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C H A P T E R 4 Poetry “in the Storm of Life” Art, Mysticism, and Politics at Meudon (1931–39) In 1931, at the height of the Meudon years and four years before Histoire d’Abraham went to press, Raïssa Maritain published her first poem, entitled “La couronne d’épines” (The Crown of Thorns), a vivid rendering of Jesus’s fear on the Mount of Olives before his crucifixion. In describing “all the misery laid bare before him,” Maritain writes that Jesus “sees himself abandoned,” and the “darkness is full / All is given.” Maritain transformed the elegiac themes we have seen in her journals, correspondence, and essays into the sparse, dark poems that would distinguish her primary intellectual work until her death in 1960.1 “La couronne d’épines” appeared in the inaugural issue of Vigile, a journal, founded the previous year by Paul Claudel, Charles Du Bos, and François Mauriac, that served as a Catholic counterweight to André Gide’s prominent secular literary journal, La Nouvelle Revue Française.2 Although it only survived fourteen issues (because of internal fights about which should take precedence, Catholic orthodoxy or art), Vigile was a rallying point for leading intellectuals of the renaissance catholique. The cover of the inaugural issue displays the name Raïssa Maritain along with five other 123 Catholic luminary hommes de lettres: Henri Bremond, the great Jesuit historian of spirituality; Étienne Gilson, the Thomist and historian of medieval Christianity; François Mauriac, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist; the playwright Henri Ghéon; and Jacques.3 The only woman on the cover, Maritain was presented here as one of the very few who now labored alongside the distinguished men in her intellectual community, forging a new kind of Catholicism engaged with the latest developments in European arts and culture.4 In 1931, Raïssa had now publicly stepped out of the shadow of Jacques and established her own distinctive literary and theological voice. Throughout the 1930s, Maritain created and operated a “counterspace ” of creativity that existed alongside her anxieties about Judaism and the ascendancy of anti-Semitism. She became a poet and a theorist of art. Sometimes this new aspect of her vocation intersected with her thinking on Judaism, as when she expressed in poetry her anguish over the betrayal of early philo-Semitic ideals, and sometimes her poems and theory of aesthetics operated at a remove from all of that, in a different register.5 In the 1930s Maritain published sixty-four poems in Catholic and literary journals, and her reputation in the literary community grew primarily when her first two books of poetry, La vie donnée and Lettre de nuit, appeared in 1935 and 1939. By the time of her death, Maritain had published ninety poems in four volumes. In addition to her poetry, Maritain presented lectures and published articles on the arts, a domain where her influence extended beyond the French Catholic revival into wider intellectual communities in Paris, the United States, and Latin America. She presented papers on religious experience and aesthetics at the Sorbonne, and, joining Jacques on some of his international lecture tours, she gave lectures in Brazil and Argentina in 1935 and 1937. Her works on aesthetic theory and mysticism appeared in a range of French and English-language journals, and in 1938 she coauthored with Jacques one of her most widely read works on aesthetics, Situation de la poésie. While in the United States during the war years (1940–45), Maritain joined a small group of European colleagues who served as founding board members of the American Society of Aesthetics, created to model European intellectual societies dedicated to discussing the meaning of art and beauty in contemporary society.6 124 / S A C R E D D R E A D The fact that Raïssa Maritain became a poet and theorist of aesthetics in the midst of the intense personal and political crises explored in the previous chapter has seemed incongruous to some readers. Like mysticism , how could art—perhaps poetry above all—be anything but an apolitical activity, an escape even, from actually choosing to confront those horrors that were affecting her so powerfully in the 1930s? Mysticism and artistic activity are often indicted for their evasion of reality and their tendency to withdraw from the political, and such perceptions have also given rise to the assumption that Raïssa was primarily Jacques’s apolitical partner. Particularly in the 1930s and during the...

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