The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life

LITTLE BROTHER OF JESUS

 LITTLE BROTHER OF JESUS Returned to France, feeble, valetudinarian, yet still with years of life ahead of him, Maritain had the great good fortune of being offered a home with the Little Brothers of Jesus in Toulouse. He could share in the life of the community, teach, prepare for eternity. For all his hope and intention to lead an increasingly reclusive life, he was constantly drawn into wider affairs . And new books continued to appear. Summers he spent in Alsace, at Kolbsheim. Father René Voillaume, a Little Brother of Jesus, had been a friend of the Maritains for years, and Jacques was a great admirer of his. We remember that he was asked to comment on the journal of Raïssa before publication . So this old connection, plus the presence of the Dominicans in Toulouse (and the grave ofThomas Aquinas), would have commended this move to Jacques. For the brothers, he was a great boon, providing seminars for them that blossomed into some of his last books. His themes were often explicitly theological—The Grace and Humanity of Jesus,The Church of Christ— and he followed the Second Vatican Council closely, viewing interpretations being made of it with alarm, as is indicated by The Peasant of the Garonne. He was consulted by Pope Paul VI before the pontiff issued his Credo of PaulVI. In The Peasant, Maritain made much of himself as an old layman, but we have seen that he was a most unusual member of the laity. From the outset of their married life, he and Raïssa—andVera—had followed a veritable religious rule in their daily life. And of course they were oblates of Saint Benedict.When to this is added the vow Jacques and Raïssa took early in their married life to live as brother and sister, he may seem even more remote from the lives most men and women lead. And then, as he neared his eighty-eighth year, Jacques Maritain himself became a Little Brother of Jesus, taking the vows of religion and becoming a full member of the community . The very simplicity of the community appealed to one who had long advocated les moyens pauvres, slender means, as the most effective. The Brothers built their own chapel and other buildings, and Jacques’s quarters had always been simple and austere. Perhaps Jacques sensed that many would be puzzled by this move. Taking the vow of chastity at eighty-eight might not seem demanding, but of course Jacques had taken it many years before.Writing to his dear friend Henry Bars, he asked for his prayers and said that he had always had it in his head to end his days under religious obedience. And he hoped his decision could be kept confidential. Does Jacques Maritain’s late entry into the religious life diminish the role we have been stressing in this presentation of his life? Is he any less a model for those lay believers whose calling it is to pursue the arts and sciences , philosophy, or theology? The Cercles d’études, it will be remembered, were not restricted to lay people, though the emphasis in the constitution is on the prayer life they must develop.The reason for this emphasis was that religious were already committed to a life of prayer. At the end, Jacques bridged the gap between the two and, I suggest, released his influence from too narrow an interpretation. Models of behavior are complicated entities.The saints all imitate Jesus and no two of them are alike. And we lesser mortals take our cue from the saints as well, but not in order to replicate them exactly. Indeed, it is logically impossible to become the clone of anyone else.The life of Jacques Maritain can only be understood as the pursuit of sanctity through the life of study, of philosophy, and, in the end, theology.We can reflect on his life in its singularity and go on to imagine living our own life like that. Over the decades of his life, as often as not unwittingly, Jacques functioned in that way for many. It is the argument of this little book that he still can—and does. In March , Jacques, who had suffered a heart attack in Princeton, began to suffer pains in his limbs. For a time he used a wheelchair, but soon Little Brother of Jesus  he was confined to his bed. On...