Enduring the Void
For Simone Weil, the void is no rest. It is a trial that almost nothing in us is willing to bear.
The void enjoys a good reputation. Contemplative wisdoms sing its praises: the hollow hub that sets the wheel in motion, the cup best left unfilled, the silence from which the right word emerges. We readily associate emptiness with rest. Simone Weil places it elsewhere.
In the notebooks Gustave Thibon compiled after her death under the title Gravity and Grace, the void is no gentle thing. The book opens with a law of physics applied to the soul.
All the soul’s natural movements are governed by laws akin to those of material gravity. Grace alone is the exception.
For Weil, gravity is no decorative metaphor. It is the law that makes the soul, like a gas, expand to fill every space offered: we take the place given, return harm received, expect reward for every gift. All this falls, mechanically, toward the heaviest side. Against this descent, one exception—grace. And grace, Weil says, requires a hollow to enter.
Grace fills, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it—and it is grace that creates this void.
The sentence turns in on itself, and this is deliberate. One might be tempted to turn it into a formula: empty myself first, to deserve being filled. But such calculation is still gravity—a gift awaiting its wage. The void Weil speaks of is no maneuver; it is grace itself that hollows it out, and one must only refrain from sealing it shut at once. Hence the verb she uses, which changes everything.
Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void. This runs counter to every law of nature: only grace can do it.
One does not savor this void: one endures it. The word conveys the effort of bearing a weight, not tranquility. Weil names it with another term, borrowed from a Spanish mystic: Void: dark night. Nothing here resembles peace; it is a tearing away.
Is Weil’s void the same as that of Eastern wisdoms?
No, and this is the crux. The hollow hub of the Tao Te Ching is a useful void: the emptiness at the wheel’s center is precisely what enables motion, just as the vessel’s hollow makes it a container. A functional, serene emptiness, perfectly natural—a disguised plenitude. Weil’s void serves no such purpose. It does not make things possible: it makes God necessary, and at a cost. “The world must be represented as containing void, so that it may need God. This presupposes evil.” The Taoist hollow aligns with the order of things; Weil’s hollow is a rupture in that order. To equate them because both speak of “void” would be to confuse a tool with a wound.
Weil goes further still, coining a word: decreation. Not self-destruction—destruction “passes from the created into nothingness”—but consenting to no longer be the center, “passing from the created into the uncreated.” Where gravity makes us occupy all space, decreation withdraws us from it: “We must renounce being anything.” It is the same gesture as enduring the void, carried to the self itself.
Our age has little patience for this kind of emptiness. The slightest interval—waiting, boredom, the silence of an empty room—is instantly filled with a screen. Weil would not see this first as a moral failing; she would see gravity doing its work, faithfully: the soul fills the space it is given, because that is its law. To hold a hollow open without sealing it—that is what nature does not know how to do.
Yet she warns of the danger. Enduring the void is not rushing into it: “one must not throw oneself into it.” The dark night is not a morbid taste for lack, and decreation is not disguised self-hatred. It is, literally, the only thing gravity cannot accomplish—and which it leaves, vacant, to something other than itself.
À lire aussi
- Le moyeu videLao-Tseu sur l'usage du non-être, en regard de Sénèque
- Le démon à trois pointesChez les Pères du désert, la vaine gloire est le seul vice qui se nourrit des victoires remportées sur tous les autres — y compris du mépris qu'on lui oppose.
- La retraite intérieureMarc Aurèle et la possibilité d'un lieu sans lieu
Sources cited
- Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce, ed. Librairie Plon, 1948 (recueil établi par Gustave Thibon).