The Maritain Way

Short, Edward

The Maritain Way 'Too liberal for conservatives, and too conservative for liberals.' by Edward Short Not long ago I met a young woman who is studying philosophy at Stanford, and when I told her I...

...Gilson continued: "Go on with your work, which is irreplaceable, and don't worry about anything...
...They formed a little community, a lay apostolate dedicated to bringing the life of faith to those whom priests could not reach...
...Maritain would entirely repudiate this tuition in his first book, Trois Reformateurs (1925), in which he took Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau to task for alienating the modern self from God...
...In a letter of 1910 to another spiritual director, Dom Delatte, Maritain showed how much his Catholic mentors had soured him on the republican ideas that had inspired his youth: "We thank you for having pointed out so clearly to us the venom of liberalism and for having provided an irrefutable historical justification for [the] disdain that every Catholic should feel instinctively . . . for all the diminutions, concessions and vilenesses of modern times...
...Some historians continue to see nuances in the occupation...
...the rest is of no account...
...The fact that he has been jettisoned from the curriculum to make room for the nominalism of Michel Foucault speaks volumes about the intellectual defeatism that holds sway over our academic elites...
...As he observed in Reflections on America (1959), "Marriage is essentially spiritual in nature— a complete and irrevocable gift of one to another...
...After the war, Maritain served as de Gaulle's ambassador to the Vatican...
...Later, he would include Kant, Schopenhauer, and Bergson in his criticism of what he called "the abdication of the mind," and insist that it was the mission of Thomism "to reconnect with being, to make fruitful all our bonds with human experience...
...The French episcopate embraced Vichy wholeheartedly...
...Judging from what Maritain once said about his own mission, it is probable that Gilson's advice did not go unheeded...
...In A travers le desas-tre, one of the first great works of the Resistance, secretly distributed throughout France in 1942, Mari-tain boosted morale by instilling solidarity...
...ment...
...This solicitude for her education caused Raissa to remark that her parents "had understood, even before I could know it myself, that this was where I would find my life—the happiness of my life...
...Barre is good on how the fall of France affected Maritain...
...His impact on the Maritains was instantaneous...
...The soul demands pure adherence to the absolutism of truth and charity...
...Two very different individuals, they were nonetheless "formed by the same desire for the absolute—an alliance against nothingness and the night, a fusion brought about by the most profound hope...
...In 1904, Paul Maritain died...
...Barre suggests that one reason might have been Maritain's desire to convert Charles Maurras, the movement's leader, who, by all accounts, was a brilliant, confused, unsavory man...
...The time is now...
...Maritain saw altogether too much of the engine room and concluded that "Catholics are not Catholicism...
...It does not provide sufficient background on the Dreyfus Affair or Action Frangaise, nor does it do justice to the moral malaise that led to the fall of France in 1940, or the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and Vichy...
...It is to a universal expansion of the intelligence that we are called by love," he wrote...
...Whether you realize it or not, you are great," Gilson told him, "and this is something for which you will never be forgiven...
...The book has serious omissions...
...While not definitive, it provides a fascinating portrait of a special marriage, and shows how many disparate lives were enriched by the couple's passion for truth...
...To judge from the amount of time and effort that Maritain spent trying to convert Gide and Cocteau, this might well have been the case...
...Jean Cocteau, Allen Tate, Marc Chagall, Erik Satie, T.S...
...After a brief, unhappy marriage, his parents divorced...
...When it is a question of God's grace, one can only close one's eyes and let it work...
...To a mind sufficiently alert, this baseness itself seems disquieting: it must have a mystical meaning...
...Before converting to Catholicism, the two were so despondent that they seriously considered suicide...
...One of the great themes of Barre's book is how Jacques and Raissa would offer similar hospitality in the households they set up in Versailles, Meudon, and Princeton, where their faith and their charity became "a little bridge thrown across the abyss...
...Barre is particularly good at showing how indispensable Raissa was to Mari-tain's moral and intellectual developEdward Short is at work on a study of John Henry Newman and his contemporaries...
...What decided Rais-sa's father to emigrate was the czar's ukase stipulating that only a limited number of Jews would be considered for seats in the gymnasiums and universities...
...The mistakes, the clumsiness, the inefficiencies, the lack of concern of Catholics do not involve Catholicism itself...
...Ronald Knox, the English Catholic convert, once advised that "He who travels in the barque of St...
...Yet the incoherence of French politics often involved Maritain in positions that he would later regret, so much so that in 1935, in his Lettre sur I'independance, he insisted that he was neither right nor left wing: "At the heart of the suffering that all the earth is experiencing today, there is doubtless a divine necessity for breaking, not with the world, but with the old servitudes of this world—these are the hard demands of engaged liberty...
...He continued: In a free and unceasing ebb and flow of emotion, feeling and thought, each [spouse] really participates, by virtue of love, in that personal life of the other which is, by nature, the other's incommunicable possession...
...In our journey toward the absolute," Maritain explained, "and in our desire to follow . . . at least one of the counsels of the life of perfection, we wanted to leave the field completely open to our quest for contemplation and union with God...
...Eliot, Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Georges Rouault, and Charles Peguy were just a few of the people in the Maritains' enchanted circle...
...Thus did Maritain become aware, as Barre writes, of "his particular responsibility to his century...
...of anti-Semitic propaganda...
...Instead of being a whitened sepulcher like the Pharisees of any and every age," Maritain recalled, "he was more like a charred and blackened cathedral...
...Maritain only repudiated the movement after Pius XI condemned it in 1926...
...The assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 led to reprisals against Russia's Jews that caused several hundred thousand of them to emigrate to America and Western Europe...
...To a friend he wrote that he was "ready to suffer anything— even the rude slamming of doors in my face—for the noble cause of the innocent and tortured prisoner...
...The many spiritual mentors to whom Maritain would later apprentice himself, from St...
...When Maritain returned to Paris after the Second World War and found that he was practically forgotten, he received a letter from his fellow Thomist, Etienne Gilson, who took the liberty of advising his old friend on what Samuel Johnson once referred to as "the justice of posterity...
...That the greatest Catholic philosopher of the 20th century should now be unknown on the very campuses where, just a generation ago, he was universally read and admired, is profoundly disheartening...
...In 1932, he published what many consider his masterpiece, Distinguer pour unir: ou Les Degres du savoir, which rejected the nominalism of Kantianism, idealism, pragmatism, and positivism and asserted, instead, that the mind can know what really exists...
...This biography, by the French journalist-historian Jean-Luc Barre, should help revive interest in the work of a man who still rewards study...
...In all events, it is not as though he did not recognize or, indeed, understand anti-Semitism...
...This is where the stars meet...
...Born in Rostov in 1883, Raissa Oumancoff spent her first ten years in a Chagallian world of rabbis, beggars, fiddlers, and harlequins...
...Thomas to Leon Bloy, Father Clerissac to Dom Delatte, were, to some degree, substitutes for his absent father...
...Without her, Maritain would never have written such compelling philosophy...
...Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room...
...Born in Paris in 1882, Maritain never got to know his father, a lawyer, whom Barre piquantly describes as part "skeptical aesthete" and part "sensual playboy...
...One of the great puzzles of Mari-tain's career is why he associated himself with Action Frangaise...
...I feel like a man walking on a slippery slope," he said, "carrying a very heavy weight in his arms...
...Why he continued marching under the Action Frangaise banner for 17 years remains a mystery...
...If this is not the critical biography for which one might have hoped, it nonetheless shows the extent to which love (there is no other word for it) animated all of Maritain's work...
...After converting, they vowed that their marriage would be celibate.The decision was not based on any disdain for nature...
...In "The Mystery of Israel" (1939), a pivotal essay, he wrote: "It is difficult not to be struck by the extraordinary baseness...
...The Vichy government is in fact prisoner of the enemy in a trap where it threw itself and all of France along with it...
...The whiteness was within, in the hidden heart of the tabernacle...
...In 1899, when Georges Clemenceau called for the complete vindication of Dreyfus, Maritain rallied to the cause...
...Jacques experienced a childhood full of abrupt moves from ramshackle households where the only stability came from his schooling, first at the Lycee Henry IV and then at the Sorbonne, where he read Bergson and Spinoza...
...She introduced him to the work of Thomas Aquinas, helped him confront the anti-Semitism that still degrades French society, impressed upon him the need for a universalism that could combat communism without neglecting Christian charity, and led him steadily onward in the life of contemplation...
...Although supportive of the Church as an agent of order, this right-wing royalist movement was also determined to root out what it perceived to be the enemy from within, including Jews, Freemasons, Protestants, and meteques, or resident aliens...
...He called a spade a spade...
...He was particularly savage about how Pierre Laval and Marshal Petain had dishonored their country: "To betray her traditional laws of political hospitality, to accept for herself and for her own laws the bestial ignominy of Nazi racism, to hand over foreign Jews welcomed by her since 1935 as into a human and faithful land, to hand over even those who fought for her and in her army in the course of the present war, never in all history has such an infamy been imposed on France...
...Maritain wisely stayed in New York...
...Before settling in Paris, the family stayed for a while with Raissa's maternal grandfather in Mariupol on the Azov Sea...
...In 1936, he published Humanisme integrale, which, taking stock of "the liquidation of four centuries of classical culture," exhorted Christians to undertake "the most true and perfect heroism, the heroism of love," to "work toward the establishment of a new temporal order of the world...
...It is amusing that his fiercely anticlerical mother should have insisted on his being initially tutored by a liberal Protestant...
...His only passion seems to have been shopping for antiques...
...Despite his interest in the world around him, Maritain always recognized that his real role must be played out in his work...
...Yet the comedy he saw was divine comedy...
...Genevieve Favre was one of the first divorcees in France, which only legalized divorce in 1884...
...It was Maritain's spiritual director, Father Clerissac, who recommended that he join the movement, which Clerissac saw as a bulwark against the depredations of liberal democracy...
...Mari-tain spent much of his time in New York helping Jewish professors who had fled the Nazis find teaching positions with American colleges...
...This spirit of independence came partly from his mother, who, when warned by her concierge that she was borrowing trouble by entertaining Jewish women in her apartment at the height of the deportations, responded: "Not to worry...
...The seminal event in Maritain's development was the Dreyfus Affair...
...It is precisely his "engaged liberty" that has made Maritain, in the words of the philosopher William Sweet, "too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals...
...In 1925, he published his brilliantly provocative Art et Scholastique, which summoned artists to find "once more the spiritual conditions of honest work"—a revolutionary summons at a time when Tristan Tzara was launching the Dada movement...
...This confidence in the mind's ability to apprehend truth is what has made him a pariah in a postmodernist ethos where the very idea of truth is rejected out of hand...
...In 1927, he published his groundbreaking Primaute du spirituel, which gave eloquent expression to his vision of a renewed Thomistic universalism...
...Beaumarchais once said that of all serious things marriage is the most ludicrous...
...Most French intellectuals chose to collaborate...
...The Maritain Way 'Too liberal for conservatives, and too conservative for liberals.' by Edward Short Not long ago I met a young woman who is studying philosophy at Stanford, and when I told her I was reading a new biography of Jacques Maritain, she said she had never heard of him...
...About the Maritain marriage, Barre says that it "proceeded less from pure chance than from a kind of inspired confluence, brought on by a similar intellectual precocity" and "a similar spiritual disquiet...
...It is not the responsibility of Catholicism to furnish an alibi for the shortcomings of Catholics...
...The man who converted the Mari-tains was Leon Bloy, a proudly penurious novelist, whose career Barre describes in suitably melodramatic terms: "This humiliated Christian, beat down by crushing poverty and handed over to the sneers of the multitude was a man at war...
...Their hospitality was proverbial," Raissa recalled...
...Maritain would have agreed...
...No sooner had the Germans taken possession than the Gestapo went looking for him...
...Bloy held on by his faith and survived because of it...
...Addressing Maritain as "My dear Teacher," Charles de Gaulle urged him repeatedly to join his exiled government in London...
...And then each one may become a sort of guardian Angel for the other—prepared as guardian Angels have to be, to forgive a great deal . . . Each one, in other words, may become really dedicated to the good and salvation of the other...
...Maritain saw only "abominable betrayals everywhere...
...What can one do...
...Here was a true Christian humanism...
...He must beware of the slightest misstep...
...They requisitioned his Meudon villa, removed his books from the bookstores, and suspended his classes...

Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 3


 
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