Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritainwas a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he became an agnostic before converting to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times, and was influential in the development and drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pope Paul VI presented his "Message to Men of Thought and of Science" at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor. Maritain's interest...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth18 November 1882
CountryFrance
Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.
Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts.
Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.
Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.
Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.
A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
The day when efficacy would prevail over truth will never come for the Church, for then the gates of hell would have prevailed against her.
It has never been recommended to confuse "loving" with "seeking to please"... ...Salome pleased Herod's guests; I can hardly believe she was burning with love for them. As for poor John the Baptist... ...she certainly did not envelop him in her love.
For to love is to give what one is, his very being, in the most absolute, the most brazenly metaphysical, the least phenomenalizable sense of this word.
When one's function is to teach the loftiest wisdom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that until you have spoken, nothing has been said.
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.
Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.