Those who write about Simone Weil (1909–43) use strikingly similar vocabulary, describing her as ascetic, brilliant, enigmatic, a genius, heretical, mad, mercurial, an outsider, passionate, prophetic, revolutionary, spiritual and troubled. The list of frequently used terms is longer, but not by much. Aside from what these terms tell us about those who comment on her life and thought, they suggest how hard it can be to classify Weil's thought or locate her in a history of ideas. Weil simply does not fit snugly into a tradition or belong neatly to a school of thought. She admired Plato, but her interpretation of him is shot through with idiosyncrasies. Indebted to Karl Marx, she came to reject revolution. Enraptured by Catholic religion and in love with Jesus Christ, she saw in the Catholic Church an embodiment of the “Great Beast … the object of idolatry … an ersatz God” (Weil 2002: 164). A religious mystic, she thought atheism purified religion. Her writings, moreover, are fragmentary by comparison with those of other major modern thinkers. She published little, and what she did publish tended (with one exception, the 1934 political essay Oppression and Liberty) to be in the form of short articles in obscure journals. Her inclination to unfold her thinking by means of short pensées in the style of Blaise Pascal was fostered by her teacher, Alain (Emile Chartier), and later necessitated by the exigencies of the Second World War. The notebooks, in which Weil's thoughts appear in the sequence in which they occurred, were left in the hands of friends.