We Have Been Friends Together & Adventures in Grace: Memoirs, Hardcover

Raissa 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 halfof the twentieth century. Her autobiography, We Have Been Friends Together, together withthe second part, Adventures in Grace, were originally published in two volumes in 1941and 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 animpressive circle of important French intellectuals, writers, artists, professors, andinfluential priests. In luminous prose Raissa recounts her childhood in Russia, her youthin 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 theyhelped to lead and describes the conversions of key figures in the French Catholic Renaissance many of whom were the Maritains close friends. However, the underlyingsubjects of her autobiography are God s goodness, the mysterious operation of grace inthe soul, and the way that Raissa and others were transformed by their encounter withthe Divine. We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace are spiritual autobiographieswritten by a mystic with a difference. Raissa was totally God-focused, but, unlike mostmystics, she was not a religious by vocation. She attended the Sorbonne, married, andassociated with the intellectual lights of Paris, New York, and Rome. She wrote a bookfor children, and published poetry, works on prayer, translations, and studies of modernauthors. Raissa also played a key role in the conversion of many and knew, oftenintimately, intellectuals like Ernest Psichari and Charles Peguy, the playwright Cocteau, the authors Mauriac, Claudel, and Bloy, and a number of painters, including Georges Rouault. Readers intere