Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Moore, Brenna

Titel

‘Leaning over the abyss’: Raïssa Maritain, the allure of suffering, and the French Catholic revival

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Although the name Raïssa Maritain (1883-1960) occasionally surfaces in the study of French Catholicism alongside that of her celebrated husband Jacques Maritain, her own writings have received scarce critical attention. This omission is significant considering her extensive activity in a range of intellectual communities in Europe and the United States. As a key player in the twentieth-century French Catholic revival, Maritain published several books of poetry, wrote theological texts on contemplative prayer, intellectual life, mysticism, aesthetics, and as a Jewish convert, on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. One goal of this project is to open up Maritain's works to English-speaking readers. But Maritain's life and writings also offer a way to focus a broader question about how to understand the widespread attraction to theologies and practices that center on suffering and anguish—a central feature of French Catholic revival writings. Like many critics of atheistic positivism in France, the themes in Maritain's own works are undeniably dark, and she rarely veers her attention away from the suffering of the cross, the affliction of the soul, and the tears of the Virgin. While Maritain deepened and expanded this tradition, she also modified it and continued to do so throughout her life. Symbols and practices around anguish were consistently intellectually and emotionally provocative, but they were also highly malleable. My analysis tracks these changes from 1900-1944. Raïssa Maritain was a Jewish convert and one of the few women in this intellectual circuit, and I pay particular attention to her engagement with the long-standing association in French Catholicism between suffering and women, and suffering and Jews. Using the methods of close textual analysis and historical-cultural investigation, the chapters proceed thematically and chronologically. I begin with Maritain's 1906 conversion to Catholicism and proceed through her experiences and writings in interwar France, and finish with her exile in New York during World War II. The final chapter is an opportunity to track the fate of the French Catholic valorization of redemptive souffrance when it came in contact with the central trauma of European history in 1940-1944. Maritain's refusal to overlay the Holocaust with meanings of redemptive suffering and her simultaneous turn to sanctified suffering as a project of memory suggests a need to think carefully about the relationship between memory and the power of theologies of suffering in the context of an unthinkable present.