Philippe Bénéton is Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Rennes in France. He is the author of Introduction à la politique (Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), Equality by Default (ISI Books, 2004), and The Kingdom Suffereth Violence: The Machiavelli/Erasmus/More Correspondence and Other Unpublished Documents (St. Augustine Press, forthcoming).

Everyone lies, said Mauriac. In this area, writers are not an exception. Mauriac is a formidable literary critic; he is the gold standard of the profession: he knows the resources and tricks of the art of writing and he doesn’t trust his confrères. Rousseau in particular comes in for criticism. But then, can one trust Mauriac himself? And can one trust Maritain, another writer? To be sure, everything we know about them witnesses to their desire to live in the truth. But didn’t they fall short?

In Jacques Maritain’s case, the answer is certain even if one cannot prove it. His moral rectitude shines in all his acts and writings; his life demonstrates probity from one end to the other. Mauriac’s case is more difficult. He was much more attracted to “the delicious and criminal use of the world” of which Pascal wrote. He is a novelist and hence in a certain way can hide behind literary fiction. To be sure, he is also a memoir writer, but when he speaks in the first person, he does not say everything, except perhaps by allusion. But he explains his own practice of writing and in many ways he revealed his passionate desire to speak the truth about himself. If one pays close attention to his art of writing, there are many reasons for thinking that he belongs among those who speak with an open heart.

François Mauriac and Jacques Maritain are two great figures of French letters who are linked by much and separated by much. Mauriac (1885–1970) and Maritain (1882–1973) belong to the same generation, to the same profession, to the same Church. They are two Catholic writers with fervent and quite public faiths. They are two great intellectual and spiritual adventurers drinking from the same source.

On the other hand, if they are debtors to the same truth, they do not deal with it in the same way. They belong to two different spiritual families in the great mansion of the Catholic faith. François Mauriac is a son, or grandson, of Pascal; Maritain, of St. Thomas. Mauriac is first of all a novelist, with no taste for philosophy and theology; Maritain is a philosopher by profession and an amateur theologian. Both are explorers of the Invisible, but they do not follow the same paths. Their two bodies of work developed independently of one another. One sees no influence of Mauriac on Maritain or of Maritain on Mauriac.

Nonetheless, they did encounter one another: they disputed for a while, but then, while not changing their different perspectives, they became friends and (especially toward the end) they loved one another.

This history, in which the two writers took a different route to the same end and in which their encounters finally ended in a fraternal friendship based on a spiritual bond, is a rich and complicated one. Here I will try to sketch its main lines and to highlight certain significant moments.

The Novelist and the Philosopher

Mauriac possesses the penetrating eye of the great novelist; Maritain has the power of abstraction of a great philosopher. Each one views men as they are in quite different ways. The human nature that Mauriac depicts is above all sinful, while the nature that Maritain analyzes and puts forth is fundamentally just. To be sure, each thinks within the framework of Catholic orthodoxy (nature was created good; it is wounded by original sin), but the difference in tone remains quite marked. To this we need to add that the novelist Mauriac is much more sensitive to the opacity of beings, to the impossibility of grasping them fully, than was the philosopher Maritain.

All his life Mauriac “stalked” himself and others, seeking to discover the truth, trying “to cast torches into our abysses.” But the enterprise always remained uncertain or unfinished. One doesn’t know oneself; one cannot know the other. “If ever I were to survive,” he wrote in 1939 (Les Maison fugitives, 7), “I know that it would not be me, because while I live now I am not the man that others imagine, and I do not myself know who I am.” Men are mistaken; in particular they are deceived in the terrible domain which is human sexuality.

Therefore one never knows completely. And even concerning the person that one knows the best—oneself—one cannot say everything. At least one cannot say everything when one is named François Mauriac, and one has a wife and children. In the name of familial discretion, Mauriac always refused to reveal to the public the entirety of his personal history. “The author of an autobiography is condemned to say everything or nothing,” he wrote. “I therefore will say nothing” (Preamble to Mémoires intérieurs, 1979). To be sure, the last sentence is hyperbolic, since Mauriac wrote a lot about himself, more precisely, about his intellectual and spiritual life. But he did not reveal the secret parts of his life. Rather, as he often said, he revealed them only indirectly, by means of fiction.

What do Mauriac’s novels show? What do they present to the reader? They reveal a generally dark world in which nature opposes grace, where the power of sin or of error tends to dominate, with intermittent flashes of grace. Mauriac is not the novelist of sanctity, as was Bernanos; he did not write stories in which thunderbolts of grace strike, like Flannery O’Connor. He is the novelist of the terrible yet seductive “misery of man without God” (Pascal), as well as of the misery of the Christian who betrays and disfigures his God.

This world is first of all a world of solitude and the incommunicability of human beings connected by bonds of blood and of marriage, brought together under one roof. The couples whose stories Mauriac recounts—mother and child, husband and wife—are most often composed of someone who loves badly and another who is loved badly. The spirits of domination, of misunderstanding, of incomprehension, reign: human love is a desert. Génitrix is a devouring mother; the spouses in Noeud de vipères (Vipers’ Tangle) ruin their lives because they do not understand each other. This world is also overrun with sensual passions: the desire which dominates and ravages someone, the sensual pleasure that overcomes you, the disgust that also occurs, not to mention incestuous temptations and homosexual inclinations. Doubtless, Mauriac’s own sexual torments are expressed here. Nor is there any doubt that in these dark portraits of familial relations, he is coming to terms with his own childhood.

On one hand, this is the world of a provincial Catholic bourgeoisie, one in which Pharisaism dominates. It is the misery of the Christian who misunderstands the Gospel. Mauriac leveled several charges against these Catholics (whom he observed in his youth) who tended to reduce Christianity to two things: strict observation of rules—of external obligations—and an obsession with the sins of the flesh. Justice hardly figured in it at all, nor did mercy for those who stumbled and fell. Moreover, among the things that were deemed worthy of respect and esteem was money, or rather, property.

On these themes Mauriac is more or less explicit. It is when he turns to the domain of sexuality that he most holds back his pen and proceeds by allusion. But his fellow writers Gide and Martin du Gard were not deceived. You are an odd Catholic writer, they told him; the flesh and its seductions ooze out everywhere in your novels.

This had to disturb Catholic criticism. It made it known: these are sensual, unhealthy, morbid works. Mauriac himself was troubled by his oeuvre. He went back and forth between his concern to express reality, not to equivocate, and his desire not to wound or scandalize others. He therefore wrote a number of works in order to justify himself, and he wrote other novels that were more edifying in order to redeem himself. After the dark Vipers’ Tangle came Le mystère Frontenanc, in which he idealized the Catholic family (and, in so doing, the Mauriac family); after Le Sagouin, in which God is absent, came L’Agneau, in which Providence is at work; after Thérèse Desqueyroux, which speaks about the poisoner whom he refused to have convert, he had other less-important characters convert.1 The problem is that these novels are not his best, the most complete and polished, and they certainly are not those which gave Mauriac his deserved reputation. The true novelist could not do what he wanted to do. “I almost always ruin my virtuous characters” (Le romancier et ses personnages, I, 1933). In his best novels sin occupies the first rank. Maritain will reproach him for this.

From Mauriac to Maritain the world changes dramatically in important respects. What the novelist unveils are the disorders and passions that trouble the hearts of men; what the philosopher reveals is a more profound order. Fallen nature is what grace must triumph over, said the son of Pascal and via Pascal of Augustine. The disciple of St. Thomas responds: nature is not so wounded that it no longer has any affinity with grace. The misery of man without God is not as radical as Mauriac depicts it in his novels. Grace does not destroy nature; it crowns it or elevates it. Despite sin, the principal fact about man is the natural rectitude of the will. By nature, man tends toward the good.

Among the themes treated by Mari-tain, one of those that he worked on all his life and that he never ceased rethinking, rendering it more precise and profound, is natural law. This was a great undertaking: to revive an old idea that seemed to be so overworked and outdated. His reengagement came to a culmination in a course he gave at the end of his life and, revised and edited, was published in 1986, La loi naturelle ou loi non écrite (Fribourg).

How can one talk about a natural law which ordains men to the good when evil abounds, when moral rules appear to be so variable according to time and place? Maritain apprentices himself to St. Thomas; he attempts to clarify his vocabulary; above all he confronts the relativistic objection. His principal move is to add a historical graft to the Angelic Doctor’s thought. In other words, he springs a bolt: the rigid opposition between Nature and History. Natural law, he says, is made of inclinations that are at once essential and fragile. At the beginning there is what all men know: that there is a Good; there is an Evil; one must do the Good and avoid Evil. Then there is the matter of a vital nonsystematic knowledge, something that is an intellectual instinct or sympathy. This knowledge was initially obscure; it has progressed in fits and starts during the historical progress of humanity. The awareness of the Good has become more precise; it has become more complete; man knows himself better. Evil is only a privation, a weakness of the will. With Mauriac or with Bernanos, evil has more solidity.

It was on this theme, or a connected one, that the first relations between Mauriac and Maritain took place. Without knowing each other personally, they disputed via a series of writings. The question in dispute concerned the portrait of evil by the Catholic novelist. An amicable controversy occurred. It was never brought to a final resolution, but a friendship began. In 1927 Maritain published Art and Scholasticism. He called upon the Catholic novelist to take the high road in depicting evil and to forbid himself any and all “connivance” with it. Mauriac responded and invoked the laws of dramatic creation. The true novelist does not think about “the high road”: he creates living beings; he is engaged; he identifies with his creations; he pushes connivance to the limit. The characters of a novel have a life of their own—it isn’t the author who is in command; one doesn’t write the novels that one wants to (1928 lecture, reprinted in Dieu et Mammon, 5, 1529). It is a powerful counterargument. Maritain conceded part of it, but he maintained the essentials of his position and reproached Mauriac with yielding to a “type of Manicheanism”: “He [Mauriac] is very close to claiming that the devil collaborates with every work of art and that, in and of itself, the novel is in complicity with evil” (Le Roseau d’or, 30, 1928). In response, Mauriac pulled in his claws and conceded that henceforth for him the question had become: to purify the source, that is, himself (Dieu et Mammon, final notes). Had he been convinced by Maritain? One can doubt it. This is because in the meantime something else had intervened (which we will discuss in a moment). At bottom, nothing was settled in the controversy.

In the years that followed, up until the end of their lives, the two men—having become friends—took up again and again the question, each in his own way. Maritain added nuances, while Mauriac remained divided between the will to respond faithfully to the vocation of the novelist and the duty of not troubling his readers. In order to justify himself he always put forth the exigencies of his art. Sometimes his justification went farther: doesn’t the novelist who casts torches into our abysses collaborate with grace?

Men of Faith

Mauriac and Maritain are two pilgrims of the Absolute. However, one can ask if their reasons for believing are the same. Both, to be sure, understand their faith as a gift of God, but the foundations of Mauriac’s Catholicism differ significantly from Maritain’s, at least at first glance. Mauriac belongs to those who see above all the infirmities of reason. What a limited thing this reason is vis-à-vis the truths of faith!, he says, following Pascal. Maritain, following St. Thomas, is impressed with the power of human reason. In Maritain’s eyes the transcendence of faith in no way abolishes the intellect and its understanding. Metaphysical certitude is accessible to reason. And if the content of faith exceeds our reason, it nonetheless remains “sovereignly reasonable” (the phrase is his wife’s, Raïssa Maritain).

Not at all, objects Mauriac. God isn’t found at the end of a chain of reasoning, and there are absurd things in our religion. The God in whom I believe is above all found in the heart. I believe in Him whom I love and who became incarnate in history. Forcing the opposition a bit: Christian faith is folly, according to Mauriac; it is wisdom, according to Maritain.

Let us look at things more closely. Mauriac is not only a novelist. In addition to his work as a political journalist, he left an abundance of writings on his spiritual life. Throughout the years he did not stop witnessing to his faith and conducting an ongoing examination of conscience. In his novels God is often absent, but in his work as a writer of memoirs God is often on the front of the stage. The culmination—the crown—of this work is, no doubt, his admirable What I Believe (1962).

What is Mauriac’s faith? It concerns a history of love, marked not only by fidelity but also by torments and ruptures.

Mauriac was born a Christian and the young Mauriac resonated with all his being during the rituals of Catholic worship. His Christianity was subsequently purified but it remained a matter of person-to-person contact, a heart-to-heart with God in which the word heart signifies an engagement at, and with, the depths of one’s being. At the center of this love is the person of Christ, the humanly upending story of his life, his burning words, his mysterious presence in the Eucharist. Mauriac’s Christ is the one who pardons, who redeems, who suffers out of love for each one of us. All that is folly—however, that folly is the truth.

Mauriac hardly argues at all; rather he reports his religious experience and meditates on his faith, drawing the conclusion: “To believe is to love.” Even more than Pascal’s, his apologetics reduces the part of discursive reason vis-à-vis “the heart” and lived experience. If Mauriac isn’t indifferent to historical criticism, he is unaffected, even rebellious toward philosophy and a theology against which he conducted a subterranean guerilla war. In appearance he showed respect for the Doctors of the Church and their works, but he acknowledges that he understands nothing or almost nothing of it. And he launches discreet arrows, from which Maritain’s Thomism isn’t spared. In L’Agneau (1954) the pious Xavier vows to read a particular learned Catholic journal even though he derives no profit from it. He tries to understand a particularly technical discussion by mouthing every word; nonetheless the text falls from his hands. Now, the text concerns St. Thomas’s Treatise on the Angels. It is cited at length, and is introduced by Mauriac to illustrate and mock an incomprehensible theology. However, it is not found in any journal; it is drawn from Maritain’s famous work The Degrees of Knowledge. Later, Mauriac was troubled at the thought of Maritain’s reaction and he wrote to him. He claimed it was an innocent joke: “I hope that you will laugh if you read it and that you won’t be offended” (30 December 1954). Nonetheless the passage shows how little sympathy Mauriac had for the Thomism of his friend, and it will be repeated in his final novel (Un adolescent d’autrefois, 1969).

In the second place, Mauriac’s faith is restless and painful. On several occasions he was wracked by doubts. He said so discreetly in his Mémoires, more openly in his correspondence: “As for me, I have periods when everything dies of what I believe—where I am full of antipathy and rancor against the Church” (Letter to J. Laval, 1 August 1939). Mauriac personally knew the revolt against demands that he found too demanding, first of all those concerning purity. He knew spiritual dryness, that “terrible hour when God isn’t true and when I continue to love Him nonetheless” (Marie Noel). He was greatly disturbed by the sufferings of men, especially at the time of Nazism. But his faith held firm. To retain it, he said, demanded an effort, it constituted a victory. The unshakeable faith of his old age shows that the victory was whole and entire.

This faith, though, also afflicted him. “I am a Christian with all my heart and I do not live as a Christian, I constantly betray Christ.” In his examination of conscience, Mauriac constantly returned to this point. God demands everything but I negotiate, I equivocate, in the final analysis I hold back. I live in a terrible “contradiction” between God and Mammon, between the evangelical demands and the “incurable hedonism which dishonors my own life”—the flesh, honors, wealth, a comfortable life (Nouveaux Mémoires intérieurs, 1965). What distinguishes Mauriac is not that he is an unworthy Christian—what Christian, except the saints, isn’t?—it is his profound sense of unworthiness which is authentically Christian.

Concerning Maritain’s personal life of faith, we know much less. He didn’t leave a spiritual autobiography, only allusions in certain of his works and a few brief texts such as Confession of Faith (1939). But after a few pages it reprises the tone and the subjects of philosophical speculation. Modesty played a role here but also a turn of mind that preferred to address the objective truths of faith rather than personal or subjective experience.

Unlike Mauriac, Maritain is a convert. It was Henri Bergson who put him on the way by responding to his desire for metaphysical truth. Then came the influences of Charles Péguy and Leon Bloy. In 1906 Maritain and his wife, Raïssa, were baptized. In her book Les grandes amitiés (1949), Raïssa recounted this path to faith, which was sown with hesitations, fears, and even repugnances. But on the day of baptism, light came: “An immense peace descended upon us, carrying with it the treasures of faith. There were no more questions, no more anxiety, no more trials—only the infinite Response of God.” From then on, apparently, their faith was unshakeable. If Maritain had any doubts he let nothing show.

Less restless than Mauriac’s, Maritain’s faith appears equally less painful. Insofar as one can tell, the torments of the flesh seem foreign to the Maritains. After a few years they together took a vow of total conjugal chastity; it apparently did nothing to damage their profound union. As for money and as for honors, these were the least of their concerns. The world had much less of a hold on them than on Mauriac.

Shortly after his conversion Maritain discovered St. Thomas. Previously he had believed that adherence to Catholicism implied the renunciation of philosophy. He discovered to his great wonder the great Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason. His intellectual orientation inclined him in this direction, as a metaphysician to the core (even if he was more than that). Henceforth Maritain has a home and harbor in the metaphysical thought of brother Thomas. He accepted the philosophical proofs of God’s existence sketched by the Angelic Doctor, and he dug into the intuition of being, which is the threshold of philosophical knowledge of God according to Thomas. He then speculated upon the invincible wisdom of God, armed with understandable human reasons and higher ones. Confronted with evil, he advanced argument upon argument in order to explain that it intelligibly coexists with the goodness of God: God did not will evil, He permitted it, and while permitting it He draws from it an incomparably greater good.

None of this—one can easily anticipate—convinced Mauriac. In 1960 he wrote: “One shouldn’t try to harmonize this world of Mein Kampf with Deus caritas est. I cannot bear anymore to hear a theologian give me reasons concerning this subject. The Cross’s embrace of the suffering of men suffices for me.”

There is another Maritain, though, less philosophical, more spiritual. Even though he appears to grant intelligence and understanding so much that it takes up all the available space, he knew that there was something else that was even more important. In The Degrees of Knowledge he gave an eminent place to St. John of the Cross, “the great doctor of this supreme, incommunicable doctrine, just as St. Thomas is the great doctor of the supreme, communicable doctrine.” Above metaphysics there is the spiritual doctrine of the mystical doctor; through him the primacy of love in the life of faith shines with particular brilliance. Elsewhere he wrote: “Christianity has taught men that love is better than intelligence” (Confession de foi). The spiritual Maritain expresses himself in this vein in various texts where he reveals more of himself than is usual. Thus in a lecture given at the Centre Catholique des intellectuels français:

When we meditate on theological truths, it is we who meditate on them, but when we meditate on the Gospel, it is the Gospel that speaks to us; it suffices to listen. There is no doubt that He who recounts the Gospel is not far from us in order to open our spirits a bit when we walk down the road with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Mane nobiscum, Domine, quoniam advesperascit. Remain with us, Lord, because the evening falls (Foi en Jésus Christ et monde d’aujourd’hui, 1949).

The phrase in Latin is taken from the road to Emmaus passage, after Christ’s resurrection. This was a passage that Mauriac cited and commented on frequently. Thus, in that place where the soul gives itself fully, the two men come together.

The second time Mauriac and Maritain encountered one another, they were brought together even closer. It was faith that was in question. In 1928 Mauriac experienced a profound crisis. In October he published The Sufferings of a Christian, a cry of pain and of indignation, a rising up of his entire being against the tyranny of a religion that sets the spirit against the flesh. His Catholic friends were troubled. One of them, Charles du Bos, recommended to Mauriac that he seek counsel with a Fr. Alterman, a close friend of Maritain’s and someone with great experience in this domain, when souls are at risk. As it happened, the combination of firmness and gentleness of the good Father worked marvelously. For his part, from the beginning Maritain followed matters from a distance. Mauriac himself knew this, took comfort from it, and was always grateful to Maritain. Much later he wrote, invoking the period: “Jacques Maritain never ceased fixing upon me a troubled, even anxious gaze… I was certain that he was monitoring me” (Nouveaux Mémoires intérieurs). There is a paradox here: Mauriac’s “conversion” (in the sense of Pascal’s conversion) was the work of an intransigent Thomist, while another Thomist kept close watch in the distance. One could say that at certain depths, differences disappear. Be that as it may, the episode was an important event in the relations between the two men. A cordial correspondence followed, itself a prelude to a “great friendship.”

Two Brothers-in-Arms

Mauriac and Maritain’s paths also came together on the political plane. They shared the same concern to revivify the temporal by the spiritual. If, as Péguy said, disdain for the temporal is a temptation consubstantial with Christianity, neither one of the two succumbed. They were contemplatives, no doubt, but they did not turn their backs on temporal affairs. And both forcefully argued that Christian exigencies should be respected in politics.

In this area too, however, their works differed in nature from one another’s. Mauriac’s contribution was a number of articles by which he became one of the great voices in the postwar political debates. Maritain’s was principally constituted by works of political philosophy, which culminated in a renewed philosophy of democracy. However, they often found themselves shoulder-to-shoulder, and this common political engagement contributed to solidify their friendship.

In the 1930s the circles in which Mauriac and Maritain traveled overlapped and their names were often associated. They saw each other and wrote to each other in friendly terms. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out. Both reacted in the same way: what a horrible thing!, this civil war, and how sad to see that the Christian camp wasn’t behind the Anti-Christian one in brutality and violence. Like Bernanos, they bemoaned and denounced the Catholic honor besmirched by the armies of Franco. Each one multiplied initiatives; they collaborated; they signed the same appeals. During the same period they were equally shoulder-to-shoulder in the struggle against anti-Semitism. Maritain fought nobly and resolutely. (He was violently attacked.) Mauriac supported him and praised him splendidly.

In 1940 World War II and the French defeat separated them: Maritain was in the United States and was caught by surprise by the outbreak of hostilities. But both writers, one from America, the other in France, found themselves united in their writings defending the ideal of a free France. It was the same publisher, Editions de Minuit, which clandestinely published Maritain’s A travers le désastre in 1942 and Mauriac’s Cahier noir in 1943.

After the war Mauriac continued the political combat in the press. He was one of the few intellectuals who dared to oppose the French Communist Party. He was eloquent and caustic, in particular making fun of the great communist writer Louis Aragon (the “grand Mamamouchi”). By the force of things, and by his own choice, Maritain withdrew. He lived abroad, first as ambassador to the Vatican, then as a professor at Princeton. He returned to France in 1960 and, after the death of his wife, he retired to live with the Little Brothers of Charles de Foucauld in Toulouse.

During this final period the two men  saw each other only rarely. But neither the years nor distance weakened their friendship. On the contrary it grew even greater. Their final letters are full of affection, mutual admiration, and spiritual fraternity. In 1963, after the publication of Mauriac’s What I Believe,Maritain wrote to him:

Dear François,

Is it permitted to an old gentleman as myself (of whom you say entirely too much good!) to tell you that he admires you in your old age? There’s not only the genius of the writer. There is the witness of the man of faith that you continue to provide, no matter what the prevailing winds … with an incomparable ardor but also a secret serenity of soul that only God can give—and no hatred, that is quite true.

And with Mauriac admiration went even further. “I am envious of Maritain,” he wrote with a touch of levity (Bloc notes, December 1962). Mauriac was the famous writer, laden with honors (the French Academy, the Nobel Prize for Literature), but he admired his friend’s choice of a humble retreat, his indifference to the honors that he himself didn’t have the strength to disdain—in short, the detachment from the world that he couldn’t attain. Maritain was the Christian he ought to have been and that he wasn’t. In the highest order of things, purely intellectual differences have little weight. Thus, at the end of their lives Mauriac and Maritain were two brothers-in-arms in spiritual combat, who shared—who communed—in the same love.

Translated by Paul Seaton and Daniel J. Mahoney

1 See A Mauriac Reader, with an introduction by Wallace Fowlie (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968), for the most comprehensive edition of Mauriac’s novels available in English.

Supplementary Bibliography

  • “Jacques Maritain et François Mauriac: Correspondance,” Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 56, juin 2008.
  • Jean Luc Barré, François Mauriac, tome 1 (Paris: Fayard, 2009).
  • Jean Luc Barré, Jacques et Raïssa Maritain: Les mendiants du Ciel (Paris: Stock, 1995).
  • A. Séailles, “Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac et les aventures de la grâce,” dans Jacques Maritain et ses contemporains (Paris: Desclée, 1991).
  • M. Brossolette, “Cette merveille des amitiés: Jacques Maritain et François Mauriac,” Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 56, juin 2008.