Jacques Maritain: An Intellectual Profile

I. Introduction

 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 neoThomist but a Thomist. The Distinguer pour unir; ou les degrés du savoir (), Court traité de l’existence et de l’existant have been  read by generations of students worldwide. His Art et scolastique () has become a Christian classic, and decades later it was followed by Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (). 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  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 (), 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 , 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 , 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 . 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...