Rescuing Maritain from His Reception History: A Reappraisal of William T. Cavanaugh’s Critique in Torture and Eucharist

Abstract

The influential writings on church and state of philosopher Jacques Maritain, who died in 1973, possessed a mid-twentieth century hopefulness about a new birth of freedom and a lay-led Christian humanism. In light of the next twenty-five years of experience—particularly that of the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile—William T. Cavanaugh, in his 1998 book Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ, argued that Maritain’s work facilitated the marginalization of the faith in the modern nation-state. Another quarter-century later, this essay reappraises Cavanaugh’s criticisms of Maritain’s views on the nature of the Church, the role of the laity, and the power of the state. It argues that while Cavanaugh’s concerns about sovereignty, subsidiarity, and formation have been vindicated, a careful reading of Maritain’s lesser-known and later works suffice to justify Maritain’s views of the laity and the church. Maritain remains a vital resource for theologians who seek to avoid both, on the right hand, a resurgent integralism and Christian nationalism and, on the left hand, a relativizing of the Gospel in what Maritain called “kneeling before the world.