 Time, contrary to God as eternal, along with space and matter, is first of all the most basic form of necessity. In its constant reminder of distance from God, and in the experiences of enduring and waiting, time is also painful. Weil’s Christian Platonism comes to light in the two most poignant metaphors she uses to refer to time, namely, the (Platonic) Cave and the (Christian) Cross. In both cases, time is the weight or the pull of necessity, through which the soul, in any effort of the self, feels vulnerable, contingent, and unavoidably subject to necessity’s mediation here below (ici-bas). Time, then, is both the Cave where the self pursues its illusory goals of expansion into the future and the Cross where necessity, a sign of God’s love, pins the self, suffering and mortal, to the world.