Emerging from the thought-provoking discussions and correspondence Simone Weil had with the Reverend Father Perrin, this classic collection of essays contains the renowned philosopher and social activist's most profound meditations on the relationship of human life to the realm of the transcendent. An enduring masterwork and "one of the most neglected resources of our century" (Adrienne Rich), Waiting for God will continue to influence spiritual and political thought for centuries to come.
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Simone Weil is an outsider's saint. The daughter of an agnostic French family of Jewish descent, Weil was never baptized ("God does not want me in the Church," she wrote), and her conversion to Christianity at the age of 23 took her by surprise. Until then, she had been a solemn, committed leftist intellectual. Now she was moving toward a life of divine encounters whose desolate ecstasy, as described by the journals, letters, and essays excerpted in Waiting for God, bear comparison to St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. As Leslie Fiedler writes in her introduction to Weil's book, "She speaks of the problems of belief in the vocabulary of the unbeliever, of the doctrines of the Church in the words of the unchurched." The book is most notable for Weil's lengthy letter titled "Spiritual Autobiography" and for her "Meditation on the Pater Noster," which is the discursive record of a spiritual process that led to her almost daily attainment of a mystical vision of God. This is not pretty writing; it is an agonized record of amazement. --Michael Joseph Gross
--This text refers to an alternate
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"Almost too important to be included in one's list of preferred reading for one year only." -- T. S. Eliot
"By now Simone Weil has become a legend and her writings are regarded as a classic document of our period." -- The New Yorker
"In an age of inspirational books without inspiration, her writing is unmatched for surprising, sometimes shocking, spiritual insight." -- New York Times
"Madameoiselle Weil is the most truly spiritual writer of this century." -- André Gide
"One of the most neglected resources of our century." -- Adrienne Rich --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
"By now Simone Weil has become a legend and her writings are regarded as a classic document of our period." -- The New Yorker
"In an age of inspirational books without inspiration, her writing is unmatched for surprising, sometimes shocking, spiritual insight." -- New York Times
"Madameoiselle Weil is the most truly spiritual writer of this century." -- André Gide
"One of the most neglected resources of our century." -- Adrienne Rich --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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82 of 83 people found the following review helpful
By puritanfan
Format:Paperback
Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a remarkable saint of the modern era. After being raised in a Jewish middle class family and graduating from the finest schools, she went to work in the inner city as a blue-collar factory worker. She once complained to the supervisor about a coal drill: "This drill was designed to break rocks. It was not designed for human hands" while illustrating the vibrating effects with her arms. She reportedly debated Trotsky on the living conditions of the proletariat into the ground.
Weil died of physical and mental exhaustion at age 34 after an arduous life of fasting, writing, and working in solidarity with the most downtrodden of society. Besides her amazing solidarity with the working class, it is Weil's profound writings that have established her legacy. Contemporary Albert Camus called her "the only great spirit of our time." T.S. Eliot wrote in his forward to one of her books: "We must expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of a saint." In his essay titled, "The Importance of Simone Weil," Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "France offered a rare gift to the contemporary world in the person of Simone Weil." Waiting for God (Harper Perennial, 2001) is the best introduction to her spiritual writings, and what follows are some highlights from that work.
The first few chapters consist of letters she wrote to her friend, Father Perrin. Though one gets a better sense of how she felt and struggled daily living out her ideas, it is her four essays in the latter half of the book that show the most profundity and coherence of thought. Every page, nearly every paragraph has such significance, one cannot finish reading an essay without being ravished through the direction of one who knew the spiritual life as deeply as she did.
When I first read the essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God," I was having trouble picking up a case to read for law school. It seemed pointless especially since I had already decided to become a pastor rather than an attorney. But Weil showed me that "the key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention." (p.58). She states, "Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer." (p.59) This explains why Weil mastered several languages including Sanskrit and a wide range of academic subjects: they helped her to pray more effectively. She exhorts, "Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within himself has lost a great treasure." (p.64)
In another application, Weil insightfully states that studying also helps one love his neighbor. She explains, "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention." (p.64) Hence studying helps enable the soul to "[empty] itself of all its contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth." (p.65) The immeasurable help that studying can bring to others is captured in this thought: "The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle." (p.64)
In the next essay "The Love of God and Affliction," Weil writes:
"The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. It is not surprising that the innocent are killed, tortured, driven from their country, made destitute . . .since there are criminals to perform such actions. It is not surprising either that disease is the cause of long sufferings, which paralyze life and make it into an image of death, since nature is at the mercy of the blind play of mechanical necessities. But it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign lord. At the very best, he who is branded by affliction will keep only half his soul." (p.69)
Weil defines affliction as the experience of "physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time." (p.81) She analogizes it to a nail that God uses to pierce the center of one's soul, to leave the person as it were crucified, where he or she can experience God most intimately as Job and Christ did in view of God's apparent absence.
But Weil warns that amidst affliction, if one does not strain to hear an absent God in silence, or feel the beauty of God in the world's absolute obedience to Him, then the person remains like a slave with half a soul. For "sin is not a distance," according to Weil, "it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction." (p.73) In other words, losing hope is a greater sin than acknowledging one's feelings of abandonment by God. She elaborates that just as two strangers may be near but not together and two friends may be apart but still near, "God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. . . . That is why the Cross is our only hope." (p.75)
In her essay "Forms of the Implicit Love of God," Weil comments on four loves: of neighbor, the order of the world, religious practices, and friendship. Regarding love for our neighbor, she profoundly states, "The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of our neighbor and justice." (p.85) She explains that "the supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship." (p.85) Thus a believer cannot show love to his poor neighbor if he assumes that he is reaching down or doing the impoverished person a favor.
Instead a believer must seek to reaffirm the dignity of this person made in God's image before seeking to help him. (p.88) Weil comments that "[i]t is not surprising that a man who has bread should give a piece to someone who is starving. What is surprising is that he should be capable of doing so with so different a gesture from that with which we buy an object. Almsgiving when it is not supernatural is like a sort of purchase. It buys the sufferer." (p.91) The beauty of the inseparability of justice and love is that it creates solidarity between rich and poor, and allows the coexistence of generosity and respect. In this way of "creative attention" we become God-like. Weil elaborates:
"God alone has this power, the power really to think into being that which does not exist. Only God, present in us, can really think the human quality into the victims of affliction, can really look at them with a look differing from that we give to things, can listen to their voice as we listen to spoken words. Then they become aware that they have a voice, otherwise they would not have occasion to notice it. . . . God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and those who receive meet." (p.93-4)
Regarding love of the order of the world, Weil writes, "[T]he soul's natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high." (p.103). She describes the beauty of the world as "Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter." (p.104) Weil however laments that too many treat the dim reflections of God's beauty on earth as the final and only reality (as manifested in luxury, art, science). (p.106-8) This locating the absolute in pleasure is the "crime of idolatry." (p.111)
On the love of religious practices, the thought most associated with Weil's contribution to spirituality is that "one of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us." (p.125) She offers the illustration: "The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it." (p.125) Weil is adamant that "the will cannot produce any good in the soul." (p.126) She writes:
"That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way . . . not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed." (p.127)
To the contrary, Weil emphasizes that "the effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent." (p.126) In other words, "[t]he crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience." (p.126) Thus, Weil exhorts, "it is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that befits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire." (p.125)
She distinguishes between morality, which depends on the will, and religion, which consists of desire, and concludes, "It is desire that saves" and again "to long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save us." (p. Read more ›
Weil died of physical and mental exhaustion at age 34 after an arduous life of fasting, writing, and working in solidarity with the most downtrodden of society. Besides her amazing solidarity with the working class, it is Weil's profound writings that have established her legacy. Contemporary Albert Camus called her "the only great spirit of our time." T.S. Eliot wrote in his forward to one of her books: "We must expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of a saint." In his essay titled, "The Importance of Simone Weil," Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "France offered a rare gift to the contemporary world in the person of Simone Weil." Waiting for God (Harper Perennial, 2001) is the best introduction to her spiritual writings, and what follows are some highlights from that work.
The first few chapters consist of letters she wrote to her friend, Father Perrin. Though one gets a better sense of how she felt and struggled daily living out her ideas, it is her four essays in the latter half of the book that show the most profundity and coherence of thought. Every page, nearly every paragraph has such significance, one cannot finish reading an essay without being ravished through the direction of one who knew the spiritual life as deeply as she did.
When I first read the essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God," I was having trouble picking up a case to read for law school. It seemed pointless especially since I had already decided to become a pastor rather than an attorney. But Weil showed me that "the key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention." (p.58). She states, "Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer." (p.59) This explains why Weil mastered several languages including Sanskrit and a wide range of academic subjects: they helped her to pray more effectively. She exhorts, "Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within himself has lost a great treasure." (p.64)
In another application, Weil insightfully states that studying also helps one love his neighbor. She explains, "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention." (p.64) Hence studying helps enable the soul to "[empty] itself of all its contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth." (p.65) The immeasurable help that studying can bring to others is captured in this thought: "The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle." (p.64)
In the next essay "The Love of God and Affliction," Weil writes:
"The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. It is not surprising that the innocent are killed, tortured, driven from their country, made destitute . . .since there are criminals to perform such actions. It is not surprising either that disease is the cause of long sufferings, which paralyze life and make it into an image of death, since nature is at the mercy of the blind play of mechanical necessities. But it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign lord. At the very best, he who is branded by affliction will keep only half his soul." (p.69)
Weil defines affliction as the experience of "physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time." (p.81) She analogizes it to a nail that God uses to pierce the center of one's soul, to leave the person as it were crucified, where he or she can experience God most intimately as Job and Christ did in view of God's apparent absence.
But Weil warns that amidst affliction, if one does not strain to hear an absent God in silence, or feel the beauty of God in the world's absolute obedience to Him, then the person remains like a slave with half a soul. For "sin is not a distance," according to Weil, "it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction." (p.73) In other words, losing hope is a greater sin than acknowledging one's feelings of abandonment by God. She elaborates that just as two strangers may be near but not together and two friends may be apart but still near, "God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. . . . That is why the Cross is our only hope." (p.75)
In her essay "Forms of the Implicit Love of God," Weil comments on four loves: of neighbor, the order of the world, religious practices, and friendship. Regarding love for our neighbor, she profoundly states, "The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of our neighbor and justice." (p.85) She explains that "the supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship." (p.85) Thus a believer cannot show love to his poor neighbor if he assumes that he is reaching down or doing the impoverished person a favor.
Instead a believer must seek to reaffirm the dignity of this person made in God's image before seeking to help him. (p.88) Weil comments that "[i]t is not surprising that a man who has bread should give a piece to someone who is starving. What is surprising is that he should be capable of doing so with so different a gesture from that with which we buy an object. Almsgiving when it is not supernatural is like a sort of purchase. It buys the sufferer." (p.91) The beauty of the inseparability of justice and love is that it creates solidarity between rich and poor, and allows the coexistence of generosity and respect. In this way of "creative attention" we become God-like. Weil elaborates:
"God alone has this power, the power really to think into being that which does not exist. Only God, present in us, can really think the human quality into the victims of affliction, can really look at them with a look differing from that we give to things, can listen to their voice as we listen to spoken words. Then they become aware that they have a voice, otherwise they would not have occasion to notice it. . . . God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and those who receive meet." (p.93-4)
Regarding love of the order of the world, Weil writes, "[T]he soul's natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high." (p.103). She describes the beauty of the world as "Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter." (p.104) Weil however laments that too many treat the dim reflections of God's beauty on earth as the final and only reality (as manifested in luxury, art, science). (p.106-8) This locating the absolute in pleasure is the "crime of idolatry." (p.111)
On the love of religious practices, the thought most associated with Weil's contribution to spirituality is that "one of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us." (p.125) She offers the illustration: "The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it." (p.125) Weil is adamant that "the will cannot produce any good in the soul." (p.126) She writes:
"That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way . . . not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed." (p.127)
To the contrary, Weil emphasizes that "the effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent." (p.126) In other words, "[t]he crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience." (p.126) Thus, Weil exhorts, "it is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that befits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire." (p.125)
She distinguishes between morality, which depends on the will, and religion, which consists of desire, and concludes, "It is desire that saves" and again "to long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save us." (p. Read more ›
42 of 43 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
No one writes of the ancient conundrum of why a loving God allows suffering more profoudly than Simone Weil. Indeed, "profound" is the word I would use to describe this book. You do not read this book, you experience it; and come to a state of awe and yes, even love for this extraordinary saint of our times. The paradox of Weil is that in her severe view of life, great solace is to be found--the solace of truth and wisdom when you know, indeed, feel you have encountered it. In conclusion, let me paraphrase the author: it is impossible to think about Simone Weil without thinking about God. Amen.
38 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is indeed a classic, but like many classics, it demands your full attention. The letters contained in the book make for fascinating reading, especially the Spiritual Autobiography. This is indeed the "easier reading" part of the book, but it gives you the sense of a person who values total obedience to God even if it marks her as an outsider. She is not afraid to be unconventional, as far as it concerns the institutional Church. The essays are a little more challenging, especially the lengthy essay "Forms of the Implicit Love of God," where I had difficulty along the way grasping all that she was saying. However, at the end, she pulls it all together brilliantly in the story of Electra and Orestes, where the importance of waiting on God rather than seeking is brought home forcefully. The final essay, "Concerning the Our Father" is classic, especially the last three paragraphs that point out the structure and the flow of this prayer and the effect it has on one's soul. The only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of 5 are for the places it seems to bog down, but that may be more a fault of mine than the author's.
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Published 3 days ago by Lyja Sam
5.0 out of 5 stars
Blown away at my first reading of Weil
Divided into a bio/intro, a series of letters to a Catholic priest (though not the replies), and several essays, "Waiting for God" is a very uneven and choppy book, and not at all... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Christopher J Yurkanin
5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent, comprehensive while not overwhelming introduction to this,...
We need now to know this saint, and this rather slim and portable if unfortunately titled (a gauche and superfluous reference to Samuel Beckett? Read more
Published 13 months ago by C. Scanlon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy Me!
This book is so wonderful.
Please buy it.
It may convince you that the Cross is pivotal not only in the spiritual life, but also in the life of society, and... Read more
Please buy it.
It may convince you that the Cross is pivotal not only in the spiritual life, but also in the life of society, and... Read more
Published 21 months ago by R. Scanlon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Someone I wish I had known
I came across Simone Weil thirty years ago and was struck by her insight and wisdom. Now, having experienced both life on life's terms and the church universal as it is, I find... Read more
Published on September 26, 2010 by Joel B. Reed
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too much time on her hands
At the start of my review of Waiting for God, let me confess that I only made it about two thirds of the way through the book. Read more
Published on July 17, 2010 by J Martin Jellinek
5.0 out of 5 stars
wanted to read some lives of some famous christian saints but
wanted to read some lives of some famous christian saints but didnt really exactly more thumb thru but it just wasnt there too devotional could be now whats her name she was... Read more
Published on July 10, 2009 by Person
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life changing
I guess when one is ready for certain changes in one's life God leads us to those things that will best facilitate that change. Read more
Published on April 13, 2007 by Bonnie Hamilton
2.0 out of 5 stars
a bit unorthodox, to say the least
I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. I was hoping to give this book to my brother-in-law, someone with a Catholic upbringing but a Marxist philosophy now- a bit of the... Read more
Published on February 9, 2006 by Glenn Yates
5.0 out of 5 stars
WAITING FOR GOD
I first tried to read this book decades ago, but could not get far with it. Then I read Iris Murdoch's, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, in which IM refers to Simone Weil and her... Read more
Published on March 5, 2003
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 2
books:
100
books
cite this book:
See all 100 books citing this book
- The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (Routledge Classics) by Simone Weil in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- Gravity and Grace (Routledge Classics) by Simone Weil in Front Matter
- Simone Weil: "The Just Balance" (Modern European Philosophy) by Peter Winch on 13 pages
- A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants: Deluxe Gift edition by Rueben P. Job on 12 pages
- Simone Weil (Penguin Lives) by Francine Du Plessix Gray on 11 pages
- A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants by Rueben P. Job on 11 pages
- The Sacred in Music by Albert L. Blackwell on 5 pages
See all 100 books citing this book
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