychology. But this vacuum is precisely what grace needs in order to come into us.

This process of “decreation,” which is the only way of salvation, is the work of grace and not of the will. Man does not pull himself up to heaven by the hair. The will is only useful for servile tasks; it controls the right use of natural virtues which are prerequisites of the work of grace in the same way as the plowman’s effort must precede the sowing. But the divine seed comes from elsewhere. . . . In this realm Simone Weil, like Plato and Malebranche, considers attention to be of far more importance than will. “We must be indifferent to good and evil, really indifferent, that is to say we must turn the light of attention equally on each of them. Then the good will triumph by an automatic phenomenon.” It is precisely this superior automatism which has to be created; it is not obtained by tightening up the self and “going beyond one’s capacity” (forçant son talent) for doing good (nothing is more degrading than a noble action performed in an unworthy spirit), but by arriving through self-effacement and love at that state of perfect docility to grace whence goodness spontaneously emanates. “Action is the needle that shows the balance. We must not touch the needle but the weight.” Unfortunately it is easier to tamper with the needle than to alter our own weight in these “golden scales of Zeus.”

So then, religious attention raises us above the “aberration of opposites” and the choice between good and evil – “Choice, a notion belonging to a low level.” So long as I hesitate between doing or not doing a bad action (for instance, possessing or not such and such a woman who offers herself to me, betraying or not betraying some friend), even if I choose the good I scarcely rise above the evil I reject. In order for my “good” action to be really pure I must dominate this miserable oscillation so that the righteous of my outward behavior is the exact expression of my inward necessity.

Holiness is like degradation in this respect This is the postulate of Hermes: the highest resembles the lowest — a central law of being of which Simone Weil gives infinite illustrations in her work. Thus the nonresistance of the saints is outwardly indistinguishable from cowardice; supreme wisdom ends in a sense of ignorance, the motions of grace have the inevitability of animal instincts. [“I have become as a beast of burden before thy face]; detachment is like indifference, etc. just as an utterly despicable man does not hesitate to possess himself of a woman if his passion demands it, or to betray a friend if it is in his interest to do so, a saint has no choice to make about remaining pure and faithful: he cannot do anything else; he goes toward goodness like the bee toward a flower.

Goodness which we choose by balancing it against evil has scarcely anything but social value; to the eyes of him who seeth in secret it proceeds from the same motives and is marked by the same vulgarity as evil. Hence the kinship often observed between certain forms of “virtue” and the corresponding sin: their and the bourgeois respect for property, adultery and a “respectable woman,” the savings bank and waste, etc. Real goodness is not opposed to evil (in order to oppose something directly it is necessary to be on the same level); it transcends and effaces it. “What evil violates is not goodness, for goodness is inviolate; only a degraded good can be violated.”

The soul engaged in the pursuit of pure goodness comes up against irreducible contradictions. Contradiction is the criterion of reality. “Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything that we want is in contradiction with the conditions or consequences which are attached to it. It is because we ourselves are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God.” Have countless children, for instance, and you are bringing about overpopulation and war (Japan is a typical case of this); improve the material conditions of a nation and you are in danger of impairing its soul; devote yourself entirely to someone and you will cease to exist for them, etc.

Only imaginary good things have no contradiction in them: the girl who wants to have numerous offspring, the social reformer who dreams of the people’s well-being, etc., meet with no obstacles so long as they do not pass on to action; they sail gaily forward in a sea of pure but fictitious goodness; the shock of hitting the rocks is the signal which wakens them. We must accept this contradiction — the sign of our misery and our greatness — in all its bitterness. It is through fully experiencing and suffering from the absurdity as such of this universe where good and evil are mixed that we attain to the pure goodness whose kingdom is not of this world. “That action is pure which we can accomplish by keeping our intention totally directed toward pure and impossible goodness, without disguising from ourselves by any lie either the attraction or the impossibility of pure goodness.”

Instead of filling the space, which stretches between necessity and goodness, with dreams (faith in God as a temporal father, science, progress…) we must receive the two branches of contradiction just as they are and allow ourselves to be torn asunder by their distance. And it is in this tearing, which is as it were a reflection in man of the creative act which rends God, that we rediscover the original identity of necessity and goodness: “This world, in so far as it is quite empty of God, is God himself. Necessity, in so far as it is absolutely distinct from goodness, is goodness itself. That is why all consolation in affliction separates us from love and from truth. Therein lies the mystery of mysteries. When we touch it we are secure.”

He, therefore, who refuses to accept confusion is marked for suffering. From Antigone, whom the guardian of the temporal city called upon to go and love among the shades, down to Simone Weil herself, whom human injustice crucified until she was in her grave, affliction is the lot of all those lovers of the absolute who are astray in this world of relative things: “If we want only goodness we are opposed to the law which links good to evil as the illuminated object to the shadow, and, being opposed to the universal law of the world, it is inevitable that we should fall into affliction.” In so far as the soul is not completely emptied of itself, this thirst for pure goodness leads to the suffering of expiation; in a perfectly innocent soul it produces redemptive suffering: “To be innocent is to bear the weight of the whole universe. It is to throw in the counterweight to restore the balance.” Thus purity does not abolish suffering; on the contrary it deepens it to infinity while giving it an eternal meaning: “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural cure for suffering, but a supernatural use of it.”

This mystery of suffering which “decreates” man and gives him back to God finds its center in the mystery of the Incarnation. If God had not been incarnate, man who suffers and dies would have become, in a sense, greater than God. But God made himself man and died on the Cross. “God abandoned God. God emptied himself: These words enfold the meaning both of the Creation and of the Incarnation with the Passion. . . . To teach us that we are nothing [non être] God made himself nothing.”

In other words God became a creature in order to teach us how to undo the creature in ourselves, and the act of love by which he was separated from himself brings us back to him. Simone Weil sees the essence of the mediatorial function of Jesus Christ in his assumption of the human condition with all that is most miserable and tragic in it: the signs and miracles constitute the human and relatively low part of his mission; the supernatural part consists of the agony, the sweat of blood, the cross, and his vain calls to an un-answering heaven. The words of the Redeemer: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” which sum up all the agony of the creature thrown into the midst of time and evil, and to which the Father replies only with silence — these words alone are enough proof for her of the divinity of Christianity.

Man only finds salvation by living in the bare instant, renouncing the past and future. That rules out the modern myth of the indefinite progress of humanity, even when it is presented under the form of a divine education. There are few ideas which are as impious as this one, for it tends to make us seek in the future what eternity alone can give, that is to say to turn away from God. “Nothing can have a destination which is not its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress — poison. The plant which bears such fruit should be torn up by the roots.” This does not mean to say that humanity cannot acquire anything in the course of time but such progress, in so far as it is temporal, can never be indefinite; for duration always ends by devouring what it has brought to birth. Time, accepted as irremediably different from eternity, is for us the door opening onto the eternal: we must not make of it a substitute for eternity.

From this essential condition of salvation, the necessity of living in the pure, instantaneous present and of toiling regardless of results, Simone Weil draws a magnificent spirituality of manual work. Such work puts man into direct contact with the inherent absurdity and contradiction of earthly life and thus, if the worker does not lie, it enables him to touch heaven. “Work makes us experience in an exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work.

If we regard one of the two as an end, or the pair of them taken in isolation, we are lost. Only the cycle contains the truth.” But in order to compass this cycle we must turn from the future and rise up to the eternal. “It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.”

Here below a thousand relative objects bearing the label of absolute come between the soul and God. So long as man does not consent to become nothing in order to be everything he needs idols. “Idolatry is a vital necessity in the cave.” And among these idols the social one of the collective soul is the most powerful and dangerous. Most sins can be traced back to the social element. They spring from a thirst to appear and to dominate. It is not that Simone Weil rejects the social clement as such; she knows that our environment, roots, and traditions form bridges, metaxu between earth and heaven; what she repudiates is the totalitarian city — symbolized by the “Great Beast” of Plato and.the Beast of the Apocalypse — whose power and prestige usurp God’s place in the soul.

Whether it shows itself under a conservative or a revolutionary aspect, whether it consists of adoring the present or the future city, social idolatry always tends to stifle and to replace the true mystic tradition. All the persecutions of prophets and saints are due to it; through it Antigone and Joan of Arc were condemned and Jesus Christ crucified. The social Beast offers man a substitute for religion which allows him to transcend his individuality without surrendering his self, and so, at small cost, to dispense with God; a social imitation of the highest virtues is possible by which they are immediately degraded into Pharisaism: “The Pharisee is he who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.”

Two nations of antiquity illustrate this idolatry of the collective soul: Israel and Rome. “Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither the one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.” The conflict between Israel and Rome, in which Nietzsche saw the dual of two irreconcilable conceptions of life, was reduced for Simone Weil to a struggle between two totalitarianisms of the same nature. It must, however, be emphasized that her anti-Semitism, which was so violent that the continuity established by the Church between the Old and New Testaments was one of the chief obstacles to her becoming a Catholic, was of a purely spiritual order and consequently had nothing in common with what goes by that name today.

She had, for example, the same aversion for Hitlerian anti-Semitism as for the Jewish idea of a temporal Messianic rule. How many times did she not speak to me of the Jewish roots of anti-Semitism! She was fond of saying that Hitler hunted on the same ground as the Jews and only persecuted them in order to resuscitate under another name and to his own advantage their tribal god, terrestrial, cruel and exclusive. Her horror of the social idol was of course extended to all other forms of totalitarian mysticism and in particular to Marxism.

Even the Catholic Church, which, moreover, she admired in many of its aspects, did not escape her criticism as a social body. Its Jewish and Roman sources, its connection with temporal things, its organization and hierarchy, its councils, certain formulae such as “no salvation outside the Church” or anathema sit, and some of its historical records such as the Inquisition, etc., appeared to her to be forms (of a higher order, but nevertheless infinitely to be feared) of social idolatry. Yet she never ceased to believe in the divine presence and inspiration within the Church. “Happily, the gates of hell will not prevail,” she wrote toward the end of her life. “There remains an incorruptible core of truth.”

Such are the main lines of Simone Weil’s thought. The schematic nature of this exposition necessarily leaves on one side a thousand touches which give precision, strength, and balance to her doctrine. But an introduction, as its name suggests, can be no more than an invitation to cross the threshold.

I may say that my friendship and veneration for Simone Weil, the pain of losing her and the joy of finding her again each day above and beyond death, the fact that I constantly feed upon her thought, and, above all, the insuperable reserve with which all true intimacy is accompanied, combine to make the effort of detachment required of me in undertaking an objective and critical analysis of her work almost impossible.

I am a Catholic, Simone Weil was not. I have never doubted for a second that she was infinitely more advanced than I am in the experimental knowledge of supernatural truths, but outwardly she always remained on the borders of the Church and was never baptized. One of the last letters she wrote me shows very clearly her attitude with regard to Catholicism: “At this moment I should be more ready to die for the Church, if one day before long it should need anyone to die for it, than I should be to enter it. To die does not commit one to anything, if one can say such a thing; it does not contain anything in the nature of a lie…At present I have the impression that I am lying, whatever I do, whether it be by remaining outside the Church or by entering it. The question is to know where there is less of a lie…”

As to whether Simone Weil was a heroic lover of Jesus Christ, my conviction has never changed; all the same her doctrine, though it is within the orbit of the great Christian truths, contains nothing specifically Catholic and she never accepted the universal authority of the Church. Now a Catholic who has to assess the thought of a non-Catholic has difficulty in avoiding two opposite extremes. The first consists of applying the principles of speculative theology to the thought in question and mercilessly condemning everything which, seen from outside, does not appear to be strictly orthodox. This method has the advantage of railings, which are always necessary on the bridges leading to God, but used without understanding or love, it is in danger of degenerating into an abuse of the evangelical precept: “If thine eye offend thee…”

For my part, as I am neither a theologian nor specially entrusted with the defense of the deposit of Christian faith, I do not feel myself in any way qualified for such an undertaking. The last thing I want to do is to set myself up as an official theologian who, armed with a sort of Baedeker of divine things, presumes to pronounce final judgment on the report, even incomplete, of a heroic explorer. .. .

The second danger consists of trying, at whatever cost, to bend the thought one is studying into conformity with Catholic truth. That is a manifest abuse of the text, “Compel them to come in.” We think that whatever is true or pure in a human life or work finds its place naturally in the Catholic synthesis without being forced or twisted in order to do so. We have no need to grasp everything for ourselves like a miser trying to increase his treasure, for everything already belongs to us who belong to Christ.

It is not for me to decide how far the ideas of Simone Well are or are not orthodox. I will confine myself to showing — on purely personal evidence — how far a Christian can interpret these ideas in order to find nourishment for his spiritual life.

I shall be particularly careful not to pick a quarrel with Sirnone Weil about words. Her vocabulary is that of the mystics and not of the speculative theologians: it does not seek to express the eternal order of being but the actual journey of the soul in search of God. This is the case with all spiritual writers. When in the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena Christ says to her, “I am that which is, thou art that which is not,” this formula which reduces the creature to pure nothingness cannot be accepted on the plane of ontological knowledge. It is the same with the expressions used by so many mystics who speak of the poverty of God, of his dependence in relation to the creature, etc.: they are true in the order of love, and false in the order of being. Jacques Maritain was the first to show, with perfect metaphysical precision, that these two vocabularies do not contradict each other, for one is related to speculative and the other to practical and affective knowledge.

Two things in particular in Simone Weil’s work have shocked the few friends to whom we have shown her manuscripts. First, the absolute division which she seems to establish between the created world and a transcendent God, who has tied his own hands in the presence of evil and who abandons the universe to the sport of chance and absurdity: there is a danger lest this clean cut should lead to the elimination of the idea of Providence in history and of the notion of progress, and as a result to a misunderstanding of the values and duties of this present world. In the second place, her fear of the social element is likely to lead to the isolation of the individual in a proud self-sufficiency.

We repeat that Simone Weil speaks as a mystic and not as a metaphysician. We are prepared to admit, and we do so readily, that the tendency of her genius, which inclines her constantly to stress the irreducible nature of supernatural reality, often leads her to overlook the meeting places and transitional stages between nature and grace. Nothing is more certain than that she has misunderstood certain aspects of Christian piety. But that does not authorize us to assert that the aspect she describes is not Christian. No human experierice—if we except that of Christ—has ever embraced supernatural truth in its totality. St. John of the Cross, for instance, does not emphasize the same divine realities as St. Bonaventura. There are several schools of spirituality, and if we substitute the word “God” for “world,” we can say of the mystics what the poet said of men in general:

Dan jeder sieht die Welt in seinem Sinn

Und jeder siehet recht, so viel ist Sinn darin!

If, as the Gospel says, there are many mansions in heaven, there are also many roads which lead to heaven.

Simone Weil chose the negative road: “There are people for whom everything is salutary here below, which brings God nearer; for me it is everything that keeps him at a distance.” Is not this royal road of salvation, which consists of finding and loving God in what is absolutely other than God (the blind necessity of nothingness and evil…), strangely like the bare mountain of Carmel where man has as his guide just one single word: nothing? And does St. John of the Cross speak in less absolute terms of the nothingness of created things and of the love which binds us to them? “The entire being of the creatures compared with the infinite being of God is nothing, and thus the soul, which is a prisoner of what is created, is nothing. All the beauty of creatures is supreme ugliness before the infinite beauty of God. All the grace, all the charm of creatures is insipid and repulsive before the divine beauty. All the goodness the creatures contain is only the height of malice when it is in the presence of divine goodness. Only God is good. ..

Moreover, though the theology of Simone Weil rejects the idea of popular imagination, of a God who governs the world like the father of a family or a temporal sovereign, it does not in any way exclude the action of Providence in the higher sense of the word. There is no doubt that here below matter and evil exercise “all the causality which belongs to them”; the spectacle of the innumerable horrors of history is enough to prove that the kingdom of God is not of this world. (Does not Scripture describe the devil as the prince of this world?) Nevertheless, God remains mysteriously present in creation: without in any way changing the calamities which weigh upon us, his grace plays upon the laws of gravity like the sun’s rays in the clouds. This God “who is silent in his love” is not indifferent to human misery after the manner of the God of Aristotle or Spinoza. It is out of love for his creature that he appears to efface himself from creation; it is in order to lead him on to the supreme purity that he leaves him to cross the whole expanse of suffering and darkness, abandoned and alone. In tying his own hands in the presence of evil, in stripping himself of everything which resembles earthly power and prestige, God invites men to love nothing but love in him. “He gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect—it is for them to choose.” But here below infinite perfection is infinite weakness: God, in so far as he is love, hangs wholly and entirely on the Cross.

Simone Weil is not in any way mistaken about the dignity and necessity of temporal values. She sees them as intermediaries — metaxu — between the soul and God. “What is it a sacrilege to destroy? Not that which is base, for that is of no importance. Not that which is high, for we cannot touch that. The metaxu. The metaxu form the region of good and evil. .. No human being should be deprived of these metaxu, that is to say of those relative and mixed good things (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.” But these relative and mixed good things can only be treated as such by those who, out of love for God, have passed through the total stripping; all others make them more or less into idols: “Only he who loves God with a supernatural love can see means simply as means.”

Whatever she may have said about “choice, a notion of a low level” and about the absolute fruitlessness of voluntary action in the spiritual domain, Simone Weil does not, for all that, fall into quietism. On the contrary she constantly recalls that without strict diligence in our practice of the natural virtues, mystical life can be nothing but an illusion. The cause of grace dwells outside man, but its condition is within him. Simone Weil’s hatred for illusion, above all when it takes the form of sensible devotion and a kind of religious “Schwärmerei,” counterbalances everything which in so purified a spirituality might flatter the imagination or the pride. She liked to repeat, after St. John of the Cross, that inspiration which leads us to neglect the accomplishment of simple and lowly obligations does not come from God. “Duty is given us in order to kill the self…We only attain to real prayer after we have worn down our own will by keeping rules.”

She regarded with such suspicion any religious exaltation unsupported by a strict fidelity to the daily task, that the infrequent negligences of which she was guilty in the accomplishment of her duties—largely as a result of her delicate health—caused her to have bitter doubts about the truth of her spiritual vocation. “All these mystical phenomena,” she wrote at the end of her life, with heart-rending humility, “are absolutely beyond me. I do not understand them. They are meant for beings who, to start with, possess the elementary moral virtues. I speak of them at random. And I am not even capable of telling myself sincerely that I speak of them at random.”

Fully sharing the political ideas of Simone Weil as I do, I think it more becoming that I should not dwell on them at great length. Any other person but myself might make something very moving out of the story of this life in which, through the influence of reflection and faith, an essentially revolutionary temperament was gradually impregnated with the cult of tradition and the past. For Simone Weil never ceased to be a revolutionary. She was not, however, pledged to a chimerical future leading men away from reality, but devoted herself more and more to revolution in the name of an unchanging and eternal principle — a principle which has to be constantly re-established because it constantly tends to be degraded by time.

Simone Weil did not believe in an indefinite perfecting of humanity: she even thought that the unfolding of history gave proof of the law of entropy rather than that of unlimited progress after the style of Condorcet. There is no need to defend her on this point. I do not see how it can be heretical to hold (in conformity with the great Greek tradition) that “change cannot be anything but limited and cyclic.” As for her invectives against the “social Beast,” however excessive a form they may sometimes take, we only have to put them back into their context in order to be assured that they do not in any way constitute an apology for anarchy. “The social order,” she writes, “is irreducibly that of the prince of this world. Our only duty with regard to the social is to try to limit the evil of it. – .. Something of the social labeled divine; an intoxicating mixture which brings about every sort of license—the evil disguised.” But she adds immediately: “And yet what about a city? But that is not of the social order — it is a human environment of which we are no more conscious than of the air we breathe — a contact with nature, the past, tradition. A man’s roots are not of the social order.” In other words, social influence is both food and poison. It is food in so far as it provides the individual with the inner equipment necessary for living as a man and for approaching God; poison, in so far as it tends to rob him of his liberty and to take God’s place. The perpetual encroachments of the social order upon the divine — that incessant degradation of mystical conceptions into politics — afford strong enough evidence, today more than ever, of the seriousness of this last danger.

Mutatis mutandis, the same remarks are applicable to the Church. Obviously a spirit so hungering for the absolute as was that of Simone Weil would necessarily be somewhat lacking in a sense of historical relativity: the words nolite conformari huic a seculo (Be not conformed to this world.) were for her a commandment allowing of no reservations. She found it very hard to understand that certain concessions of the Church to temporal exigencies did not in any way involve its eternal soul: The beatification of Charlemagne, for instance, seemed to her a scandalous compromise with the social idol. Somewhere she speaks of the Church as “a great totalitarian beast.” What does that signify? Totalitarianism is characterized at the same time by a refusal of the all and by the claim to be all. As the Catholic Church is the messenger of the All here below it does not need to be totalitarian.

The accusation made by Simone Weil, in so far as it is well founded, can therefore only be applicable to certain members of the body of the Church who arbitrarily bolt the doors of love and truth, thus failing to understand the universal vocation of Catholicism. There is no question of reopening here — especially at a time when so many Catholics do not hesitate to provide whips with which to beat their Master — the discussions formerly caused by the idea of “the Church as a body marked by sin.” We will only state that when Christ said that “the gates of hell should not prevail,” he did not promise that everything in the Church would remain eternally pure, but that the essential deposit of faith would be saved, come what might. The Church is rooted in God: that does not exclude the possibility that the tree may bear dried up or worm-eaten branches. To have faith is to believe that the divine sap will never fail. The preservation of this “incorruptible core of truth,” to use the actual expression of Simone Weil, in the midst of all the impurities mixed into the body of the Church, constitutes, moreover, one of the strongest proofs of the divinity of Catholicism. The Church could only become a “great totalitarian beast” in so far as its human body were totally separated from its divine soul. This is an impossible hypothesis for the gates of hell shall never prevail. . . . Today it is seen as the last refuge of the universal faced with rampant totalitarianisms.

Thus with Simone Weil the expulsion of the social idol does not lead to religious individualism. “The self and the social are the two great idols.” Grace saves from the one as from the other. That is doubtless what Célestin Bouglé was trying to express in his own manner when he saw in Simone Weil while she was still a student “a mixture of anarchist and cleric…

Simone Weil can only be understood on the level from which she speaks. Her work is addressed to souls who, if they are not stripped as naked as her own, have at least kept deep within them an aspiration for that pure goodness to which she devoted her life and her death. I am not unaware of the dangers of a spirituality such as hers. The worst forms of giddiness are caused by the highest summits. But the fact that light may burn us is not a valid reason for leaving it under a bushel. It is not a question of philosophy here but of life. Far from claiming to set up a personal system, Simone Weil strove with all her power to keep herself out of her work. Her one wish was to avoid getting in the way between God and men — to disappear “so that the Creator and the creature could exchange their secrets.” She cared nothing for her genius, knowing only too well that true greatness consists in learning to be nothing. “What does it matter what energy or gifts there may be in me? I have always enough to disappear. .

She had her way: Some of the text attains to that impersonal resonance which is the sign of the highest inspiration: “It is impossible to forgive whoever does us harm if this harm lowers us. We have to think that it does not lower us but that it shows our true level.” Or again: “If someone does me harm I must want this harm not to degrade me — this out of love for him who inflicted it upon me and so that he shall not really have done harm.” It is in such ejaculations of humility and love, rather than on the systematic side of her work, that Simone Weil appears as a pure messenger. I have never ceased to believe in her. In publishing the following pages I extend this confidence to all the souls who shall come to her.

All the writings contained in this book have been taken from the manuscripts which Simone Weil confided to us personally. They were therefore all written before May 1942.  More recent work, which her parents have been kind enough to show us, has not been included here. We have ourselves chosen the extracts from the notebooks, in which they were interspersed with innumerable quotations as well as philological and scientific studies. We hesitated between two ways of presentation: either to give the thoughts of Simone Weil one after the other in the order of their composition, or to classify them. The second method seemed preferable to us. We are anxious to express our thanks to all who have helped and encouraged us in our work: the Reverend Father Perrin, Lanza del Vasto, M. and Mme. Honnorat (who were personal friends of Simone Weil), Gabriel Marcel, and Jean de Fabrêgues. In the checking and transcription of the texts

M. V.-H. Debidour, who kindly helped to translate the Greek quotations incorporated in the aphorisms, and our devoted colleague, Mlle. Odile Keller, have both given us an infinite amount of valuable help.

Gustave Thibon
February, 1947.