175 years – 50 great catholics / Brenna Moore on Raïssa Maritain

To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best

Raïssa Mar­i­tain tended to publish furtively, under initials or anonymously. Then at 48 she published her first sole-authored piece under her full name, a poem entitled “La couronne d’épines” (“The Crown of Thorns”). It appeared in the 1931 inaugural issue of Vigile, a short-lived Catholic literary journal, and her name was printed alongside the other luminaries of the French Catholic revival: Henri Bremond, Étienne Gilson, François Mauriac, and her husband, the philosopher Jacques Maritain. Raïssa, raised Jewish, and Jacques, raised Protestant, had converted to Catholicism in 1906. Now, at last, she had come out of the shadows.

For the next two decades, before her death in 1960, Raïssa published volumes of poetry and important pieces on Jewish-Christian relations, aesthetics and mysticism, and two memoirs. 

Her most profound work was written while in exile in New York during the Shoah. While Catholics were largely indifferent to the suffering of Europe’s Jews, Raïssa described the world of 1939-1945 as “What cannot be imagined/What cannot be told/What the mind refuses to bear”. Her lengthy poem “Deus excelsus terribilis” (“Dreadful God on High”), modelled on Psalm 88, laments God’s seeming inability or refusal to intervene. 

Raïssa’s wartime memoir, Les grandes amitiés, described the Jewish household piety she knew growing up in Russia in beautiful and humanising terms, heightening the scandal of anti-Semitic violence.

Raïssa’s writings emerged only after decades of work on her spiritual life, an inner sanctum that was made public after she died, when Jacques published excerpts from her diary, Raïssa’s Journal, one of the great spiritual books of the twentieth century.

A first publication at nearly 50? It was only after years of concentration and silence that she found herself at last ready to write, to put new language into the world, in order to describe it anew. We are the better for it.
 
Brenna Moore is the author of Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the allure of suffering, and the French Catholic revival, 1905-1944.