Described here in a New Republic "review" of two new books. I put "review" in quotation marks only because the piece is less an evaluation of the books themselves than a survey of Maritain’s life and intellectual journey. Which is fine. Being in TNR, it’s subscriber-only, but you can always read it in the library, buy a copy, or go to Lexis-Nexis, if you’ve got access. (And if you’re around a University library computer system – you probably do.)

It’s an excellent introduction (I think, but I’m not a Maritain expert), marking the various changes and developments in, particularly, the first half of Maritain’s life:

Yet while Maritain’s rejection of what he considered the spiritual disaster of modernity seemed to ally him with those who simply wished to restore the past, in fact his neo-Thomism attempted to do quite the opposite. He desired to prove that the ideas of Aquinas could also illuminate the present, and that they could be used, if properly understood, to defend some of the seemingly anarchistic experiments of modern art. The immediate post-World War I years saw a huge explosion of talent and artistic experiment especially in Paris, and the Maritains were very far from being immune to its appeal. Younger artists such as Georges Rouault and the composer Georges Auric formed part of the Bloy circle, and through them the Maritains became acquainted with many of the immensely talented avant-garde personages who swarmed around Jean Cocteau at the café Le boeuf sur le toit in Montmartre. 

Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1920), a work that first brought him to the attention of a wider public, was an effort to prove that the ideas of Aquinas could help to understand not only the past but the present as well. It is a small book written in a rebarbative style full of scholastic distinctions and terminology; but surprisingly enough it contains a defense of modern artistic experimentation. As Barré writes, "Retrograde to the point of seeming provocative … [it] was closer to Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie than to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas." Art is an act of Making, not of Acting or Knowing, and its rules are provided by the task it sets for itself, not by anything external–and so Maritain could see Cubism as the possible infancy of a new classicism, and declare that "Aristotle would have loved Erik Satie." Maritain thus became an unexpected spokesman for that "Jazz Age Catholicism" so excellently described by Schloesser, and which brought Catholicism up-to-date with the modern world. 

During these years Maritain also became editor of a new series of books called Roseau d’or, or The Golden Reed, in which he published Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Julien Green, and especially Georges Bernanos. The latter’s novel Sous le soleil de Satan, or Under the Sun of Satan, created a sensation in 1926, and in the same year the influential critic Albert Thibaudet wrote, in the distinctively non-Catholic Nouvelle Revue Française, that the Catholic novel and Catholic literature had now begun to take "a privileged place" in French intellectual discourse. Maritain’s list also included, incidentally, a book by his friend the Jewish convert Father Jean de Menasce, formerly an ardent Zionist and a specialist in the history of Iranian civilization. The book was called Quand Israël aime Dieu, or When Israel Loves God, and it was a celebratory interpretation of Hasidism. Its appearance on Maritain’s list may have represented a certain guilty compensation for his anti-Semitic affiliations. 

The involvement of the Maritains in this rebirth of Catholic influence was more than purely philosophical and editorial. They organized weekly meetings in their home to discuss the latest issues and ideas, and those in attendance included young students who were later to become notable in one field or another, exiles from their homeland such as the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev and French scholars such as the important Islamicist Louis Massignon and the great Catholic historian of medieval thought Étienne Gilson. 

…

At the end of the war, de Gaulle asked Maritain to become the French ambassador to the Vatican, but he agreed only with a great deal of reluctance, because he wished to return to his philosophical pursuits. During his tenure in this post, he worked to block the promotion to the rank of cardinal of French clergymen who had cooperated closely with Vichy, and to advance the minority who had spoken out against Vichy policies. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain a public statement of the collective responsibility of the German people for the war and the genocide. Nor could he persuade the church to offer a public reprobation of the crimes committed against the Jewish people. In the midst of all this, and the exhausting social responsibilities imposed by his position, he wrote Court traité de l’existence et de l’existant (Brief Treatise on the Existence and the Existant), using the terms made fashionable by Sartre’s existentialism. His effort to replace its moral ambiguity with, as he saw it, the true existentialism of Aquinas met with no success, even though, as he ruefully wrote to an American friend, "this is a book into which I put my most intimate thoughts."

The Jacques Maritain Center at Notre Dame

One of the books reviewed, which I was all ready to order until I saw the price: Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris 1919-1933. 85 bucks! Ah, the university press…

And the other, a biography of the Maritains, which has been a huge success in France: Jacques and Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven. Note the publication date –  October 2006!