Research Catalog

Title

Sacred dread : Raïssa Maritain, the allure of suffering, and the French Catholic revival (1905-1944) / Brenna Moore.

Author

Moore, Brenna

Publication

Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2013]

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Holdings

Details

Description

xiii, 293 pages; 23 cm

Summary

"In early twentieth-century France, a vast network of artists, writers, and religious seekers were drawn to Roman Catholicism{u2019}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{u2014}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intellectual and cultural history, Catholic theology, biography, and an analysis of Maritain{u2019}s published and unpublished writings, Moore also identifies two major factors in this Catholic revival{u2014}gender and Judaism{u2014}that have not received adequate attention.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." -- Publisher's description.

Uniform Title

Project Muse UPCC books

Subject

• Maritain, Raïssa
• Catholic Church > France > History > 20th century
• Suffering > Catholic Church
• Authors, French > 20th century > Biography
• France > Intellectual life > 20th century

Genre/Form

• Biographies
• History
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-276) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: Vicarious Suffering, Its Interpretive Limits, and Raïssa Maritain's work -- That "Strange Things, So Unknown to Us - Catholicism": Steps to Conversion (1900-1906) -- "She Who Weeps": Feminized Suffering in the Thought of Léon Bloy and the Maritains (1906-35) -- Building a New Tribe in the Gathering Storm: Raïssa Maritain and the Complexity of Interwar Philo-Semitism (1923-39) -- Poetry "in the Storm of Life": Art, Mysticism, and Politics at Meudon (1931-39) -- Holy Suffering, Memory, and the Irredeemable Present: Raïssa Maritain in Exile (1940-44) -- Conclusion: Raïssa Maritain's Posthumous Presence and the Allure of Suffering Reconsidered.

ISBN

• 9780268035297 (pbk. )
• 0268035296 (pbk.)

LCCN

• ^^2012037113
• 40021956211

OCLC

• 794361978
• SCSB-12602613

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library