Simone Weil

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist who combined profound religious experience with radical social criticism. She worked on factory floors to understand oppression, wrote on attention as a form of love, and explored the relationship between affliction, grace, and God.

Weil's trajectory from Marxist activism to mystical theology is one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary intellectual journeys. Her concept of decreation — the self's withdrawal to make room for God — and her analysis of affliction (malheur) as the experience of extreme suffering that strips the self bare are entirely her own.