Raissa Maritain Research Articles

Poetry as Spiritual Exercise

“La Poésie Comme Exercice Spirituel” first appeared in a 1942 issue of Revue Fontaine edited by Jacques and Raissa Maritain and was subsequently republished in Wah’s 1948 text Poésie, Pensée, Perception, published by Calmann-Lévy. The following is a translation of the Fontaine version. I have noted all of the variations from the latter version in the notes. As I emphasize in my commentary, the piece is a notable display of Wahl’s eclectic range of influences. Most importantly, it shows the extent to which his interest in radical empiricism and process metaphysics informs his creative approach to the intersection of poetics and metaphysics. These interests are not explicitly named in the essay, and yet their influence is pervasive. The essay also includes several moments of substantial resonance with the work of Gilles Deleuze, as noted in the commentary.

Obraz Polski i Polaków w tekstach autobiograficznych pisarzy obcych XX i XXI wieku

This article in a way constitutes the third part of a cycle of essays on the portrayal of Poland and Poles in autobiographical texts written by foreign authors from the 18th century until the present day. It deals with the 20th and 21st centuries and discusses autobiographical material in which Poland and Polish people feature most heavily (e.g., the diaries of Claudel, Gide, and Mann). Then, the article focuses on several problems, i.e. the Jews and the Jewish question in Poland (e.g. diaries written by Kafka, Gide, Raissa Maritain, Singer, and Oz), the war (e.g. Queneau’s and Gide’s diaries), Poland after World War II (e.g. the autobiographies of Marai and Oz), and Poland as perceived by travelers (e.g. the diaries of Dublin and others). Topics pertaining to the 21st century are only dealt with here to a limited extent.

Sacred Dread: Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944). By Brenna Moore. Pp. xiii, 293, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, $30.00.

Sacred Dread: Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944). By Brenna Moore. Pp. xiii, 293, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, $30.00.

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

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. …

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

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.

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

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

(Re)reading, Reception, and Rhetoric: Approaches to Roman Catholic Modernism by C.J.T. Talar

BOOK REVIEWS647 The Friendship of Christ, Confessions of a Convert, and Paradoxes of Christianity . As a preacher he drew enormous crowds. Though he usually spoke with a slight stammer in ordinary conversation, in the pulpit he was always smooth, forceful, eloquent, convincing, moving. Many who were mesmerized by his sermons claimed he was the best preacher they had ever heard proclaim the Gospel. His reputation was such that wherever he spoke he packed the churches. Despite his public acclaim and literary successes, like other notable individuals , he had his share of problems; but he tried to surmount them with his work as a spiritual adviser to an ever-increasing number of penitents, converts, and potential converts. To all who came within his orbit he offered comfort and encouragement . Always the priest that Pius X thought Hugh would be, he did his utmost to present Divine Truths in all he did. Wise enough to avoid ecclesiastical politics and personalities, he nevertheless occasionally stumbled into, as he put it, "blazing indiscretions." Despite strong opposition from Cardinal Bourne, and only through the persistent efforts of friends in Rome,was he made a Papal Chamberlain to Pius X. Janet Grayson's account of Benson's life and works is straightforward and objective . Her biography is not "a puff-piece," a call for a Benson revival, or an attempt to send readers back to his books. One question, however, lingers: were his original readers mistaken about the quality of his books? Evelyn Waugh did not think so, and once commented that Benson was an almost faultless novelist. Most of his books are now out of print; indeed, Books in Print (1997-98) lists only four of his works that are currently available. Possibly some enterprising publisher will reissue his By What Authority'*, Come Rack! Come Rope!, The King'sAchievement, The Queen's Tragedy, or one—or even a few—of his other exciting works of historical fiction. Benson's spiritual influence is, of course, extremely difficult to measure. That at one time he moved young intellectuals, not only in Britain and America but in France as well, toward matters spiritual can be demonstrated. Three of his French devotees come quickly to mind—Jacques and Raissa Maritain and Teilhard de Chardin. G.A. Cevasco St.John's University, New York (Re)reading, Reception, and Rhetoric: Approaches to Roman Catholic Modernism . By C. J. T Talar. [American University Studies, Series VTJ: Theology and Religion,Vol. 206.] (NewYork: Peter Lang. 1999. Pp. xü, 216. $44.95.) Not that an international competition is afoot, but last summer in Rome, three German colleagues told me that, while interest in Roman Catholic Modernism 648BOOK REVIEWS is growing in Germany, their scholarship lags fifteen years behind the States'. The relatively advanced state of Modernist research in the United States is due in no small measure to the work of C.J. T. Talar,who consistently pushes the historiographical envelope with relatively new applications of sociological and literary analyses. Doubly doctored in sociology and theology, Talar is uniquely qualified for his project. This latest work emerged developmentally from his dissertation on "A Sociological Reading of the Modernist Crisis" (1979); from his first book, Metaphor and Modernist: The Polarization of Alfred Loisy and His Neo-Thomist Critics (1987); and from a score of more recent articles and papers. Five essays, flanked by a brief introduction and summary conclusion, are cleverly linked by the three R's of the book's title. Talar's overall interest lies in exploring the dynamics of interaction between texts and readers. Thus he uses reception and literary theory to explore not only what a text means but how it means, thereby wunrinating why readers react to texts as they do. His first essay argues that Loisy's autobiographical/ecclesiastical context led him to employ a literary strategy in L'Évangile et l'église that ultimately undermined his purpose. Loisy's felt need to insinuate some of his views rather than state them openly resulted in a constantly shifting viewpoint, as, while overtly challenging Harnack's Das Wesen des Christentums, he covertly challenged the Catholic Church's stance on the immutability of dogma and proof-texting exegetical tradition. The result...

A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist

A House of Her Own is the first full-length biography of the American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. Born in 1898 to wealthy American parents in upstate New York, Sage spent most of her childhood and young adult years in Italy and France. In 1937 she moved to Paris, where she became a member of the Surrealist group surrounding Andre Breton. She returned to the United States in 1940, settling in Woodbury, Connecticut. Her most productive years as an artist extended from roughly 1938 through the late 1950s, when her health began to deteriorate, and she withdrew gradually from social contact. She stopped working on her oil paintings in 1958, but continued to forge her increasingly nihilistic poems until she shot herself in the heart in January 1963. Along with her eloquent chronicle of Sage's life, Judith D. Suther presents subtle, revelatory views of Sage's artistic accomplishments. She takes us into the artist's elegant, dreamlike paintings, connecting them to Sage's complex inner life, and to the artistic and intellectual worlds in which she moved. Suther also shows how the raw language and iconoclastic themes of Sage's poetic works were related to Sage's lifelong revolt against social and artistic convention. Judith D. Suther is a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. She is the author of Raissa Maritain: Pilgrim, Poet, Exile.

Loneliness and the Existent: The Dark Nights of Raissa Maritain and Pierre Reverdy

Loneliness and the Existent: The Dark Nights of Raissa Maritain and Pierre Reverdy

Leon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute. A selection of his writings edited by Raissa Maritain. (Eyre and Spottiswoode; 18s.)

Leon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute. A selection of his writings edited by Raissa Maritain. (Eyre and Spottiswoode; 18s.)

Léon Bloy—Pilgrim of the Absolute ed. by Raissa Maritain

BOOK REVIEWS ~59 of history as the great spiritual drama of fall and redemption stamp him as an artist astoundingly perceptive of the truths his own age had denied. This is not to minimize in any way the grave errors into which Blake fell. In addition to those already mentioned, there must be added countless flaws, stemming largely from the unreasoned, intuitive character of his approach to things and the very violence of his reaction against a false reasoning, an inhuman concept of order and justice. Because he craved consideration for the human person, he cursed all governments, all churches, all law human and divine. Because he knew that sex is spiritual as well as physical, he glorified it to an absurd and antinomian degree. Because he realized that art was a God-given, creative power, he considered the artist superior to the mystic and saint, and believed the artistic imagination (by which he obviously meant the intellectual aspects of the creative faculty and not simply the physical power) to be the only valid means of attaining truth and goodness. It is the chief failure of Mr. Frye's work that he does not discriminate between these excesses and the very real good that there is to be found in Blake for those strong and mature enough not to be carried away by him. We can be grateful, then, only up to a point for Mr. Frye's penetrating, comprehensive, but overenthusiastic and often uncritical study. Riggs Memorial Library, Georgetown University. JosEPHINE NicHOLLs HuGHES Leon Bloy-Pilgrim of the Absolute. Edited by RAissA MARITAIN, with an introduction by Jacques Maritain. New York: Pantheon Books, 1947. Pp. 458, with index of sources. $3.50. In her autobiography, Raissa Maritain has already recounted the story of Leon Bloy's profound influence upon her husband and herself. She here presents the life and thought of this extraordinary and uncompromising spirit in extracts from his own voluminous works. Well-chosen selections describe his moral and physical self-portrait, his views on art, poverty, the bourgeois spirit, sanctification and suffering, history and the sense of mystery. Jacques Maritain's introductory essay, adapted from Quelques pages sur Leon Bloy, 19~7, sets forth Bloy's significance as a man and as a thinker. Estimates of Bloy vary considerably. People great and small, of all walks of life, have acclaimed him as their spiritual father. Some critics, like Fr. Fulbert Cayre, A. A. (Patrologie et histoire de la theologie, III, 588) , regard him as a powerful genius who manifesfed signs of exalted illuminism but gratuitously attributed to himself a mission of reformation in the name of the Holy Ghost. Karl Pfleger, in Wrestlers with Christ, 260 BOOK REVIEWS confesses that he was alternately attracted and repelled by Bloy, and then came, in maturity, to revere him more and more. Those who witnessed Bloy in life and at the hour of death, says Maritain, know that he was a truly humble Christian. Maritain provides perhaps the best explanation for Bloy's alleged uncharitableness, and for his antiintellectualism . According to Maritain, Bloy dwelt in a sort of fourth dimension of the spirit and envisaged human beings as pure symbols of devouring spiritual realities. Attacking Mr. Jones by name as he did, he really saw through Jones to Pride or Avarice. This explanation does not seem completely satisfactory. I cannot recall or conceive of any of the Church's canonized Saints (I do not say that Bloy was not a saintly man) , who would heap such fearful invectives upon actual individuals (who would call Benedict XV "Pilate XV," or rejoice when "bourgeois Catholics " were burned to death at the charity bazaar). Much more satisfactory is Maritain's explanation of the wisdom of Bloy. The Pilgrim of the Absolute had no taste for rational discursus; using reason according to an experimental rather than a demonstrative mode, his powerful gifts of intuition were reenforced by the theological virtues and the organism of the infused gifts. Steeped, not in systematic theology or philosophy, but in Sacred Scripture, Bloy gave utterance to doctrines which should be understood mystically and not literally in a scholastic sense. His true place, then, is more with writers like...

On Poetic Knowledge (III)

The experience of Rimbaud was too drastic to serve as an object-lesson. In spite of him and Une Saison en Enfer the same error went on—an error of aim or direction, a false deflection of energy; and this despite the fiercest and most vaunted efforts to see more deeply into poetic consciousness. But now there was to be no fullstop; now the journey, it was presumed, was to go on and on to the world’s end and beyond ; down a track that led nowhere, in a train that could not move. And this, in a way, can be done : in a sort of dream, thanks to a sort of magic.Because it tries to make use of poetry to fulfil man’s desires and his search for knowledge and his hunger for the absolute, surrealism, has for us a special historical importance.Remember the remark of Marcel Raymond—to which I have already referred—’ to declare the game not yet over, that all might still be saved from the wreck, was the essential message of surrealism.’ But in fact the surrealists too fell victims to poetic knowledge. At first they were above all concerned to rediscover what Raissa Maritain, in the first of the essays in this book, calls ‘That river in the mind underlying all our ordinary activities, that deep, authentic indefinable reality, perceived by the soul from time to time when she opens herself to the unknown and is revivified thereby.’ And I doubt not they did enjoy some moments of high ecstasy (in the natural order) when the soul ‘bathes once more in the spring of her being, is refreshed and strengthened,’ by the poetic experience. No need to refuse them this much good fortune.