More... Simone Weil
Simone Weil was a French woman, a philosopher and of a non-practicing Jewish family. She died at the age of 34 of starvation in 1943. She is not to be confused with Simone de Beauvoir, fellow philosopher and mistress of French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, although the three of them were aware of each other and met briefly before WWII.
Although all three, Weil, de Beauvoir and Sartre were leftists and supporters of or partisans with the Free French during the war, Weil eventually embraced faith in God while the other two remained atheists their whole lives.
Weil believed in living in action what she thought and believed in her mind. In 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she secretly entered that country to fight with the POUM anarchists in the north, in Catalonia. I believe this was prior to George Orwell's doing the same.
Weil, always rather sickly and with poor eyesight, joined Buenaventura Durrutti's small band of guerillas there - however, after just 2 or 3 days near the front, she accidentally stepped into a pot of boiling oil and burned her leg terribly. She had to be removed to a hospital where her parents met her. Eventually she returned to France.
Simone Weil also believed in the worth of the proletariat; she worked several months in a French factory to gain some closeness to workers and their plight. She believed workers should have education, meaningful work and be treated with dignity.
Near the end of her life, she discovered a closeness to God and Christ, but due to differences with the doctrine and hierarchy of the Catholic Church decided never to be baptized or receive any of the sacraments, including Last Rites. She believed the Catholic Church failed to reach out to her friends, atheists and agnostics, because of its strict dogmatic stance. The Church didn’t allow for the doubt and questioning that Simone and others like her had. She, even as a Jewess, could never accept an Old Testament God who condoned and even directed killing and genocide by the Israelites against their neighbors. Weil believed she was a better example as a unbaptized Christian unaffiliated with any church.
Weil was an individualist; she could never condone the collectivist ideas and policies of the Russian Communists. She was for individual thought and action, unfettered by politics, ideology or religious groups, although she diligently searched all religions for Truth and welcomed it when she found it.
Weil escaped Paris with her parents on the very day the Nazis were entering (kind of like Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca"!). The three of them went south to Marseilles where Marshall Petain was setting up the Vichy regime. But as in "Casablanca", the Vichy French were basically puppets of the Nazis and had little sympathy for the Jewish people.
Simone again escaped to New York City where she became involved with an African-American church for a while, then moved to London in an attempt to be of use with the Free French partisans based there. But by then her health was rapidly deteriorating... she ended up in a sanatorium where she passed away - mainly due to self-allowed starvation. She could not abide living in a world where others were starving; she had to participate somehow in their suffering. Probably, since she never ate much anyway as an adult. Her anorexia became irreversible. Whether she consciously wanted to starve herself or not, I don’t know.
Many of Weil's deep, deep writings didn't come to light till the 1970's, and many afficionados came to consider her as a kind of mystic. Indeed, her thought and life came very near to God in many ways after her conversion. She remains in many ways an enigma, an intellectual of profound prophetic insight and example.