Who was Jacques Maritain?
For Catholic intellectuals of my generation, Maritain and his wife Raissa were models of what we wanted to be. Maritain was a Catholic philosopher, he was one of the great interpreters of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in the twentieth century. The story I wish to tell is of how he and his wife became, first, Catholics, and then Thomists. Raissa recounts it in the memoir she wrote in New York where the couple spent World War II. Many years before, when they were young, students at the Sorbonne in Paris, they fell in love and planned to marry. The prospect of marriage concentrates the mind. They began to reflect on the deep implications of the courses they were taking. The assumption of those courses, they came to feel, was that human beings are collections of matter, however intricate, pretty much like everything else in the cosmos, randomly formed, destined to have a brief career and then, poof, cease to be altogether. Whatever materials entered into their composition, were dispers
Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was a French philosopher who converted to Catholicism, discovered St. Thomas, and became one of the most creative continuers of his thought, making it accessible to our times and applying it to fields as diverse as the natural sciences, the arts, and social and political questions. What is the philosophy of nature? The philosophy of nature looks at matter, space, time, the origin and end of the universe, and of the human race, in a distinctive philosophical way, and so it can enter into dialogue with the sciences of nature like physics and biology.
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- Who was Jacques Maritain?
