Maritain: "The peculiar vice of classical humanism"

“HERE we see the peculiar vice of classical humanism. This vice, in my judgment, concerns not so much what this humanism affirms, as what it negates, denies and divides. It is what we may call an anthropocentric conception of man and of culture. . . . We might say that the error in question is the idea of human nature as self-enclosed or self-sufficient (that is to say self-divinized, for this nature has infinite longings).

“Instead of an open human nature and an open reason, which are real nature and real reason, people pretend that there exists a nature and a reason isolated by themselves and shut up in themselves, excluding everything which is not themselves.

“Instead of a development of man and reason in continuity with the Gospel, people demand such a development from pure reason apart from the Gospel. And for human life, for the concrete movement of history, this means real and serious amputations.

“Prayer, divine love, supra-rational truths, the idea of sin and of grace, the evangelical beatitudes, the necessity of asceticism, of contemplation, of the way of the Cross,─all this is either put in parenthesis or is once for all denied. In the concrete government of human life, reason is isolated from the supra-rational.”

~Jacques Maritain: Scholasticism and Politics, Chap. I, “Integral Humanism and the Crisis of Modern Times”.

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“There can be little doubt that Jacques Maritain is one of the great minds of our time, fair, without bitterness, and of brilliant power.” ─The Manchester Guardian “

"Jacques Maritain is the most powerful force in contemporary philosophy.”
─T.S. Eliot 

“Jacques Maritain is one of the deepest thinkers of all time. His stature grows greater and greater with the years.” ─Etienne Gilson