Text: English, French (translation)

Raissa's Journal

Maritain, Raïssa

Religion & Spirituality

Magi Books

Saint Thomas Aquinas-Angel Sch:

Angelus Press

Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960), best known as the wife of the famous French philosopher
Jacques Maritain, was a remarkable person in her own right. A poet, philosopher,
translator, and mystic, she was at the epicenter of French intellectual life in the first half
of the twentieth century. Her autobiography, We Have Been Friends Together, together with
the second part, Adventures in Grace, were originally published in two volumes in 1941
and 1944. Both books are combined here and are now being re-issued for the first time.
She chronicles not only her and her husband’s lives but also those of their friends—an
impressive circle of important French intellectuals, writers, artists, professors, and
influential priests. In luminous prose Raïssa recounts her childhood in Russia, her youth
in Paris, and her momentous meeting with Jacques, followed by their conversion to
Catholicism in 1906. She gives a vivid, personal account of the Thomistic Revival they
helped to lead and describes the conversions of key figures in the French Catholic
Renaissance—many of whom were the Maritains’ close friends. However, the underlying
subjects of her autobiography are God’s goodness, the mysterious operation of grace in
the soul, and the way that Raïssa and others were transformed by their encounter with
the Divine.
 We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace are spiritual autobiographies
written by a mystic with a difference. Raïssa was totally God-focused, but, unlike most
mystics, she was not a religious by vocation. She attended the Sorbonne, married, and
associated with the intellectual lights of Paris, New York, and Rome. She wrote a book
for children, and published poetry, works on prayer, translations, and studies of modern
authors. Raïssa also played a key role in the conversion of many and knew, often
intimately, intellectuals like Ernest Psichari and Charles Péguy, the playwright Cocteau,
the authors Mauriac, Claudel, and Bloy, and a number of painters, including Georges
Rouault. Readers interested in spiritual biography, in mystics, in modern women
authors, in the psychology of conversion, in twentieth-century French intellectual life,
and in the Thomistic revival will find this book fascinating. Raïssa’s autobiography will
also hold a special place in the heart of all those who believe, as did her godfather Léon
Bloy, “There is only one misery . . . not to be saints.”

We Have Been Friends Together & Adventures in Grace: Memoirs

St. Augustines Press

Authored by Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Prayer and Intelligence is a practical book about mental prayer and how to pray. It is also a book about the intellectual life. How does our intellectual search for God influence our life of prayer and how does the discipline of a life of prayer act as the necessary grounding for a profound and sustained search for the truth? In the pages of this book, philosophy and the spiritual life intertwine and strengthen each other. Accompanying Prayer and Intelligence are two essays, Liturgy and Contemplation, also written by Jacques and Raïssa together, and Notes on the Lord’s Prayer, written by Raïssa. The former is a study of how the Church’s liturgy prepares for our union with God by contemplation of love. The latter is a powerful meditation on the great gift of the prayer of Christ himself, “the prayer that is universally true and needed.” All three of the works contained in this volume are written by friends, for friends, seeking to know and love God. If we wish to grow in our spiritual life, this book serves as a great guide.

Prayer and Intelligence & Selected Essays

MARITAIN, Jacques

Cluny Media, LLC

The Journal of Raïssa Maritain, composed of the sundry diaries, notes, and fragments of Raïssa Maritain’s substantial bibliography, tells the story of a soul in love with God. Compiled by her husband Jacques, these writings bear witness to the depth of Raïssa’s spiritual experiences, the warmth of her embrace for the contemplative life and silent prayer, the sweeping expanse of her intellectual powers, the sheer breadth of her sufferings, and, above all else, her willingness to undergo the “martyrdom of the heart,” offering to God a total gift of self. For readers already familiar with Raïssa Maritain, especially through her poetry, the Journal is an occasion to remember with renewed vigor truths already known; for the new reader, it is an illuminating introduction to one of the great mystics of the twentieth century.

The Journal of Raïssa Maritain

Cluny Media

These two essays by Raïssa Maritain-"Sense and Non-Sense in Poetry" and "Magic, Poetry, and Mysticism"-comprise an often forgotten but significant contribution to Catholic letters. Maritain considers the way true poetry always transcends its "logical sense" in order to convey a "poetic sense." Poetry is a human thing, but it stirs the human beyond mere "logic" in the direction of the divine. In his introduction, James Matthew Wilson explains that, "Poetry is the fruit of a contact of the spirit with reality, which is in itself ineffable, and with the source of reality, which we believe to be God himself in that movement of love which causes him to create images of his beauty."\nWhile the poet might be prayerful and the mystic might wax poetic, there is a "fundamental difference which separates the poetic experience from the mystical experience: while the poet progresses toward the Word, the mystic tends toward Silence." As Raïssa Maritain expounds, mystics may be moved to describe their heightened experiences, but for them this "expression is not a means of completing the experience." For the furnishing of her interior castle, a mystic like St. Teresa of Avila needs no speech; her talk, the record she left us of the "prayer of quiet," is "only a result of superabundance, a generous attempt at communication."\nThe poet, on the contrary, cannot do without words. They are the vital stuff of his service to the world. Albert Béguin corroborates Maritain's conclusion, contending that "whatever value one attributes to the poetic act, it remains an act submitted to the necessity of form. It ends at the word." On the other hand, the poetic word points beyond language, ever striving for a fuller communion with reality and its Maker.\nInhabiting the tensions between sense and nonsense, poetry and mysticism, articulation and its absence, Maritain manifests the hidden mysteries at the heart of all poetry worthy of the name.

Poetry and Mysticism

Wiseblood Books

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