Jacques Maritain was one of the great Catholic intellectuals of the 20th Century. His book True Humanism deeply influenced Dorothy Day. Asking herself why she and ten other Catholics made a spectacle of themselves as a way of voicing opposition to war, why they made themselves "a spectacle to the world, to the angels and to men", she found the answer in her annotated personal copy of Maritain.
"We are turning towards men to speak and act among them, on the temporal plane, because, by our faith, by our baptism, by our confirmation, tiny as we are, we have the vocation of infusing into the world, wheresover we are, the sap and savor of Christianity."
Words like these transcend Christian differences, elude the grasp of categories, render traditions and denominations relative though not unimportant. These are words of Christian witness that vibrate with purpose, are born of authentic spiritual experience, sourced and resourced in Christian conviction, and as clear a statement of determined compassion as an indifferent world is likely to hear – even if it stopped long enough to listen. Maritain is both Catholic enough and Christian enough to recognise the foolishness that confounds the wise, to smile knowingly at the strength that resides in weakness as a paradox of grace, and to register a gentle defiance in that four word qualifier, "tiny as we are…"
The call to discipleship, the imperative mood of the Gospel, the uncompromising yet persuasive voice of Jesus calling us to follow faithfully after him, now, here, in our time and place – these are each implicitly present, and to be explicitly lived out in Maritain's one sentence missiology: "the vocation of infusing into the world, wheresoever we are, the sap and savor of Christianity." I am not so narrowly Baptist I don't recognise the authentic New Testament adventure of grace such vocation implies. Of course our capacity to infuse, and that which we infuse, is gift and grace, and mystery and mercy; and of course the different sacramental theology of Maritain feels like an annoying and persistent elbow in the ribs for self-respecting Baptists like myself. But I share the vocation because I hear the same voice, and it calls all God's people; I can only be the light of the world as Christ commanded, if Christ the light of the world radiates through my being; and that word savor (even with its American spelling), is a welcome if unnecessary reminder of how the function of salt is directly dependent on, well, its savor.
Leave a Reply