L’image chlorophyllienne de la grâce chez Simone Weil

Abstract

“The Greeks were haunted by the idea of grace.” Simone Weil analyses this idea on the basis of the Greek word charis understood in the sense of gratuitous gift (with no reference to the sense proposed by the Hebrew language). Her taste for science and her inclination to link sensible realities and spiritual events through analogies bring her to compare the work of grace to the phenomenon of chlorophyll assimilation (or photosynthesis). In all her texts up to the last pages of L’Enracinement, she employs a powerful framework opposing Weightiness and Grace, and considers the notion of Grace in terms of the ascending energy that directs the growth of plants toward light.