Sacred Dread: Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944). By Brenna Moore

Abstract

Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960), Edith Stein (1891–1942), Simone Weil (1909–1943), and Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) share common profiles: brilliant and compelling women of Jewish origin, skeptical as young students of institutional religion and scientific positivism alike, who gained access to premier European universities in the early twentieth century. Yet while Arendt completed her doctorate and went on to write and teach philosophy, Maritain, Weil, and Stein converted to Roman Catholicism and left academic life. The gulf between the worlds they chose seems immense. When reviewing Maritain's Adventures in Grace in the pages of The Nation, Arendt spoke as a self-consciously skeptical modern philosopher, declaring her erstwhile colleague's desire for spiritual confession to be “slightly embarrassing” (Arendt 1945: 288). In Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905–1944), Brenna Moore takes on the challenge of illuminating the history, culture, and theology of the least known of this cohort of female geniuses. Moore complicates the modern secular view, shared by many of Maritain's peers and today's liberals, that exaltations and enactments of holy suffering were at best “embarrassing,” and at worst pathological and self-loathing. At the same time, Sacred Dread depicts its protagonist as an individual: a particular person who realized agency and paid costs through discourse and practices of the Catholic renaissance of souffrance. Finally, Moore refuses either to join in active or tacit romanticization of female suffering or to glory in the counter-cultural strangeness of seeking sanctification through self-denial.