Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil

First published:La Pesanteur et la grâce, 1947 (English translation, 1952)

Type of work: Notebooks

Form and Content

Gravity and Grace was the first of Simone Weil’s books to be published in English. Early in 1942, shortly before sailing from France to New York, Weil presented Gustave Thibon with a portfolio of papers, asking him to read them and take care of them during her exile. The portfolio contained a dozen thick exercise books in which Weil daily had recorded her thoughts. These entries were interspersed with quotations in many languages and with strictly personal notes. After Weil’s death in 1943, Thibon, as her literary executor, selected representative expressions of her distinctive religious philosophy from these notebooks and organized them into thirty-eight sections. The first section, “Gravity and Grace,” provides the title for the whole and establishes one of the major themes of these meditations.

Individual entries are bare and simple, like the inner experiences they express. Indeed, Weil’s ideas are often presented in an unadorned prose style much like geometry theorems. Generally, in each section a concept or process is defined in a series of aphoristic statements and then analyzed by observing what happens when the concept or process encounters the energy of other forces.

The opening sentences of Gravity and Grace explain the title and establish the basic convictions of Weil’s religious thought:

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.

We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity, unless there is supernatural intervention.

Gravity, in Weil’s spiritual vocabulary, is the evil to which the human soul is prone, a force which draws it always downward or keeps it down even when it would rise. Grace is the opposing force which alone can make possible, by its presence, the liberation and ascent of the soul. Gravity and Grace explores how these two antithetical forces operate in human life. Numerous sections—“Illusions,” “Idolatry,” “Violence,” for example—demonstrate the effect of gravity; other sections such as “Love,” “The Cross,” and “Beauty” reveal the movements of grace.

In formulating the laws of gravity and grace operating in the spiritual life, Weil frequently employs metaphors taken from the physical sciences. Her meditations are built upon metaphors of structure and force: balance, counterbalance, opposition, oscillation, entropy, retrogression, “difugal force,” equilibrium, action and reaction. For example, when describing the soul’s inclination to enlarge itself, Weil postulates a physicslike theorem and proceeds to examine a number of corollaries:

Like a gas, the soul tends to fill the entire space which is given it. A gas when contracted leaves a vacuum; this [condition] would be contrary to the law of entropy. . . . It is not so with the God of the Christians. Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void [that is, the vacuum]. This [enduring] is contrary to all the laws of nature. Grace alone can do it.

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can enter only where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

The laws regulating the spiritual life can be better understood when compared to laws governing the universe. Thus, in the description of how the soul expands and contracts, the structures and processes involved in spiritual emptiness are not like those laws operating in physical voids. The difference lies in the nature of God’s grace. The supernatural pressure of divine grace not only creates the void in the first place but also maintains the condition and fills the spiritually empty. Such an explanation is typical of Weil’s development of an idea. Heavily saturated with the metaphor and language of physics and chemistry, Gravity and Grace presents itself as the science of the spiritual, the experimental knowledge of supernatural truths.

Weil’s view of reality is fundamentally Platonic. God in His divine identification with the Good, the Beautiful, and the Virtuous is utterly transcendent. Alluding often to Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, Weil believes that most lives are spent in illusion because “there is every degree of distance between the creature and God.” Yet in spite of the distance separating humans from ultimate reality, Weil is convinced that connections exist between the transcendent world and the world of things. Thus, although all things are barriers blocking humans from knowing the divine world, at the same time they are bridges which connect them to transcendent reality. Although humans make things (money, home, traditions, culture, for example) to be ends in themselves, nevertheless, it is “the essence of created things to be intermediaries” or “bridges” (what Weil signifies in Greek as metaxu). For Weil as a Platonist, the exterior world provides a vast network of figures and images which can either hide or reveal the ultimate reality of spiritual truth.

To prepare a space in which grace overcomes the heavy pull of gravity, it is above all necessary to practice “attention,” that is, an intense looking which does not demand possession. Such attention, when thoroughly detached and devoid of any egocentric energies, encourages the Good to join itself irresistibly to the soul. By being attentive without attachment to any preconceived notions or predetermined objects, “we keep our gaze directed toward the same thing [so that] in the end illusions are scattered and the real becomes visible.” By practicing radical openness, one discovers what is truly real: “Perfect detachment alone enables us to see things in their naked reality.” Intense awareness is the path to transcendent reality.

Appropriate moral behavior results from being truly attentive. When empty of personal, ego-driven desire, then “through well-directed attention we do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing.” Correct moral action thus derives from necessity; one cannot do otherwise. Indeed, disciplining oneself in well-directed moral conduct is not so much an action as it is a “sort of passivity.”

Weil’s concentration on the impersonal quality of moral behavior underscores her belief that human life is ultimately anonymous in relation to the Absolute. By releasing oneself from the personal, one serves the final reality. Indeed, only by entering the process of “decreation” (“to make something created pass into the uncreated”) is it possible to reduce oneself sufficiently that God may be all in all. By reducing self, by “disappearing,” one strips away an “imaginary divinity” even as Christ emptied Himself of His “real divinity.” One finds one’s eternal “place” in the universe by imitating the incarnational condescension of God in Christ: “God renounces being everything. We should renounce being something. That is our only good.” According to Weil, the renunciation must be complete. It occurs when one reenacts the passion of Christ, dying to self in service to others. When one experiences such a necessary transformation, then it may be said that grace, now understood as “the law of the descending movement,” has overcome the force of gravity. The paradox is achieved: By descent, one arises. Mankind’s salvation lies in “falling upwards.”

Critical Context

English translations of Weil’s work have been published in a chronologically awkward fashion. All of her books were published posthumously, and most are composed of miscellaneous letters, articles, notes, and fragments, many of which were never intended for publication. Moreover, the English translations often gather these materials under different titles. As a consequence, Weil’s work has often appeared haphazardly, and the thematic integrity of her thought has been difficult to perceive. Thus, Gravity and Grace, while one of the first important publications of Weil’s work in English, needs to be read alongside other developed pieces. Attente de Dieu (1950; Waiting for God, 1951) provides, for example, access to Weil’s more personal voice. Composed of letters and papers in early 1942, Waiting for God not only clarifies the Weilian motif of “attending/waiting” but also describes her mystical experience, conversion, and subsequent relationship with the Church. L’Enracinement: Prelude a une declaration des devoirs envers l’etre humain (1949; The Need for Roots, 1952), regarded by many as her most brilliant and important book, is an extended meditation on the problems of rebuilding a just society in France after the liberation. It is the best explication of her sociopolitical thought, suggestions of which are provided in the final chapters of Gravity and Grace. Cahiers (1951; Notebooks, 1952-1955), which covers entries from 1940 to 1943 and from which extracts for Gravity and Grace were taken, contain the raw material for many of her other writings of those years. Readable for the most part and interesting in their own right, they exhibit the enormous range of her reading and interests; they also contain some of the harsher expressions of Weil’s thought. Oppression et liberte (1955; Oppression and Liberty, 1958) contains her critique of socialism, capitalism, and Marxism. Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (1962) contains all of her specifically historical writing; it includes her letter to Georges Bernanos expressing her convictions about the Spanish Civil War. In its longest essay, “The Great Beast,” Weil analyzes the historical preconditions which encouraged the rise of Adolf Hitler. Seventy Letters (1965) provides a cross section of Weil’s correspondence dealing especially with her experience as a factory worker in 1934. On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968) contains her famous essay on Homer’s Iliad, along with specialized discussions on differential calculus and quantum theory. The publication of First and Last Notebooks (1970) makes available the last of her untranslated exercise-book entries with themes as diverse as artificial manure, higher education, the absence of God from His world, and the insights of Eastern mythology. What was begun in Gravity and Grace twenty years earlier has been made complete; her notebooks, portions of which were first published in English in 1952, are now available in their entirety.

Bibliography

Cabaud, Jacques. Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love. New York: Channel Press, 1964. Cabaud examines the intellectual and political sides of Weil as secondary to her religious purpose. Includes an ample index and excellent primary and secondary bibliographies.

Dietz, Mary G. Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988. Structuring her work around Weil’s writing, Dietz discusses Weil’s clash of needs: the necessity for the soul to remain rooted in itself and the desire for it to join with God. This exploration attempts to rectify the public’s view that Weil abandoned politics for religion, showing that Weil’s task was in fact to link the two.

Hellman, John. Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982. Traces Weil’s movement from politics toward religion, stressing her encounter with Marxism and her later disillusionment with it. Hellman mentions her writing in instances where it directly pertains to her thought.

Kovitz, Sonia. “Simone Weil’s Dark Night of the Soul.” Midwest Quarterly 33 (Spring, 1992): 261-276. Kovitz’s article reviews the various phases of Weil’s temperament: despair, bouts with thoughts of suicide, and the more enlightening desire for a knowledge of God.

McLellan, David. Utopian Pessimist. New York: Poseidon Press, 1990. This evaluation gives a condensed version of the main points in Weil’s life. Attention is given to Weil’s political participation and her seemingly contrary views on the essence of human behavior. Offers an appendix (“On Human Personality”) and a chronology. The select bibliography includes original works in French and English translations, as well as secondary works.

Petrement, Simone. Simone Weil: A Life. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. Regarded as the premier source for an accurate, personal, and full background on Weil, this biography emphasizes the inseparability of Weil and the literary works that she produced. Petrement praises Weil’s numerous accomplishments not usually attributed to women, and she presents Weil’s political and religious excursions through memoirs of their shared academic setting and in accounts of Weil’s trying work experiences.