This is installment three of our history series of English-speaking Canadians in the twentieth century. The first dealt with Henry Carr and his influence on the Catholic educational structure in Canada (December, 1999). The second article dealt with philosophy and religion. It explained how faith needs reason and how the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas flourished in Toronto in the mid-century period, thereby strengthening the teaching of philosophy in general as well. Etienne Gilson, the medieval historian, and Father Joseph Owens, the Aristotelian philosopher, illustrated this theme.

In this edition we touch upon Jacques Maritain, like Gilson a native of France, yet having considerable influence in English-speaking Catholic circles. Editor

Jacques Maritain was the most publicly prominent Catholic philosopher of the 20th century. Born into a family of Huguenot background well-placed in the intellectual and political world of Paris, he met his wife-to-be, Raïssa, a daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia, while studying at university. Discouraged by the skepticism of the prevailing intellectual culture, they first found hope in the lectures of Henri Bergson. Subsequently, they discovered the writings and person of Léon Bloy, and were both converted to Catholicism (1906).

Maritain eventually took up the study of the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor of the Church. There he found the principles for the most thoroughgoing understanding of reality. Over the years he wrote philosophical treatises on the sciences and knowledge (The Degrees of Knowledge), on ethics, society, and politics (Man and the State), on art (Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry), on the theory of being itself (A Preface to Metaphysics, and Existence and the Existent), and on our knowledge of God (Approaches to God). I mention only a few of his best-known works.

Coming to Canada
In the later 1920s, the Basilian Fathers at St. Michael's College, Toronto, entered into a project with Étienne Gilson, another prominent French Catholic philosopher and historian of philosophy, to establish an institute of medieval studies. This got underway in 1929, and involved Gilson, several Basilian fathers, and Fr. Gerald Phelan, a priest of the diocese of Halifax.1 It was Phelan who suggested inviting Jacques Maritain to take part in the Toronto project. Gilson extended the invitation in 1929, and found Maritain very much interested. His first actual semester in Toronto was in January-March 1933. Concerning his lectures in 1933, Fr. L. K. Shook, C.S.B., who was present, wrote in an article in 1973:

Maritain's first visit to America took place when he gave courses for the graduate philosophy department of St. Michael's, and for the then new Institute of Medieval Studies, on The Critique of Knowledge, according to St. Thomas Aquinas and Kant. The event drew scholars and artists from city and province to see, hear, and meet the well-known professor from the Institut Catholique of Paris, author at the age of 50 of 23 books and 125 learned articles. When he came to Toronto in 1933 he had just published the first (French) editions of The degrees of Knowledge and An Essay on Christian Philosophy, and was even then working on his Preface to Metaphysics and Art and Poetry.

And Fr. Shook continues:

For the next 25 years he came more or less regularly to Toronto to give either a course or a single lecture. These visits were the occasion of vociferous campus discussions as his very presence sparked interest and debate on the major issues (philosophical, ethical, historical, artistic) of the moment. He was also a holy man whose daily routine of prayer and reflection made credible the programmes he was outlining for believers in books like Religion and Culture, Ransoming the Time, and many others.2

Maritain thus became, in a significant way, a contributor to the intellectual life of the Church in Canada and in the United States. Indeed, his North American presence was by no means confined to Toronto. On his very first visit, he also visited the University of Chicago. His wife Raïssa tells us (in a letter to Charles Journet, March 29, 1933):

Everything has gone very well so far in Toronto. Jacques has found there much good will, and minds well disposed to receive his teaching. He has succeeded only too well! They want him to come back every year. And it is not something to turn down without giving it thought. Jacques realizes that he could be useful in Toronto, and also in the United States. He was invited to give a lecture at the University of Chicago. He gave it in English, and it was wonderfully well received.3

In a private conversation the president of the University [Robert Hutchins] told Jacques:

Here there are countless young people asking for a true philosophy, and who are willing. But there is no one to lead them. You should have a group of students in America, just as you have in France, and you could go back and forth..

Others in Chicago told him that with him there it is possible that the youth would unite and act, but without him it is impossible.

"All that is serious. Pray that we may have light, Charles.." 4

United States and Vatican
In fact, Maritain came from France only sporadically before the Second World War. At the beginning of 1940 he came for the semester in Toronto, accompanied by Raïssa and her sister, Vera Oumanoff. With the fall of France, they remained in North America, based in New York. Before the war Jacques had given public lectures in Paris, denouncing anti-Semitism. This may have been one of the reasons why the Gestapo, on arriving in Paris, immediately sought him at the Institut Catholique to arrest him. He could not return to France.

Besides his Toronto visits, Maritain now became a visiting professor at both Columbia and Princeton Universities. Also, he was one of the founders of a French university institution in New York, the École Libre des Hautes Études. It was begun Feb. 14, 1942. He was the vice-president and later the president. During the war he broadcast regularly to France, denouncing the Vichy regime and encouraging the people. Immediately after the liberation of France, he was asked by General de Gaulle to become French ambassador to the Vatican. He accepted this task, which meant some interference with his intellectual vocation, with considerable misgivings.

At the conclusion of his stint in Rome in 1948, he accepted a professorship at Princeton University, which he made his North American base until the death of Raïssa in 1960.

Subsequently, he went to live in Toulouse, France, as a "hermit", with the Little Brothers of Jesus. He eventually became a member of this community, and died there of a heart attack Saturday, April 28, 1973.

Speaking of the association of Maritain with the St. Michael's campus, Fr. Shook says in the 1973 article:

Much of the gritty stuff of his various writings was tried out here in lectures and mulled over in small gatherings. It was not so much that men here were disciples of Maritain-some were not-it was that he helped keep them part of a larger world and made them respectable in it. That this is still so strikingly true of this campus, that we are today, as a community of scholars, so internationally oriented, is due in some real way to the habits acquired during the broad span of Maritain's visits (p. 11).5

Shook later speaks of Maritain's "vital, joyful, yet controversial sojourns among us". He concludes:

Maritain.survives at St. Michael's.in intellectual drive, in lived Christian faith, in productive scholarship, in a sense of history, in a concern for the crises of the present hour, in a dedication, after God, to fellow-men, to learning, art, and beauty. If the question must be asked, is Maritain still with us? the answer is Yes, so long as these things remain (p. 14).

In the eulogy he gave at the memorial Mass in St. Basil's Church, May 3, 1973, Anton C. Pegis, himself a historian of philosophy and one-time president of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, had this to say:

As I look back toward the beginning of the present century, I think I see how it was that Maritain played a unique and central role in what has been called the Thomistic renaissance. Whereas Etienne Gilson, while building an eminent academic career, was taking the lead in making the study of St. Thomas (and other medieval theologians) a recognized field of university research, Jacques Maritain was undertaking, almost single-handedly, the revival of Thomism as a public philosophy in the twentieth century. The Thomists around him, most of them professional theologians, were talking to one another in what was pretty much a closed circle. It was Maritain, more than any other man, who presented the philosophical teaching of St. Thomas to the whole world as a public reality, and who, while bearing the message of St. Thomas, yet faced the world as a living twentieth-century thinker. Maritain will live in history as the very model of a Christian philosopher, luminously intelligent and passionately dedicated to the truth and to his fellow man.6

And Gilson wrote in a letter, also on the occasion of Maritain's death:

"As is the case with the angels of Thomas Aquinas, he was a species all his own. There will never be another Thomist quite like him. I don't think we need pray for him. We can pray with him and to him. We can thank God for keeping his intelligence intact to the end."7

Fr. Lawrence Dewan, O.P. (Order of Preachers, i.e., Dominicans) teaches at the Dominican College of Theology and Philosophy in Ottawa. He is preparing a second article about the range of Jacques Maritain's philosophical interests. This will appear in a later installment of our series.

Footnotes
1. Concerning Phelan, see G. B. Phelan, Selected Papers, edited by Arthur G. Kirn, C.S.B., with an Introduction by Kirn and a Preface by L. K. Shook, Toronto, 1967: PIMS. Phelan taught in Toronto from 1925 to 1962, with a few years' interruption when he was at Notre Dame (1946-1952). He died May 30, 1965. Shook, in his Preface (p. 7) tells us: "The archives of the Institute contain all the papers prepared by students for Phelan's seminars and copies of all the many theses done under his guidance. These documents will one day provide an enquiring researcher with material for a rewarding analysis of the methodology of a man who may well have been America's outstanding teaching metaphysician during the second quarter of this century." - I notice in Emil L. Fackenheim's paper, "Jewish Philosophy in the Academy", in Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, a collection of his papers edited by Michael L. Morgan, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996: Indiana University Press, p. 187: "My Catholic teachers at the famed Toronto Institute of Medieval Studies then [in the early 1940s] included luminaries such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, and the less well known but equally outstanding Gerald B. Phelan." On the friendship between Phelan and Maritain, cf. the expression of gratitude by Maritain in his Foreword to The Degrees of Knowledge, newly translated. under the supervision of Gerald B. Phelan, New York, 1959: Scribners, p. xvii.

2. The Mike, Nov. 22, 1973 [vol. XXV, No. 5], p. 10. This issue has an article (pp. 10-11 and 14) by Fr. Shook entitled: "Is Maritain still with us?" This is the student newspaper at St. Michael's College. The front page is entirely taken up with a picture of Jacques Maritain.

3. This confirms the oral information I have had that Maritain in Toronto was lecturing in French in 1933.

4. Journet, Maritain, Correspondance, vol. II, 1930-1939, Edition publiée par la Fondation du Cardinal Journet, Éditions Universitaires, Fribourg, Suisse; Éditions Saint-Paul, Paris, 1997, Edition établie par Mmes Claude Favez, Jacqueline Favre, Monique Sallès, Mme et M. Dominique et René Mougel, letter #431, pp. 298-299.

5. One of the most dedicated Maritainians among St. Michael's professors was Ralph McDonald, C.S.B., who for many years presented an extremely popular course on Maritain's political philosophy. The Maritain book especially concerned was (in its English title) True Humanism, and everyone referred to the "True Hu Course". <

6. From the folder "Maritain Papers: Articles etc. on J.M., I", in the Archives of St. Michael's College and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. - Pegis had already eulogized Maritain the Thomist in the Preface he wrote for Nora Willis Michener's book, Maritain on the Nature of Man in a Christian Democracy, Hull, Canada, 1955: Éditions "L'Éclair". This modest volume, by the wife of the man who was soon to be Governor-General of Canada, is valuable both for its doctrine and for its biographical information.

7. Quoted in L.K. Shook, Etienne Gilson, Toronto, 1984: PIMS, p. 391: a letter from Gilson to John Deely, written May 4, 1973.

Editor's addendum

Grandin College
In a recent full-page article in the National Post (Dec. 4, 1999) by Catherine Pigott entitled "The leadership factory", the name of Jacques Maritain appeared as the dominant inspiration for a whole generation of leaders-lawyers, politicians, governors, etc.-in the western Arctic. It appears that just about everyone in a leadership position there is a graduate of Grandin College.

Grandin College, a Catholic-run residential school founded in 1960 in Fort Smith (NWT), was set up to train native priests and nuns. But Fr. Jean Pochat-Cotilloux, an Oblate priest from France placed in charge of it, decided to give the students who applied a thorough training as activists and leaders. "Not one religious vocation ever came out of the place," the author notes. Instead, "more than 400 Dene, Métis and Inuvialuít students-boys and girls-were molded into leaders." Here comes the relevant quote:

Inspired by the liberal Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who saw education as the moral and intellectual means to achieve freedom, Fr. Pochat had one overarching goal for Grandin: "To form leaders who could take over the North." Cradling his coffee mug 30 years later, he smiles. "And they sure did it, boy."