Friedrich Von Hugel - Jacques Maritain Letters: Frances Crane Lillie Collection, 1920 -1934

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Summary

Creators:
Language:
English.

Background

Scope and content:

Some of the letters from von Hugel have been published in Baron Friedrich von Hugel, Selected Letters, 1896-1924, Bernard Holland, editor (1933 edition). The correspondence with Maritain centers around bringing him to the University of Chicago to give a lecture in 1933 or 34.

Biographical / historical:

Frances Crane Lillie, 1870-1958, was a Chicago philanthropist, married to Frank Lillie, a zoologist and professor at the University of Chicago. (Obituaries on File, 1979) The correspondence in this collection is addressed to her from:

1) Baron Friedrich von Hugel (1852-1925): Born in Florence, Italy of an Austrian father and Scottish mother, the family moved to England in 1867. With no formal education, von Hugel became a philosopher, author, biblical comentator, and was involved in the Catholic Modernist movement in England. He was described variously as "the missionary of Christianity to the intellects of men", "the greatest thinker after Newman", and "it is this power of holding and practising together the pastoral and philosophical sides of the spiritual life, which made him ... the most influential religious personality of our time." Of his book, The Mystical Element of Religion, it was written, "it is quite arguable that this is the most important theological work written in English in the last half-century." In 1920, he received an honorary D.D. from Oxford University, the first Catholic to be so honored since the Reformation. (Paul Clasper, The Interpretation of Christian Mysticism in the Life and Writings of Baron Friedrich von Hugel)

2) Jacques Maritain (1882-1973): French philosopher. He became a Catholic in 1906. Attracted by the philosphy of St. Thomas Aquinas, he became the leading neo-Thomist of his time. After the fall of France in 1940, he came Canada as a professor at the Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, also serving as a visiting professor at both Columbia and Princeton.

Physical location:
2/C/1
Physical description:

Number of containers: 1 box Linear feet: 2 in.

Correspondence, photographs, articles

Access and use

Location of this collection:
2400 Ridge Road
Berkeley, CA 94709, US
Contact:
(510) 649-2523/2501
archives@gtu.edu
Website