Creative Intuition, Virtue, and the Possibility of Christian Art
This paper originally appeared as the first part of a panel presentation with Dr. Christopher Ragusa, entitled “Can Art Be Christian and Still Be Art? Jacques Maritain and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lessons for South Louisiana,” at the 2025 Joie de Vivre Louisiana Arts & Culture Festival.
The twentieth-century French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain draws upon the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas to develop a philosophy of art and artistic creativity. This vision is fascinating in its own right, but it also enables us to think about J.R.R. Tolkien as a model Christian artist—a topic that Dr. Christopher Ragusa addresses in his essay, “J.R.R. Tolkien as Model Christian Artist: Questions for Artists in South Louisiana.”
I want to begin by raising the question, “What is art?” and then by asking “What, if anything, is Christian art?”
Maritain’s most extensive treatment of these and other aesthetic questions can be found in one of his earliest books, Art and Scholasticism, originally published in French in 1923, and in his later work, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, which grew out of six lectures that Maritain gave at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1952 as part of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. So, what is art? Maritain argues that art is, first of all, an intellectual virtue, the good habit by which human beings create works of art. This concept—which we need to explore and unpack further—is already interesting, because in the present day, we tend to hear the word “art” and immediately think of the thing that is produced, such as a painting, sculpture, or song. But in the philosophical tradition running from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas to Jacques Maritain and other Thomists, art is one of the five intellectual virtues that pertain to the perfection of the intellect, as opposed to the moral virtues like courage and temperance, which perfect the “appetitive faculty,” or as we might say today, the will, desires, and emotions.
Maritain emphasizes the distinction between art (techne) and prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis), both of which are intellectual virtues and in fact virtues of the practical intellect. For Maritain, this distinction has far-reaching consequences in the social and political realms, since it implies that the spheres of art and morality are, in a fundamental sense, separate. What is the difference between art and prudence, if both are intellectual virtues? The exact nature of the difference is made clear by Aquinas:
The reason for this difference is that art is the “right reason of things to be made”; whereas prudence is the “right reason of things to be done.” Now “making” and “doing” differ, as stated in Metaph. ix, text. 16, in that “making” is an action passing into outward matter, e.g. “to build,” “to saw,” and so forth; whereas “doing” is an action abiding in the agent, e.g. “to see,” “to will,” and the like.
Maritain believes that this distinction points to “two entirely distinct spheres,” the sphere of making (i.e., the domain of art) and the sphere of action (i.e., the domain of morality and of prudence). As Maritain sums up, “Prudence operates for the good of the worker, Art operates for the good of the work done.” What this means is that art is not necessarily accompanied by a good will or by the moral virtues. A person could be a good painter without also being a just and temperate man or woman, because being a ‘good painter’ simply means having developed the ability to make good paintings. Thus, we can see that a certain tension between art and morality is already possible due to Maritain’s admission that a person need not be a morally good person in order to be a good artist.
Despite their fundamental distinctness as virtues, art and prudence each outrank the other according to different principles. Prudence is superior to art in relation to the human being’s ultimate perfection, but art is superior to prudence at the level of metaphysics because it is more speculative in character, due to its aiming at beauty. Maritain also calls art “more exclusively intellectual than Prudence” and does not hesitate to draw comparisons between art and contemplation. Maritain believes that art—especially fine art—must be given a certain autonomy, since it is essentially intellectual and, as such, it always retains an orientation to the truth. But even if the artist should be left free to pursue his or her art just as the geometer should be free to pursue geometry, still, as a human being, the artist ought to recognize that art is not the supreme good in life. Maritain’s verdict is profound:
If the artist were to take for the final end of his activity, that is to say for beatitude, the end of his art or the beauty of his work, he would be, purely and simply, an idolater. It is therefore absolutely necessary for the artist, qua man [insofar as he is human], to work for something other than his work, something better beloved. God is infinitely more lovable than art.
Even if the beauty of the created work of art cannot be the artist’s ultimate final end, however, the artist is not wrong to seek beauty. In fact, Maritain suggests that in the highest pursuits of art, the artist unwittingly enters the territory of the saints. It is God himself who is absolute Beauty and the prime analogate of all created beauty, whether the beauty of nature or of the artist’s work of art. The artist “tends without knowing it to pass beyond his art: as a plant unconsciously raises its stem to the sun, his eyes are turned, however low his habitation, towards subsisting Beauty, whose sweetness the Saints enjoy in a Radiance which Art and Reason cannot attain.”
A fuller understanding of art in terms of the artist’s creative process appears in Maritain’s later work, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. In this book, Maritain still refers to art a ‘virtue of the practical intellect,’ but at the same time, he acknowledges that the fine arts, such as poetry or music, differ from the useful arts, like house-building or cooking. In addition to this general distinction based on the kinds of objects produced, there seem to be two additional differences between the fine arts and the useful arts. First, the useful arts are called ‘subservient’ because they result in the making of some object needed for some purpose, such as a house or a table, whereas the fine arts are called ‘free’ because their works of art are not created for any particular use. The fine arts flow from the human being’s “creativity of the spirit,” which bears a certain resemblance to God’s own free creativity. And second, there is a slightly different creative process involved in each kind of art. The useful arts are virtues of the practical intellect and are rooted in the ‘craftsman’s idea’—a sort of blueprint in the mind—that is then transferred to a medium, like wood or clay. The fine arts, however, spring from what Maritain calls ‘creative’ or ‘poetic intuition’—a type of non-conceptual, connatural knowledge—and not from a ‘blueprint’ in the artist’s mind that is simply ‘copied’ onto a canvas or notebook.
It is important to discuss Maritain’s understanding of this ‘creative’ or ‘poetic intuition’ in more depth, since it is ultimately what gives rise to all works of fine art. Without going into too much detail, I will say that Maritain refers to ‘creative’ or ‘poetic intuition’ as a type of connatural knowledge—we might say intuitive, experiential knowledge—which he characterizes as ‘non-conceptual’ knowledge. Maritain views moral virtue, mystical contemplation, and poetic intuition as three kinds of connatural knowledge.
Maritain defines poetic intuition thus:
Poetic intuition is non-conceptual and non-rational knowledge…essentially an obscure revelation both of the subjectivity of the poet and of some flash of reality coming together out of sleep in one single awakening…through the instrumentality of emotion, which, received in the preconscious life of the intellect, becomes intentional and intuitive, and causes the intellect obscurely to grasp some existential reality as one with the Self it has moved, and by the same stroke all that which this reality, emotionally grasped, calls forth in the manner of a sign: so as to have the self known in the experience of the world and the world known in the experience of the self, through an intuition which essentially tends toward utterance and creation.
In other words, “poetic intuition is connatural knowledge of both self and reality (or, more specifically, a glimpse of the profound correspondence between the subjective self and objective reality), sparked by emotion below the level of consciousness, and oriented toward creative expression.” It is evident that this connatural knowledge is quite different from the conceptual knowledge of the carpenter who first conceives a plan for the table before building it. What is intuited by the artist through poetic intuition is not conceptualized ahead of time; it is only expressed in the work of art created, and not before. As Maritain explains, “Be it a painting or a poem, this work is a made object—in it alone does poetic intuition come to objectivization.” The artist does not first form a concept in his mind that he then copies into the work of fine art. Doing so would, in Maritain’s stark words, “make art a cemetery of imitations.” Poetic intuition thus transcends art as a virtue of the practical intellect. Its concern is not utility, as in the useful arts, but beauty:
We have a demand for the participation, through the object created, in something which is itself spiritual in nature. For beauty, which is of no use, is radiant with intelligence and is as transcendental and infinite as the universe of the intellect. …The need of the intellect to manifest externally what is grasped within itself, in creative intuition, and to manifest it in beauty, is simply the essential thing in the fine arts.
Maritain also explains that poetic or creative intuition can be considered according to either of two aspects—what we might call its ‘cognitive, receptive side’ with respect to the beauty around us that is grasped intuitively by the artist, and its ‘creative, active, or productive side’ with respect to the work of art produced. In the cognitive stage of poetic intuition, the crucial attitude is one of “alert receptivity” in which the artist “suffer[s] the things of this world,” analogous to the way in which the mystic suffers divine things. In short, the artist realizes that “things are not only what they are.” Maritain suggests that in the experience of poetic intuition, one image or object—Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy, for instance—retains its own concrete meaning while also at the same time revealing hidden connections to all of reality and its deeper significance on a myriad of levels. Although not favored by Maritain, surely the term “sacramental” is in a general sense appropriate to describe the quality of all being in this regard.
In the end, the act of creating a work of fine art requires a great deal of what Maritain calls “alert receptivity” or “attentive passivity” to the world, which he likens to a type of “suffering.” Merely accumulating technical skills in painting, developing the latest writing style, or clocking in hours of piano practice would not suffice for a genuine fine artist. Poetic intuition simply is not a product of these things. At the same time, we should not think that Maritain presents any kind of opposition between artistic skill and poetic intuition, as if Da Vinci could have done what he did with no formal training in technique. Skill in the particular ways of making an object—such as knowledge of painting techniques for a painter, or of music history and theory for a composer—are important, but only in a secondary sense. Maritain makes this point very clearly: “If creative intuition is lacking, a work can be perfectly made, and it is nothing; the artist has nothing to say. If creative intuition is present, and passes, to some extent, into the work, the work exists and speaks to us, even if it is imperfectly made.”
At this point, let us review what we have said so far. We have just discussed Maritain’s distinction between art and prudence as two distinct virtues of the practical intellect, as well as the distinction between the useful arts and the fine arts. In treating his account of fine art, we have considered creative intuition as the intellectual and spiritual wellspring from which the artistic process first arises. This suffices for our answer to the first question of “what is art?”
We can now turn to the second question I posed at the beginning: “what, if anything, is Christian art?”
This is a thornier question. We have already discussed Maritain’s (and Aquinas’s) distinction between art and prudence, and thus between the realms of art and morality. In another work, The Responsibility of the Artist (1960), Maritain criticizes any socially or politically motivated desire to manipulate art. He calls this kind of “art” (i.e., art in name only) by several names, including “Art for the people,” “Art for the community,” or “Art for the social group.” The problem here is that this kind of “‘art’ “makes the social value, or social significance, or social impact of the work into an aesthetic or artistic value, even the supreme aesthetic or artistic value. According to this theory, a good which is not the good of the work, but a certain good of human life, is made into the very object, essential and intrinsic, determining and specifying, of the very virtue or art.” The underlying problem with this approach is not that it censors artists, but that it seeks to manipulate art toward a social or political end, whereas the proper end of art—as I have already noted—is simply the good of the work itself. To manipulate the artist’s creative process would not only deny art the appropriate sovereignty in its own sphere, but it would also infringe upon the artist’s creative process, making genuine fine art (which has its natural source in poetic intuition) impossible, and severing the link between art and truth. Maritain’s judgment of this kind of “art” is strong: “Art for the social group becomes, thus, inevitably propaganda art.” Maritain’s strong conviction that art cannot be directly manipulated for any purpose, moral or political, good or evil, puts him at odds not only with modern forms of totalitarianism, but also with ancient Greek understandings of the role of art in the polis.
In this context, what can we say about the possibility of Christian art? On the one hand, given what we have just said about Maritain’s criticism of art for the social group, it seems fair to conclude that, by extension, he would be against any kind of superficial attempt to write a “Christian novel” with the goal of proselytizing or evangelizing the reader. At the very least, any attempt of this sort would not be considered genuine fine art, in Maritain’s view.
In Art and Scholasticism, Maritain does dedicate one chapter to Christian art. He begins by defining Christian art as “art bearing on the face of it the character of Christianity” rather than any particular species of the genus ‘art.’ In other words, Christian art is not a specific kind of art in the way that poetry is, or even in the way that Gothic or Byzantine art is. Rather, “The definition of Christian art is to be found in its subject and its spirit…it is the art of humanity redeemed. It is implanted in the Christian soul, by the side of the running waters, under the sky of the theological virtues, amid the breaths of the seven gifts of the Spirit.”
Maritain proceeds to explain that “everything, sacred and profane, belongs to it” including symphonies, dance, film, novels, operas, etc. There is a kind of “inspiration” that descends from God; it is roughly what Maritain call ‘creative intuition’ in his later work. He offers this advice to Christian artists: “If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose.” He proceeds to explain that an artist should not attempt to sever the “artist” and the “Christian” in himself, as if these were totally distinct things, since in reality they are united organically in one and the same person. In short, one should not superficially separate art from faith. However, insofar as the artist creates art, he or she should do so as an artist, without making religious devotion “a rule of artistic operation.” Maritain is instead describing a more organic way of being a Christian artist: the work of art made “will reveal in its beauty the interior reflection of the brilliance of grace, only on condition that it overflows from a heart possessed by grace.” Christ is present in the soul of the Christian artist through charity, and this love is “an intrinsic super-elevation” of his virtue of art. Understood in this way, Christian art does not refer to any particular technique, style, system of rules, or method. Rather it “admits of an infinite variety,” even as all Christian art will “bear a family likeness,” as he puts it.
Maritain ends this chapter on Christian art with a brief discussion of the liturgy (which is outside the scope of this essay) and with the admission that Christian art is difficult. It is difficult to be an artist, and it is difficult to be a Christian, and hence it is “doubly difficult” to be a Christian artist. In The Responsibility of the Artist, he notes that there is also the potential tension an artist might feel between his “artistic conscience,” on the one hand, and his desire not to scandalize others with his art, on the other hand. The only way to resolve an inner conflict between artistic concerns and moral concerns is for the artist to “purify his ways ceaselessly”; growth in charity will not eliminate the potential conflict between art and prudence, but charity “makes the entire subjectivity purer, and consequently, the creative source also purer.” Maritain provides a long list of 20th century writers whose faith did not in the least impair their art, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, G.K. Chesterton, Sigrid Undset, and Francois Mauriac, among others. Maritain’s call for artists to grow in charity in order to resolve the tension between art and prudence is reminiscent of Mauriac’s call “to purify the source.” The idea is that the artist—including the Christian artist—cannot manipulate his art directly for an extrinsic purpose without ruining it; he can, however, seek to purify himself, and as he grows, his art will naturally follow.
In conclusion, perhaps we can say that a receptive stance of wonder toward the world, which Maritain captures in the notion of ‘creative intuition,’ is the fundamental spiritual condition needed for any genuine artist—including a Christian artist. Any attempt to manipulate works of art to serve some pre-determined moral or political purpose is, in Maritain’s view, always a distortion of true art. Art and morality are distinct spheres, and yet both are ultimately unified in the human person who is directly oriented to a transcendent end in God. The Christian artist has the potential to grow organically as an artist insofar as he develops moral and theological virtues that organically affect his works of art because they purify the source from which poetic intuition springs. Christian art does not consist of any particular genre or content, but instead names the kind of art that arises from those Christian artists whose inner sources of creative knowledge have been illuminated and elevated by grace.
Hannah Woldum Ragusa, Ph.D., is the Interim REACH Director & an Instructor of Philosophy at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, LA.