La Passion de Simone, an oratorio based on the life and writings of Simone Weil, was performed this week for the first time in the UK at the Barbican. Composed by Kaija Saariaho, with text by Amin Maalouf and directed by Peter Sellars, the piece takes the form of a medieval Passion play, with 15 stations bringing to life key moments in Weil’s life and interpreting some of her most significant ideas.

In finding aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual inspiration in Weil, those involved in this production join a broad but disparate company of her admirers. The feminist Simone de Beauvoir, whom Weil beat to the top of the philosophy class at the Sorbonne in 1927, envied her a “heart that could beat right across the world”. Leon Trotsky, Weil’s guest in Paris in 1933, quarrelled with her but liked her stubbornness. After her death, Albert Camus considered her the most prophetic political thinker since Marx and meditated in her room before travelling to receive his Nobel prize. André Gide called her “the best spiritual writer” of the 20th century and T. S. Eliot said she had a genius akin to the saints. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI treasured her writing. To be sure, she was not to everyone’s taste: Charles de Gaulle, for whom Weil wrote a philosophical discussion paper on postwar France while working for the Free French, said of her: “The woman was mad!”

Indeed, the list of those who have paid serious attention to Weil’s writings reads like a page from a Who’s Who of the 20th century. Yet, in spite of papal endorsement, from a Christian perspective Weil can be a puzzle. As a precocious child in a secularised Jewish family growing up in France, and as a student and political activist, Weil paid scant attention to religion. But from the mid1930s, unlooked for and unexpected, she began to encounter God in Jesus Christ. She met Him in the religious processions of Portuguese fishermen, in the poetry of George Herbert, in the Gregorian chant of a Benedictine monastery, and in charged mystical visions she recorded only in private notebooks. Philosophically, she knew God to be beyond the reach of the human mind. Yet Weil knew that her love of God was not illusory. For all that, when Weil came, eventually, to consider her relation to the Church, she held back from baptism. She told a priest that though she loved several saintly Catholics and loved the Church’s architecture, sacraments and prayers, she could not love it as an institution. No human collective, whether the French nation or the Church, could rank above Weil’s loyalty to truth.

More puzzling still, though she adhered to several fundamental Christian beliefs – for example the divinity of Jesus Christ – in other respects her views were at odds with those of the Church. Weil dismissed almost all the Hebrew Scriptures and, bizarrely for someone with otherwise sound historical judgment, she denied any connection between Christianity and Judaism. In part, her antipathy to Judaism arose from her vehement rejection of any personal connection with Jews or Judaism. But it also followed from her conviction that the idea that God might reveal Himself exclusively to one people or to particular religious communities was scandalous. Jesus’s God, she thought, was the same God intimated in Hinduism and Buddhism and in the philosophy of Plato.

What Christians make of Weil will depend on how Christianity is conceived. If Christianity is a deposit of truth that, once given, constitutes a norm that must be conserved and defended, then it is clear that Weil’s writings, in several crucial respects, are at odds with orthodox faith. But if the Christian faith is conceived as a work-in-progress whose orthodoxy is as open to the future as it is to the past, then Weil’s unique combination of vulnerability and acute insight can make her writings as stimulating for Christian life and thought as they are for philosophy, literature, politics and music.

If this is so, then the woman who refused the Eucharistic bread during her lifetime may still be a companion on the Christian way.

Stephen Plant teaches theology in Cambridge