Simone Weil

Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909 into an agnostic Jewish family, and studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. She taught philosophy in provincial lycées, while engaging deeply in trade-union and political work. In 1934–1935 she took leave to work in factories, including at Renault, an experience of exhaustion and humiliation that shaped her idea of affliction. In 1936 she joined an anarchist unit in the Spanish Civil War, until an accident with boiling oil sent her home.

Between 1935 and 1938 she had three experiences of Christ: in a Portuguese fishing village, at Assisi, and at the abbey of Solesmes, where, reciting George Herbert’s poem “Love”, she felt Christ himself take possession of her. She remained unbaptized, on the threshold of the Church, out of solidarity with all those outside it. She also studied Sanskrit and read the Bhagavad Gītā.

In 1942 she left France with her parents, and went to London to work for the Free French. Refusing to eat more than the rations of those in occupied France, and suffering from tuberculosis, she died at Ashford, Kent, in August 1943, at the age of thirty-four. Her notebooks and letters were published after her death: Gravity and Grace (1947), selected by Gustave Thibon, and Waiting for God (1950), her letters to Father Perrin.