Waiting for God (Attente de Dieu) was published posthumously in 1951 by Editions Gallimard, assembled by the Dominican friar Father J.-M. Perrin from letters and essays Weil had sent him before her death. It became one of the defining spiritual texts of the twentieth century - unusual in that its author was a Jewish philosopher who experienced Christ's presence but refused baptism, a mystic whose theological insights were formed outside the institutional church.
The Work
The book consists primarily of six letters Weil wrote to Father Perrin between January and May 1942, while she was in Marseilles before emigrating to the United States, plus four essays on spiritual subjects: 'The Love of God and Affliction,' 'Forms of the Implicit Love of God,' 'Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies,' and 'The Gate.' The letters are deeply personal, tracing Weil's spiritual history and explaining her decision to remain outside the Church. The essays are works of philosophical theology at the highest level - dense, precise, and demanding.
Weil died of tuberculosis in Ashford, Kent, in August 1943. She had been in England working for the Free French government in exile. Her refusal to eat more than the rations available to people in occupied France has been cited as contributing to her death; her condition was diagnosed as tuberculosis complicated by refusal of food - an act of solidarity that she understood as participation in the affliction of the occupied.
Biblical Engagement
Matthew 25:35 - 'I was a stranger, and ye took me in' - is central to Weil's understanding of the supernatural virtue of love of neighbor. In her essay on the forms of implicit love, she argues that love of the neighbor is one of the indirect paths to God - that in genuinely attending to the suffering of another person, the believer is encountering Christ himself, whether or not they know it. This is the Matthew 25 logic: Christ identifies with the hungry, the stranger, the imprisoned. Weil extends this to an epistemology: genuine attention to another's suffering is a form of participation in divine love.
Philippians 2:7 - 'But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men' - provides the vocabulary of kenosis that is central to Weil's theology. She meditates extensively on what she calls 'decreation': the process by which the created being empties itself of its own existence in order to make room for God. This is not suicide but spiritual self-transcendence - the mystic's movement beyond ego-assertion into the receptive waiting that allows divine presence. The kenosis of Christ (God emptying himself of divine prerogative to become servant) is the model for the believer's decreation.
Matthew 27:46 - 'And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' - is the center of Weil's theology of affliction. In her essay 'The Love of God and Affliction,' she argues that the cry of dereliction is the supreme expression of affliction - the experience of being simultaneously loved by God and abandoned by God, which she calls 'malheur' (affliction, not merely suffering). She sees in this dereliction the model for the mystic's experience: to be truly afflicted is to participate in Christ's affliction, and Christ's affliction is the place where divine love is most fully revealed.
Isaiah 53 - the Suffering Servant - provides the scriptural background for Weil's theology of affliction. The servant who 'hath no form nor comeliness' (v. 2), who is 'despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief' (v. 3), who 'was wounded for our transgressions' (v. 5) - this figure is for Weil the definitive image of the divine love that expresses itself through weakness and suffering rather than through power and glory.
The Creator
Simone Weil (1909-1943) was born in Paris into a Jewish family - secular, intellectual, French-Jewish in the tradition of the Dreyfus generation. She studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where she was a brilliant student. She taught philosophy in lycées, worked in a Renault factory to experience the condition of industrial labor (1934-35), and participated briefly in the Spanish Civil War. She had three mystical experiences of Christ's presence between 1937 and 1940 that she describes in the letters to Father Perrin - culminating in a definitive experience in 1938 while reciting George Herbert's poem 'Love III' ('Love bade me welcome') during a headache attack.
Her refusal of baptism - despite her conviction of Christ's reality - was an act of deliberate solidarity with those outside the Church: with Jews, with those who had been persecuted by historical Christianity, with those for whom the institutional church was a barrier rather than a gateway. She believed that the Church's claiming of exclusive truth had caused immense harm and that her vocation was to remain at the threshold, in solidarity with the excluded, rather than entering the house.
Affliction Theory
Weil's concept of malheur (affliction) is her most distinctive contribution to theology. She distinguishes affliction from suffering: suffering is physical or emotional pain; affliction is the combination of physical suffering, social degradation, and psychic devastation that destroys the soul's sense of its own worth. Slavery, extreme poverty, imprisonment, chronic illness that isolates - these are the conditions that produce affliction. Affliction is uniquely terrible because it causes the soul to complicit in its own destruction: the afflicted person comes to believe that they deserve their degradation.
Weil argues that divine love reaches most deeply into human experience precisely through affliction - that the God who was crucified is most present in those who are most crushed. The mystic's task is to attend to the afflicted with the same quality of attention that God gives them: not pity (which looks down) but attention (which looks honestly at the other's reality).
Legacy
Weil has become one of the most widely read and discussed Christian thinkers of the twentieth century despite - or because of - her outsider position. Her combination of rigorous philosophical training, mystical experience, and political engagement (she was active in the French Resistance) produced a theology that speaks directly to the conditions of modern suffering. Her influence has extended to liberation theology, feminist theology, and the theology of disability, as well as to secular philosophy and literature. T.S. Eliot, who edited the English edition of Waiting for God, called her 'a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.'