Word: maritains
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...that he was the only philosopher actually named in the church's 1918 code of canon law. The code declared that his "method, doctrine and principles" were to be the foundation of every priest's philosophical and theological training. Brilliant Neo-Thomists like the French philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson had given Thomism a modern relevance. University of Chicago Philosopher Mortimer (The Great Books) Adler considered Aquinas to be one of the foremost molders of Western thought. In many Roman Catholic colleges, students got heavy doses of Thomism; later philosophical giants like Descartes, Hume and Kant were...
...have given my life to St. Thomas, and labor to spread his doctrine. For I, too, want intelligence to be taken from the Devil and returned to God." So wrote Philosopher Jacques Maritain to Poet Jean Cocteau 47 years ago. And when Maritain died on April 28, at the age of 90, no modern Roman Catholic had done more than this French layman to make the mind a subtly flashing sword in the defense of faith...
...mother. When he enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1901 during France's rich and corrupt Third Republic, rabid French anticlericalism had turned the church into an intellectual ghetto. At the school itself, a narrow-minded empiricism ruled out serious study of spiritual matters. One day, as Maritain walked hand in hand through a Paris park with his Jewish girl friend Raïssa, the two vowed that if they could find no meaning to life beyond the merely material, they would commit suicide within a year...
Soon thereafter Maritain began reading the massive works of St. Thomas Aquinas. As Thomas had found in Aristotle a philosophical basis for reconciling man's reason and Christian faith, so Maritain, in half a lifetime of philosophical study, brought a rejuvenated Thomism into a modern age of skepticism and science. As the most original philosopher in the Neo-Scholastic movement, he developed an abstruse new theory of human knowledge that sought to unify all the sciences and subdivisions of philosophy in the pursuit of reality. Thomism became a live intellectual option, not merely in France but for two generations...
Vulgar Objects. Like Maritain, the Pope firmly believes that the tradition of scholastic philosophy is a timeless mode of expressing the truths of the Christian faith. His encyclical on the Eucharist contended that the late-medieval word transubstantiation was the only way of expressing the mystery of the consecration, when the bread and wine at Mass become Christ's body and blood. His new creed, promulgated last July, was a disappointingly unimaginative restatement of doctrinal orthodoxy that differed only in minor details from the language of the Council of Trent. His argument against contraception in Humanae Vitae rested...