All reviews I have seen say that this is a great book of writings of a great mystic ... and I do not doubt any of this; but I did not find it compelling. Much of it I did not understand; some parts I simply did not find convincing. Having said this, I am assuming that so many people could not be wrong, and accepting that I was not competent to get value from the book. ( )

I see that I'm the only Early Reviewer so far who had not read Simone Weil. I've had her on my radar since reading a small excerpt of something in a French course 50+ years ago, so I jumped at this ER offering. I read a bit, and then I put off reading more for about eight months. Weil pretty much demands slow reading and much thinking, and I wasn't in a place to follow through.
I have tried though..... I try at least to follow her thought if not her spirit. Usually, I get thought one. I follow thought two. Thought three I find brilliant and insightful. Thoughts four and beyond, I cannot follow at all. I love that she pairs love and justice and compassion and gratitude. These anchor her mysticism and thought in this world. I love paragraphs like this one:
"The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation. It is mistaken if it thinks it is anything else. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it. It is therefore wrong to reproach the mystics, as has been done sometimes, because they use love's language. It is theirs by right. Others only borrow it."
I do less well with her exposition of the void and grace, but I'll probably try again when I have more wit or maturity about me. I think readers exploring their spirituality, whatever their tradition or lack of one, may profitably read this little book.

This book of Simone Weil excerpts is part of the publisher's Backpack Classics series. Plough Publishing intends the series to offer "time-tested, life-changing wisdom from spiritual masters" in "compact, portable books that can be absorbed at one sitting and revisited often." Other volumes in the works for this compact series include selections from other engaging mystics, poets, and thinkers like Hildegard of Bingen, Pascal, Kierkegaard, William Blake, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. The book on Weil offers some of her most quotable bits, with the majority from Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God.

I like it, but am glad I already own her full works. I think this would make a nice gift, given the smart size of the book, its colorful cover, and the decent quality paper used within, if I wanted to introduce a friend or young reader to enough Weil to make them curious to read more. ( )

It seems like wherever I turn, whatever I read lately, I run into Simone Weil. I find references to her everywhere: in articles or in books, sometimes fiction, sometimes non-fiction, sometimes in my ever-deepening yoga practice. So, I read and reviewed her wonderful book, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, for my private press blog, thewholebookexperience.com. And then, when I saw that LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program had this Weil title I immediately requested it.

Simone Weil was an agnostic until she had a religious experience that brought Christ into her life. Though she remained unaffiliated with any of the established Christian churches, she became a kind of modern Christian mystic, and her writings seem to appeal to all because of this outsider status. Laurie Gagne notes in her introduction that:

“Christians and atheists alike seemed to find in Weil a corrective to the burgeoning consumer culture that threatened to stifle the life of the mind and the soul. The French philosopher Albert Camus, for example, known for his depiction of a moral landscape without God, praised this lover of God extravagantly, calling her "the only great spirit of our time."

[Susan] Sontag wrote “In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world…” And Simone de Beauvoir envied her for having "a heart that could beat right across the world."’

The last time I bumped into Simone Weil was in the reading of the excellent book, ‘Ardor’, by Roberto Calasso, which I was reading to understand more about the Vedic culture and philosophy that underpin the yoga that I study and teach. He credited her lucidity with helping to refute societies’ dogmatic belief and show that "The imperfect proceeds from the perfect and not the other way around.” He also stated that she was one of the few that was willing and able to discuss the 'religion of society,' which he calls “the highest form of superstition.”

When I read Weil I find many parallels with my yogic studies. This is not surprising as Weil learned Sanskrit after reading the Bhagavad Gita. This passage, from the essay “The Right Use of School Studies” could easily be a commentary on the concentration/meditation (Dharana/Dhyana) of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra:

“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but read to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”

If she was familiar with the Gita, she may well have been familiar with the Sutras or other yogic texts.

Weil offers much that could be of use to American Christians in the midst of Trump’s Immigration policies and the general demonization of immigrants and others in our country. In the piece “To Love Your Neighbor”, she talks about a teaching that is often ignored in our ‘everyone for themselves’ materialistic culture and in this age of nation states:

“Christ does not call his benefactors loving or charitable. He calls them just. The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of our neighbor and justice...We have invented the distinction between justice and charity. It is easy to understand why. Our notion of justice dispenses him who possesses from the obligation of giving. If he gives all the same, he thinks he has a right to be pleased with himself. He thinks he has done a good work. As for him who receives, it depends on the way he interprets this notion whether he is exempted from all gratitude or whether it obliges him to offer servile thanks.”

And

“He who treats as equals those who are far below him in strength really makes them a gift of the quality of human beings, of which fate had deprived them. As far as it is possible for a creature, he reproduces the original generosity of the Creator with regard to them.
This is the most Christian of virtues.”

This is powerful writing and it is easy to see why her views might clash with church dogma and the establishment and lead to her classification as a “mystic” and to be seen as a bit off-kilter. She felt very keenly the plight of the poor, disadvantaged, powerless, and the “invisibles”. She quotes that “A popular Spanish song says in words of marvelous truth: "If anyone wants to make himself invisible, there is no surer way than to become poor." But that “Love sees what is invisible.” She felt strongly enough to experience these things herself, forsaking her borgeouis roots to work in a factory and trying to find a way to work with the Free French resistance in WWII.

Her writing under the heading of ‘For Love of Beauty’ was another of my favorites in this collection. She notes the importance of beauty in the world and the fact that it was crucially important to the ancient traditions of most nations, including the Stoics of Greece and the primitive Christians. She notes that it is there to see in the writings of Saint John but then disappears in the later Christian tradition. Why? She goes on to say that

“All the things that we take for ends are means. That is an obvious truth. Money is the means of buying, power is the means of commanding. It is more or less the same for all the things that we call good.
Only beauty is not the means to anything else. It alone is good in itself, but without our finding any particular good or advantage in it. It seems itself to be a promise and not a good. But it only gives itself; it never gives anything else.”

And then she ties it into her Christian faith by stating that

“The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation. It is mistaken if it thinks it is anything else. the Incarnation alone can satisfy it. It is therefore wrong to reproach the mystics, as has been done sometimes, because they use love's language. It is theirs by right. Others only borrow it.”

Commenting on Weils writings on “Idolatry”, Editor Lauri Gagne states that

“Simone identifies a tension at the heart of human existence: we have a desire for absolute good but live in a world of imperfect good. To avoid despair, we focus our desire on someone or something which becomes our god. Weil believed that in the modern era, when there is little cultural recognition of absolute truth or God, totalitarianism of all kinds will flourish; people have such a need to worship that they will bow down before an autocratic ruler. The real heroes of our time, she would say, are those who refuse to settle for an earthly fix for their longings and can therefore view the "great beast" of totalitarianism and other idolatries with lucidity.”

This is another part of the books that seemed eerily relevant to what is happening in the U.S.A and many other countries in the world. While I personally would say a more general “divine ideal of pure awareness” rather than “God”, it definitely resonates when that god we are focusing on becomes conflated with something material like money, that most dangerous of idols.

Reading Weil gives me hope and restores some of my belief and faith in the good of the basic teachings of Christianity before it got institutionalized and controlled and morphed into fundamentalist mega churches that seem more like businesses than places of worship. It also makes me miss the early mystics and the think about the “contemplative” side of faith. This contemplative side was compared to the “active” side very lucidly by the anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing”. While I just discovered this work, I suspect maybe Weil had also run across it. Whatever your background and beliefs, I think Weil would be good reading on your “road to find out.”

This book was reviewed for the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. I am grateful to Plough Publishing House (www.plough.com) for supplying a copy of the book for review.

Though there are better places to start on a voyage to Weil, this very small collection of excerpts is adequate for someone already familiar with her story and seeking a gentle reminder of some aspects of her thinking. Maybe a book to take on a retreat but not much more. Perhaps it will serve as a jumping off point for those seeking a more complete and complex understanding of this rather subtle and difficult thinker. She certainly deserves a deep read. ( )