Approaches to God, by Jacques Maritain

Approaches to God, by Jacques Maritain

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Approaches to God, by Jacques Maritain

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Maritain considers the intuitive or pre-philosophic approach and the famous five ways to God of St. Thomas Aquinas incorporated with recent progress in thought and science. Finally, he proposes a ''sixth way, based on the spiritual nature of the intellect, and deals with poetic creativeness, moral experience, and the testimony of the heroes of moral life. In his accessible but thought-provoking work, he shows in profoundly reasoned and beautifully written arguments the value of each approach for there are as many paths to God as there are roads to the human heart.It is valuable to have such a clear statement, written with charm and charity, of the Roman Catholic approach to the reality of God. Even those who do not share this particular kind of philosophical theism will find a study of M. Maritain's work rewarding.... The New York Times, Oct. 31, 1954

Approaches to God, by Jacques Maritain

• Amazon Sales Rank: #494964 in Books
• Published on: 2015-03-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 7.77" h x .20" w x 6.16" l, .0 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Approaches to God, by Jacques Maritain

Language Notes Text: English, French (translation)

About the Author Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), distinguished French Catholic philosopher and writer, is regarded as the preeminent contemporary interpreter of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Maritain was a professor of philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris, Columbia University, and Princeton University. After the outbreak of WWII, Maritain and his wife Raïssa relocated to the United States. He served as French Ambassador to the Vatican and in returned to France 1960. After Raïssa's death, Maritain decided to live the rest of his life in Toulouse with the congregation Little Brothers of Jesus.

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful. Evidence for God By Gerard Reed Thomists like Jacques Maritain insist there are good, rational reasons for believing God exists. That view is most clearly stated in his Approaches to God, tr. Peter O'Reilly (New York: Collier Books, 1962). This is Volume One in the World Perspectives Series, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, which published a series of short treatises by the world's most acclaimed scholars. Maritain first argues for "the primordial way," the "natural or prephilosophic knowledge of God." We just know, deep in our being, that there's a God who sustains our being. I never seriously question my own existence. I also know I have only recently come into being. And I know that "There is another Whole--a separate, another Being, transcendent and self-sufficient and unknown in itself and activating all beings, which is Being-without-nothingness, that is, self-subsisting Being, Being existing through itself" (p. 20).This immediate awareness serves as the foundation for St Thomas Aquinas' famous "five ways" to "prove" of "demonstrate" that God exists. If, like Aristotle and most common sense philosophers, you accept as self-evident the reality of causation, these five cosmological arguments enable you to persuasively demonstrate the necessity of "a cause which is pure Act or Being, itself subsistent in its own right" (p. 33), which indwells the various phenomena we encounter. First, we see all around us things which move. Our world is continually becoming. No one doubts that electrons and planets continually move. And we also know that balls fly through the air when thrown or hit with a bat. So "if there were not a First Agent, the reason for the action of all the others would never be posited in existence; nothing would move anything. One cannot regress from agent to agent without end; it is necessary to stop at a First Agent" (p. 35). Second, the world at hand contains efficient causes. Houses get built when builders (efficient causes) do their work. For the universe to be, and to be explainable, it needs, underlying all the efficient causes we discern, a First Cause which is "first" in sense of creating everything ex nihilo. Third, there is the argument from the contingent and necessary. The world in flux demonstrates contingency. Things come and go; nothing on the material plane is demonstrably constant or eternal. Yet if, only for a moment, something truly is, it reveals a necessary being which allows contingent beings to be. Were all things truly contingent, obviously nothing could never be! Fourth, there are evident degrees in things, qualitative levels of perfection in such things as goodness, love, life, truth, knowledge, and beauty. For us to have any reason to judge something better than something else, we must assume there is, "somewhere, a supreme degree or a maximum (a most)" (p. 51). Here, Maritain says, "the noble Augustinian approach, which rises to God through eternal truths, finds its normal place" (p. 56). Fifth, one reasons to God by virtue of the governance of things. The cosmos seems, to all but dogmatic materialists, to have purpose. As our minds grasp its workings, we almost automatically know it's guided by some supernatural Intelligence. If, as C.S. Lewis so persuasively suggested, we see a garden which seems continually weeded and tilled, full of ordered rows of nutritious plants, most of us assume there's a gardener at work--even if we never physically see him. As Maritain explains and defends St Thomas' five "proofs," he up-dates and effectively demonstrates their perennial validity as metaphysical stratagems. Then he adds a "sixth" possibility, one he found more and more attractive as he pondered it: an intuition regarding "the natural spirituality of intelligence" (p. 70). With my mind I easily transcend the limits of time and space; in my mind I am almost as infinite as the universe. As an intellectual being, I am dramatically distinct from the material world I apprehend--if not, I could only, like a computer, process the flow of data which happens to enter my neurological system. Thus I know, while I think, that I am a spiritual being. But I also know that I have not always existed. So I must, as a spiritual being, be rooted "in a Being of transcendent personality" in Whom my personality has definition and reality. Having discussed some of the "approaches to God" of the speculative intellect, Maritain then turns to some of the ways of the practical intel¬lect. Whenever we see beauty, we encounter "a transcendental, a perfection in things which transcends things and attests their kinship with the infinite, because it makes them fit, to give joy to the spirit" (p. 79). There is a certain eternality in great music and poetry which suggests its tie to some Ultimate Reality. Our moral experience also, on a practical level, points us to God. For unless we are free, as moral beings, to choose what's good, there's no real morality. Yet as we reflect on the reality of personal freedom we find ourselves rooted in a transcendent realm which grants and guarantees it. "God is thus naturally known, without any conscious judgment, in and by the impulse of the will striving toward the Separate Good, whose existence is implicitly involved in the practical value acknowledged to the moral good" (p. 88). Finally, Maritain argues, in accord with Aristotle's dictum, that natural appetites have realizable ends. The fact that we're thirsty proves, rather persuasively, that real liquids exist to slake that thirst. Similarly, since mankind has forever hungered and thirsted for God, there must be a Reality to which that appetite is directed. Though it demands careful attention, Approaches to God is not overly difficult to read. It was written for the general reader and enables anyone who desires to master its basic arguments.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Challenging read with interesting insights By bronx book nerd I found this book for the most part challenging to read. It requires slow and thoughtful reading as Maritain presents his theory of how people come to know, believe in and understand God. He begins by saying that people basically have an intuitive, pre-philosophical grasp that God exists. This is triggered by sensory awareness of beautiful and inspiring things. The next step in understanding involves philosophical understanding which Maritain considers to be Aquinas' five proofs for God. Maritain takes each proof and elaborates through them in his own style. By doing so he reinforces the traditional teaching of the proof while sometimes adding new and insightful perspectives. For example, he notes that all ends must exist in an intellect so inanimate things that have an end must have that end existing in a mind. Another example is his explanation that randomness presupposes something that is not random. This is a different response to the idea that the world evolved out of random events. Maritain concludes with a discussion of knowing God as he is, which he notes is impossible with on a natural level but possible on a supernatural level. He does veer a bit into some Eastern mysticism when he explains how a person's soul existed before he or she was actualized by God in nature. He is on the edge of error here where one can take his writing to suggest that a person is eternally one with God, although I do not think that his subtle and nuanced argument ultimately does not make that claim.

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