Medieval Man

Maritain was a major drafter of the Satanic, anti-God, anti-Christian Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even though he began as a Maurassian Integriste.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Jacques Maritain

The whole theological thought of the Middle Ages was dominated by St. Augustine, especially by the positions taken by Augustine in opposition to Pelagius. And in this the Middle Ages were purely and simply Catholic and Christian.

For mediaeval thought (and in this it only showed that it was Christian), man was not simply an animal endowed with reason, according to the famous Aristotelian definition, which one can truly regard as a definition “naturally Catholic”—and this commonplace concerning human nature already goes very far, for, making of man a spirit by the principal part of him, it shows that he must have superhuman aspirations; but it also shows, since this spirit is the spirit of an animal, that it must be the weakest of spirits, and that in fact man will live most often not in the spirit but in the senses.

For mediaeval thought, man was also a person; and one must remark that this notion of person is a notion, if I may so speak, of Christian index, since it was disengaged and clarified thanks to theology. A person is a universe of spiritual nature endowed with freedom of choice and constituting to this extent a whole which is independent in face of the world—neither nature nor the State can lay prey to this universe without its permission. And God himself, who is and acts within, acts there in a particular manner and with a particularly exquisite delicacy, which shows the value He sets on it: He respects its freedom, at the heart of which He nevertheless lives; He solicits it, He never forces it.

And moreover, in his concrete and historical existence, man, for mediaeval thought, is not a simply natural being.

He is a dislocated being, wounded—by the devil who wounds him with concupiscence, by God who wounds him with love. On the one hand, he bears the heritage of original sin; he is born divested of the gifts of grace, and not, doubtless, substantially corrupted, but wounded in his nature. On the other hand, he is made for a supernatural end: to see God as God sees himself, he is made to attain to the very life of God; he is traversed by the solicitations of actual grace, and if he does not oppose to God his power of refusal, he bears within him even here below the properly divine life of sanctifying grace and its gifts.

Existentially considered, one can therefore say that man is at once a natural and a supernatural being.

Such is, in a general manner, the Christian conception of man; but what is important for us to note is the special character that this conception had taken on in mediaeval thought as such, considered as a historical moment. Let us say that these primarily theological knowledges sufficed for the Middle Ages. They enveloped a very powerful psychology, but not in the modern sense of the word: for it was from the point of view of God that all things were regarded then. The natural mysteries of man were not scrutinized for themselves by a scientific and experimental knowledge. In short, the Middle Ages were just the opposite of a reflex age: a sort of fear or metaphysical modesty, and also a predominant concern to see things and to contemplate being, and to take the measures of the world, kept the gaze of mediaeval man turned away from himself. This characteristic we shall find everywhere.

If it is a question now, no longer of the anthropological problem, but of the theological problem of grace and freedom, here again we must distinguish that which belongs to Christian thought in general and as such, and that which characterizes in a particular manner the thought of the Middle Ages.

The whole theological thought of the Middle Ages was dominated by St. Augustine, especially by the positions taken by Augustine in opposition to Pelagius. And in this the Middle Ages were purely and simply Catholic and Christian.

When they affirmed at once the full gratuitousness, the sovereign liberty, the efficacy of divine grace, and the reality of human free will; when they professed that God has the first initiative of all good, that He gives both the will and the execution, that in crowning our merits He crowns His own gifts, that man cannot save himself by himself alone, nor begin by himself alone the work of his salvation, nor prepare himself for it by himself alone, and that by himself alone he can do only evil and error—and that nevertheless he is free when he acts under the divine grace; and that, interiorly vivified by it, he freely posits good and meritorious acts; and that he is alone responsible for the evil that he does; and that his freedom confers on him in the world a role and initiatives of an unimaginable importance; and that God, who has created him without him, does not save him without him—well then, when the Middle Ages professed this conception of the mystery of grace and freedom, it was purely and simply the orthodox Christian and Catholic conception that it professed. At the highest point of mediaeval thought, St. Thomas Aquinas elaborated theologically the solutions that St. Augustine had discerned in his great contemplative intuitions.

But it is not difficult nevertheless to find here again the particular note of this age of Christian civilization, the note of which I was just speaking apropos the anthropological problem, namely, this absence of the deliberately reflexive glance of the creature on itself.

The Middle Ages kept its eyes fixed on the luminous points which St. Augustine revealed in the mystery of grace and liberty, and which concerned the divine depths of this mystery. The vast regions of shadow which remained, and which concerned the created and human depths of this mystery, in particular all that which relates to the divine permission of the evil act and to the engendering of evil by the creature, as also to the meaning and proper value, I say in the philosophical and theological order itself, of the temporal and “profane” activity of the human being—the Middle Ages laid down forcefully, on the threshold of these regions, the principles of solution; they entered but little into the obscurities and the problems here, they let much of the terrain lie fallow and left a whole problematic unexplored.

The result was that certain parasitic representations, taking the place of the more elaborate solutions which were lacking, were able in this domain to superimpose a particular and momentary imprint on the eternally Christian conceptions of which I was speaking just now. I am thinking of a certain too facilely pessimistic and dramatic imagery concerning fallen human nature, and of a certain too simple and too summary image of the divine election and of the comportment, if I may so speak, of the divine personality vis-à-vis created destinies. I am thinking of a certain theological inhumanity of which mediaeval Catholicism—while in other respects maintaining within the limits of orthodoxy these deficient elements that by themselves asked (one has seen this well from subsequent events) only to become aberrant—was naturally and constantly tempted to seek a justification in the less sound parts of the Augustinian synthesis. St. Thomas put everything in order again, but too late for mediaeval thought to be able to profit from his principles and bring them to fruition.

It would be absurd to pretend that in the Middle Ages the prise de conscience of the creature by itself was not accomplished implicitly in the very movement of metaphysical or theological thought toward being and toward God, or of poetical and artistic thought toward the work to be created. But it was on the side of a deliberately and expressly reflexive scrutiny that this prise de conscience was lacking. We find a striking example of this in the mystics themselves. The Middle Ages are rich in incomparable mystics, but if we possessed only the documents left by them, if we did not know the works of a St. Teresa, of a St. John of the Cross, of a Marie de l’Incarnation, we would know little about the interior states, trials, and nights of the souls who have entered upon this way; and we could think that the mystics of the Middle Ages were unaware of them. They were not unaware of them, they lived them; they were not “interested” in them, and, except at the decline of the Middle Ages, at the time of Ruysbroeck and of Tauler, they did not judge it useful to speak of them.

Likewise the Middle Ages had a profound and eminently Catholic sense of the role of the sinner and his own initiatives, of his resistances, and of the mercies of God with regard to him in the economy of divine Providence. They had a profound sense of nature, of its dignity as well as of its weakness; they knew better than any other epoch the price of human pity and tears. But all this was for them lived rather than conscious, rather than the object of reflex knowledge. And if we considered only the documents of the mediaeval theological tradition (I am not speaking of Thomas Aquinas, who is much too great to characterize an epoch), we could think, and this would be an error, that mediaeval thought knew the human creature only in terms of soteriological problems and the divine exigencies with regard to man, in terms of the objective laws of the morality required of him, and not in terms of the subjective resources of his grandeurs or of the subjective determinism of his miseries.

__________

This essay is taken from “Medieval Man,” in Integral Humanism.

The featured image is “Young Man in Medieval Costume” (1840–1920), by Ferdinand Roybet, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.