Abstract
Philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) embraced a quest for sanctity at the core of his vocation as a French Catholic intellectual. Known as an exponent of the teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, he also devoted considerable energies to the promotion of democracy and human rights, as well as the combat against antisemitism. Maritain has been lauded for his sometimes courageous attempts to eradicate anti-Jewish prejudice from the Christian conscience, though some prevailing interpretations oversimplify this thinker's motivations and ideas. Keeping in mind the historically-contingent and often ambivalent nature of philosemitism, this article analyzes Maritain's postwar writings on the Jewish Question and his interactions with Popes Pius XII and Paul VI, Anglican theologian James Parkes, Jewish historians Leon Poliakov and Jules Isaac, and fellow Catholic writers Paul Claudel and Francois Mauriac.
Highlights
The most important thing that the young philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) learned from his godfather, novelist Léon Bloy, was that “there is but one sadness—not to be a saint.”[1]
Writing in 1947, he identified antisemitism as first and foremost a Christian problem: “Before being a problem of blood, of physical life and death for Jews, antisemitism is a problem of the spirit, of spiritual life and death for Christians.”[5]. Today’s reader might detect in this statement little more than a “Christianization of the Holocaust.”[6]. But one might discern a decisive change underway in how postAuschwitz Christians began to see the question of Jewish identity and survival in the modern world, rethinking the modern Jewish Question through contemplating Christian guilt and atonement, and confronting a longstanding and notyet-repudiated “teaching of contempt.”[7]
In 1961, Maritain, in retirement at a monastery outside of Toulouse, traveled to New York to receive the Edith Stein Prize, which he shared with his recently-deceased wife, to whom he believed he owed “everything good in life,” and who had the “double privilege” of being born a Jew and baptized as a Christian.[92]. He confided to his journal how he envied this double privilege, having spent decades with Raïssa and Véra: “I feel myself a debtor to Israel...I would like to be as little as possible a goïsche kop; I would like to be a Jew by adoption, since I have been introduced by baptism into the dignity of the children of Israel.”[93]. Writing in 1967 to a young woman who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, he testified to this sanctified envy while affirming her feelings of being uprooted: 89 For a comprehensive, balanced study of Christian Zionism, see Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
Summary
The most important thing that the young philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) learned from his godfather, novelist Léon Bloy, was that “there is but one sadness—not to be a saint.”[1]. One historian emphasizes the practical limitations of Maritain’s primarily theological approach to the Jewish Question, citing “lingering concerns about the practical utility of the eminent philosopher’s ruminations on the heady events of interwar and wartime Europe,” though acknowledging the “bold, courageous, and prophetic” aspects of his “theological appreciahttp://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr “L’impossible antisémitisme,” (1937) Maritain identified Jews (at least in a corporate, mystical sense) as obstinately and fatally bound to the world.[21] During the wartime years, he wrote of a “forgetful people” being made aware of their true Messiah through undergoing the unthinkable.[22] For Maritain, Jewish mass death assumed an unbearably horrific yet hopefully redemptive part of a Christian metanarrative. When Maritain describes himself as “a wandering Jew, without a rock on which to rest my head,” he is citing Raïssa’s 1939 poem “Chagall,” and not for the first time, as he reproduced part of the poem in an earlier essay:
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