Jacques Maritain 1882 – 1973

Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and one of the architects of the twentieth-century revival of Thomism. After studies at the Sorbonne and a conversion to Catholicism with his wife Raissa, he reread Aquinas as a contemporary interlocutor and produced a long series of books on metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and political philosophy. His Integral Humanism articulated a Christian alternative to both liberalism and totalitarian ideologies, and he played a decisive role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He served as French ambassador to the Vatican after the Second World War.

Jacques Maritain was born in 1882 in Paris into a liberal Protestant family; his maternal grandfather was the republican statesman Jules Favre. While studying at the Sorbonne he met Raissa Oumansoff, a Russian Jewish emigree, whom he married in 1904; in 1906 they were received together into the Roman Catholic Church under the influence of the writer Leon Bloy. Maritain devoted himself thereafter to the renewal of Thomism in dialogue with modern thought.

Teaching at the Institut Catholique de Paris and from the late 1930s at Toronto, Princeton, and Columbia, he produced a long shelf of books, of which The Degrees of Knowledge (1932), Integral Humanism (1936), Art and Scholasticism, Education at the Crossroads, The Person and the Common Good (1947), and Man and the State (1951) are the best known. From 1945 to 1948 he served as French ambassador to the Vatican, and he was a leading drafter of the philosophical preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Maritain's distinction between the individual and the person, his integral humanism opposed both to bourgeois liberalism and to totalitarianism, and his late ecclesial reflections shaped twentieth-century Catholic political and moral philosophy. After the death of Raissa in 1960 he retired to live with the Little Brothers of Jesus near Toulouse, joining their community formally in 1970, and died at Toulouse in 1973.