2. Art and prudence: the influence of morality on art

Let me begin with the Thomistic distinction between art and prudence or art and morality, which Maritain makes his own and which appears in a number of his works.Footnote ¹¹ Art is a virtue of the practical intellect that pursues the good or perfection of the work, that is, of the thing made; the artist as artist is only responsible to his work. According to Aquinas, art as a virtue is right reason about works to be made; the good of the thing made does not depend on the condition of the appetite of the artist, for at stake is not the artist’s own good but rather the good of the work made. An artist is therefore commended not for the condition of his will, which is his rational appetite, but rather for the quality of his work which is good.Footnote ¹² But while art is a virtue concerned with making, it has something in common with speculative virtues, since these, like art, are concerned with the quality of their object and not with how the human appetite may be affected toward an object. Aquinas points to the mathematician whose appetitive faculty may be affected by joy or anger, but this does not matter as long as he demonstrates the truth; the mathematical argument’s truth is not therefore assessed according to the moral character of the mathematician.Footnote ¹³ In like manner for Aquinas, the appetitive condition of the artist does not matter either. Art and the virtues of the speculative intellect are thus capacities or powers to work well, such as to produce a good artwork, one that is well made, or to arrive at truth by means of mathematical argumentation. The good use of these capacities is not however ensured by art or by the speculative virtues.Footnote ¹⁴

From the Thomistic tradition in which Maritain writes, the artist’s capacity to produce good artworks is independent of his moral condition.Footnote ¹⁵ Art does not intrinsically depend on moral virtue, just as the mathematician’s argument does not depend on his moral character; in fact, from what Aquinas says, the person who is learned in moral science can correctly judge acts of virtue even if he himself does not possess the virtue.Footnote ¹⁶ However, in order to use the virtue of art well, the artist also needs moral virtues, which will perfect his appetites. Aquinas holds that since art does not make its possessor use the capacity well, then art falls short of being a perfect virtue,Footnote ¹⁷ for according to Aristotle a virtue will generally cause its possessor to perform his function well and make him a good man.Footnote ¹⁸ In order, then, to become a good man and lead a good life, the artist who possesses the capacity to produce good artifacts will also need that his appetites and especially his will be perfected by moral virtues if he is to make good use of the virtue of art. It is not surprising then that Aquinas should appeal to Aristotle who says that there is a virtue of art, that is, a moral virtue requisite for the good use of art; it is the virtue of justice which rectifies the artist’s will to do his work faithfully.Footnote ¹⁹ I will return briefly to this virtue later in my paper.

Now prudence, too, is a virtue of the practical intellect, concerned with the good of human beings, with the perfection of their choices and decisions which will lead to their becoming morally good people. There is in the case of prudence or of practical wisdom, as prudence is called, an intrinsic dependence on the person’s appetites being directed to the true good; without rectification of the appetites to the true good, the person cannot have the virtue of prudence. Whereas art as a virtue, considered in itself, does not regard the rectitude of the appetites since art merely confers the capacity or aptness for a good work, prudence does indeed presuppose the rectitude of the appetites since prudence confers both the aptness for a good work and the use; therefore, the possession of prudence, together with the other moral virtues, would enable the person who is an artist to use well the art that he has and to become, then, not only a good artist but also a good human being.Footnote ²⁰

Since art regards the sphere of making, while prudence concerns the sphere of action, Maritain situates art ‘outside the line of human conduct’ because art has its own end, rules, and values, which regard not those of the human being but of the work to be produced.Footnote ²¹ Art becomes all-absorbing and the artist seems to live in a world apart, where he and his art are solely at the service of the thing which is being made. Maritain does however recognize that there is a distinction between the end pursued by art and the method of the art. To this effect, he says, ‘If art is not human in the end which it pursues [which is the good of the work], it is human, essentially human, in its method of working. It involves the making of a man’s work, stamped with the character of a man [that is, a rational animal].’Footnote ²² What Maritain means by this is that the work of art, although instantiated in something material, has been formed in and directed by the mind. The reality of the art is thus dependent on this formal element. For Maritain, ‘The work to be done is merely the matter of art, the form of it is undeviating reason.’Footnote ²³ The expression of ‘undeviating reason’ reminds us of Aquinas’s own definition of art as ‘right reason in regard to the making of things’.Footnote ²⁴

While from the point of view of art, the artist is concerned only with the good of the work and not the good of human beings, it is reasonable to think that from the point of view of morality what the artist writes, paints, or composes does matter, for before being an artist he is a human being and is thus responsible for the good of human life, both in himself and in his fellow human beings.Footnote ²⁵ Maritain thinks, then, that considered in themselves art and morality are in effect two ‘autonomous worlds’, each supreme within its own domain; however, because human life needs beauty and intellectual creativity, and because the artist exercises his art in the midst of human life, with life’s needs and ends, art and morality cannot ignore one another for the artist, who is a human being, belongs to both these worlds. The artist is both an ‘intellectual maker’ and a ‘moral agent’ engaged in actions, which affect others in the human community and which will affect his own personal destiny.Footnote ²⁶ Maritain thus accords a superiority to the world of morality over the world of art because the destiny of human beings depends on no law other than that of morality, although he qualifies this superiority by claiming that art is extrinsically and indirectly subordinate to morality.Footnote ²⁷

Moreover, in distinguishing between the virtue of art and the soul of the artist who is first and foremost a human being, Maritain adds that art as a virtue is ‘instrumentally subordinate’ to the soul that acts by means of it, and that the soul of the artist with all its loves and all its human, moral, and religious intentions, intentions that are outside of the artistic order and that the soul may pursue, is the principal cause that uses the virtue of art as an instrument. When the soul of the human being in the artist is diminished, so too is diminished the virtue of art that belongs to the artist as a working human being.Footnote ²⁸ The subordination of art to the soul is reiterated by Maritain when he says more emphatically that by the subject or the human being in whom art exists art is subordinate, even if extrinsically subordinate, to the good of the human subject.Footnote ²⁹ When an artist uses his free will to execute a work of art, he enters not only the sphere of artistic standards but also the sphere of moral standards where the good of human life is primary.Footnote ³⁰

But if we consider the distinction between the formal object of art, which I take to be the intellectual form imposed on the matter, which form radiates beauty, and which is the aim directly intended by art and makes art be what it is, then the formal object of art is not in itself subordinate to the formal object of morality.Footnote ³¹ Maritain adds, however, that not only must formal causality be taken into consideration but also material causality; morality has a connection with the virtue of art in what Maritain calls the order of material or dispositive causality, a connection that is extrinsic and indirect, but nevertheless inevitable and real.Footnote ³² In other words, insofar as art exists in human beings, ethical realities will concern the artist as a human being and will also have an impact on the artist as an artist.Footnote ³³ This connection between morality and art is evident when we consider that even the highest moral virtues will not make up for the mediocrity or the lack of the virtue of art in an artist, and that there are in addition moral vices such as laziness and cowardice that do not provide a suitable environment for the exercise of artistic activity. The artist’s moral constitution thus has a kind of indirect impact on his art.Footnote ³⁴

As Maritain sees it, the deficiency or even the particular beauty of an artist’s work may well be the result of a lack of psychological and moral integration and what he calls the split between sensibility and the creative faculty of the intellect or the imagination.Footnote ³⁵ Maritain graphically puts this lack of integration of the artist’s sensible and intellectual powers in the following way, ‘A moral poison which warps in the long run the power of vision will finally, through an indirect repercussion, warp artistic creativity—though perhaps this poison will have stimulated or sensitized it for a time.’Footnote ³⁶ For Maritain, ‘the work always avows’, such that even in the case of great artists whose work is exceptional, there can be said to be a ‘soft spot’ in that greatness, for the work is nourished by the experience of the artist as human being.Footnote ³⁷ From what Maritain says about the artist’s vision or his knowledge being affected by ‘a moral poison’ and this in turn affecting the work of art, it would seem that he is returning us here to the importance of the morally good use of the virtue of art which, while being extrinsic to the art as such, nevertheless places art and its exercise in the wider human moral context.Footnote ³⁸

Maritain also makes reference to the inner inclinations of the artist, which may be termed his affections or loves, as these serve to fix the artist’s attention on certain things and thus reveal things to him.Footnote ³⁹ For Maritain, it is through the artist’s emotion and subjectivity that the artist, insofar as his creative intuition is concerned, knows all that he knows.Footnote ⁴⁰ The soul of an artist that is darkened by immorality will not be able to see things as they really are. To highlight this connection, Maritain quotes from the Neo-Platonist philosopher, Plotinus, who says, ‘Just as one can say nothing about the beauties of [senses], if one has no eyes to perceive them, so it is with the things of the spirit, if one cannot see how beautiful is the face of justice or temperance… .’ Footnote ⁴¹ It seems right to say, then, that the darkness of immorality impedes the vision of the real and the beautiful. And yet, Maritain also recognized that there were great artists who lived immoral lives.Footnote ⁴² He seems however attracted by the idea that a morally good person, provided that other factors or circumstances remain the same, will be the better artist.Footnote ⁴³

At the same time, Maritain does admit that moral or religious conversion does not necessarily make the work of an artist better, especially where minor artists are concerned.Footnote ⁴⁴ Lofty moral ideas or religious feelings may come to occupy the artist’s mind, and he may be tempted to express them in his art, such that they may be detrimental to his art because they become all too easily, as Maritain says, ‘substitutes for … deep experience and creative intuition’.Footnote ⁴⁵ If, however, the artist is possessed of a great and strong virtue of art, his moral and/or religious conversion will require of him that he be even more exacting in his art and that he allow time and patience to mature and deepen his new experience and inspiration. Maritain cites examples of artists whose work was in no way hindered by their faith and their conversion to God, artists such as Hopkins, Claudel, Bernanos, Mauriac, and others.Footnote ⁴⁶

If morality and religion are to play a significant role in the artist and in his work, then it seems that the artist must have as his end not only the good of his work and its beauty but also the good of himself as human being. While the sole end of the virtue of art is the work itself and its beauty, the artist as human is directed to the ultimate good of human life. As Maritain puts it, ‘Because [art] is in man and because its good is not the good of man, art is subject in its exercise to a control from without, imposed in the name of a higher end, the very beatitude of the living creature in whom it resides.’Footnote ⁴⁷

Let us assume, then, as I think Maritain does, that a morally good person and a Christian who possesses a robust virtue of art will in fact be a better artist than his counterparts for whom art is excessively divorced from morality and the good of human life.Footnote ⁴⁸ In order to reach beatitude, that higher end to which all men tend consciously or unconsciously, the person who is an artist engaged in writing a poem, painting a landscape, or composing a symphony, must be performing acts that are proportionate to humanity’s final end. And if we take beatitude to mean, as I think St. Thomas does and with which Maritain agrees, gazing on the Beauty of God,Footnote ⁴⁹ then the beauty to which art tends and the beauty that is effected in works of art will be a trace of divine beauty and so proportionate to the final end that the artist as a human being seeks. What I say here can, I think, be better explained by turning now to Maritain’s development of creative intuition in terms of knowledge by affective connaturality which regards, as we shall see, the inner universe of the artist’s self, a self that according to Maritain can either be disinterested or egotistical.

3. Poetic intuition, a form of connatural knowledge

Creative or poetic intuition for Maritain is to be distinguished from two extreme positions that are, on the one hand, surrealism whose founder (André Breton) defines poetry as the ‘absence of any control exercised by reason’Footnote ⁵⁰ and in which there is a total unleashing of the powers of the unconscious and of the imagination separated from the intellect.Footnote ⁵¹ Surrealist poetry tends toward the ideal limit termed ‘automatic writing’,Footnote ⁵² where the automatic life of the unconscious is ‘deaf to the intellect’,Footnote ⁵³ as this is an unconscious ‘of blood and flesh, instincts, tendencies, complexes, repressed images and desires’.Footnote ⁵⁴ On the other hand, the other extreme position is the Platonic concept of the Muse, which is bound to madness, enthusiasm, and unconsciousness, and which abolishes logical thought. In addition to the beauty and delight that poems put us in contact with, both the poets and their listeners in Plato will depend on an inspiration which is above conceptual reason.Footnote ⁵⁵ Because of the transcendence of Beauty that subsists in a world of separate ideas, in the eternal fatherland, and because poetry’s end for Plato is beauty, then the poet through a sort of divine madness or inspiration given to him by God comes in contact with the transcendent, a glimmer of which is instantiated in his poetry when he produces his work; the poem will thus be a mere shadow of transcendent beauty.Footnote ⁵⁶ As Maritain contrasts the Platonic and surrealist notions of poetry, what becomes evident is that the source of poetry or poetic inspiration is separated from reason, since for Plato inspiration emerges from a source above reason, whereas for surrealism creative intuition is assigned to a sensuous unconscious and thus to a realm below reason; in both cases the poets belong to the realm of unreason.Footnote ⁵⁷

For Maritain, on the contrary, there is a way to solve the debate of reason and poetry since for him poetry and the intellect are closely related and call out, as it were, to one another.Footnote ⁵⁸ The making of poetry requires technical or artistic reason, but for its foundation or essence, poetry requires intuitive reason. According to Maritain, creative or poetic intuition is neither above nor below reason but rather inspiration from above conceptual reason; it is in the soul of human beings, united with the intellect and the imagination, where creative intuition is found. It is therefore spiritual in origin, but not extrinsic to the poet as in the Platonic inspiration of the Muse nor a kind of Freudian unconscious as in the surrealist ‘deaf’ unconscious. Maritain recognizes the existence of a spiritual unconscious, which he also calls a ‘musical’ unconscious, and which involves all the sensitive powers of the soul, especially the imagination and the emotions, insofar as these participate in the preconscious life of the intellect and the will.Footnote ⁵⁹

In order to explain the role that the intellect plays in creative intuition, Maritain points out that rational discourse and rational deliberation are preceded by the hidden workings of a deep and ‘primal’ preconscious life, which develops in a fertile and translucid night and which resembles the light first created by God. Beneath reason’s activity with its concepts and judgments and the will’s resolutions are found the sources of creativity, knowledge, and love, hidden, as Maritain says, ‘in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul’.Footnote ⁶⁰ An unconscious realm exists which belongs to the spiritual powers of the soul with its desire for knowing and seeing, for intellectual grasping and expressing, and for freedom, and which Maritain calls a spiritual or musical unconscious, unlike the surrealists’ automatic or deaf unconscious.Footnote ⁶¹ These two kinds of unconscious life, that is, the spiritual unconscious and the automatic or deaf unconscious, are in communication and can also interfere with one another,Footnote ⁶² for as Maritain writes, ‘When man seeking for his own inner universe takes the wrong road, he enters the internal world of the deaf unconscious, while believing he enters the internal world of the spirit, and he thus finds himself wandering in a false kind of self-interiority, where wildness and automatism mimic freedom’.Footnote ⁶³ This inner universe of the self is characteristic of the surrealists’ adventure and for Maritain is the result of ‘man’s freakish egotism’ – the result of looking solely to the self and ignoring the contemplation of the external world.Footnote ⁶⁴

In order to explain the role of the intellect in creative intuition, Maritain enters into a discussion of the agent intellect or as he calls it, the illuminating intellect, which permeates images originating in sensation and gathered in the internal sensitive powers; with its illuminating light, the agent intellect actualizes the potential intelligibility in those images which are then freed from any material conditions. Maritain terms what is actuated by the agent intellect a ‘spiritual germ [or seed]’, or more technically in Thomistic terminology the ‘impressed species’. Actual knowing only happens when the agent intellect stamps, as it were, the impressed species on the receptive or passive intellect, which in turn produces a more fully determined spiritual form, also called the ‘expressed species’.Footnote ⁶⁵ While this latter form can be consciously known when the intellect turns back on itself, neither the illuminating intellect nor the impressed species or the spiritual germ is consciously known to us, since the process of illuminating images takes place in the unconscious.Footnote ⁶⁶ Without this process of illumination, however, there would be no formation of ideas or concepts, or what Aquinas calls ‘expressed species’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Now, in the case of poetic intuition, emotion plays an important role in the spiritual unconscious: it is an analogue of the impressed species, as the art to be produced is an analogue of the expressed species. Like the sense image that has been illuminated, so too the emotion is spiritualized and made intentional, according to Maritain, conveying things other than itself in an immaterial way.Footnote ⁶⁸ Intentional emotion becomes for the intellect the vehicle through which the things which have impressed this emotion on the soul (together with other invisible things connected with them) are known even if only obscurely.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Maritain says, ‘It is by means of such a spiritualized emotion that poetic intuition, which in itself is an intellective flash, is born in the unconscious of the spirit’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The intentional emotion conveys both the reality of the things of the world and the subjectivity of the poet; more specifically, the thing grasped by poetic intuition, that is, the singular existent thing is grasped through its affective resonance in the subjectivity of the artist. Footnote ⁷¹ It is not toward essences or concepts that poetic intuition is directed but rather toward a particular existent thing that is connatural to the artist’s soul affected by a given emotion; while the focus is on a singular existent and not on the universal, poetic intuition is indeed cognitive because it goes infinitely beyond that singular existent.Footnote ⁷² As Maritain puts it, ‘Precisely because [poetic intuition] has no conceptualized object, it tends and extends to the infinite, it tends toward all reality, the infinite reality which is engaged in any singular existent thing (either the secret properties of being involved in its identity and in its existential relations with other things, or the other realities, all the other aspects … of being), … [and] which [this singular existent being] conveys to the mind, by the very fact that it is grasped through its union with, and resonance in, subjectivity spiritually awakened’.Footnote ⁷³

As explained by Maritain, poetic intuition is connatural and truly human, involving the whole person with all its powers working together, that is, the intellect, the imagination, emotion, and the will. Not only is knowledge of a singular existent thing given but also knowledge of all those other things that echo, as it were, in that existent thing and knowledge of the subjectivity of the artist, all of which is conveyed through the intentional emotion. Things that are grasped by poetic knowledge are replete with meaning, surpassing themselves and giving more than they have, for as Maritain sees it, ‘they are permeated by the activating influx of the Primal Cause’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The knowledge that is given in poetic intuition is only fully expressed in the work – both knowledge of things grasped through affective resonance in the subjectivity of the artist and the awakening of the artist to his very self.

Since poetic intuition is not only cognitive but also creative, it is turned toward operation or the work. As soon as poetic intuition exists, deep within the nonconceptual life of the intellect, awakening the artist to himself and to the resounding secret of reality, the artist is motivated to create.Footnote ⁷⁵ For Maritain, everything is given in poetic intuition which is born of significant emotion, such that the whole work is present in advance, ‘whether this totality is now virtually given in the first line of a poem, as a gift from the preconscious life of the soul, or virtually concentrated in the spiritual germ [or seed] of a novel or drama’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Poetic intuition needs to be guarded and protected; the artist needs to prepare himself for it by removing obstacles and ‘noise’ so that the power and transparency of poetic intuition spontaneously progress within him. The artist’s poetic intuition will have creative strength in proportion to the depth of his attentiveness to the things of this world and to his own soul; he needs to plumb, as it were, the depths of the things and of his subjectivity awakened in him through intentional emotion.

As Maritain sees it, poetic intuition demands that the artist listen to it and this requires ‘a serious school in discipline … [and] in sacrifice’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, the actual exercise of poetic intuition can be improved by humility and by the work of the artist’s intelligence and his virtue of art, which deals with the ways in which the original insight is executed and perfected throughout the artistic process. According to Maritain, ‘It is with the steady labor of intelligence intent on the elaboration of the form that this virtuality contained in poetic intuition actualizes and unfolds itself all along the process of production. And then the very exercise of artistic science and intellectual perspicacity, choosing, judging, cutting out all the nonsignificant, …, the superfluous, causes new partial flashes of poetic intuition to be released at each step of the work because [the intelligence in its labor] is always listening to creative emotion and appealing to it. Without this steady labor poetic intuition would not, as a rule, disclose its entire virtue.’Footnote ⁷⁸

4. Conclusion: personality versus individuality and the overriding end of beatitude

Let me turn now to the distinction that Maritain makes between the creative self and the self-centered ego; this distinction is connected to the metaphysical difference between the human person as person and the human person as individual, or the distinction between individuality and personality. Matter, which is at the root of individuality, desires being but also limits being, whereas personality is rooted in spirit and signifies interiority to oneself, requiring communication with others through knowledge and love. According to Maritain, the creative self of the artist is the person as person who is engaged in spiritual communication, and not the person considered as a material individual centered on its own ego and grasping for itself.Footnote ⁷⁹ As we saw previously, egotism does not lead the artist into the inner universe of the spiritual unconscious from which emerges authentic poetic intuition but leads rather to the internal world of the automatic or deaf unconscious. Furthermore, for Maritain egotism is the enemy of poetic activity; in the process of creation the artist should be disinterested in his ego; his soul has spiritual powers that are characterized by expansiveness and generosity, and his ‘passions and ambitions are not those of an egoist’.Footnote ⁸⁰ As Maritain says, ‘[S]uch internal abundance and magnanimity is the normal and connatural climate of the virtue of art. Narrowness and avarice in human desires make it live in cold and sleet’.Footnote ⁸¹ The artist is thus called to offer, as it were, his very self in sacrifice for his work; only in this way will poetic activity be truly disinterested. Otherwise, when egoism enters the realm of the poetic act, then the artist offers himself in sacrifice to the world, to human glory,Footnote ⁸² to money, or power. Then the artist’s virtue of art in its use will tend neither to the good of the work nor to the good of humanity, for what the artist is seeking are extrinsic goods such as his own glory. I take this to be especially relevant in light of that virtue of art which Aristotle posits as requisite for its good use, namely, the virtue of justice, which rectifies the rational appetite that is the will. Whoever looks only at himself, as the egoist does, will not be able to see the truth of real things and so will be neither just nor prudent, for we cannot do the good unless we know reality.

Finally, if the artist both as artist and as human seeks beatitude which is his final end as a human being and if this beatitude consists in the contemplation of the beauty of truth, then each artistic creation should be a reflection of that beauty and thus an act proportionate to the artist’s final end. The artist as artist and as human will ultimately need to ask himself where he has placed his loves: in himself and in extrinsic goods or in his work as a means to engender in beauty, sacrificing himself for his work and seeing in his work a way to glorify God. As the poet Yeats puts it in The Choice: ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work,/And if the second must refuse/A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.’Footnote ⁸³ It is possible that the perfection of the artist’s life as a human being and the perfection of his work not be odds with each other; for as Maritain seems to think, the talented artist who has undergone a moral and religious conversion will be a better human being and his artwork will also be better; such an artist will know that he will need to ‘purify the source’,Footnote ⁸⁴ that is, purify his very self, and thus work in a disinterested way, engaging his freedom in the expression of beauty in his work and in his life, seeking to glorify or please God rather than himself.Footnote ⁸⁵