Simone Weil: The Saint Without a Church

Thursday, February 13, 2025. This is for my lovely HSP client, Viv.

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
            Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
    From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
            If I lack’d anything.

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
            Love said, ‘You shall be he.’

‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
            I cannot look on Thee.’

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
            ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
            Go where it doth deserve.’

‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
            ‘My dear, then I will serve.’

‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
            So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a human tuning fork, a highly sensitive person, highly neurodivergent, vibrating with every sorrow of the world.

She lived like a woman who read the Gospels and said, "Alright, let's see if this works," and then decided to find out the hard way.

Was she a philosopher, a mystic, or a secular saint?

All three. Or maybe none.

Born comfortable, she eschewed comfort. Born a jew, she had visions of Christ, but was never baptised.

Titles didn’t interest her. Only truth did. Simone lived her 34 years with a saintly, almost asinine integrity.

Albert Camus and Simone Weil: A Philosophical Kinship

Albert Camus, the existentialist with the heart of a poet, once called Simone Weil "the only great spirit of our time."

He found her after she died, cracking open her notebooks and finding someone who had asked his questions about suffering, justice, and God but somehow answered them by walking into the fire.

Camus was obsessed with rebellion—how to resist the absurdity of life without losing your soul.

Weil, on the other hand, believed that the soul should be offered up entirely, burned to ash if necessary. He admired her, deeply, but he never quite followed her.

"Too far," you could almost hear him say. But he published her, promoted her, and carried her spirit forward. Because you don't let someone like Simone Weil slip into obscurity.

Gravity and Grace: The Universal Law of the Soul

Weil believed that the entire universe ran on two opposing forces: Gravity and Grace.

Gravity is what pulls us down—into selfishness, violence, despair. Grace is what lifts us—unexpected, unsought, a feather on the wind. Most people live entirely under Gravity's Rule. Weil believed Grace only appears when you consent to fall—to hit rock bottom and not flinch.

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception." (Weil, 1952)

She didn’t learn this in a classroom.

She learned it on the factory floor, where she worked until her body broke.

She learned it in war, fighting (badly, she was frail) for the Spanish Republic. She learned it, as I did, through migraines that could flatten you for days. She believed that through suffering, the soul could become empty enough for grace to enter.

Attention: The Gateway to Love and God

Weil believed, as I do, that human attention is a kind of prayer. Not the attention you give your phone, but the raw, piercing focus that makes a suffering person feel, for once, seen.

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." (Weil, 1951)

When you listen to someone without preparing your reply, when you witness their pain without offering a quick fix, you are, in Weil’s eyes, practicing holiness. Attention, real, bestowed attention, breaks the spell of self-absorption and makes room for grace.

Affliction (Malheur): Suffering That Breaks You Open

Affliction, or malheur, was Weil's name for suffering so profound that it crushes the soul, leaving a person hollowed out and barely human. It's not just pain. It's pain with loneliness, injustice, and humiliation folded inside.

"Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a destruction of the soul by the mechanical brutality of circumstances." (Weil, 1952)

But Weil insisted that in the hollow space left by affliction, something divine could enter. For her, the Cross was not a symbol of victory but of solidarity—God, too, had known affliction. And stayed.

Décréation: Becoming Nothing to Become Everything

Weil's most unsettling idea was décréation—the act of unmaking the self to make room for God. Most of us spend our lives building a self: accomplishments, desires, identities.

Weil thought the path to truth was to tear that construction down.

"To desire to be nothing is to desire to be in God." (Weil, 1952)

décréation isn’t destruction. It’s a softening, a surrender. In other words, Simone didn’t want to be something. She wanted to let something through.

Her War with Work: Dignity Stolen by Machines

Weil understood suffering in the abstract but also in the raw, physical sense of factory labor.

She intentionally worked the assembly line for 28 weeks and saw how it mutilated the human soul. She believed that industrial work, stripped of meaning and beauty, was spiritual violence.

"The factory makes machines out of men. The result is not merely suffering but degradation." (Weil, 1955)

To Weil, real work—craftsmanship, farming, anything with meaning—was sacred. But mechanical labor, labor without dignity, was a theft of the human spirit.

God and Absence: The Divine Hide-and-Seek

Weil believed in God, but, like me, what fascinated her most was His absence.

She was captivated by kenosis—God’s self-emptying, the idea that God withdrew to make room for creation.

To love as God loves, she believed, was to withdraw from self-importance, self-assertion, self-anything. And yet, she never joined the Church. She refused baptism.

"I refuse to be baptized because I refuse to belong to anything that separates the saved from the damned."(Weil, 1951)

I get the distinction. Johnny Cash once said that he sang with the damned, not to the damned.

To Weil, Grace could not be limited by any institution. It belonged to everyone. And so she stayed on the outside, standing with the ones who didn’t belong.

Death: Martyrdom or Madness?

Simone Weil died in 1943 at 34, refusing to eat more than what was available to the occupied French under Nazi rule.

Her death was labeled suicide. Was it? Or was it the final act of decreation, of solidarity, of love?

Albert Camus thought she was a saint. T.S. Eliot called her a genius of the order of the saints.

And Weil herself? She would have despised the notion.

But if a saint is someone who loves the world enough to suffer for it without looking away, then yes, she was a saint.

And not the tidy kind who fits on a stained-glass window. The uncomfortable kind. The kind who leaves you with questions.

Because Simone Weil doesn’t want you to admire her. She wants you to look. She left us her writings to help us do just that.

Her message is both vital and timely: Look at the world. Look at suffering. Look without turning away, with a heart that beats across the world.

I wonder what she would think of us now?

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

Major Works of Simone Weil

Weil, S. (1951). Waiting for God (E. Craufurd, Trans.). Harper & Row.

Weil, S. (1952). Gravity and Grace (A. Wills, Trans.). Routledge.

Weil, S. (1949). The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (A. Wills, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Weil, S. (1955). Oppression and Liberty (A. Wills & J. Petrie, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Weil, S. (1970). First and Last Notebooks (R. Rees, Trans.). Oxford University Press.