The Garonne Flows Right

“The history of the world progresses at the same time along the line of evil and the line of good. At certain epochs—ours, for example—you see the effects of this double, simultaneous progress blow- -up in a kind of explosion.” For the Catholics of the world the Second Vatican Council was the bomb. It blew the roof off and produced a double, simultaneous effect: violent noise and activity on the left, concussion on the right. Jacques Maritain’s new work, The Peasant of the Garonne, from which the above quotation comes, is not available in the United States. It won’t be published here for months—perhaps in November. But for an increasing number of people here and abroad, Catholic and even faintly ecumenical, this French book is already a major happening. Either the teaching voice of the Church is being raised, or the Catholic right is coming out of shock. Whichever it may prove to be, the left has been dealt a blow. The Peasant of the Garonne flatly and roundly attacks ‘“neo-modernism.” Compared with this raging fever, “the modernism of Pius X’s time was only a slight cold.” The polemics of the book, its will and emotion—and its wit, parenthetical ironies, exposures of taste, cracks— are aimed at the left. That is the news. Maritain disclaims all pretensions of special authority. He portrays himself as the old peasant calling a spade a spade and unconcerned about putting his foot in his mouth. In his old age he lives remote from offices of power, a permanent guest in the sparse house of the Little Brothers of Jesus (of Charles de Foucauld) in Toulouse, on the Garonne River. Occasionally he still gets away for visits, as far at least as Texas and Rome. And everybody knows that Maritain is a great, “progressive” French philosopher, academician and ambassador. Nor HAS HE ARRIVED at the position of The Peasant alone. The book associates Etienne Gilson, the philosopher and writer and teacher for decades recognized as his peer, closely with him. And Charles Journet, the Swiss abbé and monsignor and now Cardinal of the Church, long the probable favorite of Catholic intellectual and cultural “pros.” Many other famous persons … and one who can rather certainly be cited is Pope Paul VI. Important paragraphs and at least three footnotes of the Pope’s last encyclical bear witness to this. The story has spread, not certainly confirmed, that Maritain lived as a guest in the Vatican Palace for a considerable period during 1965-66. The Avant-propos of The Peasant is dated 31 décembre 1965. M ARITAIN HAS ALWAYS put great stress on a precariously elaborated “middleism.” He recalls his distinction of the terms “right” and “left” some years ago: physiologically, by temperament, “it is useless to pretend to be neither right nor left. All a person can do is to check his temperament and balance it as nearly as possible where the two _ tendencies converge.” Normally these temperaments group themselves in corresponding political divisions, checked by political reason and practical convenience. But in bad times the groups, exacerbated, go to fatal partisan extremes. “Then, to be neither right nor left means one tries to keep sane.” During the last thirty years the situation has not only worsened, but “right and left no longer have simply a political and social sense; on top of that they have now—at least in the Christian world—a religious sense.” “T am neither left nor right,” Maritain claims, “although I am temperamentally what people call a man of the left . . . I keep as far as I can from both camps, but it is quite natural (if hardly amusing) that I feel less distant from the first [the left, that is, whom he calls “The Sheep of the Panurge’|] when it is a question of the things that are Caesar’s, and less distant from the second (alas) [the right: “The Ruminants of the Holy Alliance”] when it is a question of the things that are God’s.” B ENEATH the current tides Maritain sees an “immanentist apostasy.’ We are afflicted by what he calls “epistemological chronolatry,” “obsessional fixation on the passing moment,” and “kneeling before the times.” Lost in the flood is our “pre-philosophy,” called common sense. In respect to this basic element of human nature, necessary for the exercise of reason, “man increasingly resembles an animal who has lost his instincts. When everyone begins to turn up his nose at these things, obscurely perceived by the instinct of the spirit— such as good and evil, moral obligation, justice, law, or even extramental being and reality, truth, the distinction between substance and accident, the principle of identity— it is because everyone is beginning to lose his head.” “As disoriented as he is, man must go on thinking anyway.” Furthermore, “there exists in man a philosophical eros, or longing for philosophy. . . . While this hunger certainly creates longing for the real to the extent that philosophic knowledge can give it, it yearns too for that aspect of reality which unfolds in other, more exalted ways. … Such hunger can tur into a morbid craving .. = for fables and intellectual counterfeit.” It is the book’s analysis and multiple condemnation of ““Teilhardism” as one more “Christian Gnosis”—a “theology fiction” riding high the evolutionary wave—which has caused the greatest intaking of breath in France. Maritain looks at the general efforts to reinterpret theology for the age and “bring the witness of the Gospel into the course of history.” Some efforts are bound to go astray. “It is not a question of understanding better, thanks to reason, or of managing somehow (always and _ indefinitely progressive) to know the unchange- — ably true things faith reveals to us.” Theology is not a rational knowledge. ‘With some current forms of “fideism”’ (belief for the sake of belief, perhaps), one can reinterpret and restate articles of faith in the terms of any contemporary way of thinking— eorrect, incorrect, or crazy. This means in practice changing the content and concepts of faith to conform. to the philosophic fashion and giving them only a temporary, utilitarian meaning. Maritain expresses sympathy for the motive of Bishop Robinson, for example, in his Honest To God. But such efforts “betray the Gospel in their desire to serve it… after their fashion.” To ANY MAN who looks, the religious, theological, philosophical time of troubles is visible in the world and in the work of the world. But even the world itself is no simple thing or easy concept in the faith and tradition of Christianity. There is the natural world of Genesis. God made it and it is good. A great work of the Council, Maritain believes, was to correct with calm and clear certainty (Schema XIII) a Manichaean tendency among Catholics to despise this naturally good world (not relatively, with the saints, but with fearsome absoluteness) and to live a life of hostility toward its civilization and society. That error was an équivoque, presumably of the right. With the Council, “the pendulum suddenly swung to the opposite extreme.” “In wide segments of the clergy and laity, but it is the clergy who set the example, hardly is the word world pronounced when a gleam of ecstasy lights up the faces of one and all. And immediately there is talk of necessary expansions and necessary commitments, and likewise of communitarian fervor, presences, openings, and their joys. Anything that would risk calling to mind the idea of asceticism, mortification or penance is set aside as a matter of course. . . Sex—it is curious to see what interest, carried to the point of veneration, a crowd of Levites sworn to continence display in its regard. Virginity and chastity have a bad press… “The other great reality which faces us in the world is the Earthly Society . . the great business and the only thing that matters is the temporal vocation of the human race, with its march, embattled but victorious, to justice, peace and happiness. Instead of realizing that we must devote ourselves to the temporal task with a will so much the firmer and more ardent just because we know that the human race will never succeed on this earth ‘saints: in completely delivering itself from evil—because of the wounds of Adam and because our ultimate end is supernatural—they make of these earthly goals a truly supreme end for the human race. In another sense, there is for them only this earth. A complete temporalization of Christianity!” This the Peasant labels the great present équivoque, presumably of the left. EF OR THE CHRISTIAN, the Peasant points out, there should be more to see than the paradisiacal world of Genesis. Outside of Eden there is also the fallen world, a rough environment with lions prowling around, condemned throughout the New Testament and in the lives of all the worldliness, closed to the spirit of God. Concentration upon the material universe without regard for Heaven is worldliness. This becomes only more radically true if glorified by some immanentist religious fiction of a God emerging in the evolution of His own physical creation. Maritain has no quarrel with the propriety of Christians working for the good of temporal society and of. the material world where people live until they die. He has spent a large portion of his life stimulating such work: the struggle to reflect and incorporate faith, hope and charity, and all the human powers, in the landscape of the City, elevating it to its highest potentialities. ‘Nevertheless, this struggle is not our one and only duty because the earth and earthly society are not the one and only reality. Besides, this temporal duty is really and truly accomplished by the Christian only when the life of grace and of prayer super-elevates energies which on their own are merely natural’ It is unlikely that the Fathers of the Church came to the Second Vatican Council for the purpose of liquidating the Holy Roman Catholic Church and the way of life it has transmitted for several thousand years. There is no plan to reduce Christianity to a benevolent association or a company of efficiency experts. The Kingdom of God is not an urban redevelopment. It is not a technological construction nor the fruit of computerized genetic breeding. The intervention of the Christian left in the world is already proving to be terribly undistinguished. However radical it is in its own eyes it seems to lack the revolutionary impact of sanctity, or even of satisfying artistry; and it seems to accomplish very little in the actual way of the world. The Peasant of the Garonne proposes at considerable length and with no small subtlety (‘distinguish in order to unify’) a “middle” Christian position. The Christian can do (and must do) his temporal duty by the natural world in the process of seeking the eschatological world of the Resurrection which Christ has opened. According to the Thomist method, which Maritain praises, “formulation of the problem, research and investigation come before systematization.” The book follows this form closely— if I am correct in finding the “systematization” in the descriptions, plain and logical and very moving. The culmination is, “according to the diversity of the gifts of the Spirit,” liturgy and contemplation—the “contemplation on the road” still visibly that of “Christ’s disciples.” Once again, “in, but not of, the world.”