Gravity and Grace
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First published in French in 1947, two years after Simone Weil’s death, Gravity and Grace is a collection of philosophical and spiritual reflections drawn from her notebooks and assembled by the writer Gustave Thibon. Moving between brief meditations and searching fragments, Weil considers the nature of suffering, attention, necessity, beauty, love and the possibility of divine grace. Her central distinction is between gravity, the force that draws the human soul towards self-interest and illusion, and grace, which offers a way beyond the limits of the self.
Neither a conventional philosophical treatise nor a systematic work of theology, the book reveals the restless originality of one of the twentieth century’s most uncompromising thinkers. Shaped by Weil’s engagement with Christianity, Greek philosophy and the experience of human affliction, its reflections demand a rare honesty from the reader. Alongside Waiting for God, it remains one of her most influential works, offering a profound meditation on attention, spiritual freedom and the difficult passage from the self towards the good.
From the book
“What is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another (no matter whether his need be slight or great) the latter draws back from him? Gravity.”
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
On Gravity and Grace
“Time and again she pierces the veil of complacency and brings the reader face to face with the deepest levels of existence.”
— Church Times