Hunted by Nazis, saved by faith: The beautiful, confusing, and messy life of Simone Weil
The philosopher who vanished into the heart of God.
Every Freedrift story has its own soundtrack, and I spend about as much time making them as I do writing the articles, and I listen to them on repeat during the entire process. They’re designed to play while you’re reading the stories:
TWO FORCES
Barely 30 years old, Simone Weil fled Paris, then Marseilles, then hid from the Nazis in the countryside.
Weil’s friend Father Perrin, a Dominican Friar, helped arrange her escape to a grape farm owned by theologian Gustave Thibon, who was later nominated for the Nobel Prize five times—though he never won. In a letter ahead of Weil’s arrival, Fr. Perrin described her as “a young Jewish girl, a graduate in philosophy and a militant supporter of the extreme left.”
Through the autumn of 1941, she harvested grapes for eight hours a day. When she wasn’t working, she lectured peasant-laborers on Plato and The Upanishads, and filled her notebooks with poems and philosophical reflections, guided by the notion that “two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.”
She quickly annoyed or confused everyone around her, including Gustave Thibon, her theologian host. Thibon initially “distrusted her motives,” and had to clad himself in “an armor of patience and courtesy in order to bear with her.”
But she gradually charmed him into admiration. He recalls that, during her time on the farm, she was “beginning to open with all her soul to Christianity.”
Increasingly, Thibon felt a strange power from Weil, later writing that “a limpid mysticism emanated from her,” and that he had never come across such “familiarity with religious mysteries.”
Remnant
Mystic, socialist, theologian, philosopher, anarcho-syndicalist: Weil was a gritty, yammering Amélie, who, at the age of five, refused to eat sugar in solidarity with deprived French soldiers shivering on the Great War’s frontline.
Her parents were agnostic Jews, but she became a devout Catholic yet refused baptism and valued the transcendence within atheists. She lived these contradictions with the passion of a maniac. Poet Czeslaw Milosz described hers as “a life of deliberate foolishness.”
Weil’s beautiful, confusing, messy life has captivated some of the greatest minds of contemporary thought. Before leaving Paris to collect his Nobel Prize in 1957, Albert Camus spent a silent hour at Weil’s mother’s apartment, in Weil’s old room, because he saw her as “the only great spirit of our times.”
Many of her classmates at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure — including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — went on to enjoy international celebrity, lives that bordered on hedonism, churning out books that, to this day, lack the generative power at the core of Weil’s writing.
She should have become famous in her own lifetime, but the world was too distracted by the ravages of war. Although it’s likely that she in fact had the chance, but succeeded in avoiding fame.
While alive, Weil was mostly invisible. Cloaked in obscurity.
“For other people, in a sense, I do not exist,” she once wrote. “I am the color of dead leaves, like certain unnoticed insects.”
Yet she also radiated, glowed — but only by dint of her willingness to disappear, to self-deny, to break open.
“Even if we could be like God,” she wrote, “it would be better to be mud which obeys God.”
She lived with self-renunciation, a process of becoming the Sacred Nobody, animated by the idea that “we have to be nothing in order to be in our right place in the whole.” It is only then, she tells us, that God becomes bread: “Love is not consolation, it is light.”
EARLY YEARS OF A BRIEF LIFE
Even as a child, uneasy with her Parisian bourgeois roots, Simone Weil embraced self-denial as liberation. Her brother André was a brilliant mathematician, beside whom she felt stupid—it often made her think of dying.
She dreamt of being a prisoner or a beggar. She adored the poverty of Francis of Assisi, and pined for starvation. She craved the sick and poor, preferring misfits and sinners to prancing intellectuals—drawn to shame, weakness, and need.
Later in life, she would often express envy of Christ’s suffering on the cross, and viewed her own anguish as a willing crucifixion.
By 12, she was fluent in Ancient Greek, and fell in love with the foundational texts of Western Civilization, cementing her lifelong preference of Hellenic discourse over the imperial growl of Roman bluster.
At fourteen, suicidal and suffering migraines (which she called an affliction “at the intersection of body and soul”), Weil experienced her first Dark Night of the Soul. It was like being trapped in a nightmare, yet it revealed freedom.
She began to desire the void.
“The good seems to us as a nothingness,” she wrote, “but this nothingness is not unreal.” Compared to it, everything else is. And she warned us not to flee the void, nor rely on earthly indulgences to fill it. Clarity, for Weil, came in “an act of absolutely unmixed attention,” which is her definition of prayer.
The Spirituality of Work
The daughter of a renowned Parisian physician, she was better suited for the life of a professor, and certainly qualified, given her prestigious education. But she only indulged in academia as a means of exhausting a greater cause.
She loved the working class and searched for a doctrine worthy of their voice. Marxism seemed like the obvious answer—until she deduced that it was mostly crafted by duplicitous intellectuals. To actual workers, Marxist texts are incoherent, boring, and indulgent. “An unneeded luxury.”
By exposing the dirty secret of this collectivist paradigm, Weil drew the ire of the intellectual class — Trotsky resented her.
But she also rejected capitalism.
Instead, she revered the work of the hands. Physical labor, she believed, held greater spiritual weight than art, science, or philosophy; that it should be the soul of a just society.
Her philosophy revolves around this collision—gravity and grace, tension and unity: “As soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way the contrary is true.”
To accomplish this, she encouraged a radical openness, in which she wouldn’t exclude any significant ideas, regardless of their political, religious, or cultural origin, until after she had given them a chance to perform.
And if the subsequent agreed-upon ideas clashed or threatened to eradicate one another, all the better, all the more true.
Contradiction, she said, was “a lever of transcendence.”
Her life became a harmony of opposites, a cohesion forged from shadow: “We have to elucidate the way contradictories have of being true.”
She believed that truth requires us to strip away illusion, to abandon “the imaginary royalty of the world,” and enter the labyrinth—to meet life in its jaws.
This dialectic is constantly in flux throughout her work. Presence made visible only through its absence.
Durutti Column
In the late 1930s, the 27-year-old Weil — an avowed pacifist — left academia and factory life to fight in the Spanish Civil War with the anarchist Durutti Column. But before she could accomplish anything heroic, she spilled cooking oil on herself and had to limp home. A month later, the women in her former unit were executed, then dumped into mass graves like so many others—including the brilliant Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, who wrote: “In tears, the moon says: ‘I want to be an orange’.” .
After fleeing Spain, Weil traveled with her parents to Portugal, where, at 28, she suffered her first revelation. While stricken with a migraine in a cathedral, she heard a Gregorian chant and, as theologian-farmer Gustave Thibon recalled, “experienced the joy and bitterness of Christ’s passion as a real event.
She knelt at a shrine in Assisi and began repeating the “Our Father” with such total attention that “Christ Himself descended upon her and took her.”
She came to believe that the Christian idea—rooted in Ancient Greek thought and shaped by centuries of European civilization—was essential, and that renouncing it would be a form of degradation. Beauty, she said, is “the only finality,” present in all human pursuits.
But before she could slow down enough to spread these ideas, Hitler’s campaign against the world began, and a Jewish intellectual with dense and tangled political beliefs had no choice but to flee, in her case to a vineyard.
PECULIAR YEARS
During her wartime months at Saint-Marcel harvesting grapes, as part of what T.S. Eliot described as the “peculiar conditions” of her last five years, she voided into skin-and-bones, crippling headaches, constant monotone, a life of alienation, with no known romance — let alone children or marriage — and an unshakable belief that she had already finished.
In a letter, Weil confessed that she suspected her “own fortunes [would] never be good in this world.”
They weren’t, by most standards.
Yet, in its vulnerability, hers was a blessed life. She thrived with the grace and beauty of a monk or a nun — Weil was famously androgynous, and throughout her life was both mocked and sacralized for this angelic ambiguity.
T.S. Eliot described her as “a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.”
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