Name: Gravity and Grace
Rating: 4.09375 (16 reviews)
ISBN: 9780415290012

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

kite

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

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.

dyonisos.

“Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”

The second is the presence of decreation. (He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent. Saint Augustine.)

God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.

“ a promise of some false good is necessary for sin, because we cannot endure the thought that we are going in the direction of evil. It is not the flesh which keeps us away from God; the flesh is the veil we place before us to shield us from him.

This is perhaps not the case until after a certain point has been reached. The image of the cave seems to suggest as much. At first it is movement which hurts. When we reach the opening it is the light. It not only blinds but wounds us. Our eyes turn away from it.

May it not be true that from that moment onwards mortal sins are the only kind we can any longer commit?

To use the flesh to hide ourselves from the light—is not that a mortal sin? A horrible idea.

I need God to take me by force, because, if death, doing away with the shield of the flesh, were to put me face to face with him, I should run away.”

God is crucified from the fact that finite beings, subject to necessity, to space and to time, think.

I have to know that as a thinking, finite being I am God crucified.

I have to be like God, but like God crucified.

 God almighty in so far as he is bound by necessity.

Prometheus—the god crucified for having loved men too much. Hippolytus, the man punished for having been too pure and too much loved by the gods. It is the coming together of the human and the divine which calls forth punishment

What is thus brought about by thought direction is in no way comparable to suggestion. If I say to myself every morning: ‘I am courageous, I am not afraid’, I may become courageous but with a courage which conforms to what, in my present imperfection, I imagine under that name, and accordingly my courage will not go beyond this imperfection. It can only be a modification on the same plane, not a change of plane.

Contradiction is the criterion. We cannot by suggestion obtain things which are incompatible. Only grace can do that.

Incarnation. God is weak because he is impartial. He sends sunshine and rain to good and evil alike. This indifference of the Father and the weakness of Christ correspond. Absence of God.

The wrong humility leads us to believe that we are nothing in so far as we are ourselves—in so far as we are certain particular human beings.

True humility is the knowledge that we are nothing in so far as we are human beings as such, and, more generally, in so far as we are creatures.

‘Judge not’: Christ himself does not judge. He is our judgment. Suffering innocence is the measure.

‘Be ye perfect even as your Father who is in heaven….’ Love in the same way as the sun gives light. Love has to be brought back to ourselves in order that it may be shed on all things.

Manual labour. Time entering into the body. Through work man turns himself into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist. Work is like a death.

We have to pass through death. We have to be killed—to endure the weight of the world. When the universe is weighing upon the back of a human creature, what is there to be surprised at if it hurts him?

Work is like a death if it is without an incentive. We have to act, renouncing the fruits of action.

No poetry concerning the people is authentic if fatigue does not figure in it, and the hunger and thirst which come from fatigue.

Arrisco-me a dizer, de coração cheio, que este foi — até ao momento — o livro mais importante da minha vida. Simone lê-se com uma sabedoria bíblica; tão antiga, tão introspectiva, e, enfim, tão profundamente calorosa. Em poucas palavras, sobre este livro — e sobre Simone, numa generalidade —, posso dizer: nunca o mundo me pareceu tão belo. Há, de facto, aqueles que carregam a esperança como quem carrega uma tocha num túnel escuro. 

Uma visão refrescante, mesmo à luz da atualidade, da religião, do mundo, da sociedade, do indivíduo; a escrita e os temas abordados por Weil são intemporais. Simone Weil está para lá do tempo. 

Arrisco-me a dizer, de coração cheio, que este foi — até ao momento — o livro mais importante da minha vida. Simone lê-se com uma sabedoria bíblica; tão antiga, tão introspectiva, e, enfim, tão profundamente calorosa. Em poucas palavras, sobre este livro — e sobre Simone, numa generalidade —, posso dizer: nunca o mundo me pareceu tão belo. Há, de facto, aqueles que carregam a esperança como quem carrega uma tocha num túnel escuro. 

Uma visão refrescante, mesmo à luz da atualidade, da religião, do mundo, da sociedade, do indivíduo; a escrita e os temas abordados por Weil são intemporais. Simone Weil está para lá do tempo. 

eris

She is so special and important to me. Insightful and clarifying - a lot of this book beautifully paralleled NA work about will, faith, self, prayer, attention. Despite losing me at times (often) in her religious logic, this is one of my favorite philosophical texts. I love the one moment where she steps outside her philosophical purity to confess her lost lover: ‘I think I love wrongly.’ Felt like she was whispering a secret to me. If anyone would like to sit down and answer all my questions about this (like what is she saying about socialism?? Marxism??) I’m available

gabrielle v

She is so special and important to me. Insightful and clarifying - a lot of this book beautifully paralleled NA work about will, faith, self, prayer, attention. Despite losing me at times (often) in her religious logic, this is one of my favorite philosophical texts. I love the one moment where she steps outside her philosophical purity to confess her lost lover: ‘I think I love wrongly.’ Felt like she was whispering a secret to me. If anyone would like to sit down and answer all my questions about this (like what is she saying about socialism?? Marxism??) I’m available

'Love is not consolation. It is light.'

Banger

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.”

Partie de la philosophie pour entrer en religion, née dans une famille d'origine juive pour se rapprocher du christianisme, Simone Weil a suivi un parcours étonnant, qui la mènera d'un statut de jeune fille de la bourgeoisie aux confins de la plus atroce misère matérielle. Animée d'une soif absolue qui la fait vivre -comme d'autres vivent de pain- , elle rend compte, dans ses écrits, de cette aventure exceptionnelle. 'La pesanteur et la grâce', recueil de ses pensées, de ses réflexions les plus intimes, témoigne de cette exigence et de ce destin. Conçu comme une succession de réflexions sur des thèmes variés, mais dont la cohérence est frappante, ce livre constitue une remarquable initiation à son oeuvre.

Gravity and Grace

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