Jacques Maritain

Jacques Maritain was a French philosopher who, with his wife Raïssa, converted to Catholicism in 1906 under the influence of Léon Bloy and made Thomas Aquinas the ground of a philosophy for the modern world. Art and Scholasticism applied Thomism to the arts and influenced Eliot, Stravinsky and Flannery O’Connor; The Degrees of Knowledge is his major work on science, philosophy and mystical knowledge; True Humanism and The Rights of Man helped shape Christian democracy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on which he worked. He taught at Princeton and served as French ambassador to the Vatican.