Who Was Raïssa Maritain? The Spiritual Mother Behind Vatican II

Raïssa Maritain.

I don’t know if this is how it is for you, but doesn’t it seem that in those first moments of conversion we are given treasures whose value we cannot possibly understand? Just golden talents poured into the hands of children who cannot possible know the value of gold.

I’m talking not just of those moments when we formally convert to Christianity, when we are baptized perhaps—yes, this. But also: this can happen to us if we’ve spent our entire lives in the Church. The teachings of the Church just suddenly become alive, verdant, electric. We can’t look away at this forest suddenly rich in symbols, rich in meaning. And in those moments, we discover gifts that seem to have been awaiting our arrival. Saints, teachings, doctrines, a passage of Scripture. Perhaps we had passed over it several times throughout our life—and the Lord was in that place, though we did not know it, and now we do know it and we cannot look away.

And it’s strange, but these gifts, these talents accrue value. We keep returning to them five, ten, fifteen years afterwards, and their significance has only grown. They mesmerize us still. They still have unexplored depths. We realize that we were really children when we first took them into our hands. How could we have possibly understood? So the talent grows deeper, it unlocks itself, it unlocks its depths.

Raïssa Maritain was one of these gifts for me. But there was really no reason why she and I should meet, no reason at all for our paths to cross. She’s not an official saint—a cause for her beatification was opened in 2011 but nothing so far has come of it. So how did she and I meet? Why? It’s a question I’m still trying to answer. I’ll return to it a bit at the end. But first, let me sketch her life; then we’ll dive into some of the themes of her life that are really vibrant for me at the moment; and we will conclude with me trying to answer this question: Why was Raïssa given to me as one of my “glorious companions,” to quote the title of our series?

From Russia to Rome: The Life of Raïssa Maritain

She was born to a Jewish family in southern Russia on September 12, 1883.¹ With her family she emigrated to France, to Paris. She did what she was supposed to do when you’re in Paris: she fell in love with a philosopher named Jacques, and together, they married and converted to Roman Catholicism. And within that conversion, she discovered a vocation that was radically unique: the vocation to contemplative life, contemplative prayer within the world—not in the cloister, but in the world; not in a monastery, but in a marriage. She would spend hours every day in silent contemplative prayer, stopping only to go to Mass, to say the hours, to read St. Thomas Aquinas. There were long stretches of aridity followed by sudden waves of ardor, of ecstatic love. We ourselves can only gain small glimpses of this life through her Journals. Here are just a couple typical examples of the sorts of things she wrote there:

Absorption in God begins early, I cannot finish dressing. At rest about a quarter to 8. Lasts, very strong and ardent, three-quarters of an hour. Forced interruption which is painful to me. Resumes about 10, lasts an hour and a quarter, very deep, very ardent, ardour of love, feeling of the presence of God.²

Security, simplicity of this silent prayer: God is in us by grace, it is enough to strip the soul of all other love to find oneself in the presence of God alone. … Relish of God and formation of the soul; gentle, progressive and, as it were, easy; tending above all to love of our neighbour, to humility, to simplicity, to truthfulness, to silence, to nakedness of spirit—to the love of God.³

Yet despite her vocation to silence and withdrawal, in the period between the World Wars, Raïssa and Jacques were at the center of the intellectual revival of French Catholicism and a renewed discovery of St. Thomas Aquinas. Their home was a place where desert hermits, artists like Jean Cocteau, theologians, priests, philosophers, and misfits collided in the most fruitful of spiritual exchanges. Again and again, the Maritains brought people to conversion. Having lived through the drama of conversion themselves, it became their specialty. They knew all the paths towards God—the path of beauty, the path of truth, the path of goodness. They knew how to take people by the hand along these paths to show them the source of beauty and truth and goodness.

But World War II brought division to their circle, and because of Jacques’s fierce resistance to all forms of totalitarianism in a time when many Catholics looked to these powers to restore the Church to a position of power and prestige—even, to restore a French Catholic monarchy—this grievous war brought this devout couple into exile in the United States.

Here was a difficult cup for Raïssa and Jacques to drink: to watch Europe burning from a distance. As she wrote in New York in 1940: “Life for me draws to a close, ended by the catastrophe that has plunged France into mourning, and, with France, the world, or at least all those in France and in the world who treasure the human and divine values of free intelligence, wise liberty and universal charity”—already you can see here the spiritual values that were at the center of her life: intelligence, liberty, charity. And then she goes on: “For justice wears mourning, the afflicted are not (cannot be) consoled, the persecuted are not succored, God’s truth is not spoken, and suddenly the world has become so little, so narrowed for the spirit, by the monotony of that lie which rules it and which almost alone makes itself heard.”⁴

I think here is something that we can learn from Raïssa, for her conscience was very sensitive to this evil, the evil of sidelining the question of truth—something she saw happening in both the realm of philosophy and of politics. What happens to the world when truth is not spoken? Because this is the same as asking: what happens to the world when we do not speak of God? This is a central question of her life, I think.

But with the end of the war, Charles de Gaulle named Jacques as French ambassador to the Holy See, the Maritains moved to Rome, and it was here in the Eternal City that had become the earthly center of Raïssa’s faith that she entered into her eternal rest in 1960.

Jacques and Raïssa Maritain near the end of her life, c. 1960.

So you can see the life as a whole, but what I want to do next is bring out a few different themes of her life and her writing—the themes that touched me deeply when I first encountered her life and that continue to affect me still, carving out space in my own heart for prayer and contemplation. Because I really think that she is one of these radiant lights set up in a dark place, and I think she can give us some direction for our souls.

The Holiness of Judaism

Isidor Kaufmann, “Friday Evening,” c. 1920.

And first I would like to point out the way that she absorbed the holiness of Judaism as a child and brought this holiness with her into the Catholic Church.

She absorbs this holiness at first—as all children do—simply on the level of embodiment, of the senses. She writes of the incredible beauty that simply characterized the devout observance of Jewish liturgical life: “Friday evening when the first star appeared, mother placed a lace kerchief over her hair, lighted the candles, said the Sabbath prayers, and no other fire might be lit until the first star appeared on Saturday evening.”⁵

We have also her memories of the synagogue: “And when the Torah, covered with velvet, embroidered and stiff with gold and silver, was carried aloft in procession, I was allowed to touch it with the tips of my fingers, and I would kiss my fingers afterwards.”⁶

But above all, the tremendous power and beauty of the Passover inscribed itself on her heart:

The liturgical supper was eaten at the first vespers; the table, gleaming with its shining cloth and silver candlesticks, was laid with the greatest care … Then came the climax of this sacred night: the passage of the Angel. … All the cups were filled with red wine, strong and sweet, the almost liturgical savor of which I have never rediscovered in any wine, even in the wines of France. … All the lights were extinguished, and in a silence heavy with adoration and fear, the Angel was given time for his passage.⁷

So there is in her childhood the quiet suffusion of liturgical beauty into the home and therefore into the soul, but then her grandparents were also living instantiations of Jewish holiness, a holiness nurtured by “the piety of the Hasidim, that Jewish mysticism which has its various aspects, sometimes leaning toward the intellect, sometimes towards the emotions,” rooted often in the Psalms.⁸

Her maternal grandparents, for instance, nurtured an entire spirituality of hospitality:

Often belated travelers knocked on their door in the middle of the night. My grandfather would then get up in great haste and awaken his wife as joyfully as if God himself had come to visit them, and the unknown guest would be received as well as their modest means allowed. Neither he nor his wife would ever permit a servant to carry out any of the duties of hospitality which they regarded as sacred.⁹

And then there was her paternal grandfather, who reached the age of 106 and who lived

like an ascetic. … He astonished us all by his mortifications; he ate only dry bread rubbed with a little onion and he drank only water. He slept in the courtyard, and indeed on the ground, until winter came; then, in the house he was willing only to occupy the vestibule, where he slept on a wooden chest. I do not remember that he ever spoke to me, except to read me marvelous stories from the Bible.¹⁰

And yet this world of beauty and prayer and asceticism was from time to time shattered by the enactment of pogroms, in which Christians would destroy property and lives, all the while carrying the processional cross aloft as they went.¹¹

A Jewish family in the aftermath of a pogrom. Russia, 1881.

Yet one further element of Jewish holiness must be noted, and that is learning as a form of piety. Even at the age of five, Raïssa recalls that her “heart almost burst with the desire to know.”¹² Only a very small quota of Jewish students were allowed into the schools, so “it was a real stroke of luck” that Raïssa was able to begin attending at the age of seven. She wrote:

My heart beat with an infinite hope. I was going to learn to read and I believed that all that was written was true. Truly a human soul must go through many an experience in order to lose this naive conviction, and to learn that one book only in the world is entirely true—and that is the Bible, inspired from above and shot through with the mystery of its origin. … concerning everything which had to do with school I felt emotions that were of a religious character.¹³

Maurycy Gottlieb, Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur, 1878.

Her family immediately recognized Raïssa’s incredible intellectual gifts, as did her teachers. Indeed, the schoolmistress praised her to such an extent that the other parents began to resent that a Jewish student was receiving so much attention. This brought home to her parents the danger that existed around every corner for Jews living in the Russian Empire. And seeking the safety and the continued education of their child, they did what so many vulnerable people continue to do even to this day—they immigrated.

Conversion

Specifically, in 1893, when Raïssa was only ten, they immigrated to France, but here, it must be admitted, learning and piety had totally split company, they had totally divorced, and it was this new fact of existence that brought about the agony of soul that instigated Raïssa’s conversion to Catholicism. For you must imagine this. Suddenly she is separated from the synagogue, from the holiness of her maternal and paternal grandparents. As her biographer Jean-Luc Barré wrote, “Already, all intellectual curiosity now appeared vain and could no longer fill her desire for truth and for ‘knowing what is.’ … this adolescent came gradually to the conclusion that God did not exist, but without deciding definitely, even praying in secret, ‘morning and evening,’ in an attempt to hold on to a faith that was fading away.”¹⁴

Perhaps a word should be said about the intellectual environment of France at this time, for Raïssa was to find in it the most arid Positivism, and this was especially true as she began to undertake studies at the Sorbonne. Her future husband Jacques described this atmosphere with the word “Scientism,” which “imposes on the intelligence the very law of materialism: those things alone are intelligible which are materially verifiable.”¹⁵ Raïssa herself wrote that what “was generally denied by the prevailing philosophy was the objectivity of our knowledge, our very ability to grasp the real. … I got out of my depth, and, being too weak to struggle against all these giants of science and philosophy or to defend the rightness of my deepest intuitions, I took refuge in sadness.”¹⁶

As Raïssa came to see much later, to abandon the search for truth in this metaphysical sense is to make way for a “moral nihilism” in which the only liturgy left to enact is “the worship of force.”¹⁷

Nevertheless, it was in this intellectual environment where she met Jacques, who was torn by an identical “metaphysical anguish,” and together they felt this despair to the very limit. They agreed that “if our nature was so unhappy as to possess only a pseudo-intelligence capable of everything but the truth … then we could neither think nor act with any dignity.”¹⁸ And yet in one another they had found the friendship that would be their lifelong vocation. Raïssa wrote, “it seemed to me that we had always been next to one another and that we would always be so.”¹⁹

Raïssa and Jacques around the time of their first meeting.

But it must be asked: what interrupted the despair of these two lovers in their early twenties, married in 1904? The light began to break through because of the philosophy of Henri Bergson—I’ll leave that for another time—but the light practically flooded in through the writings of Léon Bloy, for he revealed to them the true nature of their sadness. Of all his lines, perhaps the most famous comes from his novel The Woman Who Was Poor: “There is but one sadness, and that is for us not to be saints.”²⁰ Being cut off from a metaphysics of truth was not simply to intellectually starve; it was to undermine the very telos of human nature, which was to be ultimately united to the foundation of the real itself—united to God!

Léon Bloy, godfather to the Maritains.

And yet I think we also cannot underrate Bloy’s writings on Judaism, especially his book Salvation through the Jews. There he wrote: “We have even seen priests without number … fired at the hope of an imminent affray in which enough blood of Israel would be shed to make millions of dogs drunk,” and he added: was there not “some grave danger in a priestly heart’s thus begging for the extermination of a people”?²¹

All this must have left such an impression on the mind of one who could recall the cross lifted high, blessing the violence of the pogroms.

Given in these terms, conversion for Raïssa became not a question of self-erasure, of self-destruction, but she was to receive again all the holiness of Israel. Having struck up a friendship with this young couple, Bloy was to write to her: “the promises of God are without repentance and … in the end everything should belong to that Race which brought forth the Redeemer.”²²

For Jacques, the attraction to Bloy was the older man’s commitment to poverty. As Jacques wrote in 1906: “Christians have abandoned the poor—the poor among the nations: the Jews—and Poverty of soul: authentic Reason. They fill me with horror. Bloy is in the midst of the Christian people like a prophet.”²³

So Bloy became the godfather to this young couple ushered towards the baptismal font, there to regain the metaphysical fountainhead of all goodness, truth, and beauty.

The Ambiguities of Obedience

And yet would it be fair to say that this couple lost nothing of themselves? That in their conversion they sloughed off only the old Adam? That they were tempted to abandon nothing of their souls? You see, we cannot quite say this. As Raïssa was to admit some thirty years later, their “inexperienced docility” did indeed lead to confusion—to the surrender of parts of themselves that it would have been better not to surrender. I think this is the third theme I’d like to bring out: the ambiguities of obedience.

For as soon as they were within the Church, these two longed for nothing else but sanctity. And so they read St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Avila, and everywhere they heard of the importance of finding a skilled spiritual director. And here there was plenty of opportunity for naiveté to do its damage. For almost too quickly, they entirely forgot the anti-clericalism of their godfather—an anti-clericalism that was Catholic through and through, but an anti-clericalism nonetheless, one that expected from the priests a certain mediocrity, an inability to dwell “among those who suffer” since they are always rather seeking “to be consoled” by getting to a nicer parish.²⁴

Raïssa recalled the blissful rush of conversion and how this blotted so much out of the mind: “it seemed to us that all those were saints who should be saints—priests, religious. The warnings of our godfather, the severe judgement which he brought in all his books upon certain among them … all that was forgotten.”²⁵

Basically, they trusted people in habits and cassocks.

Fr. Humbert Clérissac, one of the Maritains’ first spiritual directors.

Ultimately the Maritains found the spiritual director they had been looking for in the Dominican Fr. Humbert Clérissac. He made a dramatic impression: “I admired his noble and ardent face with its strong, clear-cut features, the brow furrowed by wrinkles and crowned by a brush of gray hair, and the perfect folds his white Dominican robe made around him, making him resemble a personage in one of Fra Angelico’s paintings. The program he proposed was severe.”²⁶

It was Fr. Clérissac who first recommended the Summa of Aquinas to Raïssa. “Was not scholasticism, according to the reputation which had been given it, a tomb of subtleties fallen to dust?” Raïssa asked. But no, for “from the very first pages I understood the emptiness, the childishness of my fears. Everything, here, was freedom of spirit, purity of faith…”²⁷ She found in those pages a living reflection of the life of God, one that would feed her contemplation and prayer throughout her life. So at least this much must be said of Fr. Clérissac: he opened to them this doorway.

And yet, “Father Clérissac pitilessly mocked our democratic leanings and the socialistic ideas that remained dear to Jacques’ heart.”²⁸ The fact that he was successful in making Jacques feel shame about all of this is really quite remarkable when you consider that Jacques’s family had been stalwart supporters of republicanism—in the French sense of that word, i.e., denoting that form of government which sees power residing in the enfranchised people and not in a hereditary monarchy or an absolutist power. Indeed, as a young person having been introduced to socialist philosophy, Jacques had refused to eat with his family in the dining room, preferring to take his meals with the servants in back.

But under the influence of Fr. Clérissac, Jacques began to associate with the anti-democratic, xenophobic, and monarchist movement known as Action Française, which was spearheaded at the time by Charles Maurras. When you hear Raïssa talking about how the abandonment of the metaphysics of truth leads to the worship of force, she’s talking about him.

Maurras was one who gave voice to some people’s “disgust for the modern world” and who believed in developing a “violence in the service of order,” “the spiritual dangers of which we did not discern” Raïssa admits.²⁹

Indeed, while many hoped and prayed for Maurras’s conversion to Catholicism, his flirtations with the Church mostly had to do with the fact that he considered it a useful tool for promoting his politics of “anti-liberalism.”³⁰ It did not matter to him that the Church was Catholic—it mattered more that it evoked the mythos of the Roman Empire, that it was tied to the ideal of French monarchical rule. And from the Dreyfus Affair to the anti-Jewish laws of 1940 and beyond, Maurras dreamed of a France without Jews. How had Jacques Maritain come to have any sort of relation to such a man? Only later—after Pope Pius XI himself intervened to condemn the movement in 1926—did Jacques Maritain awake from his naïve slumber to recognize in all of this “a nationalistic idolatry.”³¹[31] It was a slumber for which he often reproached himself.

And yet, I think it also served as a sort of inoculation for all that came later. When in the 1930s and 40s the vast majority Catholic theologians had given up on democracy and turned to a nostalgia for absolutism, Jacques Maritain struck a solitary figure, developing a totally Catholic theology of democracy and of cooperation amidst philosophical pluralism, while also condemning Europe for its genocidal mania.³²

It was this Maritain—the Maritain of his books Integral Humanism and Christianity and Democracy—who became one of the Fathers of Vatican II.³³

So there is a line to be drawn, then, from the Judaism of Raïssa’s childhood, the writings of Bloy and the Maritains’s conversion, on the one hand, to the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, which was drafted in part by a student of Jacques Maritain and which decried “hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone”³⁴—a truly extraordinary about-face from the anti-Judaism that has often characterized the Christian Church. Raïssa is a very important figure in this development.

If there are Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, might we not regard Raïssa Maritain as one of its spiritual mothers?

Conclusions

So let us return to the question with which I started: why Raïssa? Certainly, when I first came across her story some twelve years ago, I recognized so much about myself. After all, my own first experiences of liturgy happened in a synagogue—the tabernacle doors opening to reveal the Torah scroll, the hands reaching to touch its velvet case: this first gesture illuminating for me the very nature of revelation.

And like Raïssa I had to experience the full bitterness of an intellectual world desiccated by its abandonment of truth. I remember so clearly the doubts that hounded me when I was 20 when I sustained myself on nothing but a diet of post-modern American literature: what if beauty is nothing but manipulation? What if there is no love but everything is power? And then like Raïssa, in the heart of the Church I found the wellspring of all beauty and all love, and I tasted it, and I realized that though I could never fully describe this love I had found, I knew I was not deceived to love this love.

But also, there was the fact that I was looking for a model of married holiness. It can feel sometimes in the Church that when we speak of the saints as a “great cloud of witnesses,” we really meant a cloud of male monastics. We are very grateful for the vocation of monasticism! But there are others. And here with the Maritains was a marriage that seemed to hint at the holy love I have found in my own: companionship, shared contemplation, the life of the mind and intellect meeting a fascinating and lively friend, a commitment to the fierce adventure of being faithful to the gentle beauty of this God-given world.

But today I admit to you that I find myself most moved by this final theme I have shared with you, the ambiguities of obedience. You see, in her memoir, Raïssa writes a very moving section titled “Concerning Spiritual Direction,” where she attempts to come to terms with the influence she and Jacques allowed Fr. Clérissac to have over their lives. Thinking through the way he confused politics and theology, she writes, “this element of a temporal order should never have been proposed by him in the context of his spiritual directions … Experience has shown us the point to which the direction of souls demands in the director the purest discrimination between those things which are God’s and those which are Caesar’s.”³⁵

Raïssa Maritain, c. 1935.

It is a dilemma I know only to well—and now, from both sides of the priestly collar, both wearing it and being on the receiving end of priestly ministrations. And it is part of the priesthood that I take very seriously—though how many errors I make along the way, God will have to judge. But when I am in the confessional, when I am in the pulpit, I am always posing the question to myself: am I teaching on “the order of grace, faith, theology, and perfection” or have I instead simply inserted something “only of human heritage,” of “prejudices … inclination, preference, taste”?³⁶

Even in the best scenarios, we should never forget that we are learning about God from creatures who at every point will show the limitations of creatures. We should see these limitations for what they are—and then transcend them by loving God above every creature.

What is Raïssa’s advice to us as people who receive spiritual direction, people who listen to sermons and who must see the clergy make TikToks and Reels? Her advice is at once very simple and very difficult: at every moment, we must honor the voice of our consciences.

It is true perhaps that at the beginning of our Christian life our conscience may be “rough-hewn or deficient” in many things, and yet, the conscience is there.³⁷ We should not cease listening to it simply because we are beginners. But from the very beginning, allow this conscience to have its judgement and its voice and its freedom. Do not be shamed into ignoring its pleas. Raïssa reminds us that “spiritual direction has for its object to teach us to form wisely, and not to elude, the judgement of conscience.”³⁸

Which is to say that one of the central roles of the spiritual director is to be the one who consistently asks, “Are you listening to your conscience?” The task is not to say, “No, no, no, ignore your conscience and listen to me.” The spiritual director goes before the conscience of another human being with loving reverence and fear.

And here again we see that Raïssa gives a premonition of the teaching of Vatican II. In the words of Gaudium et Spes: “Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths.”³⁹

Ceremonial opening of the Second Vatican Council; Oct. 11, 1962, in St. Peter's Basilica. (OSV News/KNA/Ernst Herb)

And then in Dignitatis Humanae: “In all his activity a man is bound to follow his conscience in order that he may come to God, the end and purpose of life”—basically, there is not situation in which you are excused from listening to the conscience, even when you are before the spiritual director, the priest. And then the document goes on: “It follows that he is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience. Nor, on the other hand, is he to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience, especially in matters religious.”⁴⁰

In both the writings of the Maritains and in the Vatican Council, we see this idea of spiritual liberty being foundational to our exercise of conscience.

So this is the question that I ask myself before I preach or teach: am I teaching merely some earthly political solution? Am I simply attempting to replicate in others my own psychological predispositions? A dangerous thing to do! Or am I helping to form the conscience according to the spiritual wisdom of the Church? Am I enabling the spiritual freedom of God’s people? Do I go before other people recognizing that their consciences are already active within them? And my job is to build them up with the wisdom of the Church. Am I helping to create that relationship of direct intimacy between the soul and God, an intimacy in which I, at a certain point, am no longer needed as a teacher and authority? At a certain point, the spiritual director disappears so that the soul can be alone before God.

All these questions are more and more important to me.

Perhaps at this point you will have your own questions that are pressing on your heart, so let me end by quoting one final time from Raïssa’s Journals:

Men do not really communicate with each other except through the medium of being or of one of its properties. If someone touches the true, like St. Thomas Aquinas, the contact is made. If someone touches the beautiful, like Beethoven or Bloy or Dostoïevsky, the contact is made. If someone touches the good and Love, like the Saints—the contact is made and souls communicate with each other. One exposes oneself to not being understood when one expresses oneself without first having touched these depths—then the contact is not made because being is not reached.⁴¹

What can we say? But from this day forward, let us speak to one another and to all creatures as Raïssa Maritain would have us speak: with words filled to the brim with truth and beauty and goodness and love.

1. This is a region that was known as “the Pale of Settlement,” an area in Russia where Jewish people were allowed permanent residency from 1791 to 1915. However, even within the Pale, Jews were often forbidden residency in a number of important cities.

2. Entry for 28 June 1917; see Raïssa Maritain, Raïssa’s Journal, ed. Jacques Maritain (Magi Books, Inc., 1974), 50.

3. Entry for 6 June 1918; see Maritain, Journal, 75.

4. Raïssa Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace: Memoirs, ed. Michael S. Sherwin, trans. Julie Kernan (St. Augustine’s Press, 2016), 1. Henceforth, cited as Memoirs.

5. Maritain, Memoirs, 10.

6. Maritain, Memoirs, 10.

7. Maritain, Memoirs, 10–11.

8. Maritain, Memoirs, 4.

9. Maritain, Memoirs, 5.

10. Maritain, Memoirs, 6.

11. Maritain, Memoirs, 5.

12. Maritain, Memoirs, 6.

13. Maritain, Memoirs, 7–8.

14. Jean-Luc Barré, Beggars for Heaven: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, trans. Bernard E. Doering (University of Notre Dame Pess, 2005), 27–28.

15. Jacques Maritain, Antimoderne (Paris: Éditions de la Revue des Jeunes, 1922), 78–79 qtd. R. Maritain, Memoirs, 46.

16. Maritain, Memoirs, 47.

17. Maritain, Memoirs, 51.

18. Maritain, Memoirs, 55.

19. Qtd. Barré, Beggars for Heaven: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, 59.

20. Léon Bloy, The Pilgrim of the Absolute, ed. Raïssa Maritain, trans. John Coleman and Harry Lorin Binsse (Cluny Media, 2017), 251.

21. Bloy, The Pilgrim of the Absolute, 201.

22. Barré, Beggars for Heaven: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, 70.

23. Barré, Beggars for Heaven: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, 73.

24. Bloy, The Pilgrim of the Absolute, 111.

25. Maritain, Memoirs, 160.

26. Maritain, Memoirs, 162.

27. Maritain, Memoirs, 168.

28. Maritain, Memoirs, 296.

29. Maritain, Memoirs, 295.

30. Maritain, Memoirs, 297.

31. Qtd. Maritain, Memoirs, 298.

32. For those interested in learning more about Jacques Maritain’s theology of democracy, see John McGreevy, “Jacques Maritain, Democratic Crisis, and the Promise and Peril of a Global Catholic History,” The Ushaw Lecture at the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, 13 May 2019. Available via SoundCloud and via Spotify.

33. Another great place to learn more: Richard Francis Crane’s article “How Jacques Maritain went from antisemite to Catholic champion of the Jewish people” from America Magazine.

34. Nostra Aetate 4.

35. Maritain, Memoirs, 301, 302.

36. Maritain, Memoirs, 302.

37. Maritain, Memoirs, 304.

38. Maritain, Memoirs, 304.

39. Gaudium et Spes 16.

40. Dignitatis Humanae 3.

41. Maritain, Journal, 51.