I read this biography of Jacques and Raissa Maritain a couple of months ago, meant to blog on it before I returned it to the library, but…forgot. So here we are. Again.

This book, originally written in French, was just recently translated into English by Notre Dame’s Bernard Doering and has garnered some awards:

"Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven,” a biography by Jean-Luc Barré, translated by Bernard E. Doering, professor emeritus of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame, and published by University of Notre Dame Press, has won two recent honors from the Catholic Press Association and the Association of American University Presses.

Jacques Maritain, born in 1882 to a French Protestant family, met Raïssa Oumansouff when they were both university students in

Paris

.  Their subsequent love affair was sufficiently complex to include a mutual suicide pact revocable only on condition of their discovery of the meaning of human life and existence.  Providentially, the revocation was delivered through their attendance at the lectures of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the influence of their friendship with Léon Bloy, the novelist who famously said, “there is only one sadness in life: Not to be a saint.”  They married in 1904 and were received into the Catholic Church in 1906. 

Maritain, who described his wife as “dimidium animae meae” (“half my soul”), went on to become one of the most influential Catholic philosophers of modern times, exemplifying the interweaving of religious belief and contemporary intellectual and political culture.  During the 1940s and 1950s he was a frequent visitor and lecturer at Notre Dame.

When I read books like this, I read them for various reasons. Certainly I want to know more about the individuals and their thought, but I’m also looking for other points: how do people come to strong faith in Christ? How do movements within Catholicism begin? Against what are they reacting? What are they seeking to rediscover? What is the interplay between these movements (for lack of a better term), the institutional Church, and the culture? The last question particularly interests me, as I am regularly driven to distraction trying to figure out the relationship between these three entities and various sub-relationships. The relationship between the first two – reform, more charismatic movements and currents and the hierarchy – vexes me most particularly. Most creative movements within Catholicism have flourished despite the hierarchy and sometimes in confrontation with it (read Cluny, the subject of another recent read), but without the hierarchical dimension, where do we go? (see previous post).

So anyway, I read Beggars for Heaven, looking for clues on how to understand all of that. Once again, the unlikeliness of this particular set of converts, the confounding of the Accepted Wisdom that Only Strong Catholic Families produce great disciples. The constant conviction on Maritain’s part that his work needed to be conducted with the approval of the papacy, and his (not contrary) conviction that French clergy should be held accountable for their collaboration during Nazi occupation (despite his efforts they were largely not).

What is most striking for the reader (like me) who is not up to snuff on her Thomism and Neo-Thomism, is the fearlessness with which Jacques and Raissa met the world as disciples. They did not live in a hothouse, in a ghetto. They welcomed everyone, prayed fervently for everyone’s salvation and conversion, but were not afraid that their own faith would be "contaminated" by encountering the modern world (in terms of art, in particular) or any other human being.

Sort of like, you know…Jesus.

By the way, this is a quote I pulled from the bio – it’s actually from Jacques Maritain. I passed it on to someone else, but I didn’t note the exact piece of writing from which it comes:

…”[the critic] has no idea of the spiritual war that is being waged beneath the external signs of artistic agitation. There are some Catholics laboring on frontiers that do not appear on his geographical maps; they only ask their brothers not to shoot them in the back.”