In graduate school, 60 years ago, I encountered the work of Jacques Maritain, delighted to find a first-rate Christian philosopher, and over the years read many of his books. To understand him it helps to peruse a two volume memoir by his wife, Raissa, entitled We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace; both appear in a single volume (Garden City: Image Books, 1961). Raissa, a Russian Jewess, brought to her union with Jacques a poetic and deeply contemplative mind which he routinely credited for expanding and enriching his philosophical endeavors. Though reared without much religious instruction, as a teenager she sensed a deep spiritual hunger. Above all, she remembers, “I had to make sure of the essential thing: the possession of the truth about God, about myself, and about the world. It was, I knew, the necessary foundation for my life” (p. 34). Raissa’s parents emigrated to Paris; there she finished her schooling, though her teachers, espousing a “rationalistic skepticism and pseudo-scientific positivism” (p. 119) which restricted itself to empirical data—failed to open for her the doors to truth. Then she met Jacques Maritain, who shared with her similar longings for intellectual nourishment unavailable in the schools.
They fortunately encountered, in Paris at the turn of the century, free spirits such as Henri Bergson (a world-acclaimed philosopher), Charles Peguy (a noted poet), and Leon Bloy (a radically-committed Catholic writer). Such thinkers helped point them to the realm of truth and the riches of Christianity which neither young person had hitherto encountered. Ultimately they “were brought face to face with the question of God, both in all its power and in all its urgency” (p. 99). Their spiritual quest led them to embrace the Christian Faith. Both were baptized and thenceforth sought to bring all of life into the love and service of Christ and His Church. For Jacques, sensing a call “to philosophize truly” (p. 143), this meant, initially, a renunciation of professional ambition, for he feared (with good reason) that he could not freely teach as a professing Christian in the state-controlled universities of France.
So he began his career as an independent philosopher! In that process Jacques and Raissa discovered St Thomas Aquinas and found in him the intellectual foundations they needed. In Raissa’s experience, the “first reading of the Summa Theologica was as if I had been given a very pure gift.” Therein she encountered truly sanctified intelligence. “So great a light kept flowing into both my heart and mind that I was carried away as if by a joy of Paradise. To pray, to understand, was for me one and the same thing; the one made me thirst for the other, and that thirst in me I felt to be constantly, and yet never, quenched” (p. 183).
In one of his early lectures (1913) Jacques declared: “There is but one region where the soul and the intellect live in the peace of God and grow in grace and truth; it is in the light of Thomism” (p. 341). Given that confidence, Maritain devoted the rest of his life to spearheading a revival, a contemporary restatement, of the thought of St Thomas. In time he wrote some 50 books and held prestigious positions, including appointments to the University of Chicago and Princeton University. Though Raissa’s memoirs tell us far more about their friends than about themselves, they’re beautifully written and help us understand the formative years wherein the Maritains flourished and undertook to make relevant the timeless wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas.
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Helping launch Mid-America Nazarene College, in 1968, I thought seriously about Christian education and found Jacques Maritain’s Education at the Crossroads (New Haven: Yale University Press, c. 1943) most helpful. If we have a realistic understanding of human nature and society, if we recognize the need for moral guidance, he said, we can effectively design healthy educational systems. What is man? What is the nature of human nature? To answer this question is the most important of educational inquiries. To him, “moral re-education is really a matter of public emergency,” for without it schoolrooms become unruly and chaotic. This means we must set forth coherent “aims of education” which give order and direction to our endeavors. “Education is an art,” he said, “and an especially difficult one” (p. 2). It is an “ethical art” which seeks to free persons to attain the end for which they are created. As practitioners of the art of teaching, teachers are more like farmers or doctors than sculptors, for there must be an attentiveness to the nature of the person, an ars cooperativa naturae—art cooperating with nature.
To both teachers and students, Aquinas said: “‘never leave behind him any difficulty unsolved.’” “He also warned teachers . . . ‘never to dig a ditch that you fail to fill up.’ He knew that to raise clever doubts, to prefer searching to finding, and perpetually to pose problems without ever solving them are the great enemies of education” (p. 50). Above all, education should encourage the development of moral reasoning, virtuous living, qualities of mind and character which, we early discover, cannot be mechanically inscribed in the young. Facts can, at least momentarily, be poured in. Data can be inscribed in computers, and young people often acquire lots of facts. But they know little about the soul, the life of the spirit, the moral dimension to life, the life of freedom. Moral persons, of course, are necessarily free persons who make moral decisions and become persons of character.
What we mainly aspire to, as persons, is freedom. Most deeply, we long for an inner spiritual freedom, the freedom which St Paul described as freedom of the Spirit. Our social world, our vocational world, have worth, but they lack the eternal dimensions our hearts crave. “Thus the prime goal of education is the conquest of internal and spiritual freedom to be achieved by the individual person, or, in others words, his liberation through knowledge and wisdom, good will, and love” (p. 11). Ultimately such things are gifts from God, gifts of grace. The true liberation we all need is freedom from self-centeredness, egoism, sin. Thus there is, in a profound sense, an essentially religious component to genuine education. Ultimately, he said, ‘our chief duty consists, according to the profound saying of the Greek poet, Pindar, in becoming who we are, nothing is more important for each of us, or more difficult, than to become a man. Thus the chief task of education is above all to shape man, or to guide the evolving dynamism through which man forms himself as a man” (p. 1). Indeed, “education is not animal training. The education of man is a human awakening” (p. 9).
If, in fact, the Greek, Jewish, and Christian understanding is correct, we best understand “man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love” (p. 7). And this definition of human nature leads to distinctively different educational strategies.
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Teaching Ethics I benefited from Jacques Maritain’s Moral Philosophy: An historical and critical survey of the great systems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, c. 1964). He said his work was an “historical and critical examination of a certain number of great systems which are, in my opinion, the most significant ones with respect to the development and the adventures of moral philosophy, and those which it is most important to consider for a work of prise de conscience and intellectual renewal to which our age seems called, at least in the eyes of a few who still care for wisdom” (p. ix). He first examined the great Ancient, Medieval, and Enlightenment ethicists whose conversation so illuminates the study of moral philosophy. He found much to admire— while always pointing out glaring flaws—in the positions taken by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans. They raised the right questions, explored the available options, and took seriously their calling to reason toward truth. But they failed to discover how to achieve what all ethicists urge us to achieve: transcending a purely physical, human existence and becoming what we really ought to be!
Into that ancient world came Christianity, with a different (and, to Maritain, far better) philosophy. Medieval Christians understood wisdom to be something far more than a purely human attainment. “Medieval Christianity was dominated by the law of descending motion of supreme wisdom to which we called attention in speaking of the Old Testament, and knew its name–it is the law of the Incarnation. Thomas Aquinas formulated it in a text of limitless significance: ‘In the mystery of the Incarnation,’ he says, ‘the descent of the divine plenitude into human nature is of greater import than the ascent of human nature, taken as pre-existent, toward Divinity’” (p. 74; quoting Sum. theol., III, 34, 1, ad 1). Beyond Plato’s hunger for the transcendent Good, beyond Aristotle’s desire for Happiness, Christianity “has its supreme archetype in a subsistent Good which is a loving Personality—three Persons in a single nature, one of whom has been incarnated, [so that] moral reflection now understands definitively and explicitly that the Good is something other than Happiness, and that the first demand and the first condition of moral rectitude is to love the Good more than Happiness” (p. 77). Medieval Scholastics such as St Thomas lived in a theocentric world. Only as things are rightly related to God do they move smoothly. Only as men and women find their final End in God do they live with meaning and purpose. So only an ethic which acknowledges God as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, truly suits human beings. Both ancient and modern thinkers routinely betray a longing for some transcendent source of values, some truly final end, but the humanistic limitations imposed on their systems keeps them locked within an inadequate vision of Reality.
From the Medieval World, Maritain jumps to Immanuel Kant, the last of the great ethicists who operated within a largely intact Christian worldview, though he does in fact take some crucial steps away from it. With his concern for disinterestedness and duty, Kant embraced some of the traditional Christian concern for unselfish love and responsibility. Yet, importantly, he effectively denied God any role in the process. His ethic “makes out of God an appendix to morality, not its foundation” (p. 102). Finding within one’s own mind a “categorical imperative” able to reason what one ought or ought not do, Kantian ethics encourages the love of moral law but not of God, the love of treating others rightly but not the love of others. With Kant, Maritain believes, we step over a threshold and thenceforth must deal with what he calls “the great illusions.” These include Hegel’s Idealism, Marx’s Dialectical Materialism, and Auguste Comte’s Positivism. These highly influential thinkers are “exponents of modern anthropocentrism whose work has seriously disorganized moral knowledge, not only among philosophers but also in broad sectors of the common conscience” (p. 353). More recent philosophers, such as Sartre and Dewey, offer little more, in Maritain’s opinion, though he grants them the courtesy of serious consideration.
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One of Jacques Maritain’s most significant philosophical treatises is entitled Distinguish to Unite, or The Degrees of Knowledge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, c. 1959). “We hope to show in this book,” Maritain said, ‘that Thomistic realism, in preserving, according to a truly critical method, the value of the knowledge of things, opens the way to an exploration of the world of reflection in its very inwardness and to the establishment of its metaphysical topology, so to speak; thus, ‘philosophy of being’ is at once, and par excellence, ‘philosophy of mind’” (p. ix). The first section of the book deals with “the degrees of rational knowledge: philosophy and experimental science.” Here Maritain celebrates our mind’s ability to truly know, through sense experience, objective reality. On its own, science cannot discern the essence of an existing, particular thing. Here philosophy—metaphysics—is needed, and Maritain asserts that the Thomistic tradition offers the key to unlock the riches of metaphysical knowledge which philosophers too often eschew. St Thomas taught the intellect has a natural ability to know, through an immediate intuition (adaequatio rei et intellectus—a bond between intellect and thing—the being of a being and thenceforth to know, by definition, its essence.
Maritain espoused a “critical realism” which begins with this simple assertion: “I am aware of knowing–I am aware of knowing at least one thing, that what is, is; not: “I think” (p. 76). In knowing that what is, is, one grasps the fundamental reality of metaphysics and begins to think truly. Failing to begin rightly, we are afflicted by bad philosophies which, Maritain believes, must be ousted by a good philosophy. Unfortunately, “good philosophy is more difficult than bad” (p. 196). Just as the intuitive certainty of the “law of non-contradiction” gives one the basis for logical thinking, so too the intuitive certainty of the “law of being” (p. 215) affords one the basis for metaphysical thinking. Thus metaphysical thinking allows one to know transintelligible” realities, immaterial realities such as person, spirit, freedom, love, and God.
Having discussed the importance of scientific and metaphysical knowledge—different types of rational knowing—Maritain turned, in the second half of the book, to “the degrees of suprarational knowledge.” Here he treats the very special knowledge which comes through faith and love, the sanctifying grace which enables us to “share in the Divine Nature” (II Peter 1:4), through mystical experience, where one suffers rather than siezes “divine things” (p. 253). While Aristotle and St Thomas serve as a good guides to rational knowledge, St John of the Cross opens to us the ultimate realms of spiritual reality.
In sum, Maritain holds: “For St. John of the Cross, as for St. Thomas Aquinas and the whole Christian tradition, the final end of human life is transformation in God, ‘to become God by participation’ which is fully achieved in heaven by the beatific vision and beatific love, and fulfilled here below, in faith, by love. Such love comes through self-surrender, which St John says is a giving to God of everything one has. This death-to-self is absolutely necessary in order to be spiritually united with God. Here we find best illustrated the principle of St Thomas: grace perfects nature but does not destroy it.
I know of no more thoughtful discussion of mystical knowledge—the contemplative wisdom given only by God—than that Maritain provides in this volume. That a first-rate philosopher finds in St John of the Cross the route to ultimate Truth and Wisdom, leads us to both pray and give thanks for the illumination which awaits those who heed him.
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Thomists like Maritain insist there are good, rational reasons for believing God exists. That view is most clearly stated in Approaches to God (New York: Collier Books, 1962). I think this was the first book of Maritain’s I encountered as a graduate student pursuing my own interests quite apart from class work. Maritain first argues for “the primordial way,” the “natural or prephilosophic knowledge of God.” We just know, deep in our being, that there’s a God who sustains our being. This immediate awareness serves as the foundation for St Thomas Aquinas’ famous “five ways” to “prove” God exists. If, like Aristotle and most common sense philosophers, you accept as self-evident the reality of causation, these five cosmological arguments (motion; efficient causation; contingency; degrees of perfection; government) enable you to persuasively demonstrate the necessity of “a cause which is pure Act or Being, itself subsistent in its own right” (p. 33), which indwells the various phenomena we encounter.
As Maritain explains and defends these “proofs,” he up-dates and effectively demonstrates their perennial validity as metaphysical arguments. Then he adds a “sixth” possibility, one he found more and more attractive as he pondered it: an intuition regarding “the natural spirituality of intelligence” (p. 70). With my mind I easily transcend the limits of time and space; in my mind I am almost as infinite as the universe. As an intellectual being, I am dramatically distinct from the material world I apprehend—if not, I could only, like a computer, process the flow of data which happens to enter my neurological system. Thus I know, while I think, that I am a spiritual being. But I also know that I have not always existed. So I must, as a spiritual being, be rooted “in a Being of transcendent personality” in Whom my personality has definition and reality. Having discussed some of the “approaches to God” of the speculative intellect, Maritain then turns to some of the ways of the practical intellect. Whenever we see beauty, we encounter “a transcendental, a perfection in things which transcends things and attests their kinship with the infinite, because it makes them fit, to give joy to the spirit” (p. 79). There is a certain eternality in great music and poetry which suggests its tie to some Ultimate Reality.
Our moral experience also, on a practical level, points us to God. For unless we are free, as moral beings, to choose what’s good, there’s no real morality. Yet as we reflect on the reality of personal freedom we find ourselves rooted in a transcendent realm which grants and guarantees it. “God is thus naturally known, without any conscious judgment, in and by the impulse of the will striving toward the Separate Good, whose existence is implicitly involved in the practical value acknowledged to the moral good” (p. 88). Finally, Maritain argued, in accord with Aristotle’s dictum, that natural appetites have realizable ends. The fact that we’re thirsty proves, rather persuasively, that real liquids exist to slake that thirst. Similarly, since mankind has forever hungered and thirsted for God, there must be a Reality to which that appetite is directed.
Though it demands careful attention, Approaches to God is not overly difficult to read. It was written for the general reader and enables anyone who desires to master its basic arguments.
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Maritain’s final book, written in his 85th year, was The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, c. 1968). Here he “calls a spade a spade” and voices his dismay at developments within the Post-Vatican II Church.