Meinvielle Contra Maritain

Julio Meinvielle's book against Maritain's personalism is now available in English: https://t.co/fk98w72xxB

— Pater Edmund (@sancrucensis) April 27, 2021

Taylor Patrick O'Neill: Maritain on Grace and Predestination

I so enjoy joining @jderosa1990
on the Classical Theism Podcast and have been honored to have been on again, this time discussing Jacques Maritain on grace and predestination. https://t.co/YM1sYTHJCr

— Taylor Patrick O'Neill (@thomaesplendor) December 23, 2020

James Matthew Wilson on Maritain

I'm looking forward to this conversation about the great, fallible Jacques Maritain. https://t.co/FEZ0uU6ULf

— James Matthew Wilson (@JMWSPT) December 2, 2020

Defending Maritain with James Matthew Wilson https://t.co/dkLUYtkWBV via @YouTube

— privepezz (@privepezz) December 2, 2020

Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau on CDK and the Personalists

In this discussion of Yves Simon's General Theory of Authority, @FrAquinasOP touches on the dispute between Maritain and De Koninck on the person and the common goodhttps://t.co/5LiUKDGKsG

— Catholic Culture Podcasts (@CatholicPods) November 18, 2020

James Matthew Wilson on Jacques Maritain

Jacques Maritain was born OTD 138 years ago. Don't miss the large selection of his works available from our friends over at @UNDPress (many of them are linked in the piece).

In Defense of Jacques Maritain Against His Neo-Integralist Critics
by @JMWSPThttps://t.co/tMCHU9sAkQ

— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) November 18, 2020

CLJ

Interview with R. Hittinger on Maritain's Scholasticism and Politics

My interview with Russ Hittinger about about Maritain's "Scholasticism and Freedom" https://t.co/BnRDlh8Kca https://t.co/EcXVaHm7Vx

— Richard Reinsch (@Reinsch84) November 18, 2020

Law & Liberty

Eternal Memory.

Still, it's a good thing that the Roman saint-making machine hasn't gotten a hold of him and his wife yet.

Happy 138th birthday to Jacques Maritain, a major Catholic #philosopher of the 20th century who spent years teaching at @PIMS_Mediaeval @uStMikes. #Thomism

📸: Maritain on the St. Mike's campus in 1942, courtesy @uStMikesKelly archive pic.twitter.com/drDhelYNUx

— University of St. Michael's College (@uStMikes) November 18, 2020

Fallen Failsafes and a Revolutionary Modern Priesthood by Clare McGrath-Merkle

My sincerest thanks to The Regensburg Forum and Dr. Matthew Gaetano for publishing my latest article on the priesthood. https://t.co/U1mKHIWmo9

— Clare McGrath-Merkle, OCDS, DPhil (@Onceandfuturepr) August 23, 2020

Regensburg Forum

Yelle penned an important monograph on the history of the theological debates surrounding the core error underlying Bérulle’s spiritual theology of priesthood: the notion of the holiness of Christ, in which Christ’s human nature is considered to have been made holy by the grace of union with the Word—a mistaken understanding of the communication of idioms. In line with Chalcedon, the properties of Christ’s human nature remained unimpaired, since the hypostatic union changed nothing. If His human nature had been made holy by the grace of union, it would have necessarily changed. Christ, rather, needed habitual grace for His human nature to be raised to the supernatural order.

This error in the understanding of the humanity of Christ (a central meditation for Bérulle’s Oratorians) served as the basis for the holiness and sacerdotal power of Bérulle’s priest. Just as the grace of union made Christ holy and a mediator of religion for Bérulle, so, too, the priest, through the grace of union with Christ, was made mediator of redemption and capable of sacrifice. In this schema, the priest became a mediator in the order of being, a distinction reserved to Christ alone.

Decades after Yelle’s critique, Jacques Maritain best explicated this error and the ongoing influence of some of Bérulle’s key philosophical ideals in his article on the French School, only translated into English in 1997, in a collection of his works. In it, Maritain questioned how it was possible that a great number of churchmen still remained under the French School’s influence despite holding different doctrinal positions. Maritain wrote that the spirituality of French School priests “must consist above all in losing their own subsistence in order to live solely in the Person of Christ, who never ceases to draw them into the unity of the divine Person” (427).

Maritain insisted that Bérulle was seriously mistaken in taking the step from affirming the perfection to which a priest is called, to affirming a perfection of his state of life, making the priest the source of all sanctity in the Church. He quoted Dupuy’s important work on Bérulle and the priesthood, “He [the priest] cannot be defined as a superchristian. For he is not just that. But it is urgent that he be at least that” (190). Dupuy continued, “The priest is united to Christ more than as an instrument, he is conjoined to Him, he is not only in His hand, he is in a sense His hand itself; he is a member of Christ” (195). The basis of the superiority of Bérulle’s sacerdotal state was, as Maritain noted, “the sacerdotal anointing emanates from that of Jesus, who (and this is the thesis dearest to Bérulle) is a priest because of and as a direct consequence of the hypostatic union…” (Maritain, 428).

Maritain believed churchmen were more or less formed by this school in seminary, and were unable to perceive the effects of a vague theology that had escaped rigorous intellectual systemization and therefore any kind of critical review. The result, he noted, was the production of an ideology rather than a theology that continued in his day to have an immense influence.

Vestiges of this vague theology continue today. Impossible to treat fully in this article-length discussion, we can at least explore a few of its major errors.

An essay worth pondering; are there any connections with current Latin opinons regarding the presbyterate and the presbyter acting in persona Christi?

 

Pinkoski's Response to James Patterson on Latin Integralism

Law and Liberty: How Not to Challenge the Integralists by Nathan Pinkoski

A response to @McGillPatterson on integralism, its origins and ideas. https://t.co/Rcy2Cx6AuR

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) April 30, 2020

And one recommendation for the above by Michael Brendan Dougherty: Is Integralism Just Catholic Fascism?

The swift refutation of James Patterson’s smear tactics is *almost* enough to make me believe in the marketplace of ideas https://t.co/ZhnxS8xsHW

— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) April 30, 2020

The author gives a history of the development of Latin integralist thought, starting with the Roman Catholic anti-liberals (not all of whom were strict monarchists, by the way). 

Although its theological claims go back further, Catholic integralism owes its politics to post-revolutionary Europe. The basic presupposition of integralism is that theology is prior to politics and must order politics. As Émile Perreau-Saussine observed in Catholicism and Democracy, this requires a strong demarcation between the spiritual power of the Church and the temporal power of the state. That demarcation was not visible in the Ancien Régime, as the monarch anointed at Reims mixed temporal and spiritual power. The cruel exposure of that demarcation came as the French Revolution’s newly secular state violently attempted to assert its temporal power over the spiritual power of the Church. Since Catholics could no longer rely on their monarch—a Christian head of a Christian state—to protect the Church’s liberties, early 19th century Catholic political thinkers sought a deeper understanding of the principles of authority. They looked to the Papacy—to spiritual power—as the ultimate guarantor of Catholic liberties. Hence Perreau-Saussine argues that integralism is post-revolutionary. Ultramontanist thinkers, such as Joseph de Maistre, helped develop the demarcation between Church and State. In distinguishing temporal authority from spiritual authority, spurning Bonapartist Concordats to revive the Gallican Church, and granting that the Pope was the ultimate authority, these thinkers sought to free the Church from the grip of the post-Revolutionary secular state and campaigned for regimes that would get the Church-State relationship right.

And Latin bishops today act with this sort of mindset, that they have a "spiritual authority" that enables them to lecture the state, even if the state does not recognize their authority. Integralism is a logical consequence to certain Roman claims concerning the authority of the bishop of Rome, and here is its first major weakness. Latin integralists will call their political theory "Catholic" as Latins are apt to label everything part of their ecclesial tradition, but it is particular to them alone, at least so far. Byzantine theory of symphonia may be reconcilable with some looser form of Latin integralism, but it will differ with Latin integralism in all forms in so far as integralism is tied to ultramontanism or a maximalist conception of the papacy. While symphonia developed within the context of empire, on the face of it I cannot see why a version of it cannot be harmonized with republican forms of government.

The rest of the essay is worth reading as the author discusses the relation of integralism to political movements in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is not a thorough history nor does he mention all of the Latin counter-revolutionary/anti-liberal thinkers, but hopefully Patterson will read it.

Renewed Attention to the CDK-Maritain Debate

First Things: False Notions of the Common Good by C. C. Pecknold

Thus De Koninck’s most powerful claim is that human dignity can only be truly defended by embracing the primacy of the common good “expressly ordered to God.” Without an “explicit and public ordination” to God, our debates about the common will devolve into mere debates between tyrants, and “society degenerates into a state which is frozen and closed in upon itself.” 

But what does an explicit ordination to God require? Not necessarily a version of the Catholic state as the integralists would advocate. Not necessarily the state at all.

Jerry Salyer on Jacques Maritain

1P5: Jacques Maritain: Visionary or Leftist Ideologue? by Jerry Salyer

Related:
Saul Alinsky and Jacques Maritain by Christopher Blosser
Saul Alinsky and "Saint" Pope Paul VI: Genesis of the Conciliar Surrender to the World by Christopher A. Ferrara

The Philosopher and the Provocateur. The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky. Edited by Bernard Doering. University of Notre Dame Press. 118 pages. $25.95.

Did it go out of print? Not seeing it at the UND website.

John Hittinger, "Maritain and Deely on the Renewal of Intellectual Life in the Modern World"

The Latest Installment in Milbank's Series

Church Life: Maritain’s Postwar Compromise of Natural Law by John Milbank

Fr. John Cush on Jacques Maritain

NCReg: Discovering New Theologians: Jacques Maritain by Father John P. Cush
Maritain’s thought, based on the perennial wisdom on Saint Thomas Aquinas, can be a guide in helping the Church to instruct the world in the way of truth.

Carrie Gress

Michael Novak on Léon Bloy

Crisis: Léon Bloy’s Role in the Catholicism of Jacques and Raissa Maritain by Michael Novak

Relevant for this weekend...

From 1984: A “Mea Culpa” for Jacques Maritain: A Personal Memoir by Thomas P. McDonnell

Never Seen a Photo of Him When He Was So Young

Post by Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology.

Publications for the American Maritain Association

Incomplete, as far as I can tell. AMERICAN MARITAIN ASSOCIATION PUBLICATIONS

The website, which must have been created rather recently; I don't think it existed during my BC days.

Call for papers.

Little?

What Can a Modern Philosopher Teach Us About Natural Law? by S. Adam Seagrave