Jacques Maritain

French religious philosopher

• Born: November 18, 1882
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: April 28, 1973
• Place of death: Toulouse, France

Perhaps the most influential Roman Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century, Maritain spearheaded a Catholic revival in France and, more broadly, the revival of philosophical Thomism in Europe and the United States. Although a traditionalist, philosophically speaking, he was one of the century’s foremost proponents of Christian democracy, and his work helped pave the way for the reforms of Vatican II in the early 1960’s.

Early Life

The story of the formative years of Jacques Maritain (zhahk mah-ree-tahn) is one of the oft-told legends of Catholic rebirth in the twentieth century. Born in Paris, Maritain was the son of Paul Maritain, a prosperous lawyer, and Geneviève Favre, granddaughter of a founder of France’s Third Republic. Reared in an atmosphere of liberal Protestantism, he entered the Sorbonne in 1901, by which time he considered himself an unbeliever and a revolutionary socialist; he was, in short, the very embodiment of French secularism at the turn of the century.

At the Sorbonne, however, Maritain encountered Charles-Pierre Péguy, who, having been a dedicated defender of left-republican ideals during the infamous Dreyfus affair of the 1890’s, was in the process of severing his ties with the victorious Dreyfusards. The ideals of the affair, in Péguy’s view, had degenerated into cynical parliamentary alliances and assaults on the Church. Péguy also attacked the Sorbonne a “positivist Church” as he called it for its new scientific curriculum, which he deemed barren and amoral. Under Péguy’s influence, Maritain and Raissa Oumansoff, a Russian Jew whom Maritain had met at the Sorbonne, underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Unwilling to live with the determinism and moral relativism imparted to them by their scientific training, the two formed a suicide pact in 1902.

Yet Péguy had also introduced his young followers to the views of Henri Bergson, then the most celebrated lecturer at the Collège de France and the perfect philosophical antidote for the Sorbonne’s materialism. Bergson’s message was clear and therapeutic: Neither scientific method nor rational analysis, he asserted, is appropriate to the study of humans; authentic human experience can be grasped not through the intellect’s spatial categories, but rather through an intuitive union with life’s natural flow, la durée. Thus freed from positivism by Bergson, Maritain married Oumansoff in 1904, then shortly thereafter fell under the spell of Léon Bloy, a Catholic poet and self-proclaimed “pilgrim of the absolute.” A paradoxical figure, Bloy combined a socialist’s egalitarianism with the intransigent faith of a convert, which he was. Attracted by Bloy’s certainty and fervor, the Maritains both converted in 1906. Péguy followed suit shortly thereafter, as did quite a number of elite young Frenchmen before the war. Thus, Maritain is often said to have paved the way for a generation’s conversion from secular and even anticlerical republicanism to the Catholic Church.

Life’s Work

As important as Maritain’s conversion was the broad historical context within which it took place. Far from signaling the end of clerical influence in France, the separation of church and state in 1905 created a powerful Catholic backlash, which was enhanced after 1907 by the so-called modernist crisis within the Church. Responding to the ongoing attempt of reforming clergymen to reconcile Catholicism with the modern world, Pope Pius X issued a series of condemnations reaffirming the Church’s opposition to secular science and liberalism. The pope’s “integral Catholicism” repudiated individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and socialism, embracing instead the vision of a universal Christian community publicly regulated by the Church under a Thomist orthodoxy.

It is no surprise, then, that Maritain’s budding Catholicism was nurtured by an integral Catholic, the Père Humbert Clérissac, whom he encountered in 1908. Clerissac was an admirer of the neoroyalist Charles Maurras, a pro-Catholic agnostic who in 1899 had formed the reactionary, anti-Semitic league Action Française , in response to Dreyfusard liberalism. The young Maritain, who disdained politics and would later claim never to have read Maurras’s works, nevertheless mirrored the belief of his spiritual mentor that only the Action Française could prepare France for the reestablishment of an integral Christian order.

More important to Maritain than Clérissac’s politics were the priest’s philosophical views: He was a Thomist. It was under Clérissac’s guidance that Maritain fashioned his first philosophical works. In 1914, he published La Philosophie bergsonienne (Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism , 1955), a comprehensive assault on the reigning monarch of French philosophy from the vantage point of Thomism. This work not only made a name for the young philosopher and set him on an intellectual path for life but also marked the beginning of the Thomist revival in the twentieth century.

Maritain’s argument was twofold. First, while lauding Bergson for the “genuinely liberating effect” of his philosophical assault on positivism, Maritain faulted him for his repudiation of those basic Aristotelian categories of subject and object, cause and effect, and mover and moved, without which Christian theology is impossible. Second, Maritain focused on Bergson’s critique of the intellect. Thomism, he argued, while rejecting with Bergson the “perverted intellect” of the modern mechanists, does not “rend the living unity of the mind,” as does Bergson, into the realms of intellect and intuition, but rather posits the “integrity of body and soul.” Thus, from the Sorbonne’s intellectualism, which had left him feeling psychologically fragmented and morally uncommitted, Maritain had passed through the Bergsonian critique of the intellect to a new Thomistic intellectualism that left him feeling psychologically integrated and authentically Catholic.

Maritain’s prolific writings between 1914 and his death bear the mark of this second, Thomist conversion. In such works as Art et scholastique (1920; Art and Scholasticism, 1962), Science et sagesse (1935; Science and Wisdom, 1940), Scholasticism and Politics (1940), and Court Traité de l’existence et l’existant (1947; Existence and the Existent, 1957), he continued to apply his neo-Thomist analysis to the realms of aesthetics, politics, science, and philosophy. He was at least equally successful at spreading the Thomist gospel by word of mouth: A professor of philosophy at the Institut Catholique in Paris between 1914 and 1933, at Toronto’s Medieval Institute between 1933 and 1945, and at Princeton and various other American universities thereafter, Maritain also began in 1919 a Thomist study-circle at Meudon that would become a famous meeting place for Catholic intellectuals from around the world.

Whatever controversy remains over Maritain’s career, however, revolves around his early association with the Action Française and his break with the reactionary league following its condemnation by Pope Pius XI in 1926. That Maritain was deeply involved with the movement is beyond question. A founding member in 1919 of the pro-Maurrasian journal La Revue universelle, he also authored two works in the early 1920’s, Antimoderne (1922) and Trois réformateurs: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (1925; Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau , 1936), which reflected a passionate hostility toward secular individualism and liberal democracy. In the latter work, for example, he renounced the three reformers in question for having severed reason from faith, fostered the growth of relativism and subjectivism, and created a cult of the individual. Indeed, notwithstanding a certain ambivalence concerning Maurras’s stress on secular politics, as well as his agnosticism and anti-Semitism, it was the royalist’s critique of secular liberalism that attracted the young philosopher.

Yet, while he initially hoped to save Maurras from the papal ax, once the decision was made, Maritain supported it actively. In 1927, he published Primauté du spirituel (The Things That Are Not Caesar’s , 1930), which repudiated Maurras’s notion that the religious transformation of society must be preceded by its political transformation, and his own political views seem to have undergone a marked shift thereafter. During the 1930’s, Maritain became one among several important French Catholic voices to speak out against Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler. Indeed, Maritain’s positions and works of his epoch earned for him, in some quarters, the epithet “Christian Marxist.” In Humanisme intégral (1936; Integral Humanism , 1968), he assaulted the “anthropocentric humanism” of modern capitalism, which, he argued, dehumanized rich and poor alike through its materialism and competitive individualism. Eschewing, however, both revolutionary Marxism and reactionary royalism, he advocated a Christian approach to social justice, a “spiritual revolution” based on the moral recognition of the individual human being as an intrinsically social and spiritual reality rather than as an isolated material atom.

Impressed by the political atmosphere of the United States, where he resided during and after World War II, Maritain continued to evolve toward Christian democracy in such works as Christianisme et démocratie (1943; Christianity and Democracy, 1944), La Personne et le bien commun (1947; The Person and the Common Good, 1947), and Man and the State (1951). Apart from expressing his horror of fascism and totalitarianism in these works, Maritain argued that democracy, purified of bourgeois materialism and infused with a sense of the sacredness of the human person, is nothing more than a secular name for the Christian ideal.

In 1945, Maritain became the living link between French democracy and the Church, accepting, at Charles de Gaulle’s insistence, the post of French ambassador to the Vatican, where he served for three years. Maritain’s relations with the Church during the final years of his life, however, were ambiguous at best. On one hand, his post-1926 works, as well as his high profile as a symbol of “left Catholicism,” had an undeniable influence on the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. However, in his final work, Le Paysan de la Garonne (1966; The Peasant of the Garonne , 1968), Maritain scandalized Church reformers by raging against their excesses. Embracing the council’s declarations in favor of religious liberty and Christian democracy as well as its repudiation of racism and anti-Semitism, he nevertheless reaffirmed doctrinal orthodoxy and firmly warned the Church against accommodation with the modern world. Thus Maritain, who had been formed in the context of one modernist crisis, ended his career perhaps fittingly, by protecting the Church against what appeared to be another.

Significance

Seeking a single thread that unites Maritain the young revolutionary socialist, Maritain the Maurrasian Catholic and Thomist, and Maritain the Christian democrat and humanist is a daunting task from which most scholars have understandably shied away. He is typically cast either as a great humanitarian who was politically indiscreet in his youth or as a weak soul caught in the gravity of stronger ones, ultimately tying himself to the ever-shifting party line of the Church. Certainly Maritain’s series of powerful mentors Péguy, Bergson, Bloy, and Clérissac as well as his obedient response to the condemnation of Action Française in 1926, give some credence to the latter interpretation.

Yet, one fact does seem to reconcile the philosopher’s many faces: Whether of the socialist left, the Catholic right, or the Christian democratic center, Maritain was ever and always opposed to bourgeois liberalism. Indeed, he refused for most of his life to be placed on the scale of secular politics: “To be neither left nor right,” he wrote in 1967, “means simply that one intends to keep his sanity.” Despairing of the scientific materialism and soulless individualism of secular liberalism, he dreamed instead of a transcendent spiritual community. Through his capacity to transform that vision, employing the tools of Thomist philosophy, into a powerful critique of modernity, Maritain was able to revitalize Catholic thought in the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Amato, Joseph. Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World. University: University of Alabama Press, 1975. An examination of Maritain and his disciple Emmanuel Mounier, a Catholic thinker and social egalitarian of the 1930’s and 1940’s, in the context of French politics and Catholic revival in the twentieth century. Amato offers a good historical backdrop for understanding Maritain’s work and influence.

Barré, Jean-Luc. Jacques and Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven. Translated by Bernard Doering. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. The first English translation of a biography of Maritain and his wife, originally published in French in 1995. Offers a clear and objective account of the couple’s lives and intellectual pursuits.

Doering, Bernard. Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. An in-depth account of Maritain’s relations with such important French intellectuals as Charles Maurras, Henri Massis, and Georges Bernanos. This work tends toward apologia but is again useful in placing Maritain into historical context. Extensive citation of Maritain’s private letters, but no bibliography.

Doughterty, Jude P. Jacques Maritain: An Intellectual Profile. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. An introduction to Maritain’s ideas, emphasizing his contributions to philosophy.

Evans, Joseph W., ed. Jacques Maritain, the Man and His Achievement. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963. An eclectic collection of essays on Maritain covering such topics as his aesthetic views, his moral philosophy, his politics, and his impact on Thomism in the United States. Most of the essays are short and easily accessible.

Gallagher, Donald, and Idella Gallagher. The Achievement of Jacques and Raissa Maritain: A Bibliography, 1906-1961. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962. While obviously dated, this still represents an excellent starting point for the English reader beginning research on Maritain.

McInery, Ralph. The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University, 2003. Biography describing how Maritain ultimately found his Catholic faith.

Maritain, Raissa. We Have Been Friends Together. Translated by Julie Kernan. New York: Longmans, Green, 1942. The first of two volumes of memoirs by Maritain’s wife, spanning the period between 1900 and World War II.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Adventures in Grace. Translated by Julie Kernan. New York: Longmans, Green, 1945. The second volume of memoirs. While obviously biased, these graceful and moving recollections are indispensable for students of Maritain’s life and times.

Smith, Brooke Williams. Jacques Maritain, Antimodern or Ultramodern? New York: Elsevier, 1976. A concise analysis of Maritain’s philosophy of history that has the virtue of providing synopses of several of his most important works. Also provides a biographical sketch and an excellent bibliography of works both by and about Maritain.