Approaches to God by Jacques Maritain (review)

392 BOOK REVIEWS Approaches to God. By JAcQUES MARITAIN. Translated by PETER O'REILLY. W01-ld Perspectives, Vol. I. Edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. New York: Harper, 1954. Pp. 1~8. $~.50. Man is a complex being and so his spirit finds many approaches to the God who is the primal thing in his existence. These "reaches" to God are first of all cognitional; love and service come later. But intelligence has a dual role: one logical and discursive, functioning in its proper clime of essences; the other intuitive and non-scientific, simply grasping the concrete act of existing. The end of either is an awareness of the divine actuality; an awareness that is the normal effect of intellection, thus universal -even connatural for mankind, and anteceding any and all activity of supernatural faith. St. Paul wrote of it in terms of being the preamble to faith, " For the invisible things of God are dearly seen by the visible things which He has created." lt is these philosophic and pre-philosophic contacts of the human intelligence with its Maker that constitute M. Maritain's " approaches " to God. " Approaches " is a happily-chosen word. Only five of them are properly demonstrations of God's existence; the remainder of them derive from an experimental encounter with reality in which by quasi-intuition, previous to any philosophic or theological ratiocination, the being and pre-eminence of the Divinity is phychically held for certain. AU that M. Maritain has to say in this little volume he has said before; it is scattered throughout with references and citations from many of his earlier efforts among them The Degrees of Knowledge which is being republished . This is less a criticism of this present work than a testimony to the author's prodigious output. And indeed the book is fully adequate to its writer's intention of grouping in an articulated whole all those varied initial movements in the natural order of man's spirit towards God which Thomism envisions. These "approaches" can be readily grouped into five categories: (1) a primordial pre-philosophic knowledge of God achieved in the natural intuition of being, (~) the five demonstrations of St. Thomas, (3) a " sixth way" in the intellect's reflexive intuition of its own spirituality, (4) three ways of the practical intellect' in its experience of beauty, moral goodness, and the holiness of the saints, (5) the natural desire for the vision of God. Briefly, we may offer reflections upon them in order. I. The Natural and Pre-Philosophic Knowledge of God. Here M. Maritain discerns a primordial contact with God in and through the intellect's intuition of the concept of being " in the intuitive perception of the analogical content of the first concept, the concept of Being." The psychological " moments " of this intellectual apperception, prior to every scien- BOOK REVIEWS tific elaboration, are as follows: (1) an intuition of the concrete act of existing of things, (2) an awareness of one's own existence as distinct from, limited, and threatened by that of others, (3) a grasp (still intuitive) of unlimited or absolute existence, (4) a prompt, spontaneous reasoning, as natural as this intuition (and as a matter of fact more or less involved in it) "whereby, ... I see that Being-with-nothingness, such as my own being, implies, in order that it should be. Being-without-nothingness-that absolute existence which I confusedly perceived from the beginning as involved in my primordial intuition of existence." This offers some difficulties. First of all, the concept of being is universal and abstract, and this precludes its acquisition by way of an intuition. If intuition involves the immediate grasp of a thing in its very individuality and unique wholeness, it is incompatible with abstraction. Abstraction is always partial knowledge , leaving something behind and precising a " form " that is common to many. An intuition of the concrete existent is understandable, but not an intuition of being as such. True, the abstractive process here (in ens ut sic) is sui generis, for "the differences of being are formally being." Nothing is left behind; ens actually and formally contains all that participates being in any way whatsoever. Yet it does so...