"Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence"
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Maritain’s line lands like a provocation because it targets modernity’s favorite idol: intelligence as status, as instrument, as proof of seriousness. A Catholic philosopher writing in the age of technocracy and ideological mass politics, he’s not dismissing intellect so much as demoting it from the throne. The sentence is crafted to offend the self-image of the clever: if love is "worth more", then intelligence is not the highest human currency, and the brilliant are not automatically the best.
The intent is Thomistic in its bones. For Maritain, reason matters - he spent his life defending it - but reason is ordered toward ends. Christianity, in this framing, reorients the entire value system by insisting that persons are not problems to be solved but beings to be willed as good. Intelligence can map the world; love decides how (and whether) you inhabit it. That hierarchy has bite in the 20th century, when societies proved they could be dazzlingly rational about monstrous goals.
The subtext is a warning to intellectuals: you can be right and still be ruined. Cleverness can justify anything, including cruelty, if it’s severed from charity. Maritain is also quietly rejecting the cult of "pure" intelligence - the idea that the mind is cleanest when it stays detached. Christianity’s scandal, for him, is that the highest act is not knowing but giving, a metric that punctures both elitism and the comforting fiction that moral progress is the automatic byproduct of education.
The intent is Thomistic in its bones. For Maritain, reason matters - he spent his life defending it - but reason is ordered toward ends. Christianity, in this framing, reorients the entire value system by insisting that persons are not problems to be solved but beings to be willed as good. Intelligence can map the world; love decides how (and whether) you inhabit it. That hierarchy has bite in the 20th century, when societies proved they could be dazzlingly rational about monstrous goals.
The subtext is a warning to intellectuals: you can be right and still be ruined. Cleverness can justify anything, including cruelty, if it’s severed from charity. Maritain is also quietly rejecting the cult of "pure" intelligence - the idea that the mind is cleanest when it stays detached. Christianity’s scandal, for him, is that the highest act is not knowing but giving, a metric that punctures both elitism and the comforting fiction that moral progress is the automatic byproduct of education.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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