Artistic Freedom in Careful Differentiation

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) introduced the Thomistic/Scholastic principles of art into the consciousness of enough modern artists—writers, in particular—to have a significant influence on art in both France (where he lived and taught until the Second World War) and the United States, where he lived for many years after the war. His book on aesthetics—Art and Scholasticism—was a key text that guided the work of writers such as Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Francois Mauriac, Thomas Merton, John Howard Griffin, Flannery O’Connor and T.S. Eliot.

Maritain’s exposition of the Scholastic principles of art rewards careful reading because it provides the artist with nuanced clarity and helpful direction in an age when art is abandoning intellection in favour of sentimentality, especially when sentimentality wears the guise of political correctness. The Scholastic principles guide and fortify the dedi­cated artist in his endeavours to produce good art by providing a framework of freedom within which art can flourish; art cannot flourish where there are unnecessary demands or constraints, or if the proper autonomy of art is improperly elevated in an attempt to produce “pure” art, in disregard of the precept that art is a product of, and for, man.

Maritain, after the Scholastics, defines art as a habit of the practical intellect. He differentiates between Speculative intellection and Practical intellection. Speculative intellection is the province of philosophers and sages; its sole aim is to know first principles such as being and essence. It is delight in knowledge for its own sake. Speculative intellection is different from Practical intellection, of which the practice of art is one expression, because:

Here man tends to something other than knowledge only. If he knows it is no longer to rest in the truth and enjoy it; it is to use his knowledge with a view to some work or action. Art belongs to the practical order. It is turned towards action, not towards the pure interiority of knowledge.

The Practical order is itself divided into the realm of Doing and the realm of Making. Doing is concerned with human good, with ethics, prudence and morality: that which takes man either towards or away from his true end, defined, of course, by the Scholastics in religious terms:

In contradistinction to Doing, the Schoolmen defined Making as productive action, considered not with regard to the use we therein make of our freedom, but merely with regard to the thing produced or with regard to the work taken in itself. [Maritain’s emphasis]

Since Making is distinct from Doing, its ends are different: Doing is concerned with the perfection of the man; Making’s sole concern is the perfection of the artwork. This frees the artwork from inappropriate ethical burdens; art should not be propaganda, even for a good cause. Maritain identifies the good that we can expect from art-making:

This action is what it ought to be, it is good in its own sphere, if it is in conformity with the rules and with the proper end of the work to be produced; and the result to which it tends if it is good, is that this work be good in itself. Thus Making is ordered to this or that particular end, taken in itself and self-sufficing, not to the common end of human life; and it relates to the good or to the proper perfection, not of the man making, but to the work produced.

This is a crucial distinction: Maritain almost labours the point that the habit or practice of art is directed towards the perfection of the work itself, which has its own integrity as an autonomous object. This peculiar autonomy of the art piece is the basis of the appeal of great art:

Art, which rules Making and not Doing, stands therefore outside the human sphere; it has an end, rules, values, which are not those of man, but those of the work to be produced. This work is everything for Art; there is for Art but one law—the exigencies and the good of the work.

Hence the tyrannical and absorbing power of Art, and also its astonishing power of soothing … it places the artisan in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute, in which he puts the energy and intelligence of his manhood at the service of a thing which he makes. This is true of all art; the ennui of living and willing, ceases at the door of every workshop.

Flannery O’Connor understood this point and practised it herself. She gave a friend this advice about writing, emphasising the requirement to honour the needs of the artwork: “A novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it … art is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made; it has no utilitarian end.” She advised a novice writer: “Once you have done a first draft then read it and see what it says and then see how you can bring out better what it says.” This echoes Maritain, who noted, “Needless to say, there are not two ways of making an object well, of realizing well the work one has conceived—there is but one way and it must not be missed.”

From this (relative) autonomy of art, which has its own requirements directed towards the perfection of the art piece, it follows that the art is compromised if it is subjected to requirements that do not inhere in the work, but are imposed on it. For example, if a movie is laden with religious concerns that are not integral to the story or characters and do not occur naturally within the setting, then the movie as art suffers. The “nice” Christian movie that nobody outside the Church (and perhaps very few inside the Church) could be bothered with because the good of the work as art has been compromised by its overt salvific message, has its secular equivalent in the installation/performance pieces that purport to convey the dangers of climate change or the anguish of illegal immigrants or the plight of Aborigines. In other words, when the realms of Doing and Making are confused then art loses its integrity, its autonomy as art, and its attractive mystery.

It seems increasingly the case that the ethical imperatives of political correctness are harming the creation of high-quality art, saddling it with demands that are not integral to the artwork; what emerges is misshapen, burdened and enslaved. Maritain insists:

In this sense every thesis, whether it claims to demonstrate some truth or to touch the heart, is for art a foreign importation, hence an impurity. In imposes on art, in art’s own sphere, that is to say in the very production of the work, a rule and an end which is not the end or rule of the production; it prevents the work of art from springing from the heart of the artist spontaneously like a ripened fruit; it betrays a calculation, a duality between the intellect of the artist and his sensibility, which two, art, as it happens, wants to see united.

If, however, the proper autonomy of the artwork (that is, art freed from the demand to convey ethical messages) is elevated to an absolute autonomy in an attempt to produce a “pure art”, then art without meaning is the result. The gratuitous quality of art, when made an absolute, expresses itself in two ways. The first occurs when:

The content of the work of art, the matter to be fashioned, the artistic thing, the lyrical and intellectual materials, all this is a constraint and a burden, an impurity that must be eliminated. In short, pure art, art about nothing, by extenuation of the subject.

For example, many Minimalist Art works reflect this desire to reduce both the matter and the meaning of art. In fact, it is possible to construct a history of modern art in terms of this misplaced autonomy of art: artists first wanted to be free from the forms of nature; next the sense and intelligibility of those forms were abandoned in the name of freedom; finally meaning and logic were removed to free art from those constraints. The second expression of the gratuitousness of art raised to an absolute occurs when there is a subject and an art object, but the artist serves nothing but his art, as if he were not a man as well. Here, art becomes an idol:

In forbidding man to pursue any other end than art itself, we are, whatever we do, positively assigning to him a last end: a God: Art in person. One binds oneself to a religion, and to a religion much more tyrannical than the true religion.

Art for art’s sake does not mean Art for the work, which is the right formula. It means an absurdity, that is, a supposed necessity for the artist to be only an artist, not a man, and for art to cut itself off from its own supplies, and from all the food, fuel and energy it receives from human life.

Art cannot be all that a person’s life is about, because the artist is also a human being with ends that lie outside the provinces of art: serving Art alone cannot sustain a person’s heart, mind and spirit. It is tempting to make Art an idol because it is intoxicating to mimic the essentialism of God: moving things from the imagination into matter and giving them a remarkable autonomy. Maritain says:

Art, then, remains fundamentally inventive and creative. It is the faculty of producing, not of course ex nihilo, but from a pre-existing matter, a new creature, an original being, capable of stirring in turn a human soul. This new creature is the fruit of a spiritual marriage which joins the activity of the artist to the passivity of a given matter.

The human in the artist is harmed if art is made into a religion, but art-making does require a sense of committed vocation and a type of rigorous asceticism:

The artist is subject in the sphere of his art to a kind of asceticism, which may require heroic sacrifices … he must be on his guard not only against the vulgar attractions of easy execution and success, but against a host of more subtle temptations. He must pass through spiritual nights, purify his ways ceaselessly, voluntarily abandon fertile places for barren regions full of insecurity.

Ascetics need courage and discrimination. Maritain knows that maintaining the distinction between Doing and Making is difficult, yet in every age it is necessary.

Today, the artist must be on guard against the temptation to seek popularity by following the fashionable ethics of the elite or the whims of the marketplace. Making high-quality art is not for cowards; it requires rectitude of the heart and mind:

The sole question for the artist is not to be a weakling; it is to have an art which is robust enough and undeviating enough to dominate at all events his matter without losing anything of its loftiness and purity, and to aim, in the very act of making, at the sole good of the work, without being turned aside or distracted by the human ends pursued.