America, I Love You

REFLECTIONS ON AMERICA (205 pp.)--Jacques Maritaln--Scribner ($3.50).

Few Americans would dare say about their country what Author Maritain says--for fear of being accused of extreme patriotic partiality, even of jingoism. But France's Jacques Maritain loves America. And, unlike most European (or American) intellectuals, who are apt to be apologetic or patronizing when they praise the U.S., Maritain proclaims his love with unstinted ardor. Having taught in and known the U.S. for almost a quarter of a century, Philosopher Maritain is familiar with America's authentic face and voice; yet he remains enough of a stranger to stress truths that are overlooked or taken for granted by many Americans. Probably Maritain's central point: "[Americans are] the least materialist among the modern peoples which have attained the industrial stage."

To Maritain, "all this talk about American materialism is no more than a curtain of silly gossip and slander." He coolly measures U.S. attitudes by materialist standards and finds that the label simply will not fit: "America is not egoist; for the common consciousness of America, egoism is shameful . . . There is no avarice in the American cast of mind. The American people are neither squeamish nor hypocritical about the importance of money in the modern world . . . The average European cares about money as well as the average American, but he tries to conceal the fact, for he has been accustomed to associating money with avarice." Where, asks Maritain, is there another nation so free with its money for charity? And to the charge that the heart does not go with the money, he asks: "But can we believe that European streets are jammed with people busy giving their hearts?"

In all its basic aspirations, says Maritain, the U.S. is a deeply spiritual country. He points out that the American's very urge to create wealth is tied up with his vision of a better life for all (Maritain believes that the U.S. has gone beyond either capitalism or socialism to "economic humanism"). Says he: "Genuine spirituals love America. Her worst enemies are pseudo-spirituals." Tellingly, Maritain notes what too many U.S. literary critics have ignored: that "American literature, in its most objective scrutinies, has been preoccupied with the beyond and the nameless which haunt our blood."

Maritain's love affair with the U.S. is not an uncritical passion. He concludes that Americans are most anxious to be loved abroad, that they feel their lack of "roots" too desperately ("The worst scoundrel in Europe has roots"), that if success does not come at once, discouragement sets in. He believes that, influenced by a "popularized, anonymous positivistic philosophy," too many Americans are afraid to hold strong opinions. Maritain makes a profound observation about tolerance: "The man who says 'What is truth?', as Pilate did, is not a tolerant man, but a betrayer of the human race. There is . . . genuine tolerance only when a man is firmly and absolutely convinced of a truth . . . and when, at the same time, he recognizes the right of those who deny this truth to exist." He also recognizes that amid America's smiling friendliness there is not enough time or place for the private world of real friendship.

To show that the All-American smile can become oppressive, he recalls a dentist whose nurses made him feel that "dying in the midst of these happy smiles and the angel wings of these white, immaculate uniforms would be a pure pleasure, a moment of no consequence . . . I left this dentist, in order to protect within my mind the Christian idea of death."

And yet Maritain adds: "Deep beneath the anonymous American smile there is a feeling that is evangelical in origin--compassion for man, a desire to make life tolerable.''

The book has its faults, including occasional oversimplification. But Americans as well as Europeans who wish to understand America should consider it must reading. They will find an illuminating witness to the American promise as well as a heart-lifting prophecy. Says Maritain: "If a new Christian civilization, a new Christendom is ever to come about in human history, it is on American soil that it will find its starting point."

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