In the last years of her short life, Simone Weil was deeply interested in non-Christian religions,
especially those of ancient India. Since 1941, she began studying the Sanskrit language and reading
the Upanishads, some of which she also tried to translate. In the Indian spirituality she
found the path to understand some masterpieces of Christian mysticism, such as The mirror of
simple souls by Marguerite Porete, which she read in London in an English version, ascribed to
“an unknown French mystic”.
Simone Weil recognized that all spiritual traditions, Hindu as well as Christian, agree with the
essential mystical experience, the annihilation of the ego, so that the divine Light can enter the
void made by man in his own soul (the so-called décreation), and so that everything can show
the world’s wonderful beauty. However, she thought that Christianity was the spiritual heir to
Heraclitus, of Platonism, and of stoicism, and expresses, in its mystical universalism , the best of
every religious tradition.
