Excerpts and my occasional notes from Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, Routledge pub., 1992
GRAVITY AND GRACE
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. (p. 1)
What is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another (no matter whether his need be slight or great) the latter draws back from him? Gravity. (p. 1)
I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead....When in this state, I have several times succumbed to the temptation at least to say words which cause pain. Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin. Thus we corrupt the function of language, which is to express the relationship between things. (pp. 1,2)
Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace and the descending movement of the second degree of grace. (p. 4)
Grace is the law of the descending movement. (p. 4)
To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity. Moral graviy makes us fall towards the heights. (p. 4)
VOID AND COMPENSATION
Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth their pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. In the case of a man in the uttermost depths, whom no one pities, who is without power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), the suffering remains within and poisons him....This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance? How gain deliverance from a force which is like gravity? (p. 5)
It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level. (p. 5)
The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows.
That is a factor making for social stability. (p. 5)
To harm a person is to receive something form him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.
To be able to hurt others with impunity – for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent – is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make. It is the same in the case of the unlawful satisfaction of any desire. The energy we economise in this way is immediately debased (p. 6)
To forgive. We cannot do this. When we are harmed by someone, reactions are set up within us. The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium. We must seek equilibrium on another plane. We have to go as far as this limit by ourselves. There we reach the void....(p. 6)
A situation which is too hard degrades us through the following process: as a general rule the energy supplied by higher emotions is limited. If the situation requires us to go beyond this limit we have to fall back on lower feelings (fear, covetousness, desire to beat the record, love of outward honours) which are richer in energy.
This limitation is the key to many a retrogression. (p. 7)
Energy, freed by the disappearance of the objects which provide motives, always tends to go downwards.
Base feelings (envy, resentment) are degraded energy. (p. 8)
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. (p. 9)
TO ACCEPT THE VOID
To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural. Where is the energy to be found for an act which has nothing to counterbalance it? The energy has to come from elsewhere. Yet first ther must be a tearing out, something desperate has to take place, the void must be created. Void: the dark night. (p. 10)
Admiration, pity (most of all a mixture of the two) bring real energy. But this we must do without.
A time has to be gone through without any reward, natural or supernatural. (p. 11)
The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil. (p. 11)
To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death. (p. 11)
DETACHMENT
'He [Christ] emptied himself of his divinity.' To empty ourselves of the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time – that is to say, to nothing.
To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world. (p. 12)
To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good. (p. 13)
Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void – to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses.
If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void...(p. 13)
To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage – and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light. (p. 13)
Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached. (p. 14)
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