The marriage of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain was an outstanding example of the encounter between intellectual life and Christianity.. They were able to demonstrate that faith does not limit or imprison the intelligence. On the contrary, it stimulates it and opens it to broader horizons.
During their years at the Sorbonne, Jacques and Raïssa noted the shortcomings of positivist materialism, which led professors to reduce philosophy to the mere study of its history. There they also encountered Bergson's philosophy of intuition. which, however, seemed insufficient.
The next step would be to be baptized in the Catholic Church. Neither of them was a practitioner of their religion of origin, Protestantism and Judaism, but the novel "The poor woman" of the combative convert writer Léon Bloy led them to become interested in Catholicism. Bloy would be their godfather at Baptism.
Later, Raïssa suggested Jacques to read the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, and this would serve to boost the studies of a philosophy that until then had been cornered and misunderstood. The Maritain couple went far beyond the academic interest. They organized in their successive homes near Paris, in Versailles and Meudon, meetings on philosophical and theological topics, with exchange of opinions and reflections. Spiritual retreats, preached by the Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and circles of Thomistic studies were also established.
Pope Paul VI and Jacques Maritain.
In 1922 the Maritain couple wrote a small work, about a hundred pages long, with the title ".From the life of prayer".a kind of guide for the circles. At first it was for internal dissemination, but later it was published in public, as it was a book written for Christian intellectuals.
Their authors They touched on one of the usual problems of Christianity: the separation between faith and life, between faith and reason. This separation questions the possibility of Christian contemplation in the midst of the world. In an introduction to the work, written by Raïssa in 1959, it is affirmed that contemplation is not only for religious orders. It is also for people who live simply in the world, without miracles or visions, but centered on love of God and love of the world. neighbor and who do good around them without noise or agitation.
This work was written to demonstrate this, although it is not intended to be a treatise on spirituality, but rather a series of simple advice supported by quotations from Scripture. St. Thomas is given as an example, one of the wisest men of his time. One of his biographers, Pedro Calo, discovered his secret: whenever he wanted to study, argue, read, write or dictate, he resorted first to prayer.
Indeed, as the authors point out, prayer is aimed at contemplation and union with God, and at the same time they recall Jesus' command to "be perfect as your Father is perfect.". Concretely, Christian perfection consists essentially in charity, and the means to reach this perfection is divine contemplation.
Hence the need to practice prayer and to pray without ceasing. In addition, Maritain overrules the objection that those who have an active life cannot be contemplatives. On the contrary, they are the ones who most need to pray. Consequently, they recommend asking divine mercy for the grace of an intense interior life so that action may be a superabundance of contemplation.
With the collaboration of:
Antonio R. Rubio Plo
Degree in History and Law
International writer and analyst
@blogculturayfe / @arubioplo
