Weil's essays are bristling with insights, and there is both a sophistication and a naivete about the way she writes about them. She's not attempting to justify herself to anyone; she's not attempting to fit into some school. There is a raw energy in what she writes, and those who are drawn to her would not be so if they did not feel that energy.
I certainly feel it, but I find in her a kindred spirit who has had similar insights but given them different interpretations. There are so many times when I'm reading her when I say "Yes, where else today would you hear some one say that?" But I am also often saying "No, that's taking what's basically right in a direction I would not go." She is someone I would have loved to have known and to have argued with.
What is important in reading every great thinker from Plato or Nietzsche is not to agree or disagree with him but to understand the underlying insight he is attempting to explain. The fundamental insight is either delusional or it is deeply disclosive of the Real. If someone is a significant enough to be taken as seriously as figures like Plato or Nietzsche, we must take seriously their insights. We can, however argue with their explanations--but not until we feel confident we understand their originating insights
I have always read Plato as someone who has had experiences of transcendence, and his philosophy as an attempt to explain how such a dimension can exist while at the same time our everyday experience seems to refute its existence. Plato's explanations are interesting but clearly inadequate. I see Weil as a Platonist in this sense, and as someone sympathetic to Plato's explanations because perhaps she was not exposed to other possible explanations.
[It's possible that Socrates was the one who had the deep, disclosive intuitions of the Real, and that Plato's did not personally have these intuitions. The difference between the younger an older Plato lies in that the younger Plato was more impressed with the personal, inspired testimony of Socrates which got progressively stale for Plato as Socrates' memory faded. As it did, Plato's philosophy becomes more rationalistic, i.e., stale, than inspired. Socrates becomes for Plato more of a literary device than an inspiring, prophetic mediator of the Real.]
In any event, Weil is an unabashed Platonist who is so because she has had experiences in which she has touched the eternal and timeless. But you can have experiences and misinterpret them. I think that she's wrong in the way she rejects the temporal and material. For her the experience of the eternal, of transcendence, is outside of the temporal and material. It's a lifting up of the soul to the transcendent, to something beyond. I would argue, as with all experiences of grace from the most overwhelming to the subtlest, that such experiences are not of rising up of lower to higher, but of a descent of the higher into the lower. This is the archetype of incarnation. The idea of the lower rising to the higher is Platonic and Buddhistic, but not Christian.
Weil acknowledges the idea of "descent" in the pairing of gravity and grace, but her idea, if I understand it correctly, is that Grace descends in order that we below might be uplifted, to live as if the real gravitational center was above rather than below. I see it rather as a receptive human emptiness creating a kind of spiritual vacuum that draws into itself what is universally and superabundantly available from above and which seeks to break through the walls of those of us below imprisoned by walls of delusion that keep grace, the penetrating energy of the Deep Real, out. Having an emptiness is a precondition for the penetration of grace. To the degree that one's soul is full of delusional concerns, especially the concerns of what I call the Darwinian Self, there is less room for grace to find a place to insinuate itself and to do its transformative work.
And so, yes, there is something important that such a higher/lower spatial metaphor seeks to express. What is above, what is transcendent is real in a way that what is below is not, and so it should define the orientation of the soul, to that which is above rather than to that which is below. And certainly any true experience of grace is uplifting in the metaphorical sense. And so it follows, that the human task is to move from what is below to that which is above, that it is most itself when it is uplifted, and feeling disoriented as a result. This is the basic Axial insight, and I affirm its validity.
Weil believes that ideas or development and progress are illusions, and if I were to argue with her I would say that she's mostly correct because most ideas of progress are parodies or distorted cooptations of the real thing, but that there is, nevertheless, a real thing that they parody and coopt. And so I would argue that Weil misses the point of the incarnation, which was to make possible the rule of what exists above into what exists below. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" means more than just mind your Ps and Qs; it means literally to work toward the establishment of the rule of heaven in the world below. And this is at the heart of all impulses, parodies though they be, in the West and elsewhere to repent and to be reformed.
The problem, of course, is how you go about Reform, and the mistake that's been made in any ambitious reform project from Calvin's Geneva to Robespierre's Paris, to Lenin, Mao, and beyond is to force things outside in. And so Platonists, those who see the Deep Real as outside time and space, tend to be politically conservative, because for them the world of change is always a world or delusion, and so all worldly projects are vain. So better to have a stable, hierarchical social order that provides a trellis of sorts that mirrors the Great Chain of Being, a ladder that provides the rungs by which one can climb from lower to higher.
But if we retain the basic insight about humans being mostly deluded and out of touch with the Deep Real, but change the metaphor, then one's orientation toward time and space changes as well. If we see the goal as moving from lower to higher, and the ultimate goal as living in a dimension of existence outside time and space, then time and space have no values except to be delusions from which we need to be liberated. If, on the other hand, we see the goal as the transformation of time and space by the infusion of grace into the world of delusion, then time and space become not something from which to be escaped but the context in which liberation is to be effected. The goal is not to rise up from lower to higher but rather to bring down what is higher into what is lower, then history becomes significant in a way it cannot be in the classic Platonic sense.
"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" is an eschatological hope, something to be accomplished on earth, not by leaving it. Humans make this possible to the degree that they allow themselves to become infusion points for grace, and they do this every time they act in accordance to what conscience, the cognitive capacity in every human heart to discern grace, prompts or inspires them to do.
Conscience, as I've written so often before, is different from superego. I'll have more to say about that when I post another essay about Weil's idea of the "Great Beast", which is for her the mesmerizing power of the collective. Loyalty to one's family, tribe, or group is considered almost universally to be a virtue, but it can be one of the greatest obstacles to acts of true conscience.