Maritain’s long and varied career is a chronicle of his time as well as a personal journey. From the feet of Leon Bloy to the French Ambassadorship to the Holy See, his intellectual compass provided an undeviating course. The youthful French intellectual discovering and embracing the Catholic Faith and then his subsequent discovery of St. Thomas Aquinas is almost a story in itself. His newfound intellectual confidence led him to critique the philosophy of his mentor, Henri Bergson. The eminent Bergson had reason to be chagrined at the apostasy of one of his most promising students. Maturation brought Maritain to...

It is hazardous to talk about the relation of church and state in the abstract, as if there were an ideal relationship to be achieved and against which all others are to be measured. The modus vivendi which prevailed in Greece and Rome during the classical period could not have been culturally possible in China of the same era. Later the religious paternalism of the Greek city-state or of the Roman polis became impossible from the standpoint of Christianity. The doctrine of two swords was forged early, and since Ambrose it has remained the standard in the West.¹ Even Ambrose’s...

Jacques Maritain’s was an “engaged” intellect from the very beginning of his academic career. Never one to waffle or to avoid conflict, Maritain joined issue with some of the leading philosophers of his generation. He proved to be an intractable critic of modernity. Maritain was not alone in viewing the dominant philosophy of his day as a danger to Christian belief and practice. Informed Protestants and Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic evaluated nineteenth-century intellectual currents in much the same way. To see this, one has only to contrast the course of American idealism in the last quarter of...

The medieval problem of individuation is not the contemporary problem of “individuals” or “particulars” discussed by P. F. Strawson, J. W. Meiland, and others.¹ In a certain sense the problem of individuation originates with Parmenides, but it is Plato’s philosophy of science which bequeaths the problem to Aristotle and to his medieval commentators. Its solution in Aquinas is not that of Aristotle, nor is it that of Scotus or Suarez. Aquinas will distinguish between the problem of individuation and what we may call the problem of “individuality” or the problem of “subsistence.” The solution to both will draw upon many...

At the end of the nineteenth century, the European philosophical turf was shared by two main camps, both coalitions: those of an idealistic strain, largely Hegelians, on one side, and the materialists and skeptics, indebted to British empiricism and the Critiques of Kant, on the other. The situation was perilous from the vantage point of those who held allegiance to classical antiquity and the religious outlook which had shaped Western culture.

In 1879 Leo XIII recommended in Aeternae patris a return to St. Thomas as an antidote to the various materialisms and positivisms which cut one off from the Faith....

That attitudes toward science and technology make a difference is widely recognized. If science is conceived as merely description and prediction and not as a search for causes and principles, it will surely be regarded as lacking in explanatory power. Adopting such a positivistic view of science, one automatically rules out certain time-honored disciplines simply because they do not fit the mold. Does something equally momentous flow from varying conceptions of art?

Given the ambiguities found in contemporary usage that not all who use the term “philosophy of art” mean by it the same thing, one can nevertheless identify certain...

In a commencement address delivered at the University of Notre Dame in May 2000, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “It is particularly shameful that the United States, the most prosperous and successful country in the history of the world, should be one of the least generous in terms of the share of its gross national product it devotes to helping the world’s poor.”¹ He admitted that the United States is the second highest contributor in foreign aid after Japan in absolute terms, spending close to $9 billion a year, but he called for debt relief and for volunteers to...

Maritain’s last complete book, De l’Église du Christ, was published in English translation in the year of his death.¹ It was ignored by the secular media and given scant notice in the Catholic press. It followed by seven years the publication of Paysan de la Garonne (1966),² which had earned Maritain the enmity of the Catholic left for its critique of some of the theology developing in the wake of Vatican II. John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths (1960) noted happily that the Church in North America was not divided between left and right as it was with...