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Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux
Awaiting God (218 pages) combines a fresh translation (by Weil scholar, Brad Jersak) of Simone Weil's Waiting for God and Letter to a Priest (Attente de Dieu and Lettre un Religieux) in one volume. These works are considered Weil's primary essays and letters.
In addition, Simone Weil's niece has contributed an introductory article entitled, Simone Weil and the Rabbi's: Compassion and Tsedekah, which puts Weil's relationship with Jewish thought into perspective. She includes source material from the Rabbis that put Weil (however reluctantly) in line with rabbinical thought throughout her major themes.
The book is the ideal English introduction to the works and thought of Simone Weil, including important preface material (by Jersak) on how to read her work, as well as her relationship to Roman Catholicism and Judaism.
Table of Contents
A clarification: This work is distinct from "Waiting for God". "Waiting for God" itself is a collection which includes all of the above essays and letters, except "Letter to a Priest", which is usually published separately.
In addition, Simone Weil's niece has contributed an introductory article entitled, Simone Weil and the Rabbi's: Compassion and Tsedekah, which puts Weil's relationship with Jewish thought into perspective. She includes source material from the Rabbis that put Weil (however reluctantly) in line with rabbinical thought throughout her major themes.
The book is the ideal English introduction to the works and thought of Simone Weil, including important preface material (by Jersak) on how to read her work, as well as her relationship to Roman Catholicism and Judaism.
Table of Contents
• Translator's Preface
• Introduction by Sylvie Weil
Part 1 — Essays
1. Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies
in View of the Love of God
2. The Love of God and Affliction
3. Forms of the Implicit Love of God
a. Love of Neighbor
b. Love of the Order of the World
c. Love of Religious Practices
d. Friendship
e. Implicit and Explicit Love
4. Concerning the Our Father
Part 2 — Letters
• Preface to her letters: Weil on Catholicism and Judaism
5. Hesitations Prior to Baptism
6. Hesitations Prior to Baptism
7. Departure from France
8. Spiritual Autobiography
9. Intellectual Vocation
10. Last Thoughts
11. Letter to a Priest
A clarification: This work is distinct from "Waiting for God". "Waiting for God" itself is a collection which includes all of the above essays and letters, except "Letter to a Priest", which is usually published separately.
204 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 11, 2012
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332 people want to read
About the author
Simone Weil
338 books1,857 followersSimone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range".
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 22, 2020
I begin my review with a quote from David Benner, who offered me the inspiration to finally read Weil first hand after reading her citations repeatedly in the writings of various contemplative authors, including Richard Rohr who has obviously been inspired by Weil. Benner is speaking about the importance of paying attention in the contemplative journey:
“Prayerful paying attention is not scrunching up our willpower and tightening our focus, but simply opening our self to what we encounter. This makes it much more an act of release than effort. We release any attempt to control attention and instead allow it to be absorbed by our present experience. This insight lies right at the heart of the profound spiritual wisdom found in the teaching and life of Simone Weil. No one has taught me more about what it means to pay attention as a way of being open to God. A French Jew born in 1909, Simone Weil was trained as a philosopher but subsequently spent most of her short adult life working in a car factory, labouring in the French vineyards, serving with the Spanish Republican Army on the Catalonian front and working with the French Resis tance during the Nazi occupation of France – all while writing some of the most brilliant and profoundly spiritual books to emerge from the twentieth century”.
With such high praise from Benner, I began searching for my first Weil book to read. When I came across one that was translated by one of our Soulstream partners Brad Jersak (who committed his doctoral dissertation to studying the writings of Weil), I launched into what has been one of the most mysterious, provocative, disturbing, and unravelling reading challenges that I have encountered in recent years.
It became immediately obvious to me that Weil was a philosopher and obviously well-versed in the classic literature, particularly Greek literature. She is not an easy read by any stretch. It is rare when I have to read a book as carefully and deliberately as I had to read this one in order to be able to mine the many gems dispersed generously throughout. Unfortunately, I can only refer to a few in this “brief” review.
It seems to me that Weil stands above her peers by her integrity – her integrity of intellect and of desire. Her intellectual integrity led to her the deliberate decision to remain outside of the church, a decision she goes to great lengths to try to explain to her mentor and priest for whom she had very obvious high esteem. Yet was not at all shy to challenge him on many fronts. From her vantage point outside of the church, she is able to analyze and critique not only the church but also the Christian religion for the ways in which it has been contaminated by the church, particularly by the unholy alliance that the Roman Emperor Constantine made with the church in the 4th century A.D.
My decision to leave the church just over one year ago has not been without many unanswered questions of my own and a perpetual awareness of how words are so limited whenever I try to offer reasons to other people for my decision. In reading Weil discuss many of her reasons for remaining outside of the church, I found myself resonating with many of them and felt like I had found in Weil an understanding and compassionate friend.
I have found that one of the most desirable consequences of leaving the church has been my increased affinity with others who by means of their own intellectual integrity have been unable to embrace God through the church or even religion but have nevertheless exhibited more passion in their spiritual search than so many placid Christians I know that appear locked in their many certitudes and religious pride. As Weil explains her reasons for refusing Catholic baptism , she declares that “no thought troubles me more than separating myself from the immense and afflicted mass of unbelievers. I have the essential need— and I think I can say the vocation— to mingle with people and various human cultures by taking on the same ‘color’ as them, at least to the degree that my conscience does not oppose it. I would disappear among them until they show me who they really are, without disguising themselves from me, because I desire to know them to the point that I love them just as they are”.
I was in large part compelled to leave the church because I had increasingly found myself losing my identity in the evangelical culture. Being removed from the church has been very difficult in spite of all of the freedom it has granted me. So often I have felt like I have lost a part of who I am. Only in the past year have I become aware of the extent to which my identity was so much wrapped up in my allegiance to the church. I now see that I could not have realized this while still immersed in it. I have always been fascinated by Richard Rohr’s repeated warnings of the dangers of what he calls “religious belonging systems”. Weil has given me a new understanding and appreciation of these dangers. I can only offer this provocative quote to offer some idea of the dangers that Weil recognized to be inherent in such religious belonging systems:
“All things carefully considered, I believe they come down to this: what scares me is the Church as a social thing . . . I have in myself a strongly gregarious spirit. I am by natural disposition extremely easily influenced in excess, and especially by collective things. I know that if in this moment I had before me twenty German youth singing Nazi songs in chorus, part of my soul would immediately become Nazi. It is a very great weakness of mine . . . I am afraid of the patriotism of the Church that exists in the Catholic culture. I mean ‘patriotism’ in the sense of sentiment analogous to an earthly homeland. I am afraid because I fear contracting its contagion. Not that the Church appears unworthy of inspiring such sentiment, but because I don’t want any sentiment of this kind for myself. The word ‘want’ is not accurate. I know— I sense with certainty— that such sentiment of this type, whatever its object might be, would be disastrous in me. Some saints approved the Crusades and the Inquisition. I cannot help but think they were wrong. I cannot withdraw from the light of conscience. If I think I see more clearly than they do on this point— I who am so far below them— I must allow that on this point they must have been blinded by something very powerful. That something is the Church as a social thing. If this social thing did such evil to them, what evil might it not also do to me, one who is particularly vulnerable to social influences, and who is infinitely feebler than they?”
Later in this book Weil clarifies the limits of intellectual integrity in the realm of mystery and further emphasizes that the intellect can only find its proper good in subordination to love. Despite her profound intellect, she is perhaps first a mystic and only secondly a philosopher.
I was even more profoundly impacted by her integrity of desire. As a contemplative wannabe, I have become persuaded of the many deficits and limitations of all human initiative, especially when inevitably contaminated by human pride, achievement, and competition. I loved her declaration of the fundamental pre-eminence of God’s initiative in the closing pages of this book: “The idea of God’s quest for man is a splendour and unfathomably profound. When it is replaced by the idea of man’s quest for God there is decadence”. The contemplative believes that God’s initiative is most profoundly discovered in our desire. Weil was so committed to the integrity of desire as the most reliable evidence of God’s initiative with in her, that she was resistant to doing anything, no matter how apparently good or righteous, in the lack of such desire.
“I suppose it was my waning desire as much as anything that propelled me out of the church. Yet how could I explain as legitimate grounds for leaving that I just didn’t feel like going to church anymore – to myself much less anyone else? How sweet to my soul were the following words of Simone (for by the end of reading her book, I truly felt like I was on a first name basis with her!):
“God rewards the soul that focuses on Him with attention and love, and God rewards that soul by exercising a rigorous compulsion on it, mathematically proportional to this attention and love. We must abandon ourselves to this pressure, and run to the precise point where it leads, and not a single step further, not even in the direction of what is good. At the same time, we must continue to focus on God, with ever more love and attention, and in this way obtain an even greater compulsion — to become an object of a compulsion that possesses for itself a perpetually growing portion of the soul. Once God’s compulsion possesses the whole soul, one has reached the state of perfection. But no matter what degree we reach, we must not accomplish anything beyond what we are irresistibly pressured (compelled) to do, not even in the way of good.”
Clearly the only means by which God can convey his will to us through our desires is if we are fully attentive and aware. Such awareness comes only to a soul willing to wait. In another book (An Anthology), Weil speaks of the value of attention: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”. She goes on to speak of the face of beauty behind which God is so often concealed. It is in our attention to beauty that we so often awake to the presence of God in our world. Weil invites us to consider how “The beauty of the world is the tender smile of Christ to us through matter. He is really present in universal beauty. Love of this beauty proceeds from God and descends into our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It too is something like a sacrament.”
Weil is controversial. She is bold in confronting both the church and the parts of the Bible that she views as inconsistent in representing the God of love which Jesus embodies. As a Jew, she is harsh in her treatment of the Jewish religion: “In the view of the Hebrews (at least before the exile, with few exceptions) sin and affliction, virtue and prosperity, were inseparable, which makes Yahweh an earthly father rather than a heavenly Father, visible rather than invisible. He is therefore a false god. A single act of pure charity is impossible under that conception”.
Not covered in this review is the attention that Weil gave in her writing to the plight of the afflicted. In this book she made this reflection: “The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.”
I conclude this review by continuing the biographical sketch began with the quote by David Benner. In her life, Simone exhibited an exceptional compassion for the suffering of others. It has been told that at the age of six, she refused to eat sugar after she heard that soldiers fighting in World War I had to go without. It was believed that she may have died from tuberculosis during WW II, possibly exacerbated by malnutrition after refusing to eat more than the minimal rations that she believed were available to soldiers at the time.
Her life has an ironic parallel to the life of Jesus (although in entertaining this comparison, I am in no way trying to raise her to God-like status) in that she was well acquainted with physical suffering (she suffered from poor health throughout her life), established herself as a scholar at the ripe age of 12 (the age at which she was proficient in ancient Greek) and then died in her early 30s. Although perhaps a bit of a stretch in continuing with this unusual comparison (which for some strange reason I find difficult to resist) is the fact that, according to her biographer (as quoted on Wikipedia), Simone Pétrement, “ Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities to have love affairs in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged. From her late teenage years, Weil would generally disguise her ‘fragile beauty’ by adopting a masculine appearance, hardly ever using makeup and often wearing men's clothes”.
If Weil had a love life, perhaps it was with Francis of Assisi, whom she adored: “I fell in love with St. Francis since I first came to know about him. I have always believed and hoped that some day fate would drive me into the life of a vagabond and beggar that he entered freely”. While in Assisi in the spring of 1937, Weil experienced a religious ecstasy in the same church in which St Francis had prayed. Perhaps her love of St. Francis is what endeared Weil to Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who has perhaps more than any other single contemplative teacher influenced my own contemplative journey.
“Prayerful paying attention is not scrunching up our willpower and tightening our focus, but simply opening our self to what we encounter. This makes it much more an act of release than effort. We release any attempt to control attention and instead allow it to be absorbed by our present experience. This insight lies right at the heart of the profound spiritual wisdom found in the teaching and life of Simone Weil. No one has taught me more about what it means to pay attention as a way of being open to God. A French Jew born in 1909, Simone Weil was trained as a philosopher but subsequently spent most of her short adult life working in a car factory, labouring in the French vineyards, serving with the Spanish Republican Army on the Catalonian front and working with the French Resis tance during the Nazi occupation of France – all while writing some of the most brilliant and profoundly spiritual books to emerge from the twentieth century”.
With such high praise from Benner, I began searching for my first Weil book to read. When I came across one that was translated by one of our Soulstream partners Brad Jersak (who committed his doctoral dissertation to studying the writings of Weil), I launched into what has been one of the most mysterious, provocative, disturbing, and unravelling reading challenges that I have encountered in recent years.
It became immediately obvious to me that Weil was a philosopher and obviously well-versed in the classic literature, particularly Greek literature. She is not an easy read by any stretch. It is rare when I have to read a book as carefully and deliberately as I had to read this one in order to be able to mine the many gems dispersed generously throughout. Unfortunately, I can only refer to a few in this “brief” review.
It seems to me that Weil stands above her peers by her integrity – her integrity of intellect and of desire. Her intellectual integrity led to her the deliberate decision to remain outside of the church, a decision she goes to great lengths to try to explain to her mentor and priest for whom she had very obvious high esteem. Yet was not at all shy to challenge him on many fronts. From her vantage point outside of the church, she is able to analyze and critique not only the church but also the Christian religion for the ways in which it has been contaminated by the church, particularly by the unholy alliance that the Roman Emperor Constantine made with the church in the 4th century A.D.
My decision to leave the church just over one year ago has not been without many unanswered questions of my own and a perpetual awareness of how words are so limited whenever I try to offer reasons to other people for my decision. In reading Weil discuss many of her reasons for remaining outside of the church, I found myself resonating with many of them and felt like I had found in Weil an understanding and compassionate friend.
I have found that one of the most desirable consequences of leaving the church has been my increased affinity with others who by means of their own intellectual integrity have been unable to embrace God through the church or even religion but have nevertheless exhibited more passion in their spiritual search than so many placid Christians I know that appear locked in their many certitudes and religious pride. As Weil explains her reasons for refusing Catholic baptism , she declares that “no thought troubles me more than separating myself from the immense and afflicted mass of unbelievers. I have the essential need— and I think I can say the vocation— to mingle with people and various human cultures by taking on the same ‘color’ as them, at least to the degree that my conscience does not oppose it. I would disappear among them until they show me who they really are, without disguising themselves from me, because I desire to know them to the point that I love them just as they are”.
I was in large part compelled to leave the church because I had increasingly found myself losing my identity in the evangelical culture. Being removed from the church has been very difficult in spite of all of the freedom it has granted me. So often I have felt like I have lost a part of who I am. Only in the past year have I become aware of the extent to which my identity was so much wrapped up in my allegiance to the church. I now see that I could not have realized this while still immersed in it. I have always been fascinated by Richard Rohr’s repeated warnings of the dangers of what he calls “religious belonging systems”. Weil has given me a new understanding and appreciation of these dangers. I can only offer this provocative quote to offer some idea of the dangers that Weil recognized to be inherent in such religious belonging systems:
“All things carefully considered, I believe they come down to this: what scares me is the Church as a social thing . . . I have in myself a strongly gregarious spirit. I am by natural disposition extremely easily influenced in excess, and especially by collective things. I know that if in this moment I had before me twenty German youth singing Nazi songs in chorus, part of my soul would immediately become Nazi. It is a very great weakness of mine . . . I am afraid of the patriotism of the Church that exists in the Catholic culture. I mean ‘patriotism’ in the sense of sentiment analogous to an earthly homeland. I am afraid because I fear contracting its contagion. Not that the Church appears unworthy of inspiring such sentiment, but because I don’t want any sentiment of this kind for myself. The word ‘want’ is not accurate. I know— I sense with certainty— that such sentiment of this type, whatever its object might be, would be disastrous in me. Some saints approved the Crusades and the Inquisition. I cannot help but think they were wrong. I cannot withdraw from the light of conscience. If I think I see more clearly than they do on this point— I who am so far below them— I must allow that on this point they must have been blinded by something very powerful. That something is the Church as a social thing. If this social thing did such evil to them, what evil might it not also do to me, one who is particularly vulnerable to social influences, and who is infinitely feebler than they?”
Later in this book Weil clarifies the limits of intellectual integrity in the realm of mystery and further emphasizes that the intellect can only find its proper good in subordination to love. Despite her profound intellect, she is perhaps first a mystic and only secondly a philosopher.
I was even more profoundly impacted by her integrity of desire. As a contemplative wannabe, I have become persuaded of the many deficits and limitations of all human initiative, especially when inevitably contaminated by human pride, achievement, and competition. I loved her declaration of the fundamental pre-eminence of God’s initiative in the closing pages of this book: “The idea of God’s quest for man is a splendour and unfathomably profound. When it is replaced by the idea of man’s quest for God there is decadence”. The contemplative believes that God’s initiative is most profoundly discovered in our desire. Weil was so committed to the integrity of desire as the most reliable evidence of God’s initiative with in her, that she was resistant to doing anything, no matter how apparently good or righteous, in the lack of such desire.
“I suppose it was my waning desire as much as anything that propelled me out of the church. Yet how could I explain as legitimate grounds for leaving that I just didn’t feel like going to church anymore – to myself much less anyone else? How sweet to my soul were the following words of Simone (for by the end of reading her book, I truly felt like I was on a first name basis with her!):
“God rewards the soul that focuses on Him with attention and love, and God rewards that soul by exercising a rigorous compulsion on it, mathematically proportional to this attention and love. We must abandon ourselves to this pressure, and run to the precise point where it leads, and not a single step further, not even in the direction of what is good. At the same time, we must continue to focus on God, with ever more love and attention, and in this way obtain an even greater compulsion — to become an object of a compulsion that possesses for itself a perpetually growing portion of the soul. Once God’s compulsion possesses the whole soul, one has reached the state of perfection. But no matter what degree we reach, we must not accomplish anything beyond what we are irresistibly pressured (compelled) to do, not even in the way of good.”
Clearly the only means by which God can convey his will to us through our desires is if we are fully attentive and aware. Such awareness comes only to a soul willing to wait. In another book (An Anthology), Weil speaks of the value of attention: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”. She goes on to speak of the face of beauty behind which God is so often concealed. It is in our attention to beauty that we so often awake to the presence of God in our world. Weil invites us to consider how “The beauty of the world is the tender smile of Christ to us through matter. He is really present in universal beauty. Love of this beauty proceeds from God and descends into our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It too is something like a sacrament.”
Weil is controversial. She is bold in confronting both the church and the parts of the Bible that she views as inconsistent in representing the God of love which Jesus embodies. As a Jew, she is harsh in her treatment of the Jewish religion: “In the view of the Hebrews (at least before the exile, with few exceptions) sin and affliction, virtue and prosperity, were inseparable, which makes Yahweh an earthly father rather than a heavenly Father, visible rather than invisible. He is therefore a false god. A single act of pure charity is impossible under that conception”.
Not covered in this review is the attention that Weil gave in her writing to the plight of the afflicted. In this book she made this reflection: “The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.”
I conclude this review by continuing the biographical sketch began with the quote by David Benner. In her life, Simone exhibited an exceptional compassion for the suffering of others. It has been told that at the age of six, she refused to eat sugar after she heard that soldiers fighting in World War I had to go without. It was believed that she may have died from tuberculosis during WW II, possibly exacerbated by malnutrition after refusing to eat more than the minimal rations that she believed were available to soldiers at the time.
Her life has an ironic parallel to the life of Jesus (although in entertaining this comparison, I am in no way trying to raise her to God-like status) in that she was well acquainted with physical suffering (she suffered from poor health throughout her life), established herself as a scholar at the ripe age of 12 (the age at which she was proficient in ancient Greek) and then died in her early 30s. Although perhaps a bit of a stretch in continuing with this unusual comparison (which for some strange reason I find difficult to resist) is the fact that, according to her biographer (as quoted on Wikipedia), Simone Pétrement, “ Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities to have love affairs in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged. From her late teenage years, Weil would generally disguise her ‘fragile beauty’ by adopting a masculine appearance, hardly ever using makeup and often wearing men's clothes”.
If Weil had a love life, perhaps it was with Francis of Assisi, whom she adored: “I fell in love with St. Francis since I first came to know about him. I have always believed and hoped that some day fate would drive me into the life of a vagabond and beggar that he entered freely”. While in Assisi in the spring of 1937, Weil experienced a religious ecstasy in the same church in which St Francis had prayed. Perhaps her love of St. Francis is what endeared Weil to Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who has perhaps more than any other single contemplative teacher influenced my own contemplative journey.
February 2, 2018
I listened to this as an audiobook which is not the way to take in a contemplative mystic, but it got me over the hump. I have had several failed attempts to read Waiting For God, and the audio got it done for me. I'm now on my second listen through and will likely consult my old paperback copy (different translation). I appreciate Weil's honesty as she weighs her understanding of spirituality against Catholic dogma and attempts to go where her reasoning takes her. She is spiritual but not religious par excellence.
August 8, 2023
Weil is such a fascinating character, one whom I’d label as rather tragic. Her writing, almost without exception, is interesting and thought-provoking, even when I don’t agree with her conclusions. That being said, I consider most of her stuff hit-or-miss. When she hits, boy howdy does she hit hard! And when she misses, you can sense that there’s some kind of hang-up at the level of her afflicted heart. It’s these small but steadfast hang-ups that seem to veer her off course.
Ultimately, I genuinely enjoy reading her works and will revisit them. She’s got some gut-punching reflections that will likely always fuel my times of prayer.
Ultimately, I genuinely enjoy reading her works and will revisit them. She’s got some gut-punching reflections that will likely always fuel my times of prayer.
April 13, 2020
8th time reading this and I have found something new to ponder every time. Inexhaustible wisdom.
December 5, 2023
An honest and intellectually rich exploration of faith, spirituality, and institutional religion from a fascinating mind. Not an easy read, she throws a lot of thought-provoking ideas at the reader in a short amount of time.
March 24, 2021
Friendship ended with church now Simone Weil is my best friend
July 2, 2025
I can't do greater justice to this book than by quoting it:
"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
"The great human error is to reason in place of finding out."
“The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen on the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”
"Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. All sins are attempts to fill voids."
"Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction."
"God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed."
"All things carefully considered, I believe they come down to this: what scares me is the Church as a social thing. Not solely because of her stains, but by the very fact that it is, among other characteristics, a social thing. Not that I am by temperament very individualistic. I fear for the opposite reason. I have in myself a strongly gregarious spirit. I am by natural disposition extremely easily influenced in excess, and especially by collective things. I know that if in this moment I had before me twenty German youth singing Nazi songs in chorus, part of my soul would immediately become Nazi. It is a very great weakness of mine. . . . I am afraid of the patriotism of the Church that exists in the Catholic culture. I mean ‘patriotism’ in the sense of sentiment analogous to an earthly homeland. I am afraid because I fear contracting its contagion. Not that the Church appears unworthy of inspiring such sentiment, but because I don’t want any sentiment of this kind for myself. The word ‘want’ is not accurate. I know— I sense with certainty— that such sentiment of this type, whatever its object might be, would be disastrous in me. Some saints approved the Crusades and the Inquisition. I cannot help but think they were wrong. I cannot withdraw from the light of conscience. If I think I see more clearly than they do on this point— I who am so far below them— I must allow that on this point they must have been blinded by something very powerful. That something is the Church as a social thing. If this social thing did such evil to them, what evil might it not also do to me, one who is particularly vulnerable to social influences, and who is infinitely feebler than they?"
"In any case, when I imagine baptism as the next concrete act toward my entry into the Church, no thought troubles me more than separating myself from the immense and afflicted mass of unbelievers. I have the essential need — and I think I can say the vocation — to mingle with people and various human cultures by taking on the same ‘color’ as them, at least to the degree that my conscience does not oppose it. I would disappear among them until they show me who they really are, without disguising themselves from me, because I desire to know them to the point that I love them just as they are."
"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
"The great human error is to reason in place of finding out."
“The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen on the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”
"Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. All sins are attempts to fill voids."
"Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction."
"God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed."
"All things carefully considered, I believe they come down to this: what scares me is the Church as a social thing. Not solely because of her stains, but by the very fact that it is, among other characteristics, a social thing. Not that I am by temperament very individualistic. I fear for the opposite reason. I have in myself a strongly gregarious spirit. I am by natural disposition extremely easily influenced in excess, and especially by collective things. I know that if in this moment I had before me twenty German youth singing Nazi songs in chorus, part of my soul would immediately become Nazi. It is a very great weakness of mine. . . . I am afraid of the patriotism of the Church that exists in the Catholic culture. I mean ‘patriotism’ in the sense of sentiment analogous to an earthly homeland. I am afraid because I fear contracting its contagion. Not that the Church appears unworthy of inspiring such sentiment, but because I don’t want any sentiment of this kind for myself. The word ‘want’ is not accurate. I know— I sense with certainty— that such sentiment of this type, whatever its object might be, would be disastrous in me. Some saints approved the Crusades and the Inquisition. I cannot help but think they were wrong. I cannot withdraw from the light of conscience. If I think I see more clearly than they do on this point— I who am so far below them— I must allow that on this point they must have been blinded by something very powerful. That something is the Church as a social thing. If this social thing did such evil to them, what evil might it not also do to me, one who is particularly vulnerable to social influences, and who is infinitely feebler than they?"
"In any case, when I imagine baptism as the next concrete act toward my entry into the Church, no thought troubles me more than separating myself from the immense and afflicted mass of unbelievers. I have the essential need — and I think I can say the vocation — to mingle with people and various human cultures by taking on the same ‘color’ as them, at least to the degree that my conscience does not oppose it. I would disappear among them until they show me who they really are, without disguising themselves from me, because I desire to know them to the point that I love them just as they are."
September 16, 2020
I finished this 2 months ago (sorry for the late review). I still can’t stop thinking about it.
Jersak’s translation and edition of the text allow Weil’s main ideas to bloom: each essay echoes the one before, unearthing a deeper meaning to Weil’s ideas on the connection between attention, charity, and justice.
Here are some repeated themes:
1. Humans have a natural tendency to hate the afflicted: the poor, lonely, destitute demand too
much from us, especially attention, which we can’t give. Most of the time, we have to pretend
they don’t exist.
2. Charity is a gift from God. Loving the afflicted means paying attention to them, but it is a
miracle.
3. In fact, loving the afflicted means seeing your neighbor as equal: you don’t see yourself as a
“giver,” and the afflicted don’t see themselves as the “given”: “If the gift [of bread] is well
given and well received, the passing of the piece from one human to the other is something
like true
communion.”
4. Paying attention to God, especially in prayer, is what saves the soul.
5. Punishment, if it comes from God, is a gift. Reward, if it does not come from God, is a curse.
Both reward and punishment from God allow Him to enter us: “The stone that kills and the
piece of bread that feeds have exactly the same virtue if Christ is present… Bread and stone are
love.”
6. Disobedience is impossible; obedience is embedded in the way things are (as the stone obeys
the law of gravity), but we can fix our gaze (attend… again) on Christ and be transformed in
the process.
Weil’s “Hesitations About Baptism” and “Letter to a Priest” are painful to read. They’re difficult to comment on, as they stem from what she believed was her calling to exist outside the church for the sake of others. She argues that the incarnational nature of Christ penetrates through all religions, leading her to believe that the Catholic church is catholic in name only.
Though I disagree with her here (and I’m glad Jersak saved these essays for last), I can respect that she followed her convictions through to the end.
I wrote an article on Weil for my church during the George Floyd murder here: https://www.christchurchbangkok.org/b...
Jersak’s translation and edition of the text allow Weil’s main ideas to bloom: each essay echoes the one before, unearthing a deeper meaning to Weil’s ideas on the connection between attention, charity, and justice.
Here are some repeated themes:
1. Humans have a natural tendency to hate the afflicted: the poor, lonely, destitute demand too
much from us, especially attention, which we can’t give. Most of the time, we have to pretend
they don’t exist.
2. Charity is a gift from God. Loving the afflicted means paying attention to them, but it is a
miracle.
3. In fact, loving the afflicted means seeing your neighbor as equal: you don’t see yourself as a
“giver,” and the afflicted don’t see themselves as the “given”: “If the gift [of bread] is well
given and well received, the passing of the piece from one human to the other is something
like true
communion.”
4. Paying attention to God, especially in prayer, is what saves the soul.
5. Punishment, if it comes from God, is a gift. Reward, if it does not come from God, is a curse.
Both reward and punishment from God allow Him to enter us: “The stone that kills and the
piece of bread that feeds have exactly the same virtue if Christ is present… Bread and stone are
love.”
6. Disobedience is impossible; obedience is embedded in the way things are (as the stone obeys
the law of gravity), but we can fix our gaze (attend… again) on Christ and be transformed in
the process.
Weil’s “Hesitations About Baptism” and “Letter to a Priest” are painful to read. They’re difficult to comment on, as they stem from what she believed was her calling to exist outside the church for the sake of others. She argues that the incarnational nature of Christ penetrates through all religions, leading her to believe that the Catholic church is catholic in name only.
Though I disagree with her here (and I’m glad Jersak saved these essays for last), I can respect that she followed her convictions through to the end.
I wrote an article on Weil for my church during the George Floyd murder here: https://www.christchurchbangkok.org/b...
February 10, 2023
Spoke My Language More Fluently Than Me
I started reading this book because it was suggested to me by a poet mentor in California. I am a poet as well. I found her writing so clear and yet so poetically beautiful as well. As I was reading, I felt so affirmed and confirmed of my faith the Church even today might see as questionable. I am a monk, and so I think some in the community perhaps do see my faith as questionable. But I found a superb theologian and philosopher that so revealed to me why I have the uncertainty about God that I do. She has also offered me the potential for a relationship with God that I didn't know I could have. Much of my uncertainty about God has diminished quite a bit after reading her. God is profoundly different from what I was taught throughout my life. What I didn't like about the book is perhaps at times her expositions of numerous reasons as to how the Church has diverged from the rich spiritual influences and adoption of the many thoughts, beliefs, theologies and traditions from the world around Christianity. She puts forward a weary number of examples throughout history of how the Church has become exclusive and intolerant. It's not that I don't agree with her, but her emotions and insistence on this point caused her to drive that point home. But that's such a small criticism, and it only took place in her last letter to a priest of the Catholic Church that gives a scathing critique of the Church and how it's actions has not only oppressed people outside of it but inside of it as well. I think some of her points are valid, but the Church has changed much since her time. I would recommend this book to those in and out of the Christian faith who have difficulty with the existence of God but are not convinced he doesn't exist. I would also recommend this book to those who feel are not willing to leave their intellect at the door when they enter a church. Her mind as well as her soul are magnificent!
I started reading this book because it was suggested to me by a poet mentor in California. I am a poet as well. I found her writing so clear and yet so poetically beautiful as well. As I was reading, I felt so affirmed and confirmed of my faith the Church even today might see as questionable. I am a monk, and so I think some in the community perhaps do see my faith as questionable. But I found a superb theologian and philosopher that so revealed to me why I have the uncertainty about God that I do. She has also offered me the potential for a relationship with God that I didn't know I could have. Much of my uncertainty about God has diminished quite a bit after reading her. God is profoundly different from what I was taught throughout my life. What I didn't like about the book is perhaps at times her expositions of numerous reasons as to how the Church has diverged from the rich spiritual influences and adoption of the many thoughts, beliefs, theologies and traditions from the world around Christianity. She puts forward a weary number of examples throughout history of how the Church has become exclusive and intolerant. It's not that I don't agree with her, but her emotions and insistence on this point caused her to drive that point home. But that's such a small criticism, and it only took place in her last letter to a priest of the Catholic Church that gives a scathing critique of the Church and how it's actions has not only oppressed people outside of it but inside of it as well. I think some of her points are valid, but the Church has changed much since her time. I would recommend this book to those in and out of the Christian faith who have difficulty with the existence of God but are not convinced he doesn't exist. I would also recommend this book to those who feel are not willing to leave their intellect at the door when they enter a church. Her mind as well as her soul are magnificent!
December 31, 2023
Over the past few years, I have read a number of books about 20th century women philosophers. The most recent one was “The Visionaries” by Wolfram Eilenberger, which covered Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil. Of these four, Weil struck me as by far the most interesting thinker - and different from my preconceptions about what a female philosopher should be like. In terms of her (short) life, her actions, and her ideas, I wanted to read more. “Awaiting God” provided a good opportunity to look in more detail.
The book combines the title tract with a series of letters and essays to others. Much of the book has to do with Weil’s thoughts about whether or not to be baptized. Along with this, these are a series of striking sections about thinking, dealing with a difficult world, and how to critically consider the role of the Catholic Church as a powerful social actor since the time of Constantine. The thinking is startlingly sharp and I must think about the various takeaways in much more depth. To provide just one example, the first chapter immediately discusses the importance of attention to thinking - and to science - and to prayer. Attention is critical for all three and is more than just trying to focus hard. I literally had to stop and consider this. I have not seen these ideas linked this way before.
I am definitely going to read more of here and very much enjoyed this short volume
The book combines the title tract with a series of letters and essays to others. Much of the book has to do with Weil’s thoughts about whether or not to be baptized. Along with this, these are a series of striking sections about thinking, dealing with a difficult world, and how to critically consider the role of the Catholic Church as a powerful social actor since the time of Constantine. The thinking is startlingly sharp and I must think about the various takeaways in much more depth. To provide just one example, the first chapter immediately discusses the importance of attention to thinking - and to science - and to prayer. Attention is critical for all three and is more than just trying to focus hard. I literally had to stop and consider this. I have not seen these ideas linked this way before.
I am definitely going to read more of here and very much enjoyed this short volume
October 10, 2022
Even as an audiobook, Simone Weil's words were often very difficult for me to understand. So, the rating may reflect my intellectual limitations rather than on her work.
I like Weil's concept that world religions are all but different 'languages' for interacting with God. She therefore chided Christian missionary work as it destroyed local people's ways of communicating with God. She outlines commonalities in writings and thought of different religions and the ancient Greeks with regards to rituals, mysticism and conversation (prayer) with God. Catholicism is her anker point in the book. She laments that she cannot accept baptism by the Catholic church since that would require her to abandon the truth that all religions are one and the same, human interaction with one God. Simone Weil appreciated, like I, the Bhagavad Gita.
Simon Weil is very critical of the role of the church as an institution, custodian of doctrines, and provider of religious education. That alone would be a great read for many American Christians, especially the nationalist fraction.
I appreciated most the Simone's letters in the second half of the book. I found those very insightful and less characterized by repetitions, probably a technique to illuminate an important point from slightly different perspectives.
I like Weil's concept that world religions are all but different 'languages' for interacting with God. She therefore chided Christian missionary work as it destroyed local people's ways of communicating with God. She outlines commonalities in writings and thought of different religions and the ancient Greeks with regards to rituals, mysticism and conversation (prayer) with God. Catholicism is her anker point in the book. She laments that she cannot accept baptism by the Catholic church since that would require her to abandon the truth that all religions are one and the same, human interaction with one God. Simone Weil appreciated, like I, the Bhagavad Gita.
Simon Weil is very critical of the role of the church as an institution, custodian of doctrines, and provider of religious education. That alone would be a great read for many American Christians, especially the nationalist fraction.
I appreciated most the Simone's letters in the second half of the book. I found those very insightful and less characterized by repetitions, probably a technique to illuminate an important point from slightly different perspectives.
March 7, 2022
Favorite Quote = “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
December 20, 2024
This is my first dip into Weil. I have a long way to go. I'm intrigued by her hangups on catholicity as much as her insights on the expansiveness of Christianity.
November 25, 2015
Simone Weil's writing is an exemplar of offering philosophical acuity to the tasks of spiritual ascesis and theological discipline. By far my favorite essay in this collection is the first, in which Weil's ability to weave philosophical learning and precision with spiritual discipline is at its height. She argues in this essay -- which, I believe, is paradigmatic for the whole collection to follow -- that all of education should serve as training in the virtue of "attention". Attention, understood as the work of suspending one's own predispositions and preferences so that the subject at hand can work on one's understanding, is training for the goal of the Christian life: prayer. Through giving oneself and one's attention to academic tasks -- mathematics, science, history, philosophy, theology -- especially when they are not one's preference, one fosters the virtue of attending to that which transcends oneself so that one might be changed through such an encounter.
Weil rightly argues that this is a fundamental virtue of prayer, and prayer is possible only insofar as we learn attention. The following chapters deal with various topics under a similar rubric: the nature of affliction, service to the poor, the Catholic faith.
The second part of the book is comprised of letters to her priest, mostly describing her conflicting feelings about becoming baptized. She was never baptized, and in these letters the reader listens in on penetrating self-analysis and rigorous reflection on the nature of the church and her perceived failings in its truly being "Catholic."
A very worthwhile read.
Weil rightly argues that this is a fundamental virtue of prayer, and prayer is possible only insofar as we learn attention. The following chapters deal with various topics under a similar rubric: the nature of affliction, service to the poor, the Catholic faith.
The second part of the book is comprised of letters to her priest, mostly describing her conflicting feelings about becoming baptized. She was never baptized, and in these letters the reader listens in on penetrating self-analysis and rigorous reflection on the nature of the church and her perceived failings in its truly being "Catholic."
A very worthwhile read.
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