Jacques Maritain draws from the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas in order to distinguish between art and prudence and to argue for the indirect influence of morality on art. He extends Thomas’s notion of knowledge by connaturality or affective knowledge, as it is sometimes called, to the domain of art and poetry. Maritain’s move here is certainly innovative, for in Thomas this sort of knowledge is principally applied to the realm of morality whereby the cultivation of virtue leads a person to spontaneously know how to act, creating, as it were, a second nature in the person. For Maritain knowledge by connaturality has fallen into oblivion and needs to be restored; he explains creative intuition as a form of connatural knowledge that regards not only the knowledge of things to be expressed in the artist’s work but also the subjectivity of the artist in whom things are grasped through affective resonance. It seems that for Maritain creative intuition is conditioned by the degree to which the artist takes a disinterested stance with respect to his own ego; if he does not, then the work of art is in jeopardy as is also the beauty to which art tends.

This article examines the poetry of Raïssa Maritain as a distinctive form of theodicy shaped by prayer, suffering, and the catastrophic violence of the twentieth century. Situating Maritain’s poetic work within the context of debates on suffering, this article places her in dialogue with Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of Leiden an Gott (‘suffering unto God’), as well as with the challenges to theodicy articulated by Elie Wiesel and Emmanuel Levinas. While Wiesel’s refusal of theology after Auschwitz and Levinas’s ethical critique of teleological accounts of suffering underscore the crisis of theodicy, Metz offers a theological response that centres on prayer as anguished address to God rather than rational explanation. I argue that Maritain’s poetry anticipates, embodies and extends this insight by functioning as a form of poetic prayer that confronts evil without aestheticising or prematurely redeeming suffering. Through close engagement with poems written before and during the Second World War, I show how Maritain’s poetic language gives voice to accusation, lament, and solidarity with the suffering other, while nonetheless holding open the possibility of redemption. In doing so, her work offers a humane poetic theodicy that both complements and critically deepens Metz’s political theology.

Jacques Maritain’s contributions to the philosophy of art and beauty are of great historical and philosophical importance. Art and Scholasticism (1920) in particular brought unprecedented attention to the place of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and provided other substantial insights on the relation of the fine arts to being. Maritain’s account of beauty, however, emphasizes the invisibility or ‘secret’ nature of ontological form, however, in a manner that shows the influence of modern European romanticism and modernism and that does not accurately reflect the thought of Aquinas or that of Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius, both of whom are the chief sources of Aquinas’s discussion of the nature of beauty. This essay argues for a Dionysian account of integrity, harmony, and clarity that suggests a closer relationship between Aquinas’s three conditions of beauty than Maritain’s discussion indicates.