5

Jacques Maritain: Catholicism under the Influence of Democratism

Introduction

After the Second World War, the social gospel and other forms of progressivism that shaped Wilsonian thinking about the war and the future found new expression in America, usually in more obviously secular forms, and in Europe. This was the case, paradoxically perhaps, even in Catholic thought. A prominent example of this tendency is the writings of Jacques Maritain, one of the most respected Catholic philosophers of the modern age. Rousseau and various progressives who have contributed to the evolution of democratism have been deeply suspicious of, even hostile to the Catholic Church and its intellectual traditions. That a person who is widely seen as a leading Catholic intellectual might be attracted to the same kind of thinking about democracy and human nature is a telling sign of its pervasiveness in the Western world and perhaps even indicative of the Catholic faith being transformed under its influence. Despite Maritain’s apparent resistance to messianic ideology as well as his sustained criticism of Rousseau’s Social Contract and of contemporary totalitarian regimes, he nonetheless entertains visions of an earthly paradise of the brotherhood of man under the aegis of democracy—an idea that is central to democratism.

Given the prolificacy of Maritain’s writings, one cannot undertake an exhaustive analysis of this complex thinker in a single chapter. Maritain’s thought as a whole is not easily classified. It contains disparate elements, some of which appear contradictory. The main purpose here is not to sort out the different lines of thought in his work or to offer a rounded estimate of his contribution. As in previous chapters, the emphasis will be on dimensions of thought of most interest to this study. Without ignoring other aspects of Maritain’s philosophy, attention will be concentrated on the prominent ingredient of democratic enchantment in his work. This chapter carefully examines Maritain’s hope for a revived Christian civilization in the postwar period and focuses attention on his mature political work Man and the State (1951). In particular, it analyzes Maritain’s vision of global democracy, one that is sustained by a philosophy of history that imagines as a culminating moment the transformation of political life on a global scale. Maritain anticipates the development of a democratic order in which people live in peace and justice and through which they will ultimately construct an ideal civilization distinguished from all others by its social, political, and spiritual harmony. For Maritain, the experience of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century was central to the development of this idea. Witnessing the evils that the grand ideological systems wrought, Maritain was convinced that the time had come when the world would at last recognize Christian democracy as the one form of government most in keeping with human nature and the transcendent moral order.

Democracy, for Maritain, is not only most desirable in the abstract but historically necessary. Given that Maritain is, perhaps in other ways, within the neo-Scholastic Catholic tradition, it is certainly tempting to view his political thought as a species of conservatism geared toward checking the moral and spiritual degeneracy of modernity. Indeed, his argument in The Person and the Common Good (1947) may be profitably viewed in this light. However, a careful reading of Man and the State, in conjunction with a comparative look at other figures in the democratist tradition, necessitates a reevaluation. Some of Maritain’s underlying assumptions about human nature and the possibilities and limits of Christianity as a civilizing force in history raise suspicion. Some of the guiding assumptions about human nature behind Maritain’s philosophy of democracy are remarkably similar to those of Rousseau.

Maritain breathed new life, especially for Catholics, into many of the democratist ideas disseminated in America and Europe in earlier generations. He worked to revise the Catholic and Christian aversion to political idealism, specifically democratic idealism. His political philosophy may in fact be the first systematic attempt to reconcile Catholicism and Christianity more broadly with democracy. His political works were so influential that they inspired the formation of many of the Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America in the twentieth century, and his involvement in the drafting and advancement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights demonstrates just how significant was his international political influence.

Maritain’s vision of global peace and democracy is, like Wilson’s, imbued with Christian language and symbolism. There are obvious differences between Wilson and Maritain, such as the latter’s willingness to acknowledge man’s sinfulness, but their similarities betray an underlying commitment to a shared political theology, a variant of democratism. Perhaps more as a result of the developing zeitgeist than because of deep philosophical or religious kinship, the two nonetheless exhibit largely compatible political theories expressed in a common language. For both of these men, as for other democratists, democracy represents the fulfillment of history and even Christian revelation.

For Maritain, as for many others, liberal democracy is by definition something other than ideology.¹ Examining his conception of democracy, however, raises the distinct possibility that even so-called liberal democracy, if it is understood in a particular way, can have the characteristics of a thoroughgoing ideology. For obvious reasons, the term “ideology” acquired a pejorative connotation in the twentieth century, partly through the contributions of figures such as Maritain who recognized the dangerous, totalizing aspects of political movements such as Bolshevism and Nazism. But ideology can exist in a variety of forms and may have the appearance of being nonideological despite being systematic and doctrinally elaborate. Maritain’s philosophy of democracy would seem to qualify as this type of ideology and fits well within the democratist framework that this book outlines and identifies. There need not be a single manifesto or political treatise detailing its tenets for a political worldview to qualify as an ideology. Indeed Marx’s Communist Manifesto is the exception rather than the rule.

Maritain’s Christian Genealogy of Democracy

Although approaching it from different perspectives, Jefferson, Wilson, and Maritain arrive at a similar philosophy of history, in which liberal democracy represents the apex of political as well as social and moral achievement. As one would expect, the Enlightenment naturally influenced Jefferson, and the role of Progressivism influenced Wilson, but Maritain employs an ostensibly Christian genealogy to explain and justify the rise of modern democracy. Democracy is the result of the evolution of Christianity from the sacral to the temporal realm, he argues. The Middle Ages represented a sacral age, in which Church and politics were undifferentiated. The modern age is a secular age in which the sacral and temporal realms have split. For Maritain, the modern democratic age is superior to the Middle Ages insofar as that spiritual differentiation has inspired a widespread recognition of human dignity and freedom.² While Maritain laments the fact of modern religious division, he accepts this misfortune as necessary to democratic progress.

Maritain’s position on the historical development of democracy may be called religiously deterministic. He attributes the unfolding of democracy to providential design and the work of the gospel in history. “Democracy,” writes Maritain, “is the only way through which the progressive energies in human history do pass.”³ It is only through gospel inspiration, however, “that democracy can progressively carry out its momentous task of the moral rationalization of political life.”⁴ By this Maritain means that there will be widespread “recognition of the essentially human ends of political life, and of its deepest springs: justice, law, and mutual friendship” and “a ceaseless effort to make the living, moving structures and organs of the body politic serve the common good, the dignity of the person, and the sense of fraternal love.”⁵ Because democracy is the only system of government that legally and rationally recognizes freedom, Maritain says that “we may appreciate . . . the crucial importance of the survival and improvement of democracy for the evolution and earthly destiny of mankind.”⁶

Like Wilson and Rousseau, and to a lesser extent Jefferson, Maritain places great hope in the ability of the democratic political system to solve, once and for all, social and political challenges. In this sense, all of these thinkers are deeply antipolitical. Politics for Maritain and other democratists is not an ongoing challenge, a series of compromises, negotiations, and problem-solving. The Rousseauean, democratist vision of democracy expects essentially an end to the ceaseless struggle for the common good that has challenged humanity since the dawn of social existence and been the subject of study for philosophers through the ages. Plato was perhaps the first thinker to imagine an end to politics with his Republic, but Maritain at times puts himself in the same tradition. Partly for this reason, democratism nearly always takes on a religious dimension. It is to be found in the civil religion that grounds Rousseau’s democratic theory, in Jefferson’s religious reading of historical events, in Wilson’s Christian interpretation of the war, and here in an ostensibly Catholic philosophy of democracy. Politics is an art, but religion proclaims eternal truths and calls its believers to look beyond an apparent reality and toward a transformed existence in the transcendent. The democratist understanding of democracy is of much the same character. Maritain represents particularly well this dimension of democratism, as he tries to unite the transcendent aspect of Christianity with mundane political existence.

“Personalist Democracy”

Maritain is careful to distinguish between different types of democracy, identifying false democracy or bourgeois and individualist democracy; totalitarian democracy, which rejects liberal ideas and treats citizens as slaves; and “personalist democracy.” The former two do not promote the common good or treat citizens with dignity. True democracy, on the other hand, is not based on “childish greed, jealousy, selfishness, pride and guile . . . but instead on a grown-up awareness of the innermost needs of mankind’s life, of the real requirements of peace and love, and of the moral and spiritual energies of man.”⁷ Maritain’s various characterizations of “personalist democracy”—the “democratic charter,” the “democratic secular faith,” and more generally the democratic “state of mind”—tend to be rather diffuse, but at the heart of this normative concept of democracy is the requirement of universal “brotherly love.” Maritain shares the romantic belief that the gospel command to “love thy neighbor” is a general exhortation to “love mankind.” Brotherly love, Maritain says, must “overflow the bounds of the social group to extend to the entire human race.” Sensitive to history’s examples of state-sanctioned “brotherly love” quickly becoming “brotherhood or death,” he is careful to explain that the gospel or transcendent understanding of brotherhood must take precedence.⁸

A fraternal sentiment for our fellow human beings is written on our hearts, Maritain believes, and spontaneously emerges from shared human experience, especially emotionally charged experience. Together in “great catastrophes, in humiliation and distress,” as well as in “the sweetness of a great joy,” human beings realize their brotherhood and equality.⁹ In this respect, Maritain shares the moral-spiritual sensibility of Rousseau, who believes that “pity” or compassion is the bonding agent of social and civil life. In general, democratism is oriented by this romantic ethic; compassion and a sense of fraternal love dramatically overshadow original sin, if such a thing even exists, and when allowed to flow freely, translate politically into democracy. This view might be contrasted with that of earlier Christian thinkers in the traditions of Christian realism and Thomism who believe that the sinfulness of human beings is formidable and is an obstacle to lasting peace and the common good. Good government depends on the quality of character of those in power and the constitutional makeup of the people. Democracy is not necessarily a better form of government if its leaders and people are rotten, they would say. Maritain’s contemporary and fellow Catholic Heinrich Rommen, while supposedly operating from within the same tradition as Maritain, arrives at a conclusion more in line with the thought of earlier Christian philosophers as well as the classical thinker Aristotle that the best type of government cannot be determined in the abstract. Discussion about the best form of government must appreciate fully a nation’s “geographic location, its economic basis of life, its national traditions, its particular cultural development, and all other such elements that establish the nation’s individuality,” Rommen says.¹⁰

A New Christian Equality

The concept of brotherhood for Maritain is informed by his understanding of equality, which represents a similar departure from the orthodox Christian understanding. Maritain defines equality as “the natural love of the human being for his own kind which reveals and makes real the unity of species among men.”¹¹ Just as we have an instinct for brotherhood, human beings also have a natural or “primary” instinct for feelings of equality. Asserting that other, competing instincts such as pride and envy are secondary to feelings of benevolence and fraternity, Maritain distances himself from the older Augustinian and Thomist beliefs about the centrality of original sin and the perpetual need to overcome selfish behaviors.¹² For Augustine especially, sins such as pride and envy constantly threaten the social order.

On the one hand, Maritain disavows “idealist egalitarianism” that “wish[es] that all inequality among [human beings] should disappear.” Instead, equality in the true sense, as understood by “Christian realism,” should include “those fruitful inequalities, whereby the multitude of individuals participates in the common treasure of humanity, should develop themselves.”¹³ On the other hand, however, Maritain concludes, “The community of essence is of greater importance than individual differences; the root is more important than the branches.”¹⁴ Without a careful reading of his philosophy, it is easy to gloss over some of Maritain’s conclusions and assume that he is a traditionalist. While giving a nod to the older idea of the inescapability of innate differences in human beings, Maritain nonetheless concludes that a “community of essence” ultimately eclipses individuality. Is a “community of essence” something akin to Rousseau’s general will? It seems to convey the same idea of a moral will that is shared by all citizens. This is an idea much more in line with the social gospel than with traditional Catholic thought, and it easily fits within the democratist paradigm. The difference between Maritain’s understanding of equality and that of thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas becomes even more pronounced in Maritain’s belief that equality requires that “natural inequalities be compensated for by a process of organic redistribution.”¹⁵ It is “just or equitable,” Maritain says, “that individuals should receive in proportion not to their needs or desires, which tend to become infinite, but to the necessities of their life and development, the means for putting to use their natural gifts.”¹⁶ Again, it is possible to read such a statement in a conservative light, which would hold that attempting to fulfill the infinite desires of its citizens is certainly impossible and also that some basic human needs ought to be met. But Maritain is calling on the state to ensure a certain material equality among citizens that would in addition promote their spiritual well-being. The older Christian idea of the state did not envision it acting as a vehicle to salvation or spiritual betterment. Material conditions should be irrelevant to salvation, the Church taught. According to a more traditional Christian perspective, for the state to be tasked with providing for the “necessities” of “life and development” would be to give it broad, practically unlimited power to determine what constitutes social welfare. Maritain’s preoccupation with the role of the state in promoting material prosperity and equality is a radical departure from earlier Catholic political thought, which focused on the state only as it applied to the Church’s mission of saving souls. In this respect, Maritain is in the same tradition as many secular, liberal thinkers and progressives, from Wilson to John Rawls.

Liberalism and Catholicism

Maritain injects a material understanding of equality into an earlier, more spiritual Christian notion. For Maritain, the redistribution of wealth is actually required to create or maintain equality even in the Christian sense. This is a decided reorientation of the Christian mission and its traditional philosophy of equality. Equality can be understood only in a spiritual sense, according to the older Christian view. Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn represents the earlier Catholic position. He was alarmed by the tide of the progressive social gospel sweeping America in the twentieth century and transforming Christianity under its influence. In particular, he cautioned against misusing the term “equality” in connection with Christian doctrine:

Christianity was by no means egalitarian, but merely established new values and new (physical as well as metaphysical) hierarchies. Human equality, theologically analyzed, is restricted to the equality of souls in the very beginning of their existence; but this equality is not continuous throughout a person’s lifetime. Potentiality and actuality should not be confused. The spiritual equality of two new-born babes in the sight of God is merely a ‘start.’ Judas Iscariot expiring in the noose and St. John the Evangelist closing his eyes on Patmos are spiritually not equals.¹⁷

Maritain, on the other hand, writes that the state owes the Church the “material task” of the “promotion of prosperity, the equitable distribution of the material things that are the support of human dignity.” He goes so far as to say that in so doing, the state contributes to “the spiritual interest of the Church.”¹⁸

Maritain’s attempts to blend Catholicism with the “democratic secular faith” often involve argumentation that is not only incompatible with traditional Catholic beliefs but also at times internally inconsistent. On the one hand, Maritain recognizes the inevitability of inequalities among persons and even says that those inequalities ought to be channeled in fruitful ways, but on the other hand he calls for leveling of the material sort. He says that universal brotherhood ought not devolve into coercion, but he believes that the state can promote feelings of equality, even the Church’s mission to save souls, through material redistribution.

The Papacy and the Democratic Welfare State

There is a great deal of overlap between Maritain’s thinking and that of secular liberal thinkers. Like Rawls, Maritain’s philosophy pretends that something like the modern welfare state is natural and inevitable. With other secular democratists, Maritain believes that a spiritual-intellectual awakening of the population can bring about a “new age of civilization,” with democracy at its foundation and in which broad “rights of the human being in his social, economic, and cultural functions” will be recognized. This includes everything from the right to employment and to unionize to having a share in “economic life,” a just wage sufficient for a family, unemployment relief, sick benefits, social security, and “the elementary goods, both material and spiritual, of civilization . . . free of charge.”¹⁹ In this respect Maritain represents a decisive break with the older Catholic tradition, which stressed spiritual over material goods. Aquinas, to be sure, considered the duty of the better-off to be charitable to the needs of the poor. He even said that whatever the rich have in superabundance is due to the poor, according to natural law. In defending the rights of the destitute, Aquinas quotes St. Ambrose: “It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom.”²⁰ But it would not have occurred to Aquinas, Ambrose, or others in the older Christian tradition to look to the state or secular authorities to compel charity.

In the twentieth century, the idea of the democratic welfare state as a Christian imperative percolated all the way to the top. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Gaudium et Spes, promulgated in 1965, reveals a strong continuity with Maritain’s understanding of personalist democracy, the need for material equality, and a distinctly secular understanding of human rights. The encyclical makes use throughout of the Rousseauean ideas of a “brotherhood of men,” “the whole human family,” “the destiny of the human community,” and the “universal community.” Despite Paul’s use of such ethereal, abstract descriptors, he considered this whole community to be real and growing more enlightened by the day, although faced with new threats: “Never before has man had so keen an understanding of freedom yet at the same time new forms of social and psychological slavery make their appearance.”²¹ What Paul has in mind are certain preoccupations with the historical particularities of existence that tend to distinguish one person from another rather than forge bonds of sameness and equality. These parochial concerns, he says, are ultimately grounded in human sinfulness. It is therefore imperative that the human race work to advance universal rights and democracy and to do so without undo attachments to outmoded national distinctions. Like Maritain, Paul imagines that there is one destiny for the entire human race, and the irresistible force of providential history moves all nations, albeit at different paces, in the same direction. Paul shared Maritain’s response to the historical predicament of the postwar period by calling for the broad implementation of political rights that overlap with those of the modern welfare state: “There must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family, the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one’s own conscience, to protection of privacy and rightful freedom even in matters religious.”²²

Paul’s predecessor Pope John XXIII expressed similar views in the encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963). John wrote that the “rights of man” ought to include “security in cases of sickness, inability to work, widowhood, old age, unemployment, or in any other case in which he is deprived of the means of subsistence through no fault of his own.” Each has the right to “respect for his person, to his good reputation; the right to freedom in searching for truth and in expressing and communicating his opinions. . . . The natural law also gives man the right to share in the benefits of culture, and therefore the right to a basic education and to technical and professional training,” to “higher studies,” to “choose freely the state of life which [human beings] prefer,” to healthy working conditions, to a “standard of living in keeping with the dignity of the human person,” to private property, to assembly and association, to freedom of movement within one’s own country and to “emigrate to other countries and take up residence there” when justice requires it.²³ Human beings are becoming increasingly enlightened and ever “conscious of their human dignity”: “There will soon no longer exist a world divided into nations that rule others and nations that are subject to others.” Even concepts like borders and national distinctions will become fluid, as men across the globe “will soon have . . . [the] rank of citizens in independent nations.”²⁴ This is due as much to rational progress as to the “progress of moral conscience.”²⁵ Although different in other ways, Maritain, John XXIII, and Paul VI share with Karl Marx the broad assumption that through politics, the historical dialectic is moving societies inexorably toward spiritual and material fulfillment.²⁶

Maritain, John XXIII, and Paul VI stand in contrast in important ways with John Paul II, whose response to modern social and political problems emphasizes another side of Catholic social teaching. At first glance, Maritain appears to have much in common with John Paul, who was similarly a staunch opponent of totalitarianism and saw the need to ground political order in the transcendent, but John Paul was no political universalist and did not believe that it was the Church’s place to offer “technical solutions” to what are ultimately political problems. “The Church does not propose economic and political systems or programs,” he says, “nor does she show preference for one or the other, provided that human dignity is properly respected and promoted, and provided she herself is allowed the room she needs to exercise her ministry in the world.”²⁷ John Paul was in the Augustinian tradition in this respect. He believed strongly in economic and political rights and hoped that the human condition on earth could be ameliorated by beneficial public policies, but he never advocated for one single form of government, and he seemed to sense in such a desire the presence of ideological thinking about democracy: “Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a ‘system’ and as such is a means and not an end. . . . Even in participatory systems of government, the regulation of interests often occurs to the advantage of the most powerful, since they are the ones most capable of manoeuvering not only the levers of power but also of shaping the formation of consensus. In such a situation, democracy easily becomes an empty word.”²⁸

Maritain’s Idea of Innerworldly Redemption

For Maritain, as for many others who share his democratist disposition, true democracy is just around the corner, following the widespread observance of new political practices and ways of thinking, possibly accompanied by a major destructive event, such as war. Maritain expresses a quintessential democratist belief when he says, “The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.”²⁹ According to democratism, historical democracies have always fallen short of “real” democracy. Like Wilson, Maritain was convinced that a more genuine form of democracy was about to replace the old, broken democracies of the West. Both Wilson and Maritain interpreted global war as portending an apocalyptic, world-historic moment that would fundamentally alter the conditions of human life. According to Maritain:

[If] the struggle of those who are fighting Nazism and its satellites is not truly animated by an heroic ideal of the liberation of human life, and if victory is not to bring about the foundations of a world reorganization which enlists men’s efforts in a common task dominated by such an ideal, civilization will have escaped from the imminent threat of destruction only to embark on a period of chaos, when, after having militarily wiped out Fascism and Nazism, it will run the risk of being morally conquered by their substitutes. . . . It is from this work that we may expect a transforming power. The creation of a new world will not be the work of the war but the force of vision and will and of the energies of intellectual and moral reform which will have developed in the collective conscience and in the responsible leaders.³⁰

Like Wilson, Maritain seems not to appreciate the paradox of imagining that the leaders responsible for generating a new world order could be the same ones who orchestrated the war in the first place. But for whatever role such leaders might play, the direction and character of the new age to come would be forged literally on the battlefield. “The war will not be truly won,” writes Maritain, “unless during the war itself a new world takes shape which will emerge in victory—and in which the classes, races and nations today oppressed will be liberated.”³¹ Through a process of destruction and regeneration, a general purification of thought and action will occur, and the new democratic order will emerge on a global scale.³²

Such views place Maritain, and by extension a line of papal thought that thrusts in the same direction, in the company of other democratists as well as political millenarians dating back to the Protestant Reformation. Apparently influenced by the utopianism of the Book of Revelation, these figures were captured by the prospect of a new earth, “the holy city, a new Jerusalem,” which will appear in the wake of great and terrible destruction.³³ Unlike many in this tradition, however, Maritain does not envision the disappearance of political life altogether. While a purified democracy will rise from widespread recognition of its moral superiority, it will still require guidance by political leaders who are committed to the “democratic creed,” as he calls it. As with religious creeds, the democratic creed would require protection from “political heretics” who would threaten “freedom and the practical secular faith expressed in the democratic charter.”³⁴ One of the general characteristics of democratism is the indispensable role of a cadre of enlightened experts who are charged with, among other tasks, the development of a system of public education whose curriculum will act as a social and political preservative for the regime.

In the final section of Man and the State Maritain presents a vision of world government and describes the types of leaders who will craft it. Not unlike Wilson, he believes that the peace settlement would be the opportunity for an intellectual and moral vanguard to engineer a new democratic world order. The “ultimate solution” to man’s historical and political predicament heretofore fraught with conflict, suffering, inequality, and oppression is a system of global governance composed of a universally respected leadership class.³⁵ Like the American system, it would comprise legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Maritain refers to the governing body as a “world council” and “senate of wise men.”³⁶ He stipulates that the senators would be stripped of national citizenship to ensure loyalty to no particular people or place. A comparison might be made with the section in Rousseau’s Social Contract in which he says that local attachments must be sundered to facilitate the general will. Like Rousseau’s legislator, Maritain’s senate would “give a voice to the conscience of the peoples” and provide “organized international opinion.”³⁷ It would enact the general will of the world—a will, says Maritain, that is for freedom.

The Material Dialectic of Democracy

Human beings will come together to live in a global community because they will recognize the common goal of humanity, which is to live in freedom and brotherhood. While this realization is already coming to pass, it will not endure without a global desire “strong enough to entail a will to share in certain common sufferings made inevitable by the task, and by the common good of world-wide society.”³⁸ Maritain’s thought here bears an uncanny resemblance to the materialist philosophy of Marxism-Leninism that emphasizes the role of struggle in the historical dialectic. Maritain believes that realizing a world-historic ideal of Democracy requires great sacrifice. Through “moral heroism,” he says, human beings can work to equalize material conditions. For example, Westerners can assent to the lowering of their standard of living in order to raise that of those living in the Soviet Union. And after global government is established, material conditions will naturally equalize: “The very existence of a world-wide society will also inevitably imply a certain—relative no doubt, yet quite serious and appreciable—equalization of the standards of life of all individuals.”³⁹ These economic changes will be accompanied by tectonic shifts in political life. This global reorganization—a “new creation of human reason”⁴⁰—will “inevitably imply deep changes in the social and economic structures of the national and international life of people,” especially those “attached to profit-making.”⁴¹

This brings to mind an image that Marx presents in the Communist Manifesto, that the forces of capitalism disrupt the very economic system from which it sprang. The bourgeoisie will become obsolete under the crushing weight of the social, economic, and cultural changes that their class wrought. Marx predicts that the natural result of these changes and corresponding displacement will be a trend toward centralization and globalization, a conclusion Maritain reaches.⁴² Pope Paul VI also writes of the “evolution” of modern material conditions and attendant social disruptions. Globalism will bring about “more thorough changes every day” for “traditional local communities such as families, clans, tribes, villages, [and] various groups and associations,” but these changes are necessary, he says, for fulfilling “the destiny of the human community.”⁴³

In Integral Humanism, Maritain acknowledges Marx’s “profound intuition” about the alienating and dehumanizing tendencies of the modern capitalist system. He hopes, however, that Christianity can take Marx’s intuition, which is “pregnant with Judeo-Christian values,” and save it from the atheist philosophy that underlies it.⁴⁴ Maritain criticizes Marx’s philosophy for its professed atheism and for espousing a “radical realist immanentism.”⁴⁵ For Marx, according to Maritain, the solution to man’s experience of alienation in the capitalist system is to accomplish the Promethean task of replacing God with Man and transforming existence for ourselves. Maritain says that liberation for Marx “is in the name of collective man, in order that in his collective life and in the free discharge of his collective work he may find an absolute deliverance . . . and in a word deify within himself the titanism of human nature.”⁴⁶ Its atheism is the source of communism’s evils, but its idea of communion, Maritain says, is at the heart of Christianity. While communion inspires communism, communism alienates the Christian virtues that would sustain genuine communion: “[I]t is the spirit of faith and of sacrifice, it is the religious energies of the soul which Communism endeavors to drain off for its own uses, and these it needs in order to subsist.”⁴⁷ The political ideology of communism is ultimately incompatible with religious faith, for that faith must be channeled into politics and into the earthly task of building utopia.

Maritain argues that Marx’s atheism ultimately undermines the pursuit of meaningful community in his theory, but is it enough for Maritain to profess the need for Christianity to “ground” politics when he shares Marx’s philosophy of history and even, to an extent, philosophy of materialism? Maritain’s vision of earthly renewal founded in a new brotherhood of humanity resembles Marx’s broad outline of the same idea. Are the differences between the two visions on these major points substantive or merely rhetorical? Maritain articulates a vision of international brotherhood, freedom, and equality that is to be accomplished through major socioeconomic reorganization at the hands of a knowing vanguard, aided by what is nothing other than a secular political faith—the “democratic creed.” Because Maritain’s language and sentiment are peppered with references to Christianity, it is tempting to interpret his political philosophy as being in keeping with traditional Christianity. But his fixation on the material, and especially the desire to level material conditions, suggests that Maritain has diverged sharply from the older, orthodox version of Christianity that he purports to be representing. Such a focus on the material and political must come at the expense of the spiritual and, worse, at times spiritualizes the political—a charge Maritain laid on Marxism. Under the auspices of Christian “democracy,” Maritain seems to be a major contributor to a new political ideology not so different from the one he repudiates.

Democratic Vanguardism

Nothing can force the dialectic of Christian democracy. The final stage of history will simply unfold—an assertion that Marx makes about socialism. On the other hand, Maritain believes that a revolution and central planning can speed the historical process.⁴⁸ One of the paradoxes of democratism is that while it professes the will of the people sovereign, its theory requires an elite to alert the people to their true will.⁴⁹ Experts must stimulate an “awakening [of] common consciousness,” Maritain says, to the value of the democratic creed as he envisions it. The element of vanguardism within his philosophy presents a problem of authority that reflects that same problem for democratism in general. This is a paradox that Maritain never quite resolves. True authority rests only with God, he contends, and so even the people are not sovereign in the final sense. Practically and politically, though, only the people and their designated agents have the political authority to rule.⁵⁰ Yet neither God nor the people appear to be sovereign according to Maritain’s theory. A global senate is tasked with encouraging the historical “process of maturation.” Maritain, like Jefferson, admires “the stock and resource of humanity in those who toil close to nature,” but he believes that the simple folk are in need of guidance.⁵¹ “Large portions of humanity,” Maritain says, “remain in a state of immaturity or suffer from morbid complexes accumulated in the course of time and are still no more than the rough draft or the preparation of that fruit of civilization which we call a people.”⁵² Certain “prophets of the people” have a duty to wake the people, who “as a rule prefer to sleep.”⁵³ Maritain’s examples of these types of prophets are revealing. The fathers of the French Revolution and of the American Constitution—specifically “men like Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson”—are the first two in a short list (that also includes John Brown, the originators of the Italian Risorgimento and the liberation of Ireland, and Gandhi).⁵⁴ Maritain seems not to consider that the violent persecution of Christians and attempts to eradicate traditional religion during the French Revolution suggest not just theoretical but real incompatibility between the “democratic mentality” he sees in the Revolution and lauds in Christianity. It may be no coincidence that Paine was an atheist and Jefferson a suspected one. These political leaders often tried to “awaken” the people to a new mode of political existence that they hoped would replace traditional religion.

In the end, Maritain, like so many other democratists, is uncomfortable with the people as they are. He often proclaims the sovereignty of the people, but he has a clear normative vision in mind that sees the need to overturn existing practices and beliefs. His language of the “immaturity” of the people and their being a “rough draft” of a real body politic indicates that, in the end, Maritain lacks faith in.

The Secular Faith of Democratism and Modern Gnosticism

Maritain argues that the “democratic impulse” is the “temporal manifestation of the inspiration of the Gospel.” The “democratic faith” cannot be “justified, nurtured, strengthened, and enriched without philosophical or religious convictions,” but those convictions may be of the secular variety.⁵⁵ In this respect, Rawls’s secular philosophy of liberal democracy has received unexpected help from Maritain’s thought. In the introduction to UNESCO’s Human Rights publication, Maritain writes, “Agreement between minds can be reached spontaneously, not on the basis of common speculative ideas, but on common practical ideas, not on the affirmation of one and the same conception of the world, of man and of knowledge, but upon the affirmation of a single body of beliefs for guidance in action.”⁵⁶ This is an idea that would inform the work of Rawls, one of the twentieth century’s most influential political philosophers.

One author points out, “Like Rawls, Maritain acknowledges the fact of religious pluralism and the right of individual conscience. Thus, the only just consensus in a pluralistic democracy is one based upon practical, not philosophical, adherence to strictly temporal values.”⁵⁷ The difference, this author points out, is that “Maritain insists that these temporal values are in essence the embodiment of the transcendent spirit of the Gospel into the immanent affairs of men.”⁵⁸ Maritain says that “the Christian political society which we are discussing would be aware of the fact that Christian truths and incentives and the inspiration of the Gospel, awakening common consciousness and passing into the sphere of temporal existence, are the very soul, inner strength, and spiritual stronghold of democracy.”⁵⁹ A Catholic and an atheist, Maritain contends, while disagreeing on philosophical and religious beliefs, can still agree on the fundamentals of a liberal political order. Rawls would agree.

This idea raises some important questions about the real role of Christianity or religion in politics. Is it necessary to democracy, as Maritain maintains? Democratic consensus can be reached on purely secular grounds through reason alone. “In other words,” one scholar and contemporary of Maritain, Aurel Kolnai, acerbically points out, “our most important beliefs and thoughts are quite irrelevant to our most important task in earthly life; each of us may quietly worship his own preferred Allah or Christ or Idea or Matter or History in his own private tin chapel, while all of us jointly build, in cheerful harmony, the huge world-wide Temple of Civilization—the one thing that really matters.”⁶⁰ Kolnai argues that a Thomist should be especially sensitive to the fact that “men’s ‘practical’ preferences and schemes are closely conditioned and intimately molded by their ‘speculative’ views. . . . [A] ‘practical’ agreement without a ‘speculative’ one is a wooden iron, though the ‘speculative’ presuppositions held in common may be merely implicit and unformulated.”⁶¹ In other words, ideas matter, especially deeply held religious and philosophical views. According to Kolnai, a working consensus that is not based on shared convictions is ultimately untenable. Maritain’s discussion of the political “leavening” effect of the gospel notwithstanding, Christianity is superfluous if a democratic consensus can be reached without it, and, moreover, Maritain unwittingly suggests that traditional Christianity may actually be a hindrance to the competing secular religion of the state. For Maritain, Kolnai says, “the ‘practical’ aim of ‘creating’ a manmade paradise on earth, is all-important. For this higher realization of the real core of Christianity, Catholic ‘motives’ are worth just as much as any other ‘motives’ so long as they subserve the one true and operative religion of humanism.”⁶²

Is Kolnai being too harsh on Maritain, or is Maritain’s attempt to reconcile Christianity with a secular philosophy of democracy ultimately contributing to the rise of Christianity’s substitute? Democratism often resembles a religion in its profession of an orthodox democratic creed, its censure of heretics, theology of the general will, and millenarian beliefs about a golden age of freedom and equality that will follow a mass awakening. Maritain’s political philosophy, although ostensibly Christian, often exhibits the traits of this ersatz religion. He believes that Christians can “transform the world temporally,” thereby altering human existence. Indeed it is a Christian duty, Maritain asserts.⁶³ The Christian’s temporal mission is “to intervene in the destiny of the world, winning at great pains and at the risk of a thousand dangers—through science and through social and political action—a power over nature and a power over history, but remaining, whatever he does, more than ever a subordinate agent: servant of divine providence and activator or ‘free associate’ of an evolution he does not direct as a master, and which he also serves insofar as it develops according to the laws of nature and the laws of history.”⁶⁴

Does the final emphasis, for Maritain, lie on God’s authorship of the world or on the human effort to win “a power over nature and a power over history”? It is possible to view such an exhortation as a modern expression of the ancient gnostic (from “knowledge”) heresy, which Eric Voegelin says animates liberal progressivism and romantic conservatism alike. Dissatisfaction with social and political reality and the belief that human beings can fundamentally change existence through social reorganization is at the core of modern gnostic thinking for Voegelin. The gnostic acts as the prophet who unveils the ideological formula “to alter the structure of the world, which is perceived as inadequate.” The gnostic quest is to bring about worldly salvation—“the immanentization of the Christian idea of perfection.”⁶⁵ Maritain attempts to distance himself from modern gnostics like Marx, pointing out the permanent existence of good and evil in history and the fact that perfection is possible only in the Kingdom of God, but his belief in the culmination of history in global democracy closely resembles Marx’s belief in the historical inevitability of global communism. History, according to Maritain, progresses and tends “unknowingly toward the kingdom of God, but [is] incapable in itself of reaching this final term”—not because the Kingdom of God is not of this world but because human beings must intervene.⁶⁶ Marx similarly contends that history progresses through stages toward communism, but revolution is ultimately required to bring about the final phase. For Maritain, the Christian must similarly revolutionize the world:

to make the earthly city more just and less inhuman, to assure to every one the goods basically needed for the life of the body and the spirit, as well as the respect, in each one, of the rights of the human person; to lead peoples to a supra-national political organization capable of guaranteeing peace in the world—in short, to cooperate with the evolution of the world in such a way that the earthly hope of men in the Gospel should not be frustrated, and the spirit of Christ and of his kingdom would in some fashion vivify worldly things themselves.⁶⁷

Although he sometimes says that Christ and the gospel are ultimately responsible for bringing about a new political existence, Maritain nonetheless believes that human beings are capable of creating a world that very much resembles the kingdom of God. This is a core belief of gnosticism as well as democratism. The idea that human beings can have power over nature and history and can fundamentally transform reality is, according to Voegelin, partly inspired by a desire to dominate, partly inspired by Christianity itself, which places a heavy burden of faith and uncertainty on the believer. Voegelin writes, “The reality of being as it is known in its truth by Christianity is difficult to bear, and the flight from clearly seen reality to gnostic constructs will probably always be a phenomenon of wide extent in civilizations that Christianity has permeated.”⁶⁸ To determine the extent to which Maritain conforms to Voegelin’s definition of gnosticism is beyond the scope of this study. What does seem beyond question is that his proclivity for democratist thinking pulls him strongly in the direction of gnosticism, which like democratism follows an ideological structure. At least in this respect, Maritain emphatically rejects St. Augustine’s distinction between the Earthly City and the City of God. For Maritain, the two may be brought together through human will.

A Competing View of Christianity and Democracy

Maritain’s attempt to merge Christianity with democracy sometimes gives the impression that the two are nearly identical in their basic beliefs and that to be a good Christian, one must also be a good democrat. But Orestes Brownson, an American Catholic political thinker writing a century before Maritain, demonstrates that admiration of democracy on the part of Catholics need not entail the embrace of democracy as a law of history, culminating in a world socialist state. Brownson defended liberal democracy at a time when the official Church teaching rejected the separation of church and state and called for an establishment state (although the Church was willing to tolerate religious liberty for reasons of stability and expediency). Brownson esteemed the American republic, with its pluralist and democratic traditions, yet this admiration never extended to a call for democracy for the rest of the globe. Such a move, in fact, would have been “as unstatesmanlike as unjust,” Brownson declared.⁶⁹ The national will of a country may establish any number of legitimate political orders: “The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute government according to its own judgment, under any form it please—monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or mixed. . . . Any of these forms and systems, and many others besides, are or may be legitimate, if established and maintained by the national will. There is nothing in the law of God or of nature, antecedently to the national will, that gives any one of them a right to the exclusion of any one of the others.”⁷⁰

It can be argued that Brownson is much closer than Maritain to Thomistic political philosophy. Aquinas, following Aristotle, believed that when a tyranny at least produces stability, there is something to commend in it, and it ought to be tolerated for the time. “The only form or system [of government] that is necessarily illegal is the despotic,” and even that, Brownson says, must sometimes be peaceably tolerated as “a matter of prudence.”⁷¹ Aquinas believed that the best regime is one that balances the elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—a virtue that Brownson sees in the American system. Yet Aquinas did not advocate a universal system for all times and all places. Brownson would agree with Aquinas that the best regime must be one that is practicable, which means that it must work for a particular people and place, not simply appear to be the best in the abstract. Rommen similarly believes that the value of all regimes “is functionally dependent on the actual service they afford in the actual circumstances to the realization of the common good.” Therefore, “neither hereditary monarchy, ‘sanctified through its old traditional continuity through centuries,’ nor representative democracy can claim an exclusive legitimacy on the basis of natural or divine law and in its name.”⁷² Brownson holds a similar view: the American system is the “best and only practicable government for the United States, but it is impracticable everywhere else, and all attempts by any European or other American state to introduce it can end only in disaster.”⁷³ Rommen condemns the American priest Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers, for this reason. Hecker argued that “the specific form of democracy as represented in the American Constitution is everywhere and always an unsurpassable ideal for all nations and all times,” and he was censured by Leo XIII for this assertion.⁷⁴ Rather, “the constitution of the government,” according to Brownson, “must grow out of the constitution of the state, and accord with the genius, the character, the habits, customs, and wants of the people, or it will not work well, or tend to secure the legitimate ends of government.”⁷⁵ It is interesting that Brownson wrote these words in 1865, perhaps seeing in the Civil War an incipient crusader mentality.

Superficially, Brownson and Rommen agree with Maritain that democracy has certain merits that, under the right circumstances, make it compatible with Christianity, but it is clear that Maritain’s understanding of the possibilities and limits of politics differs greatly from that of the other two thinkers. Indeed, the question might be asked whether calling their two respective philosophies “Catholic” robs the term of meaning. Where Maritain saw world government as the solution to man’s earthly predicament, Brownson saw decentralization and subsidiarity as the answer. For example, he commends the locally governed polities in the New England states as conducive to freedom and the popular will: “Each town is a corporation, having important powers and the charge of all purely local matters, chooses its own officers, manages its own finances, takes charge of its own poor, of its own roads and bridges, and of the education of its own children.”⁷⁶ Individual rights are protected not by the federal government but by the state government and are in turn protected from the state government by the municipal government. At the most local, decentralized level, the needs and concerns of persons are best addressed, Brownson believes. “Democracy,” or universal suffrage, is simply an abstract term that does not actually protect individual rights and dignity in the concrete: “Experience proves that the ballot is far less effective in securing the freedom and independence of the individual citizen than is commonly pretended. The ballot of an isolated individual counts for nothing. The individual, though armed with the ballot, is as powerless, if he stands alone, as if he had it not. To render it of any avail he must associate himself with a party, and look for his success in the success of his party; and to secure the success of his party, he must give up to it his own private convictions and free will.”⁷⁷ Because the raison d’être of parties is to acquire and hold power, they are beholden to the majority’s will in order to keep power. “Government becomes practically the will of an ever-shifting and irresponsible majority,” Brownson says. The result is democratic centralism, the enemy of liberty. Better than the ballot or parchment barriers is the division of power. Permitting those closest to the problem to take care of the solution is the best way to promote individual liberty and protect human dignity, according to Brownson. The principle of decentralization and division of power is compatible with Brownson’s belief that “no one form of government is catholic in its nature, or of universal obligation.”⁷⁸ Political solutions must be devised in the concrete. Democratism believes that political solutions should be devised abstractly, and power ought to be concentrated and administered centrally, so that all peoples can uniformly benefit from the democratist way of life.

Maritain and a Global Democratic Order

Maritain mentions subsidiarity and the need for pluralism, but his advocacy for world government betrays a different priority. He stresses throughout Man and the State that “the basic political reality is not the State, but the body politic with its multifarious institutions, the multiple communities which it involves, and the moral community which grows out of it.”⁷⁹ The state cannot replace the social, cultural, and religious institutions that compose civil society, Maritain maintains. However, his vision of a global state competes with his belief that civil society must determine the social reality. If politics must be administered globally, then local initiatives and ways of life must give way to the dictates of the central authority, the entity that finally determines what is in the interest of the “common good.” Maritain assumes that a global government can be a beneficent entity—that it would simply set local democratic machines in motion according to a singular vision, yet it would somehow preserve local self-determination. But government and bureaucracy generate their own raison d’être. And a political system such as Maritain imagines must be “run” by someone. What is to guarantee that those individuals entrusted with such enormous power will use it for good? The American framers were convinced that power is checked only by countervailing powers, not by feelings of goodwill. They imagined that institutions such as federalism and intermediary associations, of the kind that so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, could help to check the ambitions of those in power, preventing its abuse.

Maritain assumed that the global government he envisioned would, through the historical dialectic—the “leaven” of the gospel working in history—inevitably embrace democratic pluralism: “Once the perfect society required by our historical age, that is the world political society, has been brought into being, it will be bound in justice to respect to the greatest possible extent the freedoms—essential to the common good of the world—of those invaluable vessels of political, moral, and cultural life which will be its parts.”⁸⁰ But how to reconcile this expectation with the darker side of humanity that was taken so seriously by earlier Christian and classical political thinkers and that was such a prominent consideration within traditional American political thought? What of the original sin that has been central to the Christian understanding of politics, human nature, and society? That human beings are fallen in some sense is not ignored by Maritain. Yet expecting human reason to institute a benevolent, hands-off global government implies that human sinfulness is not sufficiently significant to stand in the way of solving the intractable problems of politics that have frustrated societies and philosophers since time immemorial. It also accords with Rousseau’s belief that poorly designed institutions, not human sinfulness, are the primary cause of worldly evils.

Maritain’s vision of global governance overlooks the historical reality of the libido dominandi and of local resistance to dictates from faraway places. What Maritain fails to realize, his critic Kolnai argues, is that “a wholesale dethronement of power by a stroke of a pen . . . directly invites the despotic rule of one massive totalitarian power claiming to determine the lives of men, without stopping short at individual rights or Church autonomy, on behalf of their general and identical ‘liberty,’ so as to make the concerted unity of their ‘wills’ fully manifest and valid.”⁸¹ In other words, seeking to eliminate power for the sake of liberty only creates a situation ripe for totalitarian “liberty” of the Rousseauean variety. People will be “forced to be free” under the democratist general will. Kolnai’s criticism of Maritain calls to mind the observations of Robert Nisbet, who argues in Quest for Community precisely this point: secondary associations are the main bulwark against unchecked state power. Uniform, global government would do away with these little centers of power that respond to the particular needs of local citizens and diffuse the power of the state. Pluralism, Kolnai says, is by nature “incompatible with utopian concepts of ‘perfection’ and once-for-all ‘planning’; it relies precisely on given realities in their manifoldness, contingency and limitation—capable indeed of local reforms, aptly devised corrections, revisions and enrichments, but essentially refractory, so long as they remain alive, to all attempts at a stream-lined ‘creation’ of social reality by human consciousness bent on enforcing a self-contained and fully ‘satisfying’ world order.”⁸²

Maritain was uncomfortable with the inherent diversity and hence uncertainty of pluralistic society. Without a central planner, these little platoons are able to go in many different directions, depending on what suits their needs. They may or may not choose the democratic way of life as Maritain envisions it. But he seems closed to the possibility that the common good may be achieved through a variety of ways.

The Legacy of Maritain’s Democratism

There appear to be two competing and very different understandings of politics and society within Catholicism. One, derived from the thought of Christian realists such as Augustine and even qualified supporters of democracy such as Rommen and Brownson, is hard to reconcile with democratism. The other, in many ways compatible with Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology, is a natural companion of democratism. Maritain, alongside Michael Novak, John Courtney Murray, George Weigel, and others who are beyond the scope of this study, is a leading representative of the latter strain of Catholic thought. This modern way of thinking about Catholicism and democracy that Maritain helped generate continues to exert great influence. In 2011, under Pope Benedict XVI, a pope who otherwise rejects democratist beliefs, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a letter calling for a “global public authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to govern financial institutions and facilitate the global common good. After an opening lamentation about the injustice of inequality, degenerate financial institutions, and corporate greed, the letter asks, “What has driven the world in such a problematic direction for its economy and also for peace?” The answer: “First and foremost, an economic liberalism that spurns rules and controls”—the capitalist economic system. Although the letter disavows technocratic solutions, it proposes a “supranational Authority” and exhorts the people of the globe to “adopt an ethic of solidarity to fuel their action. This implies abandoning all forms of petty selfishness and embracing the logic of the global common good which transcends merely passing and limited interests. In a word, [the people] ought to have a keen sense of belonging to the human family.” Drawing on the works of John XXIII and Paul VI, the document discusses the need for “moral communion on the part of the world community.” The Council hopes that the consciousness of the peoples of the world might be raised so that history can progress toward freedom and equality: “It is a matter of an Authority with a global reach that cannot be imposed by force, coercion or violence, but should be the outcome of a free and shared agreement and a reflection of the permanent and historic needs of the world common good. It ought to arise from a process of progressive maturation of consciences and advances in freedoms as well as awareness of growing responsibilities.” Focusing on the need for experts with international jurisdiction to devise structural solutions, the letter does not address the role of personal sin in perpetuating social and political ills. Instead it abstractly states that “the economy needs ethics.” In a spirit of optimism characteristic of the democratist mindset, the document expresses sincere belief that through the proposed technical solutions accompanied by a general sense of “solidarity” on the part of the human family, the world’s economic woes can be ameliorated: “Thanks to the principle of solidarity, a lasting and fruitful relationship would build up between global civil society and a world public Authority as States, intermediate bodies, various institutions—including economic and financial ones—and citizens make their decisions with a view to the global common good, which transcends national goods.”

Pope Francis, who canonized Pope John XXIII and beatified Paul VI, issued the encyclical Laudato si’, which has within it a prominent strain of the type of democratist thinking that characterizes the thought of Maritain. Laudato si’ primarily takes up the cause of environmental issues and calls for humanity’s “ecological conversion.” The “self-improvement on the part of individuals” and “the sum of individual good deeds,” Francis says, are not enough to “remedy the extremely complex situation facing our world today.”⁸³ Lasting change for the environment will come rather through “community conversion.” In its focus on the role of “community networks” and a “culture of care,” Laudato si’ resembles the same message of the progressive social gospel. Drawing on Paul VI’s Message for the 1977 World Day of Peace Francis writes, “[T]he Church set before the world the ideal of a ‘civilizational love.’ Social love is the key to authentic development.”⁸⁴ In this letter Francis stresses the need for a universal awakening or “discovery” and for strongly held “conviction.” In this respect, he resembles Maritain, who also has a tendency to emphasize feelings of communion over concrete individual action. Francis says that the requirements of “gratitude,” “recognition,” “loving awareness,” and human feeling “joined in a splendid universal communion” are foremost in a global ecological conversion.⁸⁵

This way of thinking fits into the romantic tradition that dwells on emotion and feelings of togetherness over individual responsibility and personal action. The romantic ethic, which heavily informs democratism, tends to focus in an abstract and dreamy way on the way that things could be rather than the way they are. At bottom is the desire for a dramatic transformation of reality, whether into a communist utopia, a democratic state of perfect equality, or anything else. Generalizations about infusing the Christian spirit into the practice of democracy pepper the thought of thinkers such as Maritain, Francis, and others who tend toward romantic and democratist thinking, but to what extent is Christianity really necessary to the new world order?

As the social gospel movement earlier in the century made clear, Christianity can be transformed into many, often opposing things. Using words like “God” and “faith” can mask what is ultimately secular progressivism. It is in the concrete instantiations of the theory that the actual nature of the theory is revealed.

Conclusion

Within Catholicism there appears to be two competing ideologies. One is represented by thinkers such as Maritain, Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, John Courtney Murray, Michael Novak (who credits Maritain as one of his major influences), George Weigel, and Pope Francis.⁸⁶ The other is represented by strains of thought found within the writings of Orestes Brownson, Heinrich Rommen, Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Aurel Kolnai, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope John Paul II. All are Catholic, devoutly so, and yet they disagree fundamentally about what is politically possible and desirable. The latter thinkers tend to focus on historical givens, offering political philosophies that elucidate the human condition more than they offer solutions to it. They tend to avoid proposing grand systems that promise to ameliorate what have heretofore been intractable political problems, their assumption being that there can be no systematic and final solution to challenges endemic to human nature and ultimately rooted in the permanent fact of human sinfulness. Given the cleft nature of the human soul, conflict, poverty, suffering, and other social ills will always remain an unfortunate part of our earthly existence. The best that we can do is try to mitigate their effects through salutary social practices and encouraging personal responsibility and virtue. No political system, even democracy, can permanently fix pathologies that originate from human beings themselves.

Maritain’s attempt to reconcile Christianity with an ideal concept of democracy, coinciding in many ways with liberal progressivism, ends up looking something like a political religion of democracy, or what this book identifies as democratism. Nor do Maritain’s appeals to natural law and rational distinctions between the administrative state and the organic body politic save his philosophy from the implications which it bears. Maritain’s rational delineation between “the state” and society ignores the fundamental reality that human beings make up the state. Those human beings have passions and motivations of their own that will require the checks and balances of other powers. Power cannot simply be eliminated with the “stroke of a pen,” as Kolnai points out. Maritain’s generalizations about the leaven of the gospel working in history downplays the significance of individual human action and assumes that an immanent historical dialectic is at work, a belief that has more in common with progressivism, gnosticism, and even Marxism than traditional Catholic teaching. Maritain’s philosophy, although claiming dependence on Aquinas and Aristotle, is thoroughly modern and possibly secular. Unlike Aquinas and Aristotle, who leave room for the contingent and complex nature of political life, Maritain takes a highly rationalistic and abstract approach that logically culminates in the uniform application of one type of rule for the globe. That he believes he is in possession of the knowledge to devise such a government is all the more telling of his distance from the traditional Christian ethic which emphasizes, above all, humility.

Brownson’s wise observation in 1865 might have been useful for the twentieth century: “The constitutions imagined by philosophers are for Utopia, not for any actual, living, breathing people. You must take the state as it is, and develop your governmental constitution from it, and harmonize it with it. Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions, the government has no support in the state, in the organic people, or nation, and can sustain itself only by corruption or physical force.”⁸⁷ What comes to mind immediately are the totalitarian regimes which Maritain abhorred, but the democratic ideology appears increasingly to resemble this description as well.

At the end of Man and the State, Maritain hints that rational plans for society may be futile and wonders if he too has “perhaps yielded to the old temptation of philosophers, who would have reason, through the instrumentality of certain wise men, be accepted as an authority in human affairs.”⁸⁸ The reader is left to wonder where that leaves Maritain’s treatise, the focal point of which is the rational conception of a new political program. Ultimately he seems to fall back on the authority of reason in human affairs, pointing the way to thinkers like Rawls, who hope to demonstrate the irrelevance of “comprehensive doctrines” such as Christianity to finding working consensus in liberal democracy. That Maritain’s political thought is largely compatible with Rawls’s suggests that Maritain belongs in the political tradition of Rawls and other secular democratic theorists more so than he does in the Thomist or orthodox Christian tradition.