Simone Weil: The Woman Who Rejected Everything for Her Beliefs

Simone Weil was a 20th-century French philosopher so committed to her beliefs that she literally starved herself to death. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, she rejected comfort, wealth, family security, and eventually food itself - all in pursuit of spiritual truth and solidarity with human suffering. By age 34, she was dead, officially from tuberculosis, but actually from self-imposed starvation that her family couldn't stop and she refused to reverse. Her journals and letters reveal a brilliant, tortured mind wrestling with God, suffering, and what it meant to truly live.

Weil's life was a series of radical rejections. In the 1930s, she was a political activist and communist sympathizer, writing about workers' oppression. But instead of just the ...