Dr. Deal Hudson
Jacques Maritain on Art and Morality
Deal Hudson, Ph.D., is Publisher and Editor of Crisis magazine
in Washington, D.C. His articles frequently appear in The
Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and National Review.
He has also appeared on such venues as NBC Nightly News and
National Public Radio. Before becoming Publisher of Crisis
in 1996, he was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham
University, Visiting Professor at New York University, and
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Mercer University. He
obtained his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Texas-Austin,
his M. Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D.
from the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University. He
is preparing a new edition of two of Jacques Maritain's works,
Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry and The Responsibility
of the Artist, to be published by the University of Notre
Dame Press. The following is our abridged version of his lecture
at the College on December 5, 1999.
Jacques Maritain, the 20th century Thomistic philosopher,
left us two great works on art and morality: Art and Scholasticism,
published in 1920, and The Responsibility of the Artist, published
in 1960. Maritain's works were the product of a lifelong association
with the greatest artists of his time. He was their friend,
their sponsor, their advocate, and their publisher. He did
not simply theorize about art because he found it theoretically
interesting as a philosopher; he wrote and lectured about
art because he loved it and because he was profoundly touched
by it.
Maritain conceived of three types of artists: The Aesthete,
the Magician, and the Artisan. For him, the Aesthete was best
represented by the writer, Oscar Wilde, whom Maritain quoted
frequently. Wilde represents an artist who aims to serve his
art and to serve beauty utterly free from his moral character
or even from his art's influence on the character of others.
As Maritain says: "Oscar Wilde was being but a good Thomist
when he wrote, 'The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing
against his prose.'"
Maritain's best representative of the artist as Magician
was the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud was aware of
his power as an artist and so he chose to become a message-giver.
He no longer sought to create objects that were beautiful,
he created objects to send a message to an audience, and thus
dismissed beauty as the object of his artistic habitus for
the sake of communicating some sort of magical knowledge through
his art.
Now the third type of artist, the one that Maritain admired,
is the artist as Artisan. The example he used was of his friend,
the painter, George Rouault. For Maritain, Rouault exemplified
an artist who found "the spiritual conditions of honest
work." Rouault painted the work he envisioned: He didn't
preach, he didn't try to change people's minds, yet in his
own life he demonstrated the saving role of faith in the life
of the artist. As Maritain puts it, "Religion saves poetry
from the absurdity of believing itself destined to transform
ethics and life; religion saves the poet from over-weaning
arrogance." Only through faith, Maritain thought, can
the artist solve the fundamental tension between the demands
of art and those of the moral sphere governed by prudence.
The Artisan humbly serves his work and serves the Good, an
end which outstrips his own. But he serves the Good of human
happiness, the Good that none of us can stop acting toward,
by serving the work first. That human happiness and the moral
order, which is described in the structure of human acts toward
the end of happiness, is best described by the artist's freedom
in the artistic habitus of serving the end of art, that is,
serving the end of beauty first.
Maritain's argument in favor of the Artisan as model begins
with his rejection of the modern notion of aesthetics, which
was concerned simply with arguments over perception and taste.
"Is this beautiful? - Is it beautiful to you? - Why?
- It's not beautiful to me." Instead, Maritain wanted
to return to what the ancients and scholastics meant when
they used the word 'art' - art as a virtue, a habitus of the
practical intellect. This is a virtue that some people have,
and some do not - the disposition to create objects of beauty.
Maritain rejects the notion that the artist, in creating beauty,
creates something disconnected from either God or metaphysical
being. The beauty created by the artist directly participates
in the Divine. Beauty saves the artist from suffering a strict
division between his speculative intellect and his practical
intellect and between the moral order governed by prudence
in the practical intellect and the order of making governed
by art.
Much of what Maritain says about art is derived from his
theological understanding of God as Creator as the Supreme
Artist. But unlike God as Creator, we can distinguish intellectually
between the artist qua artist and the artist qua man. The
artist serves the beauty of his work and does not directly
serve the good of man, but at the same time, artistic beauty
does not trump the good of human life. The beauty of the work
does, in some way, come under the shadow of human happiness.
Man cannot act, even the artist cannot act, except with the
desire for happiness. But this relationship Maritain describes
as an extrinsic and indirect subordination of art to morality,
not intrinsic and direct.
The artist as man is subject, extrinsically subordinate,
to the Good and to God. The use of the artist's free will
as man enters into the moral sphere and the sphere of moral
judgment. These two autonomous but related worlds are distinguished
by reason to be related extrinsically.
This distinction is important because of the kinds of judgments
of value that we make about human acts and objects of art.
Maritain is saying that when we judge an object of art we
must judge the value of it according to the nature of the
act that produced it. The judgment of the Mona Lisa must be
made according to aesthetic criteria alone. You can judge
the artist from the perspective of morality, but you must
judge the work of art by the standards of beauty.
Maritain is unambiguous on this point - a man can be a great
artist and be a bad man. The habit of art will use any grist
for its mill, perhaps even sin. Without Wagner's love for
Matilda, there would have been no "Tristan and Isolde."
Maritain's point is that the solution to the immorality of
the artist lies on the side of the artist, not the art. This
is the reason Maritain had an apostolate to artists. He sought
to bring artists into the Church and to bring artists under
spiritual direction. He was always quoting the dictum of the
novelist Francois Mauriac, who said, "The artist should
purify the source."
Some people think that the answer to dangerous beauty is
to burn the witches. They assume that the artist is trying
to infuse destructive values and destroy our character by
such things as nudity in film. And indeed the objectors have
a point. We are vulnerable whenever we behold a work of art
because we let down our guard to be moved, to be touched -
we are moved, touched and changed by the beautiful. Maritain
realizes this - he understands that the beauty the artist
creates provokes a desire no artist can satisfy. For this
very reason the artist needs faith - he needs the graces because
he is "playing" with something very powerful and
potentially very dangerous. That is why, again, the artist
must "purify the source."
Maritain sums this point up when he makes this comment on
the Middle Ages: "In the Middle Ages, men created more
beautiful things in those days and he adored himself less."
Now that is a line that should be posted over the doors of
every film studio in the country! But the period of the Renaissance,
Maritain says, drove the artist mad by revealing to him his
own "peculiar grandeur" and by letting loose on
him the "wild beast of beauty which faith had kept enchanted."
Maritain also called this the sin of "angelism"
- when an artist, or anyone, forgets man is creature with
a body. Bodies are necessary to human acts in every way. The
artist, of course, creates a body with a body. Yet artists
have almost gone to the extreme of using the body for the
sake of preaching ideas, not presenting sensible beauty.
How many times have you gone to a film that has been ruined
by a film-maker trying to make a political point about feminism
or the nation? How many times have you gone to a ballet or
an opera, especially in the last 30 or 40 years, that has
been ruined by the needless injection of political, religious,
and moral message-giving? Maritain didn't particularly like
the religious art of his day for the same reasons. It was
trying too hard to "save" people.
This is how I understand what Maritain is saying: We can
make moral judgments about an artist or the artist's voluntary
actions, but we must look at the artist's work independent
of our moral judgments about the artist. The artist creates
in beauty and the judgments we make about that beauty have
to be made according to the laws of beauty itself, the clarity,
the proportion, the order and the splendor of beauty. But
those judgments are grounded in our understanding of beauty
as having a transcendental constancy across all of being,
that what we are perceiving as beautiful in one thing is the
same kind of structure that we are perceiving in another thing.
Therefore, it is not "art for art's sake" or even
"beauty for beauty's sake" that is true. For once
we encounter beauty in some single object created by an artist,
it will leave a desire in us for a beauty beyond any infinite
object.
In the final analysis, Maritain's wisdom consists of this:
First, he saves the artist from ruining his work with preaching.
He reminds the artist that his job is to serve beauty and
not to serve ideas of any kind. In fact, Maritain says, only
faith can enable an artist to reconcile prudence and art by
purifying the source.
Secondly, for those of us who are in the audience, our delight
in beauty is not subjective. Our delight leads us towards
transcendence, and it creates within us a disposition of attentiveness,
of contemplation, to forget ourselves and to look to what
is not ourselves and to let our eye dwell on something beyond
the self. Maritain rejects self-referentiality that so many
modern artists constantly preach to us. Such artists become
obstacles to the deepest promise of Beauty itself.
Thirdly, Maritain reminds us that the role of the artist,
as an analogue to that of the saint and the contemplative,
is to treat human beings with genuine dignity. Such dignity
occurs when human beings stand gazing at a work of art, detached
from the earth, in rapt attention to something that is beautiful,
something delightful, and are manifesting the Image of God.
Lastly, Maritain's aesthetics illumines the relationship of
the artist and the audience. Between the artist, the audience,
and the object they share, you find a circle of ecstasy. In
that circle, the artist steps out of himself in creating the
work, the viewer steps out of himself to delight in beauty,
which in turn creates in both the artist and the audience
a longing for Perfect Beauty.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Spring 2001
|
