1 de diciembre de 2017
Por Michael Novak
Fuente: Catholic Education
As in the nineteenth century so in the twentieth, a number of laymen and women have appeared in the firmament of intellect and the arts to place the entire body of Christians in their debt.
I do not think that anyone has written more beautifully of, to cite his title, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry perhaps ever, down the ages, in any tradition. (So lovely is that book that often, while reading it as a undergraduate, I had to put the pages down and go for a long walk, my heart burning with more than it could bear.)
Although the twentieth century was often proclaimed by the Church to be the Age of the Laity, it remains true that most Catholic discourse is still taken up with the words, often brilliant, of popes, bishops, priests, and sisters. Nonetheless, as in the nineteenth century so in the twentieth, a number of laymen and women have appeared in the firmament of intellect and the arts to place the entire body of Christians in their debt. Of these, no one has been more influential in different spheres than Jacques Maritain, who is also most widely loved (and esteemed for his holiness of life). I do not think that anyone has written more beautifully of, to cite his title, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry perhaps ever, down the ages, in any tradition. (So lovely is that book that often, while reading it as a undergraduate, I had to put the pages down and go for a long walk, my heart burning with more than it could bear.)
In political and social thought, no Christian has ever written a more profound defense of the democratic idea and its component parts, such as the dignity of the person; the sharp distinction between society and the state; the role of practical wisdom; the common good; the transcendent anchoring of human rights; transcendent judgment upon societies; and the interplay of goodness and evil in human individuals and institutions. Indeed, in the thrust that this body of thought gave to Christian Democratic parties after World War II, Maritain gained the right to be thought of as one of the architects of Christian Democracy both in Europe and Latin America.
Nonetheless, it is perhaps in his profound grasp of the metaphysics of the philosophia perennis that one must seek the roots of Maritains achievement. More clearly and subtly than anyone else in modern times, and over a larger body of materials, Maritain grasped the intuition of being that animates the deepest stratum of Catholic intellectual life. For him, this was at once an intuition of charity as well as of being. He chose most often to express this intuition philosophically philosophy, not theology, was his vocation; but his vision of caritas, the Love that moves the sun and all the stars, broke through in a great many places (not least in his beautiful essays comparing Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas, situating the work of Saint John of the Cross, and describing knowledge by connaturality).
A number of writers, indeed, have pointed out that of all Maritains books no doubt the most seminal, like a pebble plunked in a quiet pool and rippling outward in expanding concentric circles, is his tiny Existence and the Existent. This Essay on Christian Existentialism, a difficult and dense but immensely pregnant book, lies at the heart of his work. Its brief 142 pages were penned in Rome from January through April of 1947, as much of Europe still lay in the ruins of war and as the terribly disappointing Cold War of the subsequent era was just beginning. Its five compact chapters, I predict, will echo in the worlds thinking for generations to come. Indeed, their full meaning is likely to become more apparent in the future than it was at the time of the books first appearance, particularly as thinkers from other world traditions make fertile contact with it.
I would not like it to appear that I see no faults or limits in Maritains achievement. Concerned as much as he was for the poor (or, as he usually expressed it in the vulgar Marxism current at the time, the workers), it is surprising how little sustained attention Maritain gave to the most significant new discipline of postmedieval times, political economy, with the accent on economy. Maritain came to the problems of politics and society rather late in his reflections and then, having achieved much, never took up a study of the great economic classics, especially those of the Austrian and Anglo-American worlds, not even of such French writers as Bastiat. Further, much as he admired the United States a civilization, he felt, full of reverberations of the realities to which he was trying to point in Integral Humanism1 Maritain never really grappled with such classics of American political economy as The Federalist, Democracy in America (by his fellow Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville), and the works of Abraham Lincoln. He did suggest that treasures of the human spirit lay buried there, but we never received the benefit of his sustained reflection on them.
On the whole, Maritain wrote a beautiful prose, a prose that reaches the heart and the imagination more than that of most philosophers, while manifesting as well a Thomist love of exquisite clarity, particularly in the making of distinctions (often made more precise by other distinctions). To read him is to be forced to look, through such distinctions, from many angles of vision at once. And all for the sake of unity: To distinguish in order to unite was a most suitable motto for his lifes work. He had a passion for clear and precise ideas, distinguished sharply from their nearest neighbors, as well as for the relations that tie each idea to every other. Sometimes, indeed, he tried to capture too much in one sentence, piling up distinctions within distinctions or introducing an aside about some analogous matter, while trying to capture a whole gestalt. Many of his sentences must be reread. The effort is almost always worth it, for his true conversational partners were less his contemporary critics than the classics, whose precise treasures he did not wish to muffle, to encrust, or to belittle by oversimplification.
The Intuition of Being
In the autumn of 1960, in one of my very first conversations with full professor in Harvards philosophy department, a teach of metaphysics and ethics who confessed cheerily that he deeply admired Humes happy atheism, mentioned to me, nonetheless, how deeply impressed he had been with Jacques Maritain during the latters presence on campus. He was perhaps the most saintly philosopher I have ever known, he said to me, gentle, kind, honest, almost childlike. Of course, I didnt agree with a single position he took. But I did come to admire him a great deal. This was meant to be a warning to me, of course; I should not expect an easy time at Harvard. Yet it was also meant as a token of esteem for a significant tradition and a remarkable thinker: no small tribute in those days.
Professor Williams tribute to Maritains saintliness, his gentleness, his childlike manner has remained with me, especially the unusual word (for Harvard) childlike. This is, I think, the key to Maritains intuition of being, in which so many other philosophers simply could not follow him. Maritain approached each day with a certain wonder at the color of the sky, the scent of the grass, the feel of the breeze. He marveled that such a world could have come to be. There was no necessity in its coming to be. It had happened. Here it was. He could sense it, his every sensible organ alive to its active solicitations of color, sound, scent, taste, and feel. More than that, his intellect would wonder at it, knowing that it did not have to be as it was on that particular day, or on any other day. And it could also cease to be.
Well before the cloudburst of the first atomic bomb, long before a perceived ecological crisis, Maritain perceived the fragility of earth not only in his personal mortality (born on November 18, 1882, Maritain had lived long before he visited Harvard; he was to die in 1973); not only, either, in the fragility of planet earth. Rather, Maritain sensed, in the obscure way of the human intellect at its most childlike and most profound, that all changeable created things all things short of an existent necessarily and fully existing in itself are fragile and dependent. My professors at Harvard found this intuition difficult to grasp or, rather, even on its brink profoundly resisted it. I remember one seminar on the existence of God, taught by Professor Rogers Albritton, a student of Wittgensteins who imported many of Wittgensteins legendary mannerisms into our classroom, when Professor Albritton was diagramming on the blackboard Aquinas way to the existence of God from contingency and necessity. The good professor, an honest man so far as he could go, kept pointing to the major and minor premises, one after the other, and then confessed that he could find no notion of necessity that made the argument flow into Aquinas conclusion. He then tried to supply all the definitions of necessity known to him. None would work. I remember quite clearly summoning up my courage and raising my hand. It was about twenty minutes before class was to adjourn. Nervously, I reminded him (Professor Albritton also taught Aristotle) that, based upon a rudimentary (and now recognized to be false) empirical observation, Aristotle and Aquinas thought that the stars in the firmament were unchangeable, permanent, and thus, in a special sense, necessary beings, different from all other changeable substances they had observed. Suppose, I hesitantly said, this gave them a warrant for speaking empirically of necessary beings. And suppose, further, that they postulated still other necessary beings, in a different class, not composed of material properties at all, yet nonetheless not contingent, not changeable, but beings-in-themselves, which, once existing, never ceased to exist. Suppose, further, that such necessary beings could cause the coming into existence of the contingent beings of whose existence we had no doubt. All these suppositions might be false, I remember saying. Still, if Aristotle and Aquinas held them (and clearly the texts make plain that they did), then, looking again at the premises on the board, doesnt the conclusion suddenly flow? Professor Albritton rubbed his chin Wittgenstein-style and looked again at the board. Hmmm, he said. Good point. He looked at his watch. Well, lets think about that until next time. The class adjourned early. We never went back to the argument from contingency. Perhaps Professor Albritton wished to be merciful.
Young as I was, I had no illusions that suddenly Harvard would reach the conclusion that, indeed, mysterious and terrifying as it may be, there is (or even could be) a necessary existent that explains how this fragile world of change and contingency could come to be and, perhaps, to perish. No one had any problem contemplating some Big Bang or happening to come to be; nor, at least in later years, does anyone have severe doubts that, whether with Bang or Whimper, this fragile world of ours could cease to be. The hard thing to accept, it seems, is that there is an existent not doomed to our changeability, on whom our existence depends. (Why should that be so hard, I wondered, since so many billions of human beings have always believed it? Life for Harvard philosophers, however, is more difficult than for others, and nobody ever said it was not.)
A childlike grown-up, however, aware of no special need to see the world as a Harvard philosopher does, could not help being struck by the marvel that no one denies: that things marvelously are and then are not. The fragility of all beings that we encounter is all too well known to the sensitive intellect. This sharp taste of fragile existence, to begin with, is the intuition of being or, to be more precise, since the one word being is sometimes used of more than one aspect of reality, the intuition of existing. Allow me to dwell for a moment on the difference between the essential characteristics and the existing of things. The air outside as I write is a cool, fresh October air, blown in from Canada, whereas yesterdays air, blown in from the Caribbean, was muggy and moist. It is not their coolness and their mugginess that so much attract my attention, at moments, as the fact that one is and the other was but is not and the sure knowledge that the one that today is will also pass away. So it is also with the pen so comfortable now in my fingers, and with this narrow-lined paper on which I write and soon (once the typescript is prepared) to be thrown away, and with my very fingers themselves. All will return to dust. Yet today they gloriously are, and the taste of that existing is so keen that it sometimes makes one wish to exult and to break into glories: It is such a glorious day!
I do not wish to confuse this insight into existing with the further inference (although it seems to me almost instantaneous) that I should thank someone, something, some glory, for the lucky break of existing. These are two separate movements of the soul. Yet the most salient one, surely, if only because for us it is the first, is the intuition of the sheer existing of fragile, unnecessary things. (Had I died on the numerous occasions when I am aware of almost having done so, the particular existents mentioned above would never have been; had my parents never given me birth, or their parents them . . . so easily would the world never have missed these fragile existents.)
Nonetheless, I am emboldened by the recent testimony of my second favorite atheist humanist, Sidney Hook Albert Camus still being my first who just before his death confided to the American Jewish Committee Archives that there were many times in his life, at the height of his powers, that he often felt well up within him the desire to say thanks that things, which might have gone badly, worked out in existence as they had.2This barely conscious, intuitive inference seems to me wholly natural. It seems to me also a bit of data about the human intellect that ought never to be lost to the attention of philosophers. Sidney Hook was a supremely honest man, willing to put on the record evidence that went against his own philosophy. True, he not only never interpreted that bit of data as Maritain did but also, given many opportunities to confront interpretations of human life such as Maritains, never accepted them. That bit of data about the movement of human intellect to utter thanks, nonetheless, remains to be explained.
On Social and Political Reconstruction
It is not my intention, however, to spell out the implications that Maritain derived from his intuition of the existent, not at least in the direction of metaphysics, the philosophy of God, or even Jewish and Christian faith. (Maritain was deeply involved, through his marriage with Raissa, in questions of Jewish as well as Christian faith; in fact, he may have done as much as any Christian in our time to lay the intellectual groundwork for a special instinct of fraternity among Christians and Jews.) I would prefer for today to carry the intuition of the existent into Maritains further reflections on politics and society.
For if all of human existence is fragile, even more fragile is human action, above all in the political sphere. Maritain writes in Existence and the Existent that the end of practical wisdom is not to know that which exists but to cause to exist what is not yet.3 Between the cup and the lip, many a slip. It is easier to intend results in ethical or in political action than to achieve those results. Politics, in a language more favored by Reinhold Niebuhr than by Maritain but by no means in conflict with the latters, is the realm of the contingent, the ironic, and the tragic.
Allow me to pause for a moment to observe the sharp difference between a Thomist view of politics, such as that of Maritain, and that, say, of classical conservatives such as Russell Kirk. Struck by the contingency and organic relatedness of social institutions, practices, and actions, and dismayed by the utopian ideologies to which so many modern minds are prone, paleoconservatives (so they now style themselves) such as Kirk are opposed to ideological infatuation or even to imagining social projects for the future at all.4Considering the projection of social notions into the future to be signs of the disease of ideology, such conservatives prefer to let things continue, to move along organically, to be. They resist thinking for the future, for fear of contamination by ideology.
Maritain had a significantly different view. By its very nature, for him (as for Thomas Aquinas, the first Whig),5 practical intellect is aimed not at knowing that which already exists but at causing to exist what is not yet. Practical intellect is by its very nature oriented toward the future and, precisely, to changing the future, to making the future different, to cause to exist what does not yet exist. For this reason, Maritain did not hesitate in Integral Humanism (1936) to imagine proximate probable futures or to suggest new courses of action that would alter the awful European present of the World War II era in the light of a better and more humane, more Christian proximate future.
Maritain took considerable care not to think in a merely utopian fashion. But he did not hesitate to try to imagine proximate, achievable next steps, which might in turn lead to yet further achievable steps, toward building up a more humane and more Christian civilization than the world had yet known. In brief, Maritain shared with those Whigs who are currently known as neoconservatives a willingness to project a future more attractive than socialists or others were imagining, and yet a future thoroughly realizable within the bounds of proximate probable judgments. Unlike Kirk, Maritain was not willing to embrace mere social laissez-faire in the political realm, and he was resolutely opposed to mere nostalgia about some supposedly more humane premodern era. Maritain claimed the future. Indeed, insofar as the Christian Democratic parties of Sturzo, de Gasperi, Schuman, and Adenauer draw crucial inspiration from his work, Maritain may be said, in fact, to have caused to exist much that had not existed before him.
In this sense, Aquinas is properly called the first Whig because his ethic and his politics did lay claims upon the future; did inspire, down the ages, a search for political institutions worthy of the rational, consensual dignity of humans. This is the sense in which Maritain was able in Christianity and Democracy, Man and the State, and other works to claim for a specific idea of democracy the support of the main spine of the Christian intellectual tradition. For this tradition nourished over the centuries the slow emergence of the ideal of a civilized politics, a politics of civil conversation, of noncoercion, of the consent of the governed, of pluralism, of religious liberty, of respect for the inalienable dignity of every human person, of voluntary cooperation in pursuit of the common good, and of checks and balances against the wayward tendencies of sinful men and women. Here, as will become clear in a moment, Maritain did not claim too much for the historical efficacy of the Christian intellectual tradition; he chastised its failures severely and gave credit to nonbelievers for crucial advances. But neither did he wish to claim too little.
Here, too, it is necessary to see how profound was Maritains grasp of the hold that the ideal of caritas had upon the political thinking of Thomas Aquinas. Maritain held that action in the world whether ethical action among individuals or political action among systems, institutions, and groups is always action among existents, among real sinners and saints and all those in between, not among purely rational agents. For him, realistic thinking about ethics and politics could not be conducted wholly within the boundaries of philosophy; theology was necessarily required. Why is this so? It is so because ethics and politics are about the real, existing world, and in this existing world humans are not purely rational agents but, rather, fallen creatures who are potentially redeemed by grace, on the condition that they are willing to accept Gods action within them. To proceed in merely philosophical categories about ethics and politics would be merely utopian; one must deal with real, existing creatures locked in the actual historical drama of sin and grace.6
That is why, in explicating the fundamentally existential character of Thomist ethics, Maritain stresses two points, one regarding charity, the other regarding practical wisdom or prudence. Concerning the first, he writes:
St. Thomas teaches that perfection consists in charity, and that each of us is bound to tend toward the perfection of love according to his condition and in so far as it is in his power. All morality thus hangs upon that which is most existential in the world. For love (this is another Thomist theme) does not deal with possibles or pure essences, it deals with existents. We do not love possibles, we love that which exists or is destined to exist.7
Regarding practical wisdom, Maritain makes two extremely subtle points, whose fullness I will not be able to reproduce. The first is that, at the heart of concrete existence, when a real, concrete person is confronted with a set of particulars amid which to decide to act, that persons appetite that persons will or secret and deepest loves enters into the quality of her or his perception of alternatives. More than that, for Aquinas, the rectitude of an existing persons intellect depends upon the rectitude of his existing loves. This is a powerfully realistic doctrine. Intellect follows love, and if the love is errant, so also will be the judgment of practical intellect or conscience. Although, for Maritain as for Aquinas, practical intellect still exerts a major discipline over the soul (over its loves, for example), nonetheless, here and now, under the immediate pressures of choice, the predispositions of ones loves are highly likely to bend the intellect to their purposes. (Were not David Hume and Adam Smith, under different background assumptions but with the same Augustinian sense for real experience, to make an analogous point?)
Hence, for Aquinas, there is necessary in ones ethical formation in advance of such choices a deep and profound habit of disciplining and directing ones loves, seducing them, so to speak, so that in every case love will be of the good, the true, and the just, and be habituated to being restless with anything less. Absent a right will, a right practical intelligence will also be absent. In doing what they think is best, those whose loves are disordered will distort even their own intellects. As they love, so will they perceive. Love is blind, we say, meaning that, disordered, it is more powerful than light, obscures the light, and darkens the eye of intelligence itself.
The second subtle point that Maritain makes about practical intellect begins again with the fact that ethical and political action is always about existents. This time he points out that such action always faces two wholly singular, irrepeatable realities: first, the singular character, here and now, of this particular agent; and, second, the singular, never-to-be-repeated circumstances of the here and now. For these two reasons, practical wisdom is utterly different from science. Whereas scientific judgment depends upon regularities, moral judgment must cope with singulars. The same moral case never appears twice in the world. To speak absolutely strictly, precedent does not exist.8 Practical wisdom concerns unprecedented singulars (Useless to thumb through the dictionary of cases of conscience!), on the one hand. On the other hand, its point is not to know that which exists, but to cause that to exist which is not yet, and so it is moved by the appetite of will or love, which thrusts us toward creating something new, either of evil or of good.
On a Specific Idea of Democracy
From this discussion of the sheer existing of ethical and political action here and now, singular, unprecedented, irrepeatable it follows, in nuce, that building a humane, Christian society is an iffy business. It cannot be built upon any institutional framework at all; it has preconditions; many things can go wrong. Thus, to be faithful to the full measure of Christian intellectual conviction about the dignity (and fallibility) of the human person, about civilization as a state of society characterized by uncoerced decisions arrived at through civil discourse, and about the pull upon human love of Gods own command of love, new forms of social institutions will have to be labored toward in history, and not without setbacks. For reasons Maritain articulates at some length, a certain kind of democracy, guarded against the diseases to which pure democracies are prey, best represents the full flowering of human practical wisdom about the sorts of institutions worthy of Jewish and Christian thought. This particular kind of democratic reality gives the broken world of the Second World War some hope for a better future.
Maritain is not unsophisticated about democracy. He knows, writing in 1944 in the depths of destruction, that the very name democracy has a different ring in America and in Europe.9 And, before proceeding very far on this subject, in Christianity and Democracy, Maritain makes three important distinctions, each of which he discusses at more length than we can here duplicate: First, the word democracy, as used by modern peoples, has a wider meaning than in the classical treatises on the science of government. It designates first and foremost a general philosophy of human and political life.10 Its inner dynamism, although consistent with a monarchic regime and even other classic regimes or forms of government, leads, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, to government of the people, by the people, for the people. Democratic regimes are not the only good regimes, but all good regimes will have to embody the dynamism of respect for free persons and their consent.
Second, democracy after the war will certainly have to be constitutional democracy, based on constitutions that have at least three characteristics: formation through the consent of the governed; protection of the essential bases of common life, respect for human dignity and the rights of the person; and grounding in a long process of education. This long process of education will be necessary to lead peoples away from habits of dictatorship, nationalistic impulses, and the mental habits of unfree and coercively minded peoples. It will have to lead them toward the slow and difficult construction of new habits in the temporal life of nations, supportive of the soul of democracy that is, the law of brotherly love and the spiritual dignity of the person.
By these first two distinctions, Maritain shows that he means what in the United States we mean by a democratic republic, protective of the rights of the person. He means no totalitarian or merely majoritarian democracy, but limited government, grounded in a tradition of sound habits, associations, and institutions. Moreover, he means a set of principles not exhausted by any one form of regime, and yet capable of distinguishing false from true ideas of democracy. Then, by his third distinction, Maritain makes clear both that Christian faith cannot be made subservient to democracy as a philosophy of life and that democracy cannot claim to be the only form of regime demanded by Christian belief. He means by no means to pretend that Christianity is linked to democracy and that Christian faith compels every Christian to be a democrat.11 To do so would be to mix the things of Caesar and the things of God. Nonetheless, Maritain does affirm that democracy is linked to Christianity and that the democratic impulse has arisen in human history as a temporal manifestation of the inspiration of the Gospel.
Yet Maritain does not say that Christianity exists in the world solely as the Church or the body of believers. Rather, he sees Christianity as historical energy at work in the world. It is not in the heights of theology, it is in the depths of the secular conscience and secular existence that Christianity works in this fashion. He is equally far from asserting that Christians brought modern democratic institutions into existence: It was not given to believers in Catholic dogma but to rationalists to proclaim in France the rights of man and of the citizen, to Puritans to strike the last blow at slavery in America.12 He gives credit by schematic suggestion, not comprehensive detail where credit is due: Neither Locke nor Jean-Jacques Rousseau nor the Encyclopedists can pass as thinkers faithful to the integrity of the Christian trust.13
Thus, here again, Maritain is interested in existents, not essences. In the existing world of 1944, The chances of religion, conscience and civilization coincide with those of freedom; freedoms chances coincide with those of the evangelical message.14 The terrors of war have obliged the democracies to rethink their spiritual foundations, so as to recover their spiritual energies and humanizing mission. They dare not go back to what they were before. The demands of the human spirit in our time include authentic demands, many of them rooted in the Gospels and in the deepest Christian intellectual traditions about the nature of human existents. These have not always been expressed best, or developed in practical life, by believers.
It is clear that Maritain considers the Christian message about the cry of the poor for justice to be a motor of human temporal life. He holds simultaneously that existing democratic ideas, traditions, and institutions were often championed in actual history by those who were non-Christians or even anti-Christian; and yet that, in building better than they knew, such persons were often generating in human temporal life important constructs whose foundations were not only consistent with Jewish and Christian convictions about the realities of ethical and political life but, in a sense, dependent on them. Pull out from under genuine democratic principles the beliefs of Judaism and Christianity about the transcendent dignity of the person and the human propensity to sin, and the existing edifice of democratic thought is exposed to radical doubt.
Thus, Maritain argued further that existing democratic institutions need to be grounded on a deeper, sounder foundation of intellectual conviction and moral habits than had so far been wrought in actual history. He urged Christians to take up this work, both in intellect and in active practice. He saw a great deal to be done in the slow and difficult construction of a more humane world, whether considered from a Christian or a humanistic viewpoint. He saw this task as both intellectual and moral.
A Salute
Perhaps I have said enough to show why so many of us feel immensely indebted to this layman, perhaps the greatest exemplar of the Catholic laity in the last two centuries: this master of many wisdoms, this metaphysician, this philosopher at once humane and Christian (and able to speak in either of those languages), this ethicist and philosopher of history, this political philosopher, this saintly and childlike man.
Jacques Maritain, approaching the 107th anniversary of your birth, we salute you. And with the thanks that Sidney Hook often felt the impulse to utter, we thank the Creator of all existents for your brief presence among us. May you and Sidney, and all the just and righteous philosophers, enjoy that endless pursuit of Truth, face to face, which you conducted so lovingly on this fragile earth.
Endnotes

  1. I hope you will pardon me if I now seem to give a more personal turn to my reflections. The fact is that I would like to refer to one of my books, Humanisme intégral, which was published twenty years ago. When I wrote this book, trying to outline a concrete historical ideal suitable to a new Christian civilization, my perspective was definitely European. I was in no way thinking in American terms, I was thinking especially of France, and of Europe, and of their historical problems, and of the kind of concrete prospective image that might inspire the activity, in the temporal field, of the Catholic youth of my country. The curious thing in this connection is that, fond as I may have been of America as soon as I saw her, and probably because of the particular perspective in which Humanisme intégral was written, it took a rather long time for me to become aware of the kind of congeniality which existed between what is going on in this country and a number of views I had expressed in my book. Of course the book is concerned with a concrete historical ideal which is far distant from any present reality. Yet what matters to me is the direction of certain essential trends characteristic of American civilization. And from this point of view I may say that Humanisme intégral appears to me now as a book which had, so to speak, an affinity with the American climate by anticipation (Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America[New York: Scribners, 1958], pp. (74-75).
  2. See On Being a Jew, an interview with Norman Podhoretz, Commentary, Oct. 1989, p. 30.
  3. Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Galantière and Gerald B. Phelan (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Image Books, 1956), p. 59.
  4. See Russell Kirks lecture The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species, delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6, 1988, pp. 5-7. It has been distributed as Heritage Lecture No. 178.
  5. Commenting on an early medieval text, Lord Acton remarked: This language, which contains the earliest exposition of the Whig theory of revolution, is taken from the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity, in Essays on Freedom and Power, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1955], p. 88). Embracing for himself the term Whig, Friedrich A. Hayek remarks that in some respects Lord Acton was not being altogether paradoxical when he described Thomas Aquinas as the First Whig (The Constitution of Liberty[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], p. 457, n. 4; see also the discussion of the Whigs in the Postscript, Why I Am Not a Conservative, pp. 397-4I4).
  6. Maritain elaborates thus: Because of the fundamentally existential character of Thomist moral philosophy however vast, necessary, and fundamental be the part that natural ethics plays in it a moral philosophy adequately taken, that is, a moral philosophy really apt to guide action, is conceivable in such a philosophy only if it takes into account the existential state of humanity, with all the wounds or weaknesses and all the resources that it comprises in fact; and if, therefore, it takes into account the higher data of theology (as well as the data of ethnology and sociology). Cf. J. Maritain, Science et Sagesse, pp. 228-362, Eng. trans., pp. 138-220 (Maritain, Existence and the Existent, p. 58, n. 2).
  7. , p. 58.
  8. , p. 60.
  9. In America, where, despite the influence wielded by the great economic interests, democracy has penetrated more profoundly into existence, and where it has never lost sight of its Christian origin, this name conjures up a living instinct stronger than the errors of the spirit which prey upon it. In Europe it conjures up an ideal scoffed at by reality, and whose soul has been half devoured by these same errors (Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 23).
  10. , p. 33.
  11. , p. 37.
  12. , p. 38.
  13. , p. 40.
  14. , p. 41.