Jacques Maritain: to a young girl

...All those chapels that he decorated in honor of the Blessed Virgin, how could your unfortunate directrice understand what they meant...

...But there is also an enormous number of letters to and from individuals with whom he exchanged a few or even only one letter...

...Still he made time to reply with gracious concern to all those who wrote him, however humble or unknown they were...

...And God restores all things-invisibly by His love, and the love of His saints who lay down their lives for their friends...

...He seemed incapable of letting any letter that contained an intelligent inquiry or a BERNARD DOERING is a professor of French literature at the University of Notre Dante...

...The letterhead at the top of the stationery they printed for him and which he used with all but his closest friends read: I am an old hermit come to the end of his life, but who still has work to do...

...On this poor earth I am praying for you...

...The second is his correspondence with the novelist Julien Green, member of the Academie Franpaise...

...Two collections of his letters have already been published...

...I cannot write you any more than this...

...But the serenity of these last years was not easily maintained...

...I am answering you at once, for I would be distressed if any undue delay should make you think that I am guilty of the least indifference...

...I would so much like to see you, both you and Anne, even if for only a few minutes...

...Since his death in 1973 the research done in Maritain's papers has brought to light an aspect of this great personality which few of his admirers realized...

...Alas, my doctor will permit only a very short passage and I have some indispensable business to transact...

...You are seventeen and I am going on eighty-two...

...However, this printed note would often be followed by a long and very personal handwritten letter...

...After the death of Raissa, Maritain spent his last twelve years among the Little Brothers of Jesus at Toulouse, except for the summers he regularly passed with the Grunelius family in Kolbsheim where his books and papers were stored...

...1.I think you are really a poet at heart (that is evident from the very start because of a certain tone...

...Maritain's voluminous correspondence with Yves Simon, a French philosopher who had been a pupil of Maritain and taught for many years at the University of Notre Dame and at the University of Chicago, is presently being prepared for publication...

...For two months now my health has been declining at an alarming rate, and I know now what it is to feel fatigue usque ad mortem...

...The Little Brothers protected him as much as they could...

...His book on Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectual will be published by Notre Dame early next year...

...If my letter is awkward or clumsy in any way, please forgive me...

...There were, of course, the difficult months . of the controversy over Le Paysan and the publicity that followed, as well as the publicity connected with the two literary prizes he received...

...With all my heart I want to do something for you...

...He was under the continual care of doctors, who tried to limit his activities...

...1981) in the hope that the person to whom it is addressed might see it and identify herself...

...There is no better example of this conscientious sense of responsibility to those who wrote him than the copy of his beautiful letter to an unidentified young girl recently found in his papers...

...In spite of his fatigue and the immense amount of work he set himself, he never failed to find the time and the strength for anyone who wrote to him or who came to him with a sincere question, a call for help, a need for affection...

...it's what he says that counts...

...You would not feel so furious with Him if He did not appear to you as someone who has betrayed you, and who makes you indignant because you love Him...

...sincere cry for help go unanswered, even in the years when his health was failing and he let it be known publicly that he had given up all letter-writing...

...others unknown...

...JACQUES MARITAIN...

...There was no end to the importunities of the curious, the interview-seekers, or those who simply wanted to add another name to the list of celebrities they had met...

...and in the last years by making the trip stretched out on a mattress in the rear of a station wagon...

...In spite of it all I intend to leave soon for Kolbsheim (by automobile on a mattress) and pass through Paris...

...There are only the malicious.' In Jean there was never even a shadow of malice...

...The Christianity you were taught was a child's religion...

...That means you have to put your intelligence to work...

...later, by not stopping there at all...

...For example, in 1964, just before he left for Kolbsheim, he wrote to Julien Green...

...Tell Him, 'If you exist, make yourself known to me.' And ask Jean Cocteau too, and his friends in heaven to help you...

...The letter was published in the Cahiers Jacques Maritain (No...

...I have the greatest hope for him (as I have for Reverdy...

...You are asked to realize that Christianity is a terrible mystery of love, and that the Cross is not a pleasant and comfortable figure of speech protecting those joys over Which popular preachers wax so eloquent, but actually a gallows of horror on which God was hanged for love of us-because all the abomination of this world comes not from Him, but from man's freedom which is the prime cause of evil...

...it seems to caught up with me in Alsace (where I am spending my summer vacation...

...He never lost his faith...

...it seems to me we should be able to understand one another...

...I am not telling you to wait...

...In spite of the fatigue of his journey, he replied immediately...

...I am not telling you to wait-but I am telling you to pray as best you can, blaspheming perhaps, groping and stammering...

...Your revolt is healthy because it is a revolt against a God who is not the true God...

...At seventeen your eyes have begun to open on the world as it really is...

...2. I do not think you have lost God...

...And in the Light of God Raissa too is praying for you...

...He was an accomplished listener who radiated welcome, sympathy, and understanding, inspiring in his correspondents or his listeners the sense that, however humble their situation, they deserved, because of what they were, his complete attention and concern...

...Will I be able to...

...To my great regret I am forced to give up all correspondence...

...I'm not sure of anything...

...A new edition is presently in the press because a considerable number of letters between Green and Maritain have been discovered recently and fill many lacunae in the first edition...

...Perhaps what I am writing you here seems to make no sense, but I am writing it all the same because it is the truth, and someday you will see that it is...

...To do that, it is good to start by reading a few books...

...Bloy said to me one day: 'In hell there are no sinners because sinners are the friends of Jesus...

...Une grande amitie) HOT LONG after he arrived exhausted at Kolbsheim, he received from a young unknown girl a letter filled with despair and a cry for help...

...Jacques Petit, Paris, 1973...

...Yes, you are 'in quest of Beauty, of the absolute, of a God who is not one of hate.' And how right you are...

...Your letter moved me deeply, and I had to overcome great fatigue to write you...

...And since, if I am not mistaken, next year will be your year of philosophy, you could at that time, if you are not afraid of tackling difficult problems, read a little book I published recently, God and the Problem of Evil, and I would be most happy to send it to you...

...18,1882) much has been said and written about the career of this illustrious Catholic philosopher...

...And then Leon Bloy (the selections which Raissa had published by Mercure de France, and The Woman Who Was Poor as well as the volumes of his Journal...

...They were years devoted to study and to that contemplation which he had longed for ardently, which, in the rare moments he could find, he had shared with Raissa before she died and of which he spoke so eloquently in the last chapter of Le Paysan de la Garonne...

...There are many others with whom Maritain carried on an extensive correspondence which will without a doubt appear in print before long...

...It was published in 1973, the year of Maritain's death (Maritain/Mounier, 1929-1939, ed...

...The sheer volume of these letters is overwhelming and it is difficult to understand how a man who published over eighty books and countless articles, contributed to anthologies, prepared his classes with meticulous care, and was sought after from every direction for conferences and lectures, had time for so many letters...

...I am telling you rather to take advantage of the fact that you are completely broken and beaten to the ground in order to set yourself to a real search for truth-putting your childhood behind you...

...When he adamantly insisted on going to Kolbsheim each summer (all his books and notes were there and, perhaps even more important, all the mementos of Raissa: her furniture, her paintings, her books, the little things she used, etc...

...You will undoubtedly find Bloy's language too rich and somewhat labored (but what difference does that make...

...Cocteau came to see us because he felt, with his poetic intuition, that the very evil that shocks and scandalizes us makes us cry out to the innocence of God and that if we have to suffer the intolerable and the inadmissible, it is because on the other side of the tapestry, hidden from our view, there is a love infinitely more true than all the misery through which we must drag ourselves...

...This deeply moving exchange of letters appeared under the title Une grande amiti'e (Plon) in 1979...

...In addition, his health was failing rapidly...

...He was one of the great letter-writers of his century...

...First of all (since you felt inclined to write me), Raissa's We Have Been Friends Together (before asking to be baptized, we too had rebelled against God...

...In any case I will try to get the Little Brother (Brother Joel) who is driving to telephone you...

...A copy of this letter was found recently in his correspondence...

...July 29, 1964 " You are seventeen and I am going on eighty-two...

...Let me tell you two things right off...

...2, Apr...

...they demanded that he lessen the fatigue of the journey by limiting - his business in Paris...

...Some of these individuals are famous...

...The first is his correspondence with Emmanuel Mounier, the famous Personalist philosopher and activist who founded Esprit...