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Introduction Vicarious Suffering, Its Interpretive Limits, and Raïssa Maritain’s Work “Can there be a mystical life without death?”1 Writing in 1931, the French Catholic intellectual Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960) named this the “question essentielle” in her private notebooks. She had raised this issue twenty-five years earlier, when she was baptized into the Catholic Church at the age of twenty-three. Even then, in 1906, she admired what she saw as Christianity ’s provocative way of acknowledging the reality of death and contending with human finitude and vulnerability. Describing her religious conversion, Maritain claimed that it is only when we affirm the realness of human mortality and suffering that we “discover an order more powerful than all that is human.”2 As she saw it, the ideological alternative to Catholicism in her day, scientific positivism, no longer “believes in” suffering and death, just as its advocates “no longer believe in God.” She saw in the refusal to acknowledge death a sort of “strange blindness, a kind of madness” (un aveuglement étrange, une sorte de folie). But confronting finitude and suffering is no simple task, and Maritain would spend her entire intellectual career struggling to render them visible in the poetry, mysticism, theology, and philosophical aesthetics she authored. 1 Maritain was not, by any means, alone in this struggle. Upon her baptism in 1906, she entered a vast community of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French intellectuals who shared a fascination with Catholicism’s focus on mortality and suffering. As Maritain and her fellow intellectuals puzzled over anguish and held it up as an object of analysis in their writings, they reveled in it, tapping into, deepening, and occasionally transforming the long-standing alliance in Christianity between holiness and affliction. Maritain’s first mentor, Charles Péguy (1873–1914), wrote often about the power of le suppliant (the beggar, supplicant, imploring one) as the one “who is bent, bowed under misfortune, that absolute misfortune which marks the presence of force and of the gods.” The suppliant , Péguy wrote, “whoever he may be, the beggar along the roads, the miserable blind man, and the man crushed,” is the one who, despite appearances , “holds the upper hand, orders the course of the conversation, commands the situation.”3 Or consider one of Maritain’s dear friends, Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), the French priest who inspired Maritain with his solitary life as a mystic, hermit, and evangelist in the Sahara Desert. He drafted a rule for a new religious community of which he was the only member. Suffering and death were built into his “community”: members must be “ready to have their heads cut off, to die of starvation and to obey him in spite of his worthlessness.”4 Or take, for instance, the writings of Maritain’s younger acquaintance Simone Weil (1909–43), whose intensive reflections on what she called malheur, or affliction, occupied nearly all of her writings.5 Likewise, the personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905–50), Maritain’s friend and colleague, admired Pascal for his claim that “the divine disquiet of souls, that is the only thing that counts!”6 The writings of Léon Bloy (1846–1917), Catholic novelist and godfather to Maritain, offered the most riotously excessive paeans to pain: “La douleur! [Distress/sorrow/suffering!] Here is the key word! Here is the solution for every human life on earth! The springboard for all that is superior, the sieve for every merit, the infallible criterion for every moral beauty!”7 In Bloy’s theological vision, suffering and anguish are closely tied up with pleasure and joy: “It is commonly said,” he wrote, “that Joy and Pain [la Joie et la Douleur] are opposites, incompatible! How can you understand that in some lofty souls, they are the same thing, assimilated with ease! . . .The joy of suffering! [La joie de souffrir!].”8 2 / S A C R E D D R E A D Indeed, the suffering-centered imaginaire saturates this moment in religious history, a moment also justly considered a “watershed” in the history of the Catholic Church and the golden age of French Catholicism.9 In the years following France’s Act of Separation in 1905, which enshrined laicism as a French national law and ended state funding of religion, through the Second World War, Roman Catholicism enjoyed an astounding and unanticipated resurgence in France.10 Although the roots of the French Catholic revival can be traced to the 1880s, the early twentieth...

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