Notes on the Lord's Prayer

Notes on the Lord's Prayer by Raissa Maritain, 122 pages

Assembled posthumously from notes left by the author for a work that was never completed, Notes on the Lord's Prayer is a commentary on the seven petitions of the Paternoster as recorded by St Matthew: Hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, Give us this day our daily bread, Forgive us our trespasses, Lead us not into temptation, and Deliver us from evil.

In his foreword, Thomas Merton laments the modern division between "spirituality" and "theology", recommending this book as a corrective.  This should provide a suggestion of the depth of thought as well as feeling, of sense as well as sensibility, present in this meditation, designed not only as a pious exercise but also as an exploration of the divine mysteries.

Sin

Sin: A Thomistic Psychology by Steven J Jensen, 292 pages

It may be objected that St Thomas Aquinas' understanding of sin is inconsistent, unrealistic, and incoherent.  To the contrary, Steven Jensen argues that recent critiques of the Thomist position are the products of basic misunderstandings of the subtleties of Aquinas' thought.  Through a careful exposition of Aquinas' understanding of reason, passion, and the will, Jensen develops an account of the human person as a unified whole with genuine free will, capable of both deliberation and decision.

Despite the frequent use of examples, the theology here is both difficult and abstract.  The book is neither easy nor inspiring, and therefore may be rejected by some as neither practical nor relevant.  Yet given St Thomas' view that all sin is predicated upon willful ignorance and the unwillingness to think, it is doubtful that anything could be more practical than an exploration of these foundational principles, or anything more relevant in an age in which a commitment to superficiality has virtually banished the very word sin from our vocabulary.

Aquinas and the Market

Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy by Mary L Hirschfeld, 217 pages

In this intriguing book, Mary Hirschfeld argues that economics and Thomist theology share considerable common ground, beginning with their understanding of man as fundamentally motivated by his quest for happiness.  Unfortunately, she claims, a barrier has been constructed to insulate supposedly value-neutral scientific economics from the ethical and metaphysical dimensions of human existence, but the resulting "rational" approach is itself both the product and the perpetuator of hidden (and erroneous) anthropological assumptions made all the more pernicious as the result of their invisibility.  At the same time, drawing upon her experience as a trained economist, she demonstrates that mainstream economics is not as narrow as theologians are apt to believe, and has much to teach about prudential planning and living under the limitations of finite human understanding.

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.

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.

Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain

The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life by Ralph McInerny, 211 pages

In Ralph McInerny's account of the thought of Jacques Maritain, one of the recurrent themes is the Thomistic distinction between the knowledge connected with thinking and the knowledge associated with inclination.  In his account of the life of Jacques and his wife Raissa, the attainment of both kinds of knowledge is the central theme.  The couple heroically sought not only to know virtue and holiness as concepts but to live them as realities, dedicating themselves to the truth they found in the conclusion of Leon Bloy's The Woman Who Was Poor - "There is only one tragedy in life, not to be a saint."

McInerny (a philosopher by trade but best known as the creator of Father Dowling) models the biography on the hours of the Divine Office - Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Compline - tracking the life of his subject from the dark of the morning to the dark of the evening.  Throughout, the personal lives of the Maritains are interwoven with the development of Jacques' philosophy.  The result is revelatory - a biography of a public intellectual and an examination of the thought of a great philosopher, but also a demonstration of what philosophy and faith can offer each other, and what both can offer life.

Arts of the Beautiful

The Arts of the Beautiful by Etienne Gilson, 182 pages

In this brief study, Gilson's approach is that of philosophia ancilla artis - an inversion, but a necessary one, of the values of Truth and Beauty.  Necessary because, in Gilson's view, it is precisely the attempt to evaluate Beauty in terms of Truth that has resulted in a deformation, not only of philosophies of art, but of art itself.  In true peripatetic fashion he concentrates on making distinctions - between knowing and making, between utility and beauty, between the creation of art and the perception of art.  In the process he critiques various theories of art, including those of Plato, Nietzsche, and Valery.  Gilson's own analysis establishes the will to create as rooted in the fundamental fecundity of Being itself.

Perhaps Gilson insists too much on his distinctions - although admitting the ontological unity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, he holds them as strictly separate on the human level.  Whether perception of the one can transcend the human and embrace the others is an aesthetic question formally separate from the artistic.

Art and Scholasticism

Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays by Jacques Maritain, 114 pages

In his short but influential essay "Art and Scholasticism", Maritain applies the tools of scholastic philosophy to the problems of art and aesthetics.  The result is a careful examination of the relationships between art and truth, art and goodness, and art and man.  In Maritain's analysis, the artist mimics the Creator in the work of incarnating the spiritual in the physical, a work which can be undertaken with saintly humility or Luciferian pride.

This collection also includes "The Frontiers of Poetry", which considers the metaphysical nature of poetry, and "Some Reflections Upon Religious Art", which addresses problems which arise when art is self-consciously religious.

Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages

Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages by Umberto Eco, 119 pages

Before he became known as the author of novels such as The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco wrote this little book about medieval aesthetics, an extension of his career as a semiotician.

The subject of the book is the attempt of medieval philosophers to discover a mathematical approach to visual beauty corresponding to the Pythagorean explication of musical harmony.  Above all, the medieval mind desired clarity.  Beauty was not to be found in surface impressions, but in contemplation.  At a time when the world was seen as an allegory, the "book of nature" a symbolic text speaking to the human senses the thousand names of God, art was considered an intellectual, and inevitably spiritual, endeavor.  Light and color, not usually associated with the Middle Ages in the popular mind, were seen as key components of art, representing the truth shining through appearances into the understanding.

In this work, Eco leans heavily on Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages.  The heavy doses of scholastic philosophy, with its characteristic insistence on precise distinctions, will not be to the taste of some readers, nor will Eco's facility with technical terms such as "hylomorphism" and "entelechy".  For those willing to shoulder the burden, however, it will prove enlightening.

Commentary on De Trinitate

Commentary on De Trinitate by St Thomas Aquinas, translated by Rose Emmanuella Brennan, SHN, 197 pages (from The Trinity and the Unicity of the Intellect)

This is, as the above suggests, a commentary by St Thomas Aquinas on St Boethius' theological tract on the Trinity (De Trinitate).  Aquinas uses the scholastic format usually associated with his writings ("It seems that..." but "On the contrary..." and "Furthermore...").  Aquinas uses Boethius' text as a primer on subjects ranging from the division of human knowledge into three principal categories (physics, mathematics, and metaphysics) to the nature of God Himself.

It is safe to say that this is a book with limited appeal.  It is thoroughly excellent on its own terms, but few readers - even among those with an interest in theology or Boethius - will care about most of the issues Aquinas treats in this work.  Many of the articles pack more meaning than entire books by lesser authors, but their subject is often some obscure point of epistemology or ontology.  For those with an interest in Aquinas or scholastic philosophy more generally, this is a work by the Angelic Doctor.  Others may want to skim the articles for subjects of interest to them.