IT IS DIFFICULT, if not impossible, for anyone not a Catholic to properly comprehend and discuss a Catholic philosopher. The gin-soaked, Benzedrine-ridden children of our violent age are inclined—not without some reason—to hold philosophers in some doubt as being irritatingly serene watchers of a bloodbath; their rules and their conclusions may all be rather impressive, but of what relevance are they, how can these presumably hard-earned precepts do anything to enrich or make more bearable the daily, difficult, urgent life? In addition to the above qualifications one might also add that in the case of Maritain, one would need also to be an impassioned and convinced theologian—and, alas, not many of us are.
In The Person and the Common Good Maritain poses, as the title might suggest, some exceedingly pertinent questions; in some ways, the most pertinent questions that there are. It is a pity, then, that at least for this reviewer, the answers are either entirely unacceptable or so obscured by dogma—“revealed” to Maritain but, unhappily, not to me—that this groping with the problems of the human condition becomes, in effect, unintelligible.
The trouble, perhaps, lies in the extreme rigidity of Maritain’s definitions. One must agree with him about such concepts as “good,” “divine,” “absolute,” and, of course, “God.” It is not possible to extract from this organism sections of the meat and leave the skeleton. Maritain’s concepts are as indivisible and as complete within themselves as the peculiarly compelling and circular structure he evolves out of the notion of the personal—or human—and the common good.
The person, informed and cohered by spirit, is ordained, by the fact of its existence, to the absolute and must refer itself and all that it is and has to God, and it is therefore absolutely superior in worth and importance to the temporal society of which it is a part; and at the same time, since it is a part of this temporal society, since in a temporal fashion, it owes all that it is and has to it and, indeed, could not exist without it, it is subordinate, and the needs of the community transcend its human needs. Again, and at the same time, the community has betrayed its responsibility, its raison d’être, so to speak, if it does not everywhere and always respect the human dignity of the person; if, indeed, it is not absolutely devoted—within “numerous restraints”—to the expansion of that dignity. This formulation, if exasperating, is expedient, as almost all of the contradictions attendant upon being alive can be contained within it. Thus, man “finds himself” by subordination to the group, and “the group attains its goal” by a realization of and respect for the great riches of the human spirit. This circle works perfectly, even admirably, within Maritain’s framework and prepares us to be told, later on, that it is a crime to kill an innocent man—but who is to judge the guilty?—and that the social body has the right in a “just war” to oblige its citizens to risk their lives in combat; and that, moreover, in this combat, it is as “master of itself” and “as an act of virtue” that the human being faces death. (Maritain does not inquire into the right of the social body to oblige its citizens to murder and is, apparently, quite unconcerned with the problem of what these obliging citizens are to do thereafter with their enormous weight of guilt.)
All of the foregoing, of course, is made possible, even plausible, by Maritain’s “here below” ace in the hole. This will be changed up above, and since we are related first to God, that is where we are headed, willy-nilly. (The social body is empowered to make war and punish the guilty, but at no point are we given an inkling as to what the Divine Community is prepared to do with the hopelessly, willfully reprobate.) This by-and-by-it’ll-all-be-over exhortation is not likely to deliver many from the dreadful conviction that our life on earth may be quite drastically foreshortened and that it is, in any case, a rather desperate gamble. It is unhelpful indeed to be assured of future angels when the mysteries of the present flesh are so far from being solved.
(1948)