Jacques Maritain

Jacques Maritain (November 18, 1882 – April 28, 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. He was a convert to Catholicism and the author of more than 60 books. He is responsible for reviving St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times. Pope Paul VI, a long time friend and mentor of Maritain, presented his ?Message to Men of Thought and of Science? at the close of Vatican II to Maritain.

Work

The foundation of Maritain?s thought is Aristotle and St. Thomas. He is eclectic in his use of them both. Maritain?s philosophy is one based, like his champions, on evidence of being first by the senses and second that which is acquired by an understanding of first principles (metaphysics). Fundamentally, Maritain is a metaphysician who defended philosophy as a science against those who would degrade it and promoted philosophy as the Queen of sciences that has the duty to correct errors of the secondary hence materialistic sciences.

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In 1910, Jacques Maritain?s completed his first contribution to modern philosophy, a 28 page article titled, ?Reason and Modern Science? published in Revue de Philosophie, (June issue). In it, he warned that science was becoming a divinity and it methodology usurping the role of reason and philosophy. Science was supplanting the humanities in importance.

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In 1917, a committee of French bishops commissioned Jacques to write a series of textbooks to be used in Catholic colleges and seminaries. He wrote and completed only one of these projects titled Elements de Philosophie (Introduction of Philosophy) in 1920. It has been a standard text ever since in many Catholic seminaries. He wrote in his introduction:

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::"If the philosophy of Aristotle, as revived and enriched by St. Thomas and his school, may rightly be called the Christian philosophy, both because the church is never weary of putting it forward as the only true philosophy and because it harmonizes perfectly with the truths of faith, nevertheless it is not proposed here for the reader's acceptance because it is Christian, but because it is demonstrably true. This agreement between a philosophic system founded by a pagan and the dogmas of revelation is no doubt an external sign, an extra-philosophic guarantee of its truth; but from its own rational evidence, that it derives its authority as a philosophy".

Related Topics:
Aristotle - St. Thomas - Christian philosophy

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Up to and during WWII, Jacques Maritain protested the policies of the Vichy government while teaching at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Canada. "Moving to New York, Maritain became deeply involved in rescue activities, seeking to bring persecuted and threatened academics, many of them Jews, to America. He was instrumental in founding the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes, a kind of university in exile that was, at the same time, the center of Guallist resistance in the United States". (1) After the war, he tried unsuccessfully to have the Pope speak on the issue of anti-semitism and the evils of the Holocaust.

Related Topics:
WWII - Vichy - Pope - Anti-semitism - The Holocaust

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His papers are held by the University of Notre Dame which established The Jacques Maritain Center in 1957. The purpose of the center is to encourage study and research of Maritain?s thought and expand upon them. It is also absorbed in translating and editing his writings.

Related Topics:
University of Notre Dame - The Jacques Maritain Center - 1957

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