Written history rarely offers glimpses into the lives of private saints, whose secret prayers and conversations propel the work of their more public brethren. Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960) lived such a life and in Sacred Dread Brenna Moore offers readers such a glimpse. Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), Raïssa'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 Raïssa as a figure in her own right.

Moore's explicit thesis is that Raïssa 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, Raïssa 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 Léon 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, Raïssa 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. Raïssa 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.

Such clarity degenerated after the rise of the Third Reich. Maritain's poetry waxed political. She perceived the pain of others and made it her own. Her sense of injustice gave way to despair. By the early 1940s, confronted with the reality of the Holocaust, she charged God with inaction and indifference. Many around her in her exile in New York remained willfully oblivious to the genocide, adding to her pain.

At the same time, in prose she appeared to find solace in God's presence, at least as a past memory. Written during this period, both volumes of her memoirs reflect this (Les grandes amitiés: Souvenirs and Les grandes amitiés: Les aventures de la grâce [New York: Éditions de la Maison Française, 1941 and 1944 respectively]).

In neither her poetry nor her prose did she continue to attribute a redemptive character to human suffering. In light of Auschwitz, this was no longer a possibility. As some consolation, through her reflections on her Jewish upbringing in her memoirs, Maritain was able to persuade many Catholics in France and the U.S. of the value of Judaism and, thus, dissuade them from their latent anti-Semitism. Moore provides ample documentation to corroborate this.

Moore's methods are straightforward: she analyzes Raïssa Maritain's prose and poetry alike in light of their historical context, with particular attention to how Maritain's message changed over time. Moore balances her discussion of Maritain as subject, producing her own theology, with the ways that Maritain functioned as the personification of theological ideals for others.

While Moore's work excels in its attention to primary sources, it lacks sufficient attention to secondary literature. On the one hand, all significant French- and English-language sources about Raïssa Maritain are included as references, but these tend to be relegated to endnotes, rather than as grist for discussion in the main body of the text. This prevents Moore's contribution from participating more directly in the broader conversations at hand in the literature. A further lacuna is the lack of engagement with recent theological and literary appraisals of Maritain in other languages, such as the six appearing in Italian since 1990. Given that the literature about Raïssa Maritain as a figure in her own right is not extensive, Moore would have done her work a significant service by more overtly situating it alongside the work of others.

In Moore's unarticulated connections lie her work's greatest potential contribution. Maritain gave voice to the same yearnings and disappointments as other poets of the Holocaust; she highlighted the same despair as other theologians of the Holocaust; it would behoove scholars of both fields to recognize her as such. In the fledging discourse surrounding the intersection of gender and nationalism, Moore's work offers a clear case study, though its ultimate focus lies elsewhere. Accessible for newcomers and veteran students of modern French Catholicism alike, Sacred Dread deserves to be received as earnestly as its subject received those around her. Vicariously or not, Raïssa Maritain still has much to teach.