Review: Maritain’s artful scholasticism

“Maritain’s turn to Aquinas is not a call to go back to the dark ages.”

So writes Jason West in his new book, The Christian Philosophy of Jacques Maritain. For anyone just being introduced to the thought of Jacques Maritain, statements like the above require a lot of unpacking. Accordingly, West tries to do something novel: an English-language overview of the key aspects of Maritain’s thought, rather than a historical biography or a more in-depth look at a specific area. 

Maritain was one of the pre-eminent Thomistic philosophers of the 20th century, and his thought would influence both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the United Nations in 1948 and the documents of the Second Vatican Council. His writings continue to be widely read. Yet it can be hard to know where to start with his written corpus. He wrote over 60 books on a huge array of topics. 

My own interest in Maritain comes from an interest in early 20th-century history, including a book on Argentine fascism that mentioned that local fascists once invited Maritain to speak at an event; by the time he had arrived in Argentina, they had heard about one of his new publications that opposed their point of view. 

That intriguing tidbit made me want to read The Things That Are Not Caesar’s, or perhaps Maritain’s most well-known work, Integral Humanism. For the newcomer to Maritain, however, both can feel overwhelming as introductions. Such readers will find far easier going in The Christian Philosophy of Jacques Maritain.

Ten of the book’s 12 chapters focus on different areas of Maritain’s thought, such as epistemology, moral philosophy and aesthetics. While West cannot include every single sub-discipline that Maritain wrote about, he tries to give attention to a broad array, including those that have sometimes been neglected in other studies of Maritain. Tying the whole work together is an emphasis on the strong philosophical framework that underlined Maritain’s approach to understanding the world. 

While Maritain did not see himself as a theologian, he did write extensively on theological issues, so there are chapters on natural theology and on revealed theology. These two are illuminating not just because of what is to be learned about Maritain himself but also because they help the reader gain an understanding of what it means to be a Christian philosopher who approaches theological questions from a philosophical vantage point. 

Especially illuminating is a section describing how Maritain grappled with the problem of evil existing in a world with a loving God. West also looks at the ways in which Maritain attempted to reconcile the holiness of the church with the multitude of sins committed in its name over the centuries. (Maritain’s conclusion? That the church needs to be seen as a person separate from her members.)

Maritain saw no topic as outside of the bounds of philosophical questioning, including Einstein’s theory of special relativity. His interpretation of evolution is confusing in West’s treatment, but is also a fascinating look at the way a Catholic thinker attempted to square Darwin’s theories with traditional teachings on the origin of humanity and the human relationship with the creator. 

West is clear at the beginning that this is not strictly a work of history: There are already many books putting Maritain in his historical context. Yet he does offer some historical framing, including the important reminder that Maritain began writing during a time of incipient fascism in France and then continued to write from New York as an exile during World War II. The chapters on political philosophy and the philosophy of education in particular should be read in that light. 

At the beginning of a subsection titled “Pluralism, Rights, and Democracy,” West asks: “How do we achieve practical political collaboration in a world that is divided between people and cultures that have radically different conceptions of the good, human nature, and society?” Maritain also pondered how teachers should best educate children in morality and how to prepare them to be adults in a pluralistic world; this interest was perhaps informed by his own experience as a member of a religious minority, as he grew up Protestant in a majority Catholic culture. (His wife Raïssa was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, and her family had fled Russia to France because of antisemitism.) 

Though West strives to present Maritain as a thinker unto himself and not solely as a Thomist, his subject’s neo-scholastic intellectual worldview is evident throughout. This background makes West’s text a helpful primer for the reader, especially when answering questions that remain pressing in the present moment: How can Thomism be applied to the problems of the modern world? And what does it mean in our current context to have a sense of the common good? 

Maritain was an academic, but he was not locked in an ivory tower. This, too, explains why his work had and continues to have such a wide-reaching and broad appeal. I appreciated how this book spurred me to consider issues of my own context; other readers interested in how scholastic thought can be applied to our current moment will also find this a useful text. “As he often puts it, the truth is eternal, and, consequently, it is always up-to-date,” writes West. 

West also looks at how Maritain’s works compared with those of other thinkers and notes the criticism that Maritain received while he was alive. Sometimes the best way to understand a thinker is to understand who he or she was not. Maritain strongly disagreed with many modern philosophers and was in opposition to the thought of Descartes and Locke. West’s contrast of those thinkers with Maritain’s Thomistic philosophical outlook provides a useful glimpse into the broader differences between these two modes of philosophy. 

Nor did Maritain’s philosophical contemporaries always find themselves simpatico with the thinker. The philosopher Charles De Koninck at the University of Laval once wrote a sharp criticism of Maritain’s personalist thought that did not name Maritain specifically but was generally understood to be about him. Cardinal Jean-Marie-Rodrigue Villeneuve, the archbishop of Quebec, also disparaged the “polycephalous [sic] monster of Pelagianism” he thought personalists were reviving. But, as West explains, it was Maritain’s innovations in understanding the metaphysics of the human person that led to 20th-century Catholic defenses of human rights. 

West is a professor at Newman Theological College in Edmonton, Alberta, and the reader may pick up on a tension in his writing: How can one be accessible in introducing Maritain while simultaneously engaging with dense and complex topics? However, I appreciated being able to get out of my intellectual comfort zone, even if that entailed moments when I did not fully grasp all of the technical material. Anyone seeking a clearer view of the shape of 20th-century Catholic thought will benefit from West’s work.

This article appears in July/August 2026.

• Facebook
• X
• Mail