Distinguish to Unite

In his most famous work treating of mysticism and mystical experience, Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain sketches a hierarchy of all modes of knowing that human beings are capable of in this life. Such a colossal enterprise—one which Maritain pursued throughout his life—requires us to understand the ultimate existential and spiritual ends of human beings and carefully distinguish both the means and objects of a multitude of sciences and experiences.

Maritain asserts that the ultimate destiny of every human being is life in and with God, and that intimations of this post-mortem state in genuine mystical experiences of God constitute the highest mode of human knowing. Even metaphysics, which is the highest human science and mode of knowledge by means of natural human reason, stands below mystical experience of God. This is because in metaphysics we only approach God as an object—the first cause, or ‘being as being’—and cannot experience God as a subject, like ourselves.Footnote ¹ Maritain claims that metaphysics is both the greatest and most dissatisfying rational mode of knowledge, for even as the metaphysician pursues the essence of the first cause, they can never know God as he really is in essence or act, which is love. Consequently, the metaphysician ‘does not know what he thus desires, for the philosopher as such has no conception of the Beatific Vision and of what God has prepared for those who love Him. His desire is a natural mystical desire.’Footnote ²

Naming the desire of the metaphysician to know God as first cause or being as being a ‘natural mystical desire’ in contrast to supernatural mystical experience of God requires Maritain to acknowledge and distinguish a multitude of other phenomena that can be said to anticipate supernatural mystical experiences of God. Among these are experiences induced in the ‘natural mysticism’ of non-Christian mystics and ‘natural analogies of mystical experience’ which include ‘metaphysical experiences’ (what Maritain later calls the ‘intuition of being’), experiences of the good and the beautiful, and human love.Footnote ³

Having noted that for Maritain the experience of the beautiful is a ‘natural analogy’ of mystical experience, it is also worth pointing out that for him the genuine artist is always inspired by the beautiful and necessarily aims to produce beautiful art works. Establishing how this is so and whether the experience of the beautiful can contribute to mystical experience, rather than merely serve as its natural analogy, will be explained later. Let us note for now that for Maritain, the spiritual dynamism by which the artist is inspired and creates their work—what he calls ‘poetry’ (as distinct from the art of writing verses, and which I shall hereafter capitalize for clarity, following John Trapani's example)—stands with beauty in a relationship of mutual dependence. Consequently, the creative experience of the artist involves both Poetry and beauty, and in experiencing the beautiful working in them, the artist has experiences which are analogous to mystical experiences of God. Maritain is clear, though, that the Poetry through which the artist maintains their craft can never exceed the status of an analogy of mystical experience: ‘Prayer, holiness, mystical experience—[P]oetry, even pure [P]oetry, is none of these things. But it is their most beautiful and most dangerous moral symbol.’Footnote ⁴

What is so curious, however, is that Maritain makes this assertion even as he asserts elsewhere that his godfather, the Catholic novelist Léon Bloy, was subject to ‘a most harsh mysticism’ and that ‘the true secret of Léon Bloy is the intensity of the three theological virtues in him, the absolute firmness and ador of his faith, in a soul belonging to [P]oet and prophet’.Footnote ⁵ This amounts to claiming, as I will show, that Bloy had the experience of both the artist and the mystic. How can this be understood in reference to the previous claim that Poetry and mystical experience are essentially different?

Making sense of Maritain's position and determining whether, for him, Bloy's Poetic experiences and mystical experiences were mutually dependent or were somehow one and the same requires (i) a deeper analysis of the key operative principles at work in Maritain's mystical theology and philosophy of artistic creativity, (ii) a look at Maritain's personal reflections pertaining to why he would assign this privileged vocation to Bloy specifically, and (iii) developing a Maritainian conceptual framework by which we can understand Bloy's creative and mystical vocation. To this end, I will introduce the notion of ‘Infused-Poetic Contemplation’.

Grace and Mystical Experience

Following Aquinas and St. John of the Cross, Maritain teaches that mystical experience of union with God, or ‘infused’ contemplation, is both the highest mode of knowledge that human beings are capable of in this life and the pinnacle of the Christian life lived for the sake of God.Footnote ⁶ Infused contemplation is a supernatural product of the love between God and the human soul, a dynamic mystical state which ‘penetrates and secretly tastes divine things in Faith, by the very virtue of the love which makes us one spirit with God.’Footnote ⁷ It is, then, a relational or dialogical experience and knowledge of God ‘in an affective, experimental and obscure manner … superior to every concept and image.’Footnote ⁸ Infused contemplation is a ‘connatural’ meeting and union of two subjects born of a love between God and the human person which becomes a formal mode of knowledge as much as an experience.Footnote ⁹

According to Maritain, for the soul to be able to enter into infused contemplation, there must be an infusion of God's grace so that the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, as well as the gifts of the Holy Spirit, can dwell and grow in the soul.Footnote ¹⁰ He ascribes these to Bloy in speaking of ‘The theological virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost planted in a profound and intuitive soul famished for the divine vision.’Footnote ¹¹ The infusion of grace rendering this possible, however, can occur only if the soul is rendered passive and offers itself to the will of God through constant spiritual and ascetic practice.Footnote ¹² Yet, infused contemplation is not to be regarded as something attained through human effort. Rather, God gifts it to those who are sufficiently prepared by being detached from such notions.Footnote ¹³ Then the mystic's beloved (God) enters into their will, such that ‘the beloved becomes the principle of action, the “weight” of the lover.’Footnote ¹⁴

In the highest possible mystical state that infused contemplation affords—what Maritain, following St. John of the Cross, calls the ‘spiritual marriage’—God is experienced as the ultimate end and meaning of human life. For such a state to be possible, however, the soul must undergo extreme ascetic training. Following the classical, Dionysian model, Maritain delineates the stages of the mystical life as a purgative stage in which the soul is first stripped of its attachments, an ‘illuminative’ stage in which the soul then receives communications from God and enjoys greater knowledge of divine truths, and a final, unitive stage, in which the soul is united to God in the spiritual marriage.Footnote ¹⁵

Precisely as ‘superior to every concept and image’, infused contemplation, Maritain says, is neither a visual nor a discursive experience. For while it is ‘a token and shadow, an experienced promise of vision’ of the essence of God,Footnote ¹⁶ the soul, when having progressed far enough in contemplative union, ‘no longer thinks of anything but loving.’Footnote ¹⁷ There is an apophasis that renders mystical union in infused contemplation possible. This is a knowledge of God ‘stripped of all accidents and images.’Footnote ¹⁸

We see further evidence that infused contemplation is supra-sensorial and supra-conceptual for Maritain in his reference to St. John of the Cross’ three signs or ‘symptoms’ of the beginnings of the contemplative way. The signs are a cessation of desire for discursive meditation on divine mysteries, the cessation of any desire to intentionally fix either the imagination or the senses on any internal or external object, and the soul finding itself in a peaceful state when alone with God and ‘without any discursive acts or exercises of the powers of memory, understanding or will.’Footnote ¹⁹

With such criteria and carefully-considered divisions pertaining to contemplative experiences of God, are we to infer that such experiences are the sole preserve of spiritual masters? Maritain denies this. Genuine Christian mysticism, he argues, occurs in degrees of intensity and insight, according to each person's level of spiritual development. ‘The end of the journey is transformation into God, which is begun here below by grace, faith and love’, and ‘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 ²⁰ We will see that this is significant when it comes to Christian artists such as Léon Bloy.

Poetry, Beauty, and Poetic Contemplation

Deal Hudson remarks that as we trace the development of Maritain's thoughts on the vocation of the artist, ‘Maritain's emphasis shifted from the philosophy of art to the philosophy of [P]oetry, and finally, to the philosophy of creativity.’Footnote ²¹ In what follows, we shall be taking a similar course, for I shall argue that in the case of Bloy, the convergence of artistic experience and mystical experience lies in the creative process of the artist himself, rather than in the artefacts he produced. First, then, a brief exposition of what Maritain means by ‘Poetry’, for with infused contemplation, Poetry forms our epistemological foundation for understanding Christian artists whose creative process is suffused with what I call Infused-Poetic Contemplation.

For Maritain, the artist is inspired by being able to figuratively see the world through emotion, such that in being inspired and deploying the content of that inspiration in their work, they enjoy an intuitive kind of knowledge which is at once preconceptual, cognitive and affective.Footnote ²² Previously, we saw that Maritain describes infused contemplative experience of God as a ‘connatural’ meeting and union of the human soul and God. He also describes the knowledge of the artist as a species of ‘connatural knowledge’ or an ‘experience-knowledge’,Footnote ²³ with the difference that whereas in mystical experience the human person is co-natured with God by entering into the life of God through love, the artist, in their creative experience, is co-natured with external objects, whose ‘secret meaning’ the artist divines through emotionFootnote ²⁴ directed towards the production of some artefact or performance.Footnote ²⁵ This process Maritain calls ‘[P]oetry’.

Maritain posits that the emotions of the artist are turned toward both the Freudian subconscious and a spiritual ‘preconscious’, which by association, then transforms the emotion into a ‘spiritualized’ or ‘intentional emotion’, giving it aspects of the object of which it is an emotion.Footnote ²⁶ The emotion that is associated with a thing becomes one with it in the mind of the artist, and they in turn become one with the thing, such that they are able to manifest the spiritualized emotion that is both about a thing in itself and the artist's own emotions pertaining to it in an artwork. The intentional emotion with which an artwork is imbued bears informative power for its audience to ascertain its meaning or the artist's ‘intentions’ in the work.Footnote ²⁷ Poetry allows the artist to penetrate the mystery of things and allows their audience to share in such manifestations of meaning.

According to Maritain, Poetry has both cognitive and creative aspects,Footnote ²⁸ and these correspond to the cognitive and creative aspects of the intellectual nature of human beings.Footnote ²⁹ The ‘cognitive’ aspect of aesthetic experience allows everyone to appreciate and contemplate art. Maritain makes a distinction between the universal capacity to apprehend and share in intentional emotion as ‘[P]oetic intuition’ and the artist's incitation to produce an artwork in virtue of intentional emotion as ‘creative intuition’, for the sake of a work to be produced.Footnote ³⁰ But while the cognitive and creative ‘aspects’ can be logically distinguished for non-creative audiences of art who can have Poetic insights without producing works of art, they exist in logical and temporal unity for the artist as what Maritain calls ‘Poetic Knowledge’.Footnote ³¹

Still, Poetic Knowledge is best understood in terms of the cognitive and creative elements of the intellect, and the difference between them will be crucial in determining the relationship between artistic experience and mystical experience for Maritain. For just as in ordinary knowledge the object of cognition and that which is produced on the basis of knowledge of the object (the concept) are different to the object and work produced in virtue of Poetic Knowledge, so will the object and that which is produced in mystical experience differ from those of Poetic Knowledge.

Toward what, then, do Poetry and the artist's creative intuition tend? To the creation of a work, yes, but what is the most fundamental quality of the intentional emotions involved in an artwork which, we may say, define the experience of art that moves us? Put simply: why is art special for so many of us?

Maritain writes that ‘the free creativity of the intellect … cannot help tending … toward that in which the intellect has its ultimate exultation, in other words, that which causes the pleasure or delight of the intellect.’Footnote ³² That which engenders pleasure or delight for the intellect, according to Maritain, is beauty, one of the transcendentals or qualities of ultimate reality, or what shall hereafter be referred to as ‘Being’, encountered through potentially infinite instantiations in the world.Footnote ³³ Following Aquinas, Maritain posits that the beautiful consists in three properties: ‘integrity’, ‘proportion’, and ‘clarity’ (or ‘radiance’), which encompasses the former two and denotes the intelligibility and splendor of the form of a beautiful object.Footnote ³⁴

For Maritain, when the mind recognizes matter so intelligibly arranged as to be beautiful, it recognizes its own nature and rejoices in delightful contemplation (gaudium).Footnote ³⁵ It is because of this that the intellect longs to create the beautiful as a matter of pure intellectual delight.Footnote ³⁶ What is most important here with regard to the relationship between the mystic and the artist is that for Maritain, sensual delight only accompanies an intellectual delight upon the perception of the beautiful, and that the beautiful is an occasion to contemplate Being.

If the process of creating a beautiful artwork is ‘cleared of all adventitious elements’ such as egotism on the part of the artist or mere sentimentality in content rather than genuine sentiment, that process will be a matter of pure intellectual delight.Footnote ³⁷ The intellect, then, longs to create the beautiful, because the beautiful is a manifestation of Being—an inexhaustible wellspring of intelligibility in which the mind, spontaneously and non-self-consciously, delights. However, concerning the Poetry underlying the artist's Poetic Knowledge, Maritain writes that it ‘stands in the line … of the delight procured by beauty’.Footnote ³⁸ Maritain here seems to place the natural ability to appreciate the beautiful on equal terms with Poetry as the uncovering of hidden meaning in things. It also suggests, as Trapani says, that the relationship between Poetry and beauty is one of mutual dependence and presence, that ‘where there is one, there also will the other be found.’Footnote ³⁹

The intellect seeks the beautiful as that through which it can rejoice in the infinite richness of Being, and for this reason, Maritain asserts that the genuine artist necessarily seeks to create beautiful works. Trapani argues that for Maritain, ‘our ultimate happiness and fulfilment is obtained through the satisfaction of the natural desire of the intellect for beholding the fullness of Being.’Footnote ⁴¹ One can understand this in the following way. The intellect desires what is most real, and the beautiful, unlike the merely sentimental or the grotesque, as the shining forth of the infinite mystery of Being and analogously manifesting the Being that is the heart of all reality, gives us the opportunity to delight and contemplate the mystery of Being itself. This is why Maritain says that ‘if [P]oetic intuition is really expressed it will inevitably be expressed in beauty … for any real expression of [P]oetic intuition derives from it integrity, consonance [or proportionality], and radiance.’Footnote ⁴² All this amounts to saying that the beautiful is lovable and that the hidden source of art is Poetry, which aims for the beautiful. Furthermore, the beautiful mirrors the other transcendentals of the good and the true.

Coming now to the subject of the relationship between art and the mystical, it is because this contemplation of the beautiful, corresponding to the cognitive rather than the creative aspect of the intellect, is not merely an instance of sensual pleasure but first of all an intellectual delight, that Trapani takes up a notion that Maritain rarely used and never developed: ‘Poetic Contemplation’.Footnote ⁴³ According to Trapani, Poetic Contemplation bears an analogous relationship to supernatural contemplation or mystical experience in that it is a species of practically disengaged, natural contemplation of Being through the analogate of the beautiful, but unlike supernatural contemplation, does not have God in His very essence as its object and, consequently, not consist of direct, loving communion with God.Footnote ⁴⁴

Now, however, I will take the notion of Poetic Contemplation further by exploring two issues which Trapani does not address: the relationship between the Christian artist and the mystic, and the relationship between specifically Christian Poetic Contemplation and infused contemplation.

Bloy as Mystic-Poet

We have just established that Poetic Contemplation consists of intellectual delight in the beautiful, whereas infused contemplation is a direct experience of loving union with God. Yet, we also know that Maritain ascribes the experiences of both the mystic and the Poet to Bloy. It seems that understanding where Bloy stands in relation to Maritain's mystical theology and philosophy of creativity requires exploring a third component, lest we merely remain in the realm of paradox.

This third component is what Maritain says about Bloy's mysticism and creative process specifically. Maritain writes that an artwork is ‘always nourished by the experience of the man’,Footnote ⁴⁵ and so if we are to understand Bloy's vocation as what I shall call a ‘Mystic-Poet’, we must first understand how Maritain perceives Bloy's personal experience as an artist and a mystic. A particularly pertinent question in this regard is how, according to Maritain, Bloy's mystical experiences inform his art, his Poetic Knowledge and Poetic Contemplation. Let us begin with how Maritain conceives Bloy's mode of expression as a Christian artist, that is, his use of the tangible as signs of the divine.

Here Maritain classifies Bloy's literary language along the same lines as mystical language, which differs from ordinary language and metaphysical propositions in its use of the symbolic and overstatement to convey existentially important truths. ‘For example’, writes Maritain, ‘the mystic, in describing his experience of created being before God, would say that the creature is nothing, that it is nothing at all. Yes, but these expressions have a mystical, not an ontological meaning.’Footnote ⁴⁷ In this connection, it is also worth reflecting on a passage relating to the pursuit of Christian sanctity from Bloy:

Leiva-Merikakis writes that in this striking passage, and many more throughout Bloy's writings, ‘both the fury and the lyricism are vehicles of love. What gives … all his works, a fundamental unity is this passionate love of God, what Jacques would later call amour fou (mad, frenzied love)’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this connection, the notion of the ‘friend of God’ that Bloy speaks of is also important for Maritain. For when listing the ‘practical ways’ of coming to knowledge of God, he includes the ‘testimony of the friends of God’, highlighting the role of saints in pointing us to a transcendent meaning of life by means of their service done in and through a love which is beyond measure.Footnote ⁵⁰

Bloy was certainly such a person for Maritain. For long before Maritain picked up the Summa of Aquinas, he desperately searched for a meaning to his life and was led to the Catholic faith through Bloy's writings and his novel, La femme pauvre, especially.Footnote ⁵¹ The last line of that book reads ‘Il n'y a qu'une tristesse, c'est de n'être pas des SAINTS’ (‘the only sadness is not to be a saint’). This is a proclamation which Maritain celebrates in his reflections on Bloy, who was, for him, ‘devoted to beauty as to one of the names of Him who is’ and always sought to make his art ‘a monstrance of truth.’Footnote ⁵² It was the mysterious power of the Catholic faith to provide such a meaning, conveyed through Bloy's Catholic piety, lay mysticism and literary work, that led Maritain to become Catholic.

‘“Mystery is luminous and impenetrable”’, Maritain quotes Bloy.Footnote ⁵³ The mystery of the personal example of the mystic corresponds to the mysterious and sometimes baffling notions and turns of phrase of mystical language. Another common feature of mystical language which Bloy exhibits in his writings is the refusal to ascribe any knowledge of God in His essence whatsoever (apophasis), or the use of negative propositions about God in order to speak about Him (via negativa). ‘You are seeking’, Bloy tells Maritain. He then declares: ‘I never sought or found anything, unless one wishes to describe as a discovery the fact of tripping blindly over a threshold and being thrown flat on one's stomach into the House of Light.’Footnote ⁵⁴

‘All his [Bloy's] literary efforts’, Maritain says, ‘consisted in projecting in the mirror of enigmas and similitudes the rays of this substantially luminous light.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Having seen examples of Bloy's literary techniques, what are the themes and subject-matter of his work serving as rays of divine light? Two which are particularly important for our purposes are suffering and the pursuit of spiritual purity. They mirror and give expression to Bloy's life, and he also saw them as a necessary part of his Poetic vocation. For 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 ⁵⁶ He also writes, with equal beauty and poignancy: ‘A heart without affliction is like a world without revelation’ and that ‘Suffering is the helper of creation.’Footnote ⁵⁷

Maritain writes that there was, in Bloy, ‘a poor human heart preyed upon by all that is superhuman in the divine requirements, and by all that is inhuman in the despotism of art; the great storms, the nights, the tears of a most harsh mysticism’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Here Maritain seems to bring together the demands imposed by the mystical love of God and the virtue of art as that produced for the sake of the beautiful to suggest a unity of vocations in Bloy.

For the Catholic, however, suffering is also a means to participate in the Cross of Christ and, consequently, a means of purification and purging of the soul's desires.Footnote ⁵⁹ Such asceticism constitutes a central element of Christian mysticism. It is especially pronounced in Bloy and another of Maritain's great influences, St. John of the Cross.

The saint famously speaks of both an actively endured and a passively endured ‘night of the senses’, as well as an active and passive ‘night of the spirit’ or soul, in which a human soul, trusting in God, walks in darkness, ceasing to rely upon any mental representation of God or of divine union.Footnote ⁶⁰ This ascetic means of reaching spiritual perfection is best exemplified in St. John's ‘todo y nada’ (‘everything and nothing’), which he presents in sublime poetic form:

Concerning this ‘nothing’, Maritain explains that the saint ‘asks for everything’ and that ‘This death is called self-surrender . . . . [which] transforms us into love.Footnote ⁶² As we see in Maritain's treatment of mysticism in The Degrees of Knowledge, this self-surrender becomes a positive force, allowing for the gathering and focusing of spiritual energy and God's entering the soul. He descries the mystic's experience of having passed through the nights of purgation in the following manner: ‘I was reduced to nothing and I knew no more . . . . For now my exercise is in loving alone.’Footnote ⁶³

This experience is mirrored in the Christian artist, for they recognize in the beautiful that which is most real, most lovable, and in the case of the Christian artist who pursues the divine as their very subject matter, love also becomes their mode of knowledge. This we see in Bloy and it is here that we arrive at the convergence of the experiences of the mystic and the Poet, of infused contemplation and Poetic Contemplation. On the basis of Maritain's own principles and testimony, it is evident that for him, God is known directly by Bloy in a contemplative union of love that is also an experience of the beautiful of the highest order, and which, according to the artist's creative intuition, finds expression in a work of art.

In Bloy, precisely because there is the purging of knowledge and a humbling of self in the face of the mysteries of the divine, God is not an object of consciousness like a being in the world, but is an immediately felt, personal reality, the love of whom can never be directly expressed, only suggested. Maritain writes movingly in this regard:

As late as 1968, Maritain affirms that Bloy was able to enter infused contemplation while enjoying the Poetic Knowledge and Poetic Contemplation of the artist, with the unique requirement that even in its most sublime forms, violence must be done to art in order for it to be ordered to Christian truth.

In the art and person of Bloy, God is known and contemplated by means of an imageless, pre-conceptual mystical insight born of love which I shall call ‘Infused-Poetic Contemplation’—capitalized for the reason that I refer to the Poetry at the heart of all artistic creation and wish to emphasize the creative function of the infusion of grace in this case, as opposed to infused contemplation per se, which does not involve the creative function of the intellect.

Yet, as much as I have stressed the apophatic in Bloy's mysticism, we can see that Bloy's mysticism remains strictly within the Catholic tradition, with a view to meeting the ‘absolute requirements of the Lord’ and to sainthood. Bloy's strong belief in the value of the Sacraments in the Catholic spiritual life is also important in this regard. To understand how they relate to art and mysticism for Maritain, let us first briefly consider the work of the painter Georges Rouault, who was Maritain's neighbour and a close friend of his for many years.

Art as Sacrament

Cornelia Tsakiridou writes that for Maritain, Rouault's religious art functions in an analogous manner to Byzantine icons in that the artist participates, in making an object for contemplation of divine things (such as the Crucifixion), in the Cross of Christ themselves. Referring to the same dictum of Fra Angelico's that Maritain quotes, that ‘to paint the things of Christ, the artist must live with Christ’, can help us make sense of this. As Tsakiridou explains, it implies that the virtue of art in this instance functions as ascesis (spiritual discipline) and the work of art functions as an object for mystical contemplation.Footnote ⁶⁶ This mystical contemplation upon what defines the artwork—its Christ-centredness—Tsakiridou calls ‘visio divina’ (‘prayerful seeing’), as analogous to lectio divina (‘prayerful reading’).Footnote ⁶⁷

‘From Maritain's standpoint’, writes Tsakiridou, ‘the Cross is the locus mysticus (mystical place) of communion, the intersection and union of God and man, in which the theanthropic mystery is both finalized and opened to humanity.’Footnote ⁶⁸ As the artist approaches the divine as the subject of their art, any egocentric preoccupations that the artist may have are revealed and shattered by the ‘charismatic being’ of the religious artwork as participative in ‘What in [B]eing is transcendental, its goodness, beauty and truth’ and activated by grace.Footnote ⁶⁹

Here we are reminded of why Poetry tends to the beautiful, which is that the beautiful is eminently lovable and worthy of contemplation. Hence, an artwork that is at least in some way directed to the divine functions in the same way as the Cross in laying bear human weakness and sin insofar as the mysteries of the divine overwhelm all of our attempts to define, contain, or use it for our own advantage.

In the case of the Christian artist, they must undergo an analogous kenosis (self-emptying) as that of Christ, as they find that their work inevitably fails to express the infinite mysteries of God.Footnote ⁷⁰ In living according to charity and directing their work to the beautiful, the artist, says Maritain, can ‘give himself totally … first to his God and second to something that is a reflection of his God.’Footnote ⁷¹ This kenosis, wherein the dynamism of purgation, the stripping of knowledge and divine illumination occurs, is why Maritain writes, in a collection of Rouault's work, that in genuine Christian art there is a ‘final victory of a steady struggle inside the artist's soul, which has to pass through trials and “dark nights” comparable, in the line of the creativity of the spirit, to those suffered by the mystics in their striving toward union with God.’Footnote ⁷²

Rouault's paintings of Christ exhibit a unity of artistic and mystical insight in the use of particular artistic techniques and the bringing forth of powerful emotions to make Christ's presence ‘a presence of suffering in and with our sufferings.’Footnote ⁷³ Tsakiridou points out that in Rouault's Christ Mocked by Soldiers of 1932, for example, ‘the expansion of the line itself is made into an expressive object’ as Christ is outlined in the same rough, powerful strokes of the bodies and faces of those around him (be it the soldiers mocking him or the distraught Mary and John). This implies that there is no ‘marked domain of ugliness and beauty, vice and virtue’, and that the Cross gathers all in suffering, the transcendence of suffering, and redemption.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Cross, says Maritain, is a ‘place of supreme torments and the beatitudes of peace.’Footnote ⁷⁵

In Rouault's artworks, the Cross is the locus mysticus and invites visio divina, and for both Bloy and Rouault, contemplating the inspired artwork and the process of creating it are both nothing less than sacramental, that is, acts of worship. Understood as outward signs of inward or invisible divine grace, the Sacraments themselves have a central place in the Catholic faith. However, as Bloy points out, they are no less mysterious:

Mystical artworks, such as those of Rouault, are sacramental in the same way, for they reveal to us the presence of God in Christ, even as the Cross represents mystery in all its darkness. In mystical artworks, God is known and experienced as ineffable mystery, suffering savior, and infinite love, emptying itself of all power to redeem sin and suffering. There is the co-happening of the revelation of God and His withdrawal.

For Maritain, the artist must approach such religious works with a holy fear, aware, passively but intensely, of divine inspirations which demand expression in some manner. In approaching the artwork as nothing less than sacramental, the Christian artist must enact the same kenosis as when they approach the Cross and engage in the same self-renunciation and passivity needed for infused contemplation. In cases such as Rouault's paintings of Christ, Tsakiridou says, the artwork is experienced ‘as an invitation to prayer’,Footnote ⁷⁷ for it is in virtue of grace that the artist has been inspired to create a work that is truly Christian, and that ‘its ontology is mystically formed and awaits recognition’Footnote ⁷⁸ as an occasion for worshipping God.