 Weil’s concept of necessity bears on her late conceptualization of the subject. She connects seeing oneself as central to the world to seeing oneself as exempt from necessity. From this perspective, if something were to befall oneself, then the world would cease to have importance; therefore, the assertive and willful self concludes, nothing could befall oneself. Affliction contradicts this perspective and thus forcefully de-centers the self. Unlike her existentialist contemporaries such as Sartre, Weil did not think human freedom principally through agency; for her, humans are free not ontologically as a presence-to-self but supernaturally through obedience and consent. More than obedience, consent is the unity of necessity in matter with freedom in creatures. A creature cannot not obey; the only choice for the intelligent creature is to desire or not to desire the good. To desire the good—and here her stoicism through Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza emerges in her own appeal to amor fati—is a disposition that implies a consent to necessity and a love of the order of the world, both of which mean accepting divine will. Consent, therefore, is a kind of reconciliation in her dialectic between the necessary and the good. Consent does not follow from effort or will; rather, it expresses an ontological status, namely, decreation. In supernatural compassion one loves through evil: through distance (space) and through monotony (time), attending in a void and through the abdication of God. Thus, in regard to contradiction and mediation, just as the intelligence must grapple with mystery in Weil’s epistemology, so too love must be vulnerable and defenseless in the face of evil in her metaphysical and religious philosophy.