A Philosopher for All Seasons 

“The world is in trouble because of a lack of thinking.” These words, from Pope Paul VI in 1968, ring true as a fundamentally human problem. We do not give enough thought or consideration to so many of the things whirling about us. The late 1960s were no doubt an intensified moment of thoughtlessness, but so too, in different ways, is our own time.  

But what does thinking look like? Or to put it a different way, what does a thinker look like? In the ancient world, philosophers wore certain clothing to indicate they were philosophers or to signal their school of thought. In China, Confucian scholars donned a White Sim-ui. In modern times, we might in the philosophical context think of an Oxford don, or one of those existentialist philosophers with a turtleneck and cigarette quick to hand.  

Jason L. A. West’s recent book The Christian Philosophy of Jacques Maritain is far less sartorial than this. But the book does feature a dapper and very French-looking Maritain on the cover and is most compelling in showing what a philosopher ought to look like, or be like. West argues for the continuing centrality of Maritain in philosophy. His book contends that Maritain was neither a mere commentator on Thomas Aquinas nor a philosopher contained in his own time. Maritain, for West, provided a “dynamic and compelling approach to philosophy in his time” and one worth engaging now in the twenty-first century.  

Part of the great strength of West’s book is the way that he details Maritain’s contributions to multiple fields of thought ranging from the philosophy of science to aesthetics. Maritain’s greatness influenced multiple fields of thought in contrast to many philosophers in our era of specialization. West’s development of each field of thought is thorough and engaging. He manages well the task of detailing complex intellectual developments and showing disputed questions regarding Maritain’s contributions, while also writing in a general, accessible way. The book lends itself to reading in full. But for those whose interests do not range as widely, reading specific chapters will be intellectually rewarding. While I read the whole book, I found certain chapters more interesting, especially those regarding metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. Others might dwell more with the chapters on science or history. But whether you read in full or in part, you will encounter the ideas and the thinker behind them.  

In this, West’s depiction of Maritain as a philosopher is the most important aspect of the book. Maritain becomes a kind of model of what philosophy, or thinking itself, should look like in our time. While we might not all become existential Thomists like Maritain, we can not only learn from him but should consider aiming to be like him in his activity of thinking. It is worth considering then some of the essential features of Maritain that West puts forth in his book.  

The first dynamic feature of Maritain is his passion for being and his commitment to the real. As Maritain himself wrote, “What counts is to take the leap, to release, in one authentic intuition, the sense of being, the sense of the value of the implication that lies in the act of existing.” The heart of his philosophical project, like that of his great teacher Thomas Aquinas, was a commitment to the centrality of existence. Thinkers can be overly attracted to ideas and get trapped in the world of their own intellect. We end up thus losing the meaning and purpose of our thinking. Real thinking is thinking about being and toward reality. “Being,” as West writes, “is richer and more pregnant with intelligible values than the idea of being.” In other words, our ideas are, or should be, pathways into a reality that exceeds our understanding.  

While most people might not be too worried about metaphysical realism, an era like ours desperately needs a grounding in the real as we increasingly drift into a world of technology, screens, AI “relationships,” and gender ideology that substitutes the realness of bodies with ideologies about them. For Maritain, we all have an intuition for being, an immediate though inarticulate orientation toward existence. Our task is to cultivate that attachment to the real through ideas that lead us to reality rather than away from it. Maritain’s rich engagements with multiple fields of thought, particularly natural law and aesthetics, disclose the sheer goodness of engaging with the real. For in doing so, we discover that “the fundamental character of being is its generosity, its tendency to overflow with goodness to communicate itself and its goodness to others.” If we are going to draw people out of the sterility of our time, we need to draw them into the generosity of reality and away from the simulacra that consume. That sense of generosity overflows in Maritain the thinker; West richly expresses that in generously communicating through his own book.  

For Maritain, this makes the work of thought not a mere slog through ideas, but a dynamic launch into reality. Scholasticism, and philosophy in general, can sometimes fall into a kind of static thought concerned with unchanging essences in a way that is detached from life. Maritain, in his form of Thomism, certainly holds for the reality of essences, but he emphasizes the activity of being. Thus, Maritain writes that “every existing thing has its own nature or essence.” In other words, to be is to be something, a what. But the real activity of being is living out one’s nature, thus “existing reality is therefore composed of nature and adventure.” It is the adventure of being and thus of living that Maritain witnesses in his thought and in life. Life is for the living, and thus we must live first and then philosophize.  

Because of this prioritization of the activity of being and the dynamic activity of living, West argues that the strength of Maritain is his ability to stay close to lived experiences. West writes that philosophy must “be the result of lived experience” and that this insistence was the root of Maritain’s “clarion call to integrity and authenticity in the intellectual life, in a discipline in which it is all too easy to fall into empty abstractions and irrelevant technicalities.” Maritain well knew that philosophy cannot drift off into the clouds, precisely because it has a service to humanity to help people articulate their nascent sense of morality, beauty, and being rather than to distort them.  

It is partially his lack of interest in abstractions that leads Maritain to engage in so many topics. Aesthetics becomes central in part because of our culture’s soul-sucking loss of beauty; the philosophy of science must be engaged in because of our confused and confusing materialism. This is also why Maritain cultivates a philosophy of history. The adventure of being means we must account for the history of man, a topic woefully neglected by many of his neoscholastic peers. But we must also engage in the intellectual and moral crises of our time.  

If his engagement with reality kept Maritain grounded in the adventure of being and thus lived experience, it also meant that he knew he could not just repeat a philosophical formula and call it thinking. As West writes, part of his philosophical greatness was “his unique manner of blending the old and the new.” West cultivates this sense throughout his book, which is particularly important because there is a kind of fortress Thomism that treats philosophy as a faithful commentary on Thomas’s holy writ. But “rather than being a recipe book for solving philosophical problems, Maritain’s Thomism draws on principles that are solid and well established within the tradition in order to open up new areas of inquiry and address current problems in an organic fashion.” In this, West shows the ways Maritain exceeds his master, especially regarding aesthetics, but also develops his master’s teaching, especially regarding politics and the philosophy of history.  

The world needs thinking, not a mere reproducing of what has been thought. But it is also in need of fidelity to the wisdom we have received. In many ways, it needs us to be like Thomas who was ever willing to think again, renew the tradition he was so faithful to, and engage other traditions for the wisdom that might be found there. In this, Maritain was the most Thomistic of Thomists not because he repeated Thomas’s words, but because he thought with him in the context of our time. Thus, for West, we find in Maritain “a way to live in the contemporary world as a Christian philosopher, as one loving wisdom and drawing on the tradition while ever attentive to the nuances of our own age.” In other words, Maritain is a witness to what real thinking and a real philosopher look like.  

West draws us into the dynamism of Maritain’s thought and paints a portrait of what a philosopher, and thus what thinking, should look like. This is not to say that his book, and Maritain himself, are not without flaws. West’s book does drag a bit at times, and though clear and understandable, it might leave the non–Maritain fan wishing for a shorter book. Further, the chapter on politics (which I most looked forward to) was disappointing. While it provided a rich presentation of Maritain on the common good, I was surprised that West did not highlight Maritain’s contribution to contemporary politics. As the postwar political project falls apart, Maritain’s contributions to our current discussion merit more discussion. How might Maritain offer us a richer vision of politics than either secular liberals or religious postliberals?  

Being an Augustinian myself with a wide array of interests in the history of Christian thought, I also find Maritain’s hyperfocus on Thomas too narrow. Of course, there are few thinkers as capacious as Thomas but, to paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in Maritain’s Thomism. West is right to highlight Maritain as a thinker and not a commentator, and Thomas is a central figure of Christian philosophy. And yet Maritain never seems to feel the pull of non-Thomistic Christian thought. Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, Pascal, Edith Stein, and Newman are giants of Christian thought and yet seem to have nary an influence on Maritain or on West’s book. Engaging the genuine attraction of their thought is fundamentally expressive of what thinking is. It is in fact what Thomas himself did. Maritain never seems quite to rise to that level.  

So, is Maritain a philosopher we need in the twenty-first century or even beyond? West’s book certainly succeeds in highlighting the ways Maritain contributed to Thomism and Christian philosophy in general. But more important is his depiction of the thinker. Maritain was right that the heart of the matter is not a series of ideas, but the concrete realities that ideas are supposed to help reveal. Renewing thinking in our time cannot take place merely with an appeal to “thinking.” We need concrete examples of a thinker at work. We will especially need that as liberal arts colleges, philosophy programs, and the public life of the mind dwindle.  

Maritain was the man for his season. West shows us in Maritain what a Christian philosopher in our time should look like and thus shows that he remains a philosopher for all seasons. 

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