At the end of his life, Maritain could say with Bloy, “There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.”

Jacques Maritain’s Service to Truth

by Christopher Shannon

In the nineteenth century, the West took great pride in its independence from the Church, an independence based on a new public authority rooted in the language of the natural sciences. Liberals and socialists disagreed on the nature of the economy, but both appealed to science to justify their positions. In France, this general faith in science came to be celebrated and advanced under the banner of “positivism,” an ideology that reduced the criteria of truth to empirically verifiable facts and the mechanistic, deterministic laws discernable from those facts. This ideal of scientific truth stood as the shining glory of nineteenth-century Western civilization, but it drove one sensitive, agnostic student at the Sorbonne, France’s premier university, to the brink of suicide.

That man was Jacques Maritain. Born in 1882 and raised in a Protestant, free-thinking family milieu, Maritain would convert to Catholicism in 1906 and go on to be the most influential Catholic public philosopher of the twentieth century. Maritain is best known today for his role in guiding Catholic thought toward its rapprochement with modern political democracy. But these achievements in the field of political philosophy have unfortunately hindered appreciation for those aspects of his life and thought that transcend the contingencies of modern politics. Maritain came to the Catholic Church as a man searching for a truth beyond positivistic materialism, yet also searching for an authentic way of living beyond the material prosperity and technological wizardry the West still holds up to the world as the highest goal of human aspiration.