Nature, Grace, and Metaphysical Experience, or “Why the World Needs New Maritains”
[The following is the text of my keynote lecture delivered at the 48th annual meeting of the American Maritain Association in Fort Myers, Florida: April 3–5, 2025.]
Jacques Maritain was, without question, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. His importance resides in his own appropriation of the Thomist tradition. He was among the last of a great many remarkable philosophers and theologians who deeply assimilated the principles and wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas. Even a cursory reading of Maritain’s most significant writings reveals a man who enjoyed knowledge beyond mere awareness or familiarity with the linchpins of perennial philosophy. He was a man “fully in possession.” Even when one may disagree with Maritain on this or that topic (or regret this or that of his emphases within a given topic), one is never able to forget that his was a potent mind that had been profoundly shaped by the principles that inform Thomism.
In brief, Maritain was a real, authentic, and exemplary Thomist. A significant figure for the ages. My respect and esteem for Maritain increases with each passing year.
Maritain’s significance extends beyond his subjective assimilation of Thomistic principles, however. His was not merely an ethereal intellectual project. Maritain, in this regard also, exhibits and exemplifies true and authentic Thomism. He was, much like Thomas Aquinas himself and the interpreters who followed him, un penseur engagé. Maritain was engaged in the questions, concerns, and needs of the human person at all times.
Human nature does not undergo essential revision. Because of the wisdom and goodness of God’s eternal law, the fundamental inclinations, needs, and perfective objects of the human person do not change. Human persons always need the truth. They always need goodness. God is inextricably the end of the human person—both in the order of nature and in the order of grace. The practical—and because practical, also concrete—extension of speculative contemplation is also at the forefront of Maritain’s interests and endeavors. The cohesion of the transcendentals was one of Maritain’s deepest convictions.1 Consequently, being is foundational and wonderfully unavoidable.2 Truth is good, and the goodness of truth for human persons is not a foreign accretion upon the contemplative’s identity and proper act.3 Knowledge of being and the conformity of truth is good—for the human agent and for human activity. Thus, the relevance of being, truth, and goodness across the distinction between first act and second act permeates and inspires all that Maritain wrote. In a word, readers of Maritain cannot help but recognize—and indeed, even at times to feel—a profound truth: truth, itself, matters. Truth matters eternally (God, the eternal law, the heights of contemplation). It matters at the level of contingency—with regard to those beings who are not esse ipsum per se subsistens and whose esse bears the limitations of really distinct essentia. Being, truth, and goodness matter even here—within and “between” the real distinction between act and potency.
Maritain’s intellectual engagement extended even through the order of contingent natures to the concrete natures of persons, both human and angelic. With regard to concrete and individual human persons, Maritain—from his earliest publications—showed himself to be a penetrating and insightful observer.4 Keenly aware of the consequences of ideas, for all the reasons already mentioned, Maritain consistently provides almost unparalleled diagnosis and prognosis of the intellectual and consequently spiritual ailments of his philosophical antecedents and colleagues. Here, of course, we can think particularly of his books, The Three Reformers (1925), The Dream of Descartes (1932), as well as his engagements with Blondel, Bergson, and ultimately his The Peasant of the Garonne (1966).5 In each of these books (and throughout his life) Maritain entered into the complexities of individuals and existential contingencies—their intuitions, their aspirations, their frustrations. And it is here that we can see confirmed the integrity of our consideration of Maritain thus far: Maritain pursued the truth with dogged and sanctified determination, because the truth matters—and the truth is relevant on all levels of being and for all persons. Only the truth has grace. And truth is something that all people are inclined to, need, and want—no matter what disorders, sins, privations they may suffer.6 Maritain never despaired before distance from or resistance to the truth in others. The truth inherently draws rational creatures. Always.
I say all of this—things perhaps that many of us already recognize and most of us celebrate—for a specific point: we need in the 21st century what Maritain had and what he did in the 20th century. This is why I believe that the American Maritain Association (AMA) remains very important today—indeed, desperately needed today.
Members of the AMA recognize the unique gifts of Maritain and the precious contributions he made to his time. Our time, however, is evidently different. The challenges, questions, and problems of the 21st century are downstream from those of Maritain’s epoch. Thus, today, we do not need an exact replication of Maritain. We need new Maritains who can, like Jacques (1) subjectively assimilate perennial philosophy in a profound, principial way, and (2) engage the culture in the things on the topics that matter the most. Maritain left something akin to an example that we can follow, certainly. But the formality of wisdom that he assimilated must be deployed today with regard to the unique and concrete questions of the day. The hylomorphic union of perennial wisdom (form) and contemporary concerns (matter) will look different, perhaps, than that of previous generations of Thomists—even while retaining certain specific similarities. Again, we need new Maritains.
Contemporary Interests and Scholastic Method: Why Mysticism Needs Scholasticism
And it is here that I would propose the necessity of the rigorous scholasticism that Jacques Maritain assimilated in relation to the question of mysticism. Surprisingly, perhaps, I posit that Maritain’s interest in mysticism—both supernatural and natural—can serve two key purposes: (1) mysticism is one of the ever-growing fascinations of the 21st century human person, and (2) mysticism demands scholasticism.
The first point serves as both a point of continuity with the legacy of Jacques Maritain—something he explored, wrote about, and developed his thought on—as well as something that the ever-increasingly secular person finds not just interesting, but even, some might say, consuming. In brief, the topic of mysticism is central among things that contemporary persons overtly pursue, and that Thomas, the Thomists, and Jacques Maritain also pursued. Mysticism is something like a material principle of continuity that can serve as a common point of interest and consideration. Otherwise expressed, mysticism is something that is both within the Thomistic circle, so to speak, as well as outside of the Thomistic circle—in some at times very peculiar, if not troubling, ways.
If our first point about mysticism, then, is in reference to a material principle of continuity, our second point—that mysticism requires scholasticism—is evidently about a formal principle of discontinuity with the contemporary moment. What do I mean? It is not a controversial thing to observe that the intellectual stock of Thomas Aquinas has dramatically increased in the last 40 or so years. Today, more and more graduate students—and more and more academic institutions—are studying and writing about Thomas Aquinas. But there is an important aspect of the present interest in Thomas Aquinas that senior scholars can remember: it was not always like this.
More than a few graduate students—50, 40, and even in some cases 30 years ago— found it difficult to focus on the thought of Thomas Aquinas (even at Catholic institutions). Admittedly, some faculties encouraged the study of Thomas Aquinas during these periods, but more than a few did not. And, frequently, graduate students were forced to circumvent these challenges by writing on Thomas Aquinas in comparison with other figures.
Things are different now. Thomas Aquinas is presently counted among those authors whom one can study with general academic support and approbation. This is good news. But the question can be asked: is it good enough news?
In comparison with the example and legacy of Jacques Maritain, one might conclude that the mere approbation of the text of Aquinas is not enough. A wise man does not live and publish by corpusthomisticum.com alone. And Maritain certainly assimilated more than familiarity with—or even mastery of—the literae Thomae. Maritain assimilated something deeper: the principles that underlie Aquinas’s writings. These principles are the foundation for Thomistic scholasticism and for the individual Thomist’s pursuit of (and personal conformity to) the truth. In other words, a textualism—in which the text is the end of the contemplative act—is not what Maritain was about, and it is not what made Maritain such an effective thinker. Thomas is not the end of the Thomists’ inquiry. And because Thomas is not the end, Thomas is perennially valuable for those who seek to know the truth.
In light of these two convictions, let us then turn our attention to the topic of mysticism directly. First, with regard to our contemporary moment, mysticism remains a topic of great interest. Many people describe themselves as being “spiritual but not religious.”7 This is a very common self-description. Its very formulation is complex, however. We note that this four-word phrase is both an affirmation and a negation. Positively, this phrase affirms a spiritual center. It points to a characteristic of the human person. Beyond a mere affirmation, however, it also includes a negation. A denial. Spiritual, yes. Religious, no. The felt need to deny religiosity while simultaneously affirming spirituality elicits interest. Given the hylomorphic nature of the human person, the distinction between the spiritual and the religious is possible but not automatic. Such a difference requires assertion, deliberation.
If the spiritual and the religious have a prior and inherent connection or association, then the divisive task is a difficult one. Any distinction posed between the spiritual and the religious in this scenario would be an imposed distinction—even a violent one. The principle of distinction would lie outside of the shared ratio of the notions of both spirituality and religion. Thus a specific difference would have to be added to the spiritual-religious ratio in order to divide the them into two. In other words, the contemporary project of promoting spirituality without religion is the opposite of a simplifying transcendental project. Dialectically framed and negatively executed—this project is preeminently complex.
Along with the simultaneous contemporary affirmation of spirituality and the negation of religiosity, there is additionally an associated appreciation of the mystical and the metaphysical. Of course, “mystical” and “metaphysical” do not mean precisely the same things in the lexicon of modernity as they do in that of classical thought. The modern uses of the words—evidenced by the type of volumes commonly found in (the almost extinct phenomenon of) bookstores called “metaphysics”—tend to be associated with New Age aspirations and practices.
Nonetheless, perhaps the mystical and the metaphysical are not completely equivocal. The mystical and the metaphysical—for both the New Age and for the Middle Ages—carry connotations of transcendence. Some type of inclination, orientation, and entelechy movement upward—these all characterize the fundamental contours of modern and classical mysticism. Admittedly, most people today are not really interested in the relation between metaphysics and mysticism. But some people are, including intellectuals of increasing influence and standing.
On the final epilogue page of the 2021 two-volume book, The Matter with Things, Oxford professor Iain McGilchrist writes, “Towards the end of his life Einstein was asked if he had any regrets. Reportedly he replied: ‘I wish I had read more of the mystics earlier in my life.’”8 This striking anecdote from the famous Swiss physicist immediately follows an equally striking statement by McGilchrist. “It is dogma we must avoid at all costs. Dogma is the besetting sin of the age.”9 Of course McGilchrist does not have Catholic dogma exclusively (or, perhaps, even specifically) in mind. Rather all dogma—as perhaps the best expression of what he calls “the left hemisphere’s take on the world”—receives his opprobrium.10 The human quest to know the self is explained in lengthy fashion in this book, and McGilchrist proposes that a left-brained, as opposed to a right-brained way of viewing the world, lies at the heart of society and the human problem.11
The final chapter of two-volume work is titled “The Sense of the Sacred” and it proposes a form of panentheism as perhaps the most effective way of overcoming the transcendent-imminent dialectic and pantheistic-atheistic excesses. Interestingly, however, McGilchrist does not reject religion in all senses. Indeed, an a-religious spirituality would be too individualistic and isolationistic to satisfy the deepest longings of the human person, the universe, and God. (Relation, after all, is at the heart of his proposal—a proposal that culminates in process theology.) Religious traditions, he suggests, have a value for relational cohesion. And their value is directly proportional to their abstraction (or rather liberation) from dogmatic claims.12
Jacques Maritain had a different approach to the sense of the sacred, but it was a prominent theme in his thought. Specifically, he explains the dynamics of mysticism throughout his writings. His magnum opus, The Degrees of Knowledge, culminates in mysticism. Arguably, his early works about Rousseau, Descartes, and Luther diagnose the errors around the mystical implications of their thought. In many ways, Maritain was a metaphysician because he aspired to be a mystic—even while recognizing the radical distinction between metaphysics and mysticism.
A mystical-movement aspires to something beyond the ordinary. Some attempts at mysticism contextualize this aspiration with the domain of nature. The Christian, of course, regards the mystical as lying beyond the order of nature. Nonetheless, both accounts of mysticism point to something that lies beyond normal, regular, and unreflective manners of human existence.
It is at this point that we highlight resonance between Maritain’s mystical aspirations and the spiritual aspirations of the contemporary human person. The contemporary person and Maritain search for the same experience. They all desire to get out of themselves. This is a shared, perhaps universal, desire. (One could even, maybe, locate this desire within the highest inclination of the natural law.) In an ambiguous sense, then, Maritain and the contemporary person share a goal. Transcendence.
There are profound differences between them, however. The precise potencies and the specific objectivity of the end are different. This raises an interesting question. How is it that there can be an admittedly similar proportion between the mysticism of the moderns and that of Maritain? These two conceptions of the mystical life appear to have similarities in a way abstracted from the potencies of nature and the finality of grace. This is a paradox. Strictly speaking, of course, it is impossible for a created formality to subsist independently from an end and from all potency. Potencies receive and limit the formal and the active principles. Potencies are subjectively significant for the specification of what shape, perfection, and act assume. Potencies receive and limit act.
This is why Maritain emphasized the distinction between the three forms of wisdom—all terminating in God. We recall that the first form of wisdom is metaphysical wisdom—a wisdom residing entirely within the order of nature and consisting of the movement from sense experience to the divine via analogy. Such metaphysical wisdom does terminate in God—but God in light of the creaturely relation to God, with all of the limitations (i.e., potency) that contingency entails.
The second sapiential formality is that of the scientia of sacred theology. This form of wisdom straddles, as it were, the natural and the supernatural. Sacred theology is the science and wisdom of faith. Thus its proper object and objective is God—and supernaturally so. God’s own inner life—supernatural mystery—stands at the origin of this sacred discipline. Nonetheless, sacred theology—the science of fides quaerens intellectum—is still a discursive science. In this respect, it shares similarities with metaphysics and reflects the contingent (potency-limited) nature of human operation and habitus. Nonetheless, the real disciplinary distinction between metaphysics and sacred theology is never overcome or compromised—and precisely because of this distinction metaphysics can instrumentally serve the sacra doctrina.
The third and highest form of wisdom, of course, is that of mystical wisdom: mystical experience, “suffering divine things.” In this wisdom, sanctifying grace and the indwelling of the Most Holy Trinity stand as absolute supernatural principles that render the rational soul effectively connatural to God as object. God as supernatural and imminent object of the rational soul reveals the contingency of human nature as not only limited by potency, but by potency that is obediential to the divine—even experimentally so. Thus, this union of mystical wisdom cuts through any pantheistic or panentheistic errors. The real and essential distinction between God and the creature is maintained. Nonetheless, through this divine objectivity that theologically activates the potencies—now seen as supernaturally obediential—the creature is brought into effective connatural union with God that lacks space and distance (even on the side of the creature). This is why Martian emphasizes—along with the tradition—that eternal life begins here and now. God is present to the soul supra-humanly and connaturally—exceeding the natural principles and categories of human nature.
In sum: metaphysical, theological, and mystical wisdom are all really distinct from each other even while they all terminate in God and activate the potencies of human nature.
Maritain: Thomistic Analysis of the Dynamics of “Spiritual but Not Religious”
Nonetheless, none of these wisdoms exactly maps on to the interests and intuitions of the-spiritual-but-not-religious human person. The absence of grace and the theological virtues from the list of priorities of the contemporary aspiring mystic excludes limits the possibilities of these aspiring mystics. These absences certainly excludes them from not only Christian mystical wisdom and experience but also from properly theological wisdom.
Reflection on modern spiritual intuitions also reveals that they do not fully or perfectly map on to metaphysical wisdom either. Given the remnants of the Enlightenment, Modernity, and Postmodernity, the self-conscious attention of the contemporary person is not upon being or its first and ultimate principles. Rather, the primary focus of the contemporary person is upon the self. Specifically, there is a preoccupation today upon the transcendental meaning and capacities of the human person in abstraction from God as a formal object (or even natural objective or end).
Thus, the possibility of a natural-mystical contemplation comes to the fore—something that Maritain (in Garrigou-Lagrange) considered.13 Of course, we know that Maritain rightly said that “a mystical contemplation (i.e., an authentic one) in the natural order is a contradiction in terms.”14 Human persons do not (nor can they) naturally experience or suffer divine things. The fundamental distinction between nature and grace demands this conclusion. And yet, Maritain did explore “The Natural Mystical Experience and the Void”—concluding to a kind of natural mystical experience.15 This type of natural mystical experience, if valid, would proceed from an intellectual, natural connaturality rather than an affective, supernatural connaturality.
As Thomas Aquinas explains, we know the soul only in light of the operations of the soul. There is no innate and immediate knowledge of the soul by the soul. The soul, as principle of the acts of knowing and loving, is only recognized as such upon reflection on these acts. The an sit? scientific question of the soul as subject can be answered in light of these operations. The soul exists. A full quid sit exploration of the soul, however, is only indirect. We do not directly recognize or know the soul’s essence. There is not an immediate experiential knowledge of the soul’s essence.
Nonetheless, Maritain does think that it is possible to purify our knowledge of the complexity associated with operational self-reflection through which the soul’s existence can be recognized. In brief, this is a movement through operational acts to substantial act-existence. Maritain says, “Risking everything to gain everything, and thanks to assiduous exercise reversing the ordinary course of mental activity, the soul empties itself absolutely of every specific operation and of all multiplicity, and knows negatively by means of the void and the annihilation of every act and every object of thought coming from outside—the soul knows negatively—but nakedly, without veils—that metaphysical marvel, that absolute, that perfection of every perfection, which is to exist, which is the soul’s own substantial existence.”16 In other words, the substantial existence of the soul is known precisely as that which is unknown—inexpressible by concepts.
This experience is not metaphysical, but it is quasi-mystical. It is not properly metaphysical because of the metaphysical distinction between essence and existence—and the fact that the soul’s essence is still elusive. Thus, the mystic here knows in an indistinct manner—through knowing the substantial existence of the soul—“both this same existence proper to the soul and existence in its metaphysical amplitude and the sources of existence.”17 Thus, indirectly, through the soul’s substantial yet not absolute existence, God’s absolute existence as cause of the soul is encountered. Here, intellectually, the mystery of God is not “suffered” (i.e., affective connaturality) but rather the substantial being of the soul itself. Maritain explains that this form of analysis arises when one considers intellectual connaturality along with the affective connaturality of properly supernatural mystical experience. Through intellectual connaturality with the soul’s substantial being in the soul’s singularity and particularity, one is open to the divine being—esse ipsum per se subsistens. Natural mystical experience, thus, is something like a gateway to metaphysical experience and wisdom.
Here we can recognize Maritain’s intriguing and rigorous engagement with a topic that is of interest and relevance to the contemporary moment. The rigor of Maritain’s engagement is evident in his invocation of the authentic principles of Thomas Aquinas in a way that extends beyond specific questions that Thomas Aquinas himself wrote about. Maritain is able to explore the possibilities of natural mysticism because he is a metaphysician—because he is not just a student of Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics but a practitioner of the natural “divine” science.
Admittedly, Maritain’s words are neither last nor final. (Maritain would no doubt agree.) Even if we may remain not fully persuaded by his account of natural mysticism, we can recognize that any hesitancy before his proposal must have metaphysical motivation and requires metaphysical articulation. This is why I suggested earlier that mysticism demands scholasticism. Scholasticism here is not an historically contingent expression or method of philosophy or sacred theology. Rather, scholasticism represents a principle-based reflection upon the ultimate questions of reality (terminating necessarily in God) that avoids the speculative confusion often characterizing other attempts to interpret and foster mysticism.
Maritain was a blessing to the 20th century—in a wide variety of contexts and arenas. The 21st century has questions and arenas too. But neither Maritain nor Thomas Aquinas are enough—nor have they ever been enough—for the real, existential issues that transcend time and place. Principles transcend time, discipline, and styles of writing. Consequently, because Maritain assimilated the “most first of principles,” he was able to speak wisely to the questions of his day.
May we likewise assimilate the first of principles of reality and consider them vis-à-vis our own day—for human healing, happiness, and even salvation.
See for example Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Cornelia N. Borgerhoff (Albany, NY: Magi Books, Inc., 1990), 28–33; Jacques Maritain, Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 224–26.↩︎
See Jacques Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945).↩︎
See Jacque and Raïssa Maritain, Liturgy and Contemplation, trans. Joseph W. Evans (New York: P. J. Kennedy and Sons, 1960).↩︎
Maritain considered the nature of personhood throughout his career. For an early work, see the chapter on Martin Luther in Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, trans. (New York: Charle Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 3–50 (especially the section titled: “The Individual and the Person,” 14–28).↩︎
The parenthetical dates correspond to the original publication of these works in French. For an example of his engagement with Blondel, see his An Essay on Christian Philosophy, trans. Edward H. Flannery (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955). Maritain considered Bergson often throughout his life. See especially Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. Mabelle L. Andison in collaboration with J. Gordon Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955).↩︎
For a profound and moving reflection on an instance of Maritain’s engagement with human suffering and disorder, see “Thomistic Moral Guidance: An Illustration from the Maritains,” in Romanus Cessario, O.P., Theology and Sanctity, ed. Cajetan Cuddy, O.P. (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2014), 214–35.↩︎
For the beginning of a recent academic study of this phenomenon, see Michael Horton, Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” in Antiquity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2024). This book is the first in a three-volume series.↩︎
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmasking of the World, vol. 2 (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), 1333.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
“Dogma is the besetting sin of the age; and if one wanted one it would be hard to find a better expression of the left hemisphere’s take on the world than dogma” (ibid.).↩︎
McGilchrist’s point is not to say that the left hemisphere is objectively evil and the right hemisphere objectively good. Rather, that the human person requires both. For a further consideration of the foundations of McGilchrist’s theory, see Daniel De Haan, “McGilchrist’s Hemispheric Homunculi,” Religion, Brain & Behavior 9, no. 4 (2019): 368–79.↩︎
McGilchrist find the sentiment “spiritual but not religious” attractive but not fully satisfying: “Is it enough to be ‘spiritual, but not religious’? That it is hard to know what such a thing means or entails may indeed represent one of its attractions, and I understand only too well why conventional religion is hard to accept for many people these days. I share many of these feelings. But the one feeling that I don’t share is the idea that I can’t learn anything from a tradition; that my limited rationalising [sic] on the basis of my limited experience in one time and place on the planet I enough. Indeed even such a belief is an outcome of a culture—just one that is in meltdown” (Matter with Things, vol. 2, 1291).↩︎
See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., “Prémystique naturelle et mystique surnaturelle,” Études carmélitaines 18, no. 2 (1933): 51–77. For more on Garrigou’s involvement in these reflections, see Frédéric Blondeau, “Philosophie et mystique chez Maritain,” Le Philosophoire 49 (2018): 137–50.↩︎
Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, 287.↩︎
See Jacques Maritain, Redeeming the Time (London: The Centenary Press, 1943), 225–55. For more on Maritain’s account of natural mysticism, see J. L. A. West, “The Possibility of Natural Mystical Experience: The Evolution of Jacques Maritain’s Position,” Philosophy, Culture, and Traditions 8 (2012): 123–34; and Henry Donneaud, O.P., “La genèse du concept de mystique naturelle chez Jacques Maritain,” in Maritain et la mystique, ed. Philippe-Marie Margelidon (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2020), 83–129.↩︎
Maritain, Redeeming the Time, 241–42. Emphasis original.↩︎
Maritain, Redeeming the Time, 246.↩︎
