What can the expressive and communicative instrument of this knowledge “by affective connaturality” be? It is the poetic symbol, which is a sign-image, something sensible that signifies its object by way of an analogy between sign and object, and therefore a sign, which, over and above its semantic effectiveness, obtains a practical result (by communicating an order, an appeal) by means of suggestion—an operation that Maritain does not hesitate to define as “magical” (1938a: 299 et seq.).
Nevertheless, no doubt because he did not believe that Thomas’s own texts would support this interpretation, Maritain seeks confirmation in a Scholastic of the Counter-Reformation, to be specific, in John of Saint Thomas (1589–1644; aka John Poinsot, hereinafter “John”).
Now, John’s linguistic theory is a theory of philosophical language and he does not have the slightest interest in the possibilities of poetic language. The linguistic expression or term is what the proposition can be reduced to, as occurs in the case of the subject and the predicate; the term is both vox and signum, both mental and written, and it is ex quo simplex conficitur propositio (“that out of which a simple proposition is made”); it is a vox significativa (and therefore is not meaningless, unlike, for instance, the sound blitiri); and it is such ad placitum, that is, by stipulation or convention. Meaningful words (voces significativae) that have not been agreed upon, such as moans and groans, are excluded.12
Maritain, for his part, endeavors to find allusions to the “symbolic” value of images in certain citations from John (such as “ratio imaginis consistit in hoc quod procedat ab alio ut a principio et in similitudinem ejus, ut docet S. Thomas” (“the rationale of an image, therefore, consists in this, that it proceeds from another as from a principle and in a similitude or likeness of that other, as Saint Thomas teaches”) (Deely 1985: 219). While it is true that Thomas states (in Summa Theologiae I, 35) that “species, prout ponitur ab Hilario in definitione imaginis, importat formam deductam in aliquo ab alio” (“the term species, as Hillary claims in his definition of the image, implies a form in one thing derived from another”), what he is talking about is the more traditional definition of the image as bound to the object by a relationship of likeness, not by convention, and this reading does not lend itself to a “symbolist” interpretation. Maritain, on the other hand, makes it the basis for a definition of the poetic symbol as a sign-image endowed with an analogical and ambiguous (or polysemic) relationship with the signatum. Thomas was not unaware of the existence of such sign-images capable of standing in a vaguely ambiguous position vis-à-vis the signatum; but he saw them as being the kind of visions that appear to prophets, announcing the fact, for instance, that there will be seven years of plenty by showing seven full ears of corn. This would be a purely poetic proceeding, and here again Thomas implies that it is inferior; so much so that he considers more valid and reliable those prophecies in which, instead of images, we have words, far less equivocal signs, and more desirable in a circumstance as delicate as that of the reception of the divine message.13
Saying, however, that in prophecy we encounter “poetic” procedures does not mean that prophecy and poetic procedures are one and the same thing.
Let us grant then, in order to get this false issue out of the way, that there does exist, in the authors to whom Maritain refers, a sign-image based on a relationship of analogy—and the fact that it is somewhat played down is surely not all that important, seeing that, here and elsewhere, what is at stake, as we have seen, is more a question of theology than one of aesthetics. Furthermore, the most reliable communicative vehicles are to be preferred, those that are, in other words, less “poetically” ambiguous. However, once the existence of sign-images had been recognized (as the entire allegorical tradition is there to attest), medieval thinkers invariably made every attempt to conventionalize them as much as they could, through their repertories of symbols, attributing a single meaning to every image (or at most a choice amongst four). If there are more—if, for example, in certain bestiaries, the lion may signify both Christ and the Devil—this is because of the overlapping of traditional associations. But the task of medieval hermeneutics, however much Maritain, as a reader of Baudelaire, would have preferred it, is not to cultivate a fruitful ambiguity, fraught with manifold suggestions, but on the contrary to identify as expeditiously as possible a definite meaning valid for the context at hand (which is usually scriptural).
The only way Maritain could have defended his position was by placing himself clearly outside the medieval tradition and declaring that modern man had turned the situation on its head. Incapable of choosing between the role of modern symbolist and that of ancient allegorist, on the one hand he throws a veil of ambiguity over his medieval sources, while on the other he undermines the comprehension of his personal proposals by making them sound like superannuated ruminations on Thomistic positions, whereas, if the truth were known, they are in reality assertions typical of contemporary aesthetics. It is not easy to keep one foot in Montparnasse and the other in the Street of Straw (Vicus Straminis = Ruelle au Fouarre). But this untenable ubiquity is the very essence of Maritain’s aesthetic. It explains its fascination, however outmoded today, as well as the reason why it was so short-lived.
8.5. Creative Intuition vs. Agent Intellect
And so we come at last to a book like Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), meditated and composed in an English-speaking context by a more mature Maritain, enriched by his intense experience as a reader of contemporary poetic texts and partially weaned from his strict deference to the texts of the Middle Ages.14
Here Maritain no longer presents himself as an interpreter of Saint Thomas but as an autonomous thinker, developing the concept of poetry as revelation already outlined in his previous essays.
By Poetry I mean … that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination. (3)
In other words, poetry obliges us to consider the intellect both in its secret well-springs inside the human soul and as functioning in a nonrational (I do not say antirational) or nonlogical way. (4)
The integral conclusion must, therefore, it seems to me, be set forth as follows: On the one hand, as we have seen apropos of Oriental art, when art only intent on Things succeeds in revealing Things and their hidden meanings, it does also reveal obscurely, despite itself, the creative subjectivity of the artist.… On the other hand, when art primarily intent on the artist’s Self succeeds in revealing creative subjectivity, it does also reveal obscurely Things and their hidden aspects and meanings—and with greater power of penetration indeed, I mean into the depths of this Corporeal Being itself and this Nature that our hands touch.… Our descriptive and inductive inquiry suggests that at the root of the creative act there must be a quite particular intellectual process, without parallel in logical reason, through which Things and the Self are grasped together by means of a kind of experience or knowledge which has no conceptual expression and is expressed only in the artist’s work. (33–34)15
Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that this theory of poetic knowledge is patently in conflict with the medieval conception of art as recta ratio factibilium (“right judgment regarding things to be made”), as an intellectual creation, that is, which adheres to certain rules, Maritain, revealing an unsuspected acrobatic talent, endeavors to demonstrate that his position is not in conflict with Thomistic theory. Although, for the Middle Ages, art was a virtue of the practical intellect, for Maritain the set of rules by which the intellect operates are not rules ossified into a canon that antedates the creation of the work. This is where the notion of “creative intuition” comes in, superimposing itself on the canonical rules of making and breathing new life into them by virtue of an act that proceeds from the depths of the spirit.
There is no need to stress the fact that it is precisely this concept of an intuitive moment permeating the action and superimposing itself on the rules that is nowhere to be found in Thomas’s aesthetics. Maritain seems to be affirming that the idea of creative intuition is peculiar to contemporary and modern poetics; and yet he reintroduces the intuitive moment in the context of classical philosophy when he states that all reasoning, deductive and syllogistic, is based in reality on an intuitive principle, on the existence, that is, of first principles that are not deduced but seen. The classical intuition of first principles, however, was still a modality of reason, the very law of its functioning; whereas the poetic intuition of the Moderns is an insight of the imagination: not a logical operation (which discovers) but the final effect of an imaginative operation (which creates).
Maritain does not appear sensitive to this difference. Indeed he maintains that there is no substantial difference between poetry and intellect, both are ascribable to the “same blood.” The madness of the Surrealists and Plato’s poetic mania, along with the profound intuition of principles (to say nothing of the mystical consciousness that ultimately constitutes the final step in any explicative process of being, as Maritain never tired of insisting), all have
