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

In early twentieth-century France, a vast network of artists, writers, and religious seekers were drawn to Roman Catholicism's elaborate panoply of symbols centered on suffering. A preoccupation with affliction dominated the movement now known as the French Catholic revival, or the renouveau catholique--considered a watershed in the history of the modern Catholic Church and the "golden age" of French Catholicism. In Sacred Dread, Brenna Moore examines the life and writings of Raïssa Maritain (1883-1960), one of the few women to contribute to this intellectual movement. Moore explores the reasons why Maritain, a nonpracticing Jew, was attracted to this suffering-centered theological imagination and how she and other advocates transformed it in the wake of the Holocaust. Sacred Dread offers readers a new understanding of a radical Catholic piety that was embraced by a wide range of pre-war intellectuals.

By combining late-modern French intellectual and cultural history, Catholic theology, biography, and an analysis of Maritain's published and unpublished writings, Moore also identifies two major factors in this Catholic revival--gender and Judaism--that have not received adequate attention. Discourses of femininity and Judaism were central to the French Catholic articulation and idealization of suffering. Moore argues that Maritain, as a Jewish convert and one of the few women in this intellectual community, embodied symbolic associations of suffering, holiness, women, and Jews; indeed, for her husband, godfather, confessors, friends, and godchildren, Raïssa Maritain was herself the articulation of this abject ideal. Caught as she was in a web of meaning, Raïssa Maritain was an intellectual whose legacy deepens but also subverts the centrality of femininity and Judaism in French Catholic elaborations of suffering.

Brenna Moore is associate professor of theology at Fordham University.