Simone Weil

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, political activist and Christian mystic. A student of the philosopher Alain, she taught in provincial lycées, worked for a year in Paris factories to share workers' conditions, and briefly joined anarchist forces in the Spanish Civil War. After mystical experiences in the late 1930s she wrote on God, affliction and attention while remaining outside the Church. She died in England in 1943 while working for the Free French. Nearly all her books, including Gravity and Grace and The Need for Roots, were published after her death.

Key ideas

• Attention, a patient and self-emptying openness, is the core of both study and prayer, and the rarest form of generosity.
• Affliction is more than suffering: it crushes body, soul and social standing at once.
• Decreation means giving up the self so that God and others can be.
• Rootedness, a living bond to a community, place and tradition, is a basic human need that modern society destroys.
• Obligations come before rights: a right means nothing unless someone recognises an obligation to honour it.

Major works

• Gravity and Grace (1947)
• The Need for Roots (1949)
• The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940)
• Waiting for God (1950)

In the Book corner

• Gravity and Grace 1947 (from notebooks of c. 1940–1942) · Intermediate
  A collection of short passages from the notebooks of the French philosopher Simone Weil, selected and arranged by her friend Gustave Thibon…
• The Need for Roots 1949 (written 1943) · Intermediate
  Simone Weil's last book, written in London in 1943 for the Free French, who had asked her for ideas on how France…

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• Journal Is a strike a kind of force? A crane operator’s case for the right to stop Hugo Marchetti · 2 replies