For us, a century later, embroiled in ancient questions in modern forms, the Maritans are helpful ancestors: close enough to convey a sense of continuity and different enough to show how great tradition can be, even among the most hopeless circumstances can revive and blossom again.
[Wir veröffentlichen einen Gastartikel von Robert Royal* mit freundlicher Erlaubnis in eigener Übersetzung. Original hier zu finden.]
A young man and a young woman stroll through the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in the summer of 1901. And they contemplated suicide. It wasn’t romantic despair. They were in love and wanted to live. But as science students at the Sorbonne, they were taught that the world has no meaning, only an arbitrary order that scientists believed came about accidentally and somehow. Such a world seemed unbearable to them. They wanted more, something that would give love and life meaning, dignity and purpose.
The young man was Jacques Maritain, later the most influential Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century. (Friday marked the fiftieth anniversary of his death.) The woman was Raïssa Oumançoff, Russian-Jewish who, after being converted (by the novelist and self-confessed madman Léon Bloy), became a poet and mystical writer. The world is always trying to evade the question they are being asked – or at least to defer the answer. Ultimately, that’s impossible, as the modern existentialists knew very well: either God or nothing.
For us, a century later, embroiled in ancient questions in modern forms, the Maritans are helpful ancestors: close enough to convey a sense of continuity and different enough to show how great tradition can be, even among the most hopeless circumstances can revive and blossom again.
Many Catholics, who should know better, denigrate the neo-Thomism that Maritain and others helped promote in the first half of the twentieth century. Usually because they favor the later personalist and communitarian nouvelle théologie and their developments in figures like Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger. However, this creates a split within the polyphony of the Catholic tradition that need not be, especially decades later when we need what both currents can give us.
For me personally, as a student at an Ivy League university in the 1970s, it was a godsend to Maritain (through »Coincidence«) and to discover the whole Aristotelian-Thomistic world with its intellectual solidity, its careful distinctions and its lively engagement with art and poetry. (When one of TCT’s founders, Michael Novak, was reading Maritain’s magistral Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, he had to walk a few times to catch his breath). For me, scholasticism was a bulwark against the chaos of the 1960s. And for a good reason.
Cardinal Newman, who was neither an Aristotelian nor a Thomist, wrote: »As long as we are human we cannot help but be in large part Aristotelian, for the great Master analyzes only the thoughts, feelings, views and opinions of the human kind. He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas before we were born To think correctly in many areas is to think like Aristotle, and we are his disciples whether we like it or not, even if we don’t know it.«
Behind the subtleties and complexities of Aristotle and Aquinas lies what Chesterton called reason, deeply rooted in reality, not socially constructed, as the sophists of each age claim, but the framework of the world in which we live and also the truth about our own being. For an introduction to Thomism, take a TCT course from another founder of this site, the great Ralph McInerny, who also The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain wrote. Definitely read.
As an older statesman, less susceptible to chaos, I often turn to Plato, Augustine, and the more recent theologians and philosophers who, like Newman, appeal to the early Fathers. We desperately need the personalism and communitarianism they aspire to. But such concerns were not unknown to Maritain (cf. his person and the common good, true humanism, etc.). And without Aristotelian/Thomistic reason, we will not find the human person or community again.
The sheer volume (about 14,000 pages in my French edition of the complete works) and the magnitude of his work should draw our attention. Nobody else has the desire of Leo XIII. in Eternal Father implemented with such creativity after a Thomistic renewal of society – and had such resonance far beyond the Catholic Church. In addition to his works on philosophy, theology, history, the Holy Scriptures and Judaism, Maritain also influenced public life. Even before he was forced into exile by the Nazi invasion of France, he had it »christian democracy« elaborated, a substantial alternative to the collectivism of Communism, the scientific racism of Nazism and the political totalitarianism of Fascism.
I own The Things That Are Not Caesar‘s (London, 1939), a translation of the French The Primacy of the Spiritual, which is decaying due to the acidic paper it is printed on, but is a WWII era treasure. The title speaks volumes: modern politics, as we know only too well today in America, tries to devour everything, including the realms of intellectual life. Christian democracy, modeled on Maritain, helped form political parties that were instrumental in keeping Soviet Communism out of Western Europe and several Latin American countries.
After the war, Maritain was appointed French ambassador to the Holy See. He played a crucial role in drafting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite the sad spectacle presented by the UN in the years that followed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is no small achievement.
The European Union was also originally launched by Christian Democrats in France (Robert Schumann), Germany (Konrad Adenauer) and Italy (Alcide de Gasperi). Her vision was good because Catholic social teaching and Maritain’s contributions to it were good. But like America today – which has strayed far from its constitutional roots – the EU has adopted some of the totalitarian characteristics that Maritain opposed in its earlier forms.
These are many and great contributions to the church and world from just a few decades ago that deserve examination in our own troubled times. The old foundations are not lost forever because they cannot be. They’re just waiting for us to revive them, with creative adaptations to our times of course.
And I personally owe the Maritain a debt for saving me from the clutter of the 1960s. Dante was no less relieved when Virgil, sent by the three holy women to lead him out of the dark forest, appeared. read him
*Robert Royal is Editor-in-Chief of The Catholic Thing and President of Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, DC His most recent books are Columbus and the Crisis of the West and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.