In a letter addressed to her Dominican father, Joseph Perrin, the French philosopher Simone Weil expressed how painful it was for her to imagine “that the thoughts that have descended upon me are condemned to death by the contagion of my inadequacy and my misery.” The gradual recognition of her work and the impact it produced in the intellectual world after her death at the age of 34 soon belied her fear. Albert Camus defined her as the “only free spirit of our time,” a person with a great thirst for truth accompanied by great intelligence and honesty.
The South Korean philosopher and theologian Byung Chul Han, 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, **considers Weil “the most brilliant intellectual figure of the 20th century”**, and in his latest book On God. Thinking with Simone Weil (translated by Lara Cortés, Paidós, Barcelona, 2025) establishes with her and her work a deep and illuminating dialogue with the darkness of the present, not from a school reading, but from a creative hermeneutic.
It is not a timeless and aseptic dialogue, but rather one that addresses today’s society characterized, according to Chul Han, by a neoliberal dictatorial regime that exploits our freedom and in which human beings have become slaves to their own creation, by a world that has become a “noisy market,” by social networks that spread aggression and hatred, by a democracy that, without ethics, lacks content, and by the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.
The philosopher of Korean origin admits to feeling a “deep friendship of the soul” with Simone Weil, the philosopher, mystic, and compassionate intellectual towards the most vulnerable people and collectives, and navigates her thought to show that, beyond the immanence of production, consumption, big data, and the insatiable need for information, there exists a transcendence capable of offering us the fullness of being and freeing us from a life of mere survival and devoid of meaning.
The dialogue revolves around seven fundamental words taken from the experiences and thought of the French philosopher: **attention, desacreditation, emptiness, beauty, pain, silence, and inactivity**. It also features qualified interlocutors of yesterday and today: from Socrates, Plato, and Kant to Agamben, Foucault, and Steiner, passing through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kafka, Lévinas, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Jünger, Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne, Canetti, who open new horizons to the thoughts, sayings, and feelings of Chul Han and Weil.
The first thing that is evident is the crisis of religion and of the spirit due to structural causes, not purely circumstantial ones, among which you cite the loss of silence, the decline of attention, and the deafening noise of communication. But, despite the crisis, **”it is not God who has died, but the human being to whom God revealed himself,”** he states, contradicting Nietzsche, who half a century earlier had announced the death of God. Where does God rebel now? In the answer to this question lies the originality of the philosophy of Weil and Chul Han.
God does not reveal himself through the attributes of the old theodicy: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, providence, and even violence. Quite the contrary: those attributes constitute the distortion of divine revelation. Where does he reveal himself, then? Chul Han responds:
– in the void and nakedness, following the mystics, especially Maister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross;
– in the beauty that the French philosopher, citing Plato, considers an experience of God and God as “pure experience” and Kant understands as a feeling of self;
– in the aesthetic contemplation of both nature and a Greek statue, which “in itself constitutes proof of God”;
-in pain, which is the midwife of the new;
-in negativity as a path of ascent to God;
-in attention without distraction;
in deep attention, which Simone Weil calls “the soul’s lever,” in which all creative capacity of human beings originates;
-in the silence of God, which is more powerful than any word.
The revelation of God in silence reminds me of the following scene from the First Book of Kings of the Jewish Bible. Elijah walked forty days and forty nights until Mount Horeb. There he entered a cave, where he spent the night. “Go out and stand on the mount before Yahweh,” Yahweh said to him. “Then Yahweh passed by, and a great and strong wind came, breaking mountains and shattering rocks, but Yahweh was not in the wind. After the wind came a great earthquake, but Yahweh was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came fire, but Yahweh was not in the fire. After the fire came a gentle whisper.
Upon hearing it, Elijah wrapped his face in his cloak, went out, and stood at the entrance of the cave.” And in the gentle breeze Yahweh was present (1 Kings, 19:8-13).
After citing this text, Chul Han acknowledges that no one like Nietzsche has described the divine silence as precisely and beautifully.
Faced with the noisy marketplace that the world has become and the commodified form that life has taken, Simone Weil states: “There is no happiness comparable to inner silence.” “Not even the beating of our heart breaks the divine silence,” Chul Han comments.
Apologetic book? No. We are faced with an excellent lesson in philosophy of religion from two of the most creative and influential thinkers of our time.
Here with everything, an objection I raise to Chul Han: in his “thinking with Simone Weil” he does not adequately articulate the mysticism and silence of God in Weil with his commitment to political and social action with the disinherited of the earth and his compassion for victims working in a factory where he came into contact with the unhappiness of the working class, experienced the misfortune of others, and lived in his own flesh their sufferings. “When I entered the factory –she affirms in Waiting for God–, the misfortune of others penetrated my flesh and my soul.” This experience left a mark on her for life, maintaining an identification with the oppressed working class and with suffering humanity.
I believe that Simone Weil and Byung-Chul Han would consider José Saramago’s definition of God—”God is the great silence of the universe and human being the cry that gives meaning to that silence”—to be a good one.
**Juan José Tamayo**
English version translated with AI