Vatican II and Jacques Maritain: Resources for the Future? Approaching the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Council

Abstract

us seek with to find, and with to seek still ST. AUGUSTINE ON THE LAST DAY of Second Vatican Council, December 8, 1965, as part of council's final pageantry and symbolic conclusion, messages were addressed by Pope Paul VI and bishops to several groups representative of those segments of cultural world that council most hoped to engage. Jacques Maritain was asked to accept message for thinkers and (les hommes de la pensee et de la science). (1) Not only did Maritain enjoy personal admiration and support of Paul, not only had Maritain influenced council in matters such as religious liberty and human rights, but he represented kind of echo that council fathers were hoping to elicit from academics and other intellectuals. At heart of council's message was maxim ascribed to Augustine: Let us seek with to find, and with to seek still more. (2) The message combined moments of humility and criticism, admitting that Church was still searching for her own way forward, but also expressing need for intellectual world to open its eyes to light of faith. not forget that, if thinking is something great, it is first a duty. Woe to him who voluntarily closes his eyes to light. Thinking is also a responsibility, so woe to those who darken spirit by thousand tricks which degrade it, make it proud, deceive and deform (3) That mix of hope and warning belonged to what arguably was best about council. This article argues that where council and its reception in postconciliar Church were weakest, it was caused by a failure to achieve this studied ambivalence, due to an exaggeration and isolation of hopes for or suspicions about our times. (4) To ask what Maritain and council can contribute today to intellectual and spiritual conditions for renewal is to remember where they got that mix right and to accept today together with Maritain's legacy this conciliar commission to engage world with both hope and critique. Admittedly, there are reasons prima facie for skepticism that search for a renewal of Church or society could profit by study either of Vatican II or of Maritain, much less of two in tandem. Haven't these mines been exhausted long ago? Is there anything we could conceivably desire to find in them that would intensify the to seek still more? Were they even in their heyday perhaps more a source of impoverishment than enrichment? Do we need to choose between spirit of council and that Garonne Valley peasant who was so dismissive of novel postconciliar developments? All of these reasons for doubting potential for renewal to be found in Maritain and council have less to do with individual doctrines than with fundamental perspectives and broader decisions about hermeneutics of genuine interpretation. As Maritain himself put it in The Peasant of Garonne, decisive questions here have less to do with particular clarifications than with general approach. (5) Correspondingly, this article deals with some of these necessarily broader issues of our general approach: first, as regards council; then, as regards Maritain; both, in context of question about our potential today to draw upon these two legacies in order to make a contribution to renewal. I. The Second Vatican Council As is widely accepted, we no longer can speak innocently of council; innocent, that is, of our views of postconciliar development and of our own designs to move beyond it. The attempt to unfold so complex a situation in short space of an article is a task impossible to fulfill well and yet even more impossible to neglect altogether. One aid is provided in this case by John Henry Cardinal Newman's third note of genuine Church development, power of assimilation, which Newman positions between isolation on one hand (the inability to assimilate what had originated elsewhere) and, on other hand, loss of identity and unity (being assimilated to what must remain alien to one's genuine identity). …