Christianity and Democracy: The Rights of Man and The Natural Law

By Jacques Maritain

Few political philosophers have laid such stress upon the organic and dynamic characters of human rights, rooted as they are in natural law, as did the great 20th century philosopher, Jacques Maritain.

As this important work reveals, the philosophy of Maritain on natural law and human rights is complemented by and can only be properly understood in the light of his teaching on Christianity and democracy and their relationship. Maritain shows that Christi­anity cannot be made subservient to any political form or regime, that democracy is linked to Christianity, and that in order for democracy to thrive, it must reflect certain values historically derived from the Gospel.

He also argues that personalist or organic democracy provides a fuller measure of freedom and fulfillment, and that it takes shape under the inspiration of the Gospel. Even the modern democracies we have, with all their weaknesses, represent an historic gain for the person and they spring, he urges, from the very Gospel they so wantonly repudiate!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681490946

Book preview

FOREWORD

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 Maritain’s 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 Étienne 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 intellect’s capacities to discover on its own. Boldness follows: acceptance of a transcendent source of knowledge encourages attempts to push the intellect’s 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 Maritain’s 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 condition—the 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 philosopher’s 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 God’s 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 object—Being insofar as it is Being—but because the search for wisdom has a dynamism: the lower wisdom seeks the higher wisdom.

Maritain sees a different situation, however, with regard to practical philosophy, i.e., ethics and political philosophy. These are not autonomous with respect to their proper object. Because the very aim of ethics is human happiness, it requires for its completion the knowledge of supernatural truths, such as the beatific vision and divine grace, the former being the end of human longing and the latter being the condition for attaining that aim. Maritain observes, moreover, that moral evil cannot properly be understood apart from the doctrine of sin, i.e., man’s turning away from God. Hence, although unaided reason yields knowledge of human conduct and its goal, happiness, a higher knowledge from a completely different genus is needed. The natural knowledge of ethics does not, in Maritain’s judgment, confer the knowledge of these higher truths, not even under the aspect of sensible experience, in the manner that metaphysics grasps God under the aspect of his creation. Rather what he calls moral philosophy adequately considered must acquire such knowledge from the higher wisdom of theology. Inasmuch as Maritain regards political philosophy as a branch of ethics, it is not surprising that—as set forth by Donald Gallagher in his introduction to this volume—Christian doctrine plays such an important role in his socio-political writings.

The decision to reissue the single-volume edition of Jacques Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law could hardly have come at a more urgent time, a time when, perhaps as never before, the future of democracy hangs in the balance. That Maritain wrote them back in the 1940s, in answer to the Fascist and Communist attacks on democracy, human rights, and Christianity, does nothing to diminish their timeliness. Yes, Fascism and Communism have been defeated, but the secularization of the West that fuels the threats to Christianity and human freedom continue unabated. Consider, for example, the absence of any reference to God in the European Union’s constitution; the legal challenges to the phrases under God in our Pledge of Allegiance and In God We Trust on our currency; the British law that forbids teachers in Catholic schools from teaching that homosexuality is immoral; the astonishing success of the homosexual agenda in the United States, Europe, and Latin America in legalizing same-sex marriage; and (to borrow then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s characterization) the atomic bomb that was dropped on democracy in 1973—the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and its logical consequences: laboratory reproduction and human embryo stem-cell research. The right to life is the most fundamental and important of all rights. The other rights of speech, worship, assembly, etc., are important because there can be no political society worthy of human beings without them; however, the primacy of the right to life comes down to this: if one does not have life, one does not have anything, let alone rights. A government that fails to respect the right to life can hardly be expected to respect any other rights and certainly cannot be accused of inconsistency for failing to do so.

In the long run, the most devastating assault on human dignity and freedom is the movement now underway to relegate Christianity to a backwater subculture of crosses and candles. To be sure, the attacks on freedom of religion and speech, the right to life, and the meaning of marriage and family life undermine the pillars of democracy. As Maritain argues in both Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law, however, the ideals of modern democracy are Christian in origin, and the values of Christianity energize its institutions. Thereby hangs a tale. Attempts to establish religion without God do not succeed. John Dewey’s A Common Faith is a case in point. If there can be no religion without God, it follows that there can be no Christianity without God; and if there can thus be no Christianity, can there be democracy?

Raymond Dennehy

Professor of Philosophy

University of San Francisco

INTRODUCTION

THE HUMAN PERSON IN A FREE SOCIETY

In the midst of World War II Jacques Maritain published two studies in political philosophy, Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law, issued here in a one-volume edition by Ignatius Press. These studies are at once timely and timeless. In this Introduction I wish to show that the timeliness still has a message for us four decades later and that the timelessness has a meaning one can appreciate still more from the perspective of the present day.

During the war years (1939-1945) Maritain was resident in the U.S.A., having come to North America on a lecture tour shortly before the fall of France in June 1940. He was already famous throughout the free world as a leading Thomist philosopher, together with another French Catholic layman, Etienne Gilson. Maritain was known for a number of important works, many of which had appeared in English; among the most notable were his book on speculative philosophy, The Degrees of Knowledge (English eds. 1937 and 1959; French ed. 1932) and his book on speculatively-practical philosophy, Integral Humanism (English eds. 1938 and 1968; French ed. 1936).

Following the war, Jacques Maritain served as Ambassador of France to the Holy See (1945-1948); he taught at Princeton University (1948-1955) and held professorships at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Canada (where he had lectured in 1933 on his first tour of North America), the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame.

In the 1940s Maritain lectured at many universities and colleges in Canada and the U.S.A. He delivered, for example, the Annual Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University on Saint Thomas and the Problem of Evil. At that time it was out of the ordinary for Catholic scholars to be invited to lecture at leading non-Catholic institutions of higher learning. Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain were exceptions to the rule. Gilson gave the William James Lectures at Harvard University on The Unity of Philosophical Experience while Maritain gave the Terry Lectures at Yale University on Education at the Crossroads and the Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago on Man and the State.

After the death of his wife, Raïssa, in 1960, he returned to France. Although he considered himself retired, he continued to publish works of significance, and for long periods he lived with the Little Brothers of Jesus, becoming a member of this congregation not long before his death in Toulouse in 1973.

In 1942, the Editions de la Maison Française in New York City published Les Droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle; in 1943 the book was published in English by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Christianisme et démocratie was published by the same New York French publisher in 1943. (In 1943 a clandestine edition édité en tract was printed in Occupied France). Scribner’s released the English translation in 1944. During this time, portions of and excerpts from these studies appeared in periodicals in a number of different languages. In 1950 an Italian edition printed the two together. The major themes of The Rights of Man and Natural Law¹ and Christianity and Democracy are dwelt upon and developed in other works Maritain published in the 1940s. Scholasticism and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1940) and Ransoming the Time (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941) are collections of studies and essays which had previously appeared in periodicals. The Twilight of Civilization (English ed. 1943; French ed. 1939) also contains chapters on Christianity and Democracy and The Crisis of Modern Humanism.²

The author regarded Christianity and Democracy and Rights of Man as a contribution in some measure to the war effort; as his endeavor to state clearly and forcibly what the forces of freedom were fighting for in World War II. The struggle in his eyes was one against an evil power of diabolic cunning. At the same time he took the occasion to express ideas central to his philosophy; ideas whose ramifications extend to every aspect of philosophy and which are inspired by theology.

These ideas or major themes include the following: the dignity of the human person, the person and the common good, the rights of the person and natural law, organic and personalist democracy, equality and the free society, the terminal freedom of autonomy and fulfilment, the inspiration of the Gospel in the socio-temporal order. All these are expressed trenchantly in Christianity and Democracy and Rights of Man and are developed fully in works published by Jacques Maritain in the 1940s and early 1950s. Of particular note are The Person and the Common Good (English edition 1947; French ed. 1947) and Man and the State (English ed. 1951; French ed. 1953). Nor should Integral Humanism (English edition, 1938 under the title True Humanism and the later translation recommended by Maritain, 1968; French ed. 1936) be overlooked as it is the author’s major work on social philosophy, containing his outline of a new social order or New Christendom and his well-known distinction between theocentric humanism and anthropocentric humanism.³

Themes of special significance for Christianity and Democracy and Rights of Man are treated in Maritain’s essays Human Equality (with its philosophically rigorous and religiously ardent substantiation of the fundamental equality of the human person) and The Conquest of Freedom (with its glowing passages on the true city of human rights).⁴ In a subsequent section of this introductory essay these studies are drawn upon. Despite a certain similarity of topics with these