 Weil articulates her religious philosophy through a series of distinctions—of oppositions or contradictions. It is important to read the distinctions she makes not as positing dualisms, but as suggesting contraries that are, unsynthesized, themselves mediations through which the soul is drawn upward. Her concept of “intermediaries”—or metaxu (μεταξύ), the Greek term she employs in her notebooks—becomes explicit beginning in 1939. Through metaxu God is indirectly present in the world—for example, in beauty, cultural traditions, law, and labor—all of which place us into contact with reality. In terms of her periodization, her concept of mediation moved from relations of mind and matter on the level of the natural (found in the early Weil) to a mediation relating the natural intelligence to attention and love on the level of the supernatural (at work in the late Weil), thus encompassing her early view through a universal perspective.