Maritain on the Person, State, and Community

This essay, in First Things (Christopher Shannon, "Catholicism as the Other") includes an interesting discussion of Maritain's book, The Person and the Common Good, which -- I think -- cuts to the core of a lot of the discussions we have on this blog. I was particularly interested in this passage:

. . . Like so many thinkers of his time, Maritain sought a third way between authoritarian statism and laissez-faire individualism. Rooted in Thomist philosophy, the category of the person provided Maritain with a language through which to refute Catholic supporters of fascism as well as secular liberal defenders of a purely instrumental social order. In The Person and the Common Good, Maritain writes of the human person as “a spiritual totality” that exists in relation to a “transcendent whole.” This relation renders the human person “superior to every value of mere social utility,” in dignity and worth “superior to all temporal societies.” In even stronger language, Maritain insists that “with respect to the eternal destiny of the soul, society exists for each person and is subordinated to it.”

. . . Still, the person is not simply an individual with a spiritual dimension. The inviolability of the person does not make him the primary purpose or end of the social order. Maritain affirms the dignity of the person only in the context of a relation of mutual and reciprocal subordination. Though superior to mere utility, a human life is less precious than the moral good and the duty of assuring the salvation of the community, is less precious than the human and moral patrimony of which the community is the repository, and is less precious also than the human and moral work which the community carries on from one century to the next.

. . . I know of no clearer statement of the Catholic understanding of the place of the human person in society. I know of no clearer challenge to the expressive individualism propagated by contemporary multiculturalism. In Maritain’s time, and our own, Catholicism—not race, class, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality—has stood as the most serious Western cultural alternative to American individualism. A minority social ethic in the modern West, this Catholic communalism is, moreover, a particular instance of a majority ethic that has characterized most human societies throughout history. By the standards of world history and culture, the individual, not the community, is the category in need of justification."

Rick