The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

THE HEART OF THE MATTER 1 The increased tempo of Maritain’s life as he settled into wartime exile in New York—the writing, lecturing, teaching, consultation with representatives of General de Gaulle, radio broadcasts—did not distract Jacques and his little flock from the one thing needful. His reflections on politics place squarely in the center of the picture the human person called to holiness. About this time in Oxford, C. S. Lewis was writing the remarkable essay, “Learning in War Time.” How can we justify the pursuit of learning at a time of great danger when issues of life and death confront us? Lewis’s answer could have been Maritain’s as well: “The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. . . .We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.”  2 Among the books Maritain wrote in NewYork is the remarkable TheThought of St. Paul, in which he reflects on the epistles with especial reference to the question of the “mystery of Israel.” In Paris, Jacques had been the object of some vituperation for addressing publicly the question of anti-Semitism. Raïssa was Jewish—doubtless one motive for Jacques’s lifelong interest in the issue, largely from a theological point of view. “Salvation comes from the Jews.” Maritain begins with this quotation from John :. All the apostles were Jewish, of course, not least the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul, originally Saul. “It is from Israel that the Savior of theWorld came; it is in the womb of a young Jewish girl—the only absolutely pure creature among all human creatures—that theWord by whom all was made took on human flesh, soon to be spared in the first pogrom of the Christian era, the massacre of the innocent Jewish babes by which Herod sought fumblingly to strike their king. . . .” It is with Moses that Maritain compares Paul. Moses transmitted to Israel the tablets of the Law; Paul taught the universal church by the sword of the word that had been entrusted to him, a “church composed of Jews and gentiles,” the spiritual Israel that was “by the Law, dead to the Law, in order to live for God.” That is the Pauline mission and the source of Saint Paul’s importance for human history. It was thanks to him that Christianity was freed from Judaism to become universal, catholic. It had to be understood that the Son of Man had not come only for the Jew, but for Man, for the human race taken in its unity. The great intuition of Paul that flooded his spirit, Maritain writes, was the universality of the Kingdom of God and that salvation comes through faith, not through the law. And there is another pillar of Paul’s teaching: the liberty of the sons of God. “Saint Paul is the great teacher of liberty; the sense of liberty is rooted in the very marrow of the bones of the man who was Saul, the most fervent of the Pharisees, all the barriers of whose heart melted at the vision of the glorified Christ. From that point on, he knows no frontiers, but is at the mercy of Him whom he loves and who delivered him.” In this book on Paul the reader comes into contact with the scriptural bases of the spirituality of Maritain. The book has the deceptive look of being merely a florilegium of texts, and Maritain does indeed put many texts before the reader; but they are chosen to illustrate large themes and in their cumulative effect give a profound sense of the mission of Saint  Nones The Heart of the Matter  Paul. In such a book, it is the role of the author to be self-effacing, to let his subject speak. But if it were simply a matter of listening to Paul, we need only read the epistles and the Acts of the Apostles. This is a book by one who has long immersed himself in those texts and has discerned the major themes illustrated far and wide in the epistles. And the art of the book is to make us unaware of the very...