CONGRESSO TOMISTA INTERNAZIONALE LUMANESIMO CRISTIANO NEL III MILLENIO: PROSPETTIVA DI TOMMASO DAQUINO ROMA, 21-25 settembre 2003

Pontificia Accademia di San Tommaso Societ Internazionale Tommaso dAquino

Jacques Maritain Against Modern Pseudo-Humanism

Prof. Paul Richard Blum Loyola College in Maryland, Baltimore (USA)

In this paper I will examine the traditional concepts of humanism, starting from the neo-humanism of the 19th century. Thereby I will emphasize the internal contradiction of this concept that is due to the appeal to 'humanize the human'. Maritain in his 'Humanisme Intgral', as I want to prove, was the only one to fill the gap by pointing to the aspirations of the individual toward perfection trough the anthropologically given divine appeal. From there follow several incentives for an anthropological understanding of religion that leave contemporary secularism behind.

In the 1930s Jacques Maritain advocated a new form of Humanism, an integral humanism, as he termed it, on the basis of "integral realism" and "Christian humanism", which took its major inspiration from Thomist philosophy. The essence of his message can be summarized as follows: Any philosophy has to account for the r eality of human condition, which is marked by the coincidence of natural and supernatural features. This realism deserves the attribute of 'integral' in as much it integrates the obvious material, natural and intellectual features of the human being by its aspirations at the supernatural, transcendent realm. As this realm is within the reach of human intellect and will, to exclude it from the definition of man amounts to truncating and diminishing human potentials and thus telling only half of the story of man. This concept of humanism has been criticized on historical and on philosophical grounds. It has been said, that Maritain misrepresents the Middle Ages and that he is shifting the philosophical argument to the level of theology.1 "So, what?" Maritain might have replied, and so do I. But I think
See Gerry Lessard, O. P., The Critics of Integral Humanism : A Survey, in: Thomistic Papers 3 (1987) 117-140. It should be noted (even though this is not at stake in this paper) that Maritain made a difference between Christian Humanism and
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Copyright 2003 INSTITUTO UNIVERSITARIO VIRTUAL SANTO TOMS Fundacin Balmesiana Universitat Abat Oliba CEU

P. R. BLUM, Jacques Maritain Against Modern Pseudo-Humanism

these criticisms, and maybe also some admirers of Maritain, who applaud his call for a Christian humanism, simply miss the point, both in terms of history, and in its philosophical importance. Humanism, this should be said at the outset, is an invention of the 19th century.2 The pedagogue Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer coined the term in his book on "Philanthropinismus und Humanismus" published in 1808.3 In this book the author polemicized against a new type of schools with polytechnic orientation. While these schools claimed to be "philanthropic", Niethammer invented the label of "humanist" schools and claimed their ideal to be "humanism". On the one hand, Niethammer adhered to a kind of classical training as advocated by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who expressly had demanded that "the mere individual has to be purified and upgraded in all its capacities to become a human".4 On the other hand Humboldt and Niethammer's technical means of education were modeled on the Renaissance "studia humanitatis". As a side effect of this polemics, 'humanism' was to be detected in the Renaissance and ever since humanism is associated with this period of pre-reformation culture. But from the very beginning the main thread
theocentric humanism. The former term designated for him that movement of Renaissance Humanism that ended up in a Christian naturalism as a forerunner of secular understandings of the human: see On Humanism, in: Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World, in: Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern World, and A Letter on Independence, ed. Otto Bird, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1996, p. 45. (Further quotations from Integral Humanism will refer to this edition.) 2 I am dealing only with philosophical accounts and leave aside any non thematic usage of the word, as for instance to designate someone as a nice person or to discuss matters of civilisation or global politics. As an example for the former see: John Hellman, "The Humanism of Jacques Maritain", in: Deal W. Hudson a.o. (ed.s), Understanding Maritain, Philosopher and Friend , Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ. Pr. 1987, pp. 117-131; and for the latter cf. Robert E. Marshak, "The Pragmatic Humanism of Bohr, Einstein and Sakharov", in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 132 (1988) pp. 268-275. Both meanings of humanism are "affective" and basically "philanthropist", according to Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden. The Legacy of Humanism , Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr. 2002, 29 sq. 3 Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, Der Streit des Philanthropinismus und Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziehungs-Unterrichts unserer Zeit, Jena: Frommann 1808 (Reprint: Weinheim: Beltz 1968). Cf. Paul Richard Blum, Was ist Renaissance-Humanismus? Zur Konstruktion eines kulturellen Modells, in: Ralph Hfner (ed.), Philologie und Erkenntnis. Beitrge zu Begriff und Problem frhneuzeitlicher Philologie, Tbingen: Niemeyer 2001, pp. 227-246. 4 Quoted in Eduard Spranger, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Humanittsidee, 2 nd ed. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard 1928, p. 12: "(...) das bloe Individuum soll in allen seinen Krften zum Menschen emporgelutert werden".

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of the discussion was the question about the usefulness of education and the values transmitted by it in and for society. It was the philologist Werner Jaeger who reconnected the humanism of 19 century classicism with the ancient ideal of education, "paideia", a nd again demanded on the model of Greece that pedagogy should "educate man to his true form, his intrinsic humanity, his 'being human'"; humanism was thus "the realization of the universally true and obligatory image of the kind".5 Now, Jaeger was fully aware of the paradox included in making humans humans. He therefore underscored that, indeed, this ideal had not been formulated in ancient Greece itself but rather in the Roman Empire of Aulus Gellius and Cicero, who had sought for ideals of civic education and appropriated Greek culture, which at their time had already become history. Consequently, in Jaeger the paradox of making man to what he is by nature is convergent with finding patterns of culture in history, which is necessarily distant and alien to present times. Detecting values in history that means basically finding them somewhere else than here and now; and doing this for the benefit of present day society is inherent in the concept of humanism as it was being advocated in the first half of the 20th century.
th

From this it becomes transparent that 'humanism' as a concept is nothing but an appeal; 6 and if there is any such thing like humanism it is a project.7 If 'humanism' is "an ism about the human", as Louis Mercier has cunningly stated,8 it is an abstraction that is meant to be realized in some way in some future and under certain conditions. This also entails that the ism of humanism,
Werner Jaeger, Paideia , Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 1973 (first ed. vol. 1, 1933), p. 14: "die Erziehung des Menschen zu seiner wahren Form, dem eigentlichen Menschsein (...), als allgemeingltiges und verpflichtendes Bild der Gattung". Cf. Lothar Helbing, Der dritte Humanismus, Berlin: Die Runde 1932. 6 On concepts as appeals in general see Paul Richard Blum, Europa - ein Appellbegriff, in: Archiv fr Begriffsgeschichte 43 (2001) pp. 149-171. 7 Ralph Barton Perry, The Humanity of Man, New York: Braziller, 1956, p. 4: It may be said, in fact, that humanism is now little more than a blessed word which can be trusted to evoke applause from an audience and loosen purse strings. Todorov (note 2) calls humanism a "wager" (Epilogue, pp. 226 sqq.). Roger Garaudy takes humanism as constituted by two major exigencies: "celle d'une matrise rationnelle du monde et celle d'une initiative historique proprement humaine": "L'humanisme antique et moderne", in: Jan Burian and Ladislav Widman (eds.), Antiquitas Graeco-Romana ac tempora nostra. Acta congressus internationalis habiti Brunae diebus 12-16 mensis Aprilis 1964 , Prague: Academia 1968, pp. 25-34; 27. 8 Louis J. A. Mercier, Maritains Conception of Integral Humanism , in: Thought 19 (1944) 229-246; 229. Cf. Louis J. A. Mercier, American Humanism and the New Age, Milwaukee: Bruce 1948, p. 73.
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the project, that is: the appeal must be inherent in human nature. From there the question arises whether it is a feature of every individual human being or only of humankind. The neo-humanist approach of Humboldt and Jaeger tended to see the essence of the human as some feature of the kind, which then had to be brought about in the individuals as the subjects of education. The political advantage of this view was that one could prove the usefulness of "studia humanitatis" (i.e. arts and letters, the humanities) for the society. The disadvantage was evidently that in terms of curriculum of studies humanism had to compete with polytechnical education, which always could claim much more usefulness. On the other hand, as this neo-humanism in matters of study dealt with human culture and spiritual values (such as philosophy, religion, arts, and letters) it always could claim to foster the inner qualities of any individual human being. However, the project feature of the concept of humanism prevailed and was transformed into the concept of social progress. Ever since Francis Bacon the "advancement of learning" was associated with the progress of the people. This is why the polytechnic school of the early 19th century could claim to be "philanthropist" in helping the prosperity of the nation. A typical product of this notion of humanism is the booklet on American Humanism. Its Meaning for World Survival by the learned Howard Mumford Jones. 9 In his hapless attempt at defending the substance of humanism (such the headline of his chapter 4) against the fallacy of utility (chapter 3), that is utilitarian applications of the humanities, he still defends humanism as a general task of education for the benefit of the American culture. His account of humanism draws vaguely upon Renaissance humanists and ends up in the postulate of the first essential element in humanism: that it is nontheological. Eventually, [h]umanism implies an assumption about man, namely some dignity, the meaning of which Jones is not willing to explore in any anthropological depth.10 Jones account is a symptom of the appellative function of the term humanism for political purposes, which allows to voice concern about cultural issues (justified or not) without addressing the philosophical meaning of being human, and oftentimes with explicit preclusion of any religious or theological background of it. In the English speaking world the early 1930s had been the high time of such view. To make a long story short, in 1933 the Humanist Manifesto was published, wherein the transformation of a cultural, spiritual, and historicist concept of humanism into the ideal of social progress was completed. The
Howard Mumford Jones, American Humanism. Its Meaning for World Survival, New York: Harper 1957 (World Perspectives, vol. 14). 10 Ibid. pp. 97 and 101 sqq.
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Manifesto declared the signers' "commitment to the positive belief in the possibilities of human progress (...). Humanism is an ethical process through which we all can move, above and beyond the divisive particulars, heroic personalities, dogmatic creeds, and ritual customs of past religions or their mere negation."11 I need not to discuss the origin and sources of this Manifesto. It stands as a paradigm of such humanism that tries to embed individual perfection in the progress of social welfare. Of course this manifesto and the publications that accompanied it never attempted at explaining how individual happiness might be secured by collective advancement. While the neohumanism of Humboldt and Jaeger saw the ideal of humanity (rightly or wrongly) in history, this social humanism transposed the very ideal, which instigated the progress, into the future: "Humanism (...) has time on its side."12 Charles Francis Potter (1885-1962), a Unitarian minister before he founded the First Humanist Society in New York, declared humanism to be a new religion by a strict anthropocentric turn in everything that Christian tradition had to offer.13 Already in his program the teleological impetus is transparent: To men and women today, Humanism offers inspiration and a program. () In the challenge to make the world better here and now, the Humanist will find all the thrills which formerly intrigued the seekers of celestial bliss in the thereafter.14 Eschatology and transcendence are being turned into horizontal teleology of the near future beyond the here and now. In order to achieve this view, Potter defines humanism as faith in the supreme value and self-perfectibility of human personality.15 Humanism is thus marked by a series of composites of self-, such as self-recognition, self-consciousness etc.16 The conceptual advantage of this procedure is that the author may continuously speak about humankind under the label of personality and thus keep blurring over the difference between humankind and the individual. The self-referring momentum of the concept of person insinuates an understanding of the individual, even though in terms of fact the discourse dwells in the realm of scarcely warranted assumptions about human nature, and it endows the reversal of the transcendent meaning of humanity with the appearance of individualistic concern.

11 12

Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, 7 th ed. New York: Ungar 1993, p. 291. Ibid. p. 300.
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Charles Francis Potter, Humanism. A New Religion, New York: Simon and Schuster 1933. 14 Ibid. p. 13. No wonder, the book concludes with a chapter on The Social Program of Humanism and a look into the Religion of the Future. 15 Ibid. p. 18. 16 Ibid. pp. 20-33.

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These two topics, the individual and the eschatology, are decisive for qualifying any humanism. Maritain to the best of my knowledge is the only philosopher who has not blurred over these inconsistencies of the concept of humanism, but rather employed them in order to determine the meaning of anthropology for human action and its implications in politics and morals. 17 As early as in June 1932, in a letter to Feuille Centrale, Zofingue18 , Maritain stated that: "all intellectuals, who have not opted for a fundamental atheism, hope for an integral realism and a Christian humanism ".19 What is striking is his description of that atheism, namely as: "doomed to turn into a kind of hylozoism in attributing to 'matter' all spontaneity, psychic activity, freedom etc. of a god to come".20 In this short remark Maritain reveals his understanding of atheism as an attempt at making spiritual features intrinsic to non-spiritual substances and conditions, and to stretch any transcendent meaning of life into an unknown future. He observes that forced antitheism, as voiced in communism as well as in the so called Religious Humanism of the Manifesto, by nature of spiritual reality turns itself into something like second hand theology. We may infer, even though Maritain doesn't speak about it, that the optimism of social progress is nothing but the historicity of human values as advocated in the traditional humanism stripped of their past and therefore projected into future, and stripped of their fundamental human meaning and therefore projected into social welfare.

Among the documents at the Maritain Center of the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame Indiana, there are interesting notes by the philosopher Charles De Koninck on Les paradoxes de lunivers purement humain (document CDK 11/11). In these notes for a conference, dated January 1940, the author states: lmancipation humaniste de lhomme entrane en mme temps son assujettissment et la ngation absolue de soi-mme (p. 4). Even though De Koninck declared himself to be no maritainist (letter to Mortimer Adler, dated June 15, 1938; typescript copy in the same collection no. CDK 14/01.06, p. 1), he agrees with Maritain in criticizing the lack of transcendence in the current meaning of humanism. He did not make positive use of the intrinsic paradox of the concept as such, other than Maritain did, as will be shown in the following paragraphs. 18 Centralblatt des Schweizerischen Zofingervereins, Basel 1868-1946; Zofingia is an old Swiss student's fraternity. 19 Letter, dated "8 juin 1932", in: Oeuvres 5, pp. 973-978; 974: "Je pense comme vous que c'est un ralisme intgral et un humanisme chrtien qu'aspirent aujourd'hui tous les esprit qui n'ont pas opt pour un athisme foncier ()." (Maritain's emphasis.) 20 Ibid. p. 974: "[athisme] qui doit tourner en ralit, comme l'actuelle 'ligne gnrale' de la philosophie sovitique semble l'indiquer, une sorte d'hylozosme attribuant la 'matire' la spontanit, l'activit psychique, la libert, etc., d'un dieu en devenire ()".
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Maritain puts together what makes up "integral realism": It consists (1) of "such a metaphysics that f ully values intelligence and rational knowledge"; (2) of an ontology that encompasses "theological and mystical wisdom in their own rights"; (3) and finally it has to be "realistic about love and will".21 To be sure, I don't think that the author is simply purporting his philosophical prejudices; he rather gives an agenda for any philosophy that claims to be realistic. The agenda of realist philosophy is dictated by reality and not by reference to existing patterns of thought. It should be noted that Maritain in his claim combines ontological and spiritual matters as well as rational and emotional powers. His antidote against atheism, consequently, consists in taking reason and revelation, intuition and intention into account of what there really is. 22 When Maritain, then, describes his concept of "Christian Humanism" he seems to theologize in referring immediately to the Incarnation and Passion of Christ. However, he makes his observations culminate in the statement: "The meaning of human life is to strive for perfection of love [charit],"23 and I don't see anything exclusively Christian in this. Charity, rather, combines the rational and emotional features as assessed for any realist thought. As the author is well aware that Incarnation and Passion are concepts that are despised for being "contradictory in terms", he understands the Cross as a natural feature of the human, which is at the same time its aim, because suffering and redemption is "not an outward blessing of humanity, considered to be non-blessed and selfsufficient", but an inner reality of the human.24 As an historical aside it is interesting that Nicholas Cusanus, definitely a Christian humanist of the Renaissance, had used the same pattern in taking
Ibid.: "Je ne crois pas qu'un respect universel du rel () puisse tre assur dans une culture sinon sur la base d'une mtaphysique reconnaissant la plein valeur de l'intelligence et du savoir rationnel, ni qu'une restauration de la connaissance ontologique puisse elle-mme tre stable si la sagesse thologique et la sagesse mystique ne sont aussi rtablies dans leurs droits. Enfin le ralisme de la connaissance restera, de fait, bien fragile en nous, s'il n'est uni au ralisme de l'amour et de la volont." 22 A defense of this view, based on Plato and Aristotle and without reference to Maritain, is given in: John A. J. Dudley, "The Concept of Substance and Life Presupposed by Christianity", in: Richard P. and Jane E. Francis (eds.), Christian Humanism. International Perspectives, New York: Lang 1995, pp. 187-199. 23 Ibid.: "Le sens de la vie humaine est de tender la perfection de la charit ()." 24 Ibid.: "() un humanisme soi-disant chrtien qui rduit la grce du Christ a couronner et sanctionner du dehors le dveloppement d'une nature tenue pour non bless et se suffisant, un tel humanisme est la destruction de l'homme."
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Christ and Incarnation as the model of his anthropology, because it is Incarnation in which the divine and earthly nature of man is theologically expressed.25 Hence follows, according to Maritain, that Christian humanism has to deal with human reality, which consists in plurality (again a consequence drawn by Cusanus, too) its aim being to give access to interior freedom and spiritual life to everyone. This letter of 1932 presents Maritain's Integral Humanism in a nutshell. If one is aware of the inclusion of charity, love and will in the realities that make for a human it comes without surprise that the great book Humanisme Intgrale of 1937 starts with considerations of the "heroic life": "There is nothing that man desires so much as a heroic life; there is nothing less common to man than heroism."26 Heroism as postulated by the Humanist Manifesto is an antinomy, Maritain observes against Andr Malraux's socialist humanism. We may state that the strife for a better life entails the possibility of failure, but such failure does not disclaim the naturalness of the strife nor the option for progress. When Maritain in defining humanism uses the words: "humanism () tends essentially to render man more truly human, and to manifest his original greatness by having him participate in all that which c an enrich him in nature 27 and in history", then he echoes deliberately the standard definitions of socialist and other humanisms; but he has changed the meaning and given it an anthropological turn. To render man more human means for him to undo the restriction to the mere natural conditions of an animal rationale. Enrichment in nature has its specific significance if one takes into account the tendency to reduce the human nature to exclusively spiritual values (as the neo-humanism had done): The nature of m an is natural, indeed. Enrichment in history undoes the truncation from intellectual history, as the socialist humanism tended to do, and keeps the door open to a future, which, however, has nothing of utopia.

Nicolaus de Cusa, De docta ignorantia , lib. tertius, ed. Raymundus Klibansky, Hamburg: Meiner 1977, cap. 6, 219, p. 44: "quidquid Christus Iesus passione sua meruit, illi meruerunt, qui unum sunt cum ipso (...)". 26 Integral Humanism , p. 152. On the difference between heroism in war and as human condition see Jacques Maritain, "Un humanisme hroque", in: Oeuvres compltes, vol. 7, 1988, pp. 757-762 (originally 1943). 27 Integral Humanism , p. 153. Jacques Maritain, Humanisme Intgral, in Jacques et Rassa Maritain, uvres compltes, vol. 6, Fribourg: ditions Universitaires / Paris: ditions Saint-Paul 1984, p. 298 : rendre lhomme plus vraiment humain. Cf. Jacques Maritain, The Twilight of Civilization, New York: Sheed and Ward 1943, p. 3.
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If I am not mistaken, Maritain never quotes the neo-humanism of Werner Jaeger , nor the Humanist Manifesto, both published in 1933, but it is very unlikely that he did not take them into account while he was working on his Humanisme Intgrale, which was published in 1937. Unlike these and most of those who appeal for some humanism, he does not offer a positive set of assumptions and teachings that are presupposed and pursued by it. He rather makes use of the structure of the concepts of human, humanity, and humanism in order to show that enrichment or progress, history or tradition, as well as transcendence need no justification on dogmatic grounds but are evident from the phenomenology of human being itself. Therefore it would be mistaken to expect historical research from Maritain, even though he repeatedly argued against the development of anthropology since Renaissance and Reformation and frequently referred to S. Thomas Aquinas. 29
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One cannot be astonished, then, that this book closes with an appeal for practical engagement in politics. Whatever Maritain suggested at his time, the completeness of his understanding of human nature requires secular activity: Therefore he describes three planes of activity of a Christian, namely the spiritual and the worldly plane, which are linked together by a third plane, in which the Christian acts and appears before men as a Christian as such.30 What is important for his view of humanism, however, is how he defines the worldly plane of action: "On the plane of the temporal [activity], () I should act as Christian, () engaging my whole self, not amputated or inanimate, () infusing into the world, () a Christian sap."31 This is how Maritain combines the appeal to become human with the essence of being human. It is the nature of the (Christian) human that infuses humanity into the world. Therefore he prides himself to outdo socialist humanism: "that which I call integral humanism is capable of saving and of promoting () all the truths affirmed or

In 1943 Jaeger gave a lukewarm recommendation of Maritains integral humanism, saying that against those whose ideal of education and culture is of a merely formalistic nature () Maritain pointed out () that if this be humanism, a man of his convictions must either abandon humanism entirely or redefine it. Werner Jaeger, Humanism and Theology (The Aquinas Lecture 1943), Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 1943, p. 41. My contention is that it s not a matter of convictions but of coherence of the concept. 29 See Maritain's reply to the article by L. Mercier (note 8) in Thought 19 (1944) 573575, where he claims not to write "literary history of ideas" (as Mercier did) but rather to "situate [Molina and others] and to bring out their significance in the philosophy of modern culture and history" (p. 574). Mercier in his reply (ibid. 757-758) does not respond to this point. 30 Integral Humanism , p. 340. 31 Integral Humanism , p. 338-339.
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glimpsed by socialist humanism ()."32 He is right in claiming this, because he understood the tension between individualism and teleology of human actions. He does not simply refer his contemporaries to super-historical values in history, nor does he postpone humanity into a distant future. Later, in his La Philosophie morale, Maritain would blame August Comte for substituting humanity for God, and future for transcendence, thus creating The religion of Humanity.33 Maritain accepted the paradox of human being, to be a "unity of flesh and spirit, () of incarnate spirituality"34 , and of being prone to laziness, even in philosophy: "Human weakness is always trying to go to sleep; if it is not the doubt of the old humanist Stoic, it is the eternal truths it will take for its pillow."35 Such an ironic remark should prevent any interpreter from confining Maritain to some stubborn dogmatism. Both statements taken together - that is, the twofold nature of man, being spirituality that lives in a bodily world, and the intellectual temptations of skepticism and dogmatism - point to the original root of human activity as it is expressed in the heroic potential of humans. The main source of heroism in humanist action is the desire and will. Will, as a complement to intellect, makes the difference, because "every will, even the most perverse, desires God without knowing it."36 This is a proof of the existence of God based on the volition in human nature. Maritain elaborates this proof in his Approches de Dieux, when he repeats the paradox of heroism in the formula: "Nothing is more human than that man naturally desires what is impossible by his own nature."37 Human desire as such is "a token of the possibility () to know God in a way that transcends reason, and which is not

Integral Humanism , p. 208. Jacquest Maritain, Moral Philosophy. An historical and critical survey of the great systems, New York: Scribners 1964 [French ed. 1960], chapter 12, pp. 320-327. 34 Integral Humanism , p. 154. Humanisme Intgral, p. 301 : Dune part, du seul fait que le regime de la chrtiennet mdivale tait un rgime dunit de la chair et de lesprit, ou de spiritualit incarne, il enveloppait dans ses formes sacrales un humanisme virtuel et implicite (). " 35 Integral Humanism , p. 187. 36 Integral Humanism , p. 190. 37 Jacques Maritain, Aproches de Dieu, in: uvres compltes, vol. 10, 1985, chapter 5: "Le dsir de voir Dieu", p. 88: "Que l'homme dsire naturellement des choses impossibles sa nature, il n'est rien de plus humain." Translations from this text are mine. The paradox described here has been discussed in scholastic philosophy as "velleitas", i.e. the will of the impossible. For this see Andrea A. Robiglio, L'impossibile volere. Tommaso d'Aquino, i tomisti e la volont , Milan: Vita e Pensiero 2002.
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yielded but rather aspired to by reason."38 Inclusion of divinity is therefore the fulfillment of Maritain's call for realism. No naturalism, utopianism, and antitheism can seriously deny the reality and power of human will, as on human will depends, if not intellection, then at least every action. When Maritain observes the weakness and the strength of human capacity to shape ones own destiny he obviously applies scholastic terminology of freedom, intellect and will. But he applies it in a style congenial to 20th century philosophy. He defines human nature as "immutable", that is: "precisely a nature which is in movement, the nature of a being of flesh made in the image of God".39 His biblical allusion serves to illustrate 20th century anthropology par excellence: nature in motion. Therefore he referred to Max Scheler, when talking about humanism's enrichment of man: "concentrating the world in man" and "dilating man to the world".40 This is easily recognizable as the core thesis of existentialism, namely that man is defined in his relation to the world, a relation that endangers and constitutes human being. Martin Heidegger termed it "Being-in-the-world"; Jean-Paul Sartre will later call it eksistence.41 Maritain agrees with his fellow philosophers in observing that transcendence is inherent to human nature, which is a paradox. It is under the emblem of "existence" that Maritain names Thomas Aquinas thought a humanism. The "humanist quality"42 of his teaching is granted by its existential approach. Aquinas is "the most existential of all philosophers"43 because his metaphysics is based on the axiom: "The truth of things is an upshot of their existence."44 This truth as Maritain read Aquinas applies to man in all senses of the word, because it is the power that enables humans to act within nature and despite all alienation from it and from human
Ibid. p. 90: "Ainsi le dsir naturel () est il dans la raison la marque de la possibilit () d'une connaissance de Dieu suprieure la raison, qui n'est pas due la raison, mais laquelle elle aspire." 39 Integral Humanism, p. 187. 40 Integral Humanism , p. 153. 41 A few remarks on Maritain and existentialism can be found in: Laura Westra, "Freedom, Existence and Existentialism", in: John F. X. Knasas (ed.), Jacques Maritain: The Man and His Metaphysics, Mishawaka: American Maritain Association 1988, pp. 243-253. 42 Jacques Maritain, "L'humanisme de Saint Thomas d'Aquin", in: Oeuvres 8, Fribourg: ditions Universitaires / Paris: ditions Saint-Paul 1989, 153-174 (originally 1941); 153: "la qualit humaniste d'une doctrine". Translations from this text are mine. 43 Ibid. p. 154: "Thomas d'Aquin est () le plus existentiel des philosophes. C'est parce qu'il est par excellence un philosophe de l'existence que saint Thomas est ()." 44 Ibid. p. 156: "Veritas sequitur esse rerum , () la vrit suit l'existence des choses ()."
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nature itself.45 'Existence' denotes the antinomy of human perfection and shortcoming. Being, including human being, is realized in grades of perfection and never comes to an end, but the inherent power to enact the aspirations is expressed in charity and love both being gifts of God's grace and superabundance. 46 By this interpretation, Maritain not simply enrolls the medieval scholastic in the movement of 'integral humanism', but repeats his basic insight that humanism, as an ism about man, is the theory of the transcendent nature of the human, and he overcomes the antinomy of the concept of humanism between anthropology and call for action. In taking transcendence seriously as the dialectic of internalism and externalism of the Divine in human nature, calling it "theocentric",47 he gives the traditional humanism its full meaning, namely as the unity of presence and history in the individual and in the society; and he precludes any temptation at making man the object of social or scientific experiments.

Ibid. p. 158: "() la force et le courage de faire notre travail d'hommes au sein de l'trange nature et de notre propre tranget." 46 Ibid. p. 171 on "aspirations"; p. 159 on "surabondance de l'existence divine"; p. 162 sq. on "amour de charit" and "perfection". 47 Integral Humanism , p. 169: Theocentric and Anthropocentric Humanism: The first kind of humanism recognizes that God is the center of man ().
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