Simone Weil

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition, this Routledge Classics edition offers the English reader the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever.

Gravity and Grace

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The sin which we have in us emerges from us and spreads outside ourselves setting up a contagion of sin... But at the contact of a perfectly pure being there is a transmutation and the sin becomes suffering.

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, political activist, and religious mystic, was little known when she died young in 1943. Four years later the philosopher-farmer Gustave Thibon compiled La pesanteur et la grâce from the notebooks she left in his keeping. In 1952 this English translation accelerated the fame and influence of Simone Weil. The striking aphorisms in Gravity and Grace reflect the religious philosophy of Weil’s last years. Written at the onset of World War II, when her health was deteriorating and her left-wing social activism was giving way to spiritual introspection, this masterwork makes clear why critics have called Simone Weil “a great soul who might have become a saint” and “the Outsider as saint, in an age of alienation.”

Prashant Prasad

“i also am other than what i imagine myself to be. to know this is forgiveness.”

Gravity and Grace

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