The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism ed. by Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer (review)

Abstract

Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism. Edited by Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer. [KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society, 7.] (Leuven: Leuven University Press. Distrib. Cornell University Press. 2010. Pp. 211. $42.50 paperback. ISBN 978-90-5867-714-3.)This strong collection of essays fills an important niche in Maritain studies. Through its consideration of the interwar period during which Jacques and Raisa Maritain first launched their apostolate to culture, these authors do much to illuminate the interplay of the aesthetic, religious, philosophical, and political aspects of the crucial decades preceding World War II. Maritain works best known to American readers were written during the two decades after World War II. Therefore, this collection of essays would assist such readers to appreciate the broader perspectives as well as the origins of Maritain's later work.The collection includes both overviews of the Maritains' work and studies of particular relationships and specific trends and movements. These essays are well informed, and they unearth new details about the important relationships of the age. Most of all, the authors develop fresh interpretations of their life and work. editor, Rajesh Heynickx, seeks to break with the schematic and myopic views (p. 14) of Maritain that either consign him to irrelevance because of his Catholicism and Thomism, as well as those who lionize him as the privileged way into the recovery of revitalized philosophy. What they both miss, he claims, is the concrete historical dimension that would make possible such a tremendous impact of a philosopher of fixed principles (p. 14) and eternal perspective on the practices and discourse of the modernists who celebrated change and fragmentariness.Exploring Maritain's own paradoxical claim to be both antimodern and ultramodern, the many essays in book considers how Maritain's Thomism and devout Catholicism led him to friendships and significant dialogue with many of the leaders of modern art, literature, and culture. Stephen Schloesser's The Rise of a Mystic Modernism presents a nice summary of the discoveries and hypothesis of his book Jazz Age Catholicism (Toronto, 2005). In sum, he explores how the very distinction between matter and form opened Maritain to a variety of ways of manifesting the form in diverse materials, style, and approaches. Rather than imitate the past in a neo-Gothic style, modernism could be seen as a way to explore new manifestations of the personal being, the search for God, and the conflict of good and evil. In addition, the modernist struggles with the guilt of war would lead to a reparation for the dead in fitting tribute to the young lives sacrificed in the horror of war. …