Gravity and Grace

Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills, 236 pages

Simone Weil was born into a French Jewish family in 1909, but renounced the faith in which she was raised to live her life on the periphery of Christianity, while rejecting nothing she came across which seemed of value to her in her studies, pulling in sources ranging from Virgil to Racine to the Upanishads.  Her relentless search for Truth was a search driven, above all, by her conviction that only an understanding that made suffering make sense could make the universe bearable.  The result is a via negativa so dark that it resembles Buddhism by way of Plotinus, regarding the cosmic void as the self-giving of God, and the object of the spiritual quest.  She died in exile in England in 1943, her death hastened by her fasting in solidarity with her countrymen living under German occupation.

Gravity and Grace collects items from her notebooks as fragments towards a never-finished work in the tradition of Pascal.  In another writer, it might be possible to blame the approach for decontextualizing her more unconventional beliefs - especially her Marcionite separation of the "God of the Christians" and "Jehovah" and her deep antagonism towards society and the political community (understandably exaggerated given the times in which she lived) - but with Weil those views become even more pronounced in her more developed work.  The presentation does have the effect of emphasizing the mystical aspects of her life and thought - in addition to some solid aphorisms, the best of Weil's fragments possess an uncanny Sibylline quality, promising wisdom to those who explore their mysteries.