Abstract

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 , 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