Theonas

Theonas: Conversations of a Sage by Jacques Maritain, translated by FJ Sheed, 185 pages

Theonas is a set of eleven dialogues centered on Theonas, a "hermit who reads newspapers", and his interlocutor, the modernist Philonous.  The text encapsulates much of Maritain's philosophical career in miniature - the possibility, reality, and necessity of a Christian humanism, the preservation of the human intellect from both angelism and bestiality, and, above all, Thomism as the only philosophical tradition capable of harmonizing these tensions and discriminating between healthy development and decadent corruption.

Given the dialogic form, it should not be a surprise that the book is more polemical than systematic.  Not that it is shallow or simplistic (the central dialogue compares the theory of time advanced by Einstein to that proposed by St Thomas), but here Maritain is more interested in showing the shortcomings of other philosophies than in more fully explicating his own.  Unfortunately, since his opponents are the fashionable thinkers of '30s France, this also makes Theonas itself more dated than most of Maritain's other work.