Simone Weil and the Love for the World

Abstract

The emergence of ecological consciousness has brought a profound transformation in cultural paradigms, particularly in the West. It is now a constitutive element of the public agenda calling the attention of politicians, scholars and other areas of complex thinking. The encyclical of the recently deceased Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, published in 2015, brings some insights on that issue. The pontifical document proposes the inseparability of social justice and ecological justice. This article reflects on the ecological conversion proposed in Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si in dialog with the thought of Simone Weil. Focusing on four key categories in Weil’s philosophy—beauty of the world, order of the world, necessity, and love for the world—the article argues that her reflections anticipate key elements of contemporary ecological theology. It further explores how Weil’s thought illuminates the inseparable relationship between social justice and environmental justice, offering a spiritual and ethical framework for ecological conversion.

1. Introduction

The planet in crisis brings with it the need for conceptions of life to be rethought, as well as the relationship between human beings with the earth and other living beings. It also brings strong interpellations to religions—in our case, we would say, specifically to Judaism and Christianity. This specific importance is due to the interpretation of the Scriptures, which are strongly criticized today. The anthropocentric interpretation of Genesis 1:28, according to which humankind is called to “rule the earth,” has been increasingly criticized as the source of destruction in nature and species. The growing awareness that everything is interconnected challenges traditional notions of human sovereignty. Today’s thinking in all areas of knowledge proposes a paradigm shift for humanity: no more indiscriminate growth understood as progress; no more development only for profit. Instead, a fundamental attitude of care for the earth and for everything who lives and breathes in it. This is especially important today in religious studies and theology. Important thinkers in that area—in accordance with those of other areas like Philosophy, Economics, and Political Science—point to the urgence of an ecological conversion. See among those thinkers Leonardo Boff, Celia Deane-Drummond and Sophie Hellberg (Boff 2012; Deane-Drummond 2017; Hellberg 2018).

What would this conversion consist of? We would stress our reflection and interpretation according to Latin America, where this text is rooted. At the foundation of ecological crisis there is also a justice crisis. Due to this, it is proposed to see poverty and injustice not only as a consequence of ecological crisis, but as a cause of it. In accordance with that, the injustice which is criticized as anthropocentric and destructive has to be unveiled as the root of the planet’s crisis and also as its goal. An ecological conversion would be not only that human beings should learn how to live together, in communion with the earth, their common home. It must include recognition of the victims of injustice—the poor and the oppressed—as central subjects of ecological reflection, and especially of believers (Boff 2012). Likewise, human beings should feel convoked to understand themselves as responsible for the earth, as guardians and caretakers, and not despotic and plenipotent lords and masters. This shift in mind and reason would help in awareness of human’s deepest identity, which is not a “vis à vis” relationship with the earth but a conscience to be a constitutive part of this planet together with all living beings. (Boff 2015, p. 66). Natural, human and social sciences today call attention to how much it is necessary that human beings respond to the challenge of learning that they themselves are the earth, made of the same matter as the planet. That would mean that everything affecting the earth also affects humans. And among them, it mostly affects the poor and oppressed of all kinds (Boff 2012, pp. 35–61).

Theology today—and very specifically Latin American theology—does not see this ecological crisis and its challenges just as a theoretical content to be assimilated. Rather, it presupposes a contemplative look at and relationship with the world, through a dazzled and amazed gaze (Boff 2012, pp. 104–14; 2015). It also presupposes a respectful, reverent, and even affectionate interaction with the world. This attitude demands us to distance ourselves from the “hubris” and violence, made of greed and cupidity wanting to dominate, plunder and assault the world to satisfy goals of profit and disorderly growth (Thomasberger 2020, p. 130). Finally, it presupposes an ethical and moral commitment to struggle for environmental justice, inseparable from social justice (Figueroa 2022, pp. 767–32).

Latin American theology conceives social injustice as being inseparable from environmental injustice. The conscience generating that specific reflection grew significantly after Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, published in 2015. Environmental crisis is the consequence of a model of development based upon profit and disorderly growth and also the cause of the actual climatic disaster, of which the first victims are the poor (Pope Francis 2015, p. 49). Latin American theology feels itself directly questioned by this way of conceiving justice and interpreting Christian conception about the world (Pope Francis 2015, p. 3).

In this text our proposal is to highlight that long before the pontifical document quoted above was published, some intuitions contained in it were already present within the thoughts and writings of distinguished thinkers, believers or not. We affirm this is the case with Simone Weil, a French philosopher and mystic who lived for 34 years during the first half of the 20th century1. Even writing long before the enhancement of the ecological consciousness, which has only existed for five decades (Carson 1962), Simone Weil’s experience and thoughts present an important contribution to this reflection’s process. The philosopher and mystic’s thoughts, together with her writings, contains a conception of the world which includes love and wonder together with ethics and political practice. These are experienced and reflected through four fundamental concepts:

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The first one is the “beauty of the world” which brings wonder, reverence and spiritual consolation.

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There is a second concept that goes together with this first one. It is the “order of the world”. The world has a proper order to it and it requires respect and obedience.

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The third one is “necessity”, which is the divine order of matter. It can veil the action of God, but affirms it, in “a perfect harmony or unity between contraries” (Abdulla 2025, p. 237).

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Finally, comes the fourth concept called “love for the world” which is what makes it possible to obey the order of the world.

Weil appears here as a pioneer in the philosophical reflection about nature and human attitude in relationship with it. She brings to those categories—beauty of the world, order of the world, necessity and love for the world—some insights and thoughts which turn out to be strongly important today. They can certainly help to enlighten reflection at a time like ours, when the challenge of ecological conversion is becoming ever more urgent. Weil’s contribution is especially important at a time where the connection between social justice and environmental justice appears to be constitutive of ecological thinking (Thomasberger 2020). While examining Weil’s thoughts and writings, we will not separate her theoretical contributions from her life experience. Weilian scholars, among them her biographer and great friend, Simone Petrement, have done so throughout their reflections (Petrement 1976).

In 2015, Pope Francis, who is now recently deceased, published the important encyclical Laudato Si’. Reading this document, it is possible to see how Weil, who lived in the first half of the 20th century, contributes elements to the pontifical document which can not only help its reading and comprehension, but reinforces the conviction of the need for a new relationship with the world and environment. We do not affirm here that Pope Francis read Weil’s texts, although it is not impossible that he has done so, as was the case with other thinkers who are contemporaries of the philosopher. What we intend to assert is that the pontifical document echoes Weilian concepts in many of its points. Even if there is not an explicit reference to or quote from Weilian thought in the Pope’s text, it is possible to see the presence of the philosopher’s ideas in it. At the end of our reflection, we expect to demonstrate the existence of a fruitful dialog between the philosopher and the Pope. Here and now, as with many other questions—modern work, religion, war, violence (De Lussy 1999)—Weil’s philosophy about the world and nature brings light and inspiration which, at this time of imminent and real danger of climate catastrophe, appeal to the human conscience.

2. Attention to the World

The book Waiting for God (Weil 2009), organized by Weil’s Dominican friend, Father Joseph Marie Perrin, brings together writings which Weil herself sent him when leaving Marseille and traveling to New York. The philosopher was sure to never see her friend again. In those pages, which are her spiritual autobiography and legacy, together with theoretical reflections of great importance it is possible to see how the question of relationship with the world was present in her life since a very early age.

When Weil gave those pages to Father Perrin, many years had passed since those early times of her youth, and the young philosopher was approaching the end of her short life of 34 years (Weil 2009, pp. 61–83). Her biographer and friend Simone Petrement states that Weil considered what was recorded in those pages to be of vital importance in her trajectory of thought. That explains her decision to give them only to some very few people who had her total confidence before leaving for the United States (Petrement 1978, p. 347).

Among the papers received by the Dominican friar, afterwards named Waiting for God, Simone Weil described an experience she had when she was still very young and emerging from childhood into adolescence. Living in a period of emotional instability, Weil reflected deeply on her interior movements and the anguish those feelings provoked within her. Nevertheless, at a certain moment, she was captured with extreme wonder by the contemplation of a mountain landscape (Weil 2009, p. 65). This view captivated her attention through the beauty of what she was contemplating. But it also brought her a profound moral revelation: the notion of purity (Weil 2009, p. 65). Some of her commentators and scholars interpret it as a premonitory sense of vocation (Gabellieri 2004, p. 526).

“The idea of purity… took possession of me at the age of sixteen, after a period of several months during which I had been going through the emotional unrest natural in adolescence. … I was contemplating a mountain landscape and little by little it was imposed upon me in an irresistible manner.”

(Weil 2009, p. 65)

This beautiful and gracious contemplation brings the young girl the experience of a loving knowledge of the beauty of the world. The philosophical thoughts developed throughout her life conserved and enhanced this first experience. Through Weil’s life and in her works, this experience of purity was present as the philosopher expressed the world in dialog with her own interior feelings (Craufurd 2003). According to one of her most important scholars, this purity is conceived and present in her, given over to her total attention, purified of every mixture, essential either for contemplation or for ethical action (Gabellieri 2004, p. 530).

This interior dialog and reflection led Weil to the conviction that the beauty of the world is comparable to the love of a neighbor. Both these things, together with religious ceremonies, are the only “three immediate objects…in which God is really though secretly present” (Weil 2009, p. 137). We can already perceive there a first connection between environmental justice (beauty of the world) and social justice (love of a neighbor).

That is also the case for the following excerpt, also found in Waiting for God. Even if it is a long quotation, we decided to put it here in full because of its importance.

“The love of the order and beauty of the world is thus the complement of the love of our neighbor. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world, or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing.”

(Weil 2009, pp. 159–60)

When the philosopher approaches the order of the world and the beauty of the world, after stating that both are the complement of the love of a neighbor, we can see a luminous intuition about the inseparable connection between environmental justice and social justice. Humanity is not dissociated from the world but deeply embedded within it. Through love—even within necessity and hardship—it participates in the order of the world.

This conviction continues to be present in her thoughts forever. At the very end of her life, when living in London, in 1943, Weil left another writing which contains something significantly close to those two previous statements: “Love came down out of love in this world under the form of beauty” (Weil 1970, p. 16).

As it reveals beauty and love, the world to be contemplated requires attention (Rozelle-Stone 2025). Attention is a central category in Weil’s whole life and thoughts. That same category of attention is therefore applied to the attitude required to contemplate the world. As we saw before, attention must be deep and pure (Weil 2009, p. 170). When it happens with those characteristics, it has the virtue of a prayer (Weil 2009, p. 106). This experience exerts healing and ecstatic effects on those who contemplate it and therefore bears the seal of love (Weil 2009, pp. 159–60). In coming from love, it also arouses love and is also loved. To Weil, therefore, contemplating the world is an exercise in love.

“We cannot contemplate without a certain love… The beauty of the world is the order of the world that is loved.”

(Weil 2009, p. 170)

Simone Weil’s love for the world and its beauty constitutes a totalizing vision of the entire gears of the world and of creation, which obeys the Creator’s desire ceaselessly. The world’s functions move according to its laws and rhythm. All these movements are imprinted on it by the Creator who also makes his home in them. This is why the world and its gears are beautiful and educational for human beings, who are called to learn, accept, obey and practice love. This love also reaches out to others—the neighbor—and finally returns to its source, from where it came, which is God (Weil 2009, p. 170). Such love is therefore a gift, but it also requires exercise and learning.

It is really an apprenticeship. Like every apprenticeship, it requires time and effort.

(Weil 2009, p. 131)

Attention to the world, even if it is love, is not possible without conflict and even pain. When it happens during work, in true and sensitive contact with the reality of the world, it reinforces communion between the world and the human being.

When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: “It is the trade entering his body.” …it is the universe, the order, and beauty of the world and the obedience of creation to God that are entering our body.

(Weil 2009, p. 132)

This would also be true, according to the philosopher, of her own intellectual work of thinking, reflecting and writing. The world is like a text that must be read and interpreted. And Weil is the philosopher who said “Thought fecundates writing” and also “You write like you give birth; you can’t help but make the supreme effort” (Weil 1997, p. 196). Love makes thinking and writing—as with every work—an act which passes through the body, heart and mind. This is also the way to read and learn the text of the world.

3. To Read the Text of the World with Body and Soul

For Simone Weil, “the world is a text with many meanings, and we move from one meaning to another by working on it; a task in which the body always has a part, just as, when we learn the alphabet of a foreign language, that alphabet must enter the hand by tracing the letters. Otherwise, any change in our way of thinking is illusory.” (Weil 1997, p. 210)

By saying that, Weil gets close to other thinkers, writers and mystics, who also say the world is like a book or a text2. Among them is Saint Francis of Assisi who was the object of deep admiration by the philosopher throughout her life: “I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as soon as I came to know about him” (Weil 2009, p. 65). This admiration and self-identification with Il Poverello are composed by the desire for poverty always present in Weil’s life, perfectly incarnated by the saint. Weil also stressed the importance of his testimony of closeness with the beauty of the world. “The example of Saint Francis shows how great a place the beauty of the world can have in Christian thought… Vagabondage and poverty were poetry with him; he stripped himself naked in order to have immediate contact with the beauty of the world” (Weil 2009, pp. 160, 167). Saint Francis—according to Weil—read the text of the world through nakedness and communion with the earth in an immediate and direct contact of his own body.

As with Francis, the French philosopher read the text of the world. Her connection with the medieval saint was the belief that this reading is not satisfied by contemplating and appreciating the world. The same as the saint of Assisi, she wanted to enter communion with it, at all levels. And for that, the body cannot be absent. She also wanted an “immediate contact with the beauty of the world” (Weil 2009, p. 160). Everything that exists and constitutes an object of relationship must be touched, experienced, felt, even if it is painful. This is the only way to interpret reality: to interpret reality according to its levels of significance, the “craft has to enter” and it must enter “into the body” (Weil 1997, p. 210).

The reading of the text of the world is a relationship, always mediated by corporeality and driven by an intense desire for communion with the earth and with others. This desired communion is real, not only intellectual and spiritual but involving the body and matter. Weil sought this communion throughout her life, either teaching philosophy to her students, doing manual labor in the factory or living the experiences of working in the countryside (Perrin and Thibon 1967, p. 112). All work should be manual, she believed, because in this type of work the body enters into communion with matter, in other words, with the world. This is the root of her critique of modern work (Marianelli 2004). Industrial work distances human beings from the world, from the earth, from matter. The only relationship there is between the machine and the worker. This one becomes just a cog, a part of a machine. In this circumstance, intellectual work is separated from manual work, because the privilege in modern industry lies with machines and not with human beings.

If workers are exhausted by fatigue and deprivation, it’s because they are nothing and the development of the enterprise is everything…they are degraded to this role of things because intellectual labor has separated from manual labor….

(Weil 1991, p. 22)

For Weil, humanity is therefore not separated from the outside world and from nature. On the contrary, it is part of the world and participates in the order of the world. It is therefore called to live, praise, bless and suffer in communion with this world and its order, and this fact should make it turn towards the Creator, the source from whom the world and its order came. All of existence, therefore, should relate to the world in the search of an understanding that is inseparable from consent leading to communion.

The concept of necessity—a key one in the philosopher’s reflection on the world—must always be present when her conception and relation of the world are in question.

4. Necessity in Modern Work: A Challenge to Beauty

Reflecting about necessity, Simone Weil enters into a dialectical tension which is central in her thoughts: one of gravity and grace. Necessity is a natural order referring to reality itself. It is a principle that governs the world and the forces of nature. All living beings are subject to necessity. Nevertheless, the same necessity, if lived in dialog with the experience of the beauty of the world, can be assumed and obeyed with joy, even if difficult and painful. “In the beauty of the world brute necessity becomes an object of love. What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea waves, or on the almost eternal folds of the mountains?” (Weil 2009, p. 129).

Here is one important reason why Simone Weil’s work is a privileged source of support for ecological thinking today. In the moment Western history in which we live, when human beings are understood as a counterpoint and rivalry with earth and nature, Weil’s reflection contains the idea that awareness of the limits imposed by necessity are not an expression of total despair for life, but can be accompanied by joy turning into the object of love—above all because, as she says, “what makes it possible to contemplate necessity and love is the beauty of the world. Without beauty, this would not be possible” (Weil 1957, p. 190). Even under the weight and pressure of necessity, beauty can raise heart and mind to gratitude and ecstasy. It can also inspire reason to think in an inclusive way for human and natural life, without dissociations and fractures.

In the heart of the actual climate crisis, all proposals of laws which would limit human desire for growth and development benefit only some privileged few who have not yet been able to make the transition to a contemplative and careful attitude towards the world, where beauty is present in dialog with rationality (Boff 2015, p. 66). The victims of this state of things are the vulnerable who will suffer damage to this division. To overcome this obstacle, ecological thinking brings a cultural reorientation on values, which has the possibility to promote attention, joy, and sometimes even ecstasy on contemplating nature. The predatory and harmful activism of industrial development, together with the senseless work led by profit, generates aggression toward the environment (Haydn 2020). This aggression forces growth in the name of profit and greed. Weil’s thoughts contribute to enlightenment and denounce this situation.

With lucidity, the philosopher analyzes and criticizes the modern Western way of proceeding with respect for the world. The perspective she proposes appeals to esthetic and beauty, together with ethics and spirituality. Weil shows that once seen and loved, the beauty of the world helps ecological awareness to grow with consent to be reeducated in order to appreciate and love the beauty of nature, and the order of the cosmos (Weil 2009, p. 48). On the other hand, esthetics alone, without recognizing the ethical challenge that environmental injustice implies, does not give a measure of its true value. The philosopher is aware of this and denounces colonialism as a source of the loss of sensitivity for the beauty of the world.

“Today one might think that the white races had almost lost all feeling for the beauty of the world, and that they had taken upon them the task of making it disappear from all the continents where they have penetrated with their armies, their trade and their religion.”

(Weil 2009, p. 162)

This sentence written in 1942 seems even more true today. Beauty allows us to accept necessity. However, despite the joy it brings, beauty does not cancel out the wounds inflicted on human pride by logical and physical laws. A contemplative attitude towards the world does not cancel indignation in front of injustices of all kinds. It is still difficult for human beings to accept an order that contradicts their desire for omnipotent dominion over the earth. Only love born from consent to the beauty of the world can anoint the rigidity of greed of modern systems.

Simone Weil did not propose an always harmonious or gentle relationship with the earth. In contrast, she insisted on the care with which we must contemplate nature, because “the first lesson of this contemplation is not to choose this or that, but to consent to the existence of all that exists” (Weil 1957, pp. 99–100). The attitude to love nature, to live in a respectful relationship with all that lives, to experience communion with everyone and everything, must be based on consent. And this consent should be present even in confrontation with difficult or harmful movements.

It seems, then, coherent to interpret Weil’s thoughts as proposing an ecological understanding of the universe centered in consent—consent to the whole of the environment, inseparable of consent to humanity living and being within the environment with its differences and disorders. “Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world, or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing” (Weil 2009, p. 160). Such an attitude implies attention, waiting, patience, non-action, humility. It implies not only acting and transforming the universe but also enduring nature’s movements patiently and with consent.

This behavior is based on values which generate virtues and are the opposite of the values of modern unlimited development. To have power is not necessarily to grow. Industrial development, which turned human beings into things and raised machines and things to the status of human beings, did not represent real growth for human life or for the world as a whole. It is Weil herself who wrote in her diary at the factory: “Things take the place of men and men take the place of things” (Weil 1991, p. 148).

Simone Weil interprets this modern way of existing as uprooting or rootlessness. (Weil 2002, pp. 42–178). Our societies have become disconnected from the deep values of civilization. When the philosopher imagines a new rootedness, it is not a question of going back to the past. Rooting, in Weil’s view, must be done in what she calls “certain treasures of the past and certain forebodings of the future” (Weil 2002, p. 41). This is “moral, intellectual and spiritual life” (Weil 2002, p. 41). To be rooted requires the disposal of saving every form of life, in all its fullness. What Weil calls “treasures” are what she considers as the true and authentic values of civilization. Those are situated very deeply at the bottom of the human soul, and the great pillars of civilization have been able to understand and formulate them.

Ecological thinking, therefore, inspired by Weil’s reflections, cannot be reduced to statistics and numbers. Neither does it consist of a sensitive appreciation for beautiful green landscapes. The reflection proposed by Simone Weil’s thoughts can be understood as a cultural proposal that aims to invert and transform the dominant values of industrial societies into values of contemplation and consent. The concepts the philosopher proposes—beauty of the world, order of the world, necessity and love of the world—can bring a renovated look to the crisis the planet is facing today.

Because of its configuration, Weil’s thoughts can bring important contributions to realize the ecological conversion humanity feels necessary today, which was felt and proclaimed by Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si’. However, this conversion cannot be based on statistics and cannot be seen only as a series of political, economic and technical measures. In the same sense, if this desired ecological conversion remains only at a superficial level of light and romantic affection, without a broader concern for equity and justice, it will not be a meaningful tool in the deep transformation of human attitudes towards the world. According to the great Brazilian environmentalist Chico Mendes, if dissociated of social justice, this ecological mentality, and consequently the pretense of environmental justice, is just gardening. It will never help the earth to be a common home for all living beings.

Ecological conversion, if inspired by Weil’s thoughts, must be understood as faithful loyalty by human beings, who are the conscience of the earth, towards the environment, at the heart of their own civilization. Weil’s inspiration remembers the sense of necessity, the joy of contemplation, the effort to consent to everything that is and that exists. Therefore, it supposes the inseparable connection between environmental justice and social justice. Although these are not textual categories used by Weil, they do belong to her thoughts, which always consider justice as a central element.

We can also see that this centrality of justice is not only a theoretical or abstract conviction within the whole of her thoughts. But it is something that emerges from experience where her own body and forces are touched and put to the test.

5. Consent to the Body of the Earth

During the war, the philosopher was no longer able to work as a teacher due to her Jewish family origins. At that time, she started to work in the countryside, at Gustave Thibon’s—a catholic philosopher—farm. The experience there seems to inspire what she wrote with fine and polite irony to Xavier Vallat, the French Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.

The letter is recalled by her friend and biographer Simone Petrement: “…I would like to express the sincere gratitude I feel towards the government for having removed me from the social category of intellectuals and for having given me the land and, with it, all of nature. Because only those whose bodies have entered (the world and the earth) through the daily suffering of their weary limbs possess nature and the earth“ (Petrement 1976, pp. 377–78, 444).

As well as in the factory, Weil wanted the experience of feeling necessity and the order of the world challenging her body and forces: to work the land as a peasant. She had already tried it once in the past. Her lack of experience and physical skills were an obstacle (Petrement 1976, pp. 144, 149). Now, Gustave Thibon, the catholic philosopher, and a friend of Father Perrin, opened the doors to his farm. And it was a different experience for the philosopher. According to the testimonies of Thibon himself and Simone Petrement, what drove her to work on the land was, on the one hand, a very strong and kenotic desire to strip herself of all comforts and to experience all the fatigue inherent in agricultural work. On the other hand, it was also a love for the land, for its beauty and fertility, which filled her with deep happiness, even during the extreme hardships she endured in her own free will (Petrement 1976, p. 444).

Thibon himself expresses his perception of how Weil was living at that time on his farm. He described his impression when seeing her at the end of the day contemplating nature: “…I found her in front of the house, sitting on a tree trunk and absorbed in contemplating the Rhône valley. I saw her eyes gradually leave her vision and return to sight: the intensity and purity of her gaze were such that it was as if she were contemplating an inner abyss while the splendid horizon opened up at her feet, and the beauty of her soul corresponded to the tender majesty of the landscape” (Petrement 1976, p. 348).

Later, when the grape harvest began, Thibon narrates that she worked the land “with unrelenting energy” (Petrement 1976, p. 351). In the evenings, she would sit with him on a stone bench near the fountain and read pages of Plato in Greek. Thibon was a fervent catholic and gave her the works of St. John of the Cross. At that moment of her life, Weil experienced in her body and soul the existential and spiritual triangle of hard manual work, study and prayer.

Simone Petrement recounts Weil’s own testimony about the experience of working in the fields. Weil had no illusions about how hard it could be to undertake this work with the peasants. Pain and fatigue were felt while working hard to cultivate a resistant land. Nevertheless, the synchrony between necessity and beauty helped her to live a deep and full experience, which firmly helped her to withstand a very difficult moment. As she wrote to Simone Petrement: “Don’t you feel how much this resolution helps me endure the misfortunes of this moment? The toil of my body and soul will become food for hungry people” (Petrement 1976, p. 361). And she continued, not without humor: “I have to say that, for me, the idea of turning the work of my body and soul into potatoes and the like for a starving people is the only thing that can cheer me up at the moment…” (Petrement 1976, p. 364).

From a theological point of view, it is possible to infer a Eucharistic experience when Weil lived her body’s integration, in communion with the earth, in order to feed the poor and the hungry. This ardent desire and the profound feelings resulting from it had the support of her journey with Christianity through the conversations with Perrin and the frequent visits to the chapel of the Dominicans in Marseille where the Blessed Sacrament was permanently exposed (Weil 2009, p. 43).

For the philosopher, working in the land was therefore a mixture of pain and joy. Therein lies the necessity and beauty of the world. As she wrote to her friend, the young Spanish refugee Antonio Atarez: “…fatigue is a healthy fatigue for the soul, which brings us into fuller contact with nature and in whose depths, we find profound joys…” (Petrement 1976, p. 373). It is clear, on the other hand, that her relationship with the earth at the harvest was the consequence of obedience to a spiritual impulse. As we can read in a letter to her friend Pierre Honorat: “Here I am, transformed into a grape picker… Whatever we feel we have to do, whether it’s a poem or a harvest, we have to do it…” (Petrement 1976, p. 373). Simone Weil, working the harvest on Gustave Thibon’s farm, is fully living what was already reflected upon and said about the connection between manual labor and intellectual vocation: “There are things I wouldn’t have been able to say if I hadn’t done it.” (Petrement 1976, p. 377). The possibility of reflecting coherently and profoundly on the relationship with the world depends on that connection. It takes together beauty and the order of the world, crossed and sealed by necessity, trying to make it possible to love the world.

The practice of working the land, with all the pain and fatigue it brings, was a source of consolation and joy, an experience of love for the world. It was also a source of inspiration for Weil’s life as a thinker—in other words, for her philosophy, which was then nourished by what her hands and body practiced and suffered.

However, the philosopher’s goal with her work experiences and reflection was not the pain, fatigue and suffering by themselves. The object of her desire, which motivated her thoughts, was outside her. It was the other, the neighbor, mostly those in need: the poor, the hungry. It was oppressed life that must be nourished in order to flourish. That is the reason why she immersed herself in manual labor, eagerly seeking an intimate relationship with the earth and the world, as much as with the lives of workers and peasants.

For Weil, being in the world meant entering into communion with everything that lives, inevitably starting with those on the margins, the most vulnerable. For them, it is not enough to give things, objects. It is necessary to give one’s own body—in other words, one’s own life. Theology recognizes here the analogy with the Eucharist when Christ gave his body to feed the people.

Therefore, contemplating the cosmos and relating to it was not, for Simone Weil, an esthetic distraction or a merely affective consolation, but even if we included ecstatic joy at the beauty of the world, it consists of a real conversion. Inseparable from the order of the world and configured by necessity, it awakens the first ethical concern, which consists of giving, restituting and restoring the cosmos to those who are dispossessed of it.

This restitution has the form of matter to which human beings have a right guaranteed by God himself (Gesché 1983, pp. 162, 164). The Scriptures refer to it in the Hebrew Bible, where God is the advocate of the poor, the orphan, the widow and the foreigner (Ps 68:5s; 146:9, Dt 10:18–19; 24:19; 27:19). The Christian Scriptures are even more explicit, establishing this restitution as the only criteria of salvation (Mt 25, pp. 31–46). The form of that transcendental gesture is giving bread to the hungry, a roof overhead to the homeless, water to the thirsty, which is nothing more than restituting the earth and its fruits to people who have been deprived of them. This ethical gesture of restitution would be the first and fundamental redemptive and saving gesture. That explains, at that specific moment, Weil’s spiritual consolation when she cultivated the land knowing that it would provide food for the poor. The mystical experience of “Christ in person” where Weil felt herself taken by Christ (Weil 2009, p. 69), the conversations with Father Perrin and the long hours at the Dominican chapel were certainly the elements for that philosophical and spiritual synthesis experienced on Thibon’s farm (Weil 2009, pp. 61–83).

Simone Weil was not a dualist. In her thinking we do not find the harmful separation between body and spirit, manual work and intellectual work, between thinking and acting or between acting and suffering. We consider that she was a mystic because she was someone who experienced the mystery of God in a deep and unitive way. Those experiences took all of her person and are inspiring for the thoughts she had and the texts she wrote. Her texts written in Marseille, when she was already close to the end of her life, give testimony to this communion she lived with her body consenting to the body of the earth. The times we live in, when an unprecedented crisis in the relationship between humanity and the cosmos is looming ever closer on the horizon, these luminous texts written by the French philosopher can clarify and lead to a new conception of life which puts together, inseparably, in close relationship, human beings, the earth and the world. They can also lead to an anthropology that does not dissociate humanity, the earth and the world. Integration with the cosmos, and not separation, gives each and every person their true and profound humanity. As Weil herself says:

“Hunger (thirst, etc.) and all the desires of the flesh are an orientation of the body towards the future. …The pride of the flesh is believing that it draws life from itself. Hunger and thirst make it feel dependent on the outside world. “In other words, make it feel humble. And we add, “it gives it its true perspective and dimension.”

(Weil 1950, p. 47)

Seven decades after that, Pope Francis recalled in many ways that same synthesis in his encyclical Laudato Si’. It is possible to see in the encyclical text many elements that were present in the philosopher’s thoughts and writings, in the 1940s. That is why we present here this dialog between the philosopher and the Pope as possible enlightenment for today.

6. The Dialog Between Simone Weil and Laudato Si’

The philosopher who loved the world and obeyed its order experienced the culmination of this love in her encounter with the mystery of Incarnation. This experience came to her first through the faces of the poor and then in the face of Christ incarnate, who was crucified and took her “in person” (Weil 2009, p. 17). The Weilian texts can, therefore, enter into dialog with Christian theology today even if the author lived 100 years ago.

Pope Francis ‘encyclical Laudato Si’ echoes some of Weil’s insights. In this papal document, some passages and topics show closeness and correspondence with Weilian reflection.

The first is the connection between environmental justice and social justice. Every human being has the right to the fruits of the earth, to everything it produces, so that life can be nourished. Social justice and environmental justice go hand in hand. Working the land must be a eucharistic and generous surrender, not an oppression and exploitation of the body of those who do it. The same happens with the industrial and modern world, where human beings are treated as machines. Despite the fatigue and difficulties that working the land or industry entail, it can in no way be slavery. Nor can it be a destructive attack that harms the fertility of the land and sterilizes it by subordination to profit (Pope Francis 2015, pp. 70, 92, 111).

As Pope Francis said, speaking about Francis of Assisi, the inspirer of the encyclical, who was also present in the life and thoughts of Simone Weil:

“He (Francis of Assisi) shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace. He was a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself. He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.”

(Pope Francis 2015, p. 10)

The Pope criticized, in Laudato Si’, every analysis about reality which separates its various dimensions: “…the world cannot be analyzed by isolating only one of its aspects, since “the book of nature is one and indivisible” (Pope Francis 2015, p. 6).

The second would be the integration and communion of human corporeality with the world and specifically with the earth. The earth is not separated from the human body. This is the sense of the statement that human beings are not “vis à vis” with the earth. On the contrary, human corporeality is earth, made of earth. Human life is life in communion with all other living beings in the great body of the earth. To work the land and cultivate the earth; to struggle against policies of industrial development which aggress the environment; to organize industrial work in a sustainable way is therefore to enter into communion with it, through concrete work or through contemplation of the beauty of the world.

The indifference or even the refusal of this conception is denounced by Pope Francis in Laudato Si’:

“…the way natural ecosystems work is exemplary: plants synthesize nutrients which feed herbivores; these in turn become food for carnivores, which produce significant quantities of organic waste which give rise to new generations of plants. But our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products”

(Pope Francis 2015, p. 22)

Those pontifical words resonate with Simone Weil’s reflections about the order of the world. The world lives to the rhythm of life, a proper rhythm to a body which provides breath, beauty and food for the poor. The life cycle is the order of the world. And the words of Laudato Si’ confirm, one century later, Weil’s insight that everything must pass through the great body of the earth in order that the poor and the hungry, the vulnerable and fragile can live fully.

The third is situated within the critique Laudato Si’ raises towards an ecological attitude not expressed in true and concrete communion. This critique is at the center of the pontifical document and states explicitly that environmental justice and social justice are inseparable, showing something that can be found in Weil’s life and reflection as a crucial point of dialog, communication and resonance.

“…a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

(Pope Francis 2015, p. 49)

Weil is the one who said “The love of the order and beauty of the world is thus the complement of the love of our neighbor” (Weil 2009, p. 159).

Echoing the philosopher’s words and recalling the biblical passage of Cain and Abel, in Genesis 4, 9–11, the encyclical proclaims that “Disregard for the duty to cultivate and maintain a proper relationship with my neighbor, for whose care and custody I am responsible, ruins my relationship with my own self, with others, with God and with the earth. When all these relationships are neglected, when justice no longer dwells in the land, the Bible tells us that life itself is endangered.” (Pope Francis 2015, p. 70).

In the thoughts and words of both thinkers, Latin American theology today can find a source of inspiration and a tool for a new hermeneutic of justice for the world and for humanity. The God of the poor, the center of inspiration in Latin American theological thinking, now reveals a new face of poverty: the body of the earth, exploited and harmed by cupidity and consequently threatening all species and living beings (Boff 2012, p. 113).

The earth is a common home for both humans and nonhumans. We are within it and are not other than it, distant and non-related to it. We are earth and are called to share this condition, together with our human singularity of conscience and reason, with other living beings. If this ecological equilibrium is broken, our common home will not be a home anymore for anyone or anything. This is not only a religious problem and concern, but an ethical and political challenge. It must be part not only of religion’s and Church’s agenda, but of the public agenda.

The complexity of the subject and the multiple challenges it implies requires a reflection of the quality of Simone Weil’s to inspire the dialog with its force and lucidity.

7. Love for the World and Desire for the Incarnation

In his encyclical, Pope Francis called the attention of the Church and society to the point that ecological conversion cannot be dilettantism or a romantic idyll. This statement is close to Weil’s thought about necessity and the order of the world being inseparable from the beauty of the world. Love for this world evokes the call to care for it in the direction of justice. Social justice and environmental justice are then inseparable—as told by Simone Weil and Pope Francis—and the poor are full citizens of this world, which is altogether both a beautiful transcendental revelation and an ethical and political challenge.

Within the world—and as part of it—lies the human condition: vulnerable flesh, a place of wonder and need, of joy and pain, where Christian faith locates the mystery of the Incarnation. There lies the only thing which can satisfy the human heart’s desire. Simone Weil and Francis, Il Poverello of Assisi, shared deep love for the world, God’s creation, and for creatures considered as neighbors, sisters and brothers. Either the saint or the philosopher experienced this love, illuminated by the mystery of Incarnation, where Christianity finds the true meaning of the creation of the world and, within it, of humanity. Attuned to that conception, Laudato Si’ remembers today, in the third decade of the 21st century, the Christian belief of the affinity between the mystery of God and the mystery of the world.

From the beginning of the world, but particularly through the incarnation, the mystery of Christ is at work in a hidden manner in the natural world as a whole, without thereby impinging on its autonomy.

(Pope Francis 2015, p. 99)

At a certain point in her life, Simone Weil was touched and inspired by this same mystery, which she says came down and took her (Weil 2009, p. 17). From a theological point of view, we can say she experienced then the central point in her vision of the world, with its order made of necessity and beauty. The world is where the Word of God incarnated and became flesh in a woman’s body. This earth is the one the Son of God experienced, touched, was nourished by and loved. In this world the Son of God experienced death. Before being crucified, he gave his body as food to all in the legacy of the Eucharist. From a Christian theological point of view, all desire to love the beauty and the order of the world is rooted in this mystery of Incarnation. Pope Francis remembers this in Laudato Si’.

It is in the Eucharist that all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation…The Lord, in the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation, chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter.

(Pope Francis 2015, p. 236)

Seventy years before Francis of Rome, Simone Weil, alone in London, forbidden to enter occupied France to assume a mission that would bring her in communion with those who suffered, experienced a great pain and desolation. She composed then a prayer—which is well known as the terrible prayer—asking the Father to be “devoured by God, transformed into Christ substance, and given for food to afflicted men whose body and soul lack every kind of nourishment…” (Weil 1950, pp. 243–44).

The love for the world experienced by the French philosopher will be her last torment, with the violent desire to live the eucharistic gesture of Christ, giving her own body to feed those more in need: the poor and the hungry.

The ecological conversion proposed by Laudato Si’ as an urgent need for the planet, humanity and all living beings is not only a more acute sensitivity to the beauty of the world. It has to be combined with an engagement in justice that changes systems and models of living towards a caring attitude and a contemplative gaze, together with a deep respect for the order of the world, assuming necessity with its sometimes-painful presence.

We quote Simone Weil’s own words to conclude. The philosopher describes with poetic words the love human beings feel for the beauty of nature, but states it is incomplete, because it is turned towards things incapable of responding. There—according to her—resides the source of longing for a relationship with a being who is capable of answering this human desire, in loving reciprocity and consent.

Therefore, she says that “The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is 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” (Weil 2009, p. 171).

In his encyclical Pope Francis stressed this mystical perception, suggested as the center of an ecological conversion, from his Christian point of view. Christ—meaning God made human—is the deep secret of the world. Although responsible for the sad destruction of nature, humanity is now convoked to assume the redemption of this world from within, being part of it.

The first Latin American Pope invited the Church and society to engage in the challenge undertaken as a commitment by the Church of the continent since 1968 with the Conference of Medellin: a preferential option for the poor. Today, in Laudato Si’, this preferential option has also the face of the earth, being stripped of its fertility and dynamism of life. The reading of Simone Weil’s reflections on the world and the poor can be a powerful tool to understand this challenge and respond to it.