Creative Intuition and Being in Art: J. Maritain and É. Gilson on Beauty

Abstract This paper explores the enduring tension between rational technique (technē) and creative intuition in art, tracing its origins from Plato’s Ion through Kant’s notion of genius as nature’s unteachable rule-giving via the productive imagination. It then examines Jacques Maritain’s and Étienne Gilson’s complementary Thomistic aesthetics as a unified resolution. Maritain locates creative intuition in the soul’s spiritual unconscious, a pre-conceptual grasp of Being ( esse ) uniting intellect, imagination, and senses in a metaphysical act mirroring divine creation, where poetry reveals beauty as transcendent radiance. Gilson, conversely, emphasizes art as cognitio factiva : the craftsman’s imposition of intelligible form on matter, producing an ontological entity that manifests Being’s splendor objectively, independent of subjectivity. Addressing modern unbelief, the analysis affirms that beauty depends on Being, not belief; even non-theistic artists intuitively participate in esse through form, yielding works that testify to divine reality despite denial.