The range of Christian reason

Jacques Maritain stands among the half-dozen 20th-century philosophers whose name will be recognizable beyond the university classroom. The story of his conversion, along with that of his wife, Raïssa, from the brink of nihilism and suicide to a spirited and intellectual Catholicism, as well as the great revival of the faith they helped to stir among artists and thinkers alike, has been told many times. Maritain’s name was the most widely known of the several “neo-Thomist” philosophers who drank deeply of the thought of Thomas Aquinas so as to answer modern problems with ancient wisdom.

During his lifetime, his essays, lectures, and books received prominent and continuous attention, especially among Catholics around the world, where his influence as metaphysician, political philosopher, and man of letters shaped the church’s intellectual and cultural life in countless ways. Since Maritain’s death, in 1973, reams of essays and articles have examined the various aspects of his thinking in fine detail. And yet, during those same decades, the books on Maritain have focused on his life rather than his thought. This is not without reason: The story of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain is one of hope and redemption for the soul and provides a winsome model of how Christianity can engage and convert a despairing yet almost incorrigibly materialistic modern culture.

Jason L.A. West’s new study, The Christian Philosophy of Jacques Maritain (The Catholic University of America Press, 344 pages), therefore, answers a longstanding need by giving us not the life but the essence of the philosopher’s thought. I have long nursed the idea of writing a book to summarize the many lines of Maritain’s writings but have now abandoned the idea because West has done the job so thoroughly. His book is comprehensive, careful, and compelling.

Maritain’s great intellectual and spiritual awakening came as he first read the works of Thomas Aquinas. There, he discovered two foundational terms: being and intellect. From these two conceptual mustard seeds grew many tall and interconnected branches.

For Aquinas, as for the larger tradition in which the scholastic wrote, being is the very term of the real. All that is has being and nothing is that is not being. To understand things truly, therefore, we must get our metaphysics, our understanding of the nature of being, right. What we discover is that being is the union of essence and existence. The sheer gratuity of existence leads being to beget other being; the gratuity of essence leads being to give itself away to be knowable or intelligible. As West puts it, “a fundamental character of being is its generosity, its tendency to overflow with goodness to communicate itself and its goodness to others.” This is the mystery of being.

Intellect, for Aquinas, is not merely the capacity for thinking; it is the capacity of the soul to participate spiritually, or nonmaterially, in the reality of other beings. If being gives itself away, the intellect is the source of freedom to receive that gift. We might say, for example, that a chair has its own being, but that the intellect, in knowing the chair, remains itself and yet also participates virtually in the nature of the chair. This is what Maritain and Aquinas’ master, Aristotle, meant when he wrote, “the mind is in a sense all things.” This is the mystery of the mind.

In the modern age, it has become quite common for people to view the intellect as a cause of solitude, as if consciousness closed us off from reality. Some philosophers have claimed that our self-consciousness seems to make us ill-proportioned to the rest of the material universe, while others have even said that the mind is itself a kind of delusion, an epiphenomenal ghost produced by what is, in fact, a purely material reality called the brain. To the contrary, Maritain argued (following Aristotle and Aquinas), the intellect is what shows most plainly that we were made for communion. By way of the spiritual intellect, our minds stretch out toward being, but only because the gift of being, through the creative intelligence of God, first reaches out toward us. This capacity for intellectual participation in being is the highest meaning of freedom.

With this understanding of being and intellect, Maritain proceeded to make significant contributions to all the major arguments of the modern age: to epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, natural and revealed theology, most importantly, but also to moral and political philosophy (he was one of the leading advocates of what came to be called “personalism”), aesthetics, education, and the theory of history. His life’s work served to show that, if you begin with sound first principles, your mind can roam in all directions and proceed to make the most wonderful and fruitful discoveries.

West shows us that Maritain’s contributions were not all equally profound nor were they all equally rooted in Aquinas. The man had a romantic spirit that sometimes got in the way of his classical Christian realism but also sometimes made him a more innovative thinker. His most important work generally rearticulated the insights of his master, Aquinas, in a register that answered a skeptical modern age’s challenges. Sometimes he fell prey to the weaknesses of the modern age and sometimes he idled in minutia that even the specialist will find of minor interest. But very few modern thinkers had the intellectual range of Maritain, much less the frequent vitality of expression.