The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life

CREATIVE INTUITION

CREATIVE INTUITION Have you read Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain? —Flannery O’Connor 1 From the beginning of the meetings at Meudon, the Cercles d’études thomistes had included artists and writers and poets as well as philosophers. But then, Maritain’s understanding of the role of Thomas by no means restricted it to the saint’s influence on philosophers and theologians.Thomism provided an all-embracing cultural framework. Of course, to a great degree, Thomism in this sense is only implicit in the writings ofThomas. One might be inspired in various ways by Thomas in writing about modern science, but one could scarcely be mulling over whatThomas had to say about quantum physics. One needed first of all to assimilate Thomas’s teaching and learn from the way he handled problems and then extend and apply that method into areas necessarily unknown to Thomas. When the Church recommendedThomas as our guide, it was not inviting us to become medievalists. Maritain’s reflections on art and poetry are Thomistic in origin but of course go beyond anythingThomas himself wrote. Written toward the end of WorldWar I, Art and Scholasticism was a first sustained effort to show the relevance of Thomas in aesthetics. It is impor-  Creative Intuition  tant to realize how original an effort this book represented. It was not so much a contribution to a genre as the creation of a genre. Of course, there were thousands of books on aesthetics, but there was nothing like Art and Scholasticism.The closest analogue to it must be sought perhaps in the books inspired by Aristotle’s Poetics—a work that had not yet been translated into Latin beforeThomas died, so he had not read it. If he had, if he had commented on it, Maritain’s task would have been considerably easier. But if Thomas had not written on art and poetry, how could his thought be of interest in aesthetics? It bears repeating that Art and Scholasticism begins in a deceptively pedestrian way. Having disarmed the writer by insisting that the Scholastic had no theory of art, Maritain proceeds to examine a series of doctrines that provide a framework for that unwritten treatise.The speculative order must be distinguished from the practical, and it is in the latter that such things as Thomas said about art fall. Making things, like doing things, performing moral actions, involves a thinking that is ordered to those ends. In the speculative use of the mind, thinking is ordered to the perfection of the mind, that is, to truth; but the practical use of the mind is ordered to directing some making or doing. How do these differ? Maritain puts before his reader the distinction between art and prudence that Thomas found in Aristotle, and not the Aristotle of the Poetics. Aristotle and Thomas habitually illustrate the meaning of art by considering the making of a pair of shoes or a house.The distinction between art and prudence is developed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics when he is talking of intellectual virtues, that is, the habits that enable the mind easily and infallibly to achieve its ends. Thus, Maritain devotes a chapter to art as an intellectual virtue, a chapter almost as much concerned with prudence as it is with art. Prudence is an intellectual virtue that intrinsically depends on the moral virtues. Unless one’s appetite is well disposed to the good of justice, say, the mind cannot swiftly and surely find the means to be just here and now. If one’s heart is elsewhere than in justice, say in injustice, appetite will obscure and eclipse the effort to seek and choose the means to be just. But art does not depend for its excellent exercise on the moral quality of the artist. This contrast between prudence and art, faithfully reported by Maritain and never rejected by him, nonetheless inspired a host of original suggestions that have the look of trying to circumvent the distinction. But that is hardly the major problem Maritain now faces. How is he to extrapolate from texts that talk of art in terms of the carpenter and farmer in order to say things of the poet and painter and novelist?  2 The bridge for Maritain is a discussion of art and beauty. Bringing together asides on the nature of beauty found scattered through the writings of Thomas, Maritain develops aThomisitc theory of beauty...