Searches for waiting for god simone weil usually mean one collection: letters and essays that Weil sent or entrusted to a Dominican priest, Father Perrin, including her “Spiritual Autobiography” and essays on attention, affliction and the love of God.
This page describes what the book contains and how it reached readers. For wider reading choices, see these simone weil books, which place the collection among her other titles.
What the book is
According to EBSCO’s research starter on the book, Waiting for God consists of letters and essays sent or entrusted to Father Perrin. The letters are represented by a set of six, beginning with a letter about her hesitations over baptism and ending with her “last thoughts”. The essays that follow carry the titles “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” “The Love of God and Affliction,” “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” and “Concerning the Our Father.”
The title was not Weil’s own choice. A review of the 2021 Routledge Classics edition notes that the French publishers’ note says the collection of letters and essays was given its title by the publisher. The same review records that the book has also appeared as Awaiting God and Waiting on God.
Father Perrin and how the collection came about
The same review in the journal Attention describes Perrin as the blind priest whom Weil met at a Dominican monastery in Marseilles. It also says he was the proximate cause of both the writing and the publishing of the material that became the book. Weil entrusted her letters to him, including the one now known as her spiritual autobiography.
The essay on school studies has a specific origin: according to the same review, it was written for Perrin’s students at the convent in Montpellier. The review adds that the first English edition replaced the introduction and notes by Perrin with a note from the French publishers, which says they were withdrawn at their request.
- Number of letters in the collection: six
- Essay titles: four essays
- Baptism letter distinguishes three domains: three
- Everything that comes about…: quote
- Love absolutely everything: quote
The letters: baptism, the cross and the spiritual autobiography
EBSCO’s summary says the letter about baptism distinguishes three domains: what lies outside human power, what lies under the will, and what depends on people only in part. Of the first she writes that “everything that comes about is in accordance with the will of God,” and the summary reports her view that one must “love absolutely everything”. Her stance on joining the Church is one of waiting: she says that if she came to deserve baptism, she would receive it “in the form God wills.” Details of the letter are in the same EBSCO entry.
The letter titled “Spiritual Autobiography” is the centre of the collection. In it, as EBSCO relays, Weil describes how her time in a factory made her aware of the affliction of others, and she describes a moment when “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” Another letter, titled “Her Intellectual Vocation,” explains that her calling required her to remain outside the Church “in order that I may serve God and the Christian faith in the realm of the intelligence.” Readers and scholars have taken these passages in different ways, and this page reports them rather than ruling on them.
The remaining letters show the same pattern of waiting. In the letter written as she prepared to leave France, EBSCO reports that she tells Father Perrin she is abandoning herself to a sense of being told to go, and that for her the haven is the cross. The last letter, “Last Thoughts,” develops the idea that “God’s mercy is manifest in affliction as in joy,” which the summary calls a very significant statement. Taken together, the EBSCO research starter presents the letters as the most direct route into her faith, because they are personal and go to the heart of her affliction.
The essays: attention, affliction and implicit love
EBSCO describes the school-studies essay as developing the idea that prayer consists of attention, so that study becomes a way of training the power of attention. It quotes her line that there is “a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it.” This essay is the clearest place to see why the book’s title fits: waiting, for Weil, is an active form of attention rather than passivity.
In “The Love of God and Affliction,” the same EBSCO entry says she treats both joy and affliction as ways of knowing God, describing affliction as “a marvel of divine technique.” The essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” argues, in EBSCO’s words, that the love of God includes and requires love of neighbor, love of the world’s order, love of religious practices, and friendship.
The same entry notes that the essay on implicit love also contains the statement that “contact with God is the true sacrament,” which she qualifies by adding that people whose love of God has made the pure loves of this life disappear are no true friends of God. For many readers this essay corrects the impression that her religious thought was only about solitude.
Editions, translation and reception
The Attention review gives the English publishing history: the earliest English edition appeared in Great Britain in 1951, and Routledge Classics issued a new edition in 2021 with a foreword by Malcolm Muggeridge and an introduction by Janet Soskice. The translator throughout is Emma Craufurd. The review quotes Soskice calling Weil’s version of Christianity “dark and shadowed by inexorability.”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Simone Weil lists the book in its bibliography with Craufurd as translator, the HarperCollins edition, and the French original, Attente de Dieu (literally “waiting for God”), published in Paris by Fayard in 1966.
Early reviewers disagreed about where the book points. The Attention review quotes a New York Times reviewer, John Cogley, who wrote that whether she was moving “towards Catholic orthodoxy, as Father Perrin believes, or the reinvention of certain ancient heresies, as some French theologians have suggested, will remain a fascinating question.” This site does not settle that question.
Reading the book alongside her other works
Waiting for God is often read for its religious content, but its essays also show how her ideas about attention and affliction fit together: attention in the school-studies essay leads directly to the help owed to someone in affliction. A reader who wants more of her political and social writing can consult the need for roots, which treats the spiritual needs of a society rather than an individual soul.
Gravity and Grace is a separate collection with its own history and contents, covered in the guide to the gravity and grace book; reading the two together shows how the same terms recur in different forms.
Frequently asked questions
Who wrote Waiting for God?
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Simone Weil wrote the letters and essays; the collection was given its title by the publisher, and Emma Craufurd translated it into English.
Who was Father Perrin?
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He was the blind Dominican priest to whom Weil sent or entrusted the letters and essays, according to the Attention review.
Does the book contain her spiritual autobiography?
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Yes. According to EBSCO, the letter titled “Spiritual Autobiography” is among the letters to Father Perrin.
Which essay deals with attention?
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“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” develops the idea that prayer consists of attention.