The Gravity and Grace book is a collection of passages from Simone Weil’s notebooks, arranged by theme by her friend Gustave Thibon and published in French as La Pesanteur et la Grâce, “gravity and grace”.
Among simone weil books it is one that readers meet early, yet it was never planned as a book by its author, and that shapes how it is best read.
What the book is, and what it is not
According to the Wikipedia article on Weil, the work “consists of various passages selected from Weil’s notebooks and arranged topically by her friend Gustave Thibon”. The same article adds that Weil had given Thibon some of her notebooks written before May 1942, but not with any intent to publish them.
In other words, the volume is an editor’s selection rather than a treatise composed by Weil. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists the French edition in its bibliography as published in Paris by Librairie Plon in 1947, and the same entry names Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr as translators of the Routledge English edition.
The Routledge catalogue page describes Thibon as “the farmer to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death”. Readers who come to the book expecting a continuous argument, as in a conventional philosophical monograph, will instead meet short, self-contained fragments that circle a handful of recurring themes.
How Thibon shaped the text
Because Thibon chose and ordered the passages, his judgment runs through the finished book. The Wikipedia article notes that the “selections, organization and editing” were “much influenced by Thibon, a devout Catholic”, and it points readers to Thibon’s own introduction for his account of the work.
The volume is therefore both a doorway into Weil’s religious reflection and a text whose arrangement reflects an editor’s priorities. Whether a different editor would have produced a different emphasis is a question that readers and specialists weigh for themselves, and the volume’s own introduction is the best starting point for the editor’s reasoning. Further reading on this kind of question is gathered under simone weil scholarship.
What the book contains
The Routledge table of contents shows a book organised by topic, with short chapters rather than a chronological sequence. Among the headings are these:
- The Self, Decreation and Self-Effacement
- Necessity and Obedience
- Illusions, Idolatry, Love and Evil
- Affliction, Violence and The Cross
- Atheism as a Purification
- Attention and Will
- Training, Intelligence and Grace
- Metaxu
- Beauty and The Social Imprint
- The Great Beast and Social Harmony
- The Mysticism of Work
This spread shows why the book is so often used as a compact map of Weil’s vocabulary. Terms such as decreation, affliction, attention and metaxu (the Greek term she used in her notebooks for her concept of “intermediaries”, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains) all appear under their own headings.
Gravity and grace: the central pairing
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that gravity (pesanteur) signifies “the forces of the natural world that subject all created beings physically, materially, psychologically, and socially”, and that it works as a downward pull on the attention, away from God and the afflicted. Grace, in the same account, is a counter-balance, the motivation by and goodness of God.
The entry adds that, for Weil, gravity (force) and grace (justice) are the two fundamental aspects of the created world, coming together most prominently in the crucifixion. Weil’s own images in the book are often compact. The Wikipedia article quotes her passage on a wall between neighbouring cells, where she writes: “Every separation is a link.” The same article quotes her on beauty: “The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it.”
These ideas are explained at more length in separate guides on the site; the book itself presents them as fragments, and readers differ on how far the fragments add up to a system. How Weil’s religious position should be described is also contested, which is why the entries cited here attribute each description to its source rather than settle it.
Other themes a reader meets early
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls attention Weil’s central ethical concept and says that attention resists the natural tendency of humans to seek control and dominance over others. In the book, the theme of attention sits beside chapters on will and training, so a reader can follow how she links concentration of mind to moral life.
The same entry describes affliction as something that contradicts a self-centred view of the world and forcefully de-centers the self. This helps explain why chapters on affliction, violence and the cross appear close together in the contents, and why the book is often read as a study of how people are pulled down by circumstance and how they might be opened to something beyond it.
Her remarks on justice and beauty belong here too. The Wikipedia article gives this line from the book: “Justice consists in seeing that no harm comes to those whom we have noticed as real beings.” Taken with her saying about beauty, it shows how the notebooks tie ethics to perception, to looking at things and people without trying to possess them.
Editing questions and reception
The Routledge page presents the Routledge Classics edition as offering the complete text for the first time in English, by adding a newly commissioned translation of what it calls the “controversial chapter on Israel”, and it notes the first English edition by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1952. The word “controversial” is Routledge’s own; the page does not set out the arguments, so this site does not either.
On reception, the same page collects commendations. It quotes T. S.
Reading the book alongside Weil’s other works
Because the volume draws on notebook entries, it is natural to ask where the full notebooks stand. The Routledge page for The Notebooks of Simone Weil says they were originally published posthumously in two volumes and are among the very few unedited personal writings of Weil’s that still survive. Reading them next to the thematic selection lets a reader see passages in their original surroundings.
For a collection of her letters and essays on faith, the companion title is covered in the guide to waiting for god simone weil, which also involves Thibon as editor.
Frequently asked questions
Who wrote Gravity and Grace?
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The words are Simone Weil’s, taken from her notebooks. The selection and arrangement were made by Gustave Thibon, which is why catalogues often credit both.
Did Weil intend the notebooks to be published as a book?
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Who translated the Routledge Classics edition?
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s bibliography names Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr as the translators of the Routledge edition.
Is the book a good place to begin reading Weil?
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It offers a compact view of her main vocabulary, though its fragmentary, editor-arranged form means that some readers prefer to start with a continuous essay and return to the book afterwards.