Art is a virtue of the practical intellect.
Jacques Maritain
The Habit of Art
Topic: Creativity, Culture, & the Arts
“Operative habit resides chiefly in the mind or the will…. Habits [the ancients termed habitus] are interior growths of spontaneous life… and only the living (that is to say, minds which alone are perfectly alive) can acquire them, because they alone are capable of raising the level of their being by their own activity: they posses, in such an enrichment of their faculties, secondary motives to action, which they bring into play when they want… The object [the good of the work] in relation to which (the habitus) perfects the subject is itself unchangeable–and it is upon this object that the quality developed in the subject catches. Such a habit [the habitus of art] is a virtue, that is to say a quality which, triumphing over the original indetermination of the intellective faculty, at once sharpening and hardening the point of its activity, raises it in respect of a definite object to a maximum of perfection, and so of operative efficiency. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect.“
Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882 – 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher, and was one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Art and Scholasticism
Maritain, Jacques, et al. Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays. HardPress Publishing, 2013, [Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, The Habit of Art (1920)].
Jacques Maritain
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Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) was a French Catholic philosopher, and was one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
Jacques Maritain, Philosopher and Friend
Jacques Maritain made many friends through his writings about art. He was first introduced to English-speaking audiences in 1923 by the translation of Art et scolastique (1920) Since then, both Art and Scholasticism and Maritain’s other major work in aesthetics, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), have continued to attract a reading public, even though the Thomism he advocated with Etienne Gilson, Yves R. Simon, and Mortimer J. Adler has ceased to be a major force in American intellectual life. During the height of his popularity, the 1940s and 1950s, Maritain was also known as a major social and political philosopher who had influenced the framing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
–Deal W. Hudson [Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend, edited by Deal Wyatt Hudson, Matthew J. Mancini, Mercer University Press].
Additional Jacques Maritain Quotes
“In so far as we are individuals, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of this universe, a single dot in the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey. We are subject to the determination of the physical world. But each man is also a person, he is not subject to the stars and atoms; for he subsists entirely with the very subsistence of his spiritual soul, and the latter is in him a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom.”
–Jacques Maritain [Scholasticism and Politics (1940)].
“The Intelligence delights in the beautiful because in the beautiful it finds itself again and recognizes itself, and makes contact with its own light. This is so true that those–such as Saint Francis of Assisi–perceive and savor more the beauty of things, who know that things come forth from an intelligence, and who relate them to their author.”
–Jacques Maritain [Art and Scholasticism (1920)].