WEIL, SIMONE. - Born in Paris in 1909, died in the sanatorium of Ashford in England in 1943, she is a singular figure of thinker and mystic, oriented toward the Christian mystery of the Cross.
Jewish, educated in the school of the radical philosopher Alain, she abandoned teaching and family to live in absolute dedication the experience of the working class in factories and on farms, also participating in political struggles against totalitarianism. She never embraced the Catholic faith, though she was always drawn to Christ; indeed, she was decidedly opposed to the Church, considering it from a temporal, historicist perspective, convinced that intelligence was enslaved by its dogmas and the spirit mortified by its discipline. At the crossroads between Christianity and all that is not Christian, she had no doctrine, but rather an adventitious metaphysical-theological gnosis with tendencies now Cathar, now Pythagorean, now Platonic, which surfaced in her from the humus of Eastern traditions, particularly Indian: turning from this mythological world of culture to Christ in an exemplary ascetic-mystical search, yet formally and doctrinally decomposed and therefore isolated in a restless and disturbing immolation outside the Church. She wrote no books, leaving only notebooks of annotations that were published after her death by her friends Gustave Thibon and J. M. Perrin, a Dominican, and also by A. Camus: *La pesanteur et la Grâce* (1948, Italian ed. Milan 1951), *L'enracinement* (1949), *Attente de Dieu* (1950), *Lettres à un religieux* (1950), *La connaissance surnaturelle* (1951), *Cahiers* (1951), *Intuitions préchrétiennes* (1951), *La condition ouvrière* (1951). Fundamental texts for a religious study of W.: *Attente de Dieu* and *La pesanteur et la Grâce*; for her working-class experience: *Condition ouvrière*.