Maritain’s book is a set of pen portraits of Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau from his perspective as a reactionary Catholic philosopher. “Three men, each for very different reasons, dominate the modern world, and govern all the problems which torment it: a reformer of religion, a reformer of philosophy, and a reformer of morality.”
Maritain begins with Luther, “It would be astonishing if the extraordinary loss of balance induced in the Christian mind by heresy had not had the most important repercussions in all spheres, particularly in that of the speculative and practical reason. By the very fact that the Lutheran revolution bore on religion, on that which governs all human activity, it was bound to change most profoundly the attitude of the human soul.” Obviously, Maritain is far from an impartial commentator on Luther’s character flaws, “One might sat that that immense disaster for humanity, the Protestant Reformation, was only the effect of an interior trial which turned out badly in a religious who lacked humility…. In origin and principle the drama of the Reformation was a spiritual drama, a battle of the soul…. What first impresses us in Luther’s character is egocentrism…. Luther’s self becomes practically the centre of gravity of everything, especially in the spiritual order…. The Reformation unbridled the human self in the spiritual and religious order…. After Luther decided to refuse obedience to the Pope and break with the communion of the Church, his self is henceforth supreme…. And so in Luther the swollen consciousness of the self is essentially a consciousness of will, of realisation of freedom…. The Reformer, and with him the whole modern world, rises against two mysteries: the mystery of the divine operations, and the mystery of immanent activity and the capacity of spirits.”
Descartes is viewed as the philosopher who ushered in the age of modernity, with its primacy on the individual. “What Descartes really attacks, in his impatience of the servitude of discursive work is the potentiality of our intellect, that is to say, its specifically human weakness, what makes it a reason. So by curious chance the first move of rationalism is to disown reason…. Behold it reconstructed after an intuitive type…. Descartes applies to the certitudes of reason and science the classical solutions of the traditional teaching about the formal motive of faith…. If we could not lean on the guarantee of the truthfulness of the Creator, author of things and author of our mind, we could not know on trustworthy authority that there is a material world, or that there exists outside our thought things in conformity with our ideas…. Rational cognition is for Descartes a sort of natural revelation…. The transition to existence, the grasp of existence by the help of the intelligence alone and starting from pure ideas, forms just the crucial problem of the Cartesian philosophy…. We must arrive at being, we must rejoin it, or deduce it, or beget it, from an ideal principle set or discovered in the depths of thought…. In the modern world, reason turns its back on eternal things and is ordered to the creature. It rates the mathematics of phenomena above theology, science above wisdom.”
Maritain saves his most searing scorn for the philosophical system of Rousseau, “Such is the “sincerity” of Jean-Jacques and his friends. It consists in never meddling with what you find yourself at each moment of your life, for fear of perverting your being. So now all moral labour is tainted…. “You must be yourself”…. On his lips it meant: you must be your feeling, as God is His being…. Every form imposed on the inner world of the human soul, whether it come from nature or grace, is a sacrilegious wrong to nature…. He attributes to himself the privilege of being the still unblemished Man of Nature, without trace or stain of the original corruption due to civilization…. Mimicry of sanctity, changing of the heroic life into a religious enjoyment of self, ambition to reach God and the divine life by sensation and the affective imagination: is not Jean-Jacques the finest specimen of the naturalist mysticism of feeling?” Maritain particularly disdains the fact that Rousseau never turned away from his religion, but simply perverted it. “Rousseau plunged the heart into endless uneasiness, because he hallows the denial of grace. With the philosophers he rejected the gift of Him Who first loved us, but yet he makes an outlet for religious feeling. He turns our hunger for God towards the sacred mysteries of sensation, towards the infinite of matter…. As the search for mystical enjoyment in things which are not God is an endless search, it can stop nowhere…. If we want a label, we may say that Jean-Jacques, like Luther, is a very perfect and unalloyed specimen of anti-intellectualist religious thought.”
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