Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Graduate Student, Instituto de Estudos Politicos (IEP)

Thesis Title: The Christian City in Modernity: Maritain and Benedict XVI's integral humanism against relativism"

About

Jacques Maritain, one of the greatest contemporary thinkers on the relation between politics and religion, focused the attention of many scholars during the last decades. However, many historical changes have taken place since his death forty years ago and religious revival after Fukuyama’s announce of “the end of history” by the time of communism’s collapse, marked the beginning of our XXI century. Eventually, this has been surprising and even strange for many people, but it would not surely be so for Maritain. Pope Benedict XVI points out some reasons which allow us to assure why Maritain would not be surprised by this tension between western and Islamic societies. Those reasons are exactly on the opposite side of the anathemas against western’s cultural and historical heritage which the philosophical post-modern disenchantment usually sustains. Actually, this attitude of Oikophobia, as Scruton called it, seems to be the problem rather than the solution. As Benedict XVI defends, it testifies the vestige of Marxist rigidly materialist and atheist philosophy beyond the fall of communism, whose failure tends to be carelessly assigned mostly to its economical recipes.
Although associated to a progressive quest for individual rights and liberties, post-modern relativist hostility against the Tomist and Aristotelian aim for an objective truth pose the same threats to democracy that Maritain tirelessly fought on his life. First of all, it represents an obstacle to the progress of knowledge as it sees all philosophical and theological conceptions of man and life to be contingent and meaningless. Consequently, it slips to a political attitude which is neither neutral or pragmatic nor tolerant or pluralistic as Rorty, among others, presume, since it denies religion its communitarian dimension by confining it to the private sphere. Maritain would agree, then, that the lack of a Christian spirit in contemporary philosophy’s approach to man’s deepest yearnings, weakens West ability to evolve in a fruitful interreligious dialogue as well as in a healthy multiculturalism.