Gravity and Grace

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Though delicate and ill (she had suffered all her life from intolerable headaches, and an attack of pleurisy some years before she came to us had left its mark upon her) she worked on the land with tireless energy and often contented herself with blackberries from the wayside bushes for a meal. We remain as slaves, Simone says, if we simply remain “turning round and round” in circles living lives out of mere necessity. Among her contemporaries I can only think of Paul Valéry, and of Koestler in the Spanish Testament, of which she spoke to me with unmixed praise.

She had a serious fault, however (or a rare quality according to the plane on which we place ourselves): it was to refuse to make any concession whatever to the requirements and conventions of social life. She had an intellect capable of unraveling the systems of thought that motivate governing principles or organizations. Also previously untranslated is Gustave Thibon's postscript of 1990, which reminds us how privileged we are to be able to read a work which offers each reader such 'light for the spirit and nourishment for the soul'. Four years later the philosopher-farmer Gustave Thibon compiled La pesanteur et la grâce from the notebooks she left in his keeping. Jewish by birth, Christian by vocation, and Greek by aesthetic choice, Weil has influenced religious thinking profoundly in the years since her death.Like the Buddhists, Weil rejects all attachments; nevertheless, she is able to conceive of a definition of love that is independent of attachment. Jewish by birth, but choosing to be a christian, with activism amongst some on the radical left, this melting pot of cultures and thought seemed almost bound to result in fresh expressions of thought, of belief and highlighting aspects of life in ways alien to many, offputting to some and captivating to others.

She was just then beginning to open with all her soul to Christianity, a limpid mysticism emanated from her; in no other human being have I come across such familiarity with religious mysteries; never have I felt the word supernatural to be more charged with reality than when in contact with her. It would be nice to see someone do for this book what Kreeft did for Pascal’s in Christianity for Modern Pagans—explain and expound. Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).The opposite of this is grace, which is something that defies this descent into entropy, a kind of anti-gravity. These writings fall somewhere within the realms of personal philosophy and of a spirituality of a seeker. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. She's far too radical a thinker to have fit well into any hierarchy and there are many passages that bear about as much affinity with Zen as with any Western church.