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  • Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905–1944) by Brenna Moore
  • Richard Francis Crane
Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905–1944). By Brenna Moore. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2013. Pp. xiii, 293. $30.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-03529-7.)

Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960) was a gifted poet, influential writer on aesthetics, and celebrated memoirist. Today, she is mainly known to a small number of academics and a few Catholics outside of the academy as the wife of a renowned Thomistic philosopher and human rights advocate. The scant recent attention she has received has depicted her as an archetype of suffering Catholic femininity or as a prospective candidate for sainthood along with her husband, Jacques. This new book by Brenna Moore situates her as a key figure in the early-twentieth-century French Catholic Revival. The renouveau catholique was marked by celebrated conversions and myriad contributions to arts and letters. It also embodied culture clash in advancing a “suffering-centered imaginaire” (p. 3) that reinforced “an association of Catholicism with femininity that was derogatory from the republican perspective” (p. 68). This stigma—the alleged fetishizing of souffrance—still influences scholarly interpretations that, according to Moore, exile women like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Raïssa Maritain, and Simone Weil “to the ranks of the pathetic and the bizarre” (p. 7), particularly in Richard Burton’s study Holy Tears, Holy Blood (Ithaca, NY, 2004).

Moore uses the œuvre of Raïssa Maritain to answer a “central question . . why the fascination with suffering?” (p. 3). She traces Maritain’s life (rarely does one read a book in which Raïssa is the default Maritain) from the eve of her and her husband’s conversion in Belle Époque Paris to the end of their World War II exile in the United States. Born a Russian Jew, Raïssa Oumançoff was raised in an assimilationist immigrant family that encouraged her intellectual growth, and it was while pursuing scientific studies that she met her future husband. Repelled by the arid positivism of the Sorbonne and the laicizing French Third Republic, she and Jacques sought to find meaning in defiance of a modern bourgeois culture that denied the reality of suffering and death. They turned to a series of mentors, including philosopher Henri Bergson, poet Charles Péguy, and novelist Léon Bloy. [End Page 374] The last of these luminaries served as godfather when the couple sought Catholic baptism in 1906 along with Raïssa’s sister, Véra. Bloy’s focus on female and Jewish abjection greatly influenced Raïssa, and both Maritains embraced his philosemitism, tainted as it was with supersessionism. Moore offers a nuanced interpretation of the renouveau catholique philosemitism that vied with antisemitism for the allegiance of French Catholics, drawing on recent work by Samuel Moyn and others in identifying even ostensibly pro-Jewish writings as “trafficking in essentialism and stereotype” (p. 13).

The Maritains’ remarkable openness to Judaism, Russian Orthodoxy, and the artistic, literary, and musical avant-garde—all richly portrayed in Stephen Schloesser’s book Jazz Age Catholicism (Buffalo, NY, 2005)—made their home in the Paris suburb of Meudon both a retreat center and a vibrant salon. Her own poetic gift was encouraged by Jean Cocteau and nurtured by friendships with, among others, Marc Chagall. But sickness also permeated her art, the poet describing herself as one who “has only her breath and moan,” and who “suffers with sacred dread” (p. 191). Maritain’s many serious illnesses and accompanying visions inspired a certain reverence in her husband and others, making her “frail and powerful” (p. 93) body, as Moore puts it, “the site where the divine entered and acted, a power that could be felt and appreciated by those around her” (p. 74). Moore, in contrast to other scholars, resists relegating Maritain’s bodily and psychic torture to the category of vicarious suffering, rightly identifying this experience as one Raïssa and others understood as more mystical than redemptive of others.

Perhaps the most penetrating part of this book is Moore’s...

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