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

Abstract

Sacred Dread: Raissa 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.)Raissa Maritain (1883-1960) was a gifted poet, influential writer on aesthetics, and celebrated memoirist. Today, she is mainly known 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 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 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 Moore, exile women like St. Therese of Lisieux, Raissa 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 oeuvre of Raissa Maritain answer a central question . . . why the fascination with suffering? (p. 3). She traces Maritain's life (rarely does one read a book in which Raissa is the default Maritain) from the eve of her and her husband's conversion in Belle Epoque Paris the end of their World War II exile in the United States. Born a Russian Jew, Raissa Oumancoff was raised in 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 find meaning in defiance of a modern bourgeois culture that denied the reality of suffering and death. They turned a series of mentors, including philosopher Henri Bergson, poet Charles Peguy, and novelist Leon Bloy. The last of these luminaries served as godfather when the couple sought Catholic baptism in 1906 along with Raissa's sister, Vera. Bloy's focus on female and Jewish abjection greatly influenced Raissa, 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 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. …