Jacques Maritain (1882-1973)

One of the best-known Catholic philosophers of his century

At his death in 1973, Jacques Maritain was without doubt the best-known Catholic philosopher in the world.^[20] Translated into some twenty languages^[21], read from Paris to Buenos Aires and from Rome to Princeton, he had done what few philosophers succeed in: imposing, in the middle of the scientistic and secularized 20th century, the idea that a Catholic could think rigorously — not despite his faith, but from it. His influence went well beyond academic philosophy: it irrigated art (he was a friend of Rouault, Cocteau, Stravinsky), politics (European and South American Christian democracy), and even the founding texts of human rights.^[22][23]

This influence is due to a simple and rare conviction: the truth exists, intelligence can reach it, and faith does not stifle it but accomplishes it. Against the intellectual despair of his youth, against relativism as well as against fideism, Maritain spent his life showing that “distinguishing” the orders of knowledge precisely allows us to “unite” them — this is the very title of his great epistemological work.^[24]

A convert led by beauty and a beggar

Maritain belongs to this generation of great converts who renewed the face of French Catholicism at the turn of the century - that of Paul Claudel, struck down behind a pillar of Notre-Dame, and of Charles Péguy, who “recovered the faith” around 1908.^[25][26][27] In Maritain, the instrument of grace has a name and a face: Léon Bloy, the poor and furious writer, “pilgrim of the Absolute”, of which The Poor Woman ends with the sentence that will decide their entire lives:

“There is only one sadness, she said to him, the last time, and that is not being SAINTS…” — Léon Bloy, The Poor Woman (words of the heroine, Clotilde), last sentence of the novel^[28]

Jacques and Raïssa received this sentence like love at first sight. Bloy became their godfather on the day of their baptism, June 11, 1906.^[29][30] From that day on, holiness was no longer a pious word for them, but the only serious matter - the key which controls all the philosophical work to come.

The master of a Thomist revival

Maritain's third claim to fame is to have been one of the great architects of the Thomistic revival of the 20th century.^[31] Where many saw in Saint Thomas Aquinas only a dusty school textbook, Maritain gave back to the "Angelic Doctor" his living power: an instrument to confront Bergson and Descartes, Kant and Freud, modern science and contemporary art. It was not a question of repeating Thomas, but of renovating him — of thinking with him about the problems that Thomas had not known.^[32]

It is this Thomism taken afresh, held firmly but turned towards the century, which makes Maritain something other than a commentator: a philosopher in his own right, whose work covers the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, aesthetics, morality and politics.

Biographical references

Maritain's life spans almost a century, from the France of the nascent Third Republic to the postconciliar years. It is crossed by a constant: a couple — Jacques and Raïssa — who never separated the search for truth from the search for God.^[33][34]

The suicide pact and the rescue by Bergson

It is difficult to measure, today, the violence of the intellectual despair which struck the cultured youth of 1900. The Sorbonne taught an intransigent scientism: nothing is true except what positive science can measure; metaphysics is an illusion, morality a convention, life an accident of matter. For two beings thirsting for absolutes like Jacques and Raïssa, this doctrine was deadly — literally. Around 1901, they made a terrible pact:

Raïssa Maritain recounts this pact in her memoirs, Les Grandes Amitiés: the two young people decide to give existence further credit, as an experiment to be attempted, in the hope that the meaning of life will reveal itself to their vehement appeal; if the experiment fails, it will be suicide, before the years have worn out their young strength: to die by a free refusal, rather than to live without the truth.^[36]

What kept them there were the lessons of Henri Bergson at the Collège de France. Against the reigning mechanism, Bergson gave back its place to intuition, to duration, to the mind; he “dissolved” their despair and restored to them the “sense of the absolute”.^[37][38] Maritain remained grateful to Bergson all his life, even after having criticized him in the name of Saint Thomas: it was “from Bergson to Saint Thomas Aquinas” that he would one day make the title of a book.^[39] The first rescue was philosophical; the second would be supernatural.

Raïssa, the twin soul

We cannot understand Jacques Maritain without Raïssa. A Russian Jew born in Rostov, a poet and contemplative, she was much more than a wife: the companion in the same quest, the “mystic” of the couple, the one whose silent prayer carried the intellectual work of Jacques.^[40][41] Their Great Friendships (1941) — memoirs of Raissa — remains one of the most beautiful conversion stories of the century, and the surest source for knowing their journey interior.^[42]

The couple also lived, after a vow made in 1912, in continence, entirely dedicated to what they called their common “vocation” of truth and holiness. This contemplative dimension is not an anecdote: it explains that Maritain's philosophy, however technical it may be, is always ordered to God, and that his theory of "knowledge by connaturality" - this obscure knowledge, by affinity and by love - has real mystical roots in him.^[43][44]

Léon Bloy, godfather and “ungrateful beggar”

The man through whom grace passed was therefore Léon Bloy (1846-1917), the poorest and most violent writer of his time, who called himself an "ungrateful beggar". The Maritains, brilliant young intellectuals, sought him out after reading The Poor Woman. They found a miserable man, devoured by the absolute, for whom the only real catastrophe was to miss holiness.^[45][46]

From Bloy, Maritain kept a burning certainty all his life: holiness is not a pious option reserved for a few, but the only thing that matters for all. This conviction, received from a furious novelist and not from a theological treatise, gives all of Maritain's work its secret tension. The most rigorous philosopher of the Catholic century was first the spiritual child of a beggar. Ignispedia, which loves the unpredictable ways of grace, retains this paradox: it is through the beauty of a literary work and through the poverty of a convert that God took the future master of Thomism.

Maritain's immense work is organized around a master intuition, the one which gives its title to his epistemological masterpiece: distinguish to unite. We do not create the unity of knowledge by confusing orders, but by respecting the specific nature of each.^[47]

The degrees of knowledge: a scale of knowledge

In Distinguish to unite or The degrees of knowledge (1932), Maritain proposes a critical realism: the mind is only satisfied when it reaches not only the thing, but that on which the thing is based in being and in intelligibility.^[48] Against the idealism coming from Descartes and Kant, he maintains that intelligence really joins reality.

He distinguishes three degrees of abstraction, which are all hierarchical orders of knowledge:

Still above metaphysics, Maritain places theology and, at the top, mystical knowledge — no longer discursive, but given in union with God.^[49][50] The great error of modernity, according to him, is to let empirical science — the first degree — usurp the place of metaphysics and claim to judge everything. Distinguishing the degrees is giving each knowledge its dignity and its limit; it is also reopening, above physics, the space of wisdom.

Knowledge by connaturality

Maritain's most original contribution to the theory of knowledge is knowledge by connaturality.^[51] Alongside knowledge by concepts, clear and discursive, there exists an obscure knowledge, which judges not by reasoning but by inclination, by affinity, by sympathy: intelligence "consults the interior inclinations of the subject".^[52]

This is how, says Maritain, the virtuous man knows what is good before any moral reasoning, that the artist knows his work before being able to explain it, that the mystic knows God through love much more than through demonstration. This notion - drawn from Saint Thomas and the mystics - allows Maritain to hold together the rigor of intelligence and the life of the heart: morality, art and mysticism are not vague by-products of reason, but true knowledge, of another order.

Metaphysics: the intuition of being

At the heart of Maritain's metaphysics is the intuition of being: an intellectual, direct and immediate grasp, not of abstract "being", but of the very act of existing.^[53] This intuition, he writes, is "superior to all discursive reasoning": it is the living starting point of any metaphysics worthy of the name.

In the Short treatise on existence and the existent (1947), Maritain even claims the title of "existentialist" - but of a Christian and intellectual existentialism, the antipodes of that of Sartre.^[54] Where atheist existentialism makes existence an absurdity without essence, Maritain affirms "the primacy of existence, but as involving and saving the essences".^[55] Being is not chaos: it is act, gift, plenitude — and, at the end of metaphysics, it leads to Him who is Being itself.

Art and scholasticism: a Thomist aesthetic

From 1920, in Art and scholasticism, Maritain applied the principles of Saint Thomas to the field of art - which earned him the friendship of the greatest artists of his time.^[56] Art, he said, is "a virtue of the practical intellect which aims to do": not to know or act morally, but to produce a work. And beauty is “that which, being seen, pleases” — it unites objective qualities (integrity, proportion, brilliance) with the pleasure of the intelligence which contemplates.^[57]

Later, in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), Maritain delves deeper into poetry as a "divination", an intercommunication between the being of things and the being of the subject - yet another form of knowledge by connaturality, at work at the preconscious level of the creative mind.^[58] Ignispedia notes here the fecundity of this aesthetic: against the double trap of "moral" art (which is no longer art) and “pure” art (cut off from truth), Maritain gives beauty its own nobility while connecting it to God, the source of all brilliance.

The great works can be grouped by domain:

It is through his political philosophy that Maritain most profoundly marked the century. At a time of totalitarianism – communism, fascism, national socialism – which crushed man in the name of race, class or the State, he proposed a third way: neither liberal individualism which isolates, nor collectivism which crushes, but an integral humanism rooted in the dignity of the person.^[59][60]

Distinguish between the individual and the person

The key to all of Maritain's political thought is a distinction — yet another one — between the individual and the person.^[61] Like individual, man is a fragment of matter, a part of the species and of society, subordinate to the whole. As a person, he is a spiritual being, free, endowed with an eternal destiny, who transcends society and can never be treated as a simple means. Maritain says in substance in Human Rights and Natural Law (1942): because it is a whole, master of itself and of its acts, the person is not only a means, but an end, which must be treated as such - and it is from this that its rights come.^[62]

Totalitarianism is born when we see in man only the individual, part of the great social body. Authentic democracy is born when we recognize in it the person, whose dignity precedes the State. But Maritain refuses the opposite excess — individualism which would make everyone an absolute solitary: the person is ordered to the common good, which is not the sum of interests but a truly shared good.^[63]

Integral humanism

In Integral Humanism (1936), Maritain diagnoses the drama of modernity: an anthropocentric humanism which, by wanting to exalt man without God, ends up destroying him. To this humanism without God, he opposes a “integral” and theocentric humanism — a “Incarnation” humanism which takes man whole, matter and spirit, and directs him to his supernatural end without contempt for his earthly life.^[64][65]

This book had a considerable legacy: it inspired a part of Christian democracy in Europe and especially in Latin America, where generations of activists and statesmen claimed to be Maritain. This influence had its ambiguities - we will come back to this - but it testifies to one thing: Maritain made politically thinkable, for millions of Catholics, the idea that one could serve freedom and justice in the very name of the Gospel, without denying the faith or making a regime sacred.

Human rights and natural law

The most famous - and most discussed - point of Maritain's thought is his doctrine of human rights based on natural law. Against the modern idea of ​​an unfounded right, a pure creation of will or contract, Maritain roots rights in natural law: this order that human reason can discover and according to which the will must act to accord with the necessary ends of the human being.^[66][67]

The first principles of this law, he specifies, are known by connaturality - by an inclination of nature (synderesis) - before any reasoning. The rights thus founded are inalienable and universal, but humanity only recognizes them progressively in history: they are never exhausted.^[68] This foundation in nature and not in will alone is precisely what distinguishes Maritain from a purely procedural liberalism - and what makes his doctrine assimilable by Catholic thought.

Maritain and the Universal Declaration of 1948

Maritain's influence on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is real and documented.^[69] Through his writings and through his action at UNESCO, he contributed to the intellectual climate of the Declaration; his book The Rights of Man and Natural Law foreshadowed several articles; and an influential member of the editorial board, the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik, closely followed his political thinking.^[70]

It is to Maritain that we owe a decisive intuition on the way in which men who are completely opposite can nevertheless agree on a list of rights: they will agree, he said in substance, on practical rights on the condition of not demanding agreement on their theoretical foundations. This formula — a practical agreement without speculative consensus — made possible a text common to different cultures and religions. Ignispedia sees this as both a strength (allowing civil peace) and a limit (a fragile agreement if we forget that, without a foundation in natural law and in God, proclaimed rights end up floating without root).

Maritain was never a cabinet philosopher. In every major crisis of the century, he took sides — often against the grain, always in the name of the same principles.

Against Action Française and Maurras

In the 1920s, a significant part of French Catholics followed Charles Maurras and the Action française, a nationalist, monarchist and entirely political movement, which exploited religion in the service of order ("politics first").^[71] At one time close to these circles, Maritain clearly detached himself from them, especially after the condemnation of the Action française by Rome in 1926. He then defended against the “political first”, the primacy of the spiritual: faith does not place itself at the service of a temporal cause; it is the temporal which must be ordered to the eternal.^[72][73]

Faced with anti-Semitism and totalitarianism

Married to a Jew and sensitive to this question more than any other, Maritain was one of the rare Catholic intellectuals to publicly combat the rising anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s, denouncing in it a direct negation of the Gospel.^[74] He ​​condemned with the same vigor the three totalitarianisms of his time. During the Spanish War, he refused to bless the "crusade" and pleaded for violence not to be made sacred in the name of religion - a position which earned him strong enmity in part of the Catholic world.^[75] Refugee in the United States during the Occupation, he carried the voice of a free and Christian France by radio and in writing (Through the disaster, 1941).

Ambassador to the Holy See

At the Liberation, General de Gaulle appointed Maritain Ambassador of France to the Holy See (1945-1948).^[76][77] The philosopher thus found himself a diplomat in Rome, in the decisive years of the post-war period. There he established a deep friendship with a prelate of the Secretariat of State, Mgr Giovanni Battista Montini - the future Paul VI - who had recently translated one of his books into Italian.^[78] This friendship would weigh heavily, twenty years later, in the gesture of closing the council.

Montini's friend, the message of the council

The link between Maritain and the future Paul VI gives his end of life a singular relief. Montini had read, translated, meditated on Maritain from his youth; having become pope, he considered him a master and a friend.^[79] Also, when the Second Vatican Council ended, on December 8, 1965, Paul VI decided to address a series of symbolic “messages” to large human groups — to rulers, to artists, to women, to the poor... and to men of thought and science. And it was to Jacques Maritain, present on the square in front of Saint-Pierre, that the pope delivered this last message in person.^[80][81]

“Let us seek with the desire to find, and find with the desire to seek again." — Augustinian maxim taken up by the Conciliar Message to Men of Thought and Science, December 8, 1965^[82]

This gesture was not a simple politeness. By choosing Maritain - an old man, a Catholic philosopher reviled by some as too modern and by others as too Thomistic - Paul VI signified that the Church, at the end of the council, did not break with intelligence: it invited seekers to enlighten themselves by faith “to grasp the truth, the whole truth”.^[83][84]

The Peasant of the Garonne: the refusal to kneel before the world

A year after the council, in 1966, Maritain published his most resounding and most controversial book: Le Paysan de la Garonne.^[85] The old philosopher - the very one whom the progressives believed they could enlist - denounced with biting irony a certain drift of the post-council: Catholicism which, under the pretext of openness, kneels before the world by embracing all its fashions, at the risk of dissolving dogma in the spirit of the times.^[86]

The paradox is striking: the man accused for forty years of being too modern, too liberal, too democratic, stood, at the age of 84, against doctrinal modernism and "neo-modernism" which threatened to empty the faith of its substance. The Peasant of the Garonne disappointed his former progressive friends and surprised his adversaries. Ignispedia reads a lesson in coherence: Maritain had never sought to "follow the world", but to order the world according to the truth. Opening Catholic intelligence to reality, yes; kneel faith before the idols of the century, never. This is exactly the line of hermeneutics of continuity that Ignispedia defends.

Little Brother of Jesus

Widowed since the death of Raïssa in 1960, Maritain chose an end of life of poverty and prayer. He joined the Little Brothers of Jesus in Toulouse, the fraternity born from the inspiration of Charles de Foucauld, and took his vows there in 1970, at the age of 87.^[87][88] One of the best-known Catholic philosophers of the century thus ended up not in a pulpit, but in the habit of a little brother, returning to the one thing necessary that Léon Bloy had once taught him. He died on April 28, 1973 and was buried in Kolbsheim, near Raïssa.

All of Maritain's work, however abstract it may seem, is based on a very simple spiritual flame, received from Bloy and kept until death. The most technical philosopher of the Catholic century never forgot that metaphysics itself is nothing if it does not lead to God — and that the only tragedy of life is to miss his holiness.

“There is only one sadness, she said to him, the last time, and that is not being SAINTS…” — Léon Bloy, The Poor Woman (words of the heroine, Clotilde), phrase received by the Maritains as the rule of their life^[89]

This primacy of the spiritual sheds light on his struggles: if he refused the “political first” of Maurras, if he denounced totalitarianism, if he criticized kneeling before the world, it was always in the name of a single principle — the primacy of the eternal over the temporal, of the person over the social machine, of God over idols.^[90] His contemplation, nourished by the prayer of Raïssa, was not separated from her thought: it is the same intelligence which, in The degrees of knowledge, placed mystical knowledge at the summit of all knowledge.^[91] For Maritain, philosophy is not the enemy of holiness: it is a lucid servant.

Faithful to its rule of truth, Ignispedia does not present Maritain as an infallible oracle. His work has provoked real objections, including from eminent Catholic thinkers, and they must be faced.

Gilson: a Thomism too epistemological?

The most serious criticism came from a friend, the great historian of medieval philosophy Étienne Gilson. Gilson judged that Maritain's "Thomism" remained too marked by a modern problem of knowledge - that it was, fundamentally, more of an epistemology than an authentically metaphysical Thomism, faithful to the esse as Thomas understood it.^[92] The debate between the two men - two ways of returning to Saint Thomas - remains one of the most fruitful of the Thomist renewal, and it is not settled: the Specialists still debate the exact nature of Maritain's Thomism.^[93]

Political ambiguities

Maritain's political legacy was immense but sometimes troubled. His integral humanism nourishes fruitful Christian democracies, but also readings which drew him towards a progressivism which he did not endorse - to the point that he himself had to, in Le Paysan de la Garonne, distance himself from certain of his disciples.^[94] Traditionalists have criticized him for having contributed to disarming the Christian city in the face of liberalism; progressives, conversely, for not having gone far enough. That the same author is attacked from both sides is often a sign that he was maintaining a difficult balance - here, that of the distinction between the spiritual order and the temporal order.

A reception that remains debated

Some of his positions arise from questionable philosophical options and not from the faith of the Church: his reading of Bergson, his theory of art, his analysis of democracy belong to the free debate of schools. Ignispedia takes them for what they are: the proposals of a great Catholic mind, to be examined, not dogmas. What remains beyond discussion, however, is the underlying trajectory - a man rescued from despair, converted by beauty and poverty, striving all his life towards truth and holiness, and honored by the Church even on the square of Saint-Pierre.

What remains of Jacques Maritain today? First the living proof that a Catholic can think at the highest level without giving up anything of his faith or his reason - that distinguishing to unite is better than confusing or separating. Then a doctrine of the person and human rights rooted in natural law, which remains one of the best ramparts against old totalitarianisms and new ideologies which, once again, reduce man to material. Finally, and above all, a testimony: that of one of the greatest minds of the century who, having known everything - academic glory, diplomacy, the friendship of a pope -, chose to end up as a poor little brother, faithful to the only lesson that counts.

Ignispedia does not canonize Maritain and does not make every one of his theses a truth of faith. But it salutes in him a master of believing intelligence, a brother of the converts Bloy, Péguy and Claudel, and a traveling companion for every Catholic who wants, even today, to seek with the desire to find, and to find with the desire to seek again.^[95]

• Léon Bloy (1846-1917) — the “ungrateful beggar”, godfather and spiritual father of the Maritains, about whom The Poor Woman decided their entire lives.
• Charles Péguy (1873-1914) — the friend from his youth, who pushed Jacques and Raïssa towards the lessons of Bergson, and the other great poet of rediscovered faith.
• Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) — the other master of the Thomist revival, friend and opponent of Maritain on the very nature of Thomism.
• Raïssa Maritain (1883-1960) — the couple's wife, poet and mystic, whose conversion Les Grandes Amitiés recounts.
• Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964) — the Dominican Thomist, long close to Maritain, a major figure in the theology of the time.
• Paul Claudel (1868-1955) — the other great convert-poet of the same Catholic period, struck down by grace at Notre-Dame de Paris.
• Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) — the other great French thinker of the misery and greatness of man without God, whom Maritain read with admiration.