Simone Weil (1909-1943), a French Jewish convert to Christianity and an enlightened mind, faced in her 34 years of life the difficulties of a society where the work dehumanizes by its mechanization and the search for truth is blurred. It could be said that he led at the time, ahead of his time, two challenges: a radical change in the way of understanding the work and the need to save man from individualism and rootlessness. According to Gabriella Fiori, Weil opened new paths to intelligence. I think his contributions are still current and inspiring in the midst of the digital revolution.

My teacher, the philosopher Rafael Alvira, insisted that work is a modern category. Before the industrial revolution there was labor, task; but since Adam Smith we have work rationally divided. The partitioning of tasks allows three things according to the enlightened Scotsman: specialization, time saving and - thanks to mechanization - increased production. Smith, aware of the number of poor people in the cities after the fall of the feudal system, considered that this way of organizing the work would provide them with wages and property. However, he was also able to see that this division of the work would lead to some ills: a repetitive work impedes the development of the intelligence, exhausts the bodies and dwarfs the purpose of the worker, who does not consider the service he renders with his work to the social whole.

Two centuries later, Simone Weil offered solutions to humanize the mechanized work , i.e. that the machine should be at the service of man, and not man at the service of the machine. The Frenchwoman worked voluntarily at Renault, wanted to experience the suffering of a production line (remember Charles Chaplin in Modern Times), and announced in the 1930s a new revolution for the 20th century: to move towards a spirituality of work, to be aware of the transforming task she is carrying out, to train herself to work well; and to connect her work with a service to the social whole and to the truth, where it must be rooted. Simone Weil vindicates the work guide , artisanal and agricultural, because it is there where man becomes aware of his debt: he is given the earth and its gifts by cultivating it and transforming it with his action. It seems to him that this knowledge of being indebted frees man from self-sufficiency, so widespread where individualism reigns. As he works, he tires, he experiences his proximity to death and this places him before the great Socratic question: death as a limit.

If we develop this intuition we can point out that where there is a limit, there is beyond it, therefore, death opens to a beyond, and the man who works learns it. The opening to transcendence connects with the permanent -the unchanging-, with what is subtracted from time, with the eternal, that is to say, with the divine that gives gifts to man, this can and should be celebrated. The action of working is then rhythmized between work, rest and feast: one works what is given, one recovers from fatigue, one celebrates what is given. The work can thus become a celebratory cult.

Weil reminds us that action without loving contemplation makes us similar to the machine and engenders idolatry, because what is proper to man is not only efficient execution, but to put conscience and loving attention in what he does. Whoever works cultivates himself on condition that his intelligence understands that in addition to the objective dimension - the product of work- this involves a subjective dimension: the improvement of the man who works (intelligence, justice, order, service, friendship, etc.) and the improvement of the society that becomes the recipient of his work. Far from being an enslaving task, work becomes a time of solidarity with others and deeply existential for each one. According to Weil, the West is crumbling and only the contemplation of beauty, the rediscovery of the liturgy and fraternal justice towards others could save it. Will the work be an opportunity for this challenge?