...After graduation he stayed on for a master's degree in English literature (becoming much interested in William Blake), and in 1938 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, culminating months of study of Catholic writers. Among these the philosopher Jacques Maritain was especially influential. He initially planned on a career as a writer, perhaps after a doctoral degree at Columbia, but slowly began considering a vocation in the priesthood. After various struggles, teaching at St. Bonaventure's University, and fear of being drafted, in April of 1941 he made a retreat at the Trappist Monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky, and in December of 1941 joined the community there, entering what he expected to be a great world of silence....
...Jacques Maritain is a paradigmatic Catholic philosopher, (click here) providing a
model of the way in which religious belief and various cultural,
intellectual and political concerns can be interwoven. Maritain
responded with enthusiasm to the Church's recommendation of St. Thomas
Aquinas to the faithful as their master in theology and philosophy. His
writings exhibit how his mind was permeated by the thought of the
Angelic Doctor....
...Maritain's philosophical work with the publication of books on Thomas Aquinas (1930), on religion and culture (1930), on Christian philosophy (1933), on Descartes (1932), on the philosophy of science and epistemology (Distinguer pour unir ou les degrés du savoir, 1932; 8th ed., 1963) and, perhaps most importantly, on political philosophy. Beginning in 1936, he produced a number of texts, including Humanisme intégral (1936), De la justice politique (1940), Les droits de l'homme et la loi naturelle (1942), Christianisme et démocratie (1943), Principes d'une politique humaniste (1944), La personne et le bien commun (1947), Man and the State (written in 1949, but published in 1951), and the posthumously published La loi naturelle ou loi non-écrite (lectures delivered in August 1950)....
In The Degrees of Knowledge, (click here) Jacques Maritain provides a
panorama of human intellectual activity, first distinguishing
philosophy of nature and experimental science, making clear the
distinctiveness of metaphysics, writing with authority of the mystical
life as different from all of the above, and, in the very course of
making these distinctions, showing how they are hierarchically related
and united. It is a magnificent and sapiential achievement. It has
rightly been called Maritain's Summa.
The Degrees of Knowledge better than any other single work of
Maritain, displays the comprehensiveness and range of his interests.
Its author takes his inspiration from Thomas Aquinas, reargues his
basic positions in the light of the problems posed for them in the
twentieth century, and ends by writing a profoundly original work.
