Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905–1944) . By Brenna Moore. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. xiv + 294 pp. $30.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Sacred Dread: Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944) . By Brenna Moore . Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press , 2013. xiv + 294 pp. $30.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesWritten history rarely offers glimpses into the lives of private saints, whose secret prayers and conversations propel the work of their more public brethren. Raissa Maritain (1883-1960) lived such a life and in Sacred Dread Brenna Moore offers readers such a glimpse. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), Raissa's husband, was one of twentieth century Catholicism's leading philosophers and theologians, instrumental in laying the intellectual groundwork for the Second Vatican Council. According to him, she made his work possible. Yet Moore's work is one of the first works in English appraising Raissa as a figure in her own right.Moore's explicit thesis is that Raissa Maritain illustrates why women's suffering was a prominent ideal in the twentieth century French Catholic revival. Maritain's identity as a woman, an immigrant, a Jew, and a convert to Catholicism provided multiple ways in which she embodied the marginalized Other. In her own writings and in the writings that she inspired, especially Jacques's, Raissa Maritain represented a holy woman willing to endure pain on behalf of others, part of a French Catholic tradition of "vicarious suffering" (6).Like any good dissertation that transforms into a better book, Sacred Dread demonstrates far more than its stated thesis avers. It explores the interrelationships between Christianity, Judaism, gender, suffering, nationality, nationalism, friendship, exile, and the Holocaust. At the same time, Sacred Dread balances these diverse topics with a clear focus on one woman and one theme in her evolving theology: "feminized suffering" (59).Moore begins with an assessment of the various theological, philosophical, and cultural factors leading up to Maritain's 1906 conversion to Christianity. After many years as an ardent atheist, Maritain became Catholic as the result of friendship with some of Paris's philo-Semitic literati, such as Charles Peguy, at whose behest she read the works of Christian mystics, and Leon Bloy, whose novels depicted the suffering of downtrodden women as resulting in the redemption of others.Because her identity as a Jew and as a woman marked her for a life of suffering, Raissa represented the vessel of God's potential grace. Both her husband Jacques and their mentor Bloy perceived this. The weeping Virgin, the compassionate and impoverished prostitute, the supportive wife of the overworked academic: all represented the locus of God's grace. Raissa herself embraced this idea: human suffering could be redemptive and a capacity for participating in that mystery was one of women's gifts.At a time of growing anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s, the Maritains' home in the Paris suburb of Meudon was a nexus for potential Jewish converts to Catholicism. They were drawn by their hosts' friendship and by aesthetic awe. For many, Catholicism seemed strange and ancient in contrast to mainstream French secularism. The Jewish friends of the Maritains who did convert saw Catholicism as fulfilling Judaism or even as presenting Judaism to them for the first time. …