Justified True Belief

(●) A student who promised the woman he loved that they would die together if the world had no meaning, and who became the philosopher who taught the twentieth century to say human rights and mean something by it. + In 1901 two students at the Sorbonne, the old university of Paris, made each other a promise. Their names were Jacques Maritain and Raïssa Oumançoff. Neither of them was yet twenty, they were reading philosophy and the natural sciences, and what their teachers had taught them, with great confidence, was that the questions they cared about most were not real questions at all. Whether anything is truly good, whether a human life means anything, whether the mind touches reality at all: these were feelings, the Sorbonne said, not knowledge. A student can hear that in a lecture hall, shrug, and go to lunch. These two could not. So they agreed to give the world a year. If no answer came in that year, they would end their lives rather than live in a universe that made no sense. The answer came, and it took them a very long way from that afternoon. Within five years they were baptized Catholics. Within ten, Jacques had found in Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican friar who taught in Paris in the thirteenth century, a philosophy he would spend six decades unfolding. Within forty, he was the man an American publisher went to for a book explaining why the war against Hitler was a war about the dignity of the human person, and the man UNESCO, the new United Nations agency for education, science, and culture, turned to when it needed someone to explain how nations that agreed on nothing else could agree on a list of human rights. Here is the fact to hold on to, because it measures the distance he travelled better than any summary of his books. In 1928 a young Italian priest named Giovanni Battista Montini translated one of Maritain’s books into Italian. On 8 December 1965, as Pope Paul VI, that same man closed the Second Vatican Council and placed its Message to Men of Thought and Science into the hands of Maritain, then eighty-three, who had travelled from the Little Brothers’ fraternity at Toulouse to receive it.

(●) 1882 AD: Born in Paris to a lawyer and a hostess whose family had helped make France a republic, and raised with no religion he could later remember believing. + Jacques Maritain was born in Paris on 18 November 1882. His father, Paul Maritain, was a successful lawyer. His mother, Geneviève Favre, was the daughter of Jules Favre, the republican statesman who had to negotiate France’s surrender to Bismarck in 1871 and whose name was on the armistice. In that house the Third Republic was the faith. The Republic was the France that had finished with kings and intended to finish with the public power of the clergy as well, and the word for that temper is anticlerical: not merely unbelieving, but set on getting the priests out of the schools, the hospitals, and the government offices. It was a confident house, and what it was confident about was that reason and science had at last got free of the priests. His parents separated, and his mother raised him in a liberal Protestantism that carried more politics than doctrine. He went to the Lycée Henri IV, a Paris school with a long habit of sending its pupils on to the university, and from 1900 to the Sorbonne, where he took a licence, the French first degree, in philosophy, and then a second licence in the natural sciences. He was a serious student of biology, and he expected to spend his life in a laboratory, at a bench with a microscope and a notebook. What he found instead was that the teaching he admired most had a hole in the middle of it. His professors could tell him with real authority how a cell divides. What they had to say about whether his own life was worth living was that the question lay outside knowledge altogether. The hole was exactly where he lived.

(●) 1901 AD: He met Raïssa Oumançoff, they promised each other death if life had no meaning, and a philosopher named Bergson gave them a reason to wait. + Raïssa Oumançoff was born in Rostov-on-Don on 12 September 1883, in a Russian Jewish family that brought her to Paris when she was nine. She and Jacques met at the Sorbonne in 1901, and what they recognized in each other, almost at once, was the same hunger and the same despair. In her memoir We Have Been Friends Together she remembered the afternoon in the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden by the Seine where Parisians go to look at the plane trees, when they made their pact. Give the world a year to show that truth can be reached. If it cannot, refuse the world. It sounds like the sort of thing clever students say to each other before they are twenty and have forgotten by Christmas, and in most cases it would be. What makes this pact worth taking seriously is that the thing driving it was not a mood but an argument, and the argument has a name: scientism, the belief that the natural sciences are the only road to real knowledge, so that anything they cannot weigh or measure is not knowledge but mood. Scientism is not the same thing as science. A chemist can do first-rate chemistry all his life without ever claiming that chemistry is the only way to know anything, and most chemists never make the claim. But their teachers did make it, and a young person who takes it seriously and also wants to know whether his life matters has been handed a locked door. The man who found them a way round it was not looking for souls. Charles Péguy, the poet who kept a bookshop near the Sorbonne and who was then a socialist, took them, over the winters that followed, to hear Henri Bergson lecture at the Collège de France. Bergson drew crowds no other philosopher in France drew, he was no Christian, and Maritain would spend his first book arguing against him. But Bergson said, to a hall packed to the walls, that the mind can reach reality directly, by a kind of intuition, and is not confined to the sieve of measurement, which catches only what is coarse enough to be caught. That was enough. It settled nothing, and Maritain would later think Bergson had the details wrong, but it showed that the door was not locked after all, and two people who had been ready to die on that question could now afford to go looking. Jacques and Raïssa married on 26 November 1904.

(●) 1906 AD: A poor and furious novelist stood godfather at their baptism, and a Dominican put Thomas Aquinas into their hands. + Léon Bloy was a novelist who lived in real poverty, wrote as though every sentence were a grievance against the age, and ended his best-known novel with the line that the only misery in the world is not to be a saint. A friend took the Maritains to see him in 1905. They went expecting a curiosity and found a man who believed, with his whole life and not merely his opinions, that God is real and that sanctity is the only thing worth wanting. On 11 June 1906, at Saint-Jean-l’Évangéliste in Montmartre, Jacques, Raïssa, and Raïssa’s sister Véra were baptized into the Catholic Church, with Bloy as godfather to all three. Conversion did not hand him a philosophy, and for a while he went on looking for one in the laboratory. He went to Heidelberg from late 1906 to 1908 to study biology under Hans Driesch, whose work on embryos had convinced Driesch himself that living things cannot be explained as machines. The philosophy, when it came, came from a Dominican friar, Humbert Clérissac, who became their spiritual director, the priest a Catholic goes to for counsel about the state of his own soul, and who set Raïssa to reading Thomas Aquinas. She read first and told Jacques what she had found. He opened the Summa Theologiae around 1910 and discovered a mind that did what he had been told could not be done: reason carefully and without embarrassment about God, the soul, and the good, and take the evidence of the senses with complete seriousness while doing it. The hole in the middle of the Sorbonne’s teaching turned out to have been filled, six and a half centuries earlier, by a friar in the same city. Then came the settled work of a teaching life. He taught at the Collège Stanislas from 1912, moved to the Institut Catholique de Paris, became assistant professor there in 1914 and full professor in 1921, and from 1928 held the chair of logic and cosmology, which he kept until 1939. The chairs are not the part anyone remembers. In the 1920s the Maritains moved to Meudon, on the hill southwest of Paris, and opened their house: Thomist study circles, which is to say reading groups working in the line of Thomas Aquinas, an annual retreat, and Sunday afternoons where a Russian Orthodox philosopher, a Jewish painter, a converted playwright, and a Dominican theologian could all be found in the same room.

(●) 1926 AD: Rome condemned Action Française, the nationalist movement his own spiritual director had sent him to, and he sided with Rome. + Action Française was the monarchist and nationalist movement that dominated the French Catholic right for a generation: it wanted the king back, it wanted France governed for the French, and its daily paper was read by much of the clergy and a good part of the Catholic bourgeoisie. Its leader, Charles Maurras, was not a believer. He valued the Catholic Church as the oldest and most effective instrument of French order, which is to say he wanted the church the way a builder wants good scaffolding, he said so openly, and he was an open antisemite. Father Clérissac had urged Maritain toward the movement as a wall against liberal democracy, and Maritain went. He helped launch its allied review, La Revue universelle, in 1920, and the books he published in those years, Antimoderne in 1922 and Trois réformateurs in 1925, read as an assault on the whole modern settlement, on its philosophy and its politics together. In 1926 Pope Pius XI condemned the movement, put Maurras’s works on the Index of forbidden books, the Vatican’s published list of titles Catholics were not to read, and forbade Catholics to support it. The French Catholic right was stunned, and many of them simply refused to comply, on the grounds that a pope in Rome had no business telling Frenchmen how to be French. Maritain did the opposite. He defended the condemnation in print that same year in Une opinion sur Charles Maurras et le devoir des catholiques, followed it in 1927 with Primauté du spirituel, and joined four other writers in a book explaining why Rome had spoken. It cost him, and the cost is worth measuring, because it shaped everything he wrote afterwards. Men who had been his allies for fifteen years now described him as a deserter. The political philosophy he built over the following decade was, in part, the work of a man taking apart something he had helped to hold up, and he knew it.

(●) 1936 AD: Integral Humanism proposed a Christian society that does not enforce the faith, and the Spanish war cost him what friends he had left on the right. + The lectures came first, at the summer school of Santander in 1934; the book, Humanisme intégral, followed in 1936 and is the hinge of his whole political work. Christians, he argued, should stop trying to restore the medieval arrangement in which the state enforced the faith. That does not mean the alternative everyone assumes, which is to retreat into private piety, mind their own souls, and leave public life to whoever wants it. There is a third road: a civilization Christian in its inspiration and secular in its structures, where believers work alongside unbelievers for goods both can recognize, and where the church converts by witness rather than by statute. Then Spain, which turned the theory into a test he had to pass in public. Civil war broke out there in 1936, the rebel Nationalists, soon commanded by Franco, against the Republican government, and Nationalist propaganda called the fight a crusade. Most of Catholic France agreed with them, and it is not hard to see why: churches were being burned and priests murdered in the Republican zone, and the temptation to bless the other side was enormous. Maritain refused. In "De la guerre sainte," published in the Nouvelle Revue Française in July 1937, he argued that a war fought by massacre cannot be called holy whatever is written on its banners, and he wrote the preface to a book by the Spanish Catholic jurist Alfredo Mendizábal that said the same. He was called a traitor to his own. In the same years he turned his pen against antisemitism with everything he had: "L’impossible antisémitisme" in 1937, Les Juifs parmi les nations in 1938, and lectures in Paris and New York published in 1939 as A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question. He had three reasons, and they pulled in the same direction. His wife was a Jewish convert, so the question came home to his own table. He had watched what Maurras taught grow into what Hitler was doing, which is what an idea looks like when it is finally given a government. And he had once written in that key himself.

(●) 1940 AD: France fell while he was across the Atlantic, and he spent the war arguing that human rights are a Christian idea. + The Maritains had crossed to North America early in 1940 for a lecture tour. In June France collapsed, and they could not go home. They settled in New York, where he taught at Columbia and at Princeton and helped found the École Libre des Hautes Études in 1942, the Free School of Advanced Studies, a French university in exile staffed largely by scholars who had escaped. He worked to get others out. He wrote À travers le désastre in 1941, a refusal of the Vichy government, the French authority that had made terms with Hitler and governed the unoccupied south from a spa town, and a refusal too of the idea then being preached that the defeat was a punishment France had earned. Copies were reprinted secretly and passed hand to hand in the occupied country. The wartime books are the ones that carried furthest. Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle in 1942 and Christianisme et démocratie in 1943 made the case that democracy and human rights are not the enemies of Christianity that the French right had told him they were, but the political working-out of a claim only Christianity had made with full force: that every human being, of any race or class or use to the state, is a person made in the image of God and therefore not available as raw material. He was making that case, it is worth remembering, in the years when a European government was treating human beings as raw material on an industrial scale. After the liberation, Charles de Gaulle sent him to Rome as France’s ambassador to the Holy See, a post he held from 1945 to 1948 and disliked. In 1947 he led the French delegation to UNESCO’s general conference in Mexico City, and he took part in the UNESCO inquiry that canvassed philosophers of every school on the foundations of human rights. Out of that work comes the remark he is quoted for most often: that the members could agree on a list of rights provided nobody asked them why, and that the argument began with the word "why." Put a Catholic, a Marxist, a Hindu, and a secular liberal in one room and ask them which rights a human being has, and they will hand you a list they all sign. Ask them why a human being has them, and the room comes apart.

(●) 1960 AD: Raïssa died, and the old philosopher went to live with a community of brothers at Toulouse. + The American years had been good ones. He took a chair at Princeton in 1948, retired in 1952 at seventy, and stayed on as emeritus, which meant he kept the title and lost the timetable, lecturing at Notre Dame and Chicago and becoming, improbably for a French Thomist in his seventies, a fixture of American Catholic life. Then the household that had carried him for half a century came apart in less than a year. Véra, Raïssa’s sister, who had lived with them for more than fifty years and kept their house running, died on the last day of 1959. Raïssa suffered a stroke and died in Paris on 4 November 1960. He did not go back to teaching. He went to Toulouse, to the Little Brothers of Jesus, a community founded on the example of Charles de Foucauld that works ordinary jobs and lives among the poor, and he called the years that followed a long retreat in preparation for death. A retreat, in his sense, was not idleness. He edited and published Raïssa’s journals, and he kept writing. In 1966 he published Le paysan de la Garonne, and it detonated. The title borrowed a figure from La Fontaine, the peasant of the Danube, meaning a blunt countryman who stands up and says the unsayable in polite company, which tells you what sort of book he thought he was writing. It gave thanks for the Second Vatican Council, and then it turned on what he saw Catholics making of the Council: a fashionable surrender to whatever the age happened to believe, which he called kneeling before the world. Progressives who had counted him an ally were furious. Traditionalists who had spent thirty years calling him a liberal now quoted him with delight. Four years later he joined the brothers for good. He took the habit, the plain dress of the order, in October 1970, and a year later, at the end of his novitiate, the trial period a man serves before a community will accept him, he made his profession and became one of them. He died at Toulouse on 28 April 1973, and he is buried beside Raïssa at Kolbsheim in Alsace.

What He Taught

(T1) The mind’s deepest discovery is not any particular fact but that anything exists at all. + Most of us have had the experience for a second or two and then let it go. You are washing up at the sink, or waiting at a level crossing while a freight train goes by, and it strikes you with a jolt that there is a world, that it did not have to be here, and that you did not have to be in it. Then the train passes and you drive on. Maritain built a career on the claim that the jolt is not a mood. It is the mind actually seeing something, and what it sees is the most important thing there is to see: being, the sheer fact that things are. He called it the intuition of being, and "intuition" here does not mean a hunch. It means a direct look, the way you see that the room you are sitting in is lit rather than working it out from premises. His book Sept leçons sur l’être, published in English as A Preface to Metaphysics, is seven lectures on how a person gets to that look and what follows once he has it. What follows, Maritain thought, is metaphysics: the study of things simply as existing, which can then ask whether anything exists that must exist, and so open the road to God. He also insisted, and this is the half of the teaching that answered the Sorbonne, that this kind of knowing is not the only kind there is, and that the great modern confusion is to think that any one kind is. His most ambitious book, Les degrés du savoir of 1932, is an anatomy of the ways a mind can know, and the three main ones are worth having in front of you. Natural science measures and predicts, and it is superb at that; nothing else comes close. Metaphysics asks a different sort of question, what a thing is and why there is anything at all, and no amount of measuring will answer it. Mystical contemplation knows God not by argument but by love, which is the difference between knowing a friend and knowing a good deal about him. Each of the three is real knowledge. None of them can do another’s work, and the ruin comes when one of them is set up as judge over the rest, which is exactly what his teachers had done with the first. Hence the French title that says the method in three words, Distinguer pour unir, distinguish in order to unite. You do not get a whole by blurring the parts.

(Q) "It is a very simple sight, superior to any discursive reasoning or demonstration, because it is the source of demonstration." + Source: Jacques Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being, Third Lecture (Sheed and Ward, 1939). He is describing the intuition of being (T1). "Discursive" means step-by-step, the kind of thinking that runs from premises to conclusion. His point is that this seeing cannot be produced by an argument, because every argument already stands on it, and that a philosophy which will not admit anything except what an argument produces has quietly sawn off the branch it is sitting on.

(T2) A human being is a whole, not merely a part of the society he belongs to. + Consider a bee. A bee is genuinely a part of the hive, and the question "what is this bee for?" has an answer in terms of the hive. Maritain’s whole political philosophy turns on the claim that a human being is not like that, and on a distinction he took from Aquinas and made famous: the difference between the individual and the person. Called an individual, a man is one member of a species, a specimen, a unit of a population, the sort of thing a census counts. In that respect he really is a part, and the community really is greater than he is. A soldier can be asked to die for his country, and whatever else that request is, it is not nonsense. But the same man, the very same one, is also a person: a knowing, choosing, loving centre with a soul made for God. Considered that way he is a whole who exceeds everything the state can measure, and whose destiny runs on past the state’s last day. This is the philosopher’s version of what Genesis says in seven words, that "God created man in his own image" (Genesis 1:27), and what Maritain meant by calling the person’s dignity absolute. Two conclusions follow from the distinction, and he drew them at what was either the worst or the best possible moment to be drawing them, in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. The first is that no state, however popular, may treat a person as raw material for anything, because there is a part of him it does not own and never did. The second, which he pressed just as hard against the individualists, the people who take a man to be complete in himself and society to be a convenience he opts into, is that the person is not a self-contained atom either. He is a whole with the doors open, made for society and unable to become himself without it, which is why a man left entirely alone does not turn into more of himself but into less. Maritain spent his life being attacked from both sides for holding those two together, and he thought anyone who dropped either one would end in tyranny or in loneliness.

(Q) "The person is a whole, but it is not a closed whole, it is an open whole. It is not a little god without doors or windows, like Leibnitz’s monad, or an idol which sees not, hears not, speaks not. It tends by its very nature to social life and to communion." + Source: Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, "The Person and Society" (Doris C. Anson translation, 1943). Leibniz, the German philosopher of the seventeenth century, held that the ultimate units of reality are monads, self-contained points of view with, in his own phrase, no windows: nothing gets in or out. Maritain is denying that human beings are anything of the kind (T2). The idol that sees not and hears not is the taunt of Psalm 115 against the gods of the nations, turned here against a picture of the self.

(T3) Human rights are real because human nature is real, and there is an unwritten law that no parliament wrote. + A piano is made to produce certain sounds. If it does not produce them you tune it or you throw it out, and nobody thinks the standard was invented by the tuner. Maritain used that homely example to explain natural law: because human beings have a nature, a definite way of being made, there are ends that fit that nature and a way of acting that reaches them, and human reason can find this out. Natural law is the name for that order. The ancients called it the unwritten law, and he thought that the better name; Antigone, refusing to leave her brother unburied because some laws are older than the king’s, is its patron. You might be thinking what almost everyone thinks at this point: if there is one law written into human nature, why has every culture read it differently, and some of them monstrously? He met that objection head on, and the first thing he did was give away more than his opponents expected. Natural law is not a code printed inside every conscience, ready to be unrolled, identical in every culture. Human knowledge of it has grown slowly and unevenly, cultures have been catastrophically wrong about parts of it, and he pointed at children raised under the Nazis who had been taught that denouncing their parents was a virtue. That proves nothing against natural law, he said, any more than a mistake in addition disproves arithmetic. The one thing everyone does know without being taught is that good is to be done and evil avoided; the rest is worked out, badly and slowly, the way every other kind of knowledge is worked out. Paul says the same of the Gentiles who never had the law of Moses: "For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law" (Romans 2:14). From natural law he derived rights, and this is the move that made him useful to the whole world after 1945. If a man is owed certain things simply because of what he is, then rights are not gifts from a government that could take them back; they are recognitions of something that was already there before any government arrived. The difference is not a fine point. A state that grants rights can revoke them, and has every legal right to, because what it gave it may take. A state that only recognizes them cannot, and when it violates them it is not legislating but trespassing.

(Q) "All this proves nothing against natural law, any more than a mistake in addition proves anything against arithmetic, or the mistakes of certain primitive peoples, for whom the stars were holes in the tent which covered the world, prove anything against astronomy." + Source: Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, "Natural Law" (Doris C. Anson translation, 1943). The sentence before this one lists the horrors: cruelty, the denunciation of parents, the lie told for the party, the killing of the old and the sick, all of them taught as virtues to the young of his own decade. His answer is not that moral disagreement is small. It is that disagreement about a subject is never by itself evidence that the subject has no truth in it (T3).

(T4) Christians are not called to rebuild the Middle Ages, but to build a Christendom secular in its forms. + For most of European history a Christian society meant one thing: the state carried the faith. Kings swore to defend it, heresy was a crime, and a man’s standing in the city depended on his standing in the church. When that arrangement came apart, Christians divided into two camps who have been shouting at each other ever since. One says the collapse was the disaster and the work is to get the old order back. The other says religion is now a private matter and should keep to the home and the sanctuary. Maritain said both were wrong, and Humanisme intégral is his case. The medieval arrangement was not the gospel; it was one historical shape the gospel took, suited to its own age and unrepeatable in ours. What is wanted now is a new Christendom, sacred in its inspiration and secular in its forms: a political order that does not enforce belief, that gives real freedom to people who do not share the faith, and that is nonetheless shaped by Christian conviction about what human beings are, through Christians who work in it as citizens rather than as a party. He called the goal integral humanism, humanism made whole, and the word "integral" is doing exact work. The humanisms on offer in 1936, whether liberal or Marxist or fascist, all cut something off the human being to make him fit the theory. A humanism that keeps the whole man has to keep the part of him that is made for God. Two things follow, and his critics on each side found one of them impossible to swallow. Christians must expect to work shoulder to shoulder with unbelievers on genuine common goods, which the integralists, the Catholics who wanted the state to carry the faith again, heard as plain surrender. And Christians must keep insisting that political life is answerable to a truth above it, which the secularists heard as theocracy in a new coat. He thought the discomfort was the point. This is not a compromise struck halfway between the two positions but a third thing, and a third thing always annoys both.

(Q) "Then they could work to substitute for the inhuman system which is in travail before our eyes a new form of civilisation which would be characterised by an integral humanism, and which would represent the outline of a new Christian order no longer sacred but secular in its forms." + Source: Jacques Maritain, True Humanism, Introduction: Heroism and Humanism (Margot Robert Adamson translation, 1938). The French original is Humanisme intégral, 1936. "In travail" means in labour, giving birth in pain; the inhuman system he means is the totalitarian Europe taking shape as he wrote. The contrast between sacred and secular forms is the heart of the proposal (T4): the same faith at the root, a different arrangement above ground.

(T5) Art is a virtue of the working mind, and nobody makes Christian art by aiming at it. + A cabinetmaker who is a liar can still make an excellent chair. That plain observation is where Art et scolastique begins, and Maritain got it from Aquinas, who classed art as a virtue of the practical intellect: a settled skill of the mind directed at making a thing well. Prudence, the virtue that governs how a person lives, aims at the good of the doer. Art aims at the good of the work. The two can come apart, which is why a bad man can be a great painter and a saint can write terrible poetry. That sounds like a licence for artists to ignore morality, and it is the first thing a careful reader objects to. Maritain spent the rest of the book showing that it is not, because the artist is a man before he is an artist and answers as a man for what he makes. What he would not do is let piety stand in for craft. A painting is not good because its subject is holy; a novel is not Christian because nobody in it swears. The first question the work has to answer is whether it is any good. So his advice to Christian artists, in a book read by a generation of them, was almost rude in its simplicity. Do not try to make Christian art. Be a Christian, then make the best thing you can make, and let it be what it will be. He thought the attempt to sever the artist from the believer was as ruinous as the attempt to weld them: leave what is distinct distinct, and trust that a man’s whole soul gets into his work whether he arranges it or not.

(Q) "If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose." + Source: Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, ch. VIII, "Christian Art" (J. F. Scanlan translation). The next lines are the ones artists quote back: do not make the absurd attempt to sever in yourself the artist and the Christian, but apply only the artist in you to the work in hand (T5). Georges Rouault painted in the Maritains’ circle, and Flannery O’Connor read this book in Georgia twenty years later and took her working account of the artist’s habit straight out of it.

(Q) "Unless one loves the truth, one is not a man. And to love the truth is to love it above everything, because we know that Truth is God Himself." + Source: Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne, ch. 5, "The Liberation of the Intelligence" (Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes translation, 1968). He is eighty-three and writing the book that lost him half his admirers. The sentence is the whole of him in two lines: the confidence that the mind can reach what is really there, and the conviction that what is really there is not a system but someone.

Legacy

(†) A priest who translated him at thirty handed him the Council’s closing message nearly forty years later as pope. + Giovanni Battista Montini made the first Italian translation of Trois réformateurs, finished it on the feast of the Epiphany in 1928, and wrote the preface Morcelliana printed with it. He was thirty, and translating a book is the slowest way there is to read one. The two met properly in Rome, where Maritain was France’s ambassador to the Holy See and Montini worked in the Secretariat of State, the department that handles the papacy’s dealings with governments, and they went on writing to each other until Maritain’s death. So when Montini became Paul VI in 1963, a lay philosopher working in the line of Aquinas was already part of how he thought, and historians of the Second Vatican Council keep finding Maritain’s fingerprints on the Council’s documents: on Dignitatis Humanae, the declaration that religious liberty is grounded in the dignity of the person rather than in indifference to truth, and on Gaudium et Spes, the constitution on the church in the modern world. He held no office at the Council and drafted none of its texts. What he had supplied, over thirty years, was the vocabulary. The scene at the close, on 8 December 1965, was arranged on purpose. Paul VI had messages read to various groups, and the Message to Men of Thought and Science he placed in Maritain’s own hands in St Peter’s Square. Two years later he published Populorum Progressio, an encyclical on the development of peoples, an encyclical being a letter a pope addresses to the whole church, and scholars read it as Maritain’s integral humanism turned into papal teaching. He is reported to have wanted to make Maritain a cardinal, and to have been refused.

(†) His case for human rights travelled far outside his own church, into UNESCO and into the politics of two continents. + After 1945 the world wanted a declaration of human rights and had no agreed philosophy to hang one on, which is an awkward position for a committee: everyone knows what happened in the camps, nobody can say on what authority it was wrong. UNESCO put the question to philosophers of every school, Maritain among them, and he wrote the introduction to the volume of replies that came back. His answer to the deadlock was not that the disagreements were small. It was that people who differ completely about the foundations can still converge on the same practical conclusions, because they are all looking at the same human beings; agreement about rights is possible where agreement about "why" is not. That is a modest claim, much more modest than anything he argued for in his own books, and it was enough to let the work proceed. It also gave Christian politicians a language. The Christian Democratic parties that rebuilt western Europe after the war drew on him, and in Latin America the debt was direct: Eduardo Frei Montalva, who helped found the Chilean Christian Democrats and governed Chile from 1964 to 1970, had sat in Maritain’s lectures at the Institut Catholique in Paris in 1934 and built a programme on Humanisme intégral. Protestant and secular philosophers who want nothing to do with Thomism still argue with him when they argue about where rights come from, which is its own kind of compliment: the question he forced onto the table, whether rights without a nature to ground them are anything more than a preference loudly stated, has not gone away.

(†) Writers and painters came to his house at Meudon, and some of them came to the faith there. + The Sunday gatherings at Meudon in the 1920s and 1930s are one of the odder facts of modern intellectual history: a suburban house where the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev argued with Dominican theologians, where Étienne Gilson and Emmanuel Mounier were regulars, where Marc Chagall and Georges Rouault came, and where Jean Cocteau, the most fashionable man in Paris, found his way back to the church in 1925 and published his letter to Maritain about it the following year. Raïssa, a poet in her own right, was at least half the reason people came. The influence kept running after he left France, and in America it ran mostly through people who were not philosophers at all. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose autobiography sold by the million, read him and then met him. Dorothy Day drew on him for the personalism of the Catholic Worker, personalism being the conviction that any movement or policy has to be judged by what it does to actual persons rather than by what it does to the figures. Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins pulled him into the Great Books argument at Chicago, over whether an education should be built on the hardest old books or on whatever seems useful now. And Flannery O’Connor, who kept Art and Scholasticism by her and cited it in her letters, got from it the spine of her own defence of fiction that refuses to preach. His reach was never confined to philosophers, and that is because he wrote about art, education, and politics as though laypeople were the point rather than an audience.

(†) Where he fell short: for fifteen years he lent his name to Maurras, and wrote about the Jews in terms he spent the rest of his life undoing. + The honest entry in his ledger is not a doctrine he got wrong but a stretch of his own record, the years before the break with Action Française, and it is documented in his own published words rather than in anybody’s inference about him. - The alliance. From about 1910 to 1926 Maritain was attached to Action Française, at his spiritual director’s urging and then by his own conviction. He helped launch La Revue universelle in 1920 and wrote for the movement’s readership. Its leader was a declared unbeliever who wanted the church as scaffolding for the French nation, which is precisely the instrumental use of the faith that Maritain later spent whole books refuting. - The 1921 essay. In "À propos de la question juive," a talk given to the first Week of Catholic Writers and printed in La Vie spirituelle in July 1921, he reached for categories belonging to the movement he had joined, naming secret societies and cosmopolitan finance among the undesirable influences at work in the modern world. He revised and reprinted it twice, in 1926 and again in 1935, and then let it drop: when he gathered his writings on the Jewish people as Le mystère d’Israël in 1965 that essay was left out, and no public retraction naming it is on record. The silence is a real gap; what he did instead was spend the following fifty years arguing the other way in print. Scholars read the 1921 text differently, and the disagreement is worth knowing about. Some hold that it carries the antisemitism of the movement he had joined; others point out that the same text tells Catholic writers to reason about these things without hatred, warns that popular passions and pogroms have never settled a question yet, and refuses to let "the Jew" be made the single cause of the ills of the age, and they conclude that even in his Maurrassian years he was never an antisemite. What is not in dispute is that he wrote in those categories, and that he would not have written in them ten years later. - The turn, and its cost. The 1926 condemnation forced the choice, and he made it against his allies. From 1937 he was among the loudest Catholic voices in Europe against antisemitism, and after the war he wrote on Israel and the church with a seriousness few Catholics of his generation matched, insisting on Paul’s words that "As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:28–29). Two smaller things belong here. Trois réformateurs of 1925 treats Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau as three men who between them broke the modern mind, and it is polemic rather than history; Protestant readers who find the chapter on Luther a caricature are not being thin-skinned. And Le paysan de la Garonne of 1966, whatever its diagnosis was worth, wounded friends by name, and its handling of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit palaeontologist whose attempt to read Christianity through evolution had a wide following just then, reads as contempt rather than argument. He was eighty-three and grieving, which explains the tone without excusing it. What the record will not support is the charge that he was a modernist who sold the faith to the age. The man who wrote the Peasant is the man who wrote Antimoderne, holding the same convictions about God and the human person for sixty years and changing his mind about the politics because the politics turned out to be false to them.