Hope Against Mischief

SCHOLASTICISM AND POLITICS--Jacques Maritain--Macmillan ($2.50).

In the 13th Century, St. Thomas Aquinas erected a towering Gothic cathedral of thought with vaulting arches of metaphysics, flying buttresses of Aristotelian science, stained windows of Revelation. In his great study of medieval France, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams sympathetically noted the judgment of Pope Leo XIII: "On the wings of St. Thomas's genius, human reason has reached the most sublime height it can probably ever attain."

Outstanding lay Thomist today is Jacques Maritain, who was converted to Catholicism at 20, became professor of philosophy at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Outstanding secular centre of Thomism in the U. S. is the University of Chicago, where President Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Jerome Adler (How to Read a Book) urge Aquinas and other humanist thinkers upon their students. Scholasticism and Politics represents Maritain's recent lectures at Chicago.

The book relates the disintegration of humanistic Christianity to the world's social woes. "When we consider the frightful panorama of the nations," sighs Maritain, "we feel . . . that spirit is humiliated today in an extraordinarily profound manner." Medieval philosophy sought to alleviate inhumanity and injustice by establishing a basic principle of "a love which fixes the centre of [man's] life infinitely above the world and temporal history." But in the last 400 years philosophers have dropped their eyes from God, fixed them on man. Three influences are largely to blame:

>> Luther's "immanentism" (a God not transcendent but suffused through man and nature) drifted toward a neo-pagan pantheism.

>> Descartes's rationalism made reason self-sufficient, cut man loose from intuitive, supra-rational truth.

>> Rousseau's Social Contract substituted an agreement among anarchic individuals for the Christian brotherhood of man; his optimism created a delusive new god, Progress.

"Modern civilization." explains Maritain, "pays dearly today for the past." Marx, Nietzsche, Freud have "unmasked" the rational, optimistic bourgeois citizen. Social disorders threaten to engulf him, mocking his errant faith in Progress and Enlightenment.

Maritain is pessimistic about patching up this mischief, sees no hope except in "a new temporal order inspired by Christianity." Man's basic need, he says, is a return to the "integral humanism" of Aquinas, a new philosophy of the person. Maritain's new society would be democratic, but would frighten good bourgeois citizens.

Maritain solemnly declares: "A political ideal of brotherly love alone can direct the work of authentic social regeneration. . . . Martyrs to the love of neighbor may first be necessary."

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