Jacques Maritain Quotes on Mind
Jacques Maritain, a leading twentieth-century Thomist, held a rich and ordered conception of the mind, and the quotes gathered here reflect it. Maritain insisted that philosophy engages the whole person while remaining the proper work of the intellect, holding, in a remark marked here as attributed, that the whole man must enter into philosophy but only the intellect must do philosophy. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, he held that the human mind is naturally social and political, so that the person craves communal life, both in the family and in the wider civic community. He also assigned reason its limits, holding that there are heights the spirit reaches only through a supernatural light. Drawn from his many works on metaphysics and politics, these passages present the mind as an intellectual power that is at once social, ordered, and open to what exceeds it.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Jacques Maritain:
“The thirst for poetry is one of the most spiritual thirsts in the human being.”
-
Attributed to Jacques Maritain:
“The whole man must enter into philosophy, but only the intellect must do philosophy.”
-
“Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.”
The Rights of Man (1945). London: Geoffrey Bles, pp. 7–8. -
“The supernatural light of the spirit is the only night from which the spirit can emerge alive.”
Ransoming the Time(1941) | p. 288. -
“Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.”
Christianity and Democracy(1943) | p. 49. -
“The hope of the coming of a new Christian era in our civilization is to my mind a hope for a distant future, a very distant future.”
The Range of Reason(1952) [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons] | p. 217.