An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive Thomas Aquinas for modern times, and was influential in the development and drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Pope Paul VI presented his "Message to Men of Thought and of Science" at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor.

His niece was librarian and Resistance member Éveline Garnier, who he later made his principal legatee and introduced to her life partner Andrée Jacob.

At the Sorbonne, Jacques and Raïssa soon became disenchanted with scientism, which could not, in their view, address the larger existential issues of life.

They were spared from following through on this because, at the urging of Charles Péguy, they attended the lectures of Henri Bergson at the Collège de France.

During this time, Raïssa fell ill, and during her convalescence, their spiritual advisor, a Dominican friar named Humbert Clérissac, introduced her to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

He wrote: Thenceforth, in affirming to myself, without chicanery or diminution, the authentic value of the reality of our human instruments of knowledge, I was already a Thomist without knowing it ...

In 1930 Maritain and Étienne Gilson received honorary doctorates in philosophy from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.

For several years Maritain was an honorary chairman of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, appearing as a keynote speaker at its 1960 conference in Berlin.

[11]Jacques and Raïssa Maritain are buried in the cemetery of Kolbsheim, a little French village in Alsace where he had spent many summers at the estate of his friends, Antoinette and Alexander Grunelius.

[13] In 1917, a committee of French bishops commissioned Jacques to write a series of textbooks to be used in Catholic colleges and seminaries.

This agreement between a philosophic system founded by a pagan and the dogmas of revelation is no doubt an external sign, an extra-philosophic guarantee of its truth; but from its own rational evidence, it derives its authority as a philosophy.During the Second World War, Jacques Maritain protested the policies of the Vichy government while teaching at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Canada.

"Moving to New York, Maritain became deeply involved in rescue activities, seeking to bring persecuted and threatened academics, many of them Jews, to America.

He was instrumental in founding the École Libre des Hautes Études, a kind of university in exile that was, at the same time, the centre of Gaullist resistance in the United States".

After the war, in a papal audience on 16 July 1946, he tried unsuccessfully to have Pope Pius XII officially denounce antisemitism.

The Cercle d'Etudes Jacques & Raïssa Maritain is an association founded by the philosopher himself in 1962 in Kolbsheim (near Strasbourg, France), where the couple is also buried.

Maritain's epistemology is not "critical" in Kant's sense, which held that one could only know anything after undertaking a thorough critique of one's cognitive abilities.

Rather, "Since the mind, from the very start, reveals itself as warranted in its certitude by things and measured by an esse [the Latin verb 'to be', Aquinas' preferred term for 'existence'], independent of itself, how are we to judge if, how, on what conditions, and to what extent it is so both in principle and in the various moments of knowledge?"

It would be impossible, for instance, to develop an adequate moral philosophy without giving consideration to proper theological facts such as original sin and the supernatural end of the human person in beatitude.

[15] Maritain corresponded with, and was a friend of,[16] the American radical community organizer Saul Alinsky,[17] as well as French Prime Minister Robert Schuman.

Accordingly, in Integral Humanism he explores the prospects for a new Christendom, rooted in his philosophical pluralism, in order to find ways Christianity could inform political discourse and policy in a pluralistic age.

[23] Senator John F. Kennedy (later President of the United States), once quoted Maritain in a 1955 address to Assumption College.

Molnar said that while Maritain's philosophy was "Orthodox and Thomist", he nonetheless unfortunately had "occasional excursions into strange semi-spiritual lands.