Jacques Maritain and Vatican Council II

When, many years ago, I first read Jacques Maritain’s The Peasant of the Garonne, I shared the general view that it was little more than the reactionary ramblings of a disgruntled old man. Now Ralph McInerny’s admirable and deservedly admiring biography of Maritain, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life (forthcoming from Notre Dame), has prompted me to go back and read the book again. As with Mark Twain’s surprise when he reached his twenties at how, since he was a teenager, his father had become ever so much smarter, so I have changed my view of The Peasant of the Garonne . It is a reactionary book in large part, and it does ramble, and there is no doubt that Maritain was deeply disappointed and in many ways disgruntled, but I was surprised by wisdom I had not appreciated before, and by a prescience that is nothing short of stunning. The Peasant was written in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, within a few months of its formal closing in December 1965. Maritain was then eighty-five years old, and long celebrated, along with Étienne Gilson, as the architect of a Thomistic revival that was thought to hold the promise of a veritable golden age of Catholic intellectual vitality. Heaped with honors in Europe and America, Maritain was viewed as the champion of that aggiornamento ”philosophical, theological, and pastoral”to which the Council aspired. Then came the publication of The Peasant . Some on the right were pleased to see a famous “man of the left” finally coming to his senses. From the left, there was a storm of reaction against Maritain’s putatively reactionary turn. He was in the judgment of some simply a traitor, while others, in a mix of charity and condescension, sadly shook their heads over an old man who had lost his grip. A reviewer in the New York Times said of the book, “It appears to call a halt to the modernist revolution that Maritain himself did much to inspire.” It was thought to be a pity that such a distinguished thinker, such a brilliant life, should end like this.

In his biography, McInerny begins by acknowledging that The Peasant is Maritain’s “most controversial” book, but ends up declaring it a “great book,” and that for several reasons. What Maritain is attacking he frankly calls “neo-modernism.” At the time, and still to this day, the claim was made that the putative errors of “modernism” condemned in 1907 by Pius X had, under papal oppression, continued in an underground existence until they at long last came out into the open at Vatican II, where they were vindicated by the call for aggiornamento and the opening of windows to the world. Let it be admitted that there are traditionalist Catholics who, because they are traditionalists, cannot say that the Council was a mistake, but who are inclined to agree with the progressivist reading of the Council—although they draw the conclusion, expressed only sotto voce, that the Council was, all in all, a mistake. McInerny and Maritain are not among them. McInerny writes, “There is no question, of course, of [Maritain’s] rejecting or questioning any of the sixteen documents which make up the conciliar teaching. But he saw—better, he recognized, having seen it before—the spirit animating those who were trying to turn the Council to their own ends.”

A Measure of Ambivalence

There is, I think, a measure of ambivalence in Maritain’s view of the Council. There is no question of his obedience to the Magisterium”and in this connection The Peasant includes moving and insightful reflections on the “personality” of the Church which has her own memory and consciousness. Yet, while the Council cannot teach error, it was not as effective as it might have been in countering those who do. One detects a certain chagrin on Maritain’s part that it falls to him to elucidate, albeit in deference to the Council fathers, the true meaning of the Council against those who would, for their own purposes, exploit real or manufactured ambiguities in its teaching. McInerny writes:

In The Peasant of the Garonne , as throughout his career, it is clear that the pursuit of truth and clarity is not at the service merely of winning an argument or negatively appraising other efforts. As in few other thinkers, we are always conscious that a person is doing the thinking and that this person aspires to more than the perfection of the mind. From first to last, Maritain’s philosophizing is embedded in the contemplative life. He calls the Peasant an old man’s book, and it is true that in it he is a bit garrulous and repetitive, but it is a great book, the first to see and warn of what enormities would be perpetrated in the name of Vatican II.

While I agree with that assessment, Maritain’s words of reproach and warning with respect to the misinterpretations of the Council should not obscure his genuine enthusiasm for the Council’s teaching or his appreciation of the problems that teaching was intended to remedy. Maritain begins from the conventional premise that the Council “was in response to a providential design; for the historic task, the immense renewal that it had to bring about, had to do with progress in evangelical awareness and attitudes of the heart rather than with defining dogmas.” (One notes parenthetically that, while it is commonly said that Vatican II was not a dogmatic or doctrinal Council, there are those dogmatic constitutions that clearly represent developments of doctrine.) But I think there is nothing disingenuous in Maritain’s affirmation of what the Council achieved. He rejoices in the Council’s bold affirmation of human freedom, including political and religious freedom. He cites the 1964 statement of Paul VI that the Pope “neither wants to nor ought to exercise henceforth any power other than that of his spiritual keys.”

The Integrity of the Human

Avery Cardinal Dulles speaks of the “prophetic humanism” of the Council, especially as its teachings have been so vigorously advanced by the pontificate of John Paul II. Maritain notes Paul VI’s final address to the Council on December 7, 1965, in which he summed up its teaching in terms of the defense of the hominem integrum —the integrity of the human. Maritain writes: “Here is accomplished the great reversal of virtue of which it is no longer the human which takes charge of defending the divine, but the divine which offers itself to defend the human (if the latter does not refuse the aid offered).” In its centuries of entanglement with earthly powers, and up through the providential loss of the papal states, the Church had sought alliances for the defense of what were called “the things of God.” Now at Vatican II, in a daring mix of confidence and humility, the Church declares her mission to be the defense of the things of man. As Maritain was keenly aware, this entailed a great risk, but it was a risk of faith. Everything depends upon our understanding of man, of anthropology, of what constitutes the hominem integrum . As John Paul II has said repeatedly, “Jesus Christ is the answer to which every human life is the question.” But all depends on our understanding the question that is our life.

Maritain welcomes also the Council’s opening to other Christians and other religions, while at the same time he cautions against superficial dialogues that are not dialogues in the service of the eternal truths borne by the Catholic Church. The Peasant includes an extended—and, I have to admit, somewhat unsatisfactory—reflection on how all people are “potential” members of the Church, a reflection reminiscent of Karl Rahner’s writing about “anonymous Christians,” although Rahner is not mentioned. Less ambiguous, indeed clear and wholehearted, is Maritain’s response to the Council’s rejection of the notion that the lay state is in some sense spiritually “imperfect” in relation to the greater perfection of the priestly and, especially, the religious life. He returns again and again to the point that Our Lord’s command to be “perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” applies to all, thus underscoring the universal call to holiness. Not for nothing is McInerny’s subtitle “A Spiritual Life.” For the “little community” of Jacques, his wife Raissa, and her sister Vera, the spiritual life had indisputable priority. The observation of their novelist friend Leon Bloy that finally the only sadness is not to be a saint marked the decisive turning point in their lives. They became Catholics in order to become saints.

Which brings us to the subject that occasions some of the sharpest, indeed caustic, criticisms in The Peasant : the effect of the Council—or, more precisely, of misrepresentations of the Council—on liturgy and piety. The Council urged that liturgy should be conscious, active, and devout, and Maritain complains that already some are forgetting the importance of devotion, and especially the highest form of devotion that is contemplation. Here again he cites Paul VI’s closing address to the Council, and one suspects that Maritain is among those who view that address as a kind of anticipatory correction of misunderstandings of the Council, both current and foreseen. According to Maritain, the Council statements on liturgy, and especially the Mass, in no way contradict but complement and confirm the insistence of Paul in his address that “contemplation is the most noble and the most perfect form of human activity, against which one measures, in the pyramid of human acts, the proper value of these acts, each according to its kind.”

The Denial of the Transcendent

It would, I think, be fair to say that all the criticisms expressed in The Peasant —and it is a very critical book—can be summed up in one comprehensive criticism: namely, the denial or suppression of the transcendent—of life understood as premised upon what Maritain calls “the intuition of being” and the ordering of humanity to the Being who is God. Of all religions and philosophies, he writes, Catholicism “is most steadfast in recognizing and affirming the reality—irreducibly, splendidly, generously in itself—of the beings whom the Creator has made, and the transcendence of this Other, who is the Truth in person and Being itself subsisting by itself, in whom we live and move and have our being, the living God by whose strength we live, and who loves us and whom we love.” Repeatedly, he returns to the biblical truth that “God is love.” This he posits against those who, in his judgment, are suggesting that God is history, or God is evolutionary development, or God is cosmic fulfillment, or God is worldly effectiveness, or God is political justice, or God is psychological well-being.

Of course, Teilhard de Chardin gets a most particular drubbing in The Peasant. For the benefit of readers who might think that the drubbing is excessive, McInerny notes that it is difficult to overestimate his influence at the time Maritain was writing. I would suggest that Teilhard was and is representative of a denial of transcendence that is at least equally influential in our own time. The reduction of the transcendent to the immanent, of the eternal to the temporal, and of the spiritual to the material is an error endemic to the modern theological project up to the present. That is the claim vigorously advanced in a recent book, Ascension and Ecclesia, by the Protestant theologian Douglas Farrow. Maritain would have little patience with Farrow’s relentless, almost ruthless, Barthianism, but I have no doubt that he would share my delight in Farrow’s concluding and devastating observation that all such modern theologies end up in our “arriving at Damascus without incident.”

On his way to Damascus, Maritain was knocked off his despairing pretensions and turned toward sainthood. And, for Maritain, the incidents keep on happening in the life of the Church. He writes:

At a certain moment during the Mass (and that is why the “sacred silence” is then demanded), there is a kind of divine flash of lightning; at the words of the double consecration (which, from the fact that it sacramentally separates the body of the Lord from his blood, is an efficient sign of his death on the cross), Jesus makes himself present on the altar in the state of a victim: suddenly and mysteriously, during a few minutes of our lives, the sacrifice in which he gave himself for us is there before us, his supreme offering of himself to the Father, the act by which he won for all men the grace of redemption.

And the incidents kept on happening in his own life of contemplation, and especially in the spiritual experiences of his beloved Raissa. McInerny rightly notes that it is not easy for us to share what sometimes seems to be Maritain’s extravagant reverence for Raissa’s spirituality, even to the point of attributing to her the primary inspiration for his own thought and spiritual understanding. There is, it seems to me, a similar problem in understanding Hans Urs von Balthasar’s extraordinary statements about his indebtedness to Adrienne von Speyr. In both cases, there is something intensely and intimately personal that cannot readily be communicated to others. But for both men, and for both women, it is obvious that the greatest sadness would be to arrive at Damascus without incident. Which is but another way of saying that one had spent one’s life on something less than becoming a saint.

In The Peasant , as elsewhere in his writings, Maritain traces the radically wrong philosophical turn back to Descartes, who turned almost all—I believe Maritain would say all—philosophy called modern from thinking about reality to thinking about thinking. He does temper his criticism of Descartes, and I believe appropriately so, by noting that Descartes, as a devout Catholic, did not intend all that others have done with his radical turn. The greater blame he lays at the door of the idealism entrenched by Immanuel Kant, whom he describes as “the thinking-master who still reigns over the world of professors . . . an elderly meditative clockmaker laboriously tracing, in his head and on paper, the outline of the mechanisms of a transcendental clock destined to make the stars move in their courses.” He continues:

The Judeo-Christian revelation is the strongest, the most insolently self-assured testimony rendered to the reality in itself of being—the being of things, and Being subsisting by itself—I say being dwelling in the glory of existence in total independence of the mind that knows it. Christianity professes with a tranquil impudence what in the philosophical vocabulary is known as realism. I said previously that a Christian cannot be a relativist. One must say, and this goes much further, that a Christian cannot be an idealist.

The Intuition of Being

Of course, as Maritain was well aware, the philosophical turning of the mind in upon itself, and the consequent denial of certainty about a connection between reality and rational reflection on the experience of the senses, goes back far before Kant and far before Descartes. In the sixth century b.c., thinkers such as Parmenides of Elea had apparently cut the ground out from under human knowing by demonstrating, at least to their satisfaction, that the real world is quite unlike anything knowable to us by the senses and reason, and Parmenides’ disciple Zeno claimed to have shown that even the postulates of mathematics are mutually contradictory. Socrates, Plato, and, most important, Aristotle reconstituted confidence in human knowing, a confidence brought to the fullness of its explanatory force in the great achievement of Thomas. More than in his other writings, or perhaps it simply struck me more forcefully upon this rereading, The Peasant depicts the entirety of human reflection—in philosophy, religion, and mythology—as falling on one side or the other of the great divide that is the “intuition of being” illuminated by Thomas. Here Maritain does not hesitate to speak of “the Christian philosophy,” while he recognizes the risk of “clericalizing” a way of thought and thus compromising its universality and necessary measure of independence from revealed truth as expressed in the Church’s doctrine.

Toward the end of his life, it seems, Maritain is less inhibited in taking that risk. On one side of the great divide are all the idealisms, relativisms, and what even then he called “perspectivisms” produced by the epistemological obsessions of thinking about thinking, and on the other side is Christianity, and more specifically Catholicism, finding its fullest philosophical expression in Thomism, “the Christian philosophy.” McInerny’s study helps us understand why this should be so. Again, his subtitle is “A Spiritual Life”—not, as some might have thought more appropriate, “A Philosophical Life.” For Maritain, the chief business of life was the business of the spirit, to become a saint; and to become a saint is to know the truth, and, ultimately, the Truth. The great truth of Thomas is a certain way of knowing that lower case truth and upper case Truth are inseparable. And that way of knowing is proclaimed, vindicated, and defended by Catholic Christianity. In and around the Council—but not in the Council’s Spirit-guided teaching—Maritain saw the forces from the other side of the great divide infiltrating the life and thought of the Church. They were attempting, and succeeding, in using aggiornamento as a bridge across the great divide. The result was a subjection of philosophy and theology to ways of thinking marked by what Maritain described as “kneeling before the world.”

The abandonment of the intuition of being, and of Being, resulted in a philosophy and theology wholly collapsed into, and captive to, the immanent. The “truth” was put into quotation marks and made, without remainder, instrumental to our human projects. This, Maritain was convinced, was in clear contradiction to the intention and the teachings of the Council. As I indicated earlier, and as is suggested by the repeated citation of Paul VI’s final address to the Council, Maritain does imply, ever so gently, that the Council fathers might have more effectively prevented the misuse of aggiornamento to build a bridge of infiltration across the great divide, but it would seem that his understanding of ecclesial docility prevents him from saying that explicitly.

In any event, there is no hesitance or ambivalence in his affirmation of the great achievements of the Council in, inter alia, clarifying that the Church’s mission is premised upon spiritual rather than worldly power, affirming her irrevocable commitment to religious and political freedom, opening herself to engagement with other Christians and other religions, renewing the call to evangelization in which all have a part, and underscoring the dignity and responsibility of the laity, with particular reference to the universal call to holiness. In these and other respects, there is no doubt that Maritain believed the Council was a great gift of the Holy Spirit. I said earlier that The Peasant is stunningly prescient. In substance, form, and rhetoric, there is hardly a distortion of Vatican II that has appeared in the past decades that Maritain did not see or anticipate in 1965. About one thing, however, he was not prescient. “Clearly,” he wrote, “all such pieces of foolery will pass away as quickly as they have appeared.” I suppose it depends on what is meant by quickly.

Whether the Council Failed

In 1975, the noted sociologist of religion Peter Berger and I convened a gathering of influential Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox theologians and philosophers in Hartford, Connecticut, to consider the state of Christian faith and life in America. From that intense conversation came “The Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation,” which occasioned some considerable controversy at the time. Ralph McInerny was part of the Hartford meeting and it was only after my recent rereading of The Peasant that I realized how much, through McInerny, Jacques Maritain was there as well. The Hartford Appeal specified a number of theological ideas that were “pervasive, false, and debilitating.” The foundational error in all these ideas, Hartford said, is the denial of the transcendent. In other words, Christianity, in both its academic and popular presentation, was becoming increasingly expert in helping people get to Damascus without incident.

I cannot say for sure that Jacques Maritain would have signed the Hartford Appeal, but I would not be entirely surprised if Ralph McInerny entertained the thought that he was signing on Maritain’s behalf. In any event, the “pieces of foolery” that the peasant of the Garonne thought would pass away quickly have not passed away yet, and an argument can be made that today, almost forty years later, they are more firmly entrenched.

We might well ask whether today Maritain would think, or whether we should think, that the Second Vatican Council failed. It is no secret that some have long since reached that conclusion. A Council may, of course, fail—not in its validity but in its efficacy. Of the twenty-one ecumenical councils recognized by the Church, historians generally view the thirteenth-century councils of Lateran IV and Lyons I and II, along with the fifteenth-century councils of Constance and Basel, and the sixteenth-century Lateran V, as more or less failures in their reforming intentions. At least in the second Christian millennium, a successful council seems to be more the exception than the rule. Our thinking on these matters has been skewed by the remarkable success of the Council of Trent and its implementation by heroic figures such as Charles Borromeo and the Society of Jesus in its earlier fidelity to the charism of Ignatius. There was not so much a Counter-Reformation, as it is commonly called, as an authentic Catholic Reformation, beginning already in the fifteenth century, and finding its council in Trent and its champions in those who boldly advanced the reforming vision of Trent.

There should be no doubt, or so it seems to me, that reform is very much needed today. What might be called a Second Catholic Reformation has its council in Vatican II and has many champions, the foremost of whom is John Paul II. He is, through and through, “a man of the Council,” having been a major participant in those deliberations and decisions most cheered by Jacques Maritain. As Archbishop of Krakow and for twenty-four years as pope, he has relentlessly pressed the conciliar reforms touching on almost every aspect of the Church’s faith and life. And yet we cannot avoid asking whether, fifty or a hundred years from now, it will be judged that the Second Vatican Council was a failure, and, as a consequence, the Second Catholic Reformation a vain hope. Despite Maritain’s somewhat insouciant statements about all the “foolery” passing quickly, one detects in the somber reflections of the peasant of the Garonne a haunting suspicion that the damage done by the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the Council will be with the Church for a very long time.

The “Champions” of the Council

But he does not surrender himself to that suspicion. The deniers of transcendence—represented for Maritain primarily by Teilhard’s “cosmic Christ” and its conflation of salvation with the evolutionary process—claim to have been vindicated, or at least encouraged, by the Council. But, says Maritain, “With a magnanimous serenity, the Council utterly and completely ignored this great effort at a ‘better Christianity.’ . . . They will have to wait for a new Council, and another, and Lord knows how many after that. Or else, if their patience wears thin, will they go so far as to form themselves into a separate sect, as did Marcion and his disciples, at the risk of making Père Teilhard rise from his grave to condemn them?” One notes that in the main text of The Peasant , Maritain tries to be personally gentle with Teilhard, attributing his philosophical and theological confusions to his uncontrolled “lyrical” genius. In an appendix, however, he has second thoughts, leading one to think that Teilhard may not rise from the grave to condemn his sectarian followers, being a sectarian himself.

As it happens, however, almost forty years later those whom Maritain criticized are, with few exceptions, not inclined to form a new church for their “better Christianity,” since they feel quite at home in, if not entirely in control of, the Church as it is—at least with respect to academic philosophy and theology and the Church’s catechetical directions. But it is true that those whom Maritain viewed as the enemies of transcendence wait and work for another council, and another after that, and after that maybe a permanent council in which what Maritain calls the “personality” and “memory” of the Church will be displaced by a process of endless revision. It is a great oddity that many of those who declare themselves to be most enthusiastic about Vatican II”who routinely speak of the “pre-Vatican II Church” and the “post-Vatican II Church,” as though they are two churches”are the same people who press for the convoking of Vatican Council III. They declare themselves eager to “think with the Church”—sentire cum ecclesia—always stipulating that the mind of the Church will be properly articulated by the next council and the next pope, or the council and the pope after that. Theirs is an anticipatory fidelity, faithful to a Magisterium that will one day come around to agreeing with them.

One senses a certain puzzlement in The Peasant that those most determined to undermine the teaching of the Council succeed in presenting themselves as the great champions of the Council. Their insistence on the need for Vatican III—which, they say, would “complete” the work of Vatican II—clearly suggests that Vatican II did not do what they think it should have done. Yet one must ask why it is that those who, in fact, reject the Council’s teachings have been so successful in posing as the Council’s champions. One answer, it seems to me, is that many who understand and affirm the Council’s teachings have been so lukewarm in the Council’s defense. Many are inclined to the view that John XXIII’s convocation of a council was, if not a mistake, at least unnecessary. There was, they say, no crisis that required a major initiative of reform; the Church was, all in all, vibrant and flourishing on her current course.

That way of thinking receives, I believe, no encouragement from the peasant of the Garonne. Maritain’s list of what needed to be reformed in the Church prior to the Council is simply the flip side of the above-mentioned conciliar reforms that he so strongly approved. Key to his analysis are the many meanings of the word “world.” If those who tried to hijack the intention of aggiornamento were guilty of uncritically “kneeling before the world,” they were, in part, simply overreacting against the Manicheism, the contempt for the world, that was so prominent before the Council. Maritain writes:

The hostility of a civilization in which Christianity—and especially such a disfigured Christianity—was called to question on all sides, and where science was held to be the enemy of religion; . . . the modernist crisis, with its first epidemic of itching ears and piously intended errors; . . . the indispensable struggle against these errors, the almost exclusive recourse to disciplinary measures; the spiritual impoverishment of a Christian laity, who continued in general to imagine that the call to the perfection of charity, with what it implies of life, of prayer, and, as much as possible, of contemplative recollection, was the exclusive concern of the monks; . . . All this was going to build up, in the unconscious of a great many Christians, clerics and laymen, an enormous weight of frustration, disillusionment, repressed doubts, resentment, bitterness, healthy desires sacrificed, with all the anxieties and pent-up aspirations of the unhappy conscience. Comes the aggiornamento . Why be astonished that at the very announcement of a Council, then in the surrounding of it, and now after it, the enormous unconscious weight which I have just mentioned burst into the open in a kind of explosion that does no honor to the human intelligence? Thus the Council appears as an island guarded by the Spirit of God in the middle of an ocean which is overturning everything, the true and the false, pell-mell.

There is no doubt, then, that Maritain thought reform was needed, and he welcomed the Council’s Spirit-guided response to that need. I think it fair to say that his disappointment, indeed his bitterness, over the confusions and distortions that threatened, and still threaten, to overwhelm the Council is but a measure of the high hopes he had for the reforms of the Council. Against both Manicheism and an idolatrous “kneeling before the world,” the Council proposed the Church’s critical engagement with the history of which it is part, knowing that the key to that history is the intuition of being, and of Being, without which mankind arrives at Damascus without incident—with the result that lives beyond number terminate in the greatest sadness, that of not being a saint.