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  • Simone Weil:A Sense of God
  • J. Ranilo B. Hermida (bio)

There is a reality outside of the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere of whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.

Corresponding to this reality, at the center of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

Simone Weil, 1909–43

Prologue

There is one thread of thought no serious reader of Simone Weil can possibly miss from the variegated tapestry of her thinking. And that is her sense of God, which is almost naturally embedded therein. She unfailingly elevates her every insight to a level that is at once metaphysical or theological. Indeed, Weil considers all human concerns always "situated in the context of our relation to God."1 She excludes nothing for she believes that even those practices not readily recognized as religious contribute to our spiritual development and prepare us for loving God.2 [End Page 127]

Therefore, it may strike us as baffling that Weil, who is likened to some of the greatest of the early Fathers of the Church,3 makes this confession in her spiritual biography:

I may say that never at any moment in my life have I "sought for God." For this reason, which is probably too subjective, I do not like this expression and it strikes me as false. As soon as I reached adolescence, I saw the problem of God as a problem the data of which could not be obtained here below, and I decided that the only way of being sure not to reach a wrong solution, which seemed to me the greatest possible evil, was to leave it alone. So I left it alone. I neither affirmed nor denied anything. It seemed to me useless to solve the problem, for I thought that, being in this world, our business was to adopt the best attitude with regard to the problems of this world, and that such an attitude did not depend upon the solution of the problem of God.4

To anyone who has a studied familiarity with Weil, however, this paradox is immediately recognizable as a distinctive character of her work, thought, and her very life. Her penchant for integrating apparently contradictory elements constitutes her unique approach. As Christopher Frost and Rebecca Bell-Metereau point out,

While the mainstream of Western thought may be concerned with consistency, in considerable contrast Simone Weil, long before postmodernist and deconstructionist ideas became current, was concerned with recognizing the absence of consistency in life, the continual presence of reversals and contradictions, and the unavoidable existence of these even within "solutions" to problems of the human condition.5

That is not to say of course that all we encounter in the works of Weil are diverse and heterogeneous ideas. While, admittedly, Weil expressed herself in short essays, in thoughts randomly jotted in [End Page 128] notebooks, and in reflections recorded in personal journals, there is, nonetheless, a clearly identifiable coherence that unites her positions on a range of subjects close to her heart.

The purpose of this article is to focus on one of Weil's most defining viewpoints—namely, her sense of God—by drawing from some of her writings two main leitmotifs (discussed below under the headings "Decreation" and "Malheur"). How central to her thinking this is may be inferred from her unwavering conviction that reality is only transcendent. Weil therefore contends that a true reading of reality can only be done from the perspective of the divine.

In what may be considered another irony of her colorful life, Weil did not come upon her sense of God by way of her family influence. It could not have been so, for, as a matter of fact, she was born into and grew up in an agnostic Jewish family. Weil herself professed no religion and did not practice any. Neither did she discover this sense of God from her readings of mystical works for which she claimed she never felt an attraction. As she wrote, "I had never read any...

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