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Maritain and Mounier: A Secret Quarrel Over the Future of the Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

John Hellman
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Extract

The hesitancy of French Catholic intellectuals to engage in public quarrels, and speak ill of their dead, has led to the forgetting of arguments and divergences of great importance to the background of Vatican II. It has been widely assumed that France's two most influential Christian intellectuals of the mid-century, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, worked hand in glove to promote what one historian has called a common “French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World.”* In fact, however, letters and diaries only known after the two principals were dead, have revealed deep differences between the two men at a decisive point in the evolution of modern French intellectual life. Maritain's reservations about the left-wing Catholicism and ecumenism of his younger friends remain quite relevant in our own day. In fact Maritain had, and kept, serious reservations about the new kind of Catholicism which Mounier and his new review Esprit articulated in the early nineteen-thirties but kept them private largely because of the secret danger of a known ecclesiastical condemnation for Esprit.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , April 1980 , pp. 152 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1980

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References

* Cf. Amato, Joseph, Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World (University, Alabama, 1975).Google Scholar

1 “Entretiens VI,” 12 10 1932Google Scholar, Oeuvres de Mounier (Paris, 1963), IV:506Google Scholar; Maritain, to Mounier, , 10 1932Google Scholar, in Maritain/Mounier, 1929–1939, ed. Petit, Jacques (Paris, 1973), p. 54.Google Scholar

2 Maritain, to Mounier, , 27 10 1932Google Scholar, in Maritain/Mounier, pp. 55–57.Google Scholar

3 5 November 1932, ibid., pp. 61–62.

4 Maritain, to Mounier, , 8 11 1932Google Scholar, ibid., p. 63.

5 Mounier, to Maritain, , 5 11 1932Google Scholar, ibid., pp. 61–62.

6 “Entretiens V,” 5 11 1932Google Scholar, Oeuvres, IV:510.Google Scholar

7 Here Maritain mentioned Jacques de Monleon, Etienne Borne, and Olivier Lacombe as possibilities. Maritain, to Mounier, , 10 11 1932Google Scholar, Maritain/Mounier, pp. 66–68.Google Scholar

8 Mounier, to Maritain, , 11 11 1932Google Scholar, ibid., pp. 64–65.

9 “La misère l'espérance (1832–1932),” Esprit, no. 3 (12 1932), 483–92.Google Scholar

10 “Chronique de la vie privée,” ibid., pp. 475–77. Mounier noted the reception of a letter from a young man who had founded “a revolutionary order” on 20 October. This idea would persist in the Personalist movement. “Entretiens VI,” 20 10 1932Google Scholar, Oeuvres, IV:509.Google Scholar

11 “Les jeunes radicaux et nous,” Esprit no. 3 (12 1933), 493–95.Google Scholar

12 Mounier, to Izard, Georges, 20 12 1932 (unpublished)Google Scholar; Editor's note, Esprit, no. 174, 982. Chevalier, we must recall, was the son of an army officer and Firmly anti-German. Mounier wrote several letters to Chevalier in early 1933 in an effort to mollify him.

13 Mounier, to Izard, , 29 12 1932Google Scholar (unpublished); interview with the author (2 August 1973).

Lacroix was never a member of the Action Française but while he was a student in the Law Faculty at Lyon he was an enthusiastic reader of the conservative daily Echo de Paris and secretary of the local “Cercle Joseph de Maistre.”

14 Lacroix and Simon would later become prestigious and influential in their own right as prolific authors and, respectively, the chief philosophy and the chief literature critics of the great daily Le Monde. In November 1966 Simon was elected to Daniel-Rops's chair in the Académie Française.

15 “Religion et culture II,” Esprit no. 4 (01 1934), 523–45.Google Scholar

16 More recently a conception close to Maritain's idea has been eloquently reaffirmed by Ellul, Jacques, Trahison de l'Occident (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar. Ellul, working with Esprit and Ordre Nouveau, was an interested observer at the original debate. His thought, particularly influential in North America, was strongly influenced by the Esprit milieu. (Ellul to the author, 30 January 1976.)

17 Cf. Maritain, to Mounier, , 28 12 1932Google Scholar; “1932,” 6 February 1933, in Maritain/Mounier, pp. 69; 74–75.Google Scholar

18 Maritain, to Mounier, , 6 03 1933Google Scholar, ibid., pp. 75–76. Maritain sent Mounier, for the French side, an article from the Montréal daily Le Devoir of “a young Canadian lawyer on Capitalism”; for the English side he called Mounier's attention to a young writer called Morley Callaghan.

By the eve of World War II Mounier tended to think of the liberal Catholic review Commonweal, published in New York, as a sort of American Esprit. In 1950, the year of Mounier's death, a French Canadian “Esprit,” Cité libre, was founded by a young professor of law, Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, and his friends, while that same year Cross Currents began introducing new European religious thought to Catholics of the United States with a long essay from its chief maitre: Emmanuel Mounier.

19 Dandieu, A., “Le travail contre l'homme,” Esprit no. 10 (07 1933), 571.Google Scholar

20 In the same letter Mounier asked Izard to solicit an article on Hitler. This would hardly assuage Maritain, either. Mounier, to Izard, , “Friday,” 04 1933 (unpublished).Google Scholar

21 In Maritain/Mounier, pp. 78–81.Google Scholar

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23 Mounier recorded these themes, passed on to him by Father Plaquevent, in “Entretiens VII,” 16 05 1933 (unpublished).Google Scholar

24 Cf. Plaquevent, to Mounier, , 02, 1932Google Scholar: Mounier, to Plaquevent, , 2 03 1932, 24 01 1933 (Archives of the Archdiocese of Paris).Google Scholar

25 Coquelle-Viance was a prominent corporatist, former partner of Georges Valois, and apparently influential in such matters. He defended Esprit and La Croix.

26 24 May 1933, in Maritain/Mounier, p. 86.Google Scholar

27 “Entretiens VII,” 23 05 1933Google Scholar, Oeuvres, IV:531.Google Scholar

28 Minutes, Conseil de Vigilance de l'Archidiocese de Paris, 23 May 1933.

29 Maritain, to Mounier, , 25 05 1933, 29 05 1933, 7 06 1933Google Scholar, in Maritain/Mounier, pp. 87–88; 91–92.Google Scholar

30 Mounier, to Leclercq, Paulette, 7 06 1933Google Scholar, Oeuvres, IV:532.Google Scholar

31 Canon Dupin to Excellence Luigi Maglioni, 13 June 1933 (Archives of the Archdiocese of Paris).

32 “Cinquante Mille,” Esprit no. 8 (05 1933), 147Google Scholar; “Entretiens VII,” 30 06 1933Google Scholar, in Oeuvres, IV:533Google Scholar; Mounier, to Maritain, , 30 06 1933Google Scholar, Maritain/Mounier, pp. 94–95.Google Scholar