In his defense of the Church, Maritain
can be harsh
in hi indictment of her personnel.

Maritain: On the Church of Christ

By Jude P. Dougherty 

Pran Maritain’s last complete book, De l’Église du Christ, was published in English translation in the year of his death.1 It was ignored by the secular media and given scant notice in the Catholic press. It followed by seven years the publication of Le Paysan de la Garonne,2 which had earned Maritain the enmity of the Catholic left for its critique of some of the theology developing in the wake of Vatican II. John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths (1960) noted happily that the Church in North America was not divided between left and right as it was with destructive consequences in Europe. By the close of Vatican II, the European virus had spread to North America. Maritain who had been the darling of the liberal Catholic intelligentsia because of his social philosophy was suddenly ostracized, his later works ignored. For Maritain a liberal social policy did not presuppose a liberal Catholic theology, certainly not one at war with the intellectual heritage of the Church.

In none of his critical studies does Maritain present himself as a theologian. He is a Catholic layman, a philosopher of rank, noticing the ambiguities, inconsistencies, and repudiations of key elements of the Catholic faith by prominent and regrettably influential theologians, who still called themselves somewhat dubiously “Catholic.” No stranger to debate, Maritain challenged deviant positions with his customary acuity but without much success. No surprise there; the left characteristically avoids debate, preferring to ignore or ridicule its critics, which it easily does with the aid of a willing secular media. In the case of Maritain, he was simply ignored although one can find snide comments in the writings of a number of Catholic authors. 

Maritain’s ill-treatment aside, his work proved to be prescient in a number of ways. Two recent documents, Fides et Ratio and Dominus Iesus, carry elements of the debate, emphasizing the importance of philosophy to theology and the tendency of the ecumenical dialogue to blur irreconcilable differences in the interest of accommodation.

In De l’Église du Christ Maritain speaks of the “profoundly troubled historical moment” at which he was writing. He calls himself “an old Christian philosopher who has thought about the mystery of the Church for sixty years.”3 He is appalled by the appreciable number of pseudo-theologians who employ themselves to destroy the treasure of truth which is the Church’s responsibility to transmit. His work, he says, should not be read as a work of apologetics. It presupposes the Catholic faith and is addressed primarily to those who share that faith.

Speaking of ecumenism, he decries the search for a spurious universalism whose first condition seems to be indifference with respect to truth. It is foolish, he holds, to attempt to unite all Christians in spite of their dissidences and all men in spite of the diversity of their beliefs. The great utopian ideal—unity of all Christians—can only be achieved with a complete disregard for the truth. One hears of “ecumenical dialogue” but not “ecumenical friendship.” Is it not friendship, he asks, which is first required, well-established habits of friendship, created by fraternal banquets, eating, drinking, and smoking together, conversing at random, and joking? Such is far more useful than “the meetings of commissions with their definite programs, their reports, and their speeches.”4 “The meal taken in common is a natural rite of human friendship.”

Four decades subsequent to the close of the Second Vatican Council it is apparent that something unintended occurred. The Church entered the Council in a self-confident, if not triumphant, mood. At the opening of the 21st century, the Church remains shaken by the sparseness of vocations to the priesthood and to the religious life and, except for some encouraging pockets in Europe and North America, by the fall in Mass attendance and neglect of the sacrament of penance. It is commonly acknowledged that the Church has ceased to be a significant cultural factor in its former strongholds. The vague and ambiguous documents issued by the Council, in spite of its attempt in the words of Gaudium et Spes to read “the signs of the time. . . interpreting them in the light of the Gospel,” lent themselves to misinterpretation. The clear, crisp teaching of a catechetical Church was lost to ecumenical accommodation, noble sentiment, and hollow-sounding abstractions and platitudes. Among the faithful it was thought disloyal to question or to criticize the fruit of the Council and its documents, this at the same time that deviant theologians were invoking them in support of dubious assertions. Maritain, the old philosopher, was free from sanctions and spoke his mind. Today with the unraveling of Catholic institutions worldwide he may be regarded as prescient, although his view was shared by many whose piety led them to remain silent.

With the average Catholic layman Maritain would have done with “the tempest of wildly diffused foolish ideas” that have caused sorrow and confusion among the faithful. He would “have done with the demythization of doctrine and the secularization or profanization of a Christianity which our new doctors and spiritual guides would like to entrust into the hands of the sociologists, of the psychoanalysts, of the structuralists, of the Marcusists, of the phenomenologists, and of the pioneers of technocracy.”5

The subtitle of On the Church of Christ is indicative of a distinction that is crucial to an understanding of the Church; “Churchmen will never be the Church,” in Maritain’s judgment. One can take a detached view, making positive and negative assessments of the activity of Churchmen throughout the centuries while remaining confident of the holiness of the Church itself.

His fundamental distinction runs through the work, that is, the difference between the “person of the Church” and “her personnel,” that is, between the Church visible to the intellect and the Church as visible to the eyes. “The person of the Church,” writes Maritain, “can be holy while being composed of members who are all sinners to some degree.”6 Indeed, members who are holy can be guilty of gross error in their prudential judgments. Noble purposes can be pursued by ignoble means or frustrated by actions gone awry or by miscalculation and adverse circumstances. 

That distinction made, Maritain defends the person of the Church while admitting the evils perpetrated in her name by the Crusades, the Inquisition, the suppression of the Albigensians, the imprisonment of Galileo, the execution of Joan, and the burning of Savonarola and Giordano. No critic or cynic is likely to draw a longer list of the “sins of the Church,” for the most part grievous errors of judgment by otherwise noble-minded “Churchmen.”

It is against this backdrop of acknowledged failure that Maritain assesses from a layman’s point of view the successes and failures of the Second Vatical Council. But his chronicle of admitted failures is only one aspect of an inquiry, an inquiry that is essentially a hymn of praise by a man clearly in love with his church. A short section paying tribute to Our Lady is equal to that of any poet for its beauty and depth. 

In his defense of the Church, Maritain can be harsh in his indictment of her personnel. Clearly the episodes he addresses are a bit more complex than he makes them out to be. To focus only on the Galileo affair, a scholar writing from a purely secular perspective, Giorgio Diaz de Santillana, defends the Church against charges of gross mistreatment of Galileo, largely because the heliocentric theory advanced by Galileo was not demonstrated until the early 19th century.7 Bellarmine’s Aristotelian view of scientific explanation was pertinent to the demand that Galileo defend his view as a theoretical explanation of observed phenomena and not as an established fact. De Santillana’s respect for the social context in which the sometimes unpleasant Galileo was often out of bounds with his incursions into biblical theology places the whole episode in a more humane light and is less condemnatory of the actions of the churchmen than Maritain would allow. William A. Wallace’s study of Galileo corroborates de Santillana’s judgment that Galileo may have brought most of his troubles upon himself by his intemperate behavior toward authorities who may have censured him for reasons other than his heliocentric theory, which theretofore did not disturb ecclesiastical authority as long as it was advanced as a theory.

There is one area where Maritain forcefully comes to the defense of the Churchmen—namely, the treatment of the Jews. “The hatred of the Jewish people in the Middle Ages was the deed of the populace and of many in the bourgeoisie and in the nobility and many in the lower clergy. The high personnel of the Church, the Papacy above all, remained free from it.”8 He continues, “The Popes, even the ones most severe in their legislation, never knew this hatred.”9 It was in the papal states that the Jews fared best. “During the whole of the Middle Ages and the darkest periods of the latter, it was the Popes who were their greatest protectors and defenders.”10
Maritain points out that the Bull of Calixtus II (1120) condemning the violences against the Jews and their Baptism under constraint was confirmed at least twenty-two times up to the middle of the 18th century. “The episcopal body as a whole kept itself free from religious hatred of the Jewish people.”11 By contrast, hatred of the Jews was intense in Luther and in Voltaire. Although religious anti-Semitism may have disappeared long before Maritain’s day, he praises Vatican II for completely eradicating the idea of the Jewish people as the “deicide-people,” the religious anti-Semitism which long soiled Christendom. The Council insists upon the friendship to be developed and consolidated between Jews and Christians. “It seems to me,” writes Maritain, “that in order to be authentic the friendship in question prerequires of the two sides a purification of thought: it is necessary that the Christian understand truly that God has not rejected, but has always continued to love the children of Israel, and that it is his love which has permitted this long passion and it will be necessary for the Jews to understand truly that it is not the will for power, but the charity of Christ, which animates the effort of the Church toward men.”12 Maritain is not naive. He recognizes that dislike for the Jews, quite apart from religious motivation, is often based on behavioral considerations.

Some are inclined to rejoice that finally the Church recognizes that she errs, that finally she confesses her fallibility, that finally one can proclaim that she has not ceased to accumulate mistakes in the diverse epochs of her history. This is the view of numerous theologians “who erect themselves into a magisterium—a ‘scientific’ magisterium—with which the sole true magisterium would be doubled.”13 Dangerously, they seem to be embarked on a concerted effort to undermine Roman authority.

Inexactness of language often leads some to attribute to the Church an act or decision of her directing personnel without distinguishing whether the latter has acted as “proper cause” or as an “instrument of the Church herself.” Maritain reminds his readers that it is only the solemn magisterium of the Pope speaking alone (and not through a Roman Congregation), or when he speaks “conjointly with the bishops assembled in General Council” (solemn magisterium) or “conjointly with the bishops dispersed throughout the world” (ordinary magisterium) that it is the person of the Church herself speaking and acting, the Church one, holy, and infallible. “The person of the Church is there, before our eyes, manifestly at work, through the magisterium when it teaches infallibly. She is there—and in what a sublime manner!—through the Sacrifice of the Mass . . . the Sacraments, through each Baptism, each absolution received, each Communion in the Body and Blood of Christ.”14

“Finally even when one of the members of her personnel uses badly his juridical authority or his moral authority, the person of the Church is still there in a certain indirect manner, which does not render her responsible for that which he does in betraying her spirit.”15

Maritain recognizes that writing in “the midst of a tempest of widely diffused foolish ideas,”16 much of what he says will displease many. Yet he hopes that however poorly he has said it, that in fifty years time the judgment may be made that “after all, it was not so stupid.” In fact, Maritain could be read as a preamble to the declaration, Dominus Iesus,17 which seeks to call to mind certain indispensable elements of Christian doctrine by providing a clear description of the nature of the Church and its mission. The document proclaims, “God has willed that the Church founded by Him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity . . . . This truth does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world.” 18 Yet the fullness of Christianity is to be found only within the Church, in Christ Himself who is “the way, the truth, and the life.

Interreligious dialogue is part of the Church’s evangelizing mission, but “Equality, which is the presumption of interreligious dialogue refers to equal personal dignity of the parties in the dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ—who is God himself made man—in relation to the founders of other religions.”19

One has only to study the texts of the reformers to discern how incompatible are the doctrines advanced by Luther and Calvin, for example, with those of the Catholic Church. On the issue of the relation of faith and reason addressed by John Paul II in his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio, Luther stands in the tradition of Tatian and Tertullian, both of whom who died outside of the Church, not in that of Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria. Contradictory positions cannot be held simultaneously, in spite of good will. Maritain found it necessary to repeat this truism in both De l’Église and the earlier Le Paysan. John Paul II’s encouragement of extended philosophical training in the seminaries may, if implemented, mitigate the romantic blurring of truth in the interest of a spurious intellectual ecumenism which Maritain feared.
In discussing Maritain’s view of the Church, one is drawn to the work of Vladimir Soloviev20 1853-1900, a philosopher and layman who, like Maritain, was concerned about the Church but in his case from the vantage point of Orthodox Christianity. It may not be inaccurate to present Soloviev as a near contemporary of Maritain since his work was suppressed in his lifetime and largely eclipsed by decades of Soviet domination. Like Maritain he wrote about the Church he loved, in Maritain’s language, the “person of the Church.” His witness to Christianity was praised by John Paul II in an address at Castel Gondolfo.21 Leo XIII had called him the “sage from the East.” Hans Urs von Balthasar praised him for providing “beyond question the most profound vindication and the most comprehensive philosophical statement of the Christian totality in modern times.” 22

Both Maritain and Soloviev grounded their thoughts about the Church in patristic Christianity. For Maritain the Great Schism was the work of men, the Church’s personnel. With Maritain, Soloviev affirms that Christianity is the agent empowered by Christ to bring humanity into the Kingdom of God, not only at the personal level but also at the social and political.

Toward the end of his life the goal of a united Christendom became Soloviev’s primary concern. Convinced that Catholic and Orthodox Churches were fundamentally one, as evidenced by basic agreements along doctrinal, sacramental, and hierarchically apostolic lines, he sought to advance their unity “sundered de facto and not de jure.” He found Orthodox Christianity susceptible to excessive determination by nationalist and statist attitudes, but he was equally critical, not unlike Maritain, of the papacy in its historical tendency to use its ecclesial authority to pursue worldly ends.

While Maritain makes an important distinction between the Church and her personnel, Soloviev advances a similar distinction between the Church of Rome and the Latin Church, that is, between the functions of the Pope as Bishop of Rome and as Patriarch of the West. “It is the Church of Rome, not the Latin Church, that is the mater et magistra omnium Ecclesiarum: it is the Bishop of Rome, and not the Western Patriarch, who speaks infallibly ex cathedra. And Soloviev adds, “We ought not to forget that there was a time when the Bishops of Rome were Greeks.23

One could find many parallels between the thought of Maritain and Soloviev, especially on the role of religion in society, in law and morality, and in the treatment of the Jews.24
Two laymen, philosophers, united by the Catholic faith and a common love for classical philosophy, especially Aristotle, writing across the divide wrought by the Great Schism, contribute by virtue of their professional skills to a common understanding of the Church, later taught magisterially in Fides et Ratio and Dominus Iesus. 

1 Jacques Maritain, De l’Église du Christ, Trans. By Joseph W. Evans (On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Her Personnel). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973.
2 Le Paysan de la Garonne, Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1966
3 Ibid., p. v.
4 Ibid., p.111.
5 Ibid., p. 241.
6 Ibid., p. 138
7 Giorgio de Santillana, Crime of Galileo, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
8 Ibid., p. 167.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 168.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 174
13 Ibid., p. 234.
14 Ibid., p. 239.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 241.
17 Promulgated June 16, 2000, with the approval of John Paul II and signed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
18 Ibid., p. 14.
19 Ibid., pp. 14-15.
20 Sometimes his surname is rendered as Sergveyevich or Solovyou.
21 July 30, 2000, as reported by the Vatican News Service ZENIT. 
22 Untranslated Collected Works of Vladimir Soloviev (SSVS), Vol. 13, p. 188, as quoted by Gregory Flazov, “Vladimir Solovyov and the Idea of Papacy,” Communio, 24, Spring 1997, p. 130.
23 Ibid., p. 131
24 Cf. Politics, Law, Morality: Essays by V.S. Soloviev, ed. and trans. by Vladimir Wozniuk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 

Dr. Jude P. Dougherty is the Dean Emeritus of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He is the author of over 75 articles on topics in metaphysics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of science. He is the editor of the Review of Metaphysics and received the Cardinal Wright award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in 1994.