Jacques Maritain

Abstract

For many of us Jacques Maritain embodied what hope remains for this dark world. His death in Toulouse on April 28, 1973, at the age of ninety, has left us bereft, as if he had been both our godfather and our godson. His important place in the history of human thought was established long before most of us knew him personally. For example, I was nineteen, in my first year at Princeton, when I first met him, and he was sixty-seven, recently retired from the French Embassy to the Holy See. We became close friends and remained so for twenty-four years. His association with this review was long and affectionate as was his association with the University of Notre Dame, which takes pride in its Jacques Maritain Center. But apart from these personal associations is the recognition due to his works of the mind and spirit. As long as reason was regarded as an adequate tool for knowing (and for knowing, among other things, other ways of knowing), the Western world generally preferred some form of the mind-matter dualism. Semitic religions, when they came to take up these modes of expression, discovered that they could subscribe to no other basic philosophy. Profiting from the chemistry of their own heresies, as well as by the discomfort which Islam had experienced in attempting to bring Aristotelian dualism into harmony with Koranic dualism, mediaeval Christianity sought a summation of theology in which no part of reality would be overlooked. Precisely such a summation is believed by many, including myself, to have been supplied by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. But just as the theological content of this particular summation, the systematized expression of one infinitely rich, indeed inexhaustible, Divine Revelation, was meant to germinate further speculation, so was its philosophical content. I know of no mind that examined the philosophical content of the Thomistic synthesis with greater precision, interpreted it with greater probity, advanced its growth with greater genius, than the mind of Jacques Maritain. There is a timelessness about his work simply because it bears the imprint of the whole history of thought. To attack or defend it seriously is to attack or defend any of many categories: the classical