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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Master Spirit

page 399

A Master Spirit

The text of this new edition of Maritain’s magnum opus is a translation from the French by Father Gerald B. Phelan of Toronto and five other companions. It has the complete approval of the author and is now the only authoritative English version in print. The master work of the finest Catholic mind of our time could hardly be summarised or introduced by something less than a long critical essay. Yet one is bound to record certain impressions. The Degrees of Knowledge constitutes an examination, in the light of Thomist philosophy, of modern science, idealist philosophy, metaphysical knowledge, and the mystical experience of St Augustine and St John of the Cross. This examination is sufficiently broad and humane to bring the book completely out of the special class of seminary textbooks. A very brief and amputated quotation may serve to illustrate the difference between Maritain’s approach to the darkest problems of our time and that of (let us say) Bishop Sheen –

. . . More cynical and brutal than the education by omission with which Western liberalism has stifled childhood, a painstaking, pedagogical surgery is operating on souls to extirpate from them the image of God. And despite everything, this image will be reborn: a poor child who believes he is an atheist, if he truly loves what he takes to be the face of goodness, has turned to God without knowing it. It is with deep respect that we speak here of the Russian people and the spiritual tragedy in which it is involved

. . . Do they (the men of our time) understand what spiritual density, what deep ascetic violence, Marxism and hatred of a world held to be accursed by history, must have assumed in the invisible universe of a Lenin’s heart, in order to burst forth so tellingly? God has warned us that he does not put up with lukewarmness . . .

Slowly, painfully, a trained or untrained mind can absorb the complex truths that Maritain proposes. There is no question of potted knowledge. To read Maritain seriously is to enter into the night of the intellect, to follow the humblest of living guides, an astronomer who reveals new galaxies, both the ordered systems of philosophy, and those remoter suns that contain the crucified wisdom of the Fathers and mystics. It is a most profound book, a work of controlled passion – a great river moving between strong banks – in Milton’s phrase, the life-blood of a master spirit.

1959 (204)