Maritain, Jacques

1882-1973. French Catholic philosopher who studied religion, political theory, education, liturgy, and even metaphysics. Studied at St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. Taught at Columbia, Notre Dame, and Princeton. 
Maritain was born in Paris and studied for a time at the Sorbonne. In 1904, he married Raissa Oumancoff, who partnered with Maritain in a search for truth. They made a pact after initial disappointment in scientism and their ongoing for truth: if they made no progress in one year, they would commit suicide together. Luckily, they attended a lecture by Henri Bergson , and they were inspired. Soon after, they were also influenced by [http:// http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Bloy Leon Bloy]  and converted to Catholicism. 
In 1907, Raissa became sick and through a spiritual advisor, she was introduced to Thomas Aquinas’s writings. She, in turn, brought the writings to Maritain’s attention, who also began studying Aquinas. After Raissa’s death, Maritain joined the order of the Little Brothers of Jesus , a group he had influenced early in its creation. Maritain died in 1973. 
==Connections:==
*“Wallace Stevens’s Prose.” Web. Accessed 5 April 2014. https://www2.bc.edu/~andersjb/stevensprose.html
*Luyat-Moore, Anne. Strategies of Difference in Modern Poetry: Case Studies in Poetic Composition. Ed. Pierre Lagayatte. Cranbery, NJ: Associated UP, 1988. Web. Google Books. 5 April 2014. 
**“According to Paul Weiss, there should have been a violent reaction [. . .] from members of the audience, but none followed in spite of that the fact of Stevens had given the example of the honorary president of the Entretiens, M. Jacques Maritain, as a model not to be imitated: ‘...in spite of M. Jacques Maritain, we do not want to become metaphysicians’” (80). Luyat-Moore reads this as more of a personal self-defense rather than a scholarly attack, since Stevens was also attempting to define himself in terms of T.S. Eliot’s ideas concerning modern poetry.
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