1998 is a good year to remember the French thinker Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). He died 25 years ago after contributing directly to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is 50 years old this year  [1998]. (See my June 4, 1998 Asheville TRIBUNE column , "Where Do Human Rights Come From?").

Jacques Maritain is probably the best known 20th Century disciple of  the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). St. Thomas had "baptized Aristotle" and then made him serve Christian theology. Maritain  methodically applied Aquinas to  modern challenges. He wrote more than 50 books and taught at prestigious universities.

Jacques Maritain's early life was dramatic enough. Raised Protestant and attending the Sorbonne in Paris, he was strongly attracted to natural sciences. There he met the younger student, Raissa Oumansouff, a Russian Jewess. Disillusioned with science, Jacques and Raissa married in 1904. But their love could not overcome growing intellectual despair. They agreed to commit suicide together if, within one year, they had not discovered that existence had a meaning. During this year they attended  the lectures of Henri Bergson. He convinced them that only through a dynamic relationship to some "Absolute" would their lives ever develop personal  meaning. Through Bergson's lectures and the face-to-face influence of Leon Bloy, the Maritains, along with Raissa's sister Vera, were converted to Roman Catholicism in 1906.

The University of Notre Dame, where he often lectured, houses a Maritain Center and there are American and Canadian Maritain Societies.  Jacques Maritain holds out hope that we, too, can weave religious beliefs into a consistent approach to culture, education, politics, intellect and personal human relations. He was not simply an egghead, having served, for instance, as France's ambassador to the Vatican from 1945-1948.

Maritain  is widely applauded by Europeans and South Americans for his contributions to a philosophical position known as "personalism."  Personalism provides the intellectual underpinnings for all the Christian Democratic political parties and movements in Germany, other parts of Western Europe and much of Latin America.

We Americans, as Tocqueville noted, have our own way of doing things. We see a need, we then organize a voluntary club or committee and set about solving the problem. We create Lions Clubs and the League of Women Voters and Little Leagues and such like without first framing them within cosmic world-views or laying out world-historical justifications for what we do.  All varieties of Christians, Jews, free thinkers and others can belong to the same Kiwanis Club or Exchange Club and work together on common projects such as providing scholarships and mentoring young students.

Jacques Maritain provided a theory justifying the American non-ideological approach to practical cooperation. Cast a glance at "The Rights of Man," the fourth chapter of his 1951 classic MAN AND THE STATE, reprinted in 1998 as a Catholic University of America paperback. Looking back at the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he states,

"it is doubtless not easy but it is possible to establish a common formulation of such ...rights possessed by man in his personal and social existence." 

Jacques Maritain nonetheless argues that once we start philosophizing about human behavior and rights, we must do it correctly. He describes three warring schools of theoreticians of human rights.

(1) Those who advocate a "liberal-individualistic type of society," subordinate all particular rights to "the power of each person to appropriate individually the goods of nature in order to do freely whatever he wants."

(2) Communists root human rights in the power to submit the goods of nature to collective commands of society in order to assure that human labor serves the economic community.

(3) Maritain himself sides with those embracing natural law leading to a "personalistic type of society" built upon man's

"power to make these same goods of nature serve the common conquest of intrinsically human, moral and spiritual goods and of man's freedom and autonomy."  (p. 107)

In nature 

"a plant, a dog, a horse, has its own natural law, that is, the normality of its functioning, the proper way in which, by reason of its specific structure and specific ends, it 'should' achieve fulness of being either in its growth or in its behaviour." 

We must "do good and avoid evil": that is the beginning. The rest is not so clear. Rights are inalienable if and when they are grounded "on the very nature of man, which of course no man can lose" (p. 101). Natural law and natural rights are essentially immutable. But we become aware of their implications only over centuries.

Intellectually honest people have to give reasons for what they believe. But they cannot make others agree with them on the reasons behind human rights. Men  of good will can paradoxically agree to act together while strongly rejecting the reasons the other fellow gives for why he acts.  How is this possible?  Maritain argues that people are guided by a  practical, spontaneous, pre-scientific and pre-philosophical level of reason-giving and conclusion-drawing about human rights. This is more basic and more common than ideologies.

Maritain is a philosopher and can therefore go abstract very quickly. But he argues that people with different conceptions of good and evil should set aside their ideological differences and work together when they can. Muslims, Mormons and Methodists can pull together in the Republican Party to support a balanced federal government budget. Republicans, Libertarians and Democrats can work for the good of their common neighborhood association. And so it goes. Practice is cake, theory is icing.

-OOO-

For Asheville TRIBUNE