Maritain and the Love for the Natural Law

Abstract

Once called the “Red Christian” for his leftist leanings in later years, Jacques Maritain is the twentieth century’s most well-known Thomist. While he might quarrel with the “most well known” description for the sake of modesty, Maritain would not deny the affiliation. Interesting and important is how Maritain came to Thomas and the natural law, through listening to Henri Bergson’s lectures on phenomenology. Indeed, the story goes that Maritain and Raïssa, his fiancée, had decided to kill themselves if they could not find a definite answer to the meaning of life. They found it first not in Thomas’s teachings, but in Bergson’s.