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Jacques Maritain on the Artist’s Vision and Moral Character
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2026
Abstract
Jacques Maritain draws from the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas in order to distinguish between art and prudence and to argue for the indirect influence of morality on art. He extends Thomas’s notion of knowledge by connaturality or affective knowledge, as it is sometimes called, to the domain of art and poetry. Maritain’s move here is certainly innovative, for in Thomas this sort of knowledge is principally applied to the realm of morality whereby the cultivation of virtue leads a person to spontaneously know how to act, creating, as it were, a second nature in the person. For Maritain knowledge by connaturality has fallen into oblivion and needs to be restored; he explains creative intuition as a form of connatural knowledge that regards not only the knowledge of things to be expressed in the artist’s work but also the subjectivity of the artist in whom things are grasped through affective resonance. It seems that for Maritain creative intuition is conditioned by the degree to which the artist takes a disinterested stance with respect to his own ego; if he does not, then the work of art is in jeopardy as is also the beauty to which art tends.
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- © The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
References
1 Ralph McInerny, Art and Prudence: Studies in the Thought of Jacques Maritain (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 173.
2 See as an example of the influence of morality on the artist and his work, Jacques Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), p. 37. See also pp. 48–49, pp. 110–15.
3 McInerny, Art and Prudence, p. 173.
4 Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953, published for the Bollingen Foundation: Bollingen Series XXXV, 1), p. 191
5 The recognition of the heroic virtues of Gaudí by the late Pope Francis puts this architect on the path to sanctity.
6 See Matthew S. Pugh’s 1994 dissertation from Fordham University entitled ‘Jacques Maritain, the Intuition of Being, and the Problem of the Proper Starting Point for Thomistic Metaphysics’, where Pugh speaks of Gilson, Owens, and Knasas as opponents of Maritain’s intuition of being. Other Thomist philosophers see Maritain’s political philosophy as having liberal tendencies.
7 McInerny, Art and Prudence, pp. 166–67.
8 Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, pp. 41 and 58.
9 Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 118.
10 Ibid., pp. 143 and 186–90.
11 Among these works, Maritain’s early work Art and Scholasticism: With Other Essays, trans. by J. F. Scanlan (London: Sheed & Ward, 1933) and his later work, already cited, The Responsibility of the Artist.
12 Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 57, a. 3, resp. Hereafter cited as ST. See also McInerny, Art and Prudence, pp. 164–65.
13 ST I-II, q. 57, a. 3, resp.
14 See McInerny, Art and Prudence, p. 165.
15 Moral virtue is, however, dispositive of the exercise of art, as we shall see later in this paper, in a similar way to the Thomistic account of moral virtues as dispositive for the contemplative life (see ST II-II, q. 180, a.2, resp.). This point was made to me by my colleague, Mary Bolan, whose reading of my paper was helpful. It is interesting to note here that for Maritain the artist is more in tune with the contemplative than he is with the prudent human being. On this point, see Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 43.
16 ST I, q. 1, a. 6, ad 3. According to McInerny in his article ‘Maritain and Poetic Knowledge’ in Art and Prudence, the judgment of such a person learned in moral science is merely a cognitive one, which does not engage his subjectivity, p. 162.
17 ST I-II, q. 57, a. 3, ad 1.
18 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book II, chap. 6, on the definition of virtue.
19 ST I-II, q. 57, a. 3, ad 2.
20 ST I-II, q. 57, a. 4, resp. See also McInerny, Art and Prudence, pp. 165–66.
21 Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 7.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., p. 8.
24 Ibid. Aquinas says that art is recta ratio factibilium. See ST I-II, q. 57, a. 3, resp. In speaking of art as an intellectual virtue, Maritain says, ‘Art is before all intellectual and its activity consists in impressing an idea upon a matter: therefore it resides in the mind of the artifex, or, as they say, it is subject in that mind. It is a certain quality of that mind’ in Art and Scholasticism, p. 9.
25 Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 40; see pp. 29–41.
26 Ibid., pp. 41 and 91.
27 Ibid., p. 41.
28 Maritain, ‘An Essay on Art’, which is one of the essays that follows his book Art and Scholasticism, p. 134. See also on p. 133 the distinction Maritain makes between the artist as principal cause and the virtue of art had by the artist as instrumental cause.
29 Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 39.
30 Ibid. It bears repeating that when art is considered in its own domain, that is, as being for the good of the work, then art is not subordinate to prudence, as Maritain says. See The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 40.
31 Ibid., p. 91. See also Art and Scholasticism, p. 39, chap. 6 on ‘The Rules of Art’, where Maritain speaks of the formal element of art as consisting in ‘the regulation it impresses upon the matter’. To the point I make, however, which is in conformity with what Maritain says in The Responsibility of the Artist, that the formal object of art is not in itself subordinate to the formal object of morality, the following may also be said, ‘Qua formal object of the thing of art, it would remain subordinate to man, its maker.’ This is a comment made to me by Professor Mary Bolan, Professor of Philosophy at St. Joseph’s Seminary, Yonkers, New York. I think this is why, as I indicate in my text, Maritain then proceeds to speak of the connection of morality to the virtue of art in the order of material or dispositive causality.
32 Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, pp. 91–92.
33 Ibid., p. 92.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. According to Maritain, this lack of integration of the powers in an artist contributed to the deficiencies and the particular beauty of the poetry of Poe or Hart Crane.
36 Ibid., pp. 92–93. Emphasis mine.
37 Ibid., p. 93.
38 McInerny, Art and Prudence, p. 170.
39 Aquinas tells us that the mind is drawn to those things to which it has an affection, in ST II-II, q. 166, a. 1, ad 2.
40 Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 93.
41 Enneads I, 4, quoted by Maritain in The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 93. Emphasis mine.
42 McInerny, Art and Prudence, p. 171.
43 Ibid. See also, in ‘An Essay on Art’, an essay following his book Art and Scholasticism, where Maritain seems to indicate that the artist who is moral and in fact Christian will produce art that is ‘genuinely universal’ (p. 137). According to Maritain, being moral and Christian provides the artist with the conditions to do his work well: ‘… does it not seem that the happiest conditions for the artist are conditions of peace and spiritual order in and around him, that having his soul in order and orientated towards its last end, he should thereafter have no other anxiety than to do his job well and set himself free—such as he is—in his work, without another thought, without pursuing any particular and predetermined human end? Was that not exactly how the artists of the Middle Ages went to work?’ (pp. 135–36).
44 Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 97.
45 Ibid., p. 98.
46 Ibid., pp. 98–99.
47 Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 75. Emphasis mine.
48 See note 43 above where in his ‘Essay on Art’, Maritain attends to the artist who is both moral and a Christian. As such, he is provided with conditions or an environment in which he can do his work well. While the artisans of the Middle Ages were engaged in work which they wished to be good, it turns out that this good work was also beautiful as they were not seeking themselves in their work but were above all working for the glory of God.
49 ST II-II, q. 180, a. 1, resp.
50 Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 81.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., p. 91.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., p. 85.
56 Ibid., pp. 86–87.
57 Ibid., p. 87. See also Mathew Anderson, ‘Connatural Knowing in Jacques Maritain’, in Wierność rzeczywistości, ed. by Z. J. Zdybicka and and others (Lublin: Polskie Towarzystwo Tomasza z Akwinu, 2001), pp. 231–45, especially pp. 242–45, where the author succinctly develops the notion of poetic intuition as an instance of knowledge by connaturality in Maritain.
58 Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 90. In the text, Maritain says that poetry and the intellect are of ‘the same race and blood’.
59 Ibid., p. 92, especially n. 29. According to Maritain, the spiritual unconscious which pertains to the spiritual powers also extends to the sensitive powers.
60 Ibid., p. 94; see also pp. 92–93.
61 Ibid., p. 94.
62 Ibid., p. 92.
63 Ibid., p. 95.
64 Ibid. I will return to the question of egotism later in this paper as it is dealt with again by Maritain in speaking of the operative function of poetic intuition. Maritain criticizes the poet for whom subjectivity becomes more important than the contemplation of nature and cites G.-H. von Schubert, in the age of German Romanticism, who says that ‘The poet in whom does not arise the passionate desire “to rejoin the essential unity, in the contemplation of the external spectacle as well as in the grasping of the obscure data of the innermost world” yields almost necessarily “to another movement, akin to enthusiasm, which carries man along toward the abyss. Like Phaeton, man’s freakish egotism wants to seize hold of the chariot of God: he has endeavored to make himself that inner enthusiasm which God alone can create”’.
65 Ibid., p. 97.
66 Ibid., pp. 96–98. See also the excellent study by Donald Haggerty, ‘The Agent Intellect and the Energies of Intelligence’, in my edited volume Beauty, Art, and the Polis (American Maritain Association Publication, distributed by Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), pp. 20–33.
67 Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, pp. 97–98.
68 Ibid., p. 123.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., p. 127. Emphasis mine.
72 See Anderson, ‘Connatural Knowing in Jacques Maritain’, p. 244.
73 Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 126.
74 Ibid., p. 127.
75 Ibid., p. 134. Other good resources on poetic intuition and its expression in the work of art are the following: Hannah Woldum Ragusa, ‘Beholding the Beauty of Being: Artistic Creativity in the Thomistic Tradition’, Logos, 20: 2 (Spring 2017), 105–31, and John W. Hankey, Maritain’s Ontology of the Work of Art (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
76 Ibid. It should be noted that Maritain refers to intentional emotion as a spiritual germ, which I think can be referred to as a spiritual seed.
77 Ibid., pp. 139–40.
78 Ibid., p. 139. I have taken the liberty to change this sentence somewhat so that it be more readable.
79 Ibid., pp. 141–42.
80 Ibid., p. 144.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., p. 145.
83 Quoted in Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 47. See also McInerny, Art and Prudence, pp. 167–68.
84 François Mauriac’s advice quoted in Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist, p. 61.
85 Ibid., p. 115.