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JACQUES MARITAIN
An Intellectual Profile
By Jude P. Dougherty The Catholic University of America Press
Copyright © 2003 The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8132-1329-3
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
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 newfound 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 scolastique (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 from French into Italian by Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI, then a seminary professor. 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, An Introduction to 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, Nicholas Berdyaev, Emmanuel 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 Universal Declaration of 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 at 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 fifty 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, which is to be expected among those who espouse a pragmatic naturalism or antimetaphysical, purely empirical approach to philosophy. In Catholic academic circles, his 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 Popularum 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 judgment as relevatory of esse (the act of being), and of Maritain's point 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, George Klubertanz, 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.
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 which appears as a frontispiece to this volume 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.
On a personal note, my first encounter with Maritain occurred when as a college student in the junior seminar of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America I was obliged to read his Introduction to Philosophy. Later I was privileged to attend his A. W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., lectures that became Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. As a graduate student the first paper I read to the graduate student colloquium was on Maritain's philosophy of science. The first paper I gave to a college faculty was on Maritain's Man and the State. Years later Thomas Merton shared with me some of his personal correspondence with Maritain whose handwriting at that time indicated clearly that he was in decline.
The essays presented in this volume explore only a fraction of Maritain's wide-ranging intellect. They offer an appreciation of the perennial value of his work in metaphysics, the philosophy of art, and social and political philosophy. They were delivered as lectures in places as distant as Venice, Pamplona, and Buenos Aires.
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 twentieth century he preeminently represented the philosophia perennis and has thereby earned the accolade of "doctor of the Church."
Chapter Two
MARITAIN ON CHURCH AND STATE
I
It is hazardous to talk about the relation of church and state in the abstract, as if there were an ideal relationship to be achieved and against which all others are to be measured. The modus vivendi which prevailed in Greece and Rome during the classical period could not have been culturally possible in China of the same era. Later the religious paternalism of the Greek city-state or of the Roman polis became impossible from the standpoint of Christianity. The doctrine of two swords was forged early, and since Ambrose it has remained the standard in the West. Even Ambrose's relation as Bishop of Milan to the Emperor Theodosius I was quite different from that which was to prevail a hundred years later between Pope Gelasius and Anastasius, the Emperor of Constantinople, and both those relationships were far different from that which was to obtain between Abbot Suger of Saint Denis and Louis VI, who copiously endowed the Abbey Church, and Louis, VII, who made Suger regent of France as he joined a crusade to restore the Holy Land to Christendom. The medieval problem is not the modern problem, just as the church-state relationship in Spain is not that of Poland, and that in England is not that of the United States. Mindful of context, still we need not despair of enunciating principle.
Maritain's treatment of church-state problems, although colored by twenty centuries of history, nevertheless flows principally from an analysis of certain accepted basic principles in human nature and in social structures. It was never Maritain's intention, nor is it ours, to review the vast literature on church and state; still, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the past. History is illuminating as it displays men of differing times and different cultures grappling with what seems to be a universal problem of governance.
The philosopher's approach to the problem, if not in all respects identical with that of the perspective of the state, is nevertheless one which views religion from a secular perspective. Thus we may ask, from the point of view of the state, does it make a difference whether men believe in and worship God? Does society have a stake in the presence or absence of religion? Should governments encourage, remain indifferent to, or actively oppose religion?
In the classical period of Western culture, the state's interest in religion was taken for granted. The age of Greek political experience admits of no distinction between church and state. The Greek polis can only be described as both a state and a church. Both Plato and Aristotle assumed the polis or res publica to be the highest expression of the common good, that is, the embodiment of a moral value. The whole destiny of man was involved in the state. The Roman world because of empire was more complex than the Greek, forcing the Romans to focus on implementing structure where the Greek was principally concerned with ends. Cicero offers the most detailed treatment in his treatise, De legibus, where he provides a description of priestly function within the ideal society. Cicero explores, first, the means by which the state should endeavor to win the favor of the gods and, second, the ways by which the state under divine favor should live and function. To achieve the first end, the state acts through religious ceremony and priestly order; to achieve the second, it acts through magistrates and the groupings of the chief men and people.
Cicero goes on to describe the manner in which the gods should be approached, distinguishing first a hierarchy among the gods and, then, between urban and rural ceremonial practices. Recognizing the importance of religion in the countryside, he decrees days of relaxation, falling at such seasons of the year as naturally coincide with the end of the farmer's labor. In the cities, on the other hand, the gods are to be worshiped in temples, where statues bring the gods vividly before the eyes and thoughts of men. The chief and preeminent power in the commonwealth is that associated with the authority of the augurs. Their pronouncements are law to the commanders in the field and to the magistrates in the city. Declaring war, concluding peace, or striking a treaty is done with sanction of religion. It was a common acknowledgment among the Romans that political power, considered abstractly, flowed from the gods. Human agents could properly exert political authority only when that authority was divinely sanctioned.
Against this cultural backdrop it is no mystery that Ambrose could force the Emperor Theodosius to repent publicly in the basilica of Milan of his sin against Salonica. This occurred in 380, only a few decades after Christianity had emerged from the catacombs. The way had been prepared. The distinction between things temporal and things spiritual had been clearly made in Roman times and a hierarchy established.
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