A Philosophical Happy Hour centered around a reading of Jacques Maritain’s essay, “The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism”.
Included in a collection of essays under the title, The Range of Reason, we find Jacques Maritain’s, “The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism”. We will gather this Wednesday (2/26/25) to discuss this essay’s primary intention—explaining what it means and even why it was tragic in the mid-twentieth century to be a serious atheist—along with all its many other insights.
In this brief essay, we find Maritain to begin by distinguishing three different forms of atheism: first, what he calls the practical atheists, “who believe that they believe in God but who in actual fact deny His existence by their deeds and the testimony of their behavior.” Second are those he names the pseudo-atheists (about whom he says very little), “who believe that they do not believe in God but who in actual fact unconsciously believe in Him, because the God whose existence they deny is not god but something else.” Third are the absolute atheists, “who really do deny the existence of the very God in Whom the believers believe”.
Additionally, Maritain distinguishes between negative and positive atheism. As the name suggests, negative atheism removes the idea of God (often seeking only a life-long palliative care—whether through comfort or the exercise of radical freedom). Positive atheism, on the other hand, is “an active struggle against everything that reminds us of God”—such that it is really an antitheism.
Contemporary Atheists: Positive and Absolute
When he identifies “contemporary atheism”, Maritain means by this an atheism both absolute and positive. Thus, really denying the existence of God, they strive “to recast and reconstruct the whole human universe of thought and the whole human scale of values in accordance with that state of war against God.”
Maritain goes on to argue several points against this form of atheistic thinking, of which I would highlight:
- First, that it is an “act of faith in reverse gear”—founded not upon reasoned argument but a moral choice.
- Second, that it must treat anything of God or transcendence as a threat; that the contemporary atheist “is bound to struggle against God without pause or respite, and to change, to recast everything in himself and in the world on the base of that anti-theism.”
- Third, that, although the rupture with God begins in a pursue of “total independence and emancipation”, the contemporary atheist “ends up in obeisance and prostrate submission to the all-powerful movement of History, in a kind of sacred surrender of the human soul to the blind God of history”.
Perhaps our discussion will be able to investigate these three claims—or some of the many others that Maritain makes—in greater depth.
Continuity of Atheism
But a further point which deserves our attention can be found toward the essay’s end. In the final two pages, Maritain highlights that we cannot reach meaningfully to the contemporary atheist if we do not also reproach the practical atheist—that is, the atheist who says he believes in God but behaves otherwise. Ultimately, he concludes:
…absolute atheism is “a translation into crude and inescapable terms, a ruthless counterpart, an avenging mirror, of the practical atheism of too many believers who do not actually believe.” It is both the fruit and the condemnation of practical atheism, its image reflected in the mirror of divine wrath. If this diagnosis is true, then we must go on to say that it is impossible to get rid of absolute atheism without first getting rid of practical atheism. Furthermore this has become clear to everyone that from now onwards a decorative Christianity is not enough, even for our existence in this world. The faith must be an actual faith, practical and living. To believe in God must mean to live in such a manner that life could not possibly be lived if God did not exist. Then the earthly hope in the Gospel can become the quickening force of temporal history.
Do we believers, at times—in the world of prevailing unbelief—perhaps too often slide in our behavior into imitations of practical atheism?
How are Atheists Today?
There is much we can discuss from this essay, so please join us this Wednesday (26 February 2025) for our Philosophical Happy Hour (5:45–7:15pm ET; latecomers welcome!) as we seek to understand not only the insights of Maritain but their applicability to our lives today.