Sacred Doctrine and Spiritual Practice

Although De la vie d'oraison is an essay of mystical theology and something of a spiritual manual, it also sketches out a hierarchy of knowledge. Maritain outlines the principles and dynamics of Christian mystical contemplation of God and, relying upon Aquinas and Saint John of the Cross, argues that it is the highest mode of knowledge that human beings are capable of in this life. Nevertheless, throughout De la vie d'oraison, there is a particular stress on the primacy of doctrinal truth and on proper Christian instruction according to tradition as the preconditions for genuine mystical contemplation.Footnote ³

Another core theme of the text and an insight that Maritain takes from both Aquinas and Saint John of the Cross is that in order to enter into a contemplative state, the soul must become “passive” to God's actions upon it. Mystical experience is not, then, something attained by the human person. Rather, it is gratuitously given to the person if they are sufficiently detached from personal spiritual attainment and thereby prepared for the gift.Footnote ⁴ Maritain makes it clear that this requires maturity in the Christian life, and two conditions of such maturity are adequate knowledge of foundational Christian truths and assiduous practice of spiritual means of reaching closer union with God, which are common to all Catholic Christians.Footnote ⁵ An accurate grasp of the propositions and claims of the Catholic faith prevents one from fabricating a personal religion based on convenience rather than truth, and so the contemplative life requires a thorough grasp of the tenets of the Catholic faith and what we can know of God by means of revealed and dogmatic theology as the necessary ground of mystical contemplation. According to Maritain:

In placing mystical theology and mystical experience within the larger, institutional whole of the Catholic Church, Maritain is in agreement with orthodox Catholic theologians of the day—especially with his Dominican mentors Garrigou-Lagrange and Humbert Clérissac—and opposed to what Garrigou-Lagrange describes as a purely “descriptive” or psychological approach to mysticism. The latter approach seeks to extract a shared essence from instances of mystical experience and render mystical experiences subject to the judgment of individuals regarding their content and profundity, devoid of a greater system of truths against which they can be measured.Footnote ⁷ In refutation of such a view, Garrigou-Lagrange writes:

Maritain's view, like that of Garrigou-Lagrange, is that mystical union—what he more commonly calls “infused” contemplation—is the crown of the spiritual life, the most precious fruit of faith and spiritual practice in this life.Footnote ⁹ Maritain understands infused contemplation as the “union with God through an experimental, loving and ineffable knowledge of him, which we may all desire to receive from his Grace, and particularly through the assiduous practice of prayer.”Footnote ¹⁰ Infused contemplation “penetrates and secretly tastes divine things in Faith, by the very virtue of the love which makes us one spirit with God.”Footnote ¹¹ It is, moreover, a knowledge of God “in an affective, experimental and obscure manner … superior to every concept and image.”Footnote ¹²

According to Maritain, infused contemplation is to be regarded as the summit of the Christian life itself, the highest occupation of a life dedicated to the love of God, and this love is itself a formal mode of knowledge, a connatural meeting and union of two subjects. The beloved enters into the will of the lover such that “the beloved becomes the principle of action, the ‘weight’ of the lover.”Footnote ¹³ The operative kind of “love” here is understood to be the Christian theological virtue of “charity,” or caritas, an other-regarding, selfless, supernatural love, the supreme analogate of which is God. As we saw above, Maritain describes caritas as both a coming together of God and the soul and a form of human knowledge of God. For this reason, there must be, if the soul is to be united to God insofar as it is possible in this life, an initial offering of self on the part of God to the soul. This readies the soul for the infusion of grace that is not only necessary for the cultivation of caritas in the soul, but also for the bestowal of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which, according to Maritain, are also essential for infused contemplation.Footnote ¹⁴

Maritain makes it clear, though, that for this infusion of grace and the union of the soul and God to occur, the soul must also totally offer itself in love and that this is possible only by means of spiritual discipline and purification of desires and habits of thought. In De la vie d'oraison, Maritain adopts the classical, Dionysian division of the stages of the Catholic contemplative or mystical life. These are, taken in order, an initial purgative stage in which all worldly attachments are purged from the soul, a second, illuminative stage in which the soul enjoys special insights from God pertaining to divine truths, and a unitive stage, in which the soul is joined with God in what Saint John of the Cross calls the “spiritual marriage.”Footnote ¹⁵ For Maritain, as for Saint John of the Cross, the spiritual marriage is the highest point of the spiritual life because God is both understood and experienced as the ultimate end and meaning of human existence, desire, and action, all obstacles to loving God in this life having been lifted.

In detailing the stages of the contemplative life, Maritain also refers to Saint John of the Cross's three signs or “symptoms” of the beginnings of the contemplative way.Footnote ¹⁶ Their occurrence must be verified not just by the practitioner but also by a figure of contemplative authority, such as a spiritual director. The first sign is that the soul loses all desire to discursively contemplate divine mysteries. The second is that it loses all desire to focus either the imagination or the senses on any internal or external object. The third sign is that “the soul is happy to find herself alone with God, in a state of loving attention to him … with interior peace, quietude and repose, without any discursive acts or exercises of the powers of memory, understanding or will.”Footnote ¹⁷

At the summit of this thoroughly regulated and classified spiritual progression, there is, Maritain quotes Aquinas, “a sort of holy leisure and repose.”Footnote ¹⁸ This raises two questions. The first is how this holy leisure and repose and the steps to attaining it relate to the idiosyncratic mysticism of Bloy. The second question is: If this holy leisure and repose is truly meant for the “perfect,” as Garrigou-Lagrange argues, did Bloy qualify as an example of such perfection?

The Mystical Savage of Montmartre

To understand why Bloy is so significant for Maritain, it is worth recounting the well-known story of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain's first meeting with Léon Bloy and their subsequent conversion to Catholicism. Raïssa relates that as university students, and in the face of what they perceived as the meaninglessness of an entirely biochemically determined existence, both she and Jacques made a pact to commit suicide within a year if they could not find a greater meaning to their lives.Footnote ¹⁹ Attending Henri Bergson's classes on the exercise of intuition as a means of knowing ultimate reality saved them from such a fate.Footnote ²⁰ Soon after, however, Jacques soon showed signs of remaining spiritual hunger.

It was after reading Léon Bloy's Mon Journal and his novel, La Femme Pauvre, that the Maritains first met Bloy in 1905. The meeting with Bloy, who was a writer and self-declared prophet living in almost desperate poverty in Montmartre, Paris, was to change their lives forever. Bloy's life was defined by poverty, suffering, and claims to a God-given vocation to decry the spiritual inadequacies of his contemporaries through literary means. The “mystique sauvage de Montmartre,”Footnote ²¹ or “mystical savage of Montmartre,” was a fierce opponent of anyone he deemed to be willfully ignorant of the coming judgment of God, and of his own declaration of its imminent arrival:

Bloy regarded both the poverty and his tiny literary audience as external validations of his own prophetic and literary vocation. He declares, for example, that “All that happens is divine: this I maintain with all the authority of my utter poverty, which is perfect as God is perfect, and which is therefore itself divine.”Footnote ²³ Elsewhere he professes: “There is neither despair nor bitter sadness for the man who prays much…. If you but knew how much I have the right and with what authority I speak to you!”Footnote ²⁴ He would also send letters to his few literary admirers to beg them for money even as he lambasted them, earning him the title “Le Mendiant Ingrat”: “The Ungrateful Beggar.” He saw no shame in this, however, and justified his behavior by referring to the power of his literary work to draw souls to God. “Some people ask for Baptism after having read me,” he writes. “What divine sanction for my violence! Those who condemn me, believing themselves wise, do not understand that I am a Witness, that my function is to bear witness in a day of renegades.”Footnote ²⁵

Becoming Bloy's devotees soon after their first meeting with him, Raïssa Maritain relates that she and Jacques were fascinated above all by what he conveyed to them through his writings and his personal example. She writes that in “Reading La Femme Pauvre, we passed through the literary form … to go directly not to the author but to the man, the man of faith illumined by rays of that strange thing, so unknown to us—Catholicism—and so to speak identified with it.”Footnote ²⁶ She adds: “We had to go further, we had to consider the principles, the sources, the motives of such a life. This time we were brought face to face with the question of God.”Footnote ²⁷ Bloy was, in fact, nothing less than a prophet for the Maritains—a belief that Maritain reaffirms in his eighties.Footnote ²⁸

Under Bloy's spiritual tutelage, the Maritains were baptized into the Catholic Church with Bloy as their godfather in 1906. According to Tsakiridou:

Clearly, Bloy occupied a central place in the young Maritain's religious consciousness and formation as Catholics, but it is also crucial to note that Bloy's own, idiosyncratic mysticism stands in apparent opposition to the rules for spiritual development and discernment of the mystical tradition that the Catholic Church officially recognizes and Maritain repeats in De la vie d'oraison sixteen years after his baptism. Consequently, both the context in which De la vie d'oraison was written and what remains unsaid in the book are of much value for getting a more complete picture of Maritain, serving as a foil for discerning the underlying lay and ascetic mystical sensibility he inherited from Bloy.

Maritain writes that the intended purpose of De la vie d'oraison was for it to be a “directory” for members of the study and discussion group which the Maritains founded and held at their home from 1919 to 1939, known as the Thomist Study Circles (les cercles d'études thomistes).Footnote ³⁰ Receiving formal approval by church authorities, the cercles were to “help to maintain the required integrity and purity of the renewal of Thomist studies in our time, through the means of prayer; and … help to maintain the required rectitude and purity of the renewal of spirituality in our time, through the means of Thomism.”Footnote ³¹ Maritain writes in the statutes of the cercles that Aquinas ought to be taken as the paradigmatic example of a vocational “union of the spiritual life and the life of study” or of “holiness” and a “teaching mission.”Footnote ³² After he began to earnestly study the Summa Theologiæ, Maritain came to regard Aquinas as his model in both his intellectual and spiritual pursuits.

We should not be surprised to learn, then, that the spiritual instruction set out in De la vie d'oraison is Thomist and perhaps, to some extent at least, Dominican. Some elaboration of these two points is required before proceeding onto how Maritain's discovery and discipleship of Aquinas relates to the concurrent and central role of Bloy in Maritain's mystical thought.

Bloy and the Church

As it is expressed in the spiritual teaching of De la vie d'oraison and manifest in the statutes of the cercles, Maritain's vocation as a Catholic philosopher mirrors the Dominican apostolate of “assiduous study of sacred truth” and preaching.Footnote ³³ A stress on the intellectual, evangelical and pastoral necessity to objectively systematize metaphysical, theological and mystical principles is present in both the Order of Preachers and the Maritain of the 1920s. There is also, as we see in Aquinas himself, the general principle that the moral virtues render oneself dispositionally capable of infused contemplation:

For Aquinas, the moral virtues are the necessary ground for infused contemplation, for they purify one's heart, curb one's passions, and assist one in directing one's attention to the object of contemplation, which is God.Footnote ³⁵

In De la vie d'oraison, Maritain cites precisely the same response by Aquinas concerning the relationship between the moral virtues and contemplation (q. 180, a. 2, ad. 2). He then goes on to note the necessity of the moral virtue of prudence for the cultivation of the gift of wisdom, which in turn enables infused contemplation, before adding more generally:

Maritain's orthodoxy when it comes to both classifying and validating mystical experience(s) and delineating the conditions for infused contemplation as seen in De la vie d'oraison, therefore, seems to be in tension with his approval of Bloy's idiosyncratic spiritual practice, his defense of Bloy's claims to divine revelation, and (as we will see) his justification of Bloy's problematic behavior toward Catholics and non-Catholics alike. How can this tension in Maritain's personal life and mystical theology be explained?

Although Maritain never became a Dominican, he had strong connections to the Order of Preachers from the early days of his Catholic life. Jean-Luc Barré writes that Fr. Humbert Clérissac, a Dominican who would become the Maritains’ first spiritual director in 1908, “would exercise over this couple an influence so powerful and so decisive that, for better or for worse, there was no part of the lives of the Maritains that would not be conditioned, inspired, or formented by him.”Footnote ³⁷ “From Léon Bloy to Father Clérissac,” wrote Raïssa Maritain, “we had been led from one man of the Absolute to another man of the Absolute.”Footnote ³⁸ Maritain's other connections to the Dominicans include friendships with Dominican scholars such as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, who, when Clérissac suddenly died in 1914, recommended Fr. Pierre-Thomas Dehau, another Dominican friar, to be Maritain's spiritual director.Footnote ³⁹ Maritain writes that Clérissac was a “great master of the illuminative life” and that Dehau was a “great master of the unitive life.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Barré writes of Clérissac that “He recognized himself in that fidelity to a doctrine, that love of pure truth which impregnated the mission of the Dominicans.”Footnote ⁴¹ Maritain certainly begins De la vie d'oraison in a similar spirit when he writes that “In us as well as in God, love must proceed from the Word—that is, from the spiritual possession of the truth, in Faith.”Footnote ⁴² As we have seen, when it comes to mystical theology, this implies placing mystical experience within a systematic and externally verifiable set of principles and signs of authenticity. The sign of authenticity most relevant to the case of Bloy is good moral character.

Maritain's convictions, as we see in both De la vie d'oraison and the statutes of the cercles, echo those of Humbert of Romans, the fifth master of the Order of Preachers, according to whom: “Study is not the end of our Order, but it is extremely necessary to secure its twofold end, namely, preaching and salvation of souls. For without study neither can be achieved.”Footnote ⁴³ When it comes to Aquinas, a Dominican of singular importance, Maritain writes of his dedication to “propagating in the world, and particularly among laymen, the doctrine of Saint Thomas in its purity.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Elsewhere he writes: “I have given my life to Saint Thomas, and labor to spread his doctrine.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Now that we have some understanding of the role of certain Dominicans in Maritain's life, it should be noted that Léon Bloy was regarded as a crass misfit in the ecclesiastical and literary circles of his time. It might be added that even some of his admirers, such as Georges Bernanos, had to distance themselves from him.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Bloy's foul treatment of fellow Catholics certainly discredited him, particularly problematic for the French clergy was his self-appointed role of prophet and claims to special divine revelation. In this connection, the alleged Marian apparition of La Salette, which is said to have occurred close to the mountain of La Salette in southern France in 1846, was an issue over which Bloy caused Clérissac some consternation and almost cost Maritain his professional career. The apparition, in which Mary is reported to have appeared weeping and to have delivered warnings about divine punishment for humanity's moral corruption to two children, Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, was a particularly controversial subject for the French church at the turn of the twentieth century. Bloy was a firm believer in the apparition, undertook many pilgrimages to the site, and believed himself to be divinely chosen to spread its prophetic message of imminent divine justice.

Concerning La Salette and Bloy's claims about personal divine revelations, Clérissac writes to Maritain that “Bloy is only a follower” (“Bloy n'est qu'un adepte”) of Mélanie, and unlike her and others exhibiting the marks of a saintly life, “Bloy cannot have the same certitude” (“Bloy ne peut avoir la même certitude”) when it comes to discerning whether he has received divine inspirations.Footnote ⁴⁷ Clérissac goes on to say that Bloy's case is even graver than that of the Italian Renaissance prophet Girolamo Savonarola, who was allowed to hold what he took to be personal revelations from God but not permitted to preach, for Bloy has come “to the point of view of sincere subjective belief and recourse to unique and fatal means of argumentation, such that now you can only leave him as he is” (“au point de vue de la bonne foi subjective, argument unique et fatal qui vous leste pour le laisser agir”).Footnote ⁴⁸ It is significant that the two most influential living figures on Maritain's Catholic formation and spiritual life were so at odds with each other when it came to the nature of Bloy's alleged mystical and prophetic experiences.

Reading Maritain's Notebooks, published in France in 1965, when he was already of very advanced age, we learn that Maritain spent two years writing what he describes as a very lengthy tome on La Salette. We also learn that, after discussing the matter with Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain went to Rome to petition the pope to allow the book's publication. The pope, he writes, expressed his sympathy with the project, but due to its controversial nature, referred him to Cardinal Billot, who rejected the idea of publication. Maritain reflects that the whole venture could have brought disastrous consequences for his career as a freshly minted professor of philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris—a title given to him by the church itself.Footnote ⁴⁹ He is candid about why he sought publication of the manuscript:

The story of Maritain's attempt at publishing his book on La Salette does not necessarily indicate disagreement between Maritain and the church hierarchy over a certain conviction the former inherited from Bloy (in this case, the reality of the apparition at La Salette). Rather, it is one instance of Maritain repressing such convictions—here, out of obedience to the church's decision to prohibit the publication of material about La Salette. Maritain was also concerned that “People had begun to gossip, they circulated writings against Léon Bloy and against me.”Footnote ⁵¹

It has to be remembered that at the time of the pursuit, Maritain was acting in the capacity of a philosophy professor at a reputable Catholic institution. He had pressures from ecclesiastical authorities to advance orthodox positions on intellectual matters and avoid scandal. We also have to remember Bloy's own problematic reputation in the French Catholic community, beyond the Order of Preachers. It, therefore, seems reasonable to suppose that such pressures were sufficiently strong for Maritain to seek to minimize the presence of Bloy in wide-ranging texts such as De la vie d'oraison—a text that was intended for the members of the cercles (some being prominent Dominicans) whose statutes had been approved by the church. This is, at least, until Maritain no longer felt the need to defend himself from Catholic theological authorities—a change indicated in later works not only by more explicit references to Bloy, but also by the adoption of a more combative tone, such as in The Peasant of the Garonne and Untrammeled Approaches.Footnote ⁵²

Why, however, did Maritain assign such religious authority to Bloy, and how did Bloy influence Maritain's own conception of Christian mysticism? Answering these questions first requires a brief look at the mystical theology of Saint John of the Cross, upon which Maritain relies so heavily in De la vie d'oraison and later, in The Degrees of Knowledge.

A Holy Hatred of Self

Perhaps the most well-known feature of Saint John of the Cross’ mystical theology is the ascetic stripping of personal attachments as one pursues Christian sanctity or sainthood. This purgation encompasses desires for possessions and worldly success, and even one's conception of the nature of God.Footnote ⁵³ For Maritain, as for Saint John of the Cross, the doctrine of the void is absolutely crucial in the soul's becoming passive to the will of God, exhibiting the three signs mentioned earlier, and eventually entering, at the highest point of mystical life, what Saint John of the Cross calls the “spiritual marriage.”

Denys Turner argues that John of the Cross’ pursuit of spelling out the “experienced feel” of such purgation somehow sits between the objective, cosmological perspective of the Middle Ages and the modern focus on subjectivity. Saint John of the Cross’ mystical theology thereby marks a turning point in Christian mysticism, making it resistant to historical categorization.Footnote ⁵⁴ I will now show that Maritain's mystical theology also resists categorization, for he relies on Aquinas for an objective grounding of his mystical theology, Saint John of the Cross for a systematic description of precisely the “experienced feel” of ascetic mysticism, and Bloy for a modern exemplar of lay Catholic mysticism that finds its power and expression in prophetic imagery and language that admits of neither moderation nor systematization.

For Maritain, Aquinas was above all a man of Catholic spiritual practice, but as a philosopher-theologian, his concern was not spiritual direction; rather, it was spiritual edification, with the elucidation of universal truths rather than the practical illumination of the ways of spiritual perfection. The interest of Saint John of the Cross, by contrast, is not “telling us what perfection is, as leading us to it,” the saint being what Maritain designates as a “practitioner of wisdom.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Relying upon Saint John of the Cross in The Degrees of Knowledge, Maritain suggests that mystical theology is the study of the preparation for and experience of various degrees of mystical experience from a distinctly Christian perspective.

With these two elements—a doctrinal theological basis and intended spiritual instruction—we have the two elements that Maritain aims to balance in De la vie d'oraison and make it such a curious little text in the light of the absence of anything explicitly related to Bloy. Consequently, they are the source of tension in Maritain's mystical theology, for the first and most influential figure of Catholic spiritual instruction in his life, and personally responsible for his and Raïssa's conversion, was neither a doctor of the church nor one of the Dominicans discussed earlier, but rather, Léon Bloy.

As Leiva-Merikakis writes: “Jacques Maritain owed the shape of his religious destiny to the ‘phenomenon of Léon Bloy’ just as he owed the shape of his intellectual destiny to Saint Thomas. Indeed, Jacques found Thomas's love of objective truth anticipated in the very unphilosophical Bloy.”Footnote ⁵⁶ What is so curious, and perhaps even paradoxical, though, is that it is in Bloy that the ascetic element comes to its highest point, even as we see in him the strongest affirmation of individual spiritual superiority—including over members of the Catholic Church's ecclesiastical body. Even more curious, as we will see, is that Maritain acknowledges this. But how and why did Maritain come to believe these things about Bloy and attribute such religious authority to him?

I suggest that the answers lie in the fact that Maritain saw in both the person and writings of Léon Bloy compelling examples of ascetic suffering—that is, suffering not for its own sake, but rather as participation in the redemptive work of Christ's cross and passion, for the reunion between God and human souls residing in a world all too tainted by tragedy.

Throughout his letters, Bloy expresses the belief that his poverty and suffering are both necessary for his vocation as a prophetic figure and as a writer in pursuit of Christian sanctity. He writes: “Faith, Hope and Charity, and Sorrow which is their substratum, are diamonds, and diamonds are rare, as you have learned. They are very expensive, never forget.”Footnote ⁵⁷ He affirms the value of suffering in rendering himself capable of producing his literary work when he writes that “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.”Footnote ⁵⁸ He also writes that “A heart without affliction is like a world without revelation” and that “Suffering is the helper of creation.”Footnote ⁵⁹

That suffering is both an intrinsic part of the vocation of aspiring to sainthood and an inescapable feature of the fallen world for Maritain is abundantly clear when we read a letter of his written in reply to an anonymous girl after Raïssa's death. Here Bloy's influence is quite apparent:

One cannot help but see the resemblance between Maritain's description of Christianity, the grim realities of the world and the motivations of the saint as given above and his description of Bloy's own views as given in the following:

For Maritain, it is the vocation of the saint to ascetically suffer for, and in the name of, Christ. In this connection, he writes:

For Maritain, the saint does this because “things as they are are intolerable,” and it is only by total self-renunciation that the saint can enjoy freedom from the goods and pleasures of the world, “infected,” as they are, “with lying, injustice, wickedness, distress and misery.”Footnote ⁶³ Ascetic suffering is, then, a means of participating in the cross of Christ, and consequently a means of purifying the soul's desires.

That Maritain viewed Bloy as a modern Christian ascetic earnestly pursuing holiness is evidenced by Raïssa's reflection that through Bloy's example, they “were shown heroic Catholicism—sanctity in its terrible trials, in its humility and its divine charity, in its asceticism, in the beatitude wherein it reaches its fulfilment, in its pure harmony, in its power, in its beauty.”Footnote ⁶⁴ That Bloy also played a crucial role in the formation of Maritain's mystical theology from very early on—despite being explicitly absent in De la vie d'oraison—is evident from the fact that Maritain speaks of the necessity of “spiritual and bodily penance” and “a holy hatred of self” (“la sainte haine de soi meme”) in the pursuit of holiness.Footnote ⁶⁵ Maritain's words, which convey an acute sense of sinfulness and the need for the strictest self-renunciation do seem to echo those of Bloy's literary double, Marchenoir, who, in La femme pauvre, recounts a mystical experience he had atop the mountain of La Salette and says the following:

Maritain regarded Bloy as a great witness to the redemptive power of ascetic suffering in both his life and literary work. In this connection, Leiva-Merikakas makes the point that “For both of them [Bloy and Maritain], suffering is the primary activity engaged in by the saints as lovers of God for so long as the work of redemption remains incomplete.”Footnote ⁶⁷

If we are left with any doubt, however, regarding the spiritual authority that Maritain ascribed to Bloy, let us consider the fact that Maritain argues that Bloy possessed the theological virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit necessary for mystical or infused contemplation of God and that Bloy was, in fact, a mystic of extraordinary insight. In this connection, he writes the following about Bloy:

Maritain writes elsewhere that “The true secret of Léon Bloy is the intensity of the three theological virtues in him, the absolute firmness and ardor of his faith, in a soul belonging to poet and prophet.”Footnote ⁶⁹ We, therefore, see that Maritain considers Bloy to have something of a triple vocation of artist, mystic, and prophet.

Unless it can be shown that these vocational elements can exist in harmony and that such harmony could be manifest in someone like Bloy, however, it would seem that this conviction puts Maritain at odds with his mentors in the Catholic Church. For though mystical experiences and infused contemplation itself are regarded by orthodox Catholic theologians as part of the normal flowering of Christian spiritual life, as we have seen, those same theologians argue that this stage in the spiritual life presupposes some degree of moral uprightness and purity of heart attained through the perfection of the moral and theological virtues—charity above all, as well as the gifts of the Holy Spirit that themselves depend on the moral virtues for their habituation. This is a position that Maritain himself reaffirms with Raïssa when discussing infused contemplation in a relatively late work, Liturgy and Contemplation, published in 1960.Footnote ⁷⁰

With these considerations in mind, it would seem reasonable to ask how, for Maritain, Bloy could be a mystic capable of infused contemplation given the latter's callousness and his attacks, even on other Catholics. Would not Maritain's affirmation of Bloy as a mystic capable of infused contemplation contradict his belief, as expressed in the statutes of the Thomist study circles, in the need for a union of “holiness” and a “teaching mission” within the remit of orthodox Catholic theology? What of the model provided by the “angelic doctor”? The point here is not that the asceticism or tripartite vocation that Maritain sees in Bloy are at odds with orthodox Catholic mystical theology. Rather, it is that Bloy's bombastic claims to divine revelation and ugly behavior toward fellow Christians fall outside of, and do not match up to, the behavior of someone living in obedience to the church and with moral uprightness—and whom orthodox Catholic theologians would, therefore, regard as being capable of exhibiting the gifts of the Holy Spirit and infused contemplation.

Indeed, what is essential to the asceticism on which Maritain grounds mystical life—in the mold of saints like Saint John of the Cross—is a humbling of oneself in obedience to both God and the church, as well as love for one's neighbor.Footnote ⁷¹ In connection with the cultivation of mystical union with God, the Maritains write: “There comes however a moment—when the soul has progressed rather far in the way of the Spirit—when, through the effect of contemplative union itself, concern for one's own perfection, as necessary as it may remain, passes into the background.”Footnote ⁷² We do not find that Bloy exhibits such humility, but rather a persistent preoccupation with his own spiritual authority and insights in virtue of the degree to which he suffered. In this respect, the Maritains may have had legitimate grounds for regarding Bloy as a modern prophet. However, to say that Bloy was also a mystic capable of infused contemplation is another matter entirely.

An Invisible Martyrdom

For an answer to these questions about Bloy's putative mysticism, let us return to Maritain's introduction to The Pilgrim of the Absolute, an edited collection of Bloy's letters:

This statement carries with it three major implications for understanding how Maritain reached his position regarding Bloy's mystical vocation. I will explore each of them and suggest some resources for determining whether the tension between orthodox mystical theology and Bloy's mysticism amounted to a contradiction in Maritain, with potentially destructive implications for the enterprise laid out in De la vie d'oraison but also serving as a case study demonstrating the need for Catholic mystical theology to accommodate alternative forms of mystical life among Catholic laypeople.

The first implication is that for Maritain, the suffering that Bloy endured throughout his life was, in fact, a holy suffering—the asceticism of one in pursuit of self-abandonment and absorption into the life of God. Maritain says that Bloy, who longed for justice for the poor, the coming of the kingdom of God, and a literary audience, was in fact subject to “an invisible martyrdom, inflicted by means of the threefold anguish of silence, in which his cries fell as into an abyss of solitude and destitution endured for the love of God.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In speaking of the loneliness of those who reject the goods of the world for sainthood, Maritain compares Bloy to Saint Benedict Labre, writing of the latter that “Total poverty is for him a gift from heaven”Footnote ⁷⁵ and that “His prayer is prayer of humility and of love … and of ecstasy.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The second implication of Maritain's statement about Bloy is that Maritain believed Bloy to have entered mystical contemplation of God and that he did this through entering into the sufferings of God and his people. Bloy also seems to think this, for he writes of his literary double, Marchenoir, that “He had the gift of tears, sign of predestination, the Mystics say. These tears were the hidden joy, the secret and mysterious treasure of one of the … most tragic lives of this century.”Footnote ⁷⁷

It seems reasonable to infer, on the basis of what Maritain says about Bloy, that he regarded Bloy as someone who had attained mystical insight by means of “ecstasy”—a supernatural experience of being placed outside oneself and raised to a higher knowledge or “intellectual vision” of God and divine things that surpasses normal human powers of knowledge and reason. This temporary experience occurs by virtue of the mutual love between God and a human soul and is one of many charismata or what Maritain, following Aquinas, calls “gratuitously given graces” on the part of God to the human soul.Footnote ⁷⁸ Another charismata is prophecy, which we can be certain Maritain believed Bloy to have been given on occasion.Footnote ⁷⁹ Again, following Aquinas, Maritain affirms that an “intellectual vision” or insight into divine truths can also stem from prophecy and that this kind of prophetic insight is, like infused contemplation, superior to visions of the human imagination stemming from the senses.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nevertheless, Maritain never goes beyond this to fully explore or clarify the precise relationship between Bloy's prophetic and mystical or contemplative vocations.

That Maritain believes Bloy to have been given gratuitous graces does not contravene Catholic orthodoxy. Such graces, Maritain says, can accompany infused contemplation but are not necessary for the latter to occur. Nor are they necessary for the soul to enter into the highest mystical state with God in this life, which is the spiritual marriage.Footnote ⁸¹ To claim that Bloy was in possession of the theological virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, however, does amount to regarding Bloy precisely as a spiritual adept. This is something that Maritain's Dominican peers denied, and for reasons that I have detailed at length.

At this point we must remember that Maritain remained both a disciple of Bloy and a Thomist until the end of his life. He must, therefore, have been aware of any apparent tension, blurring of notions in his mystical theology, and even the possibility of an outright contradiction in his understanding of mysticism. In this connection, there are also important facets of Bloy's own vocation as an artist in relation to his mystical insights with which Maritain was particularly concerned and to which we need to give due consideration. For the third and final implication of Maritain's statement about Bloy above is that Bloy's writing was an essential part of his own vocation to sanctity. This seems reasonable in virtue of the fact that what Bentley Hart aptly calls Bloy's “mysticism of poverty” (physical and spiritual)Footnote ⁸² is what made the art of the latter possible and gave it the strength to spread the message of Christianity in a compelling manner.Footnote ⁸³ In this connection, Maritain writes: “But I hear people asking: How do you account for Bloy's personal attacks? His violence, his injustice toward this man or that? Let the reader take note, at this point, of what is exceptional in the case of Léon Bloy.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In what follows, it is difficult for a contemporary reader not to think of mental illness or some kind of psychological trauma as being a potential cause of Bloy's irresponsible lifestyle (begging for money while refusing to work, despite having a starving family) and his ill treatment of others, especially when we bear in mind that Bloy could never hold down a job due to his temper.Footnote ⁸⁵ In this connection, Maritain mentions Bloy's “strange absorption in his own interior world” and that when Bloy “was but a young child his mother often found him sitting silently, bathed in tears, weeping for hours without ascribable motive.”Footnote ⁸⁶ What is more striking, however, is that Maritain says:

Maritain goes on:

Maritain clearly recognizes that Bloy's behavior could be morally problematic: “Without doubt this way of acting offered, for many, serious disadvantages. His love of God showed itself in none too charitable colors, and his zeal for Justice, which was really Léon Bloy's constant passion, seemed somewhat to neglect the moral virtue of the same name.”Footnote ⁸⁹

As we have seen, Maritain attempts to explain both Bloy's inability to distinguish between sin and sinner and his unfortunate tendency to regard all wrongdoings as symptomatic of spiritual mediocrity and the manipulation of evil spiritual powers as a product of Bloy's own suffering due to what he perceived as the world's abandonment of God: “The crucifying vision of universal forgetfulness for God and His Love … made the passion of the Lord perpetually present to him…. That is what existed for him: this spiritual universe—and his faithful sorrow.”Footnote ⁹⁰ He also attempts to justify Bloy's methods, however, by referring to Bloy's literary gifts and power to impress upon people the importance of the Christian message. In this regard, for Maritain, Bloy's personal attacks, employment of hyperbole, and use of off-putting imagery (such as excrement) in his writings have some justification:Footnote ⁹¹

This suggests that for Maritain, Bloy could not have been the writer and prophetic figure he was without his personal flaws and that a function of the very ferociousness we see in his literary works and correspondence was to draw souls to God. Again, as Bloy himself says: “Some people ask for Baptism after having read me. What divine sanction for my violence!”Footnote ⁹³ In this connection, Raïssa writes movingly of the impression Bloy made on her and Jacques when they first met him. Writing of Bloy's revealing to them the “tender love of Christian brotherhood” as “a soul marked with the love of God,” she also writes that “Instead of being a whited sepulcher like the Pharisees of all times, he was a charred, blackened cathedral. The white part was inside, deep in the tabernacle.”Footnote ⁹⁴

For the Maritains, Bloy's great love and his personal flaws were not in opposition but were, in fact, complementary. This we gather from the image of the Eucharist in the tabernacle—the pure source of life and love lying within the depths of what is otherwise a rather unattractive edifice. This is a familiar idea when it comes to prophets (we need only think of Moses or Jonah). Regardless of whether Bloy's deep moral flaws and morally problematic behavior were the result of mental illness or psychological trauma, however, the implication that such flaws and behavior (in Bloy's case, not only toward his readers and interlocutors by virtue of his invective, but also his disdain for those who helped him financially and his willful neglect of his family's financial needs) are necessary corollaries to mystical experience or infused contemplation is not an idea that we see in orthodox Catholic mystical theology. Rather, according to Aquinas, Lagrange, and even Maritain himself, practitioners are expected to gradually rid themselves of moral and temperamental flaws through detachment, humility, and prayer. This is why there is a tension at the heart of Maritain's mystical theology when it comes to what he takes to be Bloy's tripartite vocation.

Maritain is, in fact, convinced that only someone such as Bloy could appeal to many today who do not sense the existential urgency of the Christian message. He has this in mind when he writes that “Bloy, in crying out his disgust at all lukewarmness, in shouting on rooftops his thirst for the absolute, inspires these famished ones with a presentiment of the glory of God.”Footnote ⁹⁵ It would, therefore, seem that for Maritain, Bloy's vocation was that of a writer who, like the contemplative scholar of the Thomistic or Dominican mold, was set with the tasks of seeking spiritual perfection and of conveying the truth of Christianity to his readers. As a layman and a Catholic writer, Bloy shares with the Thomist the function of proclaiming and defending the faith. Having said that, it is clear that the medium, methods, and character of Bloy remain utterly different from those of the “angelic doctor,” and Maritain argues that this had to be the case for Bloy's work to be at all possible.

These facts suggest that for Maritain, “holiness” and mystical experience cannot be the exclusive domain of those whom his Dominican peers regarded as “adepts” or, indeed, “perfect.” Bloy's reputation as someone of dubious moral character, an artist, and someone who, for Maritain, is capable of mystical insights, therefore, seems to challenge the criteria that the Catholic Church has traditionally relied upon for determining the nature of infused mystical contemplation and a person's readiness for it. For though the church calls everyone to holiness, and though mystical experience of infused contemplation is part of the development of one's spiritual life, the church has usually put priests, hermits, or those in cloistered religious orders—including the doctors of the church Maritain relies on in his earlier works on mystical theology—as its models for those capable of infused contemplation. As we will see in the next section, Maritain comes to argue that this image of Christian mystical life does not sufficiently represent the diverse experiences of Catholic Christians in the modern world. Before moving on, though, let us note that for Maritain, the fact that Bloy was largely ignored by the public and scorned by the Catholic establishment is also scandalous because, for him, Bloy was a literary genius, modern-day prophet, and mystic who produced evangelically effective literary works. In this connection, he celebrated the latter's growing readership in 1968: “The literary world has now finally made up its mind to recognize and to admire this extraordinary witness of the Holy Spirit.”Footnote ⁹⁶ It is, therefore, clear that for Maritain, Bloy's personal flaws were more than compensated for by his singularly important vocation of calling modern people back to Christianity through his prophetic messages and written work.

“Contemplation on the Roads” and “Masked Contemplation”

We have established that Maritain's belief in what he takes to be Bloy's unique, tripartite vocation of lay mystic, prophet, and artist can be traced to the central role of Bloy and his literary works in Maritain's own religious development. Given the degree to which Maritain valued Bloy's literary work and the personal risks he was willing to take by affirming Bloy's mystical insights, it also seems reasonable to conclude that for Maritain, the greater good that Bloy's tripartite vocation served compensated for the temporary harm it did to both Bloy himself and his interlocutors. Maritain owed his own Christian faith to Bloy, and we can see in his defense of Bloy that this gratitude only deepened as Maritain grew in philosophical and theological maturity.

Even with a clear understanding of how Maritain reached his position regarding Bloy, however, we are left with the question of whether it can be consistent with the orthodox mystical theological framework laid out in De la vie d'oraison. In this connection, there are two main conceptual resources pertaining to contemplative experience which Maritain left behind for others to explore and may help us find an answer. I will briefly examine these and show that the way in which they do assist us is only negative in that they fail to explain or give us adequate resources to conceptualize Bloy's tripartite vocation and, therefore, force us to find an alternative path.

One such idea is that of “contemplation on the roads” (“contemplation sur les chemins”), which Maritain first introduced with Raïssa in Liturgy and Contemplation. The Maritains argue that in many cases, Christian mystical contemplation is both the cause and fruit of a life lived in simplicity for the love of God, occurring “without visions, without miracles, but with such a flame of love for God and neighbor that good things happen all around them without noise and without agitation.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Building on this foundation in The Peasant of the Garonne, published in 1967, Jacques argues that Christian mystical contemplation “is frequently the treasure of persons hidden in the world.”Footnote ⁹⁸

A prime example of such holy simplicity and inconspicuousness for the Maritains is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. There was in her, according to Maritain, a “marvelous reduction to the essential” and a spiritual life that matched that of Saint John of the Cross in the love of and mystical union with God, but that exhibited none of the “great typical signs, terrible or resplendent, which manifested, in the soul's own experience, the stages traversed in advancing in the way of union.”Footnote ⁹⁹ There is, in Saint Thérèse, “no longer anything but total love, total gift, and total stripping of self.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Maritain then goes on to suggest that the “little way” of Saint Thérèse, in whom infused contemplation does not follow the stages or exhibit the signs described by Saint John of the Cross or Saint Teresa of Ávila, opens up new possibilities for ordinary Catholics in their pursuit of holiness and contemplation in the midst of the messiness of the world. This he calls “contemplation of the roads (“La contemplation sur les chemins”).

When returning to this notion in The Peasant of the Garonne, Maritain mentions that “La contemplation sur les chemins” was the title of a book that Raïssa intended to write and that one of his tasks, following her death, was to “weave together” her thoughts on the subject.Footnote ¹⁰¹ That Raïssa had intended to write this book and that Maritain took her as an authority on mysticism is significant for understanding Maritain's position on who can be capable of infused contemplation and the relationship of such contemplation to the idiosyncratic, lay mysticism of his godfather. For Raïssa was a contemplative, an accomplished poet, and more importantly, a layperson herself. In this connection, Maritain forcefully argues both for the legitimacy and necessity of lay Catholic spirituality and contemplative life.

According to Maritain, laypeople who seek a contemplative path should not be dissuaded by Church authorities. Nor should their experiences be discounted as inferior to those who belong to cloistered religious orders. Maritain goes so far as to say that “the one who prays in the world is, I believe, in a better position to understand a little than the one who prays cut off from the world.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Maritain outlines the requirements of a genuine Christian spirituality for working people. He emphasizes that both solitary prayer and the love of others—as reflective of the two components of the great commandment—are necessary and suggests that, instead of talking with friends or watching TV, laypeople can use their leisure time for prayer and contemplation. Such practices presuppose the observance of the sacraments, and Maritain speaks from experience as a layperson who relied heavily on Raïssa's contemplative experience.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Having said that, the Maritains were no ordinary laypeople. Around the time of the Second World War, the Maritains oriented their lives “toward the work of contemplation,” living “like a little religious community, in which the study of spiritual things was given first place.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ They also got permission to install a chapel in their house in Meudon, at which Mass, devotions, and perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament were held. Ralph McInerny puts it well that the Maritains’ rationale for their highly regimented life consisted of a “dual purpose—the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of sanctity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Here we see in full display the role of the devotional, liturgical, and cataphatic elements of the Catholic faith that enable laypeople to cultivate a life of Christian holiness and contemplative practice. The Maritains sought to embody the universal call to holiness and did not shy away from contemplative practice as laypeople.

We now know that Jacques and Raïssa's role model in this regard was Bloy, who often frequented the sacraments and maintained a devotion to Our Lady of La Salette and claimed to have prophetic insights. According to Maritain, Bloy also had profound mystical experiences. Consequently, might Bloy's ascetic, lay mysticism be one instantiation of what the Maritains call “contemplation on the roads,” reflective of the holy simplicity exemplified by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux?

Although the notion of “contemplation on the roads” may at first seem to encompass Bloy's idiosyncratic, lay mysticism, as an attempt by the Maritains to legitimize and lay out the contours of a genuine lay Catholic mysticism, it neither encompasses nor addresses the tripartite vocation of artist, mystic, and prophet that Maritain assigns to Bloy. For if “contemplation on the roads” is spirituality “without visions, without miracles … without noise and without agitation,” Bloy—as the “mystical savage of Montmartre” who claimed personal divine revelations seemed to have prophesized and experienced ecstasy, and lambasted his fellow Catholics for their lackluster faith—certainly does not qualify. Again, Maritain does not help us in this regard because he does not attempt to clarify the precise relationship between Bloy's prophetic role and his mystical or contemplative experiences. Moreover, if, as Maritain suggests, the repugnant aspects of Bloy were necessary for this tripartite vocation, the notion of “contemplation on the roads” does not explain how Bloy could attain the theological virtues necessary for mystical insights, how he could experience ecstasy or prophecy, or how the theological virtues and charismata function with respect to his artistic vocation.

We reach the same conclusion when it comes to another (though related) idea Maritain left for us, which is his distinction between “masked” and “open” or “typical” forms of contemplation. In The Peasant of the Garonne, Maritain makes the following point:

Again, Maritain is emphasizing here that contemplation or the mystical life cannot be the sole preserve of spiritual athletes and that it be open in some fashion to Catholic laypeople. This is consistent with orthodox Catholic mystical theology at least in principle, even if it is not how the Church always presents the diverse modes of a fully committed mystical or contemplative life. But we also get a hint that for the later Maritain, the systematized approach to the mystical life and mystical experiences that he advocated earlier no longer fits the multitude of phenomena that we see in the modern world. As Maritain writes in The Peasant of the Garonne:

However, this universalization of contemplation and the emphasis on “crucifying” experiences—again, both consistent with orthodox Catholic mystical theology—do not help us to address the issue of the relationship among humility, moral character, and infused contemplation in Bloy. Furthermore, we must remember how significant Bloy's personal character, prophetism, and artistic vocation are for Maritain. And with this in mind, it seems Bloy's tripartite vocation bears little resemblance to the inconspicuous forms of contemplation Maritain describes here. There seems to be little or no sight of a possible reconciliation in Maritain's thought between orthodox Catholic mystical theology and the idiosyncratic mysticism of Bloy.

For Maritain, as we have seen, Bloy's ability to speak through his literary work to ordinary people—many of them being disenchanted Christians—and impress upon them the existential urgency of the Good News is Bloy's primary redeeming function. Does this mean, then, that Bloy's prophetic and artistic activities are one and the same with his mysticism?

In The Range of Reason, Maritain makes the following point:

Here we see that while the love of God in prayer and contemplation and the love of neighbor are both necessary in the pursuit of sanctity, there is, for the layperson, a risk that action aimed at promoting the good of others (even their salvation) can be used in an attempt to subvert the role of contemplation. This, however, is not truly possible, for, as we have seen, a genuinely mystical life depends on participation in the sacraments, prayer, and some form of contemplation. Moreover, as Maritain makes clear, just as there is a universal call to holiness, there is also a universal call to contemplation in that “all souls, by the fact that they are called to heavenly beatitude, are also commonly called in a general way to enjoy the beginnings of beatitude on earth by means of infused contemplation.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Nevertheless, individuals embark on the contemplative path or experience contemplation in diverse ways, and in this connection, Maritain distinguishes between what he calls “masked” and “open” contemplation for us to identify the various modalities of contemplation and guard against any move to replace contemplation with action.

“Open contemplation,” according to Maritain, is the contemplation of those whose hearts are always set on God—either consciously or unconsciously. The former includes the ascetic mystical practice that we find in those pursuing the mystical path, such as Saint John of the Cross. The latter includes what Maritain, following Victorino Osende, calls “prayer of the heart.”Footnote ¹¹¹ This is simply the total dedication and resting of the human heart to and in God, even when one is asleep.Footnote ¹¹²

Masked contemplation, by contrast, is when the universal call to contemplation is not detected in one's prayer life but rather in the way someone lives or acts. According to Maritain, those whose lives are informed by “masked” contemplation typically have active roles in the world, but again, this is not to reduce contemplation to action. Rather, it is the theological virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit informing someone's action in a decidedly contemplative fashion, as for example, “in the glance with which they will look at a poor man, or will look at suffering.”Footnote ¹¹³

Does Bloy exhibit instances of “open” or “masked” contemplation? Insofar as Bloy's mysticism cannot be mapped or described according to the traditional rules for discernment and the fact that the theological virtues ascribed to him by Maritain cannot be explained by those rules, Bloy could not have been engaged in an explicit and systematic “open” form of contemplation like one of the doctors of the church, “masters,” or “practitioners of wisdom” Maritain relies on in his treatments of mystical theology. Bloy was also clearly not engaged in “masked” contemplation, as he was immersed in the sacraments and devotional prayer and also producing literary work with religious themes and an evangelistic intent, all while allegedly having prophetic and mystical experiences. That he could have been engaged in what Maritain refers to as the “prayer of the heart” is certainly possible, but as with the notion of “contemplation on the roads,” this does not help us understand how Maritain conceived the relationship between Bloy's tripartite vocation and the categories of orthodox Catholic mystical theology.

Given these considerations, the value of the notions of “contemplation on the roads,” “open contemplation,” and “masked contemplation” for us does not lie in their provision of a Maritainian conceptual framework for understanding what he takes to be Bloy's unique vocation. Rather, it lies in the fact they are an important vehicle for arguing for the legitimacy and necessity of lay Catholic mysticism in the modern world.

Why does the recognition of the different modes of the mystical life among those who live in the world matter “perhaps more than anything else,” according to Maritain, and “for our age” in particular? It seems that Maritain was prescient of the diversification of contemplative practice and the need to accommodate an ever-larger multitude of mystical experiences among individuals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who live ever more complicated lives. This is especially true in the case of Christian artists, whose creative experiences Maritain consistently suggests are at least analogous to mystical experiences.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Having examined various conceptual tools and finding them inadequate for helping us determine whether Maritain's understanding of Bloy's own mysticism can be consistent with orthodox Catholic mystical theology, it seems that what is really needed first of all is an in-depth study into how Maritain conceived the precise conceptual and experiential relations among the vocational elements of artist, mystic, and prophet in Bloy himself. With these relationships established, we can then use Bloy as a case study to see how Maritain's account of Bloy's experiences interfaces with orthodox Catholic mystical theology.

What we do know is that Maritain calls for greater and more rapid recognition of contemplative diversity. According to Maritain, new forms of the contemplative life will be realized “not only by new brotherhoods … but also by those who are called to this life in the common condition of lay people with all its turmoil, its risks, and its temporal burdens.” It seems that for Maritain, Bloy was just such a layperson, but a layperson whose mystical life found its expression in literary works of such spiritual power that many would be drawn to the Christian faith.

Today we can observe the diversification of the Catholic contemplative life and new forms of Catholic contemplative and artistic experience with the emergence of organizations led by laypeople aimed at promoting both contemplative life and artistic expression. One example is “Sacred Beauty,” a Private Association of the Faithful established by Paul Chu and Valerie Tarantino in the diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, “dedicated to Eucharistic contemplation and to artistic and intellectual creativity.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Another example is a lay religious institute for artists in the process of being established by Dr. Cole Matson, under the supervision of Bishop John Stowe of the diocese of Lexington in Kentucky, and with the tentative name of “The Servants of Christ in Beauty.” Matson notes the Catholic Church's apparent lack “of any institute of consecrated life, whether religious or secular, whose apostolic mission centers on the creation of art and the service of artists.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Consequently, the institute's stated charism is “To encourage artists both spiritually and professionally, and to create art inspired by the Spirit and grounded in Christ, for the greater glory of the Father. In short, to minister through the arts and to artists.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Elsewhere, Matson writes explicitly of the role of contemplation in the institute and of the essential unity of contemplative and artistic experience that was touched upon earlier in this article in connection with Léon Bloy. “The artist's vocation,” writes Matson, “like the vocation of the Christian, is nourished by the springs of contemplation, which are the source and inspiration for action.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The institute serves to cultivate “artistic creation” among artists working in a variety of media, each of whom strives to create art “rooted in his own contemplative experience of God, and which communicates that experience of God to his audience, so that they may share in the love and joy of God as well, through the created artwork.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

That a work of art can be the fruit or expression of a contemplative or mystical experience of God and that such an artwork can serve an evangelistic function are precisely the spiritual dynamics in Bloy that led Maritain to the Catholic faith and which he saw as essential to Bloy's own vocation. Consequently, it would be useful not only for Christian theologians but also for contemplative and artistic practitioners to take Maritain's conception of Bloy's vocation as a case study for better understanding the emergence of such artistic-contemplative lay Catholic communities that we are currently witnessing.