Simone Weil as she presents her thoughts in this work is a Christian Platonist in the Platonic mystic tradition, somewhat distrustful of social institutions including any established church, primarily concerned with the personal spiritual journey but also in how that guides ethical action. The principles she discusses are meant to be timeless but are presented in a way accessible to modern secular thought, while not being "of" that origin.
The primary influences over Weil readily detected in her work by those familiar with them are Plato, the gospels and New Testament generally, St Francis of Assisi and St John of the Cross. Besides Plato, she shows a thorough and scholarly awareness of the Greek classics, and in places the influence of (or convergence with) St Augustine can be seen, but without citing him by name.
Notably Weil's conception of God is as the idea of the good and as the truth, while explicitly identifying both with Christ. She also shares Augustine's Platonic conception that our good acts are best thought of as the acts of God as the good itself acting through us, while our evil acts are our own - though often also associated with a blind natural mechanism. She also shares with the medieval and early modern mystics the language of love applied to acceptance of God's grace.
Weil has a developed view of how natural psychology works in the absence of grace - the "gravity" of the title - in which concern with power and dignity form a closed arena of struggle, in which a Nietzsche, Machiavelli, or Thrasymachus would feel at home. This conception also aligns with the Hegelian dialectic of masters and slaves struggling tragically for "recognition", which she would likely see in much of modern philosophy and social science. For her, this is what human life would look like without grace, without the action of true goodness, and without authentic religion in the world.
Weil has a definite view of what human spiritual freedom consists in, and that view is that it is a matter primarily of attention (and desire for the good), not of anything properly described as will. If we turn out attention toward the good itself and toward God and hold it there resolutely, the good itself will gradually purge us of our natural spiritual evil. She is adamant that this is not our acts but the acts of grace upon us, to which we must consent. Most flee from this into self deceptions that excuse our natural evil and spare us this transformation.
Weil has a deep and nuanced appreciation for affliction and for suffering, and the role these play both within us and without us in our spiritual orientation. She recognizes that crushing affliction threatens not just our happiness or pleasure but our soul. Naturally speaking, there is a limit of affliction beyond which we do not have the power to bear it with patience ourselves, but it must breed resentment - of others or, more deeply, of the nature of existence itself. The spiritual difficulty and task is to transmute such affliction into what she terms suffering, accepted and endured in a redemptive fashion, without loss of our love for other people and for life. She argues plausibly that only a kind of grace from outside our own lives and resources, from a good placed beyond earthly existence and made the focus of our sustained spiritual attention, can perform this through us.
Weil is noteworthy for her intellectual honesty and rigor, for her refusal to sugar coat anything she says, and for avoiding all "cant" and dogma. She presents a very attractive understanding of beauty as the sign of the divine (of good and of love), that is readily accessible to secular minded moderns. These conceptions can be traced to her Platonism, but they are also distinctly her own in their formulation and in their fitness for modern people.
I would chose the following 2 passages from her work (to give a sense of her appeal to philosophically open minded readers new to her and to this entire sort of spirituality. The first from an essay "the forms of the implicit love of God", collected with others in the work Waiting for God. The second is from Gravity and Grace, in the section entitled "Chance".
"In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It goes on crying just the same."
"The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also by chance. They will die. What they think, say and do is limited and is a mixture of good and evil. I have to know this with all my soul and not love them the less. I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things... The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence."
Overall I can highly recommend this work. It will make you think, it will also make you feel deeply. The good might use it to do still more with some of us.
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