Waiting for God by Simone Weil
Published 1950 · 227 pages · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Waiting for God to read?
Waiting for God scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Philosophical and theological vocabulary; demands familiarity with Plato and Christian theology.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- Among the most abstractly demanding spiritual writing in French literature.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Every paragraph integrates philosophical argument, theological claim, and personal testimony.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Essayistic and epistolary; personal experience used to ground abstract argument.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- The Cross, gravity, waiting — each figure carries philosophical and mystical weight.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- The radical refusal of baptism is itself an ironic enactment of the argument.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- Weil's theology is deliberately incomplete; she stopped at the threshold.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- A collection of essays and letters, each self-contained but mutually reinforcing.
How Waiting for God is regarded
Waiting for God holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.