Simone Weil on God, Religion and Mysticism

Simone Weil mysticism describes the religious experiences and ideas of the French philosopher, who reported contact with Christ while reciting a poem and developed a theology built on divine withdrawal, attention and self-emptying.

It sits at the centre of her late thought, which the guide to simone weil philosophy places alongside her ethics, politics and reading of the Greeks.

What “mysticism” means for Weil

Weil is often called a mystic, a label that also appears in the opening line of her Wikipedia biography, which describes her as a “French philosopher, mystic, political activist and labourer”. The word needs care. Her religious writing is not a retreat from the world. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, her turn to God occurred “not despite but, rather, because of her attention to reality and contact with the world”. Her spiritual turn grew out of the same concern for labour, suffering and social solidarity that shaped her earlier work.

Her writing on God also resists easy classification. Scholars describe a blend of Christian and Platonic ideas, with echoes of Greek tragedy, the Bhagavad Gita and other traditions. The Stanford entry calls her late metaphysics “both Christian and Platonic”. Readers who want a fuller picture of how those currents meet will find the Greek side explained in the guide’s other articles, while this one stays with her religious thought.

From agnostic upbringing to religious experience

According to Wikipedia, Weil was born into a secular household and raised in “complete agnosticism”. The same account records that she later described a Christian outlook running back to childhood, centred on love of one’s neighbour. Her own late essays, collected in Waiting for God, give the best-known account of how that outlook turned into direct religious experience.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises one of those experiences at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, where, suffering from headaches, she “found a joy so pure in Gregorian chant that, by analogy, she gained an understanding of the possibility of living divine love in the midst of affliction”, as the Stanford entry puts it. At Solesmes she also met the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert’s work. She reported that while reciting his poem “Love” with full attention, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me”.

Weil added a detail that matters to the question of mysticism: she thought God had prevented her from reading the mystics until after this contact, so that she could not say she had invented it. Whether that claim persuades a reader is a separate matter. The point for students is that her own account stresses surprise and passivity rather than a spiritual technique.

• Late metaphysics both Christian and Platonic: Late metaphysics both Christian and Platonic
• Herbert’s poem Love and Christ’s presence: Herbert’s poem Love and Christ’s presence
• Christ came down and took possession: Christ came down and took possession
• Creation theology: God withdrew: Creation theology: God withdrew
• Prisoners’ wall image: Prisoners’ wall image

A God who withdraws: creation, necessity and love

The most distinctive part of her religious thought is a theology of creation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises it this way: God, “as purely good, infinite, and eternal, withdrew (or reduced Godself) so that something else (something less than fully good, finite, and spatio-temporally determinate) could exist, namely, the universe”. Creation is therefore a kind of divine self-limitation, and existence itself is read as a sign of love.

The world that results is governed by what Weil calls necessity, the impersonal web of cause and effect, including social forces. The Stanford entry notes that necessity is “the screen” placed between God and creatures. One consequence is that providence is not found in occasional divine interventions. It is found, in the Stanford entry’s phrasing, by recognising “the universe in all its contingency as the sum of God’s intentions”.

Weil illustrated the paradox with an image of prisoners in adjoining cells who communicate by knocking on the wall, which both separates and connects them. In her words, quoted in the Stanford entry: “Every separation is a link.” Distance from God and connection to God are, on this reading, the same fact seen from two sides.

Gravity, grace and decreation

Two of her best-known terms belong here. In the Stanford account, gravity “signifies the forces of the natural world that subject all created beings physically, materially, psychologically, and socially”, pulling attention away from God and from the afflicted. Grace, “on the other hand, is a counter-balance, the motivation by and goodness of God”. The Stanford entry adds that these meet most prominently in the crucifixion, whose shape reflects the crossing of necessity and grace.

Humans, if they are to imitate a God who withdrew, must also give up claims to power and a place at the centre of the world. Weil calls this decreation, which the Stanford entry says she describes paradoxically as “passive activity”, drawing on her reading of the Bhagavad Gita for the related phrase “non-active action”. It is a withdrawal of the “I” so that reality and other people can be seen as they are. For that reason the term is ethical and epistemological as well as devotional.

The ethical side of this outlook, in which duties to other people come before claims, is developed in the guide to simone weil obligations and rights. The link between spiritual attention and the experience of labour is covered in the article on simone weil on work.

Atheism, imagination and the false God

Weil distrusted religious consolation. The Stanford entry reports that she criticised the imagination for producing false comforts that invite idolatry or self-satisfaction, and that she suggested “atheism can be a kind of purification insofar as it negates religious consolation that fills the void”. For those whose religion amounts to a God who smiles on them, atheism, in this reading, represents a necessary detachment.

The same entry says that for Weil love is pure not in the name of a personal God or a particular image, but when it is anonymous and universal. Scholars read this in different ways. Some stress its Christian character, since she links necessity and God’s love through Christ. Others stress its Platonic shape, echoing the distinction between the necessary and the good. The Stanford entry also notes that interest in her mysticism and “purifying atheism” among later French thinkers, including the younger Derrida, was strong but did not always last.

Weil and the Church

Weil’s relationship to organised religion remains one of the most discussed parts of her life. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in Marseilles she was introduced to the Dominican priest Joseph-Marie Perrin, “who became a close friend as well as a spiritual interlocutor, and through whom she began to consider the question of baptism”.

She did not take that step. Wikipedia reports that she was attracted to Catholicism but declined baptism, preferring to remain outside because of “the love of those things that are outside Christianity”. The same account quotes her as writing, “I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word”. Readers should take care with both statements. They come from her own letters and essays, and later writers have disagreed about how far she belonged to, or stood apart from, the Church. This site reports the positions without ruling between them.

Reading her death with care

Her death is also contested, and the question touches her religious reputation. Wikipedia notes that the coroner’s report said she killed herself “by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed”. It adds that the exact cause remains a subject of debate. Her biographer Simone Pétrement, according to the same account, regards the report as mistaken and argues that her poor health left her unable to eat. Her first English biographer, Richard Rees, wrote that any explanation “will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.” These accounts conflict, and none settles the matter.

Frequently asked questions

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