Gravity and Grace

A collection of short passages from the notebooks of the French philosopher Simone Weil, selected and arranged by her friend Gustave Thibon and published in 1947, four years after her death. Weil did not write it as a book. Its chapters gather fragments under headings such as the void, detachment, the self, decreation, attention and will, affliction, chance, necessity, beauty and the social 'great beast'. The title states the central idea. All the natural movements of the soul obey laws like those of physical gravity, pulling us towards self-interest and force and leading us to fill every emptiness with imagination. Grace is the only exception, and it can enter only where a void has been left open. Weil asks us to bear that void, to practise attention without seeking reward, and to undergo 'decreation', giving up the self that stands between God and creation. The style is compressed and often deliberately paradoxical.

It is the most widely read gathering of Weil's thought, and its pages on attention, affliction and the pull of the ego speak to religious and secular readers alike.