The Philosopher and the Provocateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky.

Le gentile Jacques Maritain was a passionate man. From his youth he was a militant socialist, but was embarrassed to bring leftist friends home to see his family's bourgeois comforts and habits. He and his future wife Raissa fell in love while organizing a committee to defend Russian students jailed by the czar, and agreed that if they couldn't find the meaning of life by year's end, they would commit suicide together. Instead of life's meaning, their next big discovery was Henri Bergson, a divertissement sufficient to deter them from their death pact. Then after their marriage they took Benedictine oblate vows that included celibacy for the rest of their lives.

About philosophy, Maritain wrote, "But this [Cartesian anthropocentric] optimism is, if I may say so, committed to suicide; for it presupposes a rupture with being" (Dream of Descartes). And about worship he wrote, "But this false perspective [of communal naturalism, for example, group sensitivity discussion] extends the human social claims outside their own order, to impose them on a domain not their own where they devour everything....Against this pseudo-liturgical state of mind, it behooves one to defend the rights and dignity of silence....Against this pseudo-liturgical exaggeration, it behooves one to defend the liberty of souls .... Against this pseudo-liturgy it behooves one to defend the liturgy" (Liturgy and Contemplation).

Saul Alinsky was the Mercutio of democratic politics, overequipped with the performing arts of the local meeting hall, such as sarcasm, bombast, bravado, Socratic ridicule, and the knock-out wisecrack. During the battle between the people's organization FIGHT and the Eastman Kodak corporation in Rochester, Alinksy observed, "When I get through with Eastman Kodak, there won't be enough toilet paper in the world to wipe them clean" (Let Them Call Me Rebel). While lecturing to a large poor people's organization in Manila, the question came up how to deal with the armed guards who forced the poor to stay off the development property on which they had political claim. "Do we shoot them? How can we get around them?" Alinsky had spotted a young woman in the front row wearing red hot-pants, and asked her to come up to the lectern where they chatted briefly. As the snickering and guffawing died down, he added, "What would happen next Sunday if Mrs. D__ and her friends, similarly dressed, took some hot coffee to those guards?" (The Radical Vision).

And in 1958-60, a good many Protestants in Chicago, led by Walter Kloetzli of the Lutheran church and Harold E. Fey of the Christian Century, were condemning the Catholic archdiocese for hiding behind unchristian political conflict to protect white ethnic parishes from black neighborhoods. The archdiocese, through a well-connected law firm, had persuaded station WGN, owned by the Tribune, to suspend the TV broadcast of a film about Martin Luther. Nicholas von Hoffman, an Alinsky cohort, convinced him that this was a grossly stupid tactic, and Alinsky proceeded to hector, cajole, and badger the chancellor, Monsignor Edward Burke, to rescind the ban. At a lunch, Burke told Alinsky to stay out of it, this was not his fight. "It's strictly between us and the goddamn Protestants." They argued heatedly, and Alinsky's final pitch was to let the movie be broadcast, "with one proviso, that they show it backward so that Martin Luther will end up as a Catholic." Everybody at the table exploded in laughter, except Burke, who finally said, "You son of a bitch, Saul." The archdiocese withdrew its opposition to the movie.

Maritain and Alinsky met when Maritain fled France during the Second World War for exile in the United States, and lectured at Hunter College by invitation of its president, George Shuster, once an editor of Commonweal, later chairman of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation board. Maritain refers to his friendship with Alinsky a number of times in his published writings. But these letters present a surprising and rich encounter with the depth of their trust and the fervor of their love and mutual respect. That only nineteen of the seventy-four letters are from Maritain surely means, not that he wrote less often, but that Alinsky's organizing motto, "Low Overhead, High Independence," excluded filing cabinets for saving documents. His administrative equipment seemed limited to his suitcase, a telephone, and his room-dominating ego.

The letters reveal a Saul Alinsky crushed by the accidental death of his first wife. The French philosopher's letter of counsel included this sentence: "In your dire solitude and agony the force of God will work in you, never has your vocation been purer, your rude task of love more necessary, your pity for men more fecund." And Alinsky's reply begins, "Jacques dear: I wept over your letter."

And they reveal Saul Alinsky as the Jewish mother, nudging, fussing, ladling out advice to the Maritains during their move to Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study. They show that both men made elaborate, complex, theological and emotional arguments with themselves about facing the ebb-tide of their careers and death. Eager to seek the other's approval, each carefully explained his own insights and conclusions: "...as you [Jacques] know I have never been convinced of the evidence (of eternal life) and am still searching." The two are equals, like a matched pair of opposites in a lifelong seminar on the meaning of politics. But they are also religious communicants who seek and often find pastoral affirmation in the other's presence and judgment.

The importance of Jacques Maritain continues in many areas, certainly in his critical appreciation of esthetics, certainly in his articulation of the mutual dependence between metaphysics and political ethics. That he reargues Thomistic principles is perhaps less significant than his intellectual method, which is everywhere to elaborate a kind of symphonic dialectic that resonates with many listeners who search and hope. His letters to the quintessential American secular activist strike the same notes.

The importance of Saul Alinsky, for metropolitan-urban communities and for religious people active in politics, is barely beginning to be reclaimed. It has suffered from a generation of fog that descended from the hyperactive fate of the Old Left and the amnesia of the New Left. Alinsky's organizing depended on religious communities and on the confidence of theologically informed clergy and teachers. He never tried to substitute or subvert those symbol-driven institutions with his own pragmatic instruments and energies of democratic power. His letters clearly exemplify this independent reciprocity between religion and politics. So also do a large number of regional organizations that came to life through his teaching and example. This volume reminds us of how vital the connection between religion and politics can be.

REVIEWERS

ELIZABETH BEVERLY is a writer and ethnographer who teaches at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

CHET RAYMO, professor of physics at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, is a science columnist for the Boston Globe.

BETHE DUFRESNE is the arts editor of The Day in New London, Connecticut.

MICHAEL J. HUNT, a Paulist priest, is the Catholic chaplain at Tufts University and coauthor of the forthcoming When Your Children Go to College.

WILLIAM SIMPSON is a research associate for the McGannon Center for Media Research at Fordham University.

PEGGY ELLSBERG teaches at Barnard College.