Simone Weil and the Sacred Work of Doubt

On a cold morning in December 1934, Simone Weil clocked in at a factory in Paris, ready to work alongside the laborers whose lives she sought to understand. The relentless clatter of machines, the sting of metal shavings on skin, the rhythm of exhaustion pressing against her chest: this was no symbolic gesture. Weil, frail and prone to migraines, suffered physically under the factory’s brutal pace. Her supervisors viewed her as odd and impractical. And still, she stayed working at the factory until August 1935. Weil had been born into an upper-middle-class intellectual family, and she felt that understanding the suffering of others required her to feel it herself. For Weil, experience was a form of reverent inquiry: a way of listening and learning with her whole life.

Weil never called herself a Christian. She wrote passionately about God, prayed in private, and experienced moments of piercing spiritual encounter. In 1937, while visiting the chapel of Santa Maria Degli Angeli in Assisi – where Saint Francis had once prayed – Weil felt suddenly compelled to kneel and pray, moved, as she later said, by something stronger than herself. The following year, during Holy Week at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, she experienced such pure joy while listening to Gregorian chants that she felt the thought of the Passion of Christ enter her being “once and for all.” There, while suffering from an intense headache, she also meditated on George Herbert’s Christian poem “Love” and wrote that “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” Yet even after all these experiences, Weil continued to refuse baptism – not out of disbelief, but out of reverence. She would not rush into naming what she felt too humble to name.

For Weil, doubt was not the opposite of faith. It was the most faithful posture she could imagine: a willingness to suspend final answers for the sake of deepening her understanding, and therefore her reverence and love. It seemed to her that since Christ was the truth, there was no harm in asking questions. Any questions she asked would only lead her into deeper knowing. “Christ likes us to prefer truth to him,” she wrote. “Because before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.” Doubt kept her open to what God would reveal.

For Weil, the path to this revelation was paying attention. Weil is often quoted for having once written “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” but she meant something much more radical than we usually mean when we say “pay attention.” She wasn’t inviting us to merely watch or listen, but to surrender to what is revealed. Weil’s faith was less about arriving at answers than cultivating her capacity to be in this posture of prayerful humility, inviting transformation.

Simone Weil in Marseilles, early 1940s. Photographer unknown / Wikimedia.

In a time when faith is often equated with certainty – and doubt seen as betrayal – Weil offers a radically different model: one of reverent questioning, humble attention, and tireless love. She lived with doubt not as a barrier to faith, but a spiritual posture that enriched it.

Mixing belief with openness is unusual and difficult, but powerful. A few decades before Weil’s activism, the American philosopher William James argued in his famous lectures The Varieties of Religious Experience that having religious beliefs can help us be better people. James wasn’t a believer himself, but he praised how belief bolstered what he called the “strenuous mood” – the willingness and ability to do hard things. Belief in something higher than ourselves can embolden us and equip us to act with compassion and courage.

Yet at the same time, James also saw open-mindedness as an important form of strenuousness. A particular fortitude is required to stay open and revise one’s beliefs. His contemporary John Dewey explained this well when he described doubt as the feeling of holding an inquiry open no matter how satisfying or safe it might feel to arrive at a premature answer. He said that the capacity to “sit in doubt” was the bedrock of learning: it meant you were willing to endure discomfort for the sake of finding deeper truths.

What if faith involves trust that what is revealed to us in our questions will imbue our lives with more sacredness, rather than less?

In 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Weil joined an anarchist brigade fighting against Franco’s fascist forces. She was nearsighted, awkward with weapons, and prone to illness – but insisted on joining the front. Her time there was brief. She accidentally scalded herself by stepping in a pot of boiling oil and was sent home.

Weil had gone to the front not out of ideological allegiance but because she felt called to give whole-bodied attention to these people embroiled in suffering. What naked truths of love, loss, longing, humanity, good, evil, and God might be revealed to her by experiencing life on the front? Afterward, Weil lamented the missed opportunity to feel and express solidarity. The experience, she said, intensified her search for a way to live that would honor the extremity of human suffering. 

This was not self-punishment. It was her theology in motion. To love rightly, she began to argue, required that we decreate ourselves: release our control over outcomes, personal will, and presuppositions so we can be re-created through the act of loving attention. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she wrote, “but by waiting for them. This waiting is not an expectation. It is a suspension of the mind.” That suspension – the pause between knowing and not knowing – was her holy ground. It was where she held herself still so the divine could create her ever anew.

In 1943, Weil, ill with tuberculosis, escaped occupied France via Casablanca and New York and ended up in London. While there, she tried to form a corps of frontline nurses who would parachute into combat zones to care for the wounded. Leaders deemed her proposal unworkable and dangerous, so she worked at the Free French headquarters in London instead. She was often frustrated by bureaucratic obstacles and the limits placed on her involvement. But she produced some of her most important texts during this period, including The Need for Roots. In this book, Weil advocates for a society built on the spiritual posture she had spent her life cultivating: faithful openness. Humans, she says, have a need for roots. We need solid ground to hold us steady. In essence, we need faith. But it cannot be a faith that closes us down. It must be a faith that opens us up. Faith that remains open and invites transformation can help not just individuals but societies find new ways to love.

Weil died shortly after completing The Need for Roots, likely because of her fierce commitment to justice. Officially, she died of tuberculosis. But she refused food beyond the rations available to the people of occupied France, often fasting or eating only meager portions. Doctors and colleagues pleaded with her to eat, but she insisted that she could not morally accept more than her countrymen had to eat. After months of this, the toll on her body was too great.

Her family friend and biographer Richard Rees later remarked, “She died of love – of love for her fellow men, of love for God.”

Weil’s life does not suggest we do the same. But it does invite our curiosity about what faith means to us and how we can best deepen our capacities for hope and love.

What becomes possible for us if we, too, let our unanswered questions sharpen our compassion instead of dulling our faith? What if we, like Weil, learned to bear uncertainty as a form of love?

In a culture that equates strength with conviction, Weil offers us a different strength: the strength to remain tender in uncertainty. To be patient with mystery. To trust that faith, too, can grow in the soil of doubt.