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Reading Selections from “Fearful Symmetries” by Stephen M. Barr

September 17, 2010

Dr. Steven M. Barr

Science seeks the elegant, elusive simplicity of the universe itself but suffers from the propensity of many of its adherents to flatten and trivialize the world by reductionism. In yesterday’s post C.S. Lewis wrote:

Christianity claims to give an account of facts — to tell you what the real universe is like. Its account of the universe may be true, or it may not, and once the question is really before you, then your natural inquisitiveness must make you want to know the answer. If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

I wonder which facts would affect the atheist more. I think of the atheists who deny the historicity of the New Testament or retreat to the narrowness of the scientific method, for whom the inability to pull God from a test tube is prima facie evidence of his lack of existence. I think Steven Barr’s latest writings might come close. Dr. Stephen M. Barr is professor of physics at the University of Delaware and author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and A Student’s Guide to Natural Science. Reading selections from Fearful Symmetries here:

Reductionism
Since the time of Newton, science has advanced by a strategy rightly called “reductionism.” This method, which explains things by analyzing them into smaller and simpler parts, has yielded a rich harvest of discoveries about the natural world. As a means of analysis, then, reductionism has certainly proven its value. But many wonder whether science is reductive in a more radical and disturbing way — by flattening, collapsing, and trivializing the world. For all its intellectual accomplishments, does science end up taking our sense of reality down several notches? One could well get that impression from perusing the writings of certain scientists. Francis Crick famously asserted that human life is “no more than the behavior of . . . nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, once described people as “machines made of meat.” Neuroscientist Giulio Giorelli announced that “we have a soul, but it is made up of many tiny robots.” And biologist Charles Zuker has concluded that “in essence, we are nothing but a big fly.”

A Metaphysical Tendency Accompanying Reductionism
This tendency to downgrade and diminish reflects a metaphysical prejudice that equates explanatory reduction with a grim slide down the ladder of being. Powerful explanatory schemes reveal things to be simpler than they appear. What simpler means in science is much discussed among philosophers—it is not at all a simple question. But to many materialists it seems to mean lower, cruder, and more trivial. By this way of thinking, the further we push toward a more basic understanding of things, the more we are im-mersed in meaningless, brutish bits of matter.

The philosopher Georges Rey has written, for example, that “any ultimate explanation of mental phenomena will have to be in non-mental [i.e., sub-mental or material] terms or else it won’t be an explanation of it.” Of course, the logic of this could be turned around. One could just as well say that any ultimate explanation of the material world must be in nonmaterial terms. But for materialists the lower explains the higher; and lower does not just mean more fundamental but instead suggests a diminished ontological status. The presumption is that explanations move from evolved complexity to primitive stuff.

At first glance, the history of the cosmos seems to bear this out. Early on, the universe was filled with nearly featureless gas and dust, which eventually condensed to form galaxies, stars, and planets. In stars and supernovas, the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, fused to make heavier ones, gradually building up the whole periodic table. In some primordial soup, or slime, or ooze on the early earth, atoms agglomerated into larger and more intricate molecules until self-replicating ones appeared and life began. From one-celled organisms, ever more complicated living things evolved, until sensation and thought appeared. In cosmic evolution the arrow apparently moves from chaos to order, formlessness to form, triviality to complexity, and matter to mind.

Dennett Theory Of Religion
And that is why, according to philosopher Daniel Dennett, religion has it exactly upside down. Believers think that God reached down to bring order and create, whereas in reality the world was built — or rather built itself — from the ground up. In Dennett’s metaphor, the world was constructed not by “skyhooks” reaching down from the heavens but by “cranes” supported by, and reaching up from, the solid ground.

The history to which the atheist points — of matter self-organizing and physical structures growing in complexity — is correct as far as it goes, but it is only part of the story. The lessons the atheist draws are naive. Yes, the world we experience is the result of processes that move upward. But Dennett and others overlook the hidden forces and principles that govern those processes. In short, they are not true reductionists because they don’t go all the way down to the most basic explanations of reality.

As we turn to the fundamental principles of physics, we discover that order does not really emerge from chaos, as we might naively assume; it always emerges from greater and more impressive order already present at a deeper level. It turns out that things are not more coarse or crude or unformed as one goes down into the foundations of the physical world but more subtle, sophisticated, and intricate the deeper one goes.

An Example
Let’s start with a simple but instructive example of how order can appear to emerge spontaneously from mere chaos through the operation of natural forces. Imagine a large number of identical marbles rolling around randomly in a shoe box. If the box is tilted, all the marbles will roll down into a corner and arrange themselves into what is called the “hexagonal closest packing” pattern. (This is the same pattern one sees in oranges stacked on a fruit stand or in cells in a beehive.) This orderly structure emerges as the result of blind physical forces and mathematical laws. There is no hand arranging it. Physics requires the marbles to lower their gravitational potential energy as much as possible by squeezing down into the corner, which leads to the geometry of hexagonal packing.

At this point it seems as though order has indeed sprung from mere chaos. To see why this is wrong, however, consider a genuinely chaotic situation: a typical teenager’s bedroom. Imagine a huge jack tilting the bedroom so that everything in it slides into a corner. The result would not be an orderly pattern but instead a jumbled heap of lamps, furniture, books, clothing, and what have you.

Why the difference? Part of the answer is that, unlike the objects in the bedroom, the marbles in the box all have the same size and shape. But there’s more to it. Put a number of spoons of the same size and shape into a box and tilt it, and the result will be a jumbled heap. Marbles differ from spoons because their shape is spherical. When spoons tumble into a corner, they end up pointing every which way, but marbles don’t point every which way, because no matter which way a sphere is turned it looks exactly the same.

These two crucial features of the marbles—having the same shape and having a spherical shape—should be understood as principles of order that are already present in the supposedly chaotic situation before the box was tilted. In fact, the more we reduce to deeper explanations, the higher we go. This is because, in a sense that can be made mathematically precise, the preexisting order inherent in the marbles is greater than the order that emerges after the marbles arrange themselves. This requires some expla-nation.

Both the preexisting order and the order that emerges involve symmetry, a concept of central importance in modern physics, as we’ll see. Mathematicians and physicists have a peculiar way of thinking about symmetry: A symmetry is something that is done. For example, if one rotates a square by 90 degrees, it looks the same, so rotating by 90 degrees is said to be a symme-try of the square. So is rotating by 180 degrees, 270 degrees, or a full 360 degrees. A square thus has exactly four symmetries.

Not surprisingly, the hexagonal pattern the marbles form has six symmetries (rotating by any multiple of 60 degrees: 60, 120, 180, 240, 300, and 360 degrees). A sphere, on the other hand, has an infinite number of symmetries—doubly infinite, in fact, since rotating a sphere by any angle about any axis leaves it looking the same. And, what’s more, the symmetries of a sphere include all the symmetries of a hexagon.

If we think this way about symmetry, careful analysis shows that, when marbles arrange themselves into the hexagonal pattern, just six of the infinite number of symmetries in the shape of the marbles are ex-pressed or manifested in their final arrangement. The rest of the symmetries are said, in the jargon of physics, to be spontaneously broken. So, in the simple example of marbles in a tilted box, we can see that symmetry isn’t popping out of nowhere. It is being distilled out of a greater symmetry already present within the spherical shape of the marbles.

Spontaneous Symmetry
The idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking is important in fundamental physics. The equations of electromagnetism have a mathematical structure that is dictated by a set of so-called gauge symmetries, discovered by the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl almost a century ago. For a long time it seemed that two other basic forces of nature, the weak force and the strong force, were not based on symmetries. But about forty years ago it was found that the weak force is actually based on an even larger set of gauge symmetries than those of electromagnetism.

Because the symmetries of the weak force are spontaneously broken, however, they do not manifest or express themselves in an obvious way, which is why it took so long to discover them. (The strong force is based on a yet larger set of gauge symmetries, but this fact was obscured by a quite different effect and also was not discovered for a long time.)

This history illustrates a general trend in modern physics: The more deeply it has probed the structure of matter, the greater the mathematical order it has found. The order we see in nature does not come from chaos; it is distilled out of a more fundamental order.

Symmetry is just one kind of order. In the case of the marbles in the box, other principles of order were also at work, such as the principle that caused the marbles to seek out the configuration of lowest energy. This is an aspect of a beautiful mathematical principle, called the principle of least action that underlies all of classical physics. When physicists investigated the subatomic realm, however, they discovered that the principle of least action is just a limiting case of the much more subtle and sophisticated path integral principle, which is the basis of quantum mechanics, as Richard Feynman showed in the 1940s. The lesson is the same: The deeper one looks, the more remarkable the mathematical structure one sees.

An Underlying Order
The mathematical order underlying physical phenomena is most easily observed in the motions of the heavenly bodies. Even primitive societies were aware of it, and it inspired not only feelings of religious awe (many expressions of which are found in the Bible itself) but also the earliest attempts at mathematical science. And when scientists began to study the solar system with more precision, they discovered unsuspected patterns even more beautiful than those known to the ancients.

Four hundred years ago, for example, Johannes Kepler discovered three marvelous geometrical laws that describe planetary motion. So impressed was he by the beauty of these laws that he wrote this prayer in his treatise Harmonices Mundi (The harmonies of the world): “I thank thee, Lord God our Creator, that thou hast allowed me to see the beauty in thy work of creation.” Decades later, Newton succeeded in explaining Kepler’s laws — but he did not explain them down, if by down we mean reducing what we observe and experience to something more trivial or brutish.

On the contrary, he explained them by deriving them from an underlying order that is more general and impressive, which we now call Newton’s laws of mechanics and gravity. Newton’s law of gravity was later explained, in turn, by Einstein, who showed that it followed from a more profound theory of gravity called general relativity. And it is now generally believed that Einstein’s theory is but the manifestation of a yet more fundamental theory, which many suspect to be superstring theory. Superstring theory has a mathematical structure so sophisticated that, after a quarter of a century of study by hundreds of the world’s most brilliant physicists and mathematicians, it is still not fully understood.

It is true that science seeks to simplify our picture of the world. An explanation should in some sense be simpler than the thing it explains. And, indeed, there is a sense in which Einstein’s theory of gravity is simpler than Newton’s, and Newton’s theory of planetary motion simpler than Kepler’s.

As physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek notes, however, Einstein’s theory is “not ‘simple’ in the usual sense of the word.” Whereas Kepler’s laws can be explained in a few minutes to a junior-high-school student, Newton’s laws cannot be fully explained without using calculus. And to explain Einstein’s theory requires four-dimensional, curved, non-Euclidean space-time and much else besides. And yet, once we know enough, Einstein’s theory does have a compelling simplicity greater than Newton’s theory. The simplicity to which scientific reductionism leads us, then, is of a very paradoxical kind. It is a simplicity that is by no means simpleminded. It is not at all jejune, but deeply interesting and intellectually rich.

Paradoxical Reductionism In Chess
The same paradox can be found in many fields. The chess world champion Capablanca was admired for the purity and simplicity of his style. But to understand his moves one must have an understanding of the game that can be acquired only by years of experience and study. A later world champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, wrote of him, “In this simplicity there was a unique beauty of genuine depth.” Another world champion, Emanuel Lasker, observed that “[in Capablanca’s games] there is nothing hidden, artificial, or labored. Although they are transparent, they are never banal and are often deep.” Wilczek had just the right term for this kind of simplicity, which is also found in the fundamental laws of physics: profound simplicity.

Profound Simplicity
Profound simplicity always impresses with its elegance, economy of means, harmony, and perfection. This perfection, as Wilczek notes, is such that one feels that the slightest alteration would be disastrous. He quotes Salieri’s envious description of Mozart’s music in the film Amadeus: “Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.” Applying this to physics, Wilczek says, “A theory begins to be perfect if any change makes it worse. . . . A theory becomes perfectly perfect if it’s impossible to change it without ruining it entirely.”

Symmetry is one of the factors that contribute to profound simplicity, both in the laws of physics and in works of art. Paint over one petal of the rose window of a cathedral, remove one column from a colonnade, and the symmetry is destroyed. Each part is necessary for the completion of the pattern.

The symmetries that characterize the deepest laws of physics are mathematically richer and stranger than the ones we encounter in everyday life. The gauge symmetries of the strong and weak forces, for example, involve rotations in abstract mathematical spaces with complex dimensions. In other words, the coordinates in those pecu-liar spaces are not ordinary numbers, as they are for the space in which we live, but complex numbers, which are numbers that contain the square root of minus one. Grand unified theories—which combine the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces into a single mathe-matical structure—posit symmetries that involve rotations in abstract spaces of five or more complex dimensions.

Supersymmetries
Stranger and more profoundly simple are supersymmetries. There is much reason to think that supersymmetries are built into the laws of physics, and finding evidence of that is one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland, which has recently begun to take data. Supersymmetries involve so-called Grassmann numbers, which are utterly different from the ordinary numbers we use to count and measure things. Whereas ordinary numbers (and even complex numbers) have the common-sense property that a × b = b × a, Grassmann numbers have the bizarre property that a × b = -b × a. A simple enough formula, but hard indeed for the human mind to fathom.

Esoteric symmetries also lie at the heart of Einstein’s theory of relativity. These Lorentz symmetries involve rotations not just in three-dimensional space but in four-dimensional space-time. We can all visualize the symmetries of a sphere or a hexagonal pattern, but Lorentz symmetries, supersymmetries, and the gauge symmetries of the weak, strong, and grand unified forces lie far outside our experience and intuition. They can be grasped only with the tools of advanced mathematics.

Physicists have found beauty in the mathematical principles animating the physical world, from Kepler, who praised God for the elegant geometry of the planets’ orbits, to Hermann Weyl, for whom mathematical physics revealed a “flawless harmony that is in conformity with sublime Reason.”

Some might suspect that this beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or that scientists think their own theories beautiful simply out of vanity. But there is a remarkable fact that suggests otherwise. Again and again throughout history, what started as pure mathematics — ideas developed solely for the sake of their intrinsic interest and elegance — turned out later to be needed to express fundamental laws of physics.

Starting As Pure Mathematics Later Needed For Fundamental Laws Of Physics
For example, complex numbers were invented and the theory of them deeply investigated by the early nine-teenth century, a mathematical development that seemed to have no relevance to physical reality. Only in the 1920s was it discovered that complex numbers were needed to write the equations of quantum mechanics. Or, in another instance, when the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton invented quaternions in the mid-nineteenth century, they were regarded as an ingenious but totally useless construct. Hamilton himself held this view.

When asked by an aristocratic lady whether quaternions were useful for anything, Hamilton joked, “Aye, madam, quaternions are very useful — for solving problems involving quaternions.” And yet, many decades later, quaternions were put to use to describe properties of subatomic particles such as the spin of electrons as well as the relation between neutrons and protons. Or again, Riemannian geometry was developed long before it was found to be needed for Einstein’s theory of gravity. And a branch of mathematics called the theory of Lie groups was developed before it was found to describe the gauge symmetries of the fundamental forces.

Indeed, mathematical beauty has become a guiding principle in the search for better theories in fundamental physics. Werner Heisenberg wrote, “In exact science, no less than in the arts, beauty is the most important source of illumina-tion and clarity.” Paul Dirac, one of the giants of twentieth-century physics, went so far as to say that it was more important to have “beauty in one’s equations” than to have them fit the experimental data.

At the roots of the physical world, therefore, one does not find mere inchoate slime or dust but instead a richness and perfection of form based on profound, subtle, and beautiful mathematical ideas. This is what the famous astrophysicist Sir James Jeans meant when he said many decades ago that “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” Benedict XVI expressed the same basic insight when in his Regensburg lecture he referred to “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality,…the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature.”

A Greater And More Impressive Order
Modern science does not directly imply or require any particular metaphysical theory of reality, but it does suggest to us that the picture presented by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins is false because the picture is only partial. In the terms of Dennett’s meta-phor of cranes constructing complexity, one sees what is built from the ground up; but delving beneath the surface, one finds an astonishing, hidden world — the underground mechanisms of the cranes, as it were.

It is true that the cosmos was at one point a swirling mass of gas and dust out of which has come the extraordinary complexity of life as we experience it. Yet, at every moment in this process of development, a greater and more impressive order operates within — an order that did not develop but was there from the beginning. In the upper world, mind, thought, and ideas make their appearance as fruit on the topmost branches of an evolutionary tree. Below the surface, we see the taproots of reality, the fundamental laws of physics that shimmer with ideas of profound simplicity.

To describe people as machines made of meat is as scientifically unsophisticated as to think of the sun as a heat-emitting machine made of swirl-ing gas. It ignores the reasons why the machines function as they do—reasons that the explanations of modern physics reduce to simplici-ties as elegant as they are elusive. Peering into the hidden depths, we see that matter itself is the expression of “a great thought,” of ideas that are, as Weyl said, “in conformity with sublime Reason.” And we begin to discover that matter, although mindless itself, is the product of a Mind of infinite profundity and infinite simplicity.

Posted in Aesthetics, Science And Religion | Tagged Daniel Dennett, mathematical order, physics, spontaneous symmetry, Stephen M. Barr | 2 Comments »

Poem: Hurrahing in Harvest by Gerard Manley Hopkins

July 30, 2010

Gerard Manley Hopkins asserted with great ardor that man could approach his Lord by the inconsiderable trifles of the world, a love for irises and moths and falcons. His notebooks are crammed with the canniest descriptions, born of love, of what he called the “inscapes” of the things he saw, the peculiar inner fingerprint of a thing that made it itself and no other:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is me: for that I came
(“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” 5-8)

His term inscape is well chosen. It suggests a creation that delves deep within a thing, to its essence. The term is derived from the German schoepfen (to create) and -schaft (knowledge, as of a craft), and from the Anglo-Saxon scieppan (to shape or fashion) and scop (a shaper of verses, that is, poet) Hopkins says the finding of inscapes is precisely what the world is for, all things are for man’s beholding, that he may learn of his Maker and sing his praises.

Hence the typical irony of Hopkins’s poetry. Knowledge is everywhere to be gleaned, but only by those who love. The fault line severs those who can read the signs, often in the most unexpected places, from those who cannot, because their love does not beat warmly enough. The double identity of the world — as heaven penetrates this smallish portion of the world that we misconstrue as the whole — comes across quite nicely in the following notebook entry, describing the first time Hopkins saw the northern lights:

Mv eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I s aw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline.

Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it.

This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.
(Sept. 24, 1870)

Note that Hopkins senses a time-within-time, independent of the clicking minutes whereby we calculate our days in the countinghouse. But it is also a time above that time, steering it, leading it from the nothingness whence it came to the eternity whither it is going. He experiences the fearful sense of the provisionality of time, of its being embedded in God’s time — against which our minutes seem to clash.

BUT IF OUR HEARTS are open, we will see. Then it will be as if the veil of creation had been torn in two. We will not see beyond creation, leaving it behind in disdain, but into creation… We will see even unto the dangerous and loving Creator who awaits within and beside and beyond. God is no mere object of love, but the Lover who will tear through cloud and sky to grip the heart of man That explains the ironic reversals in one of Hopkins’s loveliest hymns to natural beauty:

Hurrahing in Harvest
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world wielding shoulder
Majestic as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet

The first line of the poem leads, or misleads, the reader to believe that he is about to hear of the “barbarous” beauty of late summer. Hopkins echoes Shakespeare’s famous line describing the sheaves brought in for the harvest, “Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard” (Sonnets 12 8 ) The “stooks” or ricks of baled corn are bearded and bristly — in that sense barbarous, punning on the Latin barbatus (bearded) — and of a rough and rustic thrusting into the sky

But that is the last sight of an autumn harvest we have in the poem. For Hopkins casts his eye upward. Dante had called the world “this little winnowing floor” (Paradise, 22 151), alluding to Jesus’ warning that it the Last Judgment the wheat would be winnowed from the chaff. Hopkins instead looks to the physical heavens — there is the harvesting, unbeknownst to the men who shock the grain on earth. The skies are “wind-walks” where the horses of the air march round (and there, not simply round and round but in the wildest streams) to power the fan to blow the straw free; the clouds are silky sacks grain a-bursting; they spill the meal, flowing away in sudden runnels and siftings and scatterings.

It is no mere physical description. A real gleaning is going on, with the poet as gleaner, walking through the rows of grain: and his instruments are his heart and eyes. He is gleaning the Savior. That image is meant to evoke a theology of love. In most of the New Testament passages that refer to the harvest; Jesus is comparing the grain to the souls of the blessed (e.g., Luke 8:4-15). In at least one place the souls’ enjoyment of the kingdom of God is compared to a bumper crop at the harvest, “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over” (Luke 6:38). And why not? Since the life of Christ is the feast: he is the manna from heaven, the food that brings eternal life.

This is the paradox of Hopkins’ poetics of love. God loves a world whose beauty should stir man to fall in love with it and with Him. The more truly I love the meal-drifting clouds, the more truly I love God, because unless I see God in them, I do not fully see what they are. In the same way, Christ gives himself the Eucharist that we may be gleaned by our gleaning our taking Him in is His own taking us up to Himself, so that Aquinas properly says of the sacrament that it is not heaven that descends to us, but we who are raised to heaven.

No earthly love can match the fullness, even the violence, of God’s love for man, when man lifts up his heart to God. Christ’s is a “real” and a “round” reply, a halloo more reverberating than any man’s shout of joy, a kiss more real and warm than the most passionate lover’s embrace. Worship is not for the faint of heart. The hills above are the world-wielding shoulder of this hero — this God and man who is as “stalwart” (and as self-willed!) as a “stallion,” yet mysteriously as sweet as “very-violet.” Very God and very man, says The Book of Common Prayer; but Hopkins combines both natures in those superb images of royalty and approachable beauty.

Just as the northern lights seem to keep a time fixed upon eternity — a real time, a rounder time than what we know — so too the beauty of the harvest is and has always been ready for our seeing. Not the harvest of an Irish countryside, but in that harvest the harvest of oneself, in harvesting Christ. What is wanting? Only our attention: “the beholder.” But we are here to behold it. Then it is our love that is wanting. But if that heart should once move in love, it will find ravishment, swept away by and from the beauty of the earth to the beauty of Christ. For ‘they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31).

Posted in Aesthetics, Anthony Esolen, Poetry | Tagged Gerard Manley Hopkins, gleaning the Savior, Hurrahing in Harvest | Leave a Comment »

Drawing Closer To The Heart Of The Lord: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty

July 1, 2010

Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough...

This is not the first time I have introduced this poem on Paying Attention To The Sky, but I shall do it again to showcase Anthony Esolen’s prodigious talents of interpretation. I first studied the poem back in a lit class in college and counted syllables and stress, marveling at the intricacies of structure and form of the sonnet. Elsewhere I have related how this poem can easily become a prayer — a cool summer morning following several days in the nineties — you can memorize this and recite it on the way to bus stop. You’ll be surprised how many more counter, original, spare, strange things you’ll notice on the way to work.

“God is Love”
WE ARE USED TO hearing the biblical verse, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and nodding knowingly to ourselves. “Ah yes,” says the modern agnostic with a taste for religion. “I don’t know whether God exists, but I do know that if he does, then He is love. So I will try to live according to love.”

That’s better than nothing. But we are too familiar with the verse. We no longer hear its thundering challenge to the entire Greek philosophical system.

For if God is love and not necessity (since what is determined or compelled cannot be an act of love), then none of this universe need have been. Nor need it have been the way it is now. The belief that God creates from nothing, freely, is a logical consequence of believing that he creates from love.

But how can God love man? God needs nothing from man, not even man’s love. Christians believe that God already is a communion of three persons bound by love, each distinct, yet each fully God. Man knows a trace of the love that moves God, or that is God’s movement within himself: as he moves not from need, but from superabundance, from generosity one might even say from playfulness.

Man will cherish animals from which he derives nothing of use; he will potter about a flower garden for delight in the flowers; his heart will soar at the strains of music; he cheers at the sight of a big and boisterous; family. Unlike every other creature on earth, man needs what he does not need, and loves where he does not lack — and he feels that he loves more fully from his plenty and strength, from his fascination with life, and from his will-to-beauty, than from his sense of incompleteness and insufficiency. In those high-hearted moments, man is close to God.

In no classical author do we find the great Zeus, father of gods and men stooping to limn a blade of grass or smooth out a dewdrop. Such affairs would be relegated to some deity so low on the scale as to he nameless. But our God, who made even the creeping things that creep upon the earth, who cares for ostrich egg because the hen is too bird-brained to do it herself (Job 39:13), whose kingdom is as a mustard seed, and who decks the lilies of the field in such glory as would put to shame the tailors of Solomon, delights in works. He enjoys them, he calls them good, he loves them. And, to paraphrase Jesus, if God so loves the grass, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more does he love us, us of the hard hearts?

We might think such things beneath our notice, but the incomparably great God notices them. Small as they are, they provide for the attentive a powerful way to draw closer to the heart of the Lord (Paying Attention, don’t you see!!!). Such was the insight of the Victorian priest-poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The more unusual creature, the more it is peculiarly itself, the greater the delight. Consider this magnificent miniature sonnet on the beauty of all things great and small:

Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as brinded cow
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift slow sweet sour adazzle, dim,
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change
Praise him.

The bustling corral of things animate and inanimate defies category, exactly as Hopkins intends. No one really looks upon the sky and thinks of the splotches on a calico cow, probably because no one looks appreciatively enough at the sky and its cowishness, or at a cow and its reflection of a weathering sky. That odd second line brings heaven to earth with a delightful bump. The point, after all, is that heaven can be seen where no one sees it, especially upon the peculiarly beautiful things of earth — on the rosy stipples of a freshwater trout, for instance.

Not only there, though; Hopkins would never settle for being a dreamy little nature poet, a devotee of the pretty, and therefore a pretender of love. For how can you love weeds and thrush’s eggs and not love man?

If God delights in the making of chestnuts, the more does he delight in waking beings who can delight also in his making of chestnuts and everything else. Therefore, man, his labor and his ingenuity, must also be praised; for the quirky beauty of man’s own creativity, as evinced in sickles and ice-tongs and flails and adzes, reflects its source, the beauty of God. Fishing lures, wrenches, lathes, ropes and pulleys, pails of tar, seedbags and harrows, all in “trim,” in order, share in Hopkins’s hymn to muscular love.

But in the second stanza the poet leaves these particular things behind and turns his attention to their typical qualities — there is not one specific noun for the rest of the poem. That is because he wants to reverse the kaleidoscope: we shift our sights from the ever-changing and exuberantly various individual things to the never-changing God who made them.

Now the ironic thing about this shift is not just that a never-changing God would create things which, since they are not God, would be subject to change. It is rather that God would delight in having his never-changing beauty pieced out among, refracted through, so many forms and so odd. Yet it is no derogation of his one and eternal beauty that it should be made manifest in the swift and the slow, the dazzling and the dim. For he does not simply make, as an artificer. He “fathers-forth.”

We should meditate upon that phrase. It suggests neither the pantheism latent in earth-mother cults (whose goddess is identified with the mindless fecundity of nature), nor the fatalism latent in rationalistic theologies such as deism. God “fathers-forth”– the begetter and maker of what he did not have to beget or make. He has loved all things into being.

Begetting them, he is to be found by means of them, whether the spiraling galaxy or the conch on the shore. Man’s proper response, then, after he has paid his loving attention to trout and finches and things that show forth that breathless list of adjectives, is a quiet movement of the heart: “Praise him.” Two simple words, for a simple act that does not change: praising the Maker of change, who dwells in eternal light.

Posted in Aesthetics, Anthony Esolen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetry, Prayer | Tagged Anthony Esolen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Glory be to God for dappled things, God creates from nothing, God is Love, Pied Beauty | 1 Comment »

Simone Weil’s Aesthetic Vision: A Composition On Several Planes — Eric O. Springsted

June 8, 2010

Simone with brother Andre who was destined to be one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation. 1922

Eric O. Springsted teaches theology at Princeton and is formerly Professor of Religion, and Chaplain at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. After doing his undergraduate work at St. John’s College, he received his divinity degree and doctorate in philosophy and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary.

He is the author and editor of six books, including four on the French philosopher, Simone Weil. Co-founder of the American Weil Society, he has served as its President since 1981. He has written on education, theology, culture, and the philosophy of religion. This essay comes from The Beauty That Saves, a collection of essays on the aesthetics of Simone Weil that he co-authored with John Dunaway (a great book BTW).

I’ve often been attracted to a Christian aesthetics and have been reading around the edges of von Balthazar, David Bentley Hart and others. Weil brings us to the heart of the matter in many ways and repeats some things I found in Fr. Robert Barron’s work: the notion of God as artist.

In the previous post Vladimir Volkoff highlighted the central importance of mediation in the thought of Simone Weil. In doing so, he points out that in Weil’s universe, while there is one supreme value – God — there also are other values that are arranged a little like a Russian doll: “you know, one value inside another value and so on.” The image is striking; it is also appropriate, conveying very well what Weil sees in looking at the universe. She herself openly and earnestly talks about creation being “a composition on several planes.”

Now, to talk about the world being a composition on several planes is not just to talk in a fancy way about how one might construe values, or to construct a metaphysics. It is also to introduce deliberately aesthetic categories into one’s talk about the world from the very beginning. This is obvious enough in calling the world a “composition,” for compositions are intentional and usually done in such a way that the characteristics of beauty are important criteria for discussing them.

Weil herself was well aware of this when she talked about the world being a “composition.” Indeed, she undertakes her most extended discussion of the creation of the world in terms of what she called “an artistic model.” For Weil, creation is not a matter of a deity establishing a set of facts, of things that are; it is something God was inspired to do and that God deliberately set out to make beautiful and good in the highest possible way.

Aesthetic categories are also called for in suggesting that this composition takes place on several planes, for what Weil clearly intends in using this imagery is that we see the various plural beauties and values we encounter in the world as somehow harmonized, as pointing in their different ways and yet together to a single author, who — we are led to believe by the world’s beauty — is also beautiful.

This is wonderful talk (contained in Weil’s essay “Divine Love in Creation”). Philosophers and critical theorists might well ask, however, what the meaning of such talk might be. Well, at least one way of putting the issue is that what we are being asked to do in thinking about the world and what is in it is to use aesthetic categories, to think about it and about values in terms of beauty. Just as a pedant who writes a research paper but does so without style misses something of his subject, so, too, do we fail, Weil thinks, in thinking very well about the world if we do not think explicitly about its beauty, if we do not consciously use aesthetic categories. This includes — especially includes — Weil thought, science.

For beauty not only is a matter of harmony and of a certain intellectual pleasure and delight in order, it is also a sign, a suggestion of an end that our mind believes itself promised, but which can never quite be grasped fully and completely by the intellect. For modern science to give itself over to issues of technology and control but not to producing an adequate object of contemplation as the Greeks had tried to do was to belie the very nature of human thought of the universe. And that is to fail in understanding how humans find themselves situated in

In this sense beauty is not only an appropriate way by which to think of the world. It is also necessary for thinking of it very well at all. For whereas historically our very important attempts at conceptual clarity have tended to result in reductionism and attempts to control the world, beauty alone allows us to leave the mystery of the world as it is and yet to contemplate it, not to control it and cut it down to size. To talk about the world well at all we need to talk in some very different ways at the same time, and to recognize that each of those ways is limited, but also crucial and complementary. Although Weil believed that clarity and the scientific project of description is both crucial and possible, she also understood that it was only one of those little Russian dolls, and perhaps the least comprehensive of those dolls. It was itself nested within something larger, something that itself can often be put only paradoxically and poetically.

This last point — that the larger values we are after can only be put paradoxically and poetically — is important for two reasons. The first is that it gives a proper sense of the world in which we live. For many years we have schizophrenically tried to live in “two cultures” as C. P. Snow put it. Weil would have been appalled at the designation. She freely admitted the world of science and the world of humanities look very different, and woe to the person who confuses them. But that does not mean that there are two sets of values; there is only one, Weil thought, and each of those so-called cultures speaks in its own way to it. Each one is its own window and reading of those values. The only way, however, that we could ever understand that is if we use the language of each to describe, somehow, the other. Such use would obviously be metaphorical and analogical, but in a world that is a mystery such is appropriate. But it is not a matter of losing clarity when we use words in such a way. Clarity gives way to beauty.

The second reason that that point is important is because it helps us understand Weil’s own philosophical writing better. Although much of what she wrote, say, in her notebooks, was experimental and subject to revision and to being discarded, her control over her own thought and its expression was remarkable. Her manuscripts show few erasures. Rare is the occasion that she did not mean what she said and the way she said it. Ironically, that has often gotten her readers and commentators in trouble. For while her powers of description and analysis were finely honed she is also given to what appears to be wild excesses in expression and she oftens borders on the oracular. Now, she usually does mean what she says.

The problem is to recognize that what she says is often itself a composition on several planes. For not only does she try to describe accurately, she is very concerned, as were other writers such as Plato, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, with her readers and trying to get the reader to emerge from “the point of view.” In this case, her own use of language is important to understand and also serves as an example of the attempt to witness to a single supreme value that gives rise to a world of interlocked intermediary values. For she not only describes, she does shock, and she also talks very tenderly.

It is crucial to distinguish these uses of language in Weil herself, and to recognize their unity. And it is not just an invented aesthetic and use of language, it is a use of language where she is fully aware of the history and communal structure of the language she uses (This is to talk primarily about her philosophical writing. The reader should be aware, however, that Weil actually wrote a number of poems, and left an unfinished play, Venise sauvée, at her death. Her poetical works are clearly not in the same class as her philosophical works. Nevertheless, that she so actively explored firsthand the process of artistic creation in obvious forms as well as in the less obvious ones of, say, her notebooks, is important to understand.)

It is at this point that another image needs to be invoked to understand Weil fully. Volkoff is right in suggesting that Weil’s world of values is like a Russian doll. But let us also recall another nesting image, the image Alcibiades used of Socrates. In the beginning of his eulogy of Socrates in the Symposium, Alcibiades tells his audience that Socrates reminds him of one of those little sileni that can be bought in the statuary stalls in the marketplace. To outward appearances they are silly little statues of pipers or flautists. Yet, when one opens them up they have little figures of gods inside. The point we are meant to take away from this, of course, is one about the beauty and quality of Socrates’s inner life. And in a dialogue on love that point is made to underline Socrates’s own earlier point that it is the soul we need to love and not the outer appearances.

Now, the point that needs to be made here with respect to Weil’s understanding of beauty is that while it is, like a Russian doll, the result of a series of values nestled within each other, it is not just something out there. One certainly could not point to it, as many in the eighteenth century pointed to the order of the world, and form an argument to convince somebody, anybody, that there had to be a Maker, a Divine Artist. It is not simply an “objective” fact about the universe, although Weil did think the beauty of the world was not dependent on us. She was what we might call a realist in aesthetic matters. But understanding how she was depends upon thinking about an intimate connection between the beauty of the world, all intermediate beauties, and the soul. For beauty and value are not just nested within each other waiting to be uncovered by the right method; their very nature and existence is connected to human inner life, even if it is not dependent on it. One way of putting this point is to say that it is the nature of beauty to reveal our soul. It would be helpful here, therefore, to spell out briefly some of the aspects of that connection, for by doing so we should also get a clearer idea of Weil’s understanding of beauty itself as well as its importance in human moral life and thought.

The first aspect is that, mysteriously, beauty seems to be tailored to our size. This is a thought that Weil pondered often in her early works. Citing the example of Voltaire’s Micromegas, an inhabitant of the star Sirius who was 24,000 leagues in stature, she notes how what seems beautiful to us, because it is on our scale, will not be so to Micromegas. Now, Micromegas might well find beauty, too, and if he did, it would be another example of how the world is a composition on several planes. But the point here is, at least, that there is some sort of mysterious complicity between our minds, bodies, and the universe. Beauty is at the heart of that complicity.

But, again, this is not something we merely observe or feel. Instead Well uses the highly realist language of “being grasped” or “gripped.” Rather than being something that is entirely dependent on our sensitivity and mental make-up, or our desires, beauty is the very thing that makes us aware of a world outside us. Throughout all her writings Weil was very concerned with encountering a world beyond what is captured in our methods or envisioned in our fantasies and dreams. In short, she was concerned to encounter a world outside human thought so that human thought could think something other than itself In all cases, she believed, we are awakened to this world by encountering “necessity,” the warp and woof of the order of the created world.

Necessity presents itself to us under at least two faces. On the one hand, at times we are awakened by a certain harshness that causes us to suffer and lets us know in no uncertain terms that we may not always get something simply because we dream it. Indeed, we rarely get it. But just as important for that awakening is the other side of necessity, namely, beauty. It is beauty, as one of the faces of necessity, that grasps us and makes us pay attention to the other and to the world. Beauty, like suffering, is crucial for moving us out of ourselves and for beginning reflectiveness. Insofar as moving beyond self-absorption is the beginning of a certain life of the spirit, it is small wonder that Weil calls beauty a “trap” that God sets. In this she is in full accord with Dostoyevski’s dictum that “beauty will save the world.” It is opening up in us something like the inner gods that Alcibiades mentioned.

Weil, however, is no gnostic, although she frequently used gnostic-like language. Beauty does not simply reveal a hidden inner self that was there all along and merely needed liberating. Rather, as a trap, beauty signals a sort of birth of the soul, a creation of the inner life. In order to say what goes on here we need to reintroduce the Russian doll image. For Weil, beauty is not all of a piece; rather, it has a hierarchy. One is reminded that the word “hierarchy” has nothing to do with vertical dimensions. Its roots are hieros (holy) and arche (principle, or beginning). In this sense, while it may well be some particular small beautiful thing that first awakens us, we are at that point only at a beginning. We ultimately need to take in all of reality, and to consent to it and find it beautiful, Weil thought. In that sense Weil herself was no Annie Dillard, one who takes delight in the striking minutiae of a world that goes on under our noses and that we never see. Or, more accurately, she does not delight in dwelling on it. All that is small and valuable is valuable within a much larger universe, and in the end it is the beauty of the world as a whole that Weil is most interested in.

What one thinks of when he or she thinks of Weil herself contemplating beauty is her sitting high above the Rhóne valley at Gustave Thibon’s farm, wondering at the complexity and order of the whole. But let us be careful to understand why and to understand that that order does not ignore or negate small beautiful things. Indeed, it sustains them and gives them room. The universe as a whole has the beauty it has precisely because it is a composition on several planes; its beauty and value are that its order supports and sustains all other particular beauties and values, and lets them coexist. Its order is the coexistence of plural values that yet speak of one end.

What this means for the soul is that although a particular beauty may awaken us, our love is not perfected, our soul is not fully developed, until we can love the universe fully in every part and every way. At this terminus of love, suffering and beauty coincide for Weil. So it is not a question of the beauty of the universe as contrasted with particular beauties; the two concepts are mutually interdependent, and both are dependent on the spiritual journey of the soul. It is also for this reason that the beauty of the world could never for Weil provide an argument for the existence of God, although for the one who has learned how to read it, it is a proof, a witness.

It ought to be noted at this point just how Weil thought of this beauty of the world, this order of the world, for over the course of her brief life she came to think of it in increasingly sophisticated ways. Initially, she conceived it along the lines of a mathematical order. Where she came to differ from the mathematical physicists of the Enlightenment was that in time her sense of that order became more and more Pythagorean. Indeed, her most extensive treatment of it is in an essay simply titled “The Pythagorean Doctrine.” What it means to say in this instance that she became more and more Pythagorean is this: to a great extent the mathematical sense always remained with her. She was able to use it to great advantage when critiquing modern science. But what is also important to realize is that much of what held her attention in the Pythagoreans was not just the mathematical order they saw in the world, but a way of thinking that order through the relations of dissimilar, of incommensurate things. The Pythagoreans, of course, talked about this dissimilarity in terms of numbers — rational vs. irrational numbers. Weil, however, thought the idea of a unity of dissimilar things could be extended to everything else. Thus she came to think, for example, of social life as having a distinct sort of order that is irreducible to anything else, one that is fundamentally narrative and historical. But rather than believing that that order indicates a second culture opposed to scientific culture, she tried to get herself and her readers to imagine a world order that combined smaller orders that are as disparate as mathematics and history. Now, what that order is cannot be ultimately spelled out in any particular terms — in either historical or mathematical terms — for particular terms belong to particular orders. But here is where the notion of beauty is so crucial. That we find the world that contains all those particular orders beautiful is the sign that there is an overarching order.

We are now in a position to say something more about the mysterious relation between the beauty of the world and the soul. Beauty for Weil is what it is about the world that awakens our moral and spiritual life and presses us on to a fuller encounter with reality. Beauty in that sense is sacramental, and it is ultimately a moral and spiritual matter. But this is not to take a utilitarian or instrumental view of beauty, ever a high view. For beauty effects change in us precisely at the point that we learn to respect it for what it is by itself, without regard to what it can do for us or how it affects us. Beauty’s help to us is when it causes us precisely to forget ourselves and pay attention to what is valuable apart from us.

There is another way of putting this that hopefully not only illumines Weil’s concept of beauty but shows in the clearest possible terms one of its key sources. In the sixth book of the Republic, Socrates is trying desperately hard to explain to Glaucon the nature of the Good. In his first attempt to do so he likens the Good to the sun, for just as the sun’s light is the source of all organic life, of all that exists, as well as its being seen, so too in the realm of the intellect, the Good is the source of being and knowledge. Thus, Socrates says, the Good is the source of all, exceeding even Being in truth and dignity. Its first offspring are Truth and Beauty. For Weil, too, beauty is the offshoot of the Good. Not only is there no real truth without it, for truth and beauty are the daughters of the Good, it itself must be reckoned in moral terms, and is relevant for thinking through goodness.

To say this is to say without reserve that Weil’s aesthetic vision is very much at odds with most modern understandings of beauty. On the one hand she is a realist, while fully admitting a certain ineradicable subjective, and even cultural nature of beauty. She thus distances herself from many contemporary critical theorists, even while sharing certain of their insights. On the other hand, she also refuses to take the other modern option of treating aesthetics as a separate area of human understanding and experience, divorced from other areas, particularly moral ones. To say that the reason she takes neither of these paths is because she is a Platonist is, of course, true, but not entirely helpful. For if she is, it is by being inspired by that vision, and not by the very unplatonic means of imitating somebody else’s vision. Like most Platonists of the first rank, she is most traditional by being original.

Weil’s aesthetic vision is deeply suggestive, and at times not entirely worked out, at least as a theory. It is contained in explicit reflections on beauty and traditional aesthetic themes. But it is also contained in indirect ways in what has been loosely called her “religious metaphysics,” in her moral and spiritual insights and extended reflections, as well as in her use of sources and her own way of writing.

We are convinced that! Simone Weil’s aesthetic vision is deeply worthy of attention, for in a world that is so “post-” — so knowing of what it no longer is, but hard pressed to say what it now is, that vision is boldly integrative — while still pluralist, critical, and even tragic — while still morally hopeful and liberating — while yet deeply rooted in the ongoing traditions of value.

Posted in Aesthetics, Simone Weil | Tagged Aesthetics, Eric Springsted, Simone Weil, the world as composition | Leave a Comment »

Beauty As A Gateway To The Divine

March 31, 2010

Leonardo DaVinci's Virgin of the Rocks 1491

Rev. Walter F. Kedjierski who is an Associate Pastor at St. Catherine of Sienna Roman Catholic Parish in Franklin Square, NY and teaches theology at St. John’s University, NY, contributed a wonderful essay on Catholic Aesthetics to the Princeton Theological Review back in 2007 titled The Beautiful As A Gateway To The Transcendent. It dealt with how the Christian tradition has come to appreciate beauty as a gateway to the divine.

The seductive and enticing nature of beauty can lead one to a fulfilling encounter with the divine beyond the initial symbol experienced, or one can become fixated upon the symbol itself so that a self-consuming and unfulfilling form of idolatry is the result. Some reading selections follow. It considers the decadent movement in Western European literature of the 19th century and the writings of the 20th century Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Historical And Biblical Foundations: Augustine
Early in the history of Christianity, people came to discover God in the beautiful. When Augustine penned the story of his conversion in the 4th century, he chose to refer to God as the beautiful and to all other beauty as insignificant in comparison yet also an inspiration to seek God:

Too late have I loved you, O Beauty, ancient yet ever new. Too late have I loved you! And behold, you were within, but I was outside, searching for you there – plunging, deformed amid those fair forms which You had made. You were with me, but I was not with you. Things held me far from you, which unless they were in You did not exist at all. You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrant odors on me, and I held back my breath, but now I pant for You. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and now I yearn for your peace.
Hal M. Helms, The Confessions of St. Augustine: A Modern English Version (Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press, 1986), 210.

Augustine’s language is a language of yearning, a language that recognizes the innate goodness of the beautiful, not in and of the beautiful itself, but as a result of the author of the beautiful, God. One might make the comparison that just as a husband is initially enamored by the physical beauty of his wife, eventually he should come to recognize that the true beauty of his wife really lies within herself. Beauty is a reality that has the capacity to take one out of oneself and into a desire for an encounter with the transcendent. There are many biblical and historical foundations for the development of this understanding about the nature and purpose of beauty.

Historical And Biblical Foundations: the Hebrew Scriptures
Through a simple examination of the Hebrew Scriptures, one can come to the realization that as it was formed, the Jewish community was not opposed to the use of the beautiful, even in its worship. The temple of Solomon was more than likely one of the most beautiful structures standing during its time. A variety of carved animals and vegetation adorned the temple, which included pomegranates, twelve oxen, panels with lions, oxen, and cherubim, as well as golden altars decorated with flowers and lamps. Even with its great opulence, this was a building that proved to be so pleasing to the LORD that He chose to confer His name upon it. This description of the temple might prove to be a bit unsettling, particularly to Christians of the Reformed tradition, because of the fear of idolatry.

The Ten Commandments specifically forbid the worship of images, idols, or anything other than the one living God. The Ten Commandments found in Exodus 20 read thus in this regard: “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them.” In Deuteronomy 5 the Ten Commandments provide the same prohibition almost verbatim: “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them.” Yet along with an acknowledgment of this commandment must come the recognition that later on in the very same text of Exodus God commands Moses to make the ark with “two cherubim of beaten gold.” Where does the balance lie between God’s prohibition of the creation of idols and God’s approval of the use of images of heavenly and earthly realities in worship through prayer with the ark and in the temple?

Idolatry: The Bronze Serpent
One of the first questions that needs to be answered is exactly how idolatry was practiced by those religions that surrounded the Holy Land at that time. One of the most prominent religions of the time, which the Israelites would have known very well through their experience of slavery, was the religion of the ancient Egyptian empire. Archeologists have discovered the ways in which the ancient Egyptians honored their gods and their idols: “The priests of each temple cared for the statue of the god as if it were alive.” There is evidence that these statues were clothed, fed, and worshipped. As one can observe through a reading of the Decalogue of Exodus and Deuteronomy, idolatry would have no place in the Jewish religion despite its popularity at the time of the ancient Egyptian empire. This prohibition would be carried into Christianity. Yet, as one can observe, this prohibition was not against the use of beautiful objects in worship. Rather, the prohibition was against confusing God with the objects used to aid in worshipping God.

The Bible makes it clear that images can be used not only for worship but can even become vessels through which God transmits His grace. This is clearly true of the bronze serpent from Numbers 21. In this story, the people were growing weary of their long and arduous journey and began to complain to the LORD. The LORD therefore allowed poisonous snakes to attack the people. As they were bitten they became seriously ill, some even to the point of death. Moses cast a serpent out of bronze, and when the people gazed upon the representation of the animal that caused them harm, they were healed. This artistic representation of a serpent was used by God to bring people healing. Christians would later interpret this serpent affixed on a pole as foreshadowing Christ’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross. It is there one can observe the hatred and cruelty of humanity yet also be healed by the salvific merit of Christ’s death.(12) Beauty and artistic expression clearly do have their place in Christianity.

Yet at the same time the Scriptures also indicate that it would be tragic if the artwork, or the beauty, became an end in and of itself. The pole with the bronze serpent eventually had to be destroyed by King Hezekiah because the people began worshipping the image as their god and forgot about the LORD of heaven and earth who used the image to bring about healing. An image is exactly that, an image, a representation of a greater reality, not the reality itself. Once one becomes preoccupied with beauty in and of itself, the result is idolatry that turns one away from the transcendent. The Christian use of art is not about l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”) but rather it is about art as a vehicle, a gateway by which one can encounter the Transcendent One who is the author of the inner life of the particular soul that chose to create the artwork.

Artwork In The Liturgical Life Of The Church
Apart from the Bible, there are also clear precedents in the history of the Church concerning this question of idolatry versus the use of the beautiful. The Iconoclast controversy of the 8th and 9th centuries forced the Church to consider seriously the place of artwork in her liturgical life. This question was addressed first by the Second General Council of Nicaea in 787 and again at the Fourth General Council of Constantinople in 870. Notice how the Second General Council of Nicaea encouraged a legitimate use of sacred art in worship, not as an end in itself, but as a means of reaching the transcendent.

The more frequently one contemplates these pictorial representations, the more gladly will he be led to remember the original subject whom they represent, the more too will he be drawn to it and inclined to give it…a respectful veneration (proskunsis, adoratio), which, however, is not true adoration (latreia, latria) which, according to our faith, is due to God alone. But, as is done for the image of the revered and life-giving cross and the holy Gospels and other sacred objects and monuments, let an oblation of incense and light be made to give honor to those images according to the pious customs of the ancients. For “the honor given to an image goes to the original model” (St. Basil, De Spiritu Sancto, 18, 45) and he who venerates an image, venerates in it the person represented by it.
JJ. Neuner, SJ and J. Dupuis, SJ, The Christian Faith: Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church (New York: Alba House, 1990), 399-400. 15 G.A. Cevasco, J.-K. Huysmans’s A Rebours and English Literature (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 18.

Therefore, one can observe a consistent trend in the Scripture and tradition of Christianity of a great reverence and respect for sacred images and beauty yet at the same time an understanding that contact with beauty is not in and of itself the goal. Contact with the author of that beauty is the goal.

The Futility Of L’art Pour L’art As Demonstrated In 19th Century Decadent Literature
Examples of how absorbing the beautiful devoid of its goal of reaching for the transcendent leads to a lack of fulfillment can be observed in the 19th century Decadent movement. This movement, occurring primarily in French and British art and literature, included such geniuses as Andre Raffalovich, Oscar Wilde, J.- K. Huysmans, Aubrey Beardsley, and Charles Baudelaire. These are individuals whom one can safely say chose to remain fixated upon beauty in and of itself and yet in the end found that it was just not enough for them. “The typical Decadent was someone who worshipped beauty, an individual who needed to nourish his senses, who lived for the moods and emotions of life.” Of particular interest in this context would be J.-K. Huysmans’s highly influential novel, A Rebours (translated, Against the Grain). Cyril Connolly in his study The Modern Movement labeled A Rebours as “a key book” to modern literature.

A Rebours is a plotless, seemingly meaningless cacophony of events that surround the life of the ultimate fictional decadent, Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes. The religious symbolism present in this novel is abundant and seems to represent Des Esseintes’s acknowledgement of the importance of the spiritual but his failure to recognize that the desire to nourish all of his senses can only be realized through a connection with the author behind all of the beauty he seeks. Ironically, Des Esseintes surrounds himself with the beauty and artwork of the Church. His rooms are adorned with stoles, dalmatics, monstrances, and the like, which are all items used in the worship of the Roman Catholic Church. Des Esseintes enjoys smelling incense, lighting candles, and listening to Gregorian chant. He even makes himself into a monk of sorts who withdraws from the world and all outside influences in order to focus upon a higher pursuit. Arthur Symons, in fact, referred to A Rebours as “the breviary of the Decadence” (a breviary is a prayer book used by clergy and religious of the Roman Catholic Church). Yet Des Esseintes does not imbue any of the items with which he has surrounded himself with their religious value. As the decadent par excellence he only uses them for the sensual experience he can receive from them.

The novel ends abruptly in a rather unfulfilling manner to the reader. By chapter fifteen of the novel, Des Esseintes is enduring overwhelming suffering as a result of “nervous dyspepsia.” Huysmans also mentions that Des Esseintes suffers from “nightmares, hallucinations of smell, pains in the eye and deep coughing which recurred with clock-like regularity, after the pounding of his heart and arteries and cold perspiration.” Perhaps the use of his “mouth organ” (a machine that dispensed alcohol)—along with other decadent pursuits—was a detriment to his good health. At the conclusion of the novel Huysmans makes Des Esseintes’s physician’s opinion clear:

His verdict, (confirmed besides by consultation with all the experts on neurosis) was that distraction, amusement, pleasure alone might make an impression on this malady whose spiritual side eluded all remedy; and made impatient by the recriminations of his patient, he for the last time declared that he would refuse to continue treating him if he did not consent to a change of air, and live under new hygienic conditions.

Therefore Des Esseintes’s singular pursuit of sensual pleasure came to an abrupt, unsuccessful end. Des Esseintes never succeeded in finding what he longed to achieve. He became fixed upon the vehicle that was supposed to lead to something (or, more properly, someone) far greater than the sensual pleasure in and of itself.

Upon a brief examination of J.K. Huysmans’ life, one can recognize that he eventually came to the personal conclusion that immersion in the arts and the sensual is meant to lead one to an encounter with the Transcendent One. When Huysmans wrote A Rebours in 1884, he indicated that he did not have any Christian inclinations. In fact, he even explored “Satanic mysticism.” In 1891 he entered into a personal conversion, which led him to the Catholic Church as he wrote in his autobiography En Route. He chose to spend time in contemplation at a Trappist monastery. He was first attracted to the Church through curiosity about its hierarchy, then its arts, and later its mystery, and it was this curiosity which brought him to the faith. After his conversion, Huysmans became a Benedictine Oblate, meaning that he chose to live the life of a Benedictine monk while remaining in the world as a lay person.

As previously mentioned, A Rebours was a highly influential text for the Decadent movement of the 19th century, and its popularity would cross the English Channel.

Following its publication Whistler rushed to congratulate Huysmans on his “marvelous book,” Paul Valéry acclaimed it as his “Bible and bedside book” and Paul Bourget, a close friend at the time of both Huysmans and Wilde, professed himself a great admirer. Yet there were few greater admirers of A Rebours than Wilde himself. In an interview with the Morning Post he stated that “this last book of Huysmans is one of the best that I have ever seen.”
Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000)

One of the first British writers to discover A Rebours was George Moore. He wrote, “Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine worksmanship: there is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the Gothic, of the window.”(22) A number of Moore’s novels reflect the style of A Rebours, particularly a novel he wrote in 1889 entitled Mike Fletcher (London: Ward & Downey, 1889). George Cevasco provides a fine summary of this novel:

Bequeathed a small fortune by a former mistress, Mike finds every indulgence open to him. He obtains everything he goes after, but remains unsatisfied, always uneasy. Satiation brings with it despair. Ultimately, all he wants is rest and relief from the wariness of his life. “For now I know,” he concludes, “that man cannot live without wife, without child, without God.” Resigned to taste the dark fruit of oblivion, one evening he blows his brains out. “And who,” Moore demands of the reader, “knowing of Mike’s torment is fortunate enough to say: ‘I know nothing of what is written here.’”
G.A. Cevasco, J.K. Huysmans’s A Rebours and English Literature (New York: AMS Press, 2001),

Unlike Huysmans, Moore never went through a religious conversion. One can observe his dissatisfaction with the appeasement of the appetite of the senses alone and his recognition that with nothing more, life brings with it despair and weariness.

This brief exploration of 19th century Decadent literature indicates that absorption with the beautiful in and of itself does not satisfy the initial attraction the beautiful sends forth. The worship of anything other than the living God will not bring with it peace or satisfaction. Art and beauty are special tools designed by God to bring one out of oneself and into a special connection with God.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics
The Glory of the Lord is a seven-volume work written by the 20th century Swiss Jesuit theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar that exhaustively explains his theology. The subtitle of his work is “A Theological Aesthetics,” and he makes it clear from the very beginning of his writing that the beautiful is a key element to understanding his theology. In fact, it is his starting point.

Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach since only it dances, as an uncontained splendor, around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. . . . No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press/New York: Crossroad Publications, 1982) Vol. I: Seeing the Form, 18.

As one can observe, Balthasar firmly believed that the sole purpose of beauty is in some way to connect one to the transcendent. When robbed of its purpose, beauty becomes deformed. But beauty, when it is imbued with an excellence that contains goodness and truth beyond human language, brings to its observer a sense of wonder and awe which can lead one to a sense of God’s utter transcendence and a desire for adoration and prayer. Yet the beauty that surrounds this sense of wonder and awe, like a frame surrounds a picture, must not be ignored.

The privileged moment will always exist when a person falls to his knees to adore the One who says to him: “I who am speaking with you – I am He!” But the Good news cannot be reduced to such moments, since these would readily absorb all else into themselves. There are also the surfaces, time and space, and all these human factors disseminated within them and which essentially belongs to what John calls “remaining,” the commerce and familiarity with habits and opinions, reaching to what cannot be weighed or measured: a real life form.(25)
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press/New York: Crossroad Publications, 1982) Vol. I: Seeing the Form, 30.

Balthasar used Platonic ideas about matter and form to develop his theological aesthetics. Even the most elementary of philosophy courses would not be complete without an exploration of how Plato understood that all matter is simply an imperfect image of the perfect, the form upon which it is based. This understanding of the material – and material beauty in particular – will aid one in developing a clear distinction between the use of beauty as an idol or as a gateway to the transcendent. For the purposes of this article, one might consider the following observations of Balthasar as a reflection upon the problem of the idolatrous use of the beautiful.

When beauty becomes a form which is no longer understood as being identical with Being, spirit, and freedom, we have again entered an age of aestheticism, and realists will then be right in objecting to this kind of beauty. They go about demolishing what has rotted from within, but they cannot replace the power of Being which resides in the conferring of form.

To understand that there is a form – the ultimate form, Beauty itself – behind all beauty is to be delivered from the temptation of idolatry. Such an understanding actually transforms all beauty, and in fact all of creation, into a gateway through which one can perceive the very presence of God. The 19th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manly Hopkins expressed this sentiment perfectly in his poem, “God’s Grandeur:”

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went
  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church identifies that which is beautiful in creation as one of the ways in which God has chosen to manifest Himself to humanity. “God, who creates and conserves all things by His Word, provides constant evidence of Himself in created realities.”
Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, “Dei Verbum: The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” (Collegeville, In.: 1988), paragraph 3.
Scripture also makes this sentiment clear in Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.”
Romans 1:20

All of the above considerations have simply been an elaboration of one of the very first sentiments expressed in Scripture. God evaluated His creation by looking upon “everything He had made, and He found it very good.” (Genesis 1:31) An outright refusal to use beauty or any created realities as vehicles through which one can encounter the Transcendent One could possibly lead one to a denial of this basic foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It could very well even lead to a denial of the innate goodness of the material and a development of Gnostic tendencies in Christianity.

The Goal For All That Is Beautiful
God has provided to human beings an appreciation for beauty. Beauty is a reality that can take the individual outside of himself or herself and into a deeper appreciation of the form behind the beauty, which ultimately is the LORD God. Yet there is also the danger of falling into absorption with the means to God and forgetting about the end. This danger can lead one into a personal spiritual disaster. As Hans Urs von Balthasar would contend, a deeper reverence for the beautiful, with personal wonder and awe intact, would help one to understand that beauty can deepen and enliven one’s relationship with the author of all that is beautiful. This should be the goal for the use of all that is beautiful, in church buildings and in all created realities that surround humankind.

Posted in Aesthetics, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Poetry | Tagged A Rebours, Augustine, Beauty, Gerard Manly Hopkins, God’s Grandeur, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Idolatry, J.K. Huysmans, Rev. Walter F. Kedjierski, The Beautiful As A Gateway To The Transcendent, The Bronze Serpent, The Glory of the Lord | Leave a Comment »

THE APPROACH OF THE PRACTICAL INTELLECT TO GOD: A Reading Selection from Approaches to God by Jacques Maritain

March 29, 2010

Elsewhere on Paying Attention To The Sky, I have featured the topic of “Approaches to God” as opposed to the commonly argued “proofs of God’s existence:” The biblical materials for a concept of God do not organize themselves. They do not automatically arrange themselves into a satisfactory form. They achieve that form only when the human mind, seeking to understand its own faith, begins to work on them and to set them out in more intelligible ways.

To organize the biblical materials, we soon find that we need to draw on such philosophical categories as good and evil, freedom and necessity, person and nature, mind and will, essence and existence, being and knowing. Of course, the application of these notions to God is an attempt to speak of what lies beyond the world within terms drawn from this world, and so is only justified if we always add a postscript to that effect.

Here Jacques Maritain discusses the existential and “pre-philosophic” categories of the human mind approaching God – an analogy he describes as “the poetic knowledge of the mirrors of God.” He further considers the philosophical reflection on moral life and experience which he shows generates its own “ proofs of the existence of God.” This is a slow but immensely satisfying read for those who have experienced this internal path — unfortunately not something for the contentious atheist but for those already seeking to understand their own faith. Maritain closes with a wonderful salute to his former instructor, Henri Bergson, elucidating a way which he offered to affirm the existence of God.

Poetic Experience and Creation in Beauty
The diverse ways of which we have so far spoken are ways of the speculative intellect. The practical intellect also has its ways of approach towards God — which are not demonstrations at all but belong to an existential and pre-philosophic order. I shall give here some brief indications concerning them.

There is first, in the line of artistic creation, what one might call the analogy of the approach to God in poetic experience, or the poetic knowledge of the mirrors of God.

The artist is held in the grip of a twofold absolute, which is not the Absolute, but which draws the soul toward it. The demands of that beauty which must pass into his work, and the demands of that poetry which incites him to create, claim him so entirely that, in a certain way, they cut him off from the rest of men.

Beauty is a transcendental, a perfection in things which transcends things and attests their kinship with the infinite, because it makes them fit to give joy to the spirit. It is a reflection in things of the Spirit from which they proceed, and it is a divine name: God is subsistent Beauty, and “the being of all things derives from the divine beauty.” Knowing this, we realize that it is impossible that the artist, devoted as he is to created beauty which is a mirror of God, should not tend at the same time — but by a more profound and more secret urge than all that he can know of himself — toward the principle of beauty.

A celebrated passage of Baudelaire, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, reveals in this connection its full import, the import of an unimpeachable testimony: “…[I]t is this immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its various spectacles as a sketch of, as a correspondence with, heaven. The insatiable thirst for all that is beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality. It is at once through poetry and across poetry, through and across music, that the soul glimpses the splendors situated beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the) eyes, these tears are not proof of an excess of joy, they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, a demand of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect and desiring to take possession immediately, even on this earth, of a revealed paradise.”

Knowledge, not rational and conceptual, but affective and nostalgic, the knowledge through connaturality which the artist has of beauty in his creative experience, is in itself (I do not say for him or for his own consciousness) an advance toward God, a spiritual inclination in the direction of God, an obscure and ill-assured beginning of the knowledge of God — vulnerable, indeed, on all sides because it is not disengaged in the light of intelligence and because it remains without rational support.

Poetry is the prime and pure actuation of the free creativity of the spirit. Awakened in the unconscious of the spirit, at the root of all the powers of the soul, it reveals to the poet, in the obscure knowledge which is born of an intuitive emotion, both his own subjectivity and the secret meanings of things. “The poet completes the work of creation, he cooperates in divine balancings, he moves mysteries about.” Poetic experience is a brooding repose which “acts as a bath of refreshment, rejuvenation, and purification of the mind,” and which, born of a contact with reality that is in itself ineffable, seeks liberation in song.

“It is a concentration of all the energies of the soul, but a pacific, tranquil concentration, which involves no tension. The soul enters into its repose, in this place of refreshment and of peace superior to any feeling. It dies ‘the death of the Angels,’ but only to revive in exaltation and enthusiasm, in that state which is wrongly called inspiration — wrongly, for inspiration was nothing else indeed than this very repose, in which it escaped from sight. Now the mind, invigorated and vivified, enters into a happy activity, so easy that everything seems to be given it at once and, as it were, from the outside. In reality, everything was there, kept in the shade, hidden in the spirit and in the blood; all that which will be manifested in operation was already there, but we knew it not. We knew neither how to discover nor how to use it, before having gained new forces in those tranquil depths.” (Raïssa Maritain, “Sens et Non-Sens en Poésie,” Situation de la Poésie, second edition (Paris: Desclée Do Brouwer, 1948), pp. 48-49.)

Poetic experience differs in nature from mystical experience. It is concerned with the created world and with the innumerable enigmatic relations of beings with one another, while mystical experience is concerned with the principle of beings in its unity superior to the world. The obscure knowledge through connaturality proper to poetic experience proceeds from an emotion which shakes the recesses of subjectivity, while the more obscure but more decisive and more stable knowledge through connaturality proper to mystical experience proceeds — either, in the natural mystical experience, from a purely intellectual concentration which produces a void in which the Self is ineffably touched or, in the supernatural mystical experience, from charity, which con-naturalizes the soul to God and transcends every emotion. Poetic experience is from the beginning orientated toward expression and terminates in an uttered word; mystical experience tends toward silence and terminates in an immanent fruition of the absolute.

Thus it appears that poetic experience, in its approach to created things, is an unknowing correspondence to the mystical approach to God, a lived analogy of that knowledge (not rational and conceptual, but by union of love) which the contemplative has of God. It is in a kind of connivance with this experience which differs from it essentially; it can be touched by and interlaced with it. Of itself it disposes the soul to aspire to it. Furthermore, because It detects the spiritual in things and perceives in them a something beyond them, because it is a knowledge of the mirrors of God either in the being of things or, by privation, in the hollow of their nothingness, it is an advance toward God and a spiritual inclination in the direction of God, an obscure and vulnerable beginning, not of mystical experience, but of the natural knowledge of God.

But the poet knows nothing of this, nor of the bonds which in actual existence attach poetry and beauty necessarily to God; or if he does, he knows it only in so confused a way that he can either reject, insofar as his own human choices are concerned, the élan which traverses his experience, or divert its trend and stop at the mirror by turning aside from the too real Immensity which it enigmatically reflects. Thus, many poets are convinced that all poetry is religious by essence, though they hardly believe in God or confuse Him with nature (“Robert Desnos does not believe in God, nevertheless he writes: ‘Nobody has a more religious mind than I . . .‘ (Revue Européene, mars 1924 RaIssa Maritain, Situation de Ia Poésie, p. 37)

Others, choosing atheism, commit themselves and commit poetry to the spiritual experience of the void or the search for magical powers. The call which poetic experience normally creates in the soul toward the abyss of light of uncreated Being gives way to another call — the call toward the abyss of the interior desert visited only by vultures of illusion and phantoms of miracles.

Then poetry inevitably suffers some invisible wound, but one which can stimulate it. A poet can reject God and be a great poet.

He cannot, however, free himself from every metaphysical anguish or passion. For the nostalgia for God whom he has rejected remains immanent in the poetic experience itself, whether he wills it or not. And so he is divided in his being. True, the atheism of a poet can never be completely relied upon; surprises are always possible. The same Lautréamont who declares: “I did not merit this infamous torment, thou hideous spy of my causality. If I exist I am not another… My subjectivity and the Creator, that is too much for a brain,” will soon affirm: “If one recalls the truth whence all the others flow, the absolute goodness of God and His absolute ignorance of evil, the sophisms will collapse of themselves . . . We have not the right to question the Creator on anything whatever.”

Let us acknowledge it: to confuse essences is easy for poets; it is almost normal for them (that is what Plato did not forgive them). “But if the Poet confounds everything, would it not be because in him the formative powers of the world and of the word and the divine attraction toward pacification and illumination of the spirit, toward mystical knowledge and union, are together at work? We must believe, since the poets tell us that they have discovered in their nocturnal navigations or divagations a Kingdom greater than the world, that an angel is pleased sometimes to tip their bark, so that they take a little of ‘that water’ of which the Gospel speaks, and do not get away without some inquietude, and some great and mysterious desire.”

The Choice of the Good in the First Act of Freedom
The practical intellect does not deal exclusively with artistic creation. It also, and first of all, has to do with the moral life of man. There exists in this order another approach to God, enveloped in moral experience, which one might call the moral knowledge of God.

It is not possible rationally to justify fundamental moral notions such as the notion of unconditional moral obligation, or inalienable right, or the intrinsic dignity of the human person; without rising to the uncreated Reason from which man and the world proceed and which is the subsistent Good itself. Philosophical reflection on moral life and experience has thus its own proofs of the existence of God.

But it is not of this philosophical approach that I should like to speak here. I should like to speak of a quite particular knowledge of God which is implied in the moral experience itself or in the very exercise of moral life, more precisely in the first act of choice accomplished by the will, when this act is right. I may be permitted here to draw upon the more developed study which I devoted to “the immanent dialectic of the first act of freedom.”

When a human being is awakened to moral life, his first act is to “deliberate about himself.” It is a matter of choosing his way. Psychologists speak of the “Oedipus complex”; why should moralists not speak of “Heracles’ choice”? The occasion can be futile in itself; it is the motivation that counts. A child one day refrains from telling a lie; he restrains himself from it on that day, not because he risks being punished if the lie is discovered or because this was forbidden him, but simply because it is bad. It would not be good to do that. At this moment the moral good with all its mysterious demands, and in the presence of which he is himself and all alone, is confusedly revealed to him in a flash of understanding. And in choosing the good, in deciding to act in such a way because it is good, he has in truth, in a manner proportioned to the capacity of his age, “deliberated about himself’ and chosen his way. (He has chosen his way and decided about the meaning of his life, inasmuch as an act of the human will, posited in time, enlists the future: that is to say, in a fragile fashion. He is not confirmed forever in such a decision; he will be able, all during his existence, to change the decision which bears on the meaning of his life, but it will only he done by an act of freedom and of deliberation about himself just as profound as that first decision.)

And now, “What does such an act imply? What is the immanent dialectic, the secret dynamism of the primal act of freedom? Let us unfold and make explicit, in terms of speculative knowledge and philosophical discourse, what is contained in the indivisible vitality, both volitional and intellectual, of this act.

“The soul, in this first moral choice, turns away from an evil action because it is evil. Thus, the intellect is aware of the distinction between good and evil, and knows that the good ought to be done because it is good. We are confronted, here, with a formal motive which transcends the whole order of empirical convenience and desire. This is the primary implication of the first act of freedom when it is good.

“But, because the value with which the moral object and the moral act are permeated surpasses anything given in empirical existence and concerns that which ought to be, the notion of a good action to be done for the sake of the good necessarily implies that there is an ideal and indefectible order of proper consonance between our activity and our essence, a law of human acts transcending all facts. This is the second implication of the first act of human freedom when it is good.

“Let us reflect upon this law. It transcends the whole empirical order; the act that I bring into existence must conform to it, if it is to be a good act; and the first precept of this law demands of me that my act be good. Such a law carries in the world of actual existence the requirements of an order that depends on a reality which is superior to everything and is Goodness itself — good by virtue of its very being, not by virtue of conformity with anything distinct from itself, Such a law manifests the existence of a Separate Good transcending all empirical existence and subsisting per se, and subsists primarily in this Separate Good. But how could I, in an act of total commitment, strive to achieve conformity with this transcendent law unless, by the same token and on a still more profound level, I strive toward this Separate Good and direct my life toward it because it is both the Good and my Good? The initial act which determines the direction of life and which — when it is good — chooses the good for the sake of the good, proceeds from a natural élan which is also, undividedly, an élan by which this very same act tends all at once, beyond its immediate object, toward God as the Separate Good in which the human person in the process of acting, whether he is aware of it or not, places his happiness and his end. Here we have an ordainment which is actual and formal, not virtual — but in merely lived act (in actu exercito), not in signified act — to God as ultimate end of human life. This is the third implication of the act of which I am speaking.

“These implications are not disclosed to the intellect of the child. They are contained in the act by which, at the term of his first deliberation about himself, he brings himself to do a good act for the sake of the moral good, of the bonum honestum of which he has an explicit idea, no matter how confused.” (The bonum honestum is the “good as right” (contra-distinguished from the “good as useful” and the “good as pleasurable”), in other words that good which is possessed of inherent moral worth and causes conscience to be obliged, More simply — and if we are neither Utilitarians nor Epicureans—we may designate the bonum honestum by the expression the moral or ethical good.)

It is not at all necessary that in thus performing his first human act he think explicitly of God and of his ultimate end. “He thinks of what is good and of what is evil. But by the same token he knows God, without being aware of it. He knows God because, by virtue of the internal dynamism of his choice of the good for the sake of the good, he wills and loves the Separate Good as ultimate end of his existence. Thus, his intellect has of God a vital and non-conceptual knowledge which is involved both in the practical notion (confusedly and intuitively grasped, but with its full intentional energy) of the moral good as formal motive of his first act of freedom, and in the movement of his will toward this good and, all at once, toward the Good. The intellect may already have the idea of God and it may not yet have it. The non-conceptual knowledge which I am describing takes place independently of any use possibly made or not made of the idea of God, and independently of the actualization of any explicit and conscious knowledge of man’s true last End.

“In other words, the will, hiddenly, secretly, obscurely moving (when no extrinsic factor stops or deviates the process) down to the term of the immanent dialectic of the first act of freedom, goes beyond the immediate object of conscious and explicit knowledge (the moral good as such), and it carries with itself, down to that beyond, the intellect, which at this point no longer enjoys the use of its regular instruments, and, as a result, is only actualized below the threshold of reflective consciousness, in a night without concept and without utterable knowledge. The conformity of the intellect with this transcendent object, the Separate Good (attainable only by means of analogy) is then effected by the will, the rectitude of which is, in the practical order, the measure of the truth of the intellect. God is thus naturally known, of himself to the sweet will of deified Becoming; and thus moral good, duty, virtue lose their true nature.”

But let us return to the man we have described as a pseudo-atheist.. While denying a God which is not God, this man really believes in God. The fact remains that he is divided against himself, because certain obstacles to belief in God, which have arisen in him at the level of conscious thought and conceptual elaboration, form a barrier that prevents the existential knowledge which exists in the hidden, active workings of the unconscious (of both his intellect and will) from passing, along with their rational repercussions, into the sphere of consciousness. Such a situation is of itself abnormal.

Normally the unconscious and existential knowledge of God, linked to the first act of freedom when it is right, tends to pass into consciousness and it makes its way there. It creates in the soul dispositions and inclinations which assist reason in its conscious exercise to discover the truth which corresponds to them. He that doeth the truth cometh to the light. In normal Circumstances the man who has chosen the ethical good (bonum honestum) is found instinctively and unconsciously disposed to perceive, when the natural and spontaneous play of his reason is exercised on the spectacle of visible things, the existence of that invisible Good, of that Separate Good which he already knew without being aware of it by virtue of the choice of the good which he effected when he deliberated about himself in his first act of freedom. When, on the level of conscious thought — and thanks to the natural approach due to the primordial intuition of existence of which we treated at the beginning of this book; thanks also to the ways of philosophic reason — he perceives in the full light of intellectual evidence the necessity of the existence of the First Cause, he does not simply know God; he knows and recognizes Him.

The Testimony of the Friends of God
It is fitting, finally, to mention, indirect as it may be, a way of approaching God, the value of which is only auxiliary, and which can be related to the order of moral experience. This way is based on testimony and example.

Our ordinary moral life is, indeed, precarious. Many elements are mingled in its structure. Some of them come from outside ourselves: from the manners and customs of the social group projected within us, and from the opinions of the world we live in. Some of them arise from the subterranean depths of our own unconscious — masked interventions which we but dimly discern. So loose in structure, so menaced by our own weakness, so complex and obscure is our everyday moral life that we naturally turn for guidance to those who can show us the way. They have found what we so feebly seek. So to them we turn — those men whom Bergson called the “heroes” of the spiritual life and whose “appeal” he saw traversing mankind.

The quest of the superhuman is natural to man; we find it in every climate of philosophic or religious nostalgia of our species. Without speaking of mirages, illusions, or forgeries which are met in such regions, an authentic quest can get involved in impasses or in byways. But that quest may also lead to the fullness of a love superior to nature which expresses itself in a wisdom ever open and a perfect freedom. It was by such signs that Bergson recognized a supreme accomplishment of human life among Christian mystics, who, he thought, alone had crossed the ultimate barriers. (Cf. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: Henry Holt, 1935), PP. 215-16 ff)

Consequently, according to Bergson, the philosopher may question them and find in their testimony a confirmation, or rather a “reinforcement,” of that which he has himself, by means proper to a philosopher, caught sight of in the prolongation of another “line of facts.” And what is the essential indication which he will receive from the mystics, “when he compresses … mystical intuition in order to express it in terms of inte1ligence?” “God is love, and the object of love: herein lies, the whole contribution of mysticism. About this twofold love the mystic will never have done talking. His description is interminable, because what he wants to describe is ineffable. But what he does state clearly is that divine Love is not a thing of God: it is God himself.” “As a matter of fact,” Bergson added, “the mystics unanimously bear witness that God needs us, just as we need God. Why should He need us, unless it be to love us? And it is to this very conclusion that the philosopher who holds to the mystical experience must come. Creation will appear to him as God undertaking to create creators that He may have, besides Himself, beings worthy of His love.”

The movement of thought lived by Bergson is significant: the better we know the sanctity of the saints, and the moral life of those who have ventured to give all in order to enter into what they themselves describe as the divine union and the experience of the things of God, the more we feel that the truth alone can give such fruits, and that the certitude which sustains everything in these men cannot lie.

An act of true goodness, the least act of true goodness, is indeed the best proof of the existence of God. But our intellect is too busy cataloguing notions to see it. Therefore, we believe it on the testimony of those in whom true goodness shines in a way that astonishes us.

This is not a proof of the existence of God. It is an argument based only on testimony. Besides, I do not think — and neither did Bergson — that it is capable of winning the assent of the mind except when in other ways the mind –supposing some obstacle hinders it from feeling the full force with which the being of things manifests the existence of their Cause — is at least solicited by beginnings of proof, signs, and tokens whose rational value imposes itself upon the mind. Neither do I think that this argument commands rational or purely natural assent unless there be also mingled with it a belief of another order, based on the invisible testimony, in the depths of the soul, of the God of whom we hear His friends speak.

But in the end, considering it only in the order and on the level of reason, this argument has its proper value and validity; and it is possible that in fact, in concrete existence, this auxiliary way plays, for many, a more important role than pure logicians think. I wanted in any case to mention it here, for the reasons I have just given, and in memory of the great philosopher whom it helped to discover God.

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Jacques Maritain’s Aesthetics

March 18, 2010

This essay was originally a chapter in Creative Intuition In Art And Poetry.

From his earliest years Jacques Maritain has been the friend and confidant of numberless artists, writers, poets, and musicians. He is considered by many as having the finest esthetic sensibility among the major figures of modern philosophy. His long reflection — beginning with Art et Scolastique in 1920 — on almost every facet of the artistic process culminated in 1953 with the publication of his monumental Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry.

Maritain likes to say with Dante that human art is, as it were, the grandchild of God — it continues in its own way the labor of divine creation. But he keeps reminding the modern artist that human art cannot create out of nothing; it must first nourish itself on things, which it transforms in order to make a form grasped in them shine on a bit of matter. For Maritain, human art is in the last analysis doomed to sterility and failure if it cuts itself off from the existential world of nature and the universe of man.

The deepest concern of Maritain has been with the nature of poetic knowledge and poetic intuition — that is, with the nature of the knowledge immanent In and consubstantial with poetry, poetry as distinct from art and quickening all the arts. Other major themes of his are the prise de conscience (growth in self-awareness) of art and poetry in modern times; art as a virtue of the practical intellect; art and beauty, and the relationship between transcendental beauty and esthetic beauty; art as “imitation”; and the relationship between art and morality.

Maritain’s works in aesthetics are

Art And Faith
Art And Poetry
Art And Scholasticism And The Frontiers Of Poetry
Creative Intuition In Art And Poetry
The Responsibility Of The Artist
The Situation Of Poetry (In Collaboration With Raissa Maritain)

Creative Intuition And Poetic Knowledge

At The Single Root Of The Soul’s Powers
I have given a few indications, general in nature, about the existence in us of a spiritual unconscious or preconscious, specifically distinct from the automatic or Freudian unconscious, though in vital intercommunication and interaction with it. I also suggested that it is in this translucid spiritual night that poetry and poetic inspiration have their primal source. And I referred to the views of Thomas Aquinas on the structure of the intellect and the preconscious intellectual activity on which the birth of ideas depends.

It is once again with some philosophical considerations borrowed from Thomas Aquinas that I shall preface our discussion of creative or poetic intuition. These considerations deal with the manner in which the powers of the soul, through which the various operations of life — biological, sensitive, intellective life — are performed, emanate from the soul. As soon as the human soul exists, the powers with which it is naturally endowed also exist, of course, though with regard to their exercise, the nutritive powers come first (they alone are in activity in the embryo); and then the sensitive powers, and then the intellective powers. But at the very instant of the creation of the soul, there is an order — with respect not to time but to nature — in the way in which they flow or emanate from the essence of the son.

At this point St. Thomas states that with respect to this order of natural priorities, the more perfect powers emanate before the others, and he goes on to say (here is the point in which I am interested) that in this ontological procession one power or faculty proceeds from the essence of the soul through the medium or instrumentality of another — which emanates beforehand. For the more perfect powers are the principle or raison d’être of others, both as being their end and as being their “active principle,” or the efficacious source of their existence, Intelligence does not exist for the senses, but the senses, which are, as he puts it, “a certain defective participation in intelligence,” exist for intelligence. Hence it is that in the order of natural origin the senses exist, as it were, from the intellect, in other words, proceed from the essence of the soul through the intellect.

Consequently, we must say that imagination proceeds or flows from the essence of the soul through the intellect, and that the external senses proceed from the essence of the soui through imagination. For they exist in man to serve imagination, and through imagination, intelligence.

I am fond of diagrams. I hope that the one I am offering here and which represents this order of emanation, will help me to clarify the matter, poor as it may be from the point of view of abstract drawing.

Maritain's Diagram

The point at the summit of the diagram represents the essence of the soul. The first — so to speak — cone represents the Intellect, or Reason, emanating first from the soul. The second, which emerges from the first, represents the Imagination, emanating from the soul through the Intellect, The third, which emerges from the second, represents the External Senses, emanating from the soul through the Imagination.

The first circle represents the world of Concepts and Ideas in a state of explicit formation, say, the conceptualized externals of Reason: the world of the working of conceptual, logical, discursive Reason, The second circle represents the world of the Images in a state of explicit and definite formation, say, the organized externals of Imagination. This is the world of the achievements of Imagination as stirred by, and centered upon, the actual exercise of External Senses and held in unity by it: in other words, as engaged in the process of sense perception and used for practical purposes in the current activities of man in the waking state.

The third circle represents the intuitive data afforded by external sensation (which is, of itself, almost unconscious, and becomes sense perception when it is interpreted and structured of the soul’s powers, and in the unconscious of the spirit, that poetry, I think, has its source. (We may observe at this point, in regard to Coleridge’s celebrated distinction between imagination and fancy, that what Coleridge called fancy relates to the “externals of imagination” (the second circle in our diagram) inasmuch as the streams and associations of images are released from the actual service of sense perception and man’s practical life (“Equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready-made from the law of association.” Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII).

What he called imagination relates to the imagination and the intuitive intellect together as vitally united in the preconscious life of the spirit.

In forging — or rather borrowing from Schelling, as Huntington Cairns observes (Invitation to Learning [New York: Random House, 1941], P. 244) — the expression esenplastic Imagination, “to shape into one”), Coleridge had in view the implied tendency toward creation and the unifying power involved.)

Poetry’s freedom resembles, thus, as Plato pointed out, the freedom of the child, and the freedom of play, and the freedom of dreams. It is none of these. It is the freedom of the creative spirit.

And because poetry is born in this root life where the powers of the soul are active in common, poetry implies an essential requirement of totality or integrity. Poetry is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of imagination alone. Nay more, it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood, and spirit together. And the first obligation imposed on the poet is to consent to be brought back to the hidden place, near the center of the soul, where this totality exists in a creative source.

Poetic Intuition
Thus, when it comes to poetry, we must admit that in the spiritual unconscious of the intellect, at the single root of the soul’s powers, there is, apart from the process which tends to knowledge by means of concepts and abstract ideas, something which is pre-conceptual or non-conceptual and nevertheless in a state of definite intellectual actuation: not, therefore, a mere way to the concept, as was the “impressed pattern” I spoke of in the preceding chapter, but another kind of germ, which does not tend toward a concept to be formed, and which is already an intellective form or act fully determined though enveloped in the night of the spiritual unconscious. In other words, such a thing is knowledge in act, but non-conceptual knowledge.

The problem, then, that I should like to discuss now deals with that kind of knowledge which is involved in poetic activity.

Clearly, what we are considering at this point is not the previous (theoretical) knowledge, in any field whatever of human experience and culture, that is presupposed by art and poetry, and which provides them with external materials to be integrated in, and transformed by, the fire of creative virtues.

What we are considering is the kind of inherent knowledge that is immanent in and consubstantial with poetry, one with its very essence.

Here our first signpost is, I think — the notion, which I have previously pointed out, of the free creativity of the spirit. In the craftsman the creativity of the spirit is, as it were, bound or tied up to a particular aim, which is the satisfying of a particular need. In the poet it is free creativity, for it only tends to engender in beauty, which is a transcendental, and involves an infinity of possible realizations and possible choices. In this respect the poet is like a god. And in order to discover the first essentials of poetry there is nothing better for us to do than to look to the First Poet.

God’s creative Idea, from the very fact that it is creative, does not receive anything from things, since they do not yet exist. It is in no way formed by its creatable object, it is only and purely formative and forming. And that which will be expressed or manifested in the things made is nothing else than their Creator Himself, whose transcendent Essence is enigmatically signified in a diffused, dispersed, or parceled-out manner, by works which are deficient likenesses of and created participations in it. And God’s Intellect is determined or specified by nothing else than His own essence. It is by knowing Himself, in an act of intellection which is His very Essence and His very Existence, that He knows His works, which exist in time and have begun in time, but which He eternally is in the free act of creating.

Such is the supreme analogate (vocab: To make into an analogy) of poetry. Poetry is engaged in the free creativity of the spirit. And thus it implies an intellective act which is not formed by things but is, by its own essence, formative and forming. Well, it is too clear that the poet is a poor god. He does not know himself. And his creative insight miserably depends on the external world, and on the infinite heap of forms and beauties already made by men, and on the mass of things that generations have learned, and on the code of signs which is used by his fellow men and which he receives from a language he has not made. Yet, for all that he is condemned both to subdue to his own purpose all these extraneous elements and to manifest his own substance in his creation.

At this point we see how essential to poetry is the subjectivity of the poet. I do not mean the inexhaustible flux of superficial feelings in which the sentimental reader recognizes his own cheap longings, and with which the songs to the Darling and Faithless One of generations of poets have desperately fed us. I mean subjectivity in its deepest ontologic sense, that is, the substantial totality of the human person, a universe unto itself, which the spirituality of the soul makes capable of containing itself through its own immanent acts, and which, at the center of all the subjects that it knows as objects, grasps only itself as subject. In a way similar to that in which divine creation presupposes the knowledge God has of His own essence, poetic creation presupposes, as a primary requirement, a grasping, by the poet, of his own subjectivity, in order to create. The poet’s aim is not to know himself. He is not a guru. To attain, through the void, an intuitive experience of the existence of the Self, of the Atman, in its pure and full actuality, is the specific aim of natural mysticism. It is not the aim of poetry. The essential need of the poet is to create; but he cannot do so without passing through the door of the knowing, as obscure as it may be, of his own subjectivity. For poetry means first of all an intellective act which by its essence is creative, and forms something into being instead of being formed by things: and what can such an intellective act possibly express and manifest in producing the work if not the very being and substance of the one who creates? Thus it is that works of painting or sculpture or music or poetry the closer they come to the sources of poetry the more they reveal, one way or another, the subjectivity of their author.

But the substance of man is obscure to himself. He knows not his soul, except in the fluid multiplicity of passing phenomena which emerge from it and are more or less clearly attained by reflective consciousness, but only increase the enigma, and leave him more ignorant of the essence of his Self. He knows not his own subjectivity. Or, if he knows it, it is formlessly, by feeling it as a kind of propitious and enveloping night. Melville, I think, was aware of that when he observed that “no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences.” Subjectivity as subjectivity is inconceptualizable; it is an unknowable abyss. How, then, can it be revealed to the poet?

The poet does not know himself in the light of his own essence. Since man perceives himself only through a repercussion of his knowledge of the world of things, and remains empty to himself if he does not fill himself with the universe, the poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single wakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep. In other words, the primary requirement of poetry, which is the obscure knowing, by the poet, of his own subjectivity, is inseparable from, is one with another requirement — the grasping, by the poet, of the objective reality of the outer and inner world; not by means of concepts and conceptual knowledge, but by means of an obscure knowledge which I shall describe in a moment as knowledge through affective union.

Hence the perplexities of the poet’s condition. If he hears the passwords and the secrets that are stammering in things, if he perceives realities, correspondences, ciphered writings that are at the core of actual existence, if he captures those more things which are in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, he does not do so by knowing all this in the ordinary sense of the word “to know,?’ but by receiving all this into the obscure recesses of his passion. (“This thing which is in me but which no efforts of mine can slay! “Wherefore time and again I stroke my empty bosom in pity for myself; so ignorant am I of what causes the opening and the barring of the door.” Lu Chi, Wen Pu, II, (o), 6-7, in The Art of Letters: Lu Chi’s “Wen Pu,” A.D. 302, trans. and ed. E. R. Hughes, Bollingen Series XXIX (New York: Pantheon Books, 1951). All that he discerns and divines in things, he discerns and divines not as something other than himself, according to the law of speculative knowledge, but, on the contrary, as inseparable from himself and from his emotion, and in truth as identified with himself.

His intuition, the creative intuition, is an obscure grasping of his own Self and of things in a knowledge through union or through con-naturality which is born in the spiritual unconscious, and which fructifies only in the work. So the germ of which I spoke some pages back, and which is contained in the spiritual night of the free life of the intellect, tends from the very start to a kind of revelation — not to the revelation of the ubermensch or of the omnipotency of man, as the Surrealists believe, but to the humble revelation, virtually contained in a small, lucid cloud of inescapable intuition, both of the Self of the poet and of some particular flash of reality in the God-made universe; a particular flash of reality bursting forth in its unforgettable individuality, but infinite in its meanings and echoing capacity –

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.

Such is the answer of philosophical analysis to the problem which had imposed itself on our consideration at the end of the merely descriptive or inductive inquiry conducted in the first chapter of this book. At that moment we observed that Oriental art, only intent on Things, nevertheless reveals obscurely, together with Things (and to the very extent to which it truly succeeds in revealing Things), the creative subjectivity of the artist; and that, on the other hand, Occidental art, more and more intent on the artist’s Self, nevertheless reveals obscurely, together with this Self (and to the very extent to which it succeeds in revealing it), the transparent reality and secret significance of Things. And we concluded that at the root of the creative act there must be a quite particular intellectual process, a kind of experience or knowledge without parallel in logical reason, through which Things and the Self are obscurely grasped together.

Now, availing ourselves of the self-awareness which the progress of reflexivity has developed in modem art and poetry, and which causes poets to say with Pierre Reverdy that “the value of a work is proportional to the poignant contact of the poet with his own destiny,” (“To the modern poet,” Allen Tate wrote, “poetry is one of the ways that we have of knowing the world.” On the Limits of Poetry (New York: The Swallow Press and William Morrow, 1948), p. 117). We come to perceive in philosophical terms how and why the process in question takes place. A direct inquiry into the inner functioning of the intellect in its preconceptual life makes us realize that poetic intuition and poetic knowledge are both one of the basic manifestations of man’s spiritual nature, and a primary requirement of the creativity of the spirit steeped in imagination and emotion.

“Poetry, I think, must be much more ‘creative’ than science is, or at least much more spiritedly, incessantly so. It is such an eager cognitive impulse that it overreaches its object. That is its glory, and one of the causes of its delightfulness perhaps, and certainly the source of its bad reputation. It goes where science hardly cares to set foot.”
John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body

Nature Of Poetic Knowledge
I used a moment ago the expression “knowledge through con-naturality.” It refers to a basic distinction made by Thomas Aquinas,” when he explains that there are two different ways to judge of things pertaining to a moral virtue, say fortitude. On the one hand we can possess in our mind moral science, the conceptual and rational knowledge of virtues, which produces in us a merely intellectual conformity with the truths involved. Then, if we axe asked a question about fortitude, we will give the right answer by merely looking at and consulting the intelligible objects contained in our concepts. A moral philosopher may possibly not be a virtuous man and know everything about virtues.

On the other hand, we can possess the virtue in question in our own powers of will and desire, have it embodied in ourselves, and thus be in accordance with it or connatured with it in our very being. Then, if we are asked a question about fortitude, we will give the right answer, no longer through science, but through inclination, by looking at and consulting what we are an4 the inner bents or propensities of our own being. A virtuous man may possibly be utterly ignorant in moral philosophy, and know as well (probably better) everything about virtues — through con-naturality (vocab: The condition of being con-natural or similar in nature).

In this knowledge through union or inclination, con-naturality or congeniality, the intellect is at play not alone, but together with affective inclinations and the dispositions of the will, and as guided and shaped by them. It is not rational knowledge, knowledge through the conceptual, logical, and discursive exercise of reason. But it is really and genuinely knowledge, though obscure and perhaps incapable of giving account of itself.

St. Thomas explains in this way the difference between the knowledge of divine reality acquired by theology and the knowledge of divine reality provided by mystical experience. For the spiritual man, he says, knows divine things through inclination or con-naturality: not only because he has learned them, but because he suffers them, as the Pseudo-Dionysius put it.

Knowledge through con-naturality plays an immense part in human life. Modern philosophers have thrown it into oblivion, but the ancient Doctors paid careful attention to it and established upon it all their theory of God-given contemplation. I think that we have to restore it, and to recognize its basic role and importance in such domains as moral practical knowledge and natural or supernatural mystical experience — and in the domain of art and poetry. Poetic knowledge, as I see it, is a specific kind of knowledge through inclination or con-naturality—let us say a knowledge through affective con-naturality which essentially relates to the creativity of the spirit and tends to express itself in a work. So that in such a knowledge it is the object created, the poem, the painting, the symphony, in its own existence as a world of its own, which plays the part played in ordinary knowledge by the concepts and judgments produced within the mind.

Hence it follows that poetic knowledge is fully expressed only in the work. In the mind of the poet, poetic knowledge arises in an unconscious or preconscious manner, and emerges into consciousness in a sometimes almost imperceptible though imperative and irrefragable way, through an impact both emotional and intellectual or through an unpredictable experiential insight, which gives notice of its existence, but does not express it.

This particular kind of knowledge through con-naturality comes about, I think, by means of emotion. That is why, at first glance, one believes, and often the poet himself believes, that he is like the Ahab of Moby Dick: “Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege.”13 Well, in this people are mistaken. The poet also thinks. And poetic knowledge proceeds from the intellect in its most genuine and essential capacity as intellect, though through the indispensable instrumentality of feeling, feeling, feeling.

Must I quote at this point the testimony of painters? “Be guided by feeling alone,” Corot said. “We are only simple mortals, subject to error; so listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand and can unite in your own feeling…While 1 strive for a conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me.”

Similarly van Gogh: “Is it not emotion, the sincerity of one’s feeling for nature, that draws us, and if the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works, when sometimes the strokes come with a sequence and a coherence like words in a speech or a letter, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in the time to come there will again be heavy days, empty of inspiration.”

And Braque: “Emotion…is the seed, the work is the flower.”

And Hopper: “I believe that the great painters, with their intellect as master, have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into

At this point I would wish to insist that a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.”

And Matisse: “I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.”

It is in no way a merely emotional or a sentimentalist theory of poetry that I am suggesting. First, I am speaking of a certain kind of knowledge, and emotion does not know: the intellect knows, in this kind of knowledge as in any other. Second, the emotion of which I am speaking is in no way that “brute or merely subjective emotion” to which I alluded to in an earlier chapter, and which is extraneous to art. (See supra [Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry], pp. 6-7 and 8. As I put it in Art and Scholasticism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930):

“I will willingly suffer the domination of the object which the artist has conceived and which he puts before my eyes; I will then yield myself unreservedly to the emotion roused in him and me by one same beauty, one same transcendental in which we communicate. But I refuse to suffer the domination of an art which deliberately contrives means of suggestion to seduce my subconscious, J resist an emotion which the will of a man claims to impose upon me.” See also E, I. Watkin, A Philosophy of Form, revised edition (London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1951), Chapter II, section IV. In his remarkable analysis of aesthetic contemplation, Mr. Watkin rightly points out both the intellectuality and objectivity of artistic intuition, and its essential difference from the emotion or vital pleasure which normally accompanies it. These pages afford us the most correct philosophical approach I have read on the matter — except for the lack of the key notion of intentional emotion, as contradistinguished to ordinary or “vital” emotion.

It is not an emotion expressed or depicted by the poet, an emotion as thing which serves as a kind of matter or material in the making of the work, nor is it a thrill in the poet which the poem will “send down the spine” of the reader. It is an emotion as form, which, being one with the creative intuition, gives form to the poem, and which is intentional, as an idea is, or carries within itself infinitely more than itself. (I use the word “intentional” in the Thomistic sense, reintroduced by Brentano and Husserl into modern philosophy, which refers to the purely tendential existence through which a thing normally accompanies it. These pages afford us the most correct philosophical approach I have read on the matter — except for the lack of the key notion of intentional emotion, as contradistinguished to ordinary or “vital” emotion. — for instance, the object known — is present, in an immaterial or supra-subjective manner, in an “instrument” — an idea for instance, which, in so far as it determines the act of knowing, is a mere immaterial tendency or intentio toward the object.)

The distinction made in the above paragraph is basically important, and it is relevant to discuss in this connection certain views expressed by T. S. Eliot in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920). Eliot, in his essays on “The Perfect Critic” and on “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” points to valuable truths but at the price of serious equivocation, because he overlooks this distinction. He makes his point with regard to brute or merely subjective emotion (emotion as a simple psychological state), but glosses over what matters most: intentional or creative emotion (emotion as the proper medium of poetic knowledge). It is quite true that, as he puts it in “The Perfect Critic,” one who reads poets should not mistake for the poetry “an emotional state aroused in himself by the poetry, a state which may be merely an indulgence of his own emotions.” (This deals with brute or merely subjective emotion.) It is quite true that “the end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are removed” — that is, all the accidents of brute or merely subjective emotion. But this pure contemplation itself is steeped in the creative emotion or poetic intuition conveyed by the poem.

The emotions and feelings of which Eliot speaks in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” are, too, only brute or merely subjective emotions and feelings. Such affective states are indeed merely matter or material, as I have said, which poetry must “digest” and “transmute.” “It is not the ‘greatness,’ the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts,” That is perfectly right, but it is through the creative, or intentional emotion that the fusion takes place. The pressure of the artistic process would be of no avail to poetry if it did not proceed from poetic intuition or creative emotion. “It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or fiat.

The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions 0f people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express: and in this search for novelty in the wrong places it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual fact emotions at all.” All this deals with emotion as material, with brute or merely subjective emotion. It would mislead us if we forgot the essential, necessary part played by that emotion which causes to express, emotion as formative, emotion as intentional vehicle of reality known through inclination and as proper medium of poetic intuition. This creative emotion, moreover, distinct as it is from the merely subjective emotions or feelings of the poet as a man, lives on them, so that, while being bound to transmute them, he cannot “escape from them” as simply as Eliot seems to suggest. It would be misunderstanding Eliot in a most unfortunate manner to believe that self-restraint is enough for this, and finally to mistake poetic discipline for artistic skill plus dessication of the heart. The escape of which he speaks cannot come about except through poetic knowledge and creative emotion, and in the very act of creating. And this is what he means.

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” An escape from brute or merely subjective emotion, yes! But, as I just said, through and in creative emotion!

One single sentence in this essay touches the core of the matter. “Very few,” Eliot writes, “know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.” At last! At last we are told of the significant emotion, the intentional and creative emotion, without which there is no poetry. It deserved better than to be only alluded to in passing.

It seems also relevant to add at this point a few remarks about the indictment of Western art that Lionel de Fonseka offers us in the name of Eastern wisdom. The author has the merit of frankness in stating the issue in extreme terms. But he irremediably mistakes intentional emotion for brute emotion and the creative Self for the self-centered ego. In binding, moreover, art to utility, and making the artist an artisan at the service of human life, he simply disregards both the transcendental nature of beauty and the spiritual value of poetic knowledge and creative emotion.

“An obscene work to us [Orientals],” he writes, “is one wherein the artist lays bare his soul, and many of your modern artists we should consider spiritual prostitutes.” On the Truth of Decorative Art, A Dialogue between an Oriental and an Occidental (London: Greening and Go., 1912), p. 56. This sentence typifies the philosophy of those enemies of poetry who hold forth on art without recognizing its deepest life force, and who ignore the law of generosity proper to the spirit. For them, in the last analysis, any gift of oneself is prostitution. It is but natural that they regard as prostitution (which means no real gift hut only making oneself into an instrument of pleasure) the gift of himself through which the artist discloses in his work his soul and the world, so as to become a free creator (through the work) of joy and delectation — of the spiritual delectation by which men are liberated from their material ego and raised to experimental knowledge and love of what is better than human life.

When Baudelaire spoke in his own way of art as prostitution (Fusées, I, in Journaux intinies, ed. van Bever [Paris: Crés, 1919], p. 4), he made just the reverse error, in the opposite direction, and used a perverse image to humiliate what he revered and express the supreme law of the laying bare and giving of oneself which commands poetic creation.

How can emotion be thus raised to the level of the intellect and, as it were, take the place of the concept in becoming for the intellect a determining means or instrumental vehicle through which reality is grasped?

That’s a difficult question, as are all similar questions dealing with the application of the general concept of knowledge through con-naturality to the various particular fields in which this kind of knowledge is at play. I think that in all these cases, where the soul “suffers things more than it learns them,” and experiences them through resonance in subjectivity, we have to find out a certain specific way in which the great notion developed by John of St. Thomas apropos of mystical knowledge — amor transit in conditionem objecti, love passes on to the sphere of the intentional means of objective grasping — has to be used analogically. Here I would say that in poetic knowledge emotion carries the reality which the soul suffers — a world in a grain of sand — into the depth of subjectivity, and of the spiritual unconscious of the intellect, because in the poet, contrary to other men (especially those involved in the business of civilized life), the soul remains, as it were, more available to itself, and keeps a reserve of spirituality which is not absorbed by its activity toward the outside and by the toil of its powers. And this deep unemployed reserve of the spirit, being unemployed, is like a sleep of the soul; but, being spiritual, is in a state of virtual vigilance and vital tension, owing to the virtual reversion of the spirit on itself and on everything in itself. The soul sleeps, but her heart is awake; allow her to sleep.

Well, let us suppose that in the density of such a secretly alert sleep and such a spiritual tension, emotion intervenes (whatever this emotion may be; what matters is where it is received). On the one hand it spreads into the entire soul, it imbues its very being, and thus certain particular aspects in things become con-natural to the soul affected in this way. On the other hand, emotion, falling into the living springs, is received in the vitality of intelligence, I mean intelligence permeated by the diffuse light of the Illuminating Intellect and virtually turned toward all the harvests of experience and memory preserved in the soul, all the universe of fluid images, recollections, associations, feelings, and desires latent, under pressure, in the subjectivity, and now stirred. And it suffices for emotion disposing or inclining, as I have said, the entire soul in a certain determinate manner to be thus received in the undetermined vitality and productivity of the spirit, where it is permeated by the light of the Illuminating Intellect: then, while remaining emotion, it is made — with respect to the. aspects in things which are connatural to, or like, the soul it imbues — into an instrument of intelligence judging through con-naturality, and plays, in the process of this knowledge through likeness between reality and subjectivity, the part of a non-conceptual intrinsic determination of intelligence in its preconscious activity. By this very fact it is transferred into the state of objective intentionality; it is spiritualized, it becomes intentional, that is to say, conveying, in a state of immateriality, things other than itself. In the case of mystical contemplation, love of charity (which is much more than an emotion) becomes a means 0f experiential knowledge for the virtue of faith which already tends toward and knows (though not experientially) the reality with which to be united. And a special inspiration of the divine Spirit is necessary, because a supernatural object is then to be experienced in a supernatural manner.

In the case of poetic knowledge, on the contrary, no previous virtue of the intellect is already in the act of knowing when emotion brings the enigmatic reality which moves the soul, the world which resounds in it and which it suffers, to the bosom of subjectivity and of the creativity of the spirit. And the entire process needs no inspiration whatever from the outside—no more than the knowledge a mother has of her child through affection or con-naturality –because the object as well as the mode of experience are simply natural.

It becomes for the intellect a determining means or instrumental vehicle through which the things which have impressed this emotion on the soul, and the deeper, invisible things that are contained in them or connected with them, and which have ineffable correspondence or coaptation with the soul thus affected, and which resound in it, are grasped and known obscurely.

It is by means of such a spiritualized emotion that poetic intuition, which in itself is an intellective flash, is born in the unconscious of the spirit. In one sense it is, as I said a moment ago, a privilege of those souls in which the margin of dreaming activity and introverted natural spirituality, unemployed for the business of human life, is particularly large. In another sense, because it emanates from a most natural capacity of the human mind, we must say that every human being is potentially capable of it: among those who do not know it, many, in point of fact, have repressed it or murdered it within themselves. Hence their instinctive resentment against the poet.

Of itself poetic intuition proceeds from the natural and supremely spontaneous movement of the soul which seeks itself by communicating with things in its capacity as a spirit endowed with senses and passions. And sometimes it is in mature age, when the spirit has been fed with experience and suffering, and turns back toward itself, that it best experiences the sapid sleep in which poetic intuition awakes — and which also exists, in another fashion, and with the acrid taste of greenness, in the child and the primitive. Poetic knowledge is as natural to the spirit of man as the return of the bird to his nest; and it is the universe which, together with the spirit, makes its way back to the mysterious nest of the soul. For the content of poetic intuition is both the reality of the things of the world and the subjectivity of the poet, both obscurely conveyed through an intentional or spiritualized emotion. The soul is known in the experience of the world and the world is known in the experience of the soul, through a knowledge which does not know itself. For such knowledge knows, not in order to know, but in order to produce. It is toward creation that it tends.

“Je est un autre,” Rimbaud said: “I is another.” In poetic intuition objective reality and subjectivity, the world and the whole of the soul, coexist inseparably. At that moment sense and sensation are brought back to the heart, blood to the spirit, passion to intuition. And through the vital though non-conceptual actuation of the intellect all the powers of the soul are also actuated in their roots. Thus it is through the notion and reality of poetic knowledge that the sentence of Novalis quoted in the preceding chapter [Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, pp. 84-85] takes on philosophical sense, and appears not as a pure élan of lyricism, but as a justifiable statement: “The poet is literally out of his senses — in exchange, all comes about within him. He is, to the letter, subject and object at the same time, soul and universe.”

Among the pages which have been inserted in the volume as a kind of literary illustration, the ones pertaining to this chapter contain texts which seem to be significant for my present purpose. I think that by reading those collected under heading we can see better than through any philosophical arguments how the subjectivity of the poet is revealed (but together with things) in his poem; and by reading the texts collected under heading III, how the Another, the things of the world and of the intellect, and their meanings, are also (but together with the Self) revealed in the poem; and how, in this single and double revelation, everything derives from a primal creative intuition, born in the soul of the poet, under the impact of a definite emotion.

The direct, intuitive contact with any genuine work of painting, sculpture or architecture, or music, which has spiritual depth and conveys a message of its own, affords us the same evidence.

Posted in Aesthetics | Tagged Aesthetics, Creative Intuition, Jacque Maritain’s, Poetic Knowledge | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

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