Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Catholic converts and intellectuals, were key players in the revival of Thomism in France one hundred years ago. Key to their work were intellectual rigour and hospitality. In particular, their O Sapientia (O Wisdom) Sunday afternoon gatherings, which began from studying a question of the Summa, were based on a profound sense that God had brought each person along, whether that person believed in God or not, and that each person had a particular contribution to make. As such, the Maritains embodied Aquinas’ epistemology: an emphasis on clarity and trust in reason as given to us by God had its starting point in the receptive intellect. Thus, the intellectual listens to others who have something to bring, whoever they may be. For Aquinas, following Aristotle, the intellect must convert itself (translating literally) to the images that come to it from the senses. This is an ascesis of embodied cognition that is far removed from Descartes’ disembodied retreat into mind and, indeed, from the reductionism of the logical positivists. It might also explain why what began as a study group, examining a question of the Summa, rapidly expanded to involve artists and their art – Georges Rouault, Igor Stravinsky, and Jean Cocteau were among the Maritains’ friends. Because art is, at its most basic level, material: paint, stone, and sound waves; and even words on a page read in silence still have to be written with the hand and seen by the eyes.

Raïssa was herself, of course, a poet. Her small scholarly output in comparison to her husband’s was mostly due to her persistent ill health: so full of promise as an intellectually precocious teenager, she would, many years later, have to abandon her doctorate on Bergson. But Jacques attributed his best ideas to her, and her poetry exhibits both a deep rooting in Scripture and in her Hasidic heritage, and a grammatically radical, almost postmodern, use of language, which is comparable with the work of another 20th-century French Jewish poet, Paul Celan. As Catherine Pickstock has said, poetry, in being so different from everyday language in its juxtapositions and play, can make and remake connections that we have lost. Connection and juxtaposition, which one needs to welcome if one is to see the truth in the object of one’s cognition, are qualities common to friendship, hospitality, and poetry. And indeed to all the arts: one might think of Fra Angelico’s The Mocking of Christ, which includes a contemporary Dominican friar sitting reading Scripture, or the tension and resolution between simultaneous notes in a piece of music.

This spirit of hospitality, human, intellectual, and artistic, was very present and bore remarkable fruit in the launch conference of Blackfriars Hall’s new Centre for Theology and the Arts, Thomism, Creativity, and the Arts: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. In fact, this was the second conference on the Maritains, the first having taken place at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge in 2023, where I was then acting Director of Research. Chris Grey, a fellow of this small and vibrant theological centre with its pastoral orientation and broad intellectual approach, felt that the Maritains were too little known in the UK, in comparison with the US. He brought over John Trapani from the American Maritain Association, among other distinguished speakers, and some thirty delegates came, most of whom were new to us. With such a success, we wanted very much to continue. Then I moved to Oxford to be prior of the Dominican community here, with the brief to start a centre for theology and the arts at Blackfriars Hall. Margaret Beaufort was keen to support this new centre, as the arts are an important strand in its theological research and teaching, so – fittingly for the Maritains and their gift for friendship – we put on a joint conference at Blackfriars, with the generous sponsorship of the SCALA Foundation who brought over some distinguished US Maritain scholars. Attendance doubled on the previous year.

What form(s) should theology and/of the arts conferences take? They have their own very particular traps. Either the artistic component becomes an excuse for intellectual laziness, or the art becomes merely an instrument from which to draw disembodied abstractions. In the case of theology, art can get used as merely an illustration or a crutch for a theological point. Artists and art-lovers who explore the big questions through art are left bewildered and alienated. As David Brown has pointed out, God is not only transcendent but immanent: so, we should not just look for God beyond the art but also be open to His presence within it. Thus, for ‘Maritain 2’, we had live performances of choral music directed by Peter Carter: Palestrina (500th anniversary), Sir James Macmillan (our keynote speaker), Peter Carter, and myself. And these performances were inserted into the daily liturgy of the Oxford Dominican community, attended by the conference delegates, recalling the traditional model of Dominican community life. Academic research, art, and liturgy were brought together; the intellect embodied in the personal and social body worshipping God.

The quality of relation and connection were also reflected in the sheer diversity of approach in the papers. Surely analytical and continental philosophical traditions have too often – and simplistically – been pitted against each other, one of the results of which has been methodological communication problems in theological debates. So analytical Thomism is strongly present in the papers of Brad Elliott and Margarita Mooney Clayton, who argue for Jacques Maritain as retrieving art as tethered to beauty – integrity, proportion, clarity – a practical activity of the intellect making beautiful things liberates art from mere taste. Art as virtue perfecting the intellect’s practical activity, making beautiful things, while Alice Ramos shows how Maritain develops Aquinas’ notion of connaturality by applying it to art, such that it becomes an affective resonance in the artist’s subjectivity that forms him or her how to act and make. Jan Bentz, drawing also on the Platonic and German Idealist traditions, explores the tension between Maritain’s location of creative intuition in the soul’s spiritual unconscious and Gilson’s emphasis on art as cognitio factiva, finding in both a bridge for non-religious artists by the location of art in being rather than specifically belief. James Matthew Wilson brings analysis together with his own poetry to critique Jacques Maritain’s conception of form as ontological secret. On specific instantiations of art, Chris Grey draws on Jacques Maritain, Joseph Ratzinger, and David Jones to build a robust connection between art and liturgy, while Greg Kerr traces the influences of Jacques Maritain on Flannery O’Connor in her use of distortion as revealing the depths of reality. The emergence of the Divine Light in suffering and darkness emerges in Albert Robertson’s and Emma Mason’s respective explorations of Raïssa Maritain’s poetry, making a strong connection to one of Aquinas’ more neglected sources, the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. Katja Frimberger, drawing on Jacques Maritain’s concept of poetic intuition and her own film-making experience with Simon Bishopp (The Silent Messenger), argues from a phenomenological perspective for shared sight between film maker and audience as making film a shared, relational creative enterprise.

To use a Thomistic expression, all this is very fitting to the legacy of a couple who named their afternoons of study and hospitality after Wisdom. For in Proverbs 8, Wisdom is a relational, connective figure: she is with God as he creates the world, with creation, and delights in being with people. And as we saw, the arts soon found their way into the Maritains’ seminars: likewise, art and music in our conference both signalled the limits of words and opened new constructive, critical conversations. Most importantly of all, the music was in the liturgy so that the art-liturgy connection was not just talked about but, as said above, embodied in doxology.

The conference has set the tone for the Centre for Theology and the Arts. This academic year we have begun a series of exploratory seminars, ranging from Shakespeare and music to a forgotten figure of the Arts and Crafts Movement and an interactive approach to sacred architecture. This is already forging interdisciplinary links and relationships, and we are planning research strands on mysticism and incarnation, forgotten voices in theologically-focused art, and Faith and Fantasy. We are confident of the deep enrichment these strands can bring to theology. In addition, mindful of how the arts today often have the status of ‘religion for atheists’, we are seeking to commission theologically informed artworks in different media and to appoint an artist in residence to work with our philosophers and theologians. I welcome conversations about these themes and other ideas our readers may have, along with discussions on how we can fund this great vision.