Form as ‘Ontological Secret’

Abstract Jacques Maritain’s contributions to the philosophy of art and beauty are of great historical and philosophical importance. Art and Scholasticism (1920) in particular brought unprecedented attention to the place of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and provided other substantial insights on the relation of the fine arts to being. Maritain’s account of beauty, however, emphasizes the invisibility or ‘secret’ nature of ontological form, however, in a manner that shows the influence of modern European romanticism and modernism and that does not accurately reflect the thought of Aquinas or that of Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius, both of whom are the chief sources of Aquinas’s discussion of the nature of beauty. This essay argues for a Dionysian account of integrity, harmony, and clarity that suggests a closer relationship between Aquinas’s three conditions of beauty than Maritain’s discussion indicates.