Translating and reading Simone Weil as a Hymn

(*From Grace and Gravity)

Israel Centeno

Introduction

To read Simone Weil is to enter into a sacred rhythm, a chant rather than a discourse, a movement of thought that does not argue but reveals. Her words demand not analysis but contemplation—like a Greek hymn echoing through ruins, or the whispers of a Christian mystic stripped of everything but truth.

Weil does not offer doctrines to be understood in haste, nor concepts to be neatly categorized. She calls for a different kind of reading: one that resembles prayer. To dwell upon a phrase, to give it our full and serious attention, is, for Weil, the purest act of devotion. In this way, her writing becomes an ascetic exercise, a path to inner poverty where nothing is possessed, not even certainty, and where the only illumination comes through a gaze that rests without grasping.

Thus, to approach her reflections on detachment, we must resist the impulse to extract meaning too quickly. Instead, we must listen—to the silence between the words, to what comes through the Holy Spirit as we linger upon a single phrase, allowing it to descend into the depths of our being.

“Love God through the destruction of Troy and Carthage—
and without consolation.
Love is not consolation,
it is light.”

To love without seeking comfort. To embrace a light that does not warm but reveals. This is the core of Weil’s detachment: a stripping away, not just of material things, but of the very instinct to hold on—to truth, to grace, even to God as a source of refuge. To love Him even if He does not exist.

This is not an intellectual exercise; it is a process of unmaking, a purification of the soul’s attachments. In the void left behind, God may enter—not as a possession, but as pure presence.

She says:

To achieve total detachment, misfortune alone is not enough.
There must be a misfortune without consolation.
One must be left without comfort,
without any representable solace.
Only then does the ineffable consolation descend.

Forgive debts.
Accept the past without demanding compensation from the future.
Stop time immediately.
The acceptance of death is also this.

“He emptied himself of his divinity.”
Empty oneself of the world.
Assume the condition of a slave.
Reduce oneself to the single point occupied in space and time—
to nothing.
Strip away the imaginary dominion over the world.

Absolute solitude.
Only then does one possess the truth of the world.

There are two ways to renounce material goods:
To deprive oneself of them for the sake of a spiritual good.
To conceive them and hold them as conditions for spiritual goods
(for example, hunger, fatigue, and humiliation cloud the intellect and hinder meditation),
and yet, still renounce them.

Only this second kind of renunciation is true spiritual nakedness.
In fact, material goods would hardly be dangerous
if they appeared alone, unattached to spiritual goods.
Renounce everything that is not grace—
and desire not even grace itself.

The extinction of desire (Buddhism),
detachment,
or amor fati—
or the desire for the absolute good—
it is always the same:
to empty desire,
to strip purpose of all content,
to desire in emptiness,
to desire without longing.

To separate our desire from all goods,
and to wait.
Experience teaches that such waiting bears fruit.
Then, the absolute good is attained.
For everything, beyond any specific purpose,
one must will in emptiness,
will the void.
Because that good, which we cannot represent or define,
is a void for us.
Yet, that void is fuller than all fullness.

If we reach that point,
we will be beyond danger,
because God fills the void.

This is not an intellectual process,
not in the sense in which we understand it today.
Intelligence has nothing to seek—
it must only clear the ground.
It is useful only for servile tasks.

Goodness, to us, is a nothingness,
for no thing is good.
Yet that nothingness is not unreal.
Compared to it,
everything that exists is unreal.

Reject the beliefs that fill voids,
that sweeten bitterness:
the belief in immortality,
the belief in the usefulness of sins—etiam peccata,
the belief in the providential order of events—
in short, all the consolations
that religion is commonly sought for.

Love God through the destruction of Troy and Carthage—
and without consolation.
Love is not consolation,
it is light.

The reality of the world
is shaped by our attachment.
It is the reality of the self,
transposed onto things.
It is not, in any way, external reality.
That can only be perceived
through total detachment.

As long as even a thread remains,
there is still attachment.

Misfortune,
which forces one to cling to miserable objects,
reveals the miserable condition of attachment itself.
In this way, the necessity of detachment becomes clearer.

Attachment is the forger of illusions.
Whoever seeks the real must be detached.

As soon as we recognize something as real,
we can no longer be attached to it.

Attachment is nothing but an inability
to perceive reality.
We cling to the possession of things
because we believe that,
if we cease to possess them,
they cease to exist.

Many people cannot feel, with their whole soul,
that there is an absolute difference
between the destruction of a city
and its irremediable exile far from it.

Human misery would be unbearable
if it were not diluted in time.
Prevent it from being diluted,
so that it becomes unbearable.

“And when they had sated themselves with tears…”
(Iliad)—
another means of making the worst suffering bearable.

To avoid the need for consolation,
do not weep.

Any pain that does not detach
is pain wasted.

Nothing is more horrible—
cold desert,
shrunken soul.
Ovid.
Plautus’ slaves.

Never think of something or someone loved,
when out of sight,
without imagining that it may be destroyed
or that they may be dead.

And let that thought
not dissolve the sense of reality,
but make it more intense.

Each time one says,
“Thy will be done,”
imagine all possible misfortunes at once.

There are two ways to die:
suicide,
and detachment.

To kill, in thought,
all that one loves—
this is the only way to die.
But only what one loves.

“He who does not hate his father and mother…”
Yet also:
“Love your enemies.”

Not to desire immortality for what one loves.

Before any dead person,
whoever they may be,
not to desire them immortal,
nor to desire them dead.

The miser, in his greed for treasure,
deprives himself of it.

If one can place all one’s good
in something hidden beneath the earth,
why not in God?

But when God
becomes as full of meaning
as treasure is to the miser,
one must then repeat intensely
that He does not exist.

And recognize
that one loves Him
even if He does not exist.

He is the one who,
through the dark night,
withdraws—
so as not to be loved
as a miser loves his treasure.

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes.

If one loves God
while thinking He does not exist,
He will make His existence manifest.