Simone Weil's La Pesanteur et la Grace (Gravity and Grace), published posthumously in 1947 - compiled by Gustave Thibon from the notebooks Weil had left with him before her death in 1943 - is one of the most original philosophical and spiritual texts of the twentieth century. Albert Camus, who edited it for Gallimard, called Weil 'the only great spirit of our time.' The work develops a philosophy of decreation - the voluntary self-emptying that mirrors Christ's kenosis - that draws on Philippians 2:7, the Psalms of waiting, Lamentations, and the mystical tradition to construct a radical account of how the soul descends to God rather than ascending, how grace operates through affliction rather than consolation, and how genuine love requires the annihilation of self rather than its fulfillment.
The Thinker and His Work
Weil (1909-1943) was one of the most extraordinary intellectual figures of the twentieth century: a philosopher trained at the Ecole Normale Superieure under Alain, a political activist and labor organizer who worked on the factory floor to understand the experience of industrial workers, a mathematician and classical scholar, a mystic who experienced a series of intense mystical encounters beginning in 1938, and a woman who refused baptism while remaining deeply Christian - drawn to Christ, repelled by the institutional Church's historical complicity with power.
Gravity and Grace is a posthumous compilation rather than a authored book, and this matters for interpretation: Thibon selected and organized the aphorisms and reflections from Weil's notebooks according to his own thematic judgment, and scholars debate whether his selection represents Weil's thought fairly. The work's aphoristic form - compact, paradoxical, resistant to paraphrase - is both its philosophical strength (it forces the reader to think rather than receive) and its hermeneutical challenge.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Philippians 2:7 - 'but [Christ] emptied himself (ekenosen), by taking the form of a servant' - is the Christological center of Weil's philosophy. The kenosis (self-emptying) of Christ is not merely a historical event but the structure of all genuine love and all authentic knowledge. To love truly is to withdraw from the beloved the weight of one's own self, to leave them space to be themselves. To know truly is to renounce the distorting projection of the self's categories onto the known. The movement of God in the incarnation - making room for the creature by withdrawing from the creature's space - is the model for all genuine relationship.
Lamentations 3:25 - 'the Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him' - grounds Weil's concept of 'attente de Dieu' (waiting for God, also the title of another posthumous collection). The soul does not ascend to God through effort and technique; it waits, emptied of its own projects and desires, in a posture of attentive receptivity. This passivity is not quietism but the supreme activity of the soul - what Weil calls 'attention' (attente), which she regards as the fundamental spiritual virtue and the foundation of genuine intellectual work as well as genuine love.
Psalm 27:14 - 'wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!' - along with numerous other Psalms of waiting and suffering, provides Weil with the language of the soul's posture before God. The Psalms' movement between complaint and trust, between the hiddenness of God and the cry of 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Psalm 22:1), mirrors Weil's own spiritual experience and her theology of malheur (affliction).
Core Argument
Weil's central philosophical concept is decreation (decreation) - the voluntary dismantling of the self's will, preferences, and consolations in order to allow God to exist in the space thus created. This is not ascetic self-punishment or psychological self-destruction; it is the philosophical corollary of kenosis. Just as Christ emptied himself of divine prerogatives to become human, the soul must empty itself of creaturely self-assertion to become transparent to the divine.
Gravity, in Weil's metaphysics, is the universal force of necessity - the chain of cause and effect, desire and satisfaction, that governs the natural world. Everything natural falls downward: the ego seeks its own gratification, power seeks its own expansion, desire seeks its own object. Grace is the reverse movement: the supernatural force that works against gravity, that moves the soul upward toward God. The paradox - central to the title - is that grace operates through apparent descent: affliction, which gravity pulls us to interpret as punishment or bad luck, is the mechanism by which grace strips away the ego's pretensions and opens the soul to God.
Intellectual Context
Weil drew on an extraordinarily wide range of traditions: Platonism (she read the Timaeus as a proto-Christian text), the Hindu Bhagavad Gita (which she translated), Pythagorean mathematics, Greek tragedy (especially the concept of ate, the disaster that strips away illusion), Stoic philosophy, and the mystical tradition from Meister Eckhart to John of the Cross. Her Christianity was genuine but eccentric, shaped by her resistance to any claim that Christianity had superseded other spiritual traditions.
Reception and Critique
Simone de Beauvoir found Weil intellectually formidable and personally difficult; their only recorded meeting ended in sharp disagreement about whether the problem of the hungry was more important than the problem of the meaning of life (Weil insisted the latter was more urgent). T. S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction to the English edition of The Need for Roots, was strongly influenced by Weil's account of rootedness and community. Susan Sontag considered Weil a supreme example of the moral intellectual.
Feminist theologians have engaged Weil with ambivalence: her emphasis on self-emptying has been criticized (by Daphne Hampson and others) as potentially harmful to women who are already in danger of self-erasure; defenders argue that Weil's decreation is not self-abnegation but the stripping away of the false self, which is as necessary for women as for men.
Legacy
Weil's concept of attention has had enormous influence beyond philosophy of religion, particularly in education and ethics. Her essay 'Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God' argues that the discipline of genuine academic attention - learning to attend to what is actually there rather than what one wishes to see - is the same faculty as the spiritual attention that opens the soul to God. This synthesis of intellectual and spiritual discipline has influenced teachers, educators, and contemplative practitioners across traditions.
Key Passages
'We have to go down to the root of our desires in order to tear the energy from its object. There, it is in contact with love, with the fullness of love.' (Gravity and Grace, 'Decreation,' trans. Craufurd)
'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.' (First and Last Notebooks)
'Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we would prefer to think of as imaginary.' (Gravity and Grace)
Contemporary Relevance
Weil's philosophical theology speaks with unusual directness to several contemporary concerns. Her analysis of affliction (malheur) as distinct from ordinary suffering - affliction is the total destitution that strips the soul of all self-respect and social recognition - provides an extraordinarily precise phenomenology of trauma, homelessness, and social exclusion that has been used by social workers, psychiatrists, and theologians working with the most vulnerable populations. Her concept of attention, recovered and developed by Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), has become influential in moral philosophy as an account of the moral perception required to see what is actually present in a situation rather than what self-interest or habit makes us expect to see. And her refusal to belong to any institution - her insistence on remaining at the threshold of the Church, neither inside nor outside - makes her a surprisingly resonant figure for the religiously unaffiliated who nonetheless find themselves drawn to the mystical and ethical core of the Christian tradition.