Waiting for God
Attente de Dieu — Weil's 1950 posthumous collection of letters and essays to Father Perrin, the principal source for her religious thought
Tradition: Twentieth-century French mystical theology / Christian-Platonist
Letters and essays to Father Perrin — Weil's most extended account of her religious experience, her relation to the Church, and her refusal of baptism
Waiting for God is the principal source for Simone Weil's religious thought — a collection of six letters and four essays addressed to her Dominican friend Father Joseph-Marie Perrin in 1942, published posthumously in 1950. The letters are Weil's most extended autobiographical-theological reflection: her spiritual-intellectual history, her religious experience (especially the famous experience of Christ's presence during a reading of George Herbert's "Love"), her reasons for refusing baptism despite her profound engagement with Catholic faith. The essays — on the love of God and affliction, forms of the implicit love of God, school studies in view of the love of God, the love of God and the love of neighbour — develop her distinctive mystical theology. Her central thesis: attention is the essential religious capacity, the patient waiting that allows the soul to receive God's presence. The book has been a major reference for twentieth-century mystical-theological thought across Catholic, Protestant, and broader spiritual contexts.
Author
Editions cited
- Waiting for God (Emma Craufurd, Putnam, 1951; HarperPerennial reprint)
- Attente de Dieu (Fayard, 1950)
- Waiting on God (Routledge, 1959)
School Embodiments
A complicated relation: Weil's letters to Father Perrin are her most direct engagement with Catholic theology. She engages deeply but refuses formal membership.
"My refusal of baptism is not for lack of love of the Church." (Waiting for God, paraphrasing the central biographical theme)
Weil's framework remains Platonic — attention as the soul's ascent toward the divine reality, the patient waiting as the proper philosophical-religious discipline.
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." (Waiting for God)
Weil's analysis of affliction and the existential structure of religious experience has clear existentialist structure, mediating between Pascal and Kierkegaard.
"Affliction has the marvellous power to lay bare the soul." (Waiting for God, "The Love of God and Affliction")
A cross-tradition affinity: Weil's emphasis on patient attention as the form of prayer has substantial overlap with Orthodox hesychasm and the prayer of the heart.
"Patient attention as the substance of prayer." (Waiting for God, with Orthodox hesychastic resonance)
The Neoplatonic structure — divine reality glimpsed through patient attention, the soul's ascent through love — runs throughout.
"The patient ascent of the soul through attention to the divine reality." (Waiting for God, paraphrasing)
A surprising affinity: the centrality of personal religious experience (the George Herbert encounter), the emphasis on faith as personal transformation, has overlap with evangelical-Protestant themes.
"Christ himself came down and took possession of me." (Waiting for God, on the George Herbert experience)
A cross-tradition affinity: Weil's self-emptying mystical framework has substantial parallels with Sufi spirituality (Ibn Arabi, Rumi).
"The self-emptying that allows the divine presence." (Waiting for God, with Sufi resonance)
A complicated relation: Weil's analysis of affliction (malheur) — the destruction of the social-personal self by extreme suffering, including the suffering of workers and the oppressed — has been a reference for liberation-theological thought.
"Affliction is the suffering of the crushed and the marginalised." (Waiting for God, paraphrasing)
A retrospective affinity: Weil's detailed phenomenological description of religious experience, attention, and affliction has clear phenomenological structure.
"The descriptive phenomenology of religious attention." (Waiting for God, paraphrasing the method)
A complicated relation: Weil's experiential-mystical theology has shaped subsequent liberal-theological engagement with religious experience (Tillich, the broader mystical-liberal tradition).
"Religious experience as the personal ground of theological knowledge." (Waiting for God, paraphrasing)
Internal Tensions
Weil's refusal of baptism has been the central biographical-theological question — was it principled spiritual freedom (Weil's own account), incomplete theological development (some Catholic readings), or substantive theological disagreement (her concerns with the Church's historical relation to Israel and to non-Christian traditions)? The relation between Weil's individual mystical experience and her broader political-philosophical work (The Need for Roots) remains a continuing interpretive theme.
I. Time
The patient temporal structure of religious attention; the moment of religious encounter as eternity's presence in time.
Attributes
II. Space
The interior space of the praying soul; the concrete space of religious encounter.
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III. Matter
Embodied religious life; the body subject to affliction and grace.
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IV. Observer
The singular religious observer — Weil herself as the first-person witness. Embodied, patient, attentive. Personal-providential God as ultimate.
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V. Energy
The energy of patient attention; the descending energy of divine grace.
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VI. Information
The personal religious experience preserved in the letters; the wisdom of mystical tradition preserved through testimony.
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Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Waiting for God resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 29 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 4 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
3 mainstream positions
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.