Poetry, Beauty, and Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain

8. The Perception of Beauty: The Key to Resolution

120 Eight The Perception of Beauty The Key to resolution \ The beautiful goes straight to the heart. —Jacques Maritain The conclusions from chapters 6 and 7 indicated clearly that, although Maritain used the term Poetic Knowledge to refer exclusively to creative knowledge, Poetry’s history reveals a duality. Poetry serves as the foundation for that creative knowledge which reaches its term only in a work (i.e., Poetic Knowledge), yet it also serves as the foundation for an alternative form of knowledge, one which, although sharing in the cognitive dimension of Poetic Knowledge, nonetheless bears no necessary orientation toward creativity. But what is this possible alternative use of Poetry that Maritain left undeveloped? This chapter will show that Maritain’s discussion of beauty holds the key to the answer of that question. His detailed discussion of this topic first appeared in the 1920 first edition of Art and Scholasticism, and as such, it predates his specialized use of the term Poetry by nearly seven years. In this early work, Maritain provides a thoroughgoing and substantial explanation of the ontological nature of beauty and our epistemological perception of it. Maritain’s analysis of beauty involves a reflection upon basically the same human experience as its equivalent in the thirteenth century of Aquinas. Maritain would have had no reason to think that the human encounter with beauty, either in nature or in a work of art, would have been significantly different in either time period. Hence his 1920 analysis stands as a rather complete and conclusive treatment The Perception of Beauty \ 121 of this subject articulated in twentieth-century Scholastic language. From Aquinas to Maritain, the basic substance is unchanged; only the form of expression is contemporary. A sharp contrast to this exists, however, in the case of his theory of art. While it is true, as Maritain says, that Art and Scholasticism only indicates “some of the features” of a “rich and complete theory of Art” which are reworked from “the materials prepared by the Schoolman,” it is also true that these materials serve only as principles or “maxims” for reconstructing a theory that will avoid the errors “of the ‘Aesthetics’ of modern philosophers.”1 At every turn, we should measure this newly expressed theory against the witness of modern and contemporary art and artists. Maritain’s personal life, from his relationship with his poet-wife to his friendships with many artists and musicians, certainly afforded him ample firsthand contacts of this kind. And although Art and Scholasticism provided a sound primer of Thomist principles concerning a philosophy of art, when we think about the centuries of change that had occurred in creative expression from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, there can be little doubt that Art and Scholasticism represented only a beginning. As Maritain’s own discussion of the human creative process attests, and as he traces the stages of growth of artistic consciousness in Creative Intuition,2 the understanding of creativity had changed and grown significantly. It should come as little surprise therefore that Maritain’s writings concerning creative knowledge and the creative process display a long history of progressively deepening insight. Conversely, it also should come as no surprise that Maritain’s discussion of the nature and human appreciation of beauty does not reflect a lot of innovation during his early years. However, after many years of continued philosophical reflection, and with the formation of a cohesive theory of creativity behind him, Maritain returns in his mature work to reflect upon the relationship between Poetry and beauty.3 In this way, he provides 1. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 3–4. 2. See Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition, 21–34. 3. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition, chap. 5, “Poetry and Beauty.” some late but valuable insights into that undeveloped aspect of his thought. We will revisit these considerations in our final chapter. For the moment, our investigations into Maritain’s ideas about beauty will take us from the 1920 text of Art and Scholasticism to the very few but extremely important additions to the later editions of this work. In the 1927 second and 1935 third editions, Maritain places these new insights concerning beauty and the perception of beauty in either new explanatory endnotes or as emendations to original ones. With the appearance of his opus magnus Creative Intuition in 1953, Maritain revisits the subject of beauty and the perception of beauty. In this chapter, we will...