Jacques Maritain and Liberal Democracy

Can Contemporary Catholics Help to Rescue the American Republic?

Reminder: readers can view the following post, and dozens of other ones, at the Social Catholicism and a Better Kind of Politics website.

In a previous post on Yves Simon and his book The Road to Vichy: 1918-1938, I also introduced his mentor Jacques Maritain as perhaps the decisive influence in the postwar reconciliation between Catholicism and constitutional democracy. I’ve been meaning to do a post to introduce him in greater detail. In what follows, I will do so by largely reproducing—and expounding upon—a text that is very much in the spirit of this substack which was written by Daniel Philpott, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Philpott published the piece on the Public Discourse website in 2022 under the title “Where Have You Gone, Jacques Maritain?” and can be read in its original form there.

[Undated photo of Maritain from Wikipedia Commons]

Philpott’s piece opens with the observation that “Maritain’s optimistic vision of Christian liberalism is often contested or dismissed” today, especially—I would add—by influential Catholic intellectuals. Philpott proceeds based upon the conviction that Maritain’s “emphasis on Christian participation in society and politics is urgently needed.” So that Catholic can see the coherence and development of Catholic social teaching, I would add that argumentation for such renewed Catholic participation is needed precisely in a way that builds upon the whole tradition, including the great contributions that this French philosopher and his collaborators made to the Church and world, which bore fruit largely in the decades following the Second World War. Philpott opens with the winsome path of framing his piece in light of the positive lessons we should take from Maritain, namely bringing together Catholic intellectuals in response to socio-political chaos.

Writing within a week of the start of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Philpott draws an analogy by recalling an incident from 1930s French politics with which most American Catholics are likely unfamiliar. He writes the following.

On the sixth of the month, far-right agitators assaulted the national legislature, leaving several dead and many more wounded. The next month, amid a public debate so fractious as to elicit warnings of civil war, a group of Catholic philosophers signed a manifesto pleading for the common good and saying no to anti-democratic forces.

There was indeed a fractious public debate occurring in the United States when Philpott published this piece, but not the one that some readers might have thought. He writes.

But this scene, while perhaps familiar, did not take place in America. On February 6, 1934, a faction of the political right rioted in France’s Chamber of Deputies. France was polarized then by monarchists, with whom many traditional Catholics allied, and by republicans, who wished and expected that religion would disappear, and by communists. Among the alarmed Catholic signers, who included noted intellectuals Etienne Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Mounier, and Yves Simon, the most famous was Jacques Maritain, who by then advocated a democratic republic animated by Christianity, a model he came to find and love in the United States.

Although Pope Leo XIII had encouraged a Ralliement of Catholics in support of the French Third Republic with his 1892 encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes, the Church still saw a Catholic state as optimal and was decades away from the reconciliation with secular, constitutional democratic states that comes with the Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis humanae: Declaration on Religious Liberty (1965). These French Catholic intellectuals were, therefore, charting a path that the magisterium would only later endorse after the experience with the threats to human dignity and rights posed by totalitarian states and the Second World War. Philpott further illumines our contemporary situation as follows.

However, as Catholic writer James Matthew Wilson observes, Christians now “generally sense that such a spirit of reconciliation as Maritain represented has failed.” Today, critics of Maritain argue that his political vision of Christian liberalism, a democratic society that is both pluralist and inspired by Christianity, is no longer viable in America. For these critics, Maritain’s ideas could thrive in a bygone world of Billy Graham crusades, Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s television shows, and Christian Democratic politicians who studied Catholic thought, but they could not prevent and might even have encouraged the decline of Christian belief and the rise of un-Christian politics in the West. Maritain’s vision is the subject of intense criticism from integralists, who advocate reviving a confessional state that recognizes the Church as a superior authority and acts as its agent.

Maritain’s “spirit of reconciliation” was not, however, something he naively concocted out of thin air. It has deep roots in Scripture and Tradition. It reflects, for example, what St. Paul described in his Second Letter to the Corinthians as the Gospel “ministry of reconciliation” through which God “had reconciled the world to himself in Christ,” and had appointed Christians like Paul to the “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18-19). Nor does this text reflect a foul ball by St. Paul. Indeed, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council introduced the Church—in the programmatic no. 1 of Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church—as “a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race.” Whereas the orientation of the Maritain’s Christian liberalism—which is also that the Second Vatican Council and of Catholic Social Doctrine is fundamentally rooted in Christian charity—some of the most zealous contemporary Catholics oddly find this to be misguided.

Whereas a range of primarily conservative American Christians once thought their religion was compatible with liberal democracy, many of them have now been convinced that this is not the case. A common explanation is that exaggerated understandings of individualism and unrestrained freedom present since the American founding have so deteriorated the national character that the incompatibility between liberal democracy and Christianity is now evident. The conclusion some Christians have drawn is that they should form a political alliance with even illiberal leaders who will implement policies supporting their traditional moral views, even against popular consensus.

Philpott proceeds with three subsections, treating first Maritain’s understanding of The New Christendom, Christian Liberalism, and The Decline of Christian Politics. I will cite him at length.

The New Christendom

From where did Maritain’s contested political ideas originate? Born in Paris in 1882, Maritain married his close companion, Raïssa Oumansov, in 1904. The two young students had made a pact to commit suicide if they did not find the meaning of life, and, thanks to their encounters with Catholic intellectuals, found their answer in the Catholic Church, which they joined in 1906. In 1910, the young philosopher Maritain became enrapt by St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and joined the Thomist revival that Pope Leo XIII had called for in his letter of 1879, Aeterni Patris. Beginning in 1919, he and Raïssa would host “Thomist Circles” that convened Paris’s remarkable ranks of Catholic intellectuals.

Politically, Maritain associated himself with Action Française, a movement led by the political activist Charles Maurras, a monarchist who, though he was an atheist, favored the reestablishment of the Catholic Church. After Pope Pius XI condemned Action Française in 1926, Maritain accepted and defended the pope’s decision in his 1927 book, Primauté du Spirituel. Here, revising his thinking, he first set forth his notion of a democratic political order that did not enshrine the Church but whose politics would be animated by zealous Christians—what later he would call the new Christendom. Maritain continued working on political philosophy up through his 1949 Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago, published as Man and the State in 1951.

Maritain’s acceptance of the discernment of the magisterium should not be reduced to an act of subservience. It should instead be seen to reflect a proper understanding of how God works in the Church’s ongoing efforts to articulate the truths revealed about God and the divine plan of salvation. As the Second Vatican Council affirms:

“It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God’s most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls” (Dei verbum, no. 10).

As I have recently written here and here, I think a properly Catholic sense of identity—including a critical alignment with the discernment of the magisterium—is perhaps the decisive factor for especially American Catholics to understand the signs of our times, and respond to them in communion with the Church. I think Maritain’s work benefitted from his alignment with the discernment of the magisterium, which also reflected his understanding of connatural knowledge, whereby conformity to truth and virtue helps one to intuit truth and render sound judgments.

Maritain’s great accomplishment was to retrieve Aquinas’s thought in service of articulating the foundations for principles of political justice in a century of unprecedented war and injustice. Besides his new Christendom, these principles included personalism, a doctrine that stressed the dignity of the human person, which totalitarian ideologies of the left and the right had smothered; human rights; the idolatry of state sovereignty; a world federalism that devolved authority to both international and local organizations; and a personalist economics. He was widely read and sought out by politicians and prominent intellectuals in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, as well as by officials in the U.N. and the Holy See, including Pope Paul VI.

Maritain articulates the new Christendom, his blueprint for modern political orders, in one of his most enduringly read books about politics, Integral Humanism, of 1936. The Middle Ages are gone, he declares, and so, too, is that era’s “historical sky,” the civilizational configuration in which politics is mainly a means to the spiritual good of people and society. Today, the “concrete historical ideal” is a temporal order construed as an “intermediate end,” worthy of pursuit in its own right and autonomous in its characteristic ends: providing for the common defense, building roads, educating citizens, and so on. The modern state does not declare itself to be Christian, accords equal citizenship to non-Christians, protects the freedom of the Church and of non-Christians to practice their faith, and protects every citizen’s freedom of expression, ownership, and participation in politics.

In the decades since Maritain’s turn toward democracy, Catholic intellectuals have used various distinctions to reconcile the traditional understanding of the common good that emphasized the virtue of the citizenry—and our fulfillment in God—with the modern separation between the Church and a secular state. Martin Rhonheimer,¹ for example, makes a fundamental distinction between the integral common good that and the political common good. Similar to premodern understandings of the common good, he understands the integral common good as the complete common good of all members of society, including their formation in virtue and direction to the true ultimate end. He is clear that the state shouldn’t try to define or achieve this for us, nor is it the proper goal of political action. Rather, modern states allow individuals and groups to pursue this as they understand it. The political common good, on the other hand, includes those aspects of the common good that can and should be sought through political action, such as securing the conditions so people can pursue their fulfillment as they see fit. Radically antiliberal Catholics, on the other hand, reject such distinctions, along with the common good as the Church understands it, while also arguing for a renewed integralist alliance between Catholicism and states.

Philpott continues.

…

But Maritain’s modern political order was not at all denuded of Christianity. Its virtue and vitality would depend on the “vocational leadership” of Christian “heroes” who, infused by grace and impelled by love for the world, would aim to transform temporal realities in a manner taught by the Gospel—and in so doing, pursue their ultimate spiritual end. Maritain’s new Christendom would be a “vitally Christian lay body politic.”

I have argued elsewhere, however, that especially American Catholics have been diverted from such engagement in the world by rival socio-political visions. Starting in the 1980s, this included a “culturally conservative” model that combined appeals pre-conciliar emphases in the Catholic tradition (a paternalism) and a political alliance with Evangelical Protestants conceived by Republican political operatives like Paul Weyrich. More recently, Catholics have been diverted by the vision of the Second Vatican Council and Catholic Social Doctrine by radically antiliberal and postliberal Catholic alternatives. Although the Second Vatican Council encouraged a model that was largely inspired by Maritain, we never really implemented it for various reasons. Now Catholics who were never on board with that vision are proposing their alternative, which looks much more like a repeat of the mistakes of the interwar generations that Maritain opposed than a reception of the discernment of the magisterium. But I am going far beyond what Philpott writes, so I return to that.

Christian Liberalism

What Maritain articulated in Integral Humanism and subsequent writings is what may be called Christian liberalism. Liberalism is classically defined as a political doctrine that espouses individual rights and liberties and is closely tied to equal citizenship, the rule of law, and the independence of spiritual and temporal authority. Christian liberalism endorses these principles from a standpoint of orthodox Christianity—for Catholics, the dogmatic teaching of faith and morals. It involves what Pope Benedict XVI called “positive secularism,” where religious and temporal authority remain independent in order to promote robust religious participation in society and politics.

Philpott’s point merits emphasis: the social Catholicism that accepts constitutional democracy has a long history of accepting Catholic faith and morals. I would add, however, that many American Catholic conservatives—for lack of a better term—who have also resisted Catholic Social Doctrine as understood by the magisterium as “an integral and solidary humanism,” have also argued for moral positions that are “more Catholic than the Pope.” Continuing with our text.

Christian liberalism has a hall of fame, beginning with Félicité de Lamennais in his middle career, Alexis de Tocqueville, Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, John Henry Newman, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, Luigi Sturzo, Heinrich Rommen, Robert Schuman, John Courtney Murray, Yves Simon, the European émigrés who founded The Review of Politics in the late 1930s, and of course Maritain himself.

In more recent years, notable advocates of Christian liberalism have included Robert George, Pierre Manent, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, Michael Novak, Christopher Wolfe, Jean Bethke Elshtain, David VanDrunen, Jonathan Chaplin, John Witte, Mary Ann Glendon, John Finnis, and Peter Lawler. Popes have taught natural rights, or human rights, in encyclicals since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891. The Second Vatican Council’s declaration, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), proclaimed the human right of religious freedom and the principle of equal citizenship, tenets of Christian liberalism that subsequent popes have strongly endorsed.

Christian liberalism is distinguishable from liberal Christianity, which rejects orthodox teachings. It is also distinct from all forms of liberalism that root rights and liberties in doctrines that deny God and elevate the self-definition of morality and religion. And it is different from negative secularism, which looks on religion as a regressive force and seeks its marginalization from public life—a viewpoint Maritain encountered firsthand in France’s Third Republic. Maritain repudiated all these doctrines as forms of a “radical vice” that he termed anthropocentric humanism and whose roots he located in a line of thinkers running from Machiavelli through to Descartes, Luther, Rousseau, and Kant.

In the eyes of Maritain’s current critics, these radical vices have triumphed in the West, and the new Christendom has failed. “The right to define one’s own concept of existence,” the rationale with which the U.S. Supreme Court justified abortion, undergirds this right along with the state’s endorsement and enforcement of the sexual revolution, the erosion of social ties, and alarming rates of exit from churches, especially among the young.

Joining this criticism of Maritain’s political ideas are diverse contemporary academic perspectives. For political theologian William Cavanaugh, Maritain marginalizes the church by according it a purely spiritual role that yields to a militaristic modern state hungry to consume the loyalties of its citizens. For British theologian and founder of the radical orthodoxy movement John Milbank, Maritain’s notion of human rights entails a possessive individualism inimical to classic Christian natural law. For historian Samuel Moyn, Maritain’s personalism and his advocacy of human rights was contingent on the conservative Christianity of the 1940s.

…

Though Maritain’s current supporters maintain that he still offers wisdom for our own politics, they agree with much of his critics’ diagnosis of today’s West. Wilson holds that “the church is in disarray” and “the secularization of morality and politics [has] continued apace,” while New York Times columnist Ross Douthat believes that Maritain’s “optimism was timebound and ill-fated.” Maritain probably would agree.

Nobody would want to deny that Western culture has degraded in many ways, especially from the perspective of traditional Catholic faith and morality.

Philpott begins the last section of his 2022 essay by raising the key question for our day.

The Decline of Christian Politics

The question, though, is whether Maritain’s secular state caused or culpably failed to halt the collapse of Maritain’s new Christendom. Is positive secularism responsible for negative secularism? Christian liberalism for godless liberalism? Can Christian civilization only be revived through the Old Christendom?

This case is difficult to sustain. The decline of Christianity and of Christian politics has manifold causes, among these the cultural power of the liberalism of self-definition, economic affluence, the morally corrosive effects of technology, and churches’ own poor catechesis, conformity to (negative) secularism, and sex-abuse scandals. On what grounds can one demonstrate the distinctive crippling effect of religious freedom and the independence of church and state?

A comparison among countries casts doubt on this effect. While, as political scientist Jonathan Fox shows, all of the world’s developed democracies are more “integrated” than the United States—supporting religion through measures such as established religion, tax-supported churches, and public religious holidays—in most of these democracies, pews are emptier, and emptied out far earlier, than in the United States. The country that Maritain thought most approximated his political ideal, then, hosts one of the most religious populations among democracies, despite its recent decline.

Religious freedom and equal citizenship also pose substantial moral barriers to abandoning Maritain’s positive secularism for a confessional state. It is telling that Thomas Pink, one of the leading theorists of integralism, interprets Dignitatis Humanae to permit the coercion of baptized Christian heretics. The declaration’s axial principle, though, is no coercion of anyone’s religious faith at all.

A different response to (negative) secularism, doubtless Maritain’s, would be a revival of Christian faith and politics. Critics will deem this proposal naïve and utopian. But is a confessional state any less utopian? The charge of utopianism, moreover, makes revivalists out to be Pelagians, reliant on human effort alone. Maritain’s heroes are rather the work of the Holy Spirit. Let us recall, too, that the history of Christianity does not move in a single direction in the deterministic manner that Kant, Hegel, or Marx envisioned, but is rather, in societies as in human lives, one of decline and renewal, sin and grace. Christian hope cannot accept the decline of faith as inevitable.

Here we might note that—amidst the threats of a dystopian future following from the new autocracy—the Vatican under Pope Francis declared a Jubilee Year of Hope, a theme that Pope Leo XIV has emphasized.

Philpot concludes his 2022 essay during the middle of the Biden Administration, when Catholic institutions were continuing their decades of collaboration with the federal government to welcome immigrants on the border, and to serve the most vulnerable worldwide. He could also welcome the progress in defending innocent unborn lives, although I would emphasize that the Catholic approach to such issues in recent decades came together with a widespread forgetting of the “integral and solidary humanism” of Catholic social doctrine. In my opinion, this helps to explain why what might be seen as progress on that issue is inseparable from what today looks like the loss of American democracy and existential threats to the global common good.

In conclusion, I think we should pray as Philpott advises “for the revival of Maritain’s new Christendom,” and that we should even more work for it, trusting that with God’s help it can be realized more fully than we might imagine.

1. The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2012) by Martin Rhonheimer, edited with an introduction by William F. Murphy Jr.