Simone Weil (1909–1943) was one of the great souls of the 20th century. She was flawed in many respects, but she possessed a rare and admirable sensitivity to things of the spirit. Though she came from a comfortably bourgeois family of French Jews and graduated from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, she deeply sympathized with the afflictions of the poor. As a result, she combined teaching and political activism with (awkward) stints trying to work in factories or live alongside France’s agricultural workers. The English man of letters Malcolm Muggeridge, who admired her profoundly, couldn’t deny that her “passion to identify [herself] with the downtrodden and oppressed” had elements of farce about it, given her “absent-mindedness and congenital clumsiness.” Yet for all that she seemed to embody the tendency of well-off Marxists to salve their guilt through inept and often unwanted displays of solidarity with the poor, Weil would not remain on the Left for long—at least, not in any simple or unqualified sense. Unlike many of her peers, she caught on early to the sinister totalitarian propensities of Marxist ideology and its rigid materialism. And she came to embody in a quite admirable way a genuine, non-ideological concern for the poor and “afflicted,” as she called them.

As the Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz observed in