Maritain’s long and varied career is a chronicle
of his time
as well as a personal journey.

Jacques Maritain: la vie intellectuelle
By Jude P. Dougherty

n Associations of Catholic scholars are numerous, spanning almost the full range of academic disciplines, the arts, and the professions. Among the most viable is the American Maritain Association, which has emerged as a catalyst to a resurgent Catholic intellectual movement. The Association honors the memory of Jacques Maritain, who still serves as a magnetic pole for scholars worldwide who have in common a respect for the philosophia perennis.

Maritain’s long and varied career is a chronicle of his time as well as a personal journey. From the feet of Leon Bloy to the French Ambassadorship to the Holy See, his intellectual compass provided an undeviating course. The youthful French intellectual discovering and embracing the Catholic Faith and then his subsequent discovery of St. Thomas Aquinas is almost a story in itself. His new-found intellectual confidence led him to critique the philosophy of his mentor Henri Bergson. The eminent Bergson had reason to be chagrined at the apostasy of one of his most promising students. Maturation brought Maritain to a renewed appreciation of Bergson as he simultaneously delved deeper into the philosophy of Aquinas. The peasant of the Garonne, as he was later to call himself, early on delivered a scathing attack on three reformers, Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau. Though he subsequently moderated his tone, his critical intelligence never failed him.

Critiques aside, Maritain began a lifelong study of the philosophy of Aquinas and its implication for modern thought. He was not a textual exegete, but a speculative philosopher who thought ad mentem divi Thomae. Maritain insisted that he was not a neo-Thomist but a Thomist. The Distinguer pour unir, ou Les degrés du Savoir (1932), Court Traité de l’Existence et de l’Existant have been read by generations of students worldwide. His Art et Scholastique (1920) has become a Christian classic, and decades later it was followed by Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953).

Two of the early works were translated by Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI, then a seminary professor, from French into Italian. The gentle and reserved Maritain was all tooth and claw in intellectual debate. In disagreement he could be harsh and caustic. Etienne Gilson, by contrast, usually challenged ideas in their context. The historian of philosophy could not disengage ideas from their holder or the intellectual milieu from which they arose. Maritain would attack adverse positions in their pure and abstract form, often with pain to the subject of his criticism. From a Thomistic position he challenged the materialisms, positivisms, and determinisms of his day. This led to an invitation of the French bishops to do a series of textbooks in philosophy for use in the seminaries. Of a projected seven volumes, he completed only two, Logic and An Introduction to Philosophy, although subsequent writing covered most of the topics initially planned for coverage. His wife Raïssa was not a philosopher, but clearly she was an intellectual peer. Their omnivorous interest in the arts and sciences attracted a wide circle of friends, philosophers, theologians, painters, and poets who would gather at the Maritain home in Meudon on Sunday afternoons, among them Garrigou-Lagrange, Jean Cocteau, Etienne Gilson, Ernst Psichari, S.J., Nicholas Berdyaev, Emmannuel Mounier, François Mauriac, Marc Chagall, and Georges Rouault. In 1914 when Maritain joined the faculty of the Institut Catholique de Paris, the Thomistic revival was well underway, and Maritain was making a major contribution. His writing led him to lecture tours in North and South America. Translated into Spanish and Portugese, his work was particularly influential in Brazil and Argentina, an influence that today remains unabated in Catholic circles.

Although Maritain’s interest in social and political issues is evident in Humanisme Intégral (1936), it is generally acknowledged that his best work in social and political philosophy was accomplished in his North American years. The Walgreen lectures, delivered at the University of Chicago in 1949, must be considered of perennial value and a major contribution to Catholic political thought. Christianity and Democracy and Education at the Crossroads were written while he was in exile from his native France. When France fell in 1940, Maritain was on a lecture tour in the United States, where he remained until the close of the war. The lucidity of his work gained for him a following outside of professional circles. Called to address some of the major policy issues of the day, he participated in the drafting of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights at San Francisco in 1945. He weekly provided occupied France with uplifting radio broadcasts.

Robert M. Hutchins as chancellor of the University of Chicago tried twice to appoint him to its faculty of philosophy. Each time his nomination was blocked at the departmental level. Denied an appointment at Chicago, he was eventually appointed by Princeton University, a position he accepted when he was 65 years of age and which he held from 1948 to 1952.

Devastated by the death of Raïssa, he spent his final years with the Little Brothers of Jesus, whose house was in the garden of the Dominican Convent on the banks of the Garonne in Toulouse.

The author of more than 50 books, the entry for Maritain in the French “Who’s Who” lists him as a philosopher and man of letters. He was honored as both. In addition to many academic honors, Maritain was named a Commander of the Legion of Honor and a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great. He was also given the Medal of the French Resistance and the Grand Cross of the Order of Pius IX. As a writer he received the Grand Prix of Literature from the French Academy in 1961 and the French National Grand Prize for letters in 1963.

While Maritain is venerated by many, he has not been without detractors, to be expected among those who espouse a pragmatic naturalism or antimetaphysical, purely empirical approach to philosophy. In Catholic academic circles, his Le Paysan de la Garonne (1966) scandalized the left because Maritain seemingly vacated many of the liberal policies he formerly embraced. His last two works, Approches sans entraves (1973) and De l’Église du Christ (1973), were given scant notice by the Catholic Press in North America. In his later works, Maritain voiced concern over some of the practices that had been introduced into his beloved Catholic Church in the post-Vatican II years, practices which found little support in the Council documents themselves but were inspired by what some progressive theologians called the “spirit of Vatican II.” Once again he proved to be prescient. His concerns are almost universally recognized, and we now find Vatican officials trying to restore a respect for some of the practices hastily abandoned.

It is impossible to assess Maritain’s lasting contribution to Catholic thought. Paul VI called Maritain his teacher and cited him in Populorum Progressio (1967). Yves Simon, a student when Maritain taught at the Institut Catholique, acknowledged his mentor’s influence as he developed his political philosophy. So too did John Courtney Murray when speaking of the role of religion in society and the relation of the Church to the state. It is evident that Etienne Gilson was influenced by Maritain’s insistence on the existential character of Thomistic metaphysics. Both stressed the importance of the judgment as relevatory of esse (the act of being), Maritain pointing to the intuitive and affective character of the juridicative act. Their common concern was to avoid what was thought to be a static essentialism in which even the act of being was conceptually represented as a thing. Many of their common disciples in North America helped develop a metaphysics of esse, including Joseph Owens, Gerard Smith, S.J., George Klubertanz, S.J., and Anton Pegis. In France, E. Mounier oscillated from discipleship to flirtation with the fascists and eventually to brief cooperation with the French Communist Party. Maritain’s influence on the Personalist movement was pronounced. Jean-Paul Sartre complained to Denis de Rougemont, “You Personalists have won . . . . Everybody in France calls himself a Personalist.”

The interest in Maritain’s work continues unabated throughout the West. One finds institutes and conferences built around Maritain’s legacy in Europe and North and South America. Eugeen de Jonge, the late editor of Politica (Belgium), and Bishop Nicholas Derisi, long-time editor of the quarterly Sapientia (Argentina), provided forums for discussions of his social and political philosophy. Mention must be made of Peter Redpath and his colleagues who have made the American Maritain Association a viable institution.

Foremost among contemporary disciples of Maritain is Ralph McInerny, director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame. With his encouragement the University of Notre Dame Press has undertaken the publication of the English language translations of Maritain’s oeuvre in a uniform edition. McInerny is not only instrumental in making available the written work of Maritain, but through the Maritain Center has provided students and seasoned scholars with the opportunity to study Maritain’s works as well as those of St. Thomas Aquinas. The portrait that accompanies this article is a photograph of a bust commissioned by McInerny and executed by Alex Giampietro of Washington, D.C. Declared by viewers to be of museum quality, a copy of the bust was presented to Pope John Paul II with the hope that it might grace a portal within the Vatican where Maritain served for three years as ambassador.

As a model of the philosopher working within the Catholic faith and drawing upon antiquity and the middle ages, principally Aquinas, to address contemporary issues, Maritain is likely to be unsurpassed. In the 20th century he preeminently represented the philosophia perennis and has thereby earned the accolade of “doctor of the Church.”

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