Theological Indebtedness to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: A Testimony to Their Contribution to My Theological Vocation

Abstract

Theological Indebtedness to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain:A Testimony to Their Contribution to My Theological Vocation Matthew L. Lamb Robert Cardinal Sarah's important The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise shows the fundamental significance of monastic contemplation and silence for a God-centered renewal of society and culture. Before I would teach at Catholic theological faculties, I realized that I should draw upon an intellectual and contemplative formation I had received previous to any teaching.1 Just before my fifteenth birthday, in May of 1952, I was graced with a vocation to enter the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. This gave me the advantage of being in a contemplative monastery where an intellectual asceticism was linked with quests for wisdom and worship. Steeped in the Biblical Word of God and the Divine Office, the intellectual, moral, and religious formation invited the monk to an in depth study of the philosophical and theological writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, as well as the Medieval monastic and scholastic saints and scholars. I drew upon those fifteen years of study because they were foundational for a much needed renewal of Catholic theology in our times. A serious shortcoming in Catholic circles after Vatican II was a severing of a genuine ressourcement from aggiornomento. This rupture relegated the great intellectual achievements of the biblical, conciliar, patristic, medieval, and [End Page 617] Renaissance periods to historical museums. They were fine for visits, but had little or no relevance to modern issues and questions. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI warned, a hermeneutics of rupture made a hermeneutics of reform and renewal dead, leaving Catholics with nothing more than the swirling, ever-changing cultural fashions of the day. The writings of Jacques Maritain were studied and read in the Trappist monastery I had entered. The essay he wrote with Raïssa on "Liturgy and Contemplation" was published in the Carmelite journal Spiritual Life and was important in its relation of the Divine Office to the contemplative life. A most important aspect of Maritain's many writings is how, during the 1920s through the 1960s, he forged in philosophy the importance of recovering the great intellectual achievements of the past in order to provide adequate answers to contemporary questions. He saw clearly that major problems in modernity are due to the failure to keep alive the intellectual, moral, and religious traditions of Catholic Europe. He saw clearly the universal validity of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas as inviting the reader to discover the natural reason of humanity.2 It was common in the monastery to read Maritain's writings on an array of issues: natural law, the state and democracy, Christian existentialism, art and scholasticism, and the art of Rouault, as well as his contributions to the United Nations charter. His wonderful Reflections on America were read aloud during meals in the monastic refectory. Indeed, it was Jacques Maritain who illustrated in his philosophy how only by recovering human reason (ressourcement) through a thorough study of the ancients could one bring renewal and reform to modern times (aggiornomento). Thus the philosophical recovery of Aquinas by Maritain prepared the intellectual groundwork for a proper understanding of the biblical and patristic renewals, even though this had been unfortunately overlooked by some proponents of la nouvelle théologie.3 Decades before the 1960s, Maritain was recovering important theoretical writings of the Fathers, especially St. Augustine, and the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and his commentators, especially John of St. Thomas. [End Page 618] Maritain realized the importance of this recovery not only to counteract the baneful consequences of nominalism and voluntarism on modern thought and life, but also to provide more adequate perspectives on major issues facing modernity. His philosophical ressourcement was decisive for his philosophical aggiornomento. When he saw the failures of many Catholic intellectuals after Vatican II to live up to the demands of the theoretical recoveries of the Fathers and Aquinas, he wrote the blunt positive and negative assessments of post-conciliar life and thought in The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time. Nevertheless...