The French philosopher Jacques Maritain was a powerful force in twentieth-century philosophy and cultural life. The author of more than fifty philosophical works and of countless articles that appeared in the leading philosophical journals of the world, he was widely regarded as a preeminent interpreter of the thought of Thomas Aquinas and as a highly creative thinker in his own right.

Maritain, born in Paris, was reared in an atmosphere of liberal Protestantism. He attended the Sorbonne, where he fell briefly under the spell of teachers passionately convinced that science alone could provide all the answers to the questions that torment the human mind. It was at the Sorbonne that he met his wife-to-be, Raïssa Oumansoff, a young Russian-Jewish student who was to share his quest for truth and to become an intellectual and poet of real stature in her own right. She...