Abstract
Kindred Spirits, through an exploration of spiritual friendships and political activism within Catholicism during the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s, offers a rare glimpse into Catholic spirituality in the twentieth century. Drawing from the margins of the institutional church, Brenna Moore reveals the life-giving sustenance of Catholicity or all-embracing universality. Abjuring Nazism and European colonialism, the men and women depicted in Kindred Spirits portray a more humane and multicultural world. Ironically, Moore finds that their commitment to spiritual friendship avoids carnal tribalism to such an extent that familial biological ties are often disparaged. Referring to these spiritual friends in the light of Joseph Amato’s book on Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, Brenna Moore notes in the Epilogue to Kindred Spirits how spiritual friendship sometimes steered them to loathe those who were biological rather than spiritual kin: they routinely and troublingly shook off the kids they brought into this world, their perplexed elderly parents, and their spouses, like so much dust on their shoes (p. 235).
Jacques Maritain is not a marginal figure within Catholicism, and it is his life and affiliation with the men and women highlighted in Kindred Spirits that helps place them within the heart of Catholic spirituality in the twentieth century. Jacques Maritain’s unusual marriage to Raïssa Oumançoff under vows of celibacy as Benedictine oblates, in conjunction with Raïssa’s sister Vera, served as a guidepost for familial intimacy. His move away from authoritarian and fascist trends within Roman Catholicism, along with his rejection of liberal individualism, served as a beacon for those mentioned in Kindred Spirits.
The opening chapter of Kindred Spirits offers an informative discussion of the long-term relationship involving Jacques, Raïssa, and Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean reformer, teacher, journalist, and poet. Gabriella Mistral also maintained a long-term relationship with Palma Guillén, the two living together as a couple while accepting responsibility for Yin-Yin, purported to be the son of Gabriella Mistral’s half-brother. It is noted that the couple may have been lovers, but what is stated with certainty is that their circle of friends occluded a meaningful relationship with Yin-Yin, who committed suicide while a teenager. Brenna More is scathing: Gabriella Mistral raised a child whom she claimed to be the son of a widowed half-brother who could not care for him. With her exile and moves around the world, Mistral was sustained by a global network of spiritual friendship, but her child was isolated, depressed, and lonely and died by suicide as a teenager (pp. 21–22). Her letters to the Maritains always asked them to pray for Yin-Yin, and her late poems evoke the pain of his absence. The details of this teenager’s tragic life are obscure, a boy just outside the radiance of spiritual friends (p. 61).
The second chapter focuses on the friendships of Louis Massignon, the Catholic scholar of Islam who convinced Jacques Maritain to acknowledge the presence of God’s grace in the life of the Sufi mystic al-Hallāj. Early erotic homosexual encounters are noted, and there is even speculation concerning sublimation involving the medieval al-Hallāj. However, a richly nuanced portrayal of the relationship between Louis Massignon and Mary Kahil, the Egyptian feminist and activist, acknowledges that a spiritual friendship may offer its own rewards: ‘Overall, there is an overabundance to the spiritual friendship of Kahil and Massignon that cannot be entirely reduced to genital sexuality, as if sex (and its repression) is the only truth that bonds can reveal’ (p. 100).
The third and fourth chapters revolve around Marie-Magdeleine Davy, a scholar of medieval mysticism, and her spiritual friendship with the philosopher Simone Weil. The overabundance of the spiritual friendship of Mary Kahil and Louis Massignon is realised in the apparent celibacy and transcendence of gender evident in the lives and attire of these two souls. Here, the experience of God establishes in solitude an intuitive link with kindred spirits.
With Claude McKay, a Jamaican-born Catholic writer of the Harlem Renaissance, the fifth and final chapter shifts to the New World, although Claude McKay’s experience in France was a strong component in his makeup. Openly bisexual, such matters were secretive, in the background of a life dedicated to interracial justice through the universal friendship he encountered within the Catholic milieu: ‘This Catholic scene, while certainly not openly queer friendly, was a world where one could remain unmarried without having to explain why’ (p. 215).
Considering the sex scandals currently plaguing the Roman Catholic Church, authentic spiritual friendship may require the challenge of a nurturing family. Like the other radical voices in Kindred Spirits, Jacques Maritain abjured exclusive tribalism along with liberal individualism, although it should be noted that he would seek the common good precisely in familial service, biological or otherwise, to each irreplaceable person entering the world.