All That is Not Love Will Fail

Jacques Maritain, Paul VI, and the Age of the Spirit

Barbara Hepworth, Doves (1927)

You have to admit by now that he didn’t pull it off. But he got far closer than anyone might have expected; certainly closer than he himself had ever hoped. We came within a pen’s stroke, after all, of the Vicar of Christ solemnly proclaiming the advent of the Third Age from the balcony of St Peter’s. Jacques had included it in his draft of the Credo of the People of God, but Paul removed it, or one of his theologians, which probably didn’t surprise anyone, even the author. Declarations about entering the Age of the Holy Spirit would risk misinterpretation in any age of the Church and In illo tempore, the Summer of 1968, it would have been practically guaranteed a misreading. 

Again, that wouldn’t have surprised anyone, even Jacques - especially Jacques: hadn’t he warned that true charity is always misunderstood? And hadn’t he seen exactly that happen with the council; predicted it would happen, in fact, anticipated that rather than nature raising herself to a supernatural height the opposite would happen, worse than the opposite, the supernatural occluded entirely by the natural, ecclesial maurassism is what Ottaviani called it, and he was wrong about all kinds of things, but was he wrong about that?

And isn’t that exactly why the Credo was necessary, and necessary right then, because there were no theologians left, Jacques wrote to Julien Green, literary critics and historians and canonists and people who know Christianity but no-one who knows God. And - as much as he exalts the Council, he glories in it - none of the experts there, clever and accomplished as they were, none seemed to have any wisdom. 

And they didn’t have wisdom, they still don’t, because wisdom isn’t something you have, it’s something you’re given, it’s grace, the first gift of the Holy Spirit, which is why Jacques made Les Cercles d'ètudes thomistes pray for it - O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti - every day, a study circle that sounded like a religious order just as Jacques’ own house felt like a monastery, morning Mass and the little office seven times a day, because that was what was necessary and that was missing, in 1908 or 1968 or 2023 or any time ever because there is no time with God.

In Raissa’s memoirs one of the visionaries her and Jacques visit calls the two of them universal souls, which is about the shape of it, I think, the electric current animating sixty years of writing and talking and work and prayer, the insight that brought them into the Church in the first place, a laicist jew and a Socialist republican making the least logical choice possible, all for the pearl of great price, all for a chance at sanctity, not just real but the only thing that is, the only sadness - said Leon Bloy, their godfather, too poor for a shirt and too proud to admit it - the only sadness is not to be a Saint. 

And when you know this, or not just know but understand, da mihi intelligendi acumen, when you enter what Raissa called the night of the spirit, then it is time, she says, to put away childish things, playing games, make-believe, eloquence, “let’s pretend”. It is then, she says, when you realise your ignorance, when you comprehend the depth of the abyss between you and your creator, it’s only then that one no longer lives on anything but grace. 

Of course this was misunderstood, because true charity always is, and an adult faith was taken to mean roughly the opposite of how Jacques and Raissa understood it, and the charismata, the gifts of prophecy, of faith, of tongues, of signs and wonders, became embarrassments to something that sounds like history or literary criticism or canon law or - more and more - like politics but very rarely like knowledge of God, like wisdom, like sanctity, all of which are so many different words for the same thing, the one thing needful: grace. 

No-one reads the documents of the council, Maritain said in 1966, and what was true then is true now, but even if they did we wouldn’t be able to understand them, because another of the gifts of the spirit is interpretation and the Age of the Spirit, the Third Age, was meant to arrive and it didn’t, the council announced the Universal Call to Holiness and we keep hanging up. 

And so we come back to Jacques and Paul-who-was-Giovanni, and fifty years of friendship is concluding, in the Summer of 1968, with an efficacious word, a Credo, Solemni Hac Liturgia, and it’s beautiful but no-one really cares and it doesn’t announce the advent of the Age of the Spirit but perhaps, after all, it doesn’t need to, because the Third Age had started anyway, a Pentecost of the invisible Church, and everything since is, as Jacques suspected, growing pains, the putting away of childish things as children do, by tiring of them, by having had enough and when we finally have done the Credo will still be there, still necessary, still true, ipsa non alia fruitur vita, quam vita gratiae, for she herself has no other life but that of grace, and that’s the Church speaking of the Church, through Paul and through Jacques and through Raissa, too, because when the Credo was published Jacques noted that he had done very little in the whole affair, that he had entered a mystery too far beyond him, and that it was Raïssa who has steered everything, who has done everything since this extraordinary adventure began. 

And although we’re obliged to note that by then Raissa had been dead for eight years, there are, all things considered, good reasons not to dismiss him out of hand. Jacques explained it in one of his last lectures before his own death, five years later. There is no time for God - Jacques Maritain said, the last theologian of a former age, the first one of the new - and so for the friends of God, for those who live by the spirit, for Christians as we ought to be, there is no such thing as death.

☩ JM 18-11-1882 – 28-04-1973 ☩

☩RM 31-08-1883 – 04-11-1960 ☩

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The temporal means of this Christendom are primarily humble means; they can be pared down as much as you please, they will enable it to pass through all obstacles. Even if Christian secular effort were to fail--at least before the liquidation of modern times— to inaugurate, even in a partial and momentary fashion, a new Christian life of the world, and to renew the visible structures of the world, nevertheless it cannot fail as regards this diaspora of Christian civilization. 

It might be that before the supreme reintegrations of which I have spoken, the world will in fact know only an epoch of terror and of love confronting each other. It might be that the whole effort of Christians in the temporal order will have to limit itself to rendering less evil regimes of civilization modeled according to Behemoth and Leviathan rather than according to the human person. It may be that the Christian community, having had for condition to be persecuted by the pagans, then of persecuting heretics, will again and anew to be in the condition of being persecuted. It would remain to it to attest in the midst of the vicissitudes of history, that all that is not love will fail.

- Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, 1936

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Please pray for my grandmother, who was buried on Holy Thursday, and for the rest of my family. Also, if you can, please pray I get better as I am still, amazingly, sick. Happy feast of St. Catherine of Siena; wishing you a quiet night and a private end. ☩