Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882–28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pope Paul VI presented his "Message to Men of Thought and of Science" at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor.Maritain's interest and works spanned many aspects of philosophy, including aesthetics, political theory, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, education, liturgy and ecclesiology.

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Maritain was born in Paris, the son of Paul Maritain, who was a lawyer, and his wife Geneviève Favre, the daughter of Jules Favre, and was reared in a liberal Protestant milieu. He was sent to the Lycée Henri IV. Later, he attended the Sorbonne, studying the natural sciences; chemistry, biology and physics.

At the Sorbonne, he met Raïssa Oumancoff, a Russian Jewish émigré. They married in 1904. Furthermore, she, a noted poet and mystic, was his intellectual partner who participated with his search for truth. Raissa's sister, Vera Oumancoff, lived with Jacques and Raissa for almost all their married life.

Soon, he became disenchanted with scientism at the Sorbonne, for it could not, for him, address the larger existential issues of life. In light of this disillusionment Jacques and Raïssa made a pact to commit suicide together if they could not discover some deeper meaning to life within a year. Happily they were spared from following through on this because, at the urging of Charles Péguy, they attended the lectures of Henri Bergson at the Collège de France. Along with his deconstructionism of scientism, Bergson instilled in them "the sense of the absolute." Then, through the influence of Léon Bloy, they converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1906.

In the fall of 1907 the Maritains moved to Heidelberg, where Jacques studied biology under Hans Driesch. Hans Driesch’s theory of neo-vitalism attracted Jacques because of its affinity with Henri Bergson. During this time, Raïssa fell ill, and during her convalescence, their spiritual advisor, a Dominican friar named Fr. Humbert Clérissac, introduced her to the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. So enthusiastic, she, in turn, exhorted her husband to examine the saint’s writings. In Thomas, he found a number of insights and ideas that he had believed all along, he wrote:

"Thenceforth, in affirming to myself, without chicanery or diminution, the authentic value of the reality of our human instruments of knowledge, I was already a Thomist without knowing itWhen several months later I came to the Summa Theologiae, I would construct no impediment to its luminous flood."

From the Angelic Doctor (the honorary title of St. Aquinas), he was led to "The Philosopher" as St. Thomas christened him, Aristotle. Still later to further his intellectual development, he read the neo-scholastics.

Beginning in 1912, Maritain taught at the Collège Stanislas and later moved to the Institut Catholique de Paris. For the 1916—1917 academic year, he taught at the Petit Séminaire de Versailles. In 1933, he gave his first lectures in North America in Toronto at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. He also taught at Columbia University; at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago; at the University of Notre Dame, and at Princeton University.

From 1945 to 1948, he was the French ambassador to the Vatican.

Afterwards, he returned to Princeton University where he achieved the "Elysian status" (as he puts it) as a professor emeritus in 1956. Raissa Maritain died in 1960. After her death, Jacques published her journal under the title "Raissa's Journal." From 1961, Maritain lived with the Little Brothers of Jesus in Toulouse, France. He had had an influence in the order since its foundation in 1933. He became a Little Brother in 1970.

Learning the death of his friend Maritain, Pope Paul VI cried. Jacques and Raïssa Maritain are buried in the cemetery of Kolbsheim, a little French village where he had spent many summers at the estate of his friends, Antoinette and Alexander Grunelius.

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The foundation of Maritain’s thought is Aristotle, St. Thomas and the Thomistic commentators, especially John of St. Thomas. He is eclectic in his use of these sources. 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. He promoted philosophy as the queen of sciences.

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, its methodology usurping the role of reason and philosophy. Science was supplanting the humanities in importance.

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:

"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 proposed here for the reader's acceptance not 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".

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 École Libre des Hautes Études, a kind of university in exile that was, at the same time, the center of Gaullist 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.

Many of his American papers are held by the University of Notre Dame, which established The Jacques Maritain Center in 1957. The Cercle d'Etudes Jacques & Raïssa Maritain is an association founded by the philosopher himself in 1962 in Kolbsheim (near Strasbourg, France), where the couple is also buried. The purpose of these centers is to encourage study and research of Maritain’s thought and expand upon them. It is also absorbed in translating and editing his writings.

Metaphysics and Epistemology more less

Maritain's philosophy is based on the view that metaphysics is prior to epistemology. Being is first apprehended implicitly in sense experience, and is known in two ways. First, being is known reflexively by abstraction from sense experience. One experiences a particular being, e.g. a cup, a dog, etc. and through reflexion ("bending back") on the judgement, e.g. "this is a dog", one recognizes that the object in question is an existent. Second, in light of attaining being reflexively through apprehension of sense experience one may arrive at what Maritain calls "an Intuition of Being". For Maritian this is point of departure for metaphysics, without the intuition of being one cannot be a metaphysician at all. The intuition of being involves rising to the apprehension of ens secundum quod est ens (being insofar as it is a being). In Existence and the Existent he explains:

"It is being, attained or perceived at the summit of an abstractive intellection, of an eidetic or intensive visualization which owes its purity and power of illumination only to the fact that the intellect, one day, was stirred to its depths and trans-illuminated by the impact of the act of existing apprehended in things, and because it was quickened to the point of receiving this act, or hearkening to it, within itself, in the intelligible and super-intelligible integrity of the tone particular to it." (p. 20)

In view of this priority given to metaphysics, Maritain advocates an epistemology he calls "Critical Realism". Maritain's epistemology is not "critical" in Kant's sense, which held that one could only know anything after undertaking a thorough critique of one's cognitive abilities. Rather, it is critical in the sense that it is not a naive or non-philosophical realism, but one that is defended by way of reason. Against Kant's critical project Maritain argues that epistemology is reflexive, you can only defend a theory of knowledge in light of knowledge you have already attained. Consequently, the critical question is not the question of modern philosophy how do we pass from what is perceived to what is. Rather, "Since the mind, from the very start, reveals itself as warranted in its certitude by things and measured by an esse independent of itself, how are we to judge if, how, on what conditions, and to what extent it is so both in principle and in the various moments of knowledge?"

In contrast idealism inevitably ends up in contradiction, since it does not recognize the universal scope of the first principles of identity, contradiction, and finality. These become merely laws of thought or language, but not of being, which opens the way to contradictions being instantiated in reality.

Maritain's metaphysics ascends from this account of being to a critique of the philosophical aspects of modern science, through analogy to an account of the existence and nature of God as it is known philosophically and through mystical experience.

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I. (His most important and influential works.)

The Degrees of Knowledge, orig. 1932
Integral Humanism, orig. 1936
A Preface to Metaphysics, engl. 1962
Education at the Crossroads, engl. 1942
The Range of Reason, engl. 1952
The Person and the Common Good, fr. 1947
Approaches to God, fr. 1953
Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, engl. 1953
Moral Philosophy,
Introduction to Philosophy, Christian Classics, Inc., Westminster, MD, 1st. 1930, 1991.
Existence and the Existent, (fr. 1947) trans. by Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan, Image Books division of Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1948, Image book, 1956. ISBN 9780837180786
Man and The State, (orig.) University of Chicago Press, Chicago, ILL, 1951.
The Peasant of the Garonne, An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time, trans. Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, NY, 1968; orig. 1966.
God and the Permission of Evil, trans. Joseph W. Evans, The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, WI, 1966 (orig. 1963).
Art and Scholasticism with other essays, Sheed and Ward, London, 1947

II. (original)

La philosophie bergsonienne, 1914 (1948)
Eléments de philosophie, 2 Bd.e, Paris 1920/23
Art et scolastique, 1920
Théonas ou les entretiens d’un sage et de deux philosophes sur diverses matières inégalement actuelles, Paris, Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1921
Antimoderne, Paris, Édition de la Revue des Jeunes, 1922
Réflexions sur l’intelligence et sur sa vie propre, Paris, Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1924.
Trois réformateurs : Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, avec six portraits, Paris [Plon], 1925
Réponse à Jean Cocteau, 1926
Une opinion sur Charles Maurras et le devoir des catholiques, Paris [Plon], 1926
Primauté du spirituel, 1927
Pourquoi Rome a parlé (coll.), Paris, Spes, 1927
Quelques pages sur Léon Bloy, Paris 1927
Clairvoyance de Rome (coll.), Paris, Spes, 1929
Le docteur angélique, Paris, Paul Hartmann, 1929
Religion et culture, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1930 (1946)
Le thomisme et la civilisation, 1932
Distinguer pour unir ou Les degrés du savoir, Paris 1932
Le songe de Descartes, Suivi de quelques essais, Paris 1932
De la philosophie chrétienne, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1933
Du régime temporel et de la liberté, Paris, DDB, 1933
Sept leçons sur l'être et les premiers principes de la raison spéculative, Paris 1934
Frontières de la poésie et autres essais, Paris 1935
La philosophie de la nature, Essai critique sur ses frontières et son objet, Paris 1935 (1948)
Lettre sur l’indépendance, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1935.
Science et sagesse, Paris 1935
Humanisme intégral. Problèmes temporels et spirituels d'une nouvelle chrétienté; zunächst spanisch 1935), Paris (Fernand Aubier), 1936 (1947)
Les Juifs parmi les nations, Paris, Cerf, 1938
Questions de conscience : essais et allocutions, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1938
La personne humaine et la societé, Paris 1939
Le crépuscule de la civilisation, Paris, Éd. Les Nouvelles Lettres, 1939
Quattre essais sur l'ésprit dans sa crudition charnelle, Paris 1939 (1956)
De la justice politique, Notes sur le présente guerre, Paris 1940
Scholasticism and politics, New York 1940
A travers le désastre, New York 1941 (1946)
Conféssion de foi, New York 1941
Ransoming the time (Redeeming the time), New York 1941
La pensée de St.Paul, New York 1941 (Paris 1947)
Les Droits de l'Homme et la Loi naturelle, New York 1942 (Paris 1947)
Saint Thomas and the problem of evil, Milwaukee 1942;
Essays in Thomism, New York 1942;
Christianisme et démocratie, New York 1943 (Paris 1945)
Education at the crossroad, New Haven 1943
Principes d'une politique humaniste, New York 1944 (Paris 1945);
De Bergson à Thomas d'Aquin, Essais de Métaphysique et de Morale, New York 1944 (Paris 1947)
A travers la victoire, Paris 1945;
Messages 1941-1944, New York 1945;
Pour la justice, Articles et discours 1940-1945, New York 1945;
Le sort de l'homme, Neuchâtel 1945;
Court traité de l'existence et de l'existent, Paris 1947;
La personne et le bien commun, Paris 1947;
Raison et raisons, Essais détachés, Paris 1948
La signification de l'athéisme contemporain, Paris 1949
Man and state, Chicago 1951
Neuf leçons sur les notions premières de la philosophie morale, Paris 1951

Approches de Dieu, Paris 1953.

L'Homme et l'Etat (engl.: Man and State, 1951) Paris, PUF, 1953

Creative intuition in Art and Poetry (engl.), 1953

On the philosophy of history, ed. J.W. Evans, New York 1957

Truth and human fellowship, Princeton 1957

Reflections on America, New York 1958

Pour une philosophie de l'éducation, Paris 1959

Le philosophe dans la Cité, Paris 1960

The responsibility of the artist, New York 1960;

La philosophie morale, Vol. I: Examen historique et critique des grands systèmes, Paris 1960

Man's approach to God, Latrobe/Pennsylvania 1960

On the use of philosophy, Princeton 1961

A preface to metaphysics, New York 1962

Dieu et la permission du mal, 1963

Carnet de notes, Paris, DDB, 1965

L'intuition créatrice dans l'art et dans la poésie, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1966 (engl. 1953)

Le paysan de la Garonne. Un vieux laïc s’interroge à propos du temps présent, Paris, DDB, 1966

Challenges and renewals, ed. J.W. Evans/L.R. Ward, Notre Dame/Ind. 1966

The education of man, The educational philosophy of J.M., ed. D./I. Gallagher, Notre Dame/Ind. 1967

De la grâce et de l'humanité de Jésus, 1967

De l'Église du Christ. La personne de l'église et son personnel, Paris 1970

Approches sans entraves, posthum 1973.

Oeuvres complètes de Jacques et Raissa Maritain, 16 Bde., 1982-1999.

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