Jaques Maritain (1882-1973) a french philosopher, Catholic and major contributor to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, was a great, and very accomplished academic. Here is one of his quotes on how Aquinas reconciled Christianity with the philosophy of Aristotle (reason and religion):
"If the philosophy of Aristotle, as revived and enriched by St. Thomas and his school, may rightly be called the Christian philosophy, both because the church is never weary of putting it forward as the only true philosophy and because it harmonizes perfectly with the truths of faith, nevertheless it is proposed here for the reader's acceptance not because it is Christian, but because it is demonstrably true. This agreement between a philosophic system founded by a pagan and the dogmas of revelation is no doubt an external sign, an extra-philosophic guarantee of its truth; but from its own rational evidence, that it derives its authority as a philosophy".
Meritain made pursuasive arguments for what he called Integral Humanism in his book entitled the same in 1936:
It is not to the dynamism or the imperialism of race or class or nation that this humanism asks men to sacrifce themselves; it is to a better life for their brothers and to the concrete good of the community of human persons; it is to the humble truth of brotherly love to be realized--at the cost of an always difficult effort and of a relative poverty-- in the social order and the structures of common life. In this way such a humanism can make man grow in communion, and if so, it cannot be less than a heroic humanism (page 7).
My views are quite consistent with Maritains and I hope to show how his political views have been fundamentally altered, not merely expanded.
In a similar fashion, I have also read some preliminary work that suggests that Trudeau would not be supportive of how the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms have been interpreted and applied in the last twenty years.
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