The Peasant of the Garonne
Jacques Maritain (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston; 1966)

277 pp.  First reading.
Posted 16 June 2006.


Not many people are still writing books when they reach the middle of their ninth decade, but the philosopher Jacques Maritain was so prolific throughout his long life that, it seems, he just couldn’t stop.  This book, with its self-depreciating title and circumspect sub-title (“An Old Layman Questions Himself About The Present Time”) was, I believe, his last, but it is still written with all of the admirable passion that one finds throughout his work.  Which is not to say that the book doesn’t have its problems.

In the years between the First World War and the Second Vatican Council, Maritain was among the most eminent Catholic intellectuals in the world.  He was a primary force behind the twentieth century revival of Thomistic philosophy – a revival that seems to have died a second death in the wake of Vatican II, one notes with sorrow.  He was a determined realist in epistemology and metaphysics, and an implacable foe of relativism and idealism.  I have not read many of his books, but those I have read have been full of lively, urgent arguments, the work of a man who clearly cares deeply about his subject.

The Peasant of the Garonne is no exception.  Written just as Vatican II was coming to a close, it is essentially a reflection on the significance of the Council for the Catholic Church, for Catholic intellectual and contemplative life, and for Catholic laymen.  I call it a ‘reflection’, but that is too placid a word, for it has about it the odour of a diatribe, a rant – or, to be fittingly Biblical in my diction, a jeremiad.  Apparently the dissension that has since the Council troubled the Church in the West was already on the horizon as he wrote, and he perceived – correctly, I believe – that many of those rejoicing at the prospect of reform were in fact ‘kneeling before the world’, intending to evacuate the Catholic Church of all that distinguishes her from secular culture.  These people are, of course, still with us – though their agenda has shifted with the prevailing winds – and it was bracing to read his passionate denouncement of their cause, and his vision for authentic reform.

The aspect of the Council’s teaching on which he dwells most consistently is the emphasis on the sheer goodness of the world (as, for instance, in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes).  He saw in this a needed corrective to a long misunderstanding, for while Catholic theology has from the beginning insisted on the primordial and foundational goodness of all that exists, there has nevertheless been a stream of Catholic thought and devotional life that has regarded ‘the world’ with a disapproving eye, as somehow tarnished and antithetical to spiritual purity.  At a deep level this misunderstanding is inconsistent with Catholic theology of creation, sacraments, and even the Divine nature, but nevertheless it existed, and the Council strove to correct it. This teaching heartened Maritain in another way, too, for he saw in it the potential for a return to philosophical realism, which grants to the world its own good nature, independent of the knower and to be approached and apprehended with respect. Whether this potential has been actualized (if I may speak like a half-baked Thomist) may be debated, but a casual glance around a typical university philosophy department might plant the tiniest seed of doubt…

The bulk of the book is, roughly speaking, devoted to an unfolding of Maritain’s vision for renewal of intellectual culture and his thoughts on the vocation of laymen in light of the Council’s teaching that we are charged with the task of evangelization of culture.  Essentially, his view is that we must undertake a serious task of intellectual reconstruction, governed above all by a devotion to truth, and sustained by contemplative prayer.

I should round off these thoughts with a few remarks about Maritain’s writing style in this book. There is never a dull moment. I honestly believe that he sat before a stack of paper and wrote the book from start to finish without planning it.  It is full of digressions, snide asides, complaints, and requests that the reader indulge the unpolished manners of a simple peasant.  He quotes at length from his other books and from his wife’s journals whenever the fancy seems to strike him.  It really is a thoroughly disorganized book.  Disorganized, but not, I hope I have made clear, without its merits.

[grouchy]
…all knowledge naturally acquired by man proceeds from sense experience, and, if there is an insane asylum among the pure spirits of heaven, it is only there that we can see Kant’s Pure Reason in operation.

[The motives and the fruit of certain would-be reformers]
The judgment deserved by the works of the renovators…is not hard to reach: they are the product of an impassioned fatuousness anxious to serve the idols of the times.  However ephemeral they may be, these choice writings threaten to disconnect completely Christian consciousness and the life of faith.  Instead of the true new fire called for by our era, they bring us only the smoke from rotten wood which cannot catch fire.  The would-be renewers we are discussing are hapless stragglers who would like us to return to a zero point so that we can begin all over again.  In other words, they wish to make our thought retreat across the centuries and bring us back to the gropings of childhood (a modern childhood, of course, brought up on audio-visual techniques and trying its hand at typewriters and computers).  That is not how one makes progress.

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