Jacques Maritain: Est, Est, Non, Non

JACQUES MARITAIN EST, EST, NON, NON. By RuTH NANnA ANsHEN WHEN one who is a sympathetic observer of the calm solidity of Christian thought comes into the presence of Jacques Maritain, when one is overwhelmed by the genius of his thought and by the ontological profundity of his analysis of truth in accordance with his hypothesis, one may well be convinced that the dark world of satanic powers will pass from one's mind. Here one discerns the possibility of finding oneself ultimately in the presence of an Ideal Judge who knows all Good and Evil. The world as we approached it seemed so restless, so disheartening, without teleological validity. The world of our postulates was a brighter one only because we determined to make it so. But there was something lonely and isolated in the thought that the postulates received, as a response from the world of reality, only their own echo-and often not even that. Their world was rather their own creation than an external and universal truth that gave them independent substance and support. Frequently there seemed nothing solid that could reverberate at all. But Jacques Maritain is convinced that we all may look upon a truth that is indeed dependent on no subjective longings of ours, no whims of social tradition, no demands of our personal narrow lives. He has rediscovered for himself and for others the fact that all truth is known to One Thought, and that Thought, Infinite. It is infinite Intelligence which is above all and through all, embracing everything, judging everything, infallible, pe.Hect. This is Jacques Maritain's contribution to contemporary philosophy-an apostrophe to Reason and its decisive influence on the life of humanity. M. Maritain points out the disastrous dehumanization in the existential continuum of the life of man when Reason is abandoned, and he eloquently indicates the ineluctable necessity of sur79 80 RUTH NANDA ANSHEN rendering the fluctuating will to an immanent and common Reason. Ever since the Middle Ages, the world has lost an integrating principle. There has been a futile effort to substitute scientific explanation for metaphysical meaning. The medieval thinkers, St. Thomas Aquinas in particular, were warmly aware that the community is based upon the guiding and shaping power of a spiritual value and in the adaptation of the laws of nature. This transcending and shaping power, Maritain warns, is not contained either in the idea of scientific empiricism, moral empiricism , in the idea of bourgeois society or in the concepts of some collective consciousness. All lack the concrete substance, the existential value of an idea which is capable of integrating life beyond the borders of the subordination of ends to means. The substitution of the idea of indefinite progress for the idea of meaning and purpose has resulted in a metaphysical agnosticism , an educational secularism and a bourgeois humanism which has left the soul of man bewildered, full of fear, lost and without hope. Furthermore, Jacques Maritain teaches that as soon as men refuse to be ruled primarily by God, they condemn themselves to be ruled primarily by man; and if they decline to receive from God the leading principles of their moral and social conduct , they are bound to accept them from the king, or from the state, or from their race, or from their own social class. In all cases, there will be a state-decreed philosophical, moral, historical, and even scientific, truth, just as tyrannical in its pretensions, and much more effective in its oppressions of individual conscience than any state religion may ever have been in the past. Maritain warns us against the encroachments of the totalitarian state in its various forms, and points out that our only conceivable protection, humanly speaking at least, is in a powerful revival of the genuine feeling for the universal character of truth. I say feeling, because it is a natural temptation for everyone to coin a truth of his own, made after his own image and likeness, so that this anthropomorphism may JACQUES MARITAIN 81 give us at the same time the solipsistic pleasure of self-contemplation . It has so often been thought and written that the discovery of truth is a...