“November 24, 1939. 5 am. The night. My God, why did I write this letter where I made myself available to France to go abroad? Why did I give myself in Marx’s hands? What crazy I was. What an atrocious regret. »» These scraps of anxiety thrown on paper are those of Jacques Maritain, one of the great thinkers – if not the great Catholic thinker – who influenced the XXe century, in France and in the world.
At the start of the Second World War, the diplomat philosopher left for New York with his wife, Raïssa, and her sister, Véra. Together, they form “The three Maritain”. Since the 30th, Fifth Avenue, south of Manhattan, the couple of intellectuals decrypts and comments on the tragic events experienced by Europe. The first volume of these War notebooksheld from 1939 to 1942, were a precious testimony to the upheaval of the current world, but also of their burning approach to the love of God. Because it is faith that guides the author of theIntegral humanism (1936).
Jacques and Raïssa Maritain have only one idea in mind: to build bridges between the United States and France, and demonstrate, in words and actions, that Christian culture can deeply modify social life. How to be in the world after the atrocities of the Great War and when it is necessary to cross a new one? In a magnificent poem entitled “With desperate dead”, Raïssa opened it in 1939: “It is not pain that despairs / – it is injustice. – It’s not misfortune – but it’s cruelty. / It is not to die – but to be inconsolate / of the formidable accomplice silence. »» The same day, her husband gives the Marigny theater a conference on “the twilight of civilization”. But hope is never far for these two converts, whose baptism sponsor is none other than Léon Bloy. Their inner life is their base. Prayer, at the heart of their daily lives, goes, in this period of their lives, to be jostled by “The countless requests for their common life, the influence of their creative work, their friendly donation” or by the “True hell” of their “Public mission”retraces Michel Fourcade, great specialist in the philosopher, and whose annotations guide the reader with this sum.
De Gaulle will name him ambassador to the Vatican
And we discover how, by his work as an intellectual, Jacques Maritain is shaping “His way, in wartime, to do his duty”. Far from being only a theorist, we discover through the pages a fine political analyst. As early as 1940, he was one of the first intellectuals to mention General de Gaulle. It is the latter who will also ask him to become an ambassador to the Holy See, from 1945 to 1948. Before settling in America and, on the occasion of one of his trips, Maritain entrusted to his friend and disciple Yves Simon: “This separation is very hard. However, I think we are doing a good job here, and this work of clearing should not be challenged. In two hundred years, we may see an American thomism flowering. »»
It will have taken less than a century to see, across the Atlantic, the thought of the writer Rod Dreher, author of How to be a Christian in a world that is no longerwhich offers us a reading of the world, applicable to the old continent, in the same Thomist philosophy of the being as Maritan.
30, Fifth avenue, war diaries (Volume 1, 1939-1942), Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Desclée de Brouwer, 768 pages, 48 euros
