Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven (review)

I much prefer autobiographies over biographies, and, in the case of Maritains, I never thought anything could supersede Raïssa's We Have Been Friends Together and her Adventures in Grace. But Jean-Luc Barré's Jacques and Raïssa Maritian: Beggars for Heaven has proven me wrong. Barré's coverage is obviously longer than Raïssa's, but it is also more in-depth on a host of points: Jacques' father and mother; the death-bed conversion of Raïssa's father; Jacques' spiritual combat with the homosexuality of so many of the French literary elite, e.g., Maurice Sachs; the personage of Vera, Raïssa's sister; Jacques' help of French and Jewish refugees in World War II; his relation with Charles de Gaulle; and the persistent Vatican doubts about Integral Humanism which the Second Vatican Council put to rest. The strength of Barré's narrative is that it possesses the immediacy of an autobiography because of its abundant and judicious citation of letters by all the personages mentioned.

This is not a work to read to garner an understanding of Maritain's Thomism. It is more personal. Coming through its pages is a Maritain devoted in deep love to his fellow man—especially the artists, intellectuals, and the poor. Repeatedly Barré quotes the first-time reactions of those of other persuasions to Maritain. They all mention Maritain's gentleness, his ability to listen, and his uncanny ability to perceive the essence of a discussion. In short, his friendship. One cannot read these reactions without measuring one's life to Maritain's.

Yet Barré also depicts a Maritain riddled by doubt, almost to the end, about what God wanted of him. Hence, a wanderer continually reinventing, but not compromising, himself to meet the needs of the apostolate. He apparently failed to convert the French elite to Catholicism. Also, Maritain could not dent clerical support for the Fascistic governments of Franco in Spain and Petain in wartime France. During his ambassadorship to the Holy See after World War II, Maritian failed to get from Pius XII stronger ecclesiastic condemnation of the persecution of the Jews. Finally, Maritain received no invitation to participate in the sessions of the Second Vatican Council.

Barré's account of Maritain's last years is particularly painful to read. Despite all the honors, e.g., the ambassadorship to the Vatican, the posting to Princeton, his receiving from Paul VI the Vatican Council's message to the intellectuals of the world, Maritain was like a dinosaur. Both the world and Catholicism had in fact moved beyond Maritain's Thomism. Yet if Maritain was a dinosaur, he was more like a ferocious tyrannosaurus than a mild brontosaurus. In his The Peasant of the Garonne (1966) Maritain looked the times in the face, took their measure, and without any second thoughts judged them fiercely in the light of his beloved faith and Thomism. An inspiring desperado to the end.

Barré's narrative is so wonderfully stirring and multifaceted that it generates its own lacunae in the minds of readers. Garrigou-Lagrange comes off quite badly (perhaps slanderously in the book's proximity between Maritain's criticism of Garrigou-Lagrange's support for Vichy and Vichy's support for the deportation of Jews, pp. 375-376). Nothing is ever said of the long and warm collaboration between Maritain and Garrigou-Lagrange with the Cercle thomiste. Also, I wish that the coverage of Gilson and Toronto had equaled the coverage of Hutchins and Chicago. Finally, last but not least, readers owe Bernard Doering a deep debt of gratitude for a superb translation.