Jacques Maritain - Christianity and Democracy and the Rights of Man and Natural Law

CHRISTIANITY AND DEMOCRACY
THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND NATURAL LAW

CHRISTIANITY AND DEMOCRACY
and
THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND
NATURAL LAW

Translated by Doris C. Anson

With an Introduction by
Donald Arthur Gallagher
and
With a Foreword by
Dr. Raymond L. Dennehy

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Titles of the French originals
Christianisme et democratic
1943 ditions de la Maison Franaise
New York, N.Y. Les Droits de lhomme et la loi naturelle
1942 Editions de la Maison Francaise
New York, N.Y.

Cover photograph Lee Pettet / istockphoto

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

2011, 1986 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-600-6
Library of Congress Control Number 2011932358
Printed in the United States of America

THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND
NATURAL LAW

The Human Person

The Person and Society

The Common Good

Totalitarianism and Personalism

The Movement of Persons within Social Life

Four Characteristics of a Society of Free Men

A Vitally Christian Society

The Movement of Societies within Time

The Conquest of Freedom

The Common Task

The Internal Progress of Human Life Itself

Political Humanism

Animality and Personality

Natural Law

Natural Law and Human Rights

Natural Law, Law of Nations, Positive Law

The Rights of the Human Person

The Rights of the Civic Person

The Rights of the Working Person

Rsum of the Rights Enumerated

Jacques Maritain was a philosopher, and it was exactly because he was a philosopher in the truest sense that he enjoyed the freedom to write books such as Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law . Both abound with references to Christian doctrine to clarify philosophical claims. Predictably, that combination of faith and reason would lead to misunderstandings. Philosopher Sidney Hook was not alone in dismissing Maritains socio-political thought as a disguised Christian theology. After listening to Maritain delivering a paper in which he unabashedly appealed to Christian doctrine, at a philosophy conference in Paris, the organizer of the event remarked to tienne Gilson during the intermission, What has happened to Maritain? Has he gone crazy?

Jacques Maritain was neither a theologian in disguise nor crazy. He was only being his usual philosophical self. The obvious question is, How can appeals to Christian doctrine stand as evidence for philosophical commitment? Down through Christian history, from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to John Henry Cardinal Newman, Leo XIII, John Paul II, and Maritain himself, this question has been answered. In The Gospel of Life , Pope John Paul II teaches that divine revelation benefits the philosopher by instilling two qualities: humility and boldness. Humility reminds him that there is a source of wisdom that exceeds the human intellects capacities to discover on its own. Boldness follows: acceptance of a transcendent source of knowledge encourages attempts to push the intellects natural capacities to ever higher levels of understanding.

Ever since the Renaissance, reason has been celebrated at the expense of faith. With his redefinition of the human person as an angelic thinking substance, replacing the Aristotelian definition of him as a rational animal, Rene Descartes inadvertently bequeathed to modern culture the philosophical rationale for discarding faith as a valid source of knowledge. Whatever could not be justified by unaided reason was relegated to the dustbin of history. This secularist influence permeates democracy today. Current political debates are rife with accusations from advocates for abortion and same-sex marriage that their opponents are trying to impose their religious beliefs on legislation and public policy. Students graduate from our universities with a knee-jerk reaction to any argument advanced by religious believers. Apparently few graduates understand the energizing interaction between faith and reason, as they remain ignorant of the important role Christians have played in American history: the first two legislators in the Continental Congress to speak against slavery were Quakers; the leaders of the anti-slavery movement in nineteenth-century America were Christian ministers, as were the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; and Cesar Chavez, the leader of the farm workers movement in California, nourished his understanding of social justice by reading the teachings of the Catholic Church on the subject. Yet who would say that arguments against slavery or for civil rights and social justice are religious arguments? That they are inspired by divine revelation is true. But to reject an argument because its origin is religious belief and therefore refuse to consider it on its merits is to commit the genetic fallacy, which is to shift attention from the evidence given to how the evidence came to human attention. When this fallacy is committed, what is then overlooked is whether or not an argument makes its appeal to the evidence of human experience and the conclusions of unaided human reason regarding human nature, justice, freedom, equality, etc.

To understand the intertwining of philosophy and Christian doctrine in Maritains writings, it is necessary to understand two things: first, what he means when he refers to his philosophy as a Christian philosophy; second, the different ways speculative and practical philosophy respectively relate to divine revelation. First, Maritain does not understand Christian philosophy to refer to a single, internally unified discipline but rather to a complex, which serves as a framework within which the philosopher who is a Christian seeks the truth. Accordingly, he distinguishes between the nature of philosophy itself and the state , or the circumstances, in which it is practiced. Owing to the limitations of the human conditionthe imperfection of our understanding, the fact that we are confined to sensible things for our evidence, etc.unaided reason cannot by itself attain the ultimate and complete truth. Maritain understands that to accept the ethos of philosophy is to search for truth and for the highest truth, wisdom. To the extent that truth is discovered, it transforms the philosophers entire life, for he lives according to what he believes to be the truth, according to what is: What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve ( Degrees of Knowledge ). If the philosopher finds a source of higher truth, or truth that he believes cannot be grasped by unaided reason, then, because he is dedicated to the truth, he incorporates it into his life. But, if this higher truth cannot be grasped by reason alone, then it cannot, Maritain insists, be fused with philosophy (which relies on unaided reason) to form a single, unified discipline.

Second, Maritain holds that speculative philosophy-knowledge for the sake of knowing (metaphysics) as opposed to knowledge for the sake of action (ethics)constitutes an autonomous discipline. Nevertheless, divine revelation does add knowledge to metaphysics and thus confirms what unaided reason has already discovered. For example, metaphysics, which is the highest natural wisdom, arrives at the knowledge of God by starting with the data of experience. Consequently, it knows God only under the aspect of natural things, only as the cause of Being. Conversely, whatever objective truths revelation furnishes to philosophy, they are not, as given , philosophical truths, for they have not been verified by reason and through natural experience. But this is exactly what must be done if they are to become part of the fund of philosophical wisdom. Take, for example, the idea of God as Subsisting Being Itself , an idea which was set down by Moses, scarcely surmised by Aristotle... and which the Christian doctors drew from Aristotle, thanks to Moses ( An Essay on Christian Philosophy ). So, Christian revelation, by telling us something about Gods nature, prepared the way for certain aspects of the natural evidence by which Aristotle arrived at the existence of a first mover, aspects that were not explicit to Aristotle. Although admitting that speculative philosophy is an autonomous discipline, Maritain maintains that philosophy leads to theology, not because he thinks that speculative philosophy is inadequate with regard to its proper objectBeing insofar as it is Beingbut because the search for wisdom has a dynamism: the lower wisdom seeks the higher wisdom.