Peasant of the Garonne

The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time by Jacques Maritain, translated by Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes, 277 pages

This is Maritain's final testament, written from his retirement among the Little Brothers of Jesus in Toulouse, along the banks of the Garonne.  It is, however, more of a look ahead than a look back.  In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Maritain chose "to offer known or unknown friends an opportunity... to hear some imprudent talker stammer out truths which are not welcome."

The first of those truths concerns the relationship between the Church and the world, a central theme of the Council.  Maritain distinguishes the different senses in which Scripture and Tradition speak of the world, criticizing those who would entirely reject the world as fundamentally wicked, but more pressingly warning against embracing the world uncritically, substituting its natural ends for the supernatural ends of the Church.  He moves on to a criticism of modern philosophy, which he maintains is better described as ideosophy, divorced from reality most powerfully experienced in the intuition of being.  This leads naturally to a consideration of the post-conciliar state of Thomism, about which Maritain proves remarkably sanguine, regarding the particular virtues of St Thomas Aquinas and his thought as necessary for the development of understanding, however infrequently his disciples have shared those virtues.  For the celebrated worker in the groves of academe now a humble peasant in a house of prayer, the only hope - for Thomism, philosophy, the Church, and the world - is in the activity of a clerisy of small groups and individuals who possess and share a sense of the love of God deepened through lives devoted to contemplation, in the cloister but especially outside.