Ultra-Modernist

One Sunday in 1905, two young Sorbonne students climbed hand in hand up the long, steep stairs to Paris' Sacre Coeur. They knocked at a door which was opened by a strange, shabby old man with a walrus mustache. Young Protestant Jacques Maritain and his Jewish wife Rai'ssa had come to old Roman Catholic Leon Bloy for help. The Maritains were heavyhearted with questions, and they believed that Bloy, the outcast scourge of complacent Christianity (TIME, April 14, 1947), might have some answers.

At the Sorbonne, Jacques and Raissa Maritain had recoiled from the materialist philosophies of their professors. They had even brooded about a suicide pact, until Philosopher Henri Bergson's lectures opened their eyes to the possibility of a truth beyond reason. Then they read two of Bloy's books. Wrote Maritain: "All the values we gave to things were put in different places, as if by the turning of an invisible switch. We knew . . . from then on that 'there is but one sadness, and that is, not to be of the saints' . . ." Maritain and his wife became Roman Catholics.

No Dinner. Today, at 65, white-haired, stooped and serene, Jacques Maritain shares with his countryman Etienne Gilson the place of honor among living Roman Catholic philosophers. Since 1945 Maritain has served as France's ambassador to the Vatican, giving no official dinners, roaming through other people's parties lost in thought, and devoting most of his time to Rome's Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Maritain is largely responsible for the upsurge of interest in the philosophic system of the 13th Century's "Angelic Doctor." Last week Princeton University appointed Maritain professor of philosophy.

Maritain has written more than two dozen books, hardly any of them light reading. Together they form almost an encyclopedia of Roman Catholic thought. Nothing irritates Maritain more than to be accused of reaction or medievalism; he insists that his "antimodern" position is actually "ultra-modern."

God-Centered. A social critic as well as a philosopher, Maritain applies Thomist principles to such contemporary phenomena as industrialism, modern art, anti-Semitism and communism. Aiming his attacks at both man-centered Marxism and capitalism, Maritain proposes a God-centered "Christian humanism." Says he: "God trains us through our disillusionments and mistakes to understand at last that we must believe only in Him and not in men, which places us in the proper position to marvel at ... all the good which [men] do in spite of themselves."

A longtime professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris, Maritain has lectured at top European universities (Oxford, Heidelberg, Louvain, Milan). The fall of France found him on the U.S. university lecture circuit (Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton). He settled down to a Greenwich Village exile, walked daily to mass at old St. Joseph's, consumed quantities of peanuts and ginger ale, and held a Sunday salon frequented by savants and celebrities. Said Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: "Maritain [belongs] to that small company of great spirits in any age from whom one may learn."

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