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

by Brenna Moore (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2013

  $42.48

  In early twentieth-century France, a vast network of artists, writers, and religious seekers were drawn to Roman Catholicism's elaborate panoply of symbols centred 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 Raissa Maritain (1883-1960), one of the few women to contribute to this intellectual movement. Moore explores the reasons why Maritain, a non practising 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French intellectual and cultural history, Catholic theology, biography, and an analysis of Maritain's published and unpublished writings, Moore also identifies two major factors in this Catholic revival-gender and Judaism-that have not received adequate attention.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 idealisation 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, Raissa Maritain was herself the articulation of this abject ideal. Caught as she was in a web of meaning, Raissa Maritain was an intellectual whose legacy deepens but also subverts the centrality of femininity and Judaism in French Catholic elaborations of suffering.