When I was in my fourth year of college (and my third year in the major seminary in Huntington), one of my philosophy professors, Father Frank Tyrell, assigned a philosophy paper to our class, which was equivalent to a thesis.
The assignment could be done by an individual or by a team. I decided to do mine with two other students, both of whom were exceptionally intelligent. One of them did not continue in the seminary to ordination. The other was Charles Matonti, who years later taught at Cathedral College Seminary and St. John’s University. Now retired, Father Matonti may have been the most gifted person in our class.
The three of us decided to write our thesis on philosopher Jacques Maritain’s philosophy of art. We worked very diligently on the thesis, perhaps harder than anyone else in the class. We met frequently to discuss Maritain’s philosophy and raised every question we could think of about art. We also honestly criticized each other’s thoughts and writing. I had written several pages at one point, but my two coworkers told me I had to redo them.
Producing the thesis with my classmates was one of the most demanding but wonderful intellectual experiences in my life. During the 50 years that I have been teaching philosophy, I have frequently used Maritain’s theory of art, especially when discussing novels and films.
Maritain thought every work of fine art was made up of two components. One he called the “matter,” and the other he called the “creative intuition.” Ideally, every work of art should have these two components.
By matter, Maritain meant all the material components that make up the work. So, for a novel, it should be the words, the plot, and the characters. For a film or a play, the matter would be similar, though a film’s matter might include color, music, and other material components. At the end of a film, there is often a lengthy list of artists who provided some “matter” to the production of the film.
In order to produce a masterpiece the artist must have some skill with “matter.” Was the artist born with that skill, or did the artist achieve it with effort and practice? Not having skill with “matter,” I don’t have an answer to that question. I tend to think of great artists in a way similar to how I think of great athletes. Are great athletes born with something, perhaps extraordinary reflexes, that most of us do not have, or do they achieve greatness through practice? I suspect artistic and athletic greatness is due to something inherent, but it has also been improved and perhaps further developed by many hours of practice.
I have heard that when a baseball was hit out into centerfield, the great Yankee centerfielder Joe DiMaggio would turn his back on home plate immediately after the bat hit the ball and gracefully run deep into centerfield. The ball would land in his glove when he turned to face home plate. How did he do that? If I tried to do that the ball would probably hit me in the head!
I think Maritain’s notion of the material component of a work of art is relatively easy to understand. But what about what Maritain called the “creative intuition”?
No one, including Maritain, could completely understand a “creative intuition.” I think all “creative intuitions” deal with mystery. A “creative intuition” is not an idea or a concept. We have many concepts or ideas and they can be verbalized or articulated, for example: “hat,” “car,” “building.”
The “creative intuition” cannot be put into words. It is an insight into reality at the center of a great work of art. It is the ultimate ingredient that makes the work of art “say” something to us. A work of art that does not have a creative intuition cannot be a great work of art. Ideally, the “creative intuition” exists in three places: in the artist, the work of art, and the person experiencing the work of art.
Are there artists who have “creative intuitions” but do not have the skill with “matter” to incarnate the intuition into a work of art? I imagine there are but how can we know whether an artist has intuitions but never succeeds in embodying them into a work of art? Are there artists who have tremendous skill with matter but don’t have any creative intuitions”? I think there may be many.
Great artists make a great contribution. They imitate the creativity of God, even if they do not believe in God. They reveal in special ways the beauty of God’s creation.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. He presents two 15-minute talks from his lecture series on the Catholic Novel, 10:30 a.m. Monday through Friday on NET-TV.