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PARTISAN REVIEW
critical and experimental approach to the fundamental questions
of religion, morality, and
a fortiori,
politics.
*
That M. Maritain's views are dangerous, then, we may con·
sider as having established. Reasonable they may also be, but
there is at least as much gall and blood mixed up with the reason·
ing as sweetness and light. For M. Maritain, religious freedom is
a contradiction in terms, intellectual independence on matters of
faith and morals a form of arrogant impiety, urbane skepticism
of metaphysical assertions, spiritual decadence, and simple cour·
age in the face of death defiance of God. The position he represents
may be found congenial by those who, having surrendered one or
another specific variety of totalitarianism, have not yet repudiated
its generic form. It deserves attentive consideration from those
who refuse to acknowledge that the good life, personal or social,
can be built on'the pillars of myth, mystery and authority. We turn
now to an examination of M. Maritain's reasoning.
Tbeology and Politics
M. Maritain is a subtle and persuasive writer. But this is not
to say that he is a rigorous thinker. Despite the reputation for
cogent argument which he enjoys among literary men and his
Catholic brethren, there is hardly a conclusion he reaches that is
not begged at the outset. He considers few of the possible alterna–
tives to his controlling assumptions, and 'of these, only the crudest.
The whole bent of his intellectual procedure is to make distinctions
that enable him to withdraw the issues with which
he
is most con–
cerned, from the possibility of scientific or empirical determina–
tion.
The result is that to the unwary he seems to extend a vast area
which includes almost all of the domains of scientific knowledge,
-The real secret of M. Maritain's ideas is their organizationally orthodox character.
How orthodox his conception of the New Christendom is may be gathered by compar,
ing his position with that of Max Scheler, in his Catholic phase,
(Vom Ewigen. im
Mellschen).
Scheler sought to bring Catholicism and Socialism together in the
interests of a new European culture by assigning to the first an educatiorial and spirit·
ualizing function in a socialist society, and not by giving· the Church a place at the
political controls. As an Augustinian, he was more interested
in
the direct relationship
between the individual soul and God than in the mediating role of the Church. He,
therefore, could embrace a Catholicism which falls short of totalitarianism. But it is
necessarily an heretical Catholicism. Aquinas leaves no doubt as to the central place
of the Church, as an organization, in Catholic theory and practice. "The practice of
the Church possesses the highest authority, and we must be directed by it in all
things. Even the doctrine of the Catholic teachers has its authority from the Church.
Hence we must hold tlae custom of the church in higher esteem than the authority of
an Augustine or a Jerome." (Quodlib. 11, A. 7, cited by Grabmann,
Aquinas,
p. SO.)
