Jacques Maritain: An Intellectual Profile

III. Maritain at the Cliff ’s Edge: From Antimoderne to Le Paysan

   MARITAIN AT THE CLIFF’S EDGE From Antimoderne to Le Paysan  Jacques Maritain’s was an “engaged” intellect from the very beginning of his academic career. Never one to waffle or to avoid conflict, Maritain joined issue with some of the leading philosophers of his generation. He proved to be an intractable critic of modernity. Maritain was not alone in viewing the dominant philosophy of his day as a danger to Christian belief and practice. Informed Protestants and Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic evaluated nineteenth-century intellectual currents in much the same way. To see this, one has only to contrast the course of American idealism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the simultaneous appearance of the Thomistic revival on the European continent. In the second year of his pontificate, on August , , Leo XIII promulgated the encyclical Aeterni patris, which endorsed a fledgling Thomistic movement that was to enlist some of the best minds of the following generation. That encyclical was followed by the founding of philosophical institutes at Louvain and Washington for the purpose of making available the thought of St. Thomas as an antidote to the then dominant positivisms and materialism.  The Institut Superiéur de philosophie under the direction of Désir é J. Mercier came into being in ; the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America under the direction of Edward A. Pace in . The Institute Catholique de Paris was already twelve years old when Leo became Pope and in due course it was to play an important role in the Thomistic revival. Jacques Maritain was to be offered a professorship there in . Leo recommended to the Catholic world the study of St. Thomas because of the perceived value of his philosophy in meeting “the critical state of the times in which we live.” Leo saw that the regnant philosophies of his day not only undercut the faith but also were beginning to have disastrous effects on personal and communal life. Succinctly he says in Aterni patris, “Erroneous theories respecting our duty to God and our responsibilities as men, originally propounded in philosophical schools, have gradually permeated all ranks of society and secured acceptance among the majority of men.”1 Leo recognized that some philosophies opened out to the faith, just as some philosophies closed it off as an intellectual option. Immanuel Kant may be the perfect philosopher for a fideistic form of Protestantism, but he can never become an adequate guide for the Catholic mind. With his dictum, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,”2 he reflects the tradition of Luther and Calvin, whose doctrine of original sin holds that with “the fall” intellect is so darkened that it cannot unaided conclude to the existence of God. Catholic thought, by contrast, is essentially and historically a system of intellectualism , of objectivism. The basic principle of Catholic         . Maritain reproduces this encyclical in his Le doctur angelique (); trans. J. F. Scanlan, St. Thomas Aquinas: Angel of the Schools (London, Sheed and Ward, ), ix–x. . Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, preface to second edition, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), . thought asserts the reliability of intelligence, that is, that we are equipped with intellects that are able to know objective reality. Upon the reliability of our knowledge depend our practical decisions , our conduct. We can only do what is right on the condition that we know what is right. We can only live Catholic lives on the condition that we know what Catholic doctrine is. By any measure, the nineteenth century was no less an intellectually tumultuous one for Europe than the twentieth. Dominated in the intellectual order by the Enlightenment, Anglo-French and German, Europe underwent a systematic attempt on the part of the intelligentsia to replace the inherited, largely classical and Christian learning, by a purely secular ethos. The Napoleonic wars in their aftermath added materially to the destabilization, eradicating many institutional structures: economic and social as well as religious. Startling advances in the physical sciences reinforced the Enlightenment ’s confidence in natural reason. In retrospect we can see that the ideas which formed the secular outlook of the nineteenth century were the product of two major intellectual revolutions . The first is associated with the biological investigations of the period and with the names of Spencer...