Here Simone Weil writes of how she came to an appreciation of the real import of Christian teaching – and her own Christian identity – in an affectively toned experience of music. At the time of this episode, Weil was of course already familiar with the credal claims of Christianity; so in the terms I have been using, this seems to be a case of feeling building upon a prior doctrinal understanding, so as to provide a deeper, more integrative, more self-involving understanding of what was previously grasped in purely verbal or ‘notional’ terms. Weil makes no reference to the meaning of the words of the hymns. So the revelatory force of the music does not depend, it seems, upon any verbal mediation. Nor is its religious suggestiveness evidently the product of a religious context: the sense that the women's behaviour bears a religious meaning is presumably given, at least in large part, in the music itself.