Jacques Maritain and French Catholic Intellectuals

278 Pages·1983·43.385 MB·English

by  Bernard E. Doering

Jacques Maritain
and the
French Catholic
JACQUES MARITAIN
AND THE FRENCH CATHOLIC
INTELLECTUALS
Bernard Doering
Jacques Maritain and the French
Catholic Intellectuals covers seventy
years of Maritain’s life—from his con-
version to Catholicism in 1905 to his
death in 1973—and it follows the de-
velopment of his ideas in response to
the crucial social and political events
of this century. In discussing his ten-
uous affiliation with and later repudia-
tion of the right-wing, monarchist
Action Frangaise in the 1920s, sym-
pathy and support for the victims of
the Spanish Civil War, defense of the
Jews against the anti-Semitic attacks
in the 30s and 40s, and support of the
Free French during the Second World
War, it shows Maritain to be one for
whom a commitment to Catholicism
went hand in hand with a commitment
to justice that led him to resist the
absolutist, authoritarian tendencies
of both the left and the right.
Jacques Maritain and the French
Catholic Intellectuals is more than the
intellectual biography of one man,
however; it presents a collective biog-
raphy of an age. The Cercle d’Etudes
Thomistes that met regularly at the
Maritains’ home at Meudon brought
together some of the leading Catholic
intellectuals in France, including
Mauriac, Cocteau, Merleau-Ponty,
Massignon, Simon, and Mounier. This
group of highly individualistic thinkers
—and the other Catholic intellectuals
connected with them—were faced with
the double task of making sense of
their place within Catholicism while
at the same time determining their
response as Catholics to the political
currents engulfing Europe.
Continued on back flap

Jacques Maritain and
the French Catholic
Intellectuals
BERNARD E. DOERING
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
Notre Dame - London
Copyright © 1983 by
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Doering, Bernard E.
Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic intel-
lectuals.
Includes index.
1. Maritain, Jacques, 1882- 1973. 2.
Philosophers — France — Biography. 3. Catholics —
France — History — 20th century. 4. France —
Intellectual life —20th century.
I. Title.
B2430.M34D63 1983 194 82-40377
ISBN 0- 268-01202-4
Manufactured in the United States of America
TO JANE
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Action Frangaise: Maurras, Massis, Maritain 6
2. Action Frangaise: Bernanos, Massis, Maritain 37
3. The Decade of Manifestos 60
4. The Spanish Civil War 85
5. The Jewish Question 126
6. The Second World War and the Defense of Democracy 168
7. Ambassador to the Vatican and Professor at Princeton 206
8. Peasant of the Garonne and Little Brother of Jesus 217
Notes 243
Index of Names 265
Vll
Acknowledgments
No BOOK IS THE WORK of one individual. Like our lives, our books
are influenced by so many persons that it is impossible for an
author to recall all those who participated either directly or indi-
rectly in the making of a book. It would be futile for me to try to
express my gratitude to each one who, in the course of a conver-
sation or a letter, by hints about avenues of research, by
suggested corrections, or simply by gracious encouragement, has
contributed to the writing of this book.
However, I would like to express my appreciation to a
number of people in a very particular way. First to Wallace Fow-
lie, who suggested the topic of the book and has shown continued
interest in my work. To the late Professor Joseph Evans, Director
of the Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame when I
began working on this study, for generously making available
whatever I needed from the Maritain Center for my research and
for countless other acts of assistance. To the trustees of the Mari-
tain Archives: the late Brother Heinz Schmitz, Professor Olivier
Lacombe and Madame Antoinette Grunelius, for permitting me to
consult certain documents prior to the date they were to be made
public.
I am particularly grateful to Madame Grunelius for the long
hours she spent searching out the documents I needed, and above
all for the long hours of conversation and her generous and cor-
dial hospitality which made my stay at the Centre d'Etudes Jac-
ques et Rai’ssa Maritain so fruitful and so pleasant. I am most
grateful, too, to Brother Jean-Marie Allion, a Little Brother from
Toulouse, who was working at the Maritain Archives in
Kolbsheim during the summer of 1981 and who acted as my per-
sonal “amanuensis," for giving so generously of his time reading
letters to select those that would interest me, copying documents
ix
Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals
X
I needed and typing legible copies of letters written in almost in-
decipherable script.
I am also most grateful to Henry Bars for our long and help-
ful conversations, and above all for his unselfishly putting at my
total disposition unpublished manuscripts of his own on topics I
was treating in my book. Finally, I express my appreciation to
Anthony O. Simon for his countless acts of kindness and encour-
agement, and in particular for having given me complete access
to the correspondence between his father, Yves R. Simon, and
Jacques Maritain, which, with Deba P. Patnaik, he is presently
preparing for publication. All quotations from the Maritain/
Simon correspondence are from this collection. Copies of the
Maritain/Simon letters can be found at the Maritain Center of the
University of Notre Dame and at the Maritain Archives in
Kolbsheim, France.
Unless otherwise indicated, the English translations of all
French texts are my own.
Introduction
striking phenomena of twentieth-century French
ONE OF THE MOST
letters is the Catholic Literary Revival, which was the more re-
markable for the fact that it began from almost nothing. Consid-
ering the situation in France in the early 1880s, one cannot avoid
the impression that, in all its long history, the Church had
scarcely ever found itself in such desperate straits.
Positivism reigned supreme, often under the form of an
ambitious and complacent scientism which saw no need for the
supernatural and which therefore felt called to undermine the
structure of traditional metaphysics and, consequently, of Catho-
lic theology. The only metaphysicians who enjoyed any ac-
ceptability were those who turned to a system of Kantian
idealism which, to many minds, appeared sufficient to found a
moral system without God and to make religion useless. For any-
thing that resembled a religious climate, one had to turn to
Renan, whose memories of seminary life and ecclesiastical
vocabulary gave way with age to a skeptical laicism or to an
aging Victor Hugo, who in countless alexandrins constructed a
jumbled metaphysical system in which the name of God ap-
peared, to be sure, but certainly not the traditional Christian God
of the Bible and even less, of Calvary.
In the literary world the spirit of positivism led, on one
hand, in the tradition of Parnasse, to a kind of decorative
paganism and voluptuous erudition which tended to describe
with subtlety and perfection a beautiful object without ever look-
ing for its soul. On the other hand, in the tradition of Medan, it
led to an epic but vulgar naturalism.
In the political order, the adamant antirepublicanism of
Popes Pius IX and Pius X allied the Church with the antidemo-
cratic forces of reaction. The papal condemnation of Lammenais,
Lacordaire, Montalembert, Lord Acton and the Catholic liberal
1