☩1906
From The Notebooks of Jacques Maritain:
“Christians have abandoned the poor. They fill me with horror. Bloy is in the midst of the Christian people like a prophet amid the Jewish people: raging against his own people. (But nevertheless a part of this people.) In such a situation, one must double one’s interior submission, one’s waiting, one’s love for the Church...
One must in fact be separated from today’s Christians. With one’s body present in this corrupt age of the world, one must live really with the first Christians, go back beyond all the Christians of the present time. . . .In religion there is nothing which I reject, but everything is equally accepted, without restriction or mental reservation. But this faith is distressed within me, repelled and thwarted by the consent of Christians to earthly injustice and by the horror which their history, their inclinations, inspire in me. It will be necessary to be in the midst of them like strangers, come from elsewhere.
Far from fleeing the earthly house of God, we shall turn towards it, and we shall enter it. But how can one mingle with the horrible children who feast in it? We shall remain separated, on the threshold. We do not reject any truth, we do not separate God from His Church, charity from worship; we keep the whole of the faith. But what is to be done in order not to enter at the same time into the family of the satisfied, who in the name of their eternal salvation have taken sides against the temporal salvation of the world?”
1925
From Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau:
The fundamental question for man is, in the practical order, to find the conditions of liberty. Jean-Jacques saw that with a vengeance; but he answered all awry. Man is not born free, he becomes free; and he only gains his liberty on condition that he serves. Do you think we do not know that the law holds in slavery the man who suffers its restraint? That state of slavery is our natural state. As for the saints, they were free, and they have taught us the secret of the state of liberty, which is supernatural. The name of that secret is love.
Because we are not essentially good, we only bear fruit if we are pruned. But because we are grafted on to the only Son, on to the divine Truth in person, we are branches who are sons, and the hand that prunes us is the hand of love. “Pater meus agricola est.” It is when love is consummated that liberty is won. Love, which is the beloved present in the lover as the weight which draws him – amor meus pondus meum – is the deepest personal instinct of him who loves. He who acts from love acts without constraint, for love drives away fear. Sanctity, fulfilling the law out of love, is no longer under restraint to the law. There is only one liberty: that of the saints.
1937
From De la guerre sante, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Issue 49:
“This problem of means, on which we continue to insist, is of absolutely central importance. It involves all morality; it is morality itself. It is on this point that Christianity, if it does not wish to abdicate its role, will have to affirm its evangelical folly in the sharpest possible manner against the doctrines of force for which all means are good and which prove it by moving from one success to another — toward death...
We forget…that evil is evil, and that it is growing at the present time, and that the horror that is done remains done and that the despair of men and their suffering or a single tear, a single cry torn forth by injustice, that all these things can be abundantly compensated for (that is why Jesus died), they can never be effaced, they never will be effaced, never…it is a horrible sacrilege to massacre priests, even if they are "fascist" (they are the ministers of Christ), out of hatred for religion; and it is another sacrilege, just as horrible, to massacre the poor, even though they are "marxists" (they are the people of Christ), in the name of religion…A man who does not believe in God might think: after all, this is the price of a return to order and one crime deserves another. A man who believes in God knows that there is no worse disaster. It is as if the bones of Christ, which the executioners could not touch, were broken on the Cross by Christians.”
1952
From The Range of Reason:
In presenting his book, On the Threshold of the Apocalypse, to one of his readers some thirty years ago, Leon Bloy wrote on the first page: "Cher ami donnez-vous la peine d'entrer" ("Dear friend, pray walk in"). It seems that, as a matter of fact, we did walk in. Our age appears as an apocalyptic age, a liquidation of several centuries of history. We are picking the grapes of wrath. We have not finished suffering. But at the end of the crisis a new world will emerge.
Bearing these thoughts in mind, experience – that very experience which jeopardized our faith in man – is transfigured. It assumes a meaning. It is not the revelation of the absurdity of existence but of the pangs and travail of history, not the revelation of the root baseness and contemptibleness of man but of his distress laid bare when he falls from his pride, and of the trials and catastrophes through which the abiding greatness of his destiny asserts itself.
A historical reckoning such as the one we are undergoing does not take place in one day. Time is necessary to make reason able to control the formidable material means which industrial and technological revolution has put in our frail hands. Time is necessary to stir up, from the depths of human bewilderment, the moral and spiritual revolution that is incomparably more needed than any other revolution. For nothing less is required than a terrestrial triumph of Gospel inspiration in the social behavior of mankind. We do not lose hope. The renewal of civilization that we hope for, the age of integral humanism, the time when science and wisdom are to be reconciled, the advent of a fraternal commonwealth and of true human emancipation – all this we do not await on the morrow. But we await them on the day after the morrow, on that day which St. Paul announced will be, after the worst darkness, like a springtime of splendor and renovation for the world.
1973
From A Society Without Money
“Let me remark here that for many Marxists and other revolutionaries (whose revolutions remain incomplete from my point of view) whose hearts are noble and generous, but whose minds are clouded by their atheism, the final end they pursue is to "change man." But to "change man" by the process of any temporal revolution whatsoever based solely on the efforts of human nature is the worst of all possible Utopias. To "change man," yes; we must aspire to this with all our heart, but this is proper to the supernatural life received from God. It means aspiring toward a situation where each one (and ourselves first of all) tends toward the perfection of charity and holiness. ("There is only one sadness," said Leon Bloy, "and that is not to be saints"). This is the business of God's Grace, offered to each person by Jesus, and the way to this life of Grace is opened to each one by the Gospel. In other words, this is the affair of the Church, the Immaculate Spouse of Christ (regardless of how many betrayals there may be on the part of certain – more often many – members of its personnel). It is the work of the Church, not of the world.”
reditus
Jean Daniélou, From “Love of the Truth,” Revue des Deux Mondes, June 1973:
“After the coffin was taken up, the funeral procession made its way on foot through the village, bathed in spring sunshine. The cemetery was filled with jonquils, tulips, and forget-me-nots. It looked like one of the paradises painted by Fra Angelico. If angels had happened to pass by at that moment, no one would have been in any way surprised….
Reading the name of Raissa on the grave, looking at his gathered
friends, I thought of how Jacques' long life had mixed so intimately with the spiritual history of our time…We will always be indebted to Jacques Maritain for the work that constituted his distinctive vocation: to make known to us love of the truth.”
My New Statesman piece on Jacques Maritain is online here. Please continue to pray for my family. ☩