On August 4, 1879, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical (Aeterni Patris, or “On Christian Philosophy”) in which he urged Catholic theologians and philosophers, in response to the materialistic philosophies of the day, to revive the teachings of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas. That encyclical marked the beginning of what is often referred to as “neo-Thomism,” and helped pave the way for a Catholic convert and philosopher named Jacques Maritain to make a significant impact the following century in both the academic and political world. Early in his life, Maritain (1882-1973), languished in an intellectual and spiritual crisis that he blamed on those nihilistic philosophies the Pope sought to counter. So deep was Maritain’s despair that the Frenchman, together with his future wife Raissa, made a vow to commit suicide within a year should they not find some answer to the apparent meaninglessness of life. They at last found some hope in the teachings of the idealist Henri Bergson, who at least “proceeded on the assumption that the truth could be known, that the human mind was capable of knowing reality.”[1] After his life was, literally, spared by the intervention of Bergsonism, Maritain was soon thereafter introduced to Catholicism by Leon Bloy, and later became a committed disciple of Aquinas, eventually becoming a vocal critic of Bergson’s idealism.
Other powerful influences on the life and thought of Jacques Maritain included the rise of totalitarian regimes with their perverted views of the nature of man, and the brutal wars that scarred the world, particularly Europe, in the first half of the twentieth century. Ralph McInerny, president of the American Maritain Association, observes how World War I forced the opportunity for Maritain to “rethink, in the light of the Catholic tradition, the relationship between the temporal and the spiritual,” a theme that dominated much of Maritain’s later philosophy.[2] Moreover, as Richard Crane notes, Maritain saw in World War II an opportunity for the spread of a new Christendom and a “personalist democracy.”[3]Maritain was no mere ivory tower intellectual, however, but actively opposed the Nazi order, fought for social justice to a degree that earned him the moniker “Red Christian” by some critics,[4] and was officially involved, as a French delegate, in helping to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. From the time of his spiritual conversion to Catholicism and his intellectual conversion to Thomism, Maritain weighed in on an incredible range of interests including art, history, and philosophy. Perhaps his most lasting impact, however, was in the articulation and advocacy of his Christian humanism and political theology.
Concerning the subject of political theology, John W. Cooper writes: “At the most basic level, this term designates the intersection of politics and religion – or, more precisely, of political philosophy and theology. It implies, therefore, the search for a social and political vision with an essentially theological base.”[5] Further, “In the history of Christian thought, the idea of political theology has been commonly referred to as the problem of the Kingdom of God or the problem of the two realms.”[6] According to Robert P. Kraynak, one of the fundamental questions asked by political theology as opposed to a mere political philosophy is this: “Is there a connection in principle between Christianity and a specific form of government, such as democracy? Or, is there only a prudential connection between Christianity and all political matters, thereby permitting a variety of legitimate forms of government depending on the circumstances?”[7]Though Maritain insisted that Christianity was not enslaved to any temporal regime,[8] he also seemed to think there was more than a mere prudential connection, with the most obvious place to find a possible principled connection being the Christian view of the nature of man. Pope Leo’s encyclical, according to McInerny, was largely an attempt to combat the materialistic notions of man, to which the pontiff viewed Thomism as the only antidote.[9] Maritain too, considered Christianity to be the spiritual answer to the bad politics engendered by such philosophies as Lutheran immanentism, Cartesian rationalism, and “the optimism and individualism which sprang from Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”[10] Though he considered natural law to be the ground for natural rights, at the same time, the Christian revelation factored prominently in his political vision, for “only when the Gospel has penetrated to the very depth of human substance will natural law appear in its flower and its perfection.”[11] True political liberty itself is Christian liberty, arising “neither from history nor from the world, but from the Living God.”[12]
Thus, Maritain’s political vision was grounded in an explicitly theological worldview. Owing to his Thomism, however, his theology was thoroughly grounded in and complemented by a rigorous philosophy. As McInerny points out, “The basic characteristic of Thomas is that there can be no real conflict between what is known and what is believed, between faith and reason, between philosophy and theology.”[13] The findings of true philosophy, as the handmaid of theology, provide what Thomas called the preambles of faith.[14] This was the tradition out of which Maritain worked out a theology of politics. The most thorough and mature expression of Maritain’s political theology was delivered as the Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago in December 1949. These lectures subsequently were published as Man and the State in 1951, a book that represents the culmination of his political philosophy.[15] Accordingly, after a brief sketch of the “Christian humanism” that underscored all of Maritain’s politics, this paper will expound on Maritain’s political theology by following the outline provided by that important book.
At the heart of Maritain’s political theology was what he called integral or Christian humanism, which he contrasted with the disruptive, anthropocentric humanisms of such thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Rousseau. As John F. X. Knasas observes: “For Maritain only the saint is the true humanist. Why? Maritain concedes that sanctity is first and foremost a love of God. But because God has made all in his likeness, the saint’s love of God cannot but blossom into a love of all else.”[16] Maritain believed that it was only through a “sound philosophy of the person that the genuine, vital principle of a new Democracy, and at the same time of a new Christian civilization, can be rediscovered; and this involves an extensive work of purification of the ideas that the world has received from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”[17] These disruptive ideas to which Maritain referred were the fruit of
a false philosophy of life, which made of human free will the sovereign rule for the whole social and moral order; made of the multitude an idle god, obeying no one, but completely handed over to the power of the State in which it was incarnate; made of all human values, and in particular of work, merchandise to be exchanged for wealth and for the hope of enjoying material goods in peace; made of Democracy or Revolution a heavenly Jerusalem of Godless Man – this false philosophy of life has so badly impaired the vital principle of modern democracies that it has at times been possible to mistake the false philosophy of life for the very essence of Democracy.[18]
As far as modern philosophy went, Maritain ultimately traced these fascist and Marxist perversions, which he considered “a grotesque caricature of Christianity,”[19] to the “angelism”[20] of Rene Descartes, whose ideas he also implicated in the anthropocentric disfigurement of man. From the time of Descartes, “enormous promises have been made to man . . . in the prediction that progressive enlightenment will automatically bring about a complete felicity of release and repose, an earthly beatitude.”[21] The end result of the ensuing Cartesian revolution was that “reason has been imperiled by rationalism, and humanism by anthropocentric humanism.”[22]
The solution to the wayward intellectual offspring of Cartesianism was a Christian humanism in which man was open to the divine and supra rational and considered in the wholeness of his natural and supernatural being. In other words, Maritain espoused what he called “the humanism of the Incarnation.”[23] Such an “integral humanism” would not have to choose between eternal life and temporal life; rather, both would be pursued at the same time.[24] The first of three basic elements of integral humanism was man’s capacity to know the truth. Regarding the epistemological question, Maritain sought to refute the two dominant philosophies of the day:
“Neo-positivism and dialectical materialism lead, by different ways, to certain common negations. If either of them is right, there is only one science, the science of phenomena, pure and even purist in one case and, in the other case, carried away by the great dialectical fantasy. And there is no wisdom. Blinded by logical empiricism or hallucinated by historical explanation, the intellect is a slave in the service of sensitive apprehension.”[25] This should not be taken as anti-scientific or anti-historical. Both logical positivism and Marxism, however, were defective philosophical truncations that erroneously disregarded the science of being, or metaphysics.
Only through metaphysics is “wisdom . . . illumined by the intelligibility of being disengaged and in a pure state . . . at the highest degree of abstractive intuition. Its formal object is being according to its proper mystery, – being as being, as Aristotle said.”[26] Situated between metaphysics at the top and the empirical sciences at the bottom is the philosophy of nature: “The philosophy of nature knows the same world as the empiriological sciences, the world of change and movement, of sensible and material nature; but the resolution of concepts is made here in intelligible being, not in the observable and the measurable as such.”[27] Again, Maritain had no intention of doing away with scientific knowledge. As McInerny observes: “Good Thomist that he is, Maritain does not think we can bypass the knowledge of this world gained by the sciences and philosophy. As a Christian, he knows we cannot be content with the theology that is an achievement of philosophy.”[28] Indeed, Thomism, if true, helped to preserve and protect the findings of natural science. But divorced from metaphysical insight, the sciences cannot discern the very mystery that they seek, that is, “being itself, that being after which the intellect thirsts and hungers.”[29] To use Maritain’s oft-quoted phrase, it is imperative that in his pursuit of knowledge that man recognize “the primacy of the spiritual over the temporal.” Crane summarizes that “against a prevailing tendency to envision human progress without God, [Maritain] emphasizes both the philosophical heritage of natural law-drawing above all on the thought of Thomas Aquinas-and the theological centrality of the incarnation, describing the nature and destiny of the human person as “the conquest of a freedom consonant with the vocation of our nature.”[30]
The second aspect of integral humanism involves a rather technical distinction between “individuality” and “personality.”[31] The distinction itself did not originate with Maritain, but is a classical one that is akin to the “ego” and the “self” in Hinduism.[32] What Maritain meant by it was that “the human being is held between two poles: a material pole, which in reality does not concern authentic personality, but rather the material condition and the shadow, as it were, of personality; and a spiritual pole, which concerns personality itself.”[33] Concerning individuality, Dr. Donald Demarco writes that, “in a fundamental sense which most people can understand, only individuals exist in the extra-mental world of concrete reality. Ideas and the like do not have real existence, that is to say, they are not capable of exercising the act of existing. Here, Maritain is writing as an existentialist echoing the existentialism of his master, St. Thomas Aquinas.”[34]George Klubertanz and Maurice Holloway, also writing in the Thomistic tradition, explain why only individuals exist:
Nonindividuals are either formal universals or absolute natures (simple, or direct, universals). But: neither universals nor absolute natures exist (a) because formal universals must be one in order to be what they are, and that which is one is not-many and therefore not-common, yet an existing formal universal should also be common to many; (b) because absolute natures, which can be either singular or universal, cannot simultaneously be fully actual. Absolute natures cannot exist as such in singulars, because a real thing cannot be composed of elements each of which is indifferent to reality. Therefore: no nonindividuals exist, or only individuals exist.[35]
Individuality, then, is something that is common to all things that exist, including God and angels. Moreover, as Demarco explains, “Human persons, because they are material, have their individuality rooted in matter. Matter in itself, however, is a mere potency to receive forms. Its nature is essentially relatable to that which can inform it. In this regard it is roughly analogous to computer hardware that is merely a potentiality for receiving the information contained in the software programming.”[36]
It was Maritain’s contention that humanism became perverted once the material pole, the individuating aspect of man, became the center of the self. Modernity, to Maritain, had illegitimately identified the “person” and the “self.”[37] Traces of this were even found in Pascal:
‘We never love the person, but only his qualities,’ Pascal has said. This is a false statement, and exhibits in Pascal a trace of the very rationalism against which he strove to protect himself. Love does not go out to qualities. They are not the object of our love. We love the deepest, most substantial and hidden, the most existing reality of the beloved being. This is a metaphysical center deeper than all the qualities and essences which we can find and enumerate in the beloved. The expressions of lovers are unending because their object is ineffable.[38]
The metaphysical center to which Maritain referred is the “personality,” or “the subsistence of the spiritual soul communicated to the human composite.”[39] Personality is not connected with the individuating principle of matter, but rather “has its roots in spirit, inasmuch as spirit holds itself in existence and superabounds in existence.”[40] It is personality that makes man a subject, and not a mere object. Moreover, the dimension of personality in man means that “each of us requires communication with the other and with others in the order of knowledge and love. Personality, of its essence, asks for a dialogue in which souls really communicate.”[41]
This “Christian personalism” bears profoundly upon Maritain’s political theology, especially his view of the common good. The end of the state is to promote the common good, which is “the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in the good life; it is therefore common to the whole and to the parts, on whom it flows back and who must all benefit from it.”[42] Each person is a whole, but he is an “open whole.”[43] In other words, the person is a whole by its very nature, but the person is not a self-contained entirely independent whole, but is interdependent on other persons materially, intellectually, and morally.[44] Hence, the person cannot be alone. By virtue of personality, each man “requires to be a member of a society.”[45] Therefore, “society thus appears as furnishing the person with the conditions of existence and development which he definitely needs. The human person cannot achieve his fullness alone, but only through receiving certain goods essential to him from society.”[46] Society is, therefore, a whole made up of wholes. Further, as Michael A. Smith points out, “for Maritain, the notion of person comes from theology: it goes from the Divine Persons to angelic persons and finally to human persons. Maritain’s approach is theological. For political philosophy, it is the human person who is immediately being considered.”[47]
Maritain’s integral humanism, or Christian personalism, precludes any idea of the person being considered as relating to society “according to the atomistic and mechanistic type of bourgeois individualism, which suppresses the social organic totality.”[48] It also precludes the person being conceived merely biologically, the “characteristic of the communist and totalitarian doctrines, which engulf the person, as an histological element of Behemoth or of Leviathan, in the body of the social community or of the State, and which enslave it to the work of this totality.”[49] In the end, the proper relation between the person and the state is one that does not reduce man to his individuating matter, but respects him in his person. The gospel alone provides the influence by which this is possible.[50] The best political system, therefore, is a “democracy of the person and humanism of the person [which] spring[s] forth from a theocentric inspiration.”[51]
By his own admission, nothing is more basic to Maritain’s political theology than the distinctions he made between the nation, the body politic, and the state.[52] But prerequisite to understanding those distinctions is an even more elemental distinction between community and society.[53] First, whereas the community proceeds from the historical and environmental situation, the society is shaped by voluntary determination.[54] Second, the community is the fact of a “common unconscious psyche, common feelings and psychological structure, and common mores. But in a society the object is a task to be done or an end to be aimed at, which depends on the determinations of human intelligence and will.”[55] Third, in a community, social pressure derives from a deterministic coercion that imposes patterns of conduct. In a society, by contrast, social pressure derives from law and rational regulation.[56] Thus, a nation is a community, not a society: “It is a community of communities, a self-aware network of common feelings and representations that human nature and instinct have caused to swarm around a number of physical, historical, and social data.”[57] On the other hand, “both the Body Politic and the State pertain to the order of society.”[58] Yet the body politic and the state are distinguishable as a whole is to a part: “The Body Politic or the Political Society is the whole. The State is a part – the topmost part – of this whole.”[59]
Any apprehension of Maritain’s views on democratic authority, church-state relations, and world government, requires that one grasps this crucial distinction. The body politic is the whole. It is a work of reason, and justice is the reason for its existence. Furthermore, for the body politic, friendship “is its very life-giving form.”[60] The state is but a part of the body politic, albeit the superior part. Nevertheless, the state, as but a part, is inferior to the body politic considered as a whole.[61] As Smith notes, “The State . . . is not the same thing as the political community: while the political community is composed of persons, the State is an administrative apparatus designed to serve the community.”[62] The relationship between the individual person, the body politic, and the state is as follows: “The human person as an individual is for the body politic and the body politic is for the human person as a person. But man is by no means for the State. The State is for man.”[63] But Maritain was clearly not against the state. Indeed, he considered the growth of the democratic state as being the only way for a free body politic to “resist the pressure or the aggression of totalitarian States.”[64] Moreover, the state is necessary as protector and defender of rights. But in the end, it is “necessary that the people have the will, and the means, to assert their own control over the State.”[65]
Because he sought a limitation to the power of the state, Maritain believed that the very word “sovereignty” should be eliminated from the vocabulary of political philosophy: “Considered in its genuine meaning, and in the perspective of the proper scientific realm to which it belongs . . . this concept is intrinsically wrong, and bound to mislead if we continue using it.”[66] Used in political philosophy, “sovereignty means independence and power which are separately or transcendentally supreme and which are exercised upon the body politic from above because they are a natural and inalienable right belonging to a whole . . . which is superior to the whole constituted by the body politic or the people, and which, consequently, either is superimposed on them or absorbs them in itself. The equality thus defined does not belong to the State. Ascribed to it, it vitiates the State.”[67] Further, if states are sovereign in the usual sense of the word, then no international law could be binding.
What then is a proper and genuine meaning of sovereignty? First, sovereignty is a right to supreme independence and supreme power which is a natural and unalienable right. Second, sovereignty is a right to independence and power which are supreme absolutely or transcendentally, not comparatively or as a topmost part in the whole.[68] Sovereignty thus understood can be predicated of no other being other than God, and, moreover, only God as properly understood by the Thomistic notion of essentialism.[69] James Schall explains:
The word sovereignty, no doubt, does have a perfectly good and proper meaning when it is applied to God, though even there is makes a difference how God is understood, particularly if He is understood as purely arbitrary will, as seems to have been the case with William of Occam, a position that undermines the stability of all reality. When this notion of God as pure, arbitrary will is applied to political things, we get Hobbes’s Leviathan, Rousseau’s General Will, and Bodin’s Sovereignty, mortal gods and wills that are responsible neither to nature nor to God nor to the people.[70]
Maritain understood sovereignty to be a prime example of a concept that was perfectly acceptable in one order, and out of place in another. Sovereignty belonged to the realm of metaphysics and should be kept out of politics altogether: “God, the separate Whole, is Sovereign over the created world. . . . But with respect to the men or agencies in charge of guiding peoples toward their earthly destinies in the political sphere, there is no valid use of the concept of Sovereignty, because, in the last analysis, no earthly power is the image of God or deputy for God.”[71]
Maritain’s humanism underscored the whole of his political theology. His distinctions between the nation, the body politic, and the state are the crucial distinctions that bear upon a number of other questions, such as sovereignty and church-state relations. But in his own words, the problem of “ends and means” is “the basic problem of political philosophy.”[72]
Men assemble for a reason, an end. In the bourgeois-individualist society, each one asks only that the State protect his individual freedom of profit against encroachments of other men’s freedoms.[73] But this confuses the true dignity of the person with the illusory divinity of an abstract Individual, supposedly sufficient unto himself.[74] In the racial community, such as Nazi Germany, there is no common task but rather a passion for communion. Says Maritain: “Nothing is more dangerous than such a notion of the community: deprived of a determining objective, political communion will carry its demands to the infinite, will absorb and regiment people, swallow up in itself the religious energies of the human being. Because it is not defined by a work to be done, it will only be able to define itself by its opposition to other human groups.”[75] In the communist-totalitarian conception, the essential task is the industrial domination of nature.[76] But just as in the racial community, in the communist conceptions the dignity of the person is disregarded, being sacrificed to “the titanism of industry.”[77]
In contrast to the ends pursued by political regimes inflamed by anthropocentric humanism, Maritain wrote that it is not the ultimate aim of the body politic “to ensure the material convenience of scattered individuals,” but rather, “to better the conditions of human life itself, or to procure the common good of the multitude, in such a manner that each concrete person, not only in a privileged class but throughout the whole mass, may truly reach that measure of independence which is proper to civilized life and which is ensured alike by the economic guarantees of work and property, political rights, civil virtues, and the cultivation of the mind.”[78] In other words, the end of society is the common good of the body politic as human persons,[79] and “the political task is essentially a task of civilization and culture.”[80] The ends of human life are two-fold. The first is the “ultimate end in a given order,” that is, “the terrestrial common good.”[81] The second is the “absolute ultimate end, which is the transcendent, eternal common good.” Political ethics takes into account the absolute ultimate end, “but its direct aim is the subordinate ultimate end, the good of the rational nature in its temporal achievement.”[82] Accordingly, the means by which this ultimate end is pursued should be proportionate and appropriate.[83]
Concerning means, there are two rationalizations of political life: the technical and the moral. The technical rationalization is akin to Machiavellianism, which is rooted in a radically pessimistic view of human nature and normalizes “political immorality.”[84] Further, there are two kinds of Machiavellianism. Moderate Machiavellianism, typified, for example, in the early seventeenth-century career of Cardinal Richelieu, uses injustice within “reasonable” limits.[85] Absolute Machiavellianism, on the other hand, is the fruit of nineteenth-century positivism “which considered politics to be, not a mere art, but a mere natural science, like astronomy or chemistry, and a mere application of so-called ‘scientific laws’ to the struggle for life of human societies – a concept much less intelligent and still more inhuman than that of Machiavelli himself.”[86]
The great strength of Machiavellianism “comes from the incessant victories gained by evil means,” and brings with it “the illusion of immediate success.”[87] The success, however, is the success of a man, and not of a state or nation.[88] In reality, the “success” of Machiavellianism is nothing more than the success of the absolute version over the moderate version. Moderate Machiavellianism has no strength to withstand its extreme counterpart.[89] But Machiavellianism in any form can never fully succeed any more than evil can ever fully overcome good. In sum, Machiavellianism does not “possess lasting inner force . . . because it engenders everywhere fear and insecurity, [and] is in itself a process of self-destruction for the body politic.”[90] Maritain warned that political philosophy must struggle against such “a pessimistic pseudo-realism that extends from Machiavelli to Hitler and that bends man under violence, retaining only the animality which enslaves him.”[91]
In sharp contrast to the technical rationalization of Machiavellianism, the moral rationalization, drawn from Aristotle as well as other greater thinkers from both antiquity and the middle ages, “means the recognition of the essentially human ends of political life, and of its deepest springs: justice, law, and mutual friendship; it also means a ceaseless effort to make the living, moving structures and organs of the body politic serve the common good, the dignity of the human person, and the sense of fraternal love.”[92] Maritain strongly opposed the Machiavellian notion that “justice and respect for moral values spell weakness and doom.”[93] Instead, as the Allied victory in World War II proved, “strength can exist together with justice, and the power of nations struggling for freedom can be even greater than that of nations struggling for enslavement.”[94] But Maritain also opposed what he called “hypermoralism,” which causes political ethics to be something idealistic and impractical, and is a wholly ineffective defense against the immoral politics of Machiavellianism. In reality, that which alone can square off against Machiavellianism, is a gritty, Christian politics,
neither theocratic nor clerical, nor yet a politics of pseudo-evangelical weakness and non-resistance to evil, but a genuinely political politics, ever aware that it is situated in the order of nature and must put into practice natural virtues; that it must be armed with real and concrete justice, with force, perspicacity and prudence; a politics which would hold the sword that is the attribute of the state, but which would also realize that peace is the work not only of justice but of love, and that love is also an essential part of political virtue. For it is never excess of love that fools political men, but without love and generosity there is regularly blindness and miscalculation. Such a politics would be mindful of the eternal destiny of man and of the truths of the Gospel, knowing in its proper order – in a measure adapted to its temporal ends – something of the spirit, and of love, and of forgiveness.”[95]
Also related to the problem of “ends and means” is the means by which the people can supervise and control the state.[96]In the democratic state, “the people have regular, statutory means of exercising their control.”[97] Moreover, the people have (at least) the indirect means of expressing public opinion through the press.[98] Third, there is the power of what we might today call “special interest groups.”[99] Finally, there is what Maritain called “the means of spiritual warfare,” or those acts of “enduring, bearing, [and] suffering with constancy.”[100] Even though the people supervise the complicated engine of the large and growing state, “they can confront the whole machine with the naked human strength of their patience in sustaining suffering on behalf of unyielding, just claims.”[101] In contrast, the totalitarian state “suppresses any means whatever for the people to control or supervise it.”[102] But even for those brutally repressed within such temporal arrangements, moral reason must never be abdicated and those keen to that reason must resist such a state.[103]
Natural law, “which is within the being of things as their very essence,” is the philosophical foundation for the rights of man.[104] Maritain distinguished between the ontological and gnoseological elements of the natural law; that is, what the natural law is, and how the natural law is known. The ontological element begins with the assumption that there is such a thing as human nature, and that nature is the same in all men.[105] But as a rational animal, “man is endowed with intelligence and determines his own ends, it is up to him to put himself in tune with the ends necessarily demanded by his nature. This means that there is, by the very virtue of human nature, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself to the essential and necessary ends of the human being. The unwritten law, or natural law, is nothing more than that.”[106] More than just a “normality of function,” like when we speak of a “good horse” or a “good piano,” natural law is for man a moral law in that “man obeys or disobeys it freely, not necessarily, and because human behaviour pertains to a particular, privileged order which is irreducible to the general order of the cosmos and tends to a final end superior to the immanent common good of the cosmos.”[107] Natural law, in sum, is both ideal and ontological. It is ideal “because it is grounded on the human essence and its unchangeable structure and the intelligible necessities it involves.” It is ontological “because the human essence is an ontological reality, which moreover does not exist separately, but in every human being, so that by the same token natural law dwells as an ideal order in the very being of all existing men.”[108]
The gnoseological element of natural law pertains to how natural law is known. Natural law is not written, and men know it to greater or lesser degrees. All that can be universally known from the natural law is its preamble: one must do good and avoid evil.[109] It is the contention of some that at this point Maritain was at odds with Thomism traditionally understood. Maritain understood Thomas as such: “When [Aquinas] says that human reason discovers the regulations of natural law through the guidance of the inclinations of human nature, he means that the very mode or manner in which human reason knows natural law is not rational knowledge, but knowledge through inclination.”[110] Gregory Doolan, however, disputes this reading of Aquinas:
When Thomas speaks of man’s inclinations in reference to the natural law, he does not mean by this term some sort of non-rational, non-conceptual mode of knowledge, as Maritain maintains; to the contrary, by inclination Thomas refers to nothing less than man’s natural capacity to form concepts, make judgments, and deduce conclusions. It is precisely because man has this capacity to reason, Thomas explains, that he is capable of recognizing the natural law.[111]
Thus, according to Doolan, Aquinas believed that the more specific requirements of the natural law are rationally deduced while Maritain asserted only the preamble was such. Doolan considers Maritain’s alleged departure from Aquinas to be rooted in an epistemological difference between the two,[112] but another explanation may lie in the heavy emphasis that Maritain placed upon the gospel’s relation to natural law. For Maritain, natural law was the “heritage of [both] Greek and Christian thought.”[113] But, in explaining the gnoseological element, Maritain wrote that “only when the Gospel has penetrated to the very depth of human substance will natural law appear in its flower and its perfection.”[114] Thus, while there does appear to be an epistemological divide between Aquinas and Maritain on the natural law, for Maritain, that divide was apparently bridged by the illuminating effect of the gospel. This explanation is perhaps alluded to by McInerny, who thinks that in his explanation of how one proceeds from the first principles of natural law to the here and now act, “Maritain was trying to make room for the moral relevance of such writers as Saint John of the Cross.”[115]
Maritain believed that not only does natural law lay down our most fundamental duties; it also assigns our most fundamental rights.[116] Humanism, which for Maritain was solidly rooted in the Christian revelation, provides the proper foundation for human rights: “The human person possesses rights because of the very fact that it is a person, a whole, master of itself and of its acts, and which consequently is not merely a means to an end, but an end, and end which must be treated as such.”[117] Maritain sought to explain how the historical transition from natural duty to natural right transpired:
Thus it is that in ancient and mediaeval times attention was paid, in natural law, to the obligations of man more than to his rights. The proper achievement – a great achievement indeed – of the XVIIIth Century has been to bring out in full discovery the rights of man as also required by natural law. That discovery was essentially due to a progress in moral and social experience, through which the root inclinations of human nature as regards the rights of the human person were set free, and consequently, knowledge through inclination with regard to them developed.[118]
In contrast to positivism that recognizes the mere fact of natural rights and not their source, and idealism that views rights solely on the basis of a detached abstraction of human nature, each man individually possesses his natural rights “by virtue of the right possessed by God, Who is pure Justice, to see the order of His wisdom in beings respected, obeyed, and loved by every intelligence.”[119] In other words, natural law is only law because it is rooted in eternal law. In turn, the law of nations and positive law only take on force because they are grounded in natural law.
The governing principle of Maritain’s view of natural law and natural rights is his view of the human person, or, as McInerny writes, “that man has been called to a supernatural end: that is the ultimate end of human endeavor with reference to which actions must be assessed as good or bad. Any discussion of human action that ignores the fact that we are called to a supernatural end and that there is no other ultimate end for human agents must be inadequate to its subject.”[120] But in addition to the dual vocation of man, natural rights are also grounded in the notion of human equality, which has been defended by nominalists, idealists, and realists. Nominalists, however, are unable to rationally ground human equality, and therefore human rights, “because the unity of the human race is only a word for them, in practice they erect the natural or social inequalities to which men are exposed into specific differences between groups.”[121] Likewise, idealism also fails in this regard: “For all those who unwittingly think as pure idealists, the unity of human nature is the unity of a subsisting Idea, of a man-in-himself existing outside time, and of whom the individuals in concrete life are shadows without substance; in such a view, this realized abstraction is reality itself.”[122]
Rather, the only true justification for equality and rights is found in Christianity, which “confirms and accentuates the concrete sense of equality in nature by affirming its historic and genealogical character and by teaching that we have a consanguinity in the strict sense, since all men are descended from the same original couple and are brothers in Adam before they are brothers in Jesus Christ.”[123] Indeed, “is it possible for any Christian to look upon man with the demented eyes of racist pride?”[124] Thus, arising out of the ashes of a disillusioning “anthropocentric humanism,” Maritain hoped for “a new age of Christendom,” in which “temporal things, philosophical and scientific reason, and civil society, will enjoy their autonomy and at the same time recognize the quickening and inspiring role that spiritual things, religious faith, and the Church play from their higher plane.”[125] The new Christian humanism would recognize man “in the full reality of nature, sin and sainthood.”[126] And it primary goal “would be to cause the Gospel leaven and inspiration to penetrate the secular structures of life – a work of sanctification of the temporal order.”[127] This Maritain termed “the humanism of the Incarnation,” and he saw it as the only true substitute for the materialistic-individualistic civilization that, in the culmination of two costly world wars, had greatly damaged western civilization.[128]
Maritain enumerated what he saw as the four characteristics of a society of free men. First, it would be personalist,considering “society to be a whole composed of persons whose dignity is anterior to society and who, however indigent they may be, contain within their very being a root of independence and aspire to ever greater degrees of independence until they achieve that perfect spiritual liberty which no human society has within its gift.”[129] Second, it would be communal, “recogniz[ing] the fact that the person tends naturally toward society and communion, in particular towards the political community, and because, in the specifically political sphere and the extent that man is a part of political society, it considers the common good superior to that of individuals.”[130] Third, it would be pluralist, “assum[ing] that the development of the human person normally requires a plurality of autonomous communities which have their own rights, liberties and authority.”[131] Finally, it would be theist or Christian. By this last requirement, Maritain did not mean that a Christian society would require belief, but rather that a society of free men would recognize that God as the source of natural law and rights, and that the gospel was the source of liberty and fraternity. In addition, Maritain was “Lincoln-esque” in believing that a society of free men necessarily involved a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”[132]
Maritain was very keenly aware of the problems inherent in a pluralist society. Even though all humans are bound together by virtue of a common nature, “that sameness of nature is not sufficient to insure community of action, since we act as thinking beings and not simply by natural instinct.”[133] Seeming to anticipate the political liberalism of John Rawls, Maritain wrote that “it would be an illusion to seek for the basis and purpose of good fellowship in a common minimum of doctrinal identity.”[134] Indeed, as he addressed the second International Conference of UNESCO,[135]Maritain asked: “[How] is an agreement conceivable among men assembled for the purpose of jointly accomplishing a task dealing with the future of the mind, who come from the four corners of the earth and who belong not only to different cultures and civilizations, but to different spiritual families and antagonistic schools of thought?”[136] As Maritain explained, “the present state of intellectual division among men does not permit agreement on a common speculativeideology, nor on common explanatory principles.”[137]
Maritain found it to be a great “paradox that rational justifications are indispensable and at the same time powerless to create agreement among men.”[138] For instance, as it concerns democratic principles, men only accept the principles because they believe they are true. Maritain, in fact, was fully convinced that his “way of justifying the belief in the rights of man and the ideal of freedom, equality, and fraternity is the only one which is solidly based on truth.”[139] Indeed, “the more the body politic – that is, the people – were imbued with Christian convictions and aware of the religious faith which inspires it, the more deeply it would adhere to the secular faith in the democratic charter.”[140] But although he was convinced that democracy “has taken shape in human history as a result of the Gospel inspiration awakening the ‘naturally Christian’ potentialities of common secular consciousness,” at the same time, those who did not adhere to the Christian faith were still free to “found their democratic beliefs on grounds different from those more generally accepted.”[141]
Thus, rational justifications are indispensable. At the same time, however, men of different creeds could find rational justification for democratic principles in conflicting theoretical systems. Rational justifications, hence, are powerless to provide any universal consensus for democracy. But while speculative ideology and explanatory principles were often mutually exclusive, a common secular or civic faith is found “by virtue of an analogical similitude in practical principles, toward the same practical conclusions.”[142] That is, the various ideological principles and doctrines share, in a rather technical sense, an analogical relation to one another that is manifested in practical thought.[143] This secular creed of practicality is what we know as genuine democracy. And as a genuine democracy, it cannot impose upon its citizens a demand for any philosophic or religious creed.[144] Therefore, the object of the secular faith in democracy is practical, not theoretical or dogmatic.[145] And men of different creeds can, for quite different reasons, share a reverence for “truth and intelligence, human dignity, freedom, brotherly love, and the absolute value of moral good.”[146] In the end, even though “a Thomist and a Barthian will always clash in theology and philosophy, they can work together within human society.”[147]
Whereas by its very nature democracy permits men to provide for its existence mutually exclusive justifications, there are, nevertheless, “political heretics” within the democratic faith that society must confront. Men are free to ground their faith in democracy to any theoretical system they believe provides a rational justification. But within the democratic charter, men are not permitted to “stand against freedom, or against the basic equality of men, or the dignity and rights of the human person, or the moral power of law.”[148] One who stands against freedom, and does so by embarking on political activity, is the political heretic who “will be met with, and checked by, opposite political activity freely developed by citizens in a body politic sufficiently lively and alive.”[149] Maritain was very careful to defend the right to free expression, even for the heretic. Moreover, excepting extreme circumstances, he argued against the use of censorship and police power to restrict the freedom of expression. But he also conceded that “it is not true that every thought as such, because of the mere fact that it was born in a human intellect, has the right to be spread about in the body politic.”[150]Since the democratic charter was based upon practical and not ideological agreement, “the criterion for any interference of the State in the field of the expression of thought is also to be practical, not ideological.”[151] The State is incompetent “to judge whether a political theory is heretical with regard to the democratic faith.” Only the Church was competent in that respect, though she does so with thoughtful cognizance of how that power has historically been misused.[152] The State, in contrast, is charged with protecting the democratic charter against the practical threats of the political heretic.[153]
Education, beginning with the family, is an indispensable “means to foster common secular faith in the democratic charter.”[154] It is imperative that the educational system “provide the future citizens not only with a treasure of skills, knowledge, and wisdom – liberal education for all – but also with a genuine and reasoned-out belief in the common democratic charter, such as is required for the very unity of the body politic.”[155] Even though democracy cannot impose a philosophical or religious creed, and the teachers of democracy must “cling only to the common practical recognition of the merely practical tenets upon which the people have agreed to live together,” it is unreasonable and unhealthy to ignore “the philosophical or religious traditions and schools of thought which are spontaneously at work in the consciousness of the nation and which have contributed historically to its formation.”[156] Maritain held that “those who teach the democratic charter must believe in it with their whole hearts, and stake on it their personal convictions, their consciences, and the depths of their moral life.”[157] In other words, even within public education, Maritain believed that teachers should be permitted to ground their faith in democracy in light of their own religious or philosophical ideology.[158] While it may seem paradoxical, to attain the goal of unity in the educational system and the state, “a sound pluralism must obtain in the means; inner differentiations must come into force in the structure of the educational system so as to afford an efficacious teaching of the democratic charter.”[159] This pluralism should not relate to the curriculum itself, but to the inspirations behind the faith in democracy.[160]
Maritain admitted that these were quite general principles that would not easily be worked out in reality. Nevertheless, he considered this pluralism-inspired unity to be essential to the health of democracy.[161] And while this notion runs afoul of “the plea of a ‘separation’ between State and Church wrongly and anti-politically understood, the religious traditions and schools of thought which are part of the heritage of the body politic, would simply mean for democracy to separate itself, and democratic faith, from the deepest of its living sources.”[162] As Patrick Neal observes: “To cut the practical propositions off from the various comprehensive views which are their deeper sources would be, in Maritain’s view, to render the process of education a failure.”[163]
John Hittinger remarks that “as a citizen of the world, engaged with the United Nations (UNESCO), and as a French ex-patriot in American Universities such as Princeton, Notre Dame and Chicago, Maritain was at a crossroads of new opportunities for Church-State relations.”[164] Hittinger considers Maritain’s unique contribution to church-state relations to derive from his account of history.[165] That account of history was broken up into four stages. First, there was the sacral age characterized by a) “the fact that the unity of faith was a prerequisite for political unity; and b) “the dominant dynamic idea of strength and fortitude at the service of justice.”[166] Second, the post-mediaeval centuries, or the baroque age, was a time in which the “the notion and reality of the State was gradually rising, yet the tenets of sacral civilization were more or less preserved . . . so that the notion of State-religion, for instance, then came to the fore.”[167]The third stage is the modern, or secular age, in which the normal distinction between the things which are God’s and the things which are Caesar’s was disfigured “by a most aggressive and stupid process of insulation from, and finally rejection of, God and the Gospel in the sphere of social and political life. The fruit of this we can contemplate today in the theocratic atheism of the Communist State.”[168] The fourth stage was yet to be realized. It was what he called “a new Christendom, a new Christianly inspired civilization.” This new Christendom was not a return to the Middle Ages but an “attempt to make the leaven of the Gospel quicken the depths of temporal existence.”[169]
In the new Christendom, there would be three general and immutable principles regulating church-state relations. The first derives from Maritain’s particular view of the human person: “The human person is both part of the body politic and superior to it through what is supra-temporal, or eternal, in him, in his spiritual interests and his final destination.”[170]That means that “both society itself and its common good are indirectly subordinated to the perfect accomplishment of the person and his supra-temporal aspirations as to an end of another order – an end which transcends the body politic.”[171]Within the natural order, “the common good of the body politic implies an intrinsic though indirect ordination to something which transcends it.”[172] For the Christian, “the direct ordination of the human person to God transcends every created common good.”[173] Thus, as both the natural order and revelation reveal what Maritain called “the primacy of the spiritual,” the body politic has an “indirect subordination . . . to the supratemporal values to which human life is appendent . . . [and] to the supernatural end to which the human person is directly ordained.”[174]
In the new Christendom, the second principle of church-state relations would be the freedom of the church. To the unbeliever, the Church is an organized body “concerned with the religious creeds and needs of a number of his fellow-men,” and which is committed to spiritual values that respect the supra-temporal goods as well as the natural order and the moral heritage of mankind. Thus, even though the democratically-minded unbeliever does not embrace the values of the Church, nevertheless, he “acknowledges as a normal and necessary thing the freedom of the Church, or of the Churches.”[175] To the believer, “the Church is a supernatural society,” the “body of Christ supernaturally made up of the human race.”[176] As such, the State is prohibited from interfering with the Church, especially as it relates to “the freedom of the Church to teach and preach and worship, the freedom of the Gospel, the freedom of the word of God.”[177]
The third principle would be the relationship of the church to the body politic. It is here, according the Maritain, that we are confronted with the distinction made by Christ between the things which are God’s and the things which are Caesar’s.[178] But the distinction is made according to the order of values: the things that are God’s are better and superior to the things that are Caesar’s.[179] Maritain understood “superior” not as domination, but rather as “a higher place in the scale of values, a higher dignity.”[180] Simply put, “the order of eternal life is superior in itself to the order of temporal life.”[181] Thus, not only is the Church free, but by virtue of its spiritual character, is superior over the body politic or the state.[182] But since “the same human person is simultaneously a member of that society which is the Church and a member of that society which is the body politic, an absolute division between those two societies would mean that the human person must be cut in two.”[183]
Maritain respected the principle of the separation between church and state. In fact, this very distinction was made possible by Christianity itself and the New Testament’s admonition to distinguish the things that are Caesar’s from the things that are God’s.[184] But he also thought it necessary that church and state cooperate.[185] However, “the root requirement for a sound mutual cooperation between the Church and the body politic is not the unity of a religio-political body . . . but the very unity of the human person, simultaneously a member of the body politic and of the Church, if he freely adheres to her.”[186] Specifically, Maritain laid out six terms of cooperation, but all assumed the superiority of the Church “not by virtue of a coercion exercized on the civil power, but by virtue of the spiritual enlightenment conveyed to the souls of the citizens, who must freely bear judgment, according to their own personal conscience, on every matter pertaining to the political common good.”[187] First, the body politic and the State owe to the Church attention to their own duties, attention to the natural law, creating and securing condition for the peaceful enjoyment of all rights.[188]Second, there should be a public acknowledgment of God, including a preference for Christian confessions, but without altogether disregarding the views of non-Christians.[189] Third, while neither the state nor the body politic have an obligation to advance any temporal advantage of the church, they should help in its spiritual mission.[190] Fourth, the state should seek to dissolve any religious sect that aimed at destroying the base of common life and civic friendship.[191]Fifth, full freedom should be granted to the Church to leaven society with the grace and truth of the gospel.[192] And finally, the State should be willing and able to ask the Church to aid in “all the activities which aim at enlightening human minds and life.”[193]
Maritain developed his perspective on world government in the immediate context of a nascent nuclear age and an escalating Cold War. The very real threat of man’s complete destruction strongly impacted this aspect of his political theology: “The problem of World Government – I would prefer to say, of a genuinely political organization of the world – is the problem of lasting peace. And in a sense we might say that the problem of lasting peace is simply the problem of peace, meaning that mankind is confronted today with the alternative: either lasting peace or a serious risk of total destruction.”[194] Any notion of world government would have to address the two fundamental obstacles to lasting peace: the alleged sovereignty of the several states and an economic interdependence occurring at “this present irrational stage of political evolution.”[195] Moreover, the only type of world government that would be legitimate would be one that was recognized and was based upon the fundamental distinction between the nation, the body politic, and the state: “We must come down to the roots, that is, we must get rid of the Hegelian or pseudo-Hegelian concept of the State as a person, a supra-human person, and understand that the State is only a part (a topmost part, but a part) and an instrumental agency in the body politic, – thus bringing the State back to its true, normal, and necessary functions as well as to its genuine dignity.”[196]
Maritain envisioned two ways of approaching world government. The first was what he called the merely governmental theory. This theory, by not distinguishing the nation, the body politic, and the state, would reduce the whole matter to the sole and exclusive consideration of the state and government. This merely governmental theory is clearly faulty: “The quest of such a Superstate capping nations is nothing else, in fact, than the quest of the old utopia of a universal Empire. This utopia was pursued in past ages in the form of the Empire of one single nation over all others. The pursuit, in the modern age, of an absolute World Superstate would be the pursuit of a democratic multinational Empire, which would be no better than the others.”[197]
In contrast to the former is the fully political theory. The merely governmental theory would fail “because from the very start it would pursue an analogy between State with respect to individuals and World State with respect to particular States in the mere perspective of the topmost power.”[198] But the fully political theory would pursue world government based upon the fundamental requirements of political life and freedom, namely, those basic elements contained in a genuine and Christian political theology. In the end, if there was ever to be a world government (which Maritain did not expect to see in his day and strongly cautioned against any attempt to implement it too hastily), it would be only because the “peoples of the earth will have been brought to a common will to live together.”[199] And that common will would be manifested in the world-wide common task of the conquest of freedom.[200] Finally, in his vision of world government, the independence of nations would not be jeopardized but assured.[201] To help assure the health of nations, he advocated a “Supra-National Advisory Council,” deprived of any power and having no juridical connection with the United Nations, but “an organized international opinion” to which governments could turn for moral guidance.[202]
During the Nazi occupation during World War II, the U. S. Army Air Force airdropped Maritain’s books over France to help spread his message of truth and hope. Though no longer facing fascist totalitarianism, the world today can still be challenged by the teachings of this articulate defender of the dignity and rights of man. His lasting influence can be seen in part by the prevalence of societies in his honor, including the Jacques Maritain Center at Notre Dame University, the American Maritain Association, and the Canadian Jacques Maritain Association, as well as his profound influence on thinkers such as John Courtney Murray.[203] Critics have sometimes claimed that he was overly optimistic. Richard Crane replies that he was simply “a man of abundant Christian hope living in an age that seemed designed to shatter such hope.”[204] Maritain himself rejected any notion of naïve optimism. But he considered a depressed, cynical pessimism an equal error: “To wish paradise on earth is stark naïveté. But it is surely better than not to wish any paradise at all.”[205]
It would be an oversight to not at least mention in closing Jacques Maritain’s genuine affection for America, which, as Raymond Dennehy describes it, was more like “praise bordering on hagiography.”[206] To Maritain, the American experiment in liberty provided justification for his realist optimism, though it should be noted that his enthusiasm resulted more from the promise of the institutions and traditions in America, the idea of democracy, than from any naïve conclusion that in America democracy had somehow “arrived.”[207] Nevertheless, it was in America that he found safe haven during World War II. And it was in America that he found a reason to hope that man could indeed construct a just and pluralistic society “by the people and for the people.”
To Maritain, America was founded upon principles very similar to the ones he espoused. In his words, the “Constitution can be described as an outstanding lay Christian document tinged with the philosophy of the day. The spirit and inspiration of this great political Christian document is basically repugnant to the idea of making human society stand aloof from God and from any religious faith.”[208] He saw in America a political tradition “built upon a sharp distinction between Church and State combined with their actual cooperation.”[209] It was that cooperation, and the inclusion of religious faith in human society, that he hoped would provide for the infusion of the grace of the gospel into the body politic. It was this theological vision, a realization of the Church set free to energize society with the light of the gospel, that he hoped would inspire a new age of Christian humanism, promote a stable, pluralistic democracy based upon love and civic friendship, and put a permanent end to the types of gruesome wars with which the world had become all too familiar. In 1879, Pope Leo’s call was for “carefully selected teachers [who would] endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others.”[210] Among the greatest of those who answered that call was the Christian humanist Jacques Maritain.
[1] Ralph McInerny, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 17.
[2] McInerny, Rich Hours, 142.
[3] Richard Francis Crane, “Maritain’s True Humanism.” First Things 150 (February 2005): 20.
[4] Crane, 18.
[5] John W. Cooper, The Theology of Freedom: The Legacy of Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 3.
[6] Cooper, 3. See also Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, translated by Joseph W. Evans(University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 99-126.
[7] Robert P. Kraynak, “The Christian Democracy of Glenn Tinder and Jacques Maritain.” Perspectives on Political Science 27, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 69-78.
[8] Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics, Third Edition (London: Robert Maclehose and Company,1954), 68.
[9] Ralph McInerny, A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas: A Handbook for Peeping Thomists (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 21.
[10] Maritain, Scholasticism, 191.
[11] Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, Translated by Doris C. Anson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 64.
[12] Maritain, Scholasticism, 197.
[13] McInerny, First Glance, 62.
[14] Ibid.,60-61.
[15] McInerny, Rich Hours, 164.
[16] John F. X. Knasas, “Aquinas and the Liberationist Critique of Maritain’s New Christendom.” The Thomist 52, no.2 (April 1988): 248-49.
[17] Maritain, Scholasticism, vii.
[18] Maritain, Rights of Man, 52.
[19] McInerny, Very Rich, 145.
[20] “Angelism” was Maritain’s moniker for Descartes’ epistemology, an attempt to bypass the senses and acquire knowledge by direct intuition. See Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther-Descartes-Rousseau (London: Sheed & Ward, 1936), 60-61.
[21] Maritain, Scholasticism, 3.
[22] Ibid., 4.
[23] Ibid., 8.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid., 44.
[26] Ibid., 39-40.
[27] Ibid., 43.
[28] McInerny, Very Rich, 122.
[29] Maritain, Scholasticism, 44.
[30] Crane, 17.
[31] “Individuality” and “personality” are distinguishable in the mind, but not in reality. As Maritain said: “There is not in me one reality, called my individual, and another reality, called my person. One and the same being is an individual, in one sense, and a person, in another sense. Our whole being is an individual by reason of that in us which derives from matter, and a person by reason of that in us which derives from spirit. Similarly, the whole of a painting is a physico-chemical mixture by reason of the coloring stuff of which it is made, and the whole of it is a work of beauty by reason of the painter’s art.” See Joseph W. Evans and Leo R. Ward, editors, The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain: Selected Readings (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 9.
[32] Maritain, Scholasticism, 47.
[33] Maritain, Scholasticism, 47.
[34] Donald DeMarco, “The Christian Personalism of Jacques Maritain.” Taken from the Summer 1991 issue of Faith and Reason. Available at http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/FR91201.HTM. Accessed November 6, 2005.
[35] George P. Klubertanz and Maurice R. Holloway, Being and God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Being and to Natural Theology (St Louis: Saint Louis University, 1963), 76-77.
[36] See DeMarco.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Evans and Ward, 7.
[39] Ibid., 8.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Evans and Ward, 8.
[42] Maritain, Scholasticism, 55-56.
[43] Maritain, Rights of Man, 5.
[44] Ibid., 7.
[45] Maritain, Scholasticism, 54.
[46] Ibid., 55.
[47] Michael A. Smith, Human Dignity and the Common Good in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition (Queenston, Ontario: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 18.
[48] Maritain, Scholasticism, 65.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Ibid., 69.
[51] Ibid., 68.
[52] Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 1.
[53] Ibid., 2.
[54] Ibid., 4.
[55] Ibid., 3.
[56] Ibid., 4.
[57] Ibid., 6.
[58] Ibid., 9.
[59] Ibid., 10.
[60] Ibid.
[61] Ibid., 13.
[62] Smith, 156.
[63] Maritain, Man and the State, 13.
[64] Ibid., 19.
[65] Ibid., 26-27.
[66] Jacques Maritain, “The Concept of Sovereignty.” The American Political Science Review 44, no.2 (June 1950): 343-44.
[67] Ibid., 355.
[68] Ibid., 348-49.
[69]. What is meant by Thomistic divine essentialism is the idea that God acts according to his immutable nature, not merely according to raw, omnipotent, arbitrary will (divine voluntarism).
[70] James Schall, Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 73-74.
[71] Maritain, “Sovereignty,” 355.
[72] Maritain, Man and the State, 54.
[73] Maritain, Rights of Man, 39.
[74] Ibid., 42.
[75] Ibid., 40.
[76] Ibid., 42.
[77] Ibid., 43.
[78] Ibid., 54.
[79] Maritain, Scholasticism, 55.
[80] Maritain, Man and the State, 55.
[81] Ibid., 62.
[82] Ibid.
[83] Ibid., 55.
[84] Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason, chapter 11, “The End of Machiavellianism.” Available online at The Jacques Maritain Center of Notre Dame, http://www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/range11.htm. Accessed November 6, 2005.
[85] Ibid.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Maritain, Man and the State, 56-57.
[88] Ibid., 57.
[89] Maritain, Range of Reason.
[90] Maritain, Man and the State, 58.
[91] Maritain, Rights of Man, 58.
[92] Maritain, Man and the State, 59.
[93] Ibid., 60.
[94] Ibid.
[95] Maritain, Range of Reason.
[96] Maritain, Man and the State, 54.
[97] Ibid., 65.
[98] Ibid.
[99] Ibid., 66.
[100] Ibid., 68-69.
[101] Ibid., 70-71.
[102] Ibid., 71.
[103] Ibid., 74-75.
[104] Ibid., 80.
[105] Ibid., 85.
[106] Ibid., 86. Emphasis added.
[107] Ibid., 87.
[108] Ibid., 89.
[109] Ibid., 89-90.
[110] Ibid., 91.
[111] Gregory Doolan, “Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the First Principles of the Natural Law,” In Reassessing the Liberal State: Reading Maritain’s Man and the State, ed., Timothy Fuller and John P. Hittinger (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 139.
[112] Ibid., 131.
[113] Maritain, Man and the State, 84.
[114] Ibid., 90.
[115] McInerny, Rich Hours, 113. John of the Cross was a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and poet. Maritain wrote: “St. Paul and St. John of the Cross teach us what is the supreme freedom of exultation and of autonomy by saying that where the spirit of God abides, there is also liberty (II Cor., 3, 17), and that if you are led by the spirit, you are no longer under the law (Gal., 5, 18); that those that are moved by the spirit of God, being really sons of God, are really and perfectly free, and that they enter into the very life of the Divine Persons. Such then is here below the term of the progress of the soul, the penultimate end, wherein even before having that vision, which union of a corruptible body forbids, time joins eternity. It is the freedom of God Himself that the perfect spiritual man enjoys, being independent of all external constraint in so far as he depends only on the divine causality, which is extraneous to nothing.” See Maritain, Scholasticism, 112.
[116] Maritain, Man and the State, 95.
[117] Maritain, Rights of Man, 65.
[118] Maritain, Man and the State, 94. Robert Kranak comments: “With these historic shifts in mind, Maritain apparently sees himself as developing for the first time the proper mix of rights and duties in Christian natural law. The result is a political theology that provides a Christian basis for “a democracy of the person.” In this conception, political authority in general is ordained by God, while particular rulers are chosen by the people. The rights of persons in all spheres are protected as sacred because persons are autonomous agents made in the image of God. There is thus a necessary harmony, even a moral equivalence, between democracy and Christianity when the two are properly understood.” See Kraynak, 69-78.
[119] Maritain, Man and the State, 96.
[120] Maritain, Rich Hours, 113-14.
[121] Ward and Evans, 62.
[122] Ibid., 63.
[123] Ibid., 66.
[124] Ibid. Maritain was not denying the obvious reality of racial prejudice even among Christians but was pointing out that bigotry was radically inconsistent with Christianity.
[125] Ibid., 164.
[126] Ibid., 165.
[127] Ibid.
[128] Ibid.
[129] Maritain, Rights of Man, 20.
[130] Ibid.
[131] Ibid., 20-21.
[132] Maritain, Man and the State, 112. Maritain was emphatic in distancing his view of “the people” from that of Rousseau. See Scholasticism, 85-86.
[133] Jacques Maritain, “The Achievement of Co-Operation Among Men of Different Creeds.” The Journal of Religion 21, no.4 (October 1941): 364.
[134] Ibid. Compare with John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xviii.
[135] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
[136] Maritain, Man and the State, 77.
[137] Ibid., 78.
[138] Ibid.
[139] Ibid.
[140] Maritain, Man and the State, 113. In this regard, Maritain advocated “the view that a general Christian education for the nation, a general development of Christian habits and Christian instinct is, in fact, a condition for the political success of democracy.” See Scholasticism, 90.
[141] Maritain, Man and the State, 113-14.
[142] Ibid., 110-11.
[143] Maritain, “Co-Operation,” 365-66, 369. For a democracy to function properly, certain truths must be univocally held, such as “the existence of God, the sanctity of truth, the value and necessity of good will, the dignity of the person, the spirituality and immortality of the soul.” But in a pluralist society, these univocal concepts are understood analogically.
[144] Maritain, Man and the State, 110.
[145] Ibid., 111.
[146] Ibid.
[147] Maritain, “Co-Operation,” 366. Maritain explained elsewhere that the “Barthian” positions included a return “to the pure pessimism of primitive Protestantism,” as well as a strict denial of the efficacy of natural theology, both in stark contrast to the Thomist position he defended. See Maritain, Integral Humanism, 69-71.
[148] Maritain, Man and the State, 114.
[149] Ibid., 115.
[150] Ibid., 116-17.
[151] Ibid., 117.
[152] Ibid., 118. Drawing upon Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, Maritain was clear that it was not up to Christians to resolve the pluralist tension in a democratic society but to contribute to it. See Crane, 21.
[153] Ibid.
[154] Ibid., 119.
[155] Ibid., 120.
[156] Ibid., 120-21.
[157] Ibid., 121.
[158] Ibid.
[159] Ibid., 122.
[160] Ibid., 123.
[161] Maritain, Scholasticism, 89.
[162] Maritain, Man and the State, 125-26.
[163] Patrick Neal, “Three Readings of Political Liberalism: Rawls, Maritain, and Crick.” Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no.2 (2000): 231.
[164] John P. Hittinger, “The Cooperation of Church and State: Maritain’s Argument from the Unity of the Person.” In Fuller and Hittinger, 180.
[165] Ibid., 183.
[166] Maritain, Man and the State, 157.
[167] Ibid., 158-59.
[168] Ibid., 159.
[169] Ibid.
[170] Ibid., 148.
[171] Ibid.
[172] Ibid., 149.
[173] Ibid.
[174] Ibid., 149-50.
[175] Ibid., 150.
[176] Ibid., 151.
[177] Ibid., 151-52.
[178] Ibid., 152.
[179] Ibid., 152-53.
[180] Ibid., 153.
[181] Ibid.
[182] Ibid.
[183] Ibid., 153-54.
[184] See Hittinger, 183.
[185] Maritain, Man and the State, 154.
[186] Ibid., 160.
[187] Ibid., 164.
[188] Ibid., 171-72.
[189] Ibid., 172-73.
[190] Ibid., 173. Maritain explained: “The Catholic Church insists upon the principle that truth must have precedence over error and that the true religion, when it is known, should be aided in its spiritual mission in preference to religions whose message is more or less faltering and in which error is mingled with truth. . . . It would, however, be very wrong to conclude herefrom that this principle can only be applied by claiming for the true religion the favors of an absolutist power or the assistance of the soldiery, or that the Catholic Church claims of modern societies the privileges which it enjoyed in a civilization of a sacral type, like that of the Middle Ages.” Rights of Man, 25-26.
[191] Ibid., 174.
[192] Ibid., 177.
[193] Ibid., 178.
[194] Ibid., 189.
[195] Ibid., 194.
[196] Ibid., 195.
[197] Ibid., 204.
[198] Ibid.
[199] Ibid., 206.
[200] Ibid., 207.
[201] Ibid., 211.
[202] Ibid., 213-215.
[203] Robert W. McElroy, The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contribution of John Courtney Murray (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 11, 79-80.
[204] Crane, 21.
[205] Maritain, Scholasticism, 153.
[206] Raymond Dennehy, “Can Jacques Maritain Save Liberal Democracy from Itself?” In Truth Matters: Essays in Honor of Jacques Maritain, ed., John C. Trapani, Jr. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 258. Also see generally, Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).
[207] Ibid.
[208] Maritain, Man and the State, 183-84.
[209] Hittinger, 181.
[210] Aeterni Patris available online at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13cph.htm. Accessed November 11, 2005.