You feel bad saying you don’t like Simone Weil. Referring to her in conversation is taken as code for a decent modern thinker’s gasping attempts to integrate the intellect and the soul. Which might explain why Routledge has just included Weil in its “Great Minds” series, reprinting her short essay, “Letter to a Priest” in a volume supplemented by the even shorter “Human Personality”. These two torturous meditations on faith and doubt are introduced by a small but perfectly formed foreword by the atheist philosopher Raimond Gaita. Maybe it takes an atheist to, as Gaita puts it, “open up the conceptual space” that Weil’s words inhabit. Gaita does so through a story from his early clinical experience. While several profession