Jacques Maritain, the most famous Thomist philosopher of his age, contributed to the drafting of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
Three years later, the definitive expression of his political philosophy Man and the State was published. In that book Maritain recalls that people with very opposed ideologies had agreed a draft list of rights, saying, “we agree on these rights providing we are not asked why.” With the “why”, the dispute begins. For Maritain, the Declaration was a practical project, an attempt to achieve consensus not on speculative notions but on common practical notions, on the “affirmation of the same set of convictions concerning action”. Believing in “a sort of vegetative development or growth…of moral knowledge and moral feeling, which is in itself independent of philosophical systems”, Maritain assumes that this “knowledge through inclination” progresses through humanity’s awareness of the precepts of natural law.
Yet this downgrading of the cognitive nature of natural law neglects the fact that knowledge is not essentially inclination and that our knowledge of the first precepts of the natural moral law is authentically cognitive. By stressing the importance of universal co-operation Maritain rightly focusses on the natural moral law, common to all. However, in seeing that knowledge as coming “through inclination”, he appears to ignore, in the words of the Thomist Lawrence Dewan, “the consensus in which our primary grounds for hope are to be found, that the human race should be preserved, and that human life must be for a purpose that transcends it, is in us a vision of the good and a willing love of that seen good”. And the presence of that knowledge and love in us is ultimately explained by “the derivation of all beings, including the human being from a transcendent cause of being and goodness”.
It is not hair-splitting to point out that what people want in practice is radically governed by what they speculatively know (or think they know), such that any co-operation which ignores religious and philosophical truths is necessarily fragile. Civil toleration and the recognition of a minimal set of agreed truths about the nature of man is one thing, but Maritain goes much further. For him the “sacral” era of the Middle Ages, where an attempt was made “to build the life of the earthly community and civilization on the foundation of the unity of theological faith and religious creed” is now “in no way conceivable”. He welcomes the increasing distinction between civil society and the spiritual realm and sees in a Christianly inspired temporal society an advance on the sacral era. He adds that the object of a common “secular faith” is a “merely practical one, not theoretical or dogmatic” and that agreements can be found because, “they depend basically on simple, ‘natural’ apperceptions, of which the human heart becomes capable with the progress of moral conscience”.
This optimistic view of the progress of human nature, which views the movement beyond the sacral age as broadly positive and even sees in the United States Constitution a secular “fruit of the perennial Christian life-force” and an “outstanding lay Christian document”, passes over a rather inconvenient reality. For, just as the passing of time allows for Christianity to act as a “leaven” on the body politic, it also allows, in the words of an early reviewer of Maritain’s book, “the specifically anti-Christian reaction of pagan human nature to Christ’s claim on man…more time to unfold; to combat and to supress (rather than merely reject) embodied Christianity proper, that is the Church; but especially to distort the glad tidings of Christianity into a poisonous gospel of man’s prideful self-worship.”
Pope Leo XIII had captured the traditional understanding of the relationship between Church and State by declaring that the State related to the Church as the body related to the soul – namely that it had its own ends, but that these were subservient to the higher ends of the soul which animates the body. The English philosopher Thomas Pink notes that in Man and the State Maritain tellingly passes over in silence Leo XIII’s post sacral-age re-assertion of the State’s proper subordination to the Church in spiritual matters. That this model is not possible in a given age does not mean that there is any other model that the Church can assent to as the ideal relationship of Church and State.
Looking back on this well-intentioned book from the perspective of 2023 one cannot help but conclude, with Aristotle, that a small mistake in the beginning is multiplied later a thousandfold. Maritain ends the book with paeans to Democracy and looks forward to a One-World government, falling into the trap that allows our view of the present, which we know only too well, to be mediated through the lens of a future we know not at all. Toward the end of his life, in The Peasant of Garonne, Maritain mourned what he saw as Christians engaging in “a kind of kneeling before the world”. Man and the State played its part in bringing about the object of his distress.
(Photograph of Jacques Maritain: Wikicommons)
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.