Waiting for God, Gravity & Grace, & Selected Writings by Simone Weil
Reviewed by Eighth Day Books
Feast of St Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome
Anno Domini 2020, April 13
Waiting for God
by Simone Weil; introduction by Leslie Fiedler
Gravity and Grace
by Simone Weil; introduction by Gustave Thibon and Thomas R. Nevin
SIMONE WEIL
(1909-1943) has become emblematic of the political and spiritual agonies of our age and a sign of the inseparability of the two. A child of a nominally Jewish, bourgeois French family, she passed through commitments to Marxism, nihilism, and atheism to a fascination with the person of Christ: after a Holy Week service at Solesme in 1938, she claimed that “Christ came down and possessed” her. Yet, despite what Fiedler describes as the “terrible purity” of her life, her refusal to separate her philosophical convictions from the concrete action and direction of her life, and her love for God, she remained on the outskirts of the Church. Perhaps her baptism would have been inevitable given more time – in any case, her ambiguities seem to be a litmus test for the attitudes of those who read her: Nevin and Fiedler believe the question is simply evidence of a Catholic desire to claim her, while Springsted sees the question as an index of something else. Perhaps Weil could never resolve the tension between the institutional, the intellectual, and the mystical. Her writings collected in these three books are of a heart-rending earnestness, honesty, and longing. Waiting for God
collects her autobiography and some of her most important essays on religion; Gravity and Grace
is best described as a twentieth-century Pensées; and Springsted’s selection of writings draws from difficult to find letters and journal entries. Together, these books provide a portrait of a luminous yet fragmentary conversion, an unforgettable intensity.
Selected Writings 143 pp. paper $21.00
Waiting for God
208 pp. paper $15.99
Gravity and Grace
236 pp. paper $19.95
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