DE Weekly: Maritain, Personalism, & Existence and the Existent
Below is an archived email originally sent on March 2, 2026.
Maritain, Personalism, & Existence and the Existent
Today, I am going to introduce a philosopher I have not written about in this newsletter to date, whose name is Jacques Maritain. Born in 1882, Maritain was a twentieth-century philosopher and theologian who revitalized Thomism, the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Maritain used the philosophy of Aquinas to address modern issues, drawing from Aquinas on issues such as the dignity inherent in every human person, and emphasizing a God-centered approach to politics and ethics.
It’s what helped him contribute to the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and what inspired his authoring of over sixty books on various topics.
Central to Maritain’s philosophy are two concepts referred to as Integral Humanism and Christian Personalism.
His strain of humanism focused on the full reality of what he considered the “human person” to encompass, which, for him, included a spiritual dimension (the soul).
His personalism distinguished between two freedoms he thought inherent to each human person, namely our free will (or freedom of choice), and our autonomy (or freedom of independence).
For Maritain, we used the former to reach the latter, i.e., we use our free will to attain autonomy in life, of course, through understanding our person as a spiritual subject of God.
At this point, you’ve likely realized that Maritain’s Christian theology underpins his entire philosophical framework. To this end, this is why I would refer to him, in the conceptual framework I’m writing about, as a Theistic Existentialist, or a Christian Existentialist.
This is also how I have referred to the father of Existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, in the past. (I also wrote a newsletter last November about Theistic Existentialism, if you would like to read that.)
Aside from his contributions to our modern understanding of human rights and his revival of Thomist tradition (or, perhaps, in addition to those contributions), Maritain also wrote an essay called Existence and the Existent: An Essay on Christian Existentialism. This is primarily what I will focus on today.
In Existence and the Existent, Maritain outlines an approach to existential themes popularized in his time by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, but does so through a Christian lens.
He defines his Thomistic Existentialism as one centered on the act of being.
What he meant was that, as humans that exist––that are beings-in-the-world––our focus is on an existent striving for perfection. That is to say, the purpose of our existence is to strive for a perfect relationship with the world, and with God.
Whether we are taking actions in our lives to do anything in particular, our very act of existing is an act in itself. Using our intellect (à la Aquinas), we grasp at this act of existing to judge the reality of the world we live in.
If you’re a frequent reader of this newsletter or of existentialist literature, none of this sounds new at all.
But what differentiated Maritain from the secular philosophers of his time was his use of faith as a bridge between the rational and the “irrational” (read: that we cannot understand materially).
He argued that Christian philosophy was the bridge that can help us understand both the intellectual world and the spiritual, both the objective and the subjective experience of our own existence.
For all the existentialists, I would argue, this subjective world––the one beyond material understanding and the one we have not truly come to understand––is the big question all of modern philosophy grapples with.
The key difference between Maritain and his contemporaries was this: in a period where many had a cynical, nihilistic view of the world as a consequence of the postwar social structure, Maritain had one of hope.
His inclusion of Thomist philosophy in his own made way for a form of existentialism grounded in traditional metaphysics, one that affirms the worth of our existence in and of itself. A form of existentialism that preserves the esse––the act of being, the essence––of the human person just for being human.
Of course, in so doing, Maritain had to dispel with the notions put forth by other secular philosophers to prove his the better. He was not shy in this effort.
Maritain drew a hard line between his form of existentialism (what he called Authentic Existentialism), and Apocryphal Existentialism, a tag he assigned to Sartre.
He argued that Sartre’s existentialism was uniquely apocryphal because it effectively destroyed the intellect and, indeed, the very essence of humanity. He himself, on the other hand, sought to preserve the essence of humanity by returning to the “essence precedes existence” metaphysical understanding of the world.
When it came to the radical freedom and the importance of personal action, he was on board with the prevailing existentialist conclusions, but only insofar as they are informed and grounded by a relationship with God working toward a vocation of love.
In other words, Maritain’s unique brand of existentialism told us this:
We exist. Our essence as human persons includes inherent dignity and value. Our existence should be informed by our free will and autonomy to achieve a relationship with God based on virtue and love.
Nothing abstract. Nothing irrational. Simply, perhaps, radical for its time.
“The spiritual experience of the philosopher is the nourishing soil of philosophy; that without it there is no philosophy; and that, even so, spiritual experience does not, or must not, enter into the intelligible texture of philosophy. The pulp of the fruit must consist of nothing but the truth.” –– Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Existentialism comes in all shapes and sizes. Try not to let it be narrowly defined, instead try to read more to understand it more fully. There might just be something in there that you like. The same is true for all philosophies.
For more content, follow @TheDailyExist on X. For other social links, click here.
I write this newsletter for free–I love sharing my thoughts with you all, and I’ll continue to do so for free. But if you like what I write and want to show your support, you can always click here to share a tip. Thanks for keeping me going–it’s much appreciated.