Acting Reasonable: Democracy, Authority, and Natural Rights in the Thought of Jacques Maritain

Acting Reasonable: Democracy, Authority, and Natural Rights in the Thought of Jacques Maritain | Brian Jones, M.A. | Ignatius Insight | January 17, 2011

After listening to one of Jacques Maritain's last public lectures in 1958, the late Ralph McInerny pondered the greatness of the French philosopher:

He was a saintly man. That is what I sensed as I scuffled through the leaves on my way back from Maritain's last lecture. He loved the truth, but his purpose in life was not to win arguments. He wanted to be wise. Such an odd ambition for a philosopher! He succeeded because he prayed as well as he studied.

Whether examining Maritain's philosophic or political works, this reality must always be kept at the forefront. The scientific rationalism that bombarded Maritain and his wife at the Sorbonne led to a near suicide attempt. Yet, it was the pursuit of truth and wisdom that opened them to the discovery of life's greatest tragedy: not to become a saint.

In an age of moral, intellectual, and political disintegration, it is to one such as Maritain that we ought to turn to. Maritain, like the great English statesman St. Thomas More, expresses in thought and life the harmonious link between faith and reason. There comes a realization that Christianity does have legitimate answers to man's fundamental questions concerning his earthly existence. How we ought to act in a given and established political order is at the heart of the Catholic intellectual tradition, and one that Maritain frequently reflects upon with great clarity and substance.

In this essay, I want to show that Maritain's theoretical grounding of democracy and authority in an authentic anthropology of man is necessarily linked with an appropriate understanding of his work in the area of naturallLaw and natural rights. The Natural Law, according to Maritain, is an act of reasonableness that equips man to know the good that must be done and what evils must be avoided (apart from divine revelation). Specifically, I will examine Maritain's metaphysical understanding of "rights" (what type of being we are) and also its relation to ethics and politics (what we ought to do in a given body politic).

Secondly, I want to examine Maritain's distinction in Scholasticism and Politics between the democracy of the individual and the democracy of the person, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between authority and power.

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Comments

[Robert Miller]

It might be useful for Ignatius to bring out a new critical edition of "The Peasant of the Garonne".

As a Catholic college student, I read it eagerly in the late 1960s, but I've lost the copy I had then.

Maritain's reflections on the Council and the modern (and emerging post-modern)world in that work were taken by critics at the time of its publication as being in "discontinuity" with his life's work, just as the same critics were welcoming Vatican II as being in radical discontinuity with 1,500 years or more of Catholic doctrinal development and practice. An Augustinian Thomist then, as now, can see that the critics were wrong on both counts.

[David H. Lukenbill]

I would second Mr. Robert Miller's comment.

"The Peasent of the Garonne", which I am currently rereading, surely calls out for a critical edition.

[William]

Re: "He succeeded because he prayed as well as he studied."

In their little book, Prayer and Intelligence, Jacques and Raissa Maritain make a similar point:

"But the intelligence itself can only develop its highest powers in so far as it is protected and fortified by the peace given by prayer. The closer a soul approaches God by love, the simpler grows the gaze of her intelligence and the clearer her vision." (5)

It is prayer that forms the heart of the person and the resulting studies are the fruit of such prayer.