INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

There are two truisms about politics and philosophy. The first is that politics bears upon the totality of philosophy. The second is that philosophy bears upon the totality of politics. However, a person can press either to the point of falsehood and foolishness. For example, one can press the first to the point of claiming that politics will explain the whole of philosophy, or one can press the second to the point of claiming that philosophy will explain the whole of politics. And the closer one comes to pressing either truism to its extreme, the closer one comes to falsehood and foolishness. The reality of the connection between politics and philosophy is, in fact, extremely complex. My objective in the present article is to show just how complex the connection can be by tracing the work of two major Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Jacques Maritain. I select them in particular because of their interest and my interest in the Modernist controversy within the Roman Catholic Church at the beginning of the century and because in their lives politics and philosophy affected each other throughout a long and significant personal relationship. When I say that my objective is “to show just how complex the connection can be,” I have in mind showing both the extent of the variety and the degree of the complexity.