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

The prominence of suffering, mourning, pain and sadness in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century French Catholic piety has intrigued recent scholars. Their investigations have frequently led them to understand the origins of such behavior in terms of a particular confluence of affective, bodily and feminine devotional practices, influenced by the socio-political conditions of republican France. In this engagingly written and highly scholarly study of the experience and understanding of suffering in the life and work of Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960), Brenna Moore engages with such debates over the origin and function of suffering. In five chapters arranged roughly chronologically in order to make the work also function as a detailed biography of Maritain’s life, she addresses Maritain’s understanding of suffering from a variety of angles which provide a wealth of new resources both for understanding Maritain herself and, more broadly, for understanding the role of suffering in piety.

Moore’s first chapter exemplifies her strengths as a biographer (and, given the lack of English-language book-length accounts of Maritain’s life, this aspect of the work alone is a helpful contribution to scholarship). Drawing extensively from archival sources, she produces a very clear and well-structured account of Maritain’s intellectual formation, including her 1906 conversion to Christianity alongside her husband and fellow-scholar Jacques. Moore focuses in particular on the possible influence of Charles Péguy and Leon Bloy in shaping Raïssa’s attitude to suffering in relation to her Jewish heritage—through Péguy’s conceptions both of the unity of Christianity and Judaism and of the Jew as the ideal sufferer, and through Bloy’s peculiar exaltation of Judaism’s marginalized and underprivileged status by criticizing all forms of Christianity which had themselves lost sight of the latter religion’s original marginal status. Through Moore’s careful interweaving of analysis of the thought of these figures with a historical account of the interaction of Maritain with these two figures in the first decade of the twentieth century, Moore produces a highly plausible thesis for the intellectual influences on Maritain’s understanding of Jewish suffering.

Chapter Two addresses Maritain’s exposition of suffering in relation to femininity. She takes aim, notably, at Richard Griffiths’s The Reactionary Revolution, (1967) and Richard Burton’s, Holy Tears, Holy Blood, (2004), both of whom have interpreted French Catholic women’s suffering (be it such women’s own understanding of such suffering or their—often male—interpreters’ writing) predominantly through the lens of the notion of “vicarious suffering.” Moore argues that the issue is much more complex, through thoughtful consideration of Léon Bloy’s writings on prostitutes, Jacques Maritain’s writings on feminized holy suffering as stimulated by Raïssa’s various illnesses in their early years of marriage, and Raïssa’s own conception of suffering femininity (both in her reading of the gendered associations of the Christian mystical tradition and in her own experience of suffering). In these efforts Moore is certainly successful in arguing that it is too simplistic simply to interpret Raïssa’s thought in terms of vicarious suffering. It would have been helpful, however, for Moore to have explored in more detail the extent to which vicarious suffering remained important to Raïssa. She only briefly acknowledges (7–8, 61) the continuing role of vicarious suffering in Raïssa’s work, and later cursorily writes off as curious the fact that after Raïssa’s death, Jacques Maritain himself understood his former wife’s life and writings to have been driven by a sense of vicarious suffering (196). More broadly, Moore’s acknowledgement that Griffiths and Burton are right—other Catholic revivalists aside from Maritain were highly interested in sickness and vicarious suffering (94)—makes it unclear how far she believes her work to be undermining these writers’ broader thesis on...