Jacques Maritain on the Artist’s Vision and Moral Character

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.