Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905–1944) by Brenna Moore (review)

Raïssa Maritain was a Russian Jew who, with her husband Jacques, born a Protestant, converted to Catholicism in 1906. Along with a number of other convertis, both became prominent members of the intellectual and artistic renouveau catholique in France. While Brenna Moore recognizes that historians have revised the ‘old narrative’ of Church versus Republic, this Manichean division remains a constant presence in the narrative of Raïssa Maritain’s spiritual trajectory. The centrality of suffering in her work rests, for Moore, on Maritain’s perception that a cold, rationalist and bourgeois state, where atheistic positivism and secular values predominated, denied the existence of mortality and affliction (Moore’s own conflation of laïcisme and laïcité is unfortunate here). Such indifference was represented in the intellectual world by the dead, dry knowledge of the Sorbonne (insufficiently evidenced by Moore). Under the enduring influence of Léon Bloy Maritain proceeded to develop a doctrine of suffering, related to the presence of vicarious and redemptive suffering in a certain historical tradition of Catholicism, and aimed to construct a more complete understanding of, and connection with, human reality unavailable in secular humanism. Such a perspective is firmly grounded in the image of the suffering Christ. Moore argues that Maritain offers her own non–submissive inflection of a doctrine of suffering by bridging a gender divide between feminine affections and masculine rationality through her discovery of St Thomas Aquinas (unaccountably described as a mystical writer) as centralizing the role of the intellect. The concept of suffering also constitutes a major factor in Maritain’s philo–Semitic project, where Jews are regarded as ‘uniquely assimilable to agonized Catholicism’ (p. 13). The Jew becomes the ideal sufferer, reflecting, on a historical continuum, the suffering central to Christian tradition. Catholicism thereby recognizes and valorizes the suffering of Jews in history, where the fulfilment of Judaism will nonetheless reside in Jewish conversion to Catholicism. In Maritain’s United States exile, this idea of a unifying cosmopolitan Catholicism, especially via the publication of her memoirs, Les Grandes Amitiés, in 1941, served in her eyes to counter anti–Semitism in the time of the Shoah by providing a sympathetic account of Jewish culture and tradition. Undoubtedly, Moore’s book is highly informative about Maritain, especially as a woman thinker in the renouveau catholique who additionally provides an interesting version of Catholic aesthetics. It is, however, undermined by considerably underdeveloped contextual grounding. Certainly, Moore recognizes the philo–Semitic project as problematic, but she could have pointed up more precisely in the main body of the text its controversial nature. Additionally, the account of the renouveau catholique as such is too historically isolated, since the sort of Christianity that Maritain espoused, and the conviction of excess among the convertis, which many clerics identified as unwelcome, ran counter to the recuperation of, in particular, the lapsed working–class faithful by means of various social movements under the aegis of Catholic Action. Maritain could be seen as standing not only against heartless secularism but also in direct conflict with the proselytizing activity of the Church as an institution aspiring to be more attuned to non–suffering social need.