Art and Scholasticism
Jacques Maritain
(Scribner’s, 1930) [1923]
177 p.
Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world…
— von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: a Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1
Not many philosophers, I think, have written convincingly and insightfully about aesthetics. As Balthasar says above, it’s a slippery topic that seems to resist analysis. The ancient world may, as he says, have refused to understand itself apart from beauty, but nonetheless medieval philosophers said more, and more systematically, about truth and goodness. In this book Jacques Maritain gathers up the stray statements about beauty and art to be found in the scholastics, and especially in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, and puts them into order, thereby sketching for us a basic framework for thinking about art, the making of art, and the place of beauty and morality in artistic appreciation.
**
Art has to do with the practical, rather than the speculative, order. It is not focused simply on truth, as is (say) logic or theology. The practical order has to do with doing and making; doing concerns prudence and ethics and the good of the person acting, but making has to do with the good of the thing made. Art has to do with making.
Art, here, is being treated in its widest connotation: something made. It might be a stool or a Missa Solemnis. The particular distinction that makes something a “fine art” will be discussed below.
Because art as such aims at the excellence of the thing made, it goes astray if it aims at anything else. It may evoke emotion, but it must not aim at doing so. It may earn the artist a living, but that cannot be its purpose. It may give pleasure, but that cannot be its primary aim. It may edify or instruct, but its artistic excellence does not consist in this. It may effect change in the world, but it cannot be made for that reason. Just as a scientist’s intention is only to present his audience with what is true, so the artist must aim only at what is well-made.
Maritain has much to say about the qualities and characteristics of an artist. Following the scholastics, he argues that an artist is someone who possesses the habitus of art. This habitus is a somewhat difficult word; it is not “habit” in the modern sense of something rote and unthinking, for habitus involves intellect and will. It is, he says, a characteristic of the soul that enables a person to do a thing readily and naturally. It is a stable disposition that perfects a faculty of the one possessing it; the habitus of art enables the person to make art naturally, as a capacity of soul. A habitus is a capacity that is realized in a person. The habitus of art involves the intellect inasmuch as the formal element in all art is ruled by the intellect, for art as such is the act of investing matter with form, of imprinting an idea onto matter. A master carpenter is one who knows how to make things from wood. He has a sense of what to do in a given situation, what will work, what will lead to an excellent result. He has the habitus of art as it pertains to woodworking. A mathematician has the habitus of mathematics; he has a sense of it, he knows where he is, he slips into the world of his abstractions as easily as a seal into the water. I’m sure you know people like this, who have a habitus of some kind.
Some habitus can be used for good or for ill, but a habitus that can only do good is what we call a virtue. Justice and courage are virtues. Art, as Maritain means it, is such a habitus. To have it means to have the capacity to make good things.
Art is the investment of matter with form, and as such is addressed to the intellect. Even so, art does not give knowledge but delight (although greater knowledge increases the possibility of delight, which is why there is such a thing as educated or well-formed taste and judgment). Art does not give us an “idea”; a work of art cannot be boiled down to “the point” or “the lesson”. A work of art is what it is precisely because that is the form in which it can be expressed; it cannot be expressed as an idea. “It expresses what our ideas cannot signify.” Art is the one realm in which we know things intuitively and immediately, as angels do, though we know them through our senses rather than (as with angels) abstractly.
God Himself is a maker, and so an artist, and possesses the virtue of art preeminently. God’s love is the cause of beauty, whereas for us beauty is the cause of love. Because beauty involves perception of form, it can be seen more readily by those who know that things have a Creator.
The scholastics did not stress the distinction between the fine arts and other kinds of making. (They distinguished liberal from servile arts, but the division is not the same.) Nonetheless, the distinction between fine arts and other arts is present in their thought: an art is a fine art when it is ordered to beauty as its end, rather than to some other purpose. A shoemaker’s primary purpose is to make good shoes, and making handsome good shoes is part of that purpose but not the whole of it. A chef’s primary purpose is to make an excellent dish, drawing on the many ways in which a dish can be excellent, and the dish may be beautiful, but that is not its main purpose. But a composer aims to make something beautiful per se. That is the source and summit of his labours. What he makes has no other purpose. Likewise for the other fine arts: what sets them apart is that their beauty is the point of their being.
Apprehension of beauty involves perception of form. Maritain argues that we perceive beauty by way of our senses (and specifically sight and hearing). At the same time he defines beauty, following the scholastics, as “being considered as delighting . . . an intellectual nature”. So when we behold a work of art we are integrating our sensory and intellectual capacities in a particularly pure way.
Note well that “beauty” is a multifaceted thing. To say that the fine arts aim at beauty as their end isn’t to confine them to any narrow or conventional standard of beauty. Maritain stresses that “there is always an infinity of ways of being a beautiful work”. We often hear it said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, meaning that it is relative. Maritain agrees that it is relative in some ways, but not with respect to the subject (as is the usual meaning of the phrase in our time). Rather, he argues that beauty is truly apprehended by the subject, but that beauty is relative to the end and conception of the thing made. That is, how it is beautiful depends on its form and purpose. The last string quartet of Shostakovich isn’t beautiful in a conventional sense; it’s thorny and difficult and even, by some standards, ugly, but it realizes its form — it is proportionate, it is intelligible, it has an organic unity — and it exists for no other reason than to do just that. To say that all works of fine art are distinguished by having beauty as their end is not to narrow their range of expression, but it is to give them all a certain dignity.
**
Maritain stresses numerous times that for an artist, the good of the thing being made is the highest concern: excellence above all, a full realization of the conception of the work. The artist cannot be distracted by any other consideration without the work suffering. But this raises the question of how art and morality are related, because the moral excellence of a work of art is distinct, it seems, from its specifically artistic excellence.
In response to this question Maritain makes some important distinctions. Although it is true that the artist as an artist aims only at the good of the work made, this cannot be his highest aim as a human person without leading to idolatry. The artist, as a person, must work for something higher than artistic excellence, and it is here, Maritain thinks, that morality enters the picture, for although the artist as an artist is blind to it, the artist as a human person cannot be:
“Art has no right against God. There is no good opposed to God or the ultimate Good of human life. Art in its own domain is sovereign like wisdom; through its object it is subordinate neither to wisdom nor to prudence nor to any other virtue. But by the subject in which it exists, by man and in man it is subordinate — extrinsically subordinate — to the good of the subject; insofar as it finds itself in man and insofar as the liberty of man makes use of it, it is subordinate to the end of man and to the human virtues.”
Since every human artist is a human being, art is therefore always subject to moral evaluation. As we know it must be. Art may be metaphysically superior to prudence, but in the realm of human action prudence sits in judgment. Beauty and morality are both always relevant to anything made by an artist.
Moral evaluation nonetheless poses certain hazards for art. Art that is too deferential to moral expectations can fail on that account by failing to put the artistic good first. Self-consciously pious religious art and politically correct art are vulnerable to this trap. In another way, even works of great artistic excellence can be unwisely spurned because subjected to the judgment of a narrow, puritanical moral view. The seemingly wholesale rejection of our artistic inheritance from “dead, white males” is the most obvious example of this in our own times.
**
Given the emphasis Maritain puts on the (conditional) autonomy of art, it’s interesting to read his views on religious art, and specifically (since he was a Christian) on Christian art. This is a realm in which, on the one hand, art may be tempted away from its proper good by allowing pious considerations to overrule artistic ones, yet, on the other hand, it is a realm in which the “foreign” good is actually higher than the artistic, and so, perhaps, able to elevate the art even if it, at some level, interferes with its purity.
Maritain makes a distinction between Christian art and religious art. The first is, for him, any art made by a Christian regardless of its content, whereas the second has to do with art intended for an “officially” religious purpose, such as liturgical art. As to the former — “Christian art” — he argues that it refers to no style or technique, but simply to an implicit or latent expression of a Christian view of things, no matter the immediate subject. “Everything belongs to it, the sacred as well as the profane. It is at home wherever the ingenuity and the joy of man extend.” Christianity affects the Christian’s experience of the world in a way that is distinctive and affects his art, for it gives him “simplicity, the peace of awe and of love, [and] the innocence which renders matter docile to men and fraternal”. He finds Christian art wherever a Christian makes art truly and honestly. Like Augustine whose moral counsel was “Love God above all things, and then do as you will”, Maritain’s advice to Christian artists is, “Be a Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work.”
Religious art, on the other hand, serves a solemn and, at some level, official purpose within a religious tradition. Maritain lays out a few requirements that he thinks such art must satisfy. First, it must be comprehensible by the other adherents of the tradition. The comprehension and appreciation need not be universal, of course, since, as he says, “there are an infinite number of Christians with bad taste”, but it should present itself as intelligible and appropriate by some reasonable standard. Second, it must be well-made, proper, and honest; nothing shabby or substandard should be acceptable in worship. Third, it must be dependent on and deferential to theology; it must be vigilant against doctrinal distortions and against sowing discord or confusion among the faithful. Finally, it should be religious in expression, touched in some way by piety and devotion.
With these criteria in mind, it’s interesting to think of some test cases. The heritage of Gregorian chant, for instance, would be an archetypal example of religious art. We could say with confidence, I think, that Michelangelo’s Last Judgment would qualify. What about one of Vaughan Williams’ hymns? I think so, but is there some friction on the fourth criterion because Vaughan Williams was an agnostic? I hope not. In the last few centuries much Catholic art has fallen under the baleful influence of kitsch, and so fails on the criterion of being well-made, perhaps. (Think of all those images of Divine Mercy.) The dismal parade of folksy music that has displaced the chant since Vatican II fails resoundingly. Maritain thought, in his time, that he could discern “the regermination of a truly Christian art,” and he — and this book — were an influence on, inter alia, Stravinsky, Claudel, and other major artists, but that regermination seems to have fallen afoul of one or more of the hazards outlined in the parable of the sower. Not that we are entirely without hope.
**
It is a stimulating book, rich in ideas. Although it feels in some respects a little “academic” as he rolls out distinctions between speculative and practical, prudential and artistic, servile and liberal, and so on, I suppose a book about scholastics should be expected to be academic, if etymologists are onto something. I appreciated the wide net; many of his statements about art apply as much to the carpenter as the composer. There is a healthy appreciation that art can serve practical purposes, or, put the other way around, that useful, everyday things can, and should, nonetheless be works of art.
The doctrine that fine arts are those that aim at beauty as their primary end has something to it, but it is important, I think, that it be coupled with an expansive idea of beauty; Maritain is careful about this, but it’s the kind of point that might be easily forgotten or oversimplified. I’m also curious about what doesn’t qualify as a fine art under this definition. I wonder, for instance, if narrative arts, like storytelling (on paper or film) are aiming at beauty in the relevant sense. Maritain doesn’t seem to think much of literature, saying at one point that “Literature puts on the work the grimace of personality.. Literature is to art as self-conceit is to the moral life,” which strikes me as harsh. But then he turns around and says that, “Poetry…is to art what grace is to the moral life,” so the written word isn’t entirely excluded from the tent.
Also worthwhile is the framework for thinking about art and morality. We understand that the proper good of a work of art is not a moral one, but also that art cannot be somehow outside the realm of moral evaluation. The series of distinctions he makes provides a way to retain both sides of the issue and understand how they relate.
The book was, I believe, influential in the early twentieth century. Wikipedia cites a scholar who claims the book “was a key text that guided the work of writers such as Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Francois Mauriac, Thomas Merton, John Howard Griffin, Flannery O’Connor and T.S. Eliot.” A good list. It also does the valuable service of pulling together St. Thomas’ thoughts on aesthetics and putting them in some kind of order. Still, one wishes that the master might have done it himself!
***
[Art and love]
The artist has to love, he has to love what he is making, so that his virtue may truly be, in Saint Augustine’s words, ordo amoris, so that beauty may become connatural to him… This undeviating love is the supreme rule.
[On Satie]
Never any sorcery, repetitions [what, never?!? — Ed.], suspicious caresses, fevers, or miasmas. Never does Satie ‘stir the pool’. It is the poetry of childhood relived by a master technician.
[Intelligence and reality]
The intellect…seizes being and draws it into itself — it eats being and drinks being — so as “itself to become, in a certain fashion, all things. […] Like a stag at the gushing spring, intelligence has nothing to do but drink; it drinks the clarity of being.
[The medieval period]
Matchless epoch, in which an ingenuous people was formed in beauty without even realizing it.
All Manner of Thing 