Poetry As Ontology

Carson 1

Poetry As Ontology:

Jacques Maritain’s Aesthetics in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor

by:

Nathan Carson

for:

ENG 5306: The Bible and Literary Theory

Dr. David L. Jeffrey

Baylor University, Spring 2007

I. Introduction

In connection to either human or divine realities, what does a work of art do? Is artistic work revelatory, and if so, in what sense is that true? Is art revelatory in a salvific sense, and can poetry save us, as I.A. Richards indicates (Eliot 124)? If so, the question remains as to what is meant by salvation. Does a work of art merely play upon and draw out the aesthetic emotions latent within the viewer or reader, as Belgion suggests (Belgion 71), or does it draw them into a longing for the “unquenchable” eschatological “not yet,” as Baudelaire indicates, in the form of a desire for immortality (Maritain, AS, 134)? Finally, does a literary text merely exert itself as a discourse of power over against the reader’s own response of power (Yaeger 191)?

In this study we will be focused on another such claim, offered by French philosopher, theologian and aesthetician Jacques Maritain, about the status and function of art. Drawing from his immersion in existential Thomism, Maritain suggests that when the artist submits to the good of the work to be made, art can perform a revelatory function; it can disclose the splendor of transcendent beauty in and through the sensible world. Indeed, speaking more narrowly of poetry itself, Maritain goes so far as to borrow Charles Maurras’s striking claim that “poetry is ontology” (Maritain, AS, 71).In short, poetry, as well as the work of art in general, have for Maritain the revelatory potential to unveil the “splendor” of God in the things of the world; it can effect an “excessive disclosure of ontology” or point up the “overflow of presence,” as two prominent scholars have recently described it.[1] But how, we might ask, does the artist accomplish such an unveiling of splendor in the artistic work? What is more, what qualifies as truly a “revelation,” and does a mere disclosure of beauty or being suffice as a Christian revelation?

In order to answer these questions, in what follows we will examine not only the foundation Maritain lays for how this unveiling of being might be possible, we will also examine the work of one artist who sought to incorporate these claims into her own work. When asked about her aesthetic influences, O’Connor commented that Maritain’s work was what she cut her “aesthetic teeth” on, and throughout her work and personal life the direct influence of Maritain’s aesthetic theories are palpable.[2] O’Connor’s integrated emphasis on “manners” and “mystery, on the concrete, local and sensible on the one hand, and the ineffable, mysterious participation in the divine life on the other, readily aligns her work with Maritain’s “transcendental realism,” whereby the concrete reality of the natural world is opened to the supernatural that is latent within and extending beyond it (Maritain AS, 20; O’Connor MM, 72, 96). The value of examining O’Connor’s work, then, it that it offers a chance to evaluate Maritain’s claim, that a literary text can indeed open the reader to the being and beauty of God. Therefore, in this paper we intend to show that Maritain’s metaphysical appeal to “transcendental” beauty, his suggestion that artists can uncover that beauty, and his application of analogical thinking to literary symbols, are all incorporated and augmented by O’Connor as keys for producing a truly “revelatory” fictional text. Alongside this main agenda, we will further argue, by way of analysis of O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back,” that Maritain’s program falls short of enabling artists to achieve a fully Christian revelation, and that O’Connor’s story only succeeds on that score by, unlike Maritain, appealing to uniquely biblical images and symbols.

II. Maritain’s Metaphysical Aesthetics

Maritain’s conception of the work in which an artist engages is rooted in his intense study of Thomas Aquinas, and the latter’s robust account of the way that every sensible thing participates in the life of God. Maritain’s existential Thomism owes a great deal to Thomas’s

ratio entis, the notion of being, and he held that the properties of being can be known by way of analogical abstraction from the “real,” sensible things of the world.[3] For Maritain, the concepts thus abstracted are, the “transcendentals,” which include the ratio entis itself, as well as the concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful. What is more, for Maritain, as well as for Gilson, all things in the sensible world do not merely exist as things in fact, but are an actus esseni; they exist as thing in act, and the action of existence is a participation in the life of God, who is both “pure act” and “first cause” of all things.

With these preliminary remarks in mind, we can better discern the way that, for Maritain, Beauty is a “property of being” or a “transcendental” among those concepts which “surpass all limits of kind and category...because they absorb everything and are to be found everywhere. Like the one, the true and the good, [Beauty] is being considered from a certain aspect, it is a property of being” (Maritain AS, 24). For Maritain, however, beauty is no mere philosophical category of metaphysics, but is rather a divine attribute of God, who is both “beautiful” and “beauty itself” (Maritain, AS, 24-25). Further, Maritain affirms that, as First Cause, God imparts his beauty to all created things such that every “particularized” instance of beauty in the world proceeds from and participates in His beauty. Quoting key statements from Thomas’s De Divinis Nominibus, Maritain summarizes this view in the opening section of Art and Scholasticism:

He is beauty itself, because He imparts beauty to all created beings...He is the cause of all harmony and brightness. Every form indeed, that is to say every light, is ‘a certain irridation proceeding from the first brightness,’ ‘a participation in the divine brightness.’ And every consonance or harmony, every concord, every friendship and union of whatever sort between creatures, proceeds from the divine beauty, the primitive, super-eminent type of all consonance, which gathers all things together and calls them to itself…Thus ‘the beauty of the creature is nothing but a similitude of the divine beauty shared among things.’ (Maritain, AS, 25)

In this passage, Maritain’s mention of “form” as “light” or “irridation” proceeding from and participating in the divine brightness, is an important concept to grasp as we move toward an understanding of how an artistic production can be called “revelatory.” Following Thomas and the ancients, Maritain sees “splendor” as “the essential character” and “intelligibility” of Beauty (Maritain, AS, 20). Form, on the other hand, is a “remnant or ray of the creative Mind” intelligibly communicated to created beings. In a passage which O’Connor herself marked up for future reference, Maritain fully elaborates this concept:

…form, that is to say the principle determining the peculiar perfection of everything which is, constituting and completing things in their essence and their qualities, the ontological secret, so to speak, of their innermost being, their spiritual essence, their operative mystery, is above all the peculiar principle of intelligibility, the peculiar clarity of every thing. Every form, moreover, is a remnant or ray of the creative Mind impressed upon the heart of the being created. (Maritain, AS, 20)

For Maritain, citing Thomas, the splendor formae is “the splendor of the secrets of being radiating into intelligence....the radiance or clarity inherent in beauty itself,” that proceed from God into the intellectus of his beings (Maritain, CI, 161). This, then, is the heart of Maritain’s thesis that human beings can indeed have an “intuition of being,” which elsewhere he calls “poetic intuition,” or a sense of the “inscape” of things, as Hopkins would say.[4] However, the splendor of form intuited by the artist does not amount to conceptual clarity; it retains the character of “mystery” and thus constitutes the inner “ontological secret” which Maritain mentions above (Maritain, AS, 23). Nonetheless the artist perceives something of this “mystery,” and as he devotes himself to the good of his artistic work, the work will attain to beauty as the splendor and mystery of form, the ontological essence and inscape of things, shines forth from it as an “overflow of presence” (Williams 4).

All of this appears to be what Maritain means when he claims that “poetry is ontology,” or a “divinization of the spiritual in the things of sense” which, at least in his early work, he seems to apply to all artistic endeavors.[5] How is this accomplished, we might ask? Maritain’s answer is that by attending to the specific sensible symbols that are the grist for the mill of artistic work, and by further illumining the way that these symbols open out into the splendor and mystery of being through “exchanges” and “correspondences,” the artist can offer “spiritual nourishment” to the world. Drawing many of the fine arts under this umbrella, Maritain aptly summarizes the point here:

Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, Music, even Dancing, are imitative arts, that is to say arts realising the beauty of the work and producing the joy of the soul by the use of imitation or by producing through the medium of certain sensible symbols the spontaneous presence in the mind of something over and above such symbols…. And the things made present to the soul by the sensible symbols of art—by rhythm, sound, line, colour, form, volume, words, metre, rhyme and image, the proximate matter of art—are themselves merely a material element of the beauty of the work, just like the symbols in question; they are the remote matter, so to speak, at the disposal of the artist, on which he must make the brilliance of a form, the light of being, shine. (Maritain, AS, 45-46)

The secret, then, of how it is that a work of art can indeed be “revelatory” in any sense, has to do, in Maritain’s view, with a very specific literary technique whereby the artist uses the sensible symbols in such a way that they point to something “more.” Here the question with which we began this study must be reemphasized. If a text is said to be revelatory in some way, what precisely is revealed and how does the artist bring it about? At present it would seem that, for Maritain, it is beauty that is revealed as the splendor and mystery of our participation in the life of God. The way the artist brings this about, it seems, is through the use of symbols that somehow operate on multiple levels at once; they at once remain a concrete, sensible symbol and a pathway into mystery. Flannery O’Connor is one artist who took Maritain’s suggestions quite seriously, and we turn now to look at her understanding of concrete symbols and mystery, and the way the two might work together in her fictional texts.

III. O’Connor and Maritain

In a comment on the character of good fiction writing, O’Connor offers a distinct echo of all that we’ve explored in Maritain: “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger that that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader” (O’Connor, MM, 83). Here it might seem odd that O’Connor defines a “good writer” as one who can appeal to a “realm” that may touch, but is not remotely limited to the writer’s own mind. It appears that, like Maritain, O’Connor is arguing that only a writer who acknowledges the participation of the sensible in some kind of greater reality, can do justice to the world as it really is. And, following Maritain, this does not mean that representation of the sensible and concrete is left behind, but rather that it is onlywithin the concrete spectrum of sensible things that the full register of participation in the divine life can be discerned.[6] This again aligns with Maritain’s contention that ratio entis and the “transcendentals” of being can indeed be intellectually grasped, by analogy, in and through the sensible things of the world. Thus O’Connor continually emphasizes that good fiction must appeal to the senses: “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the sense with abstractions.” Thus O’Connor saw fiction as not “an escape from reality,” but rather “a plunge into reality” that is “very shocking to the system” (O’Connor, MM 78). Because of her artistic insistence on immersion in the sensible and concrete O’Connor calls herself a “realist.” It is important to note here that for O’Connor, this “realism” which seeks to “penetrate the concrete” is rooted in an ontological understanding of the goodness of creation. Citing Augustine, O’Connor affirms that the “things” of the created world are good because they “pour forth from God” and “proceed from a divine source” (O’Connor, MM 157).

However, as for Maritain, this affirmation of a “divine source” is precisely what gave O’Connor a reason, as Sykes suggests, to “place confidence in the power of artistic symbol to reveal truth. Symbol-making mysteriously puts us in touch with a level of reality otherwise unknown to us” (Sykes 45). Thus O’Connor adds to her concern for sensible things a stress on “mystery,” which for her is an essential element of being that is disclosed when the artist “penetrates the concrete.” The true novelist knows, she contends, that he must “make his gaze extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets” (O’Connor, MM 45). For O’Connor, this “realm” that exists “beyond the surface” is the special province of “mystery,” which involves “the Divine life and our participation in it” (O’Connor, MM 72). The mystery of life, for O’Connor, is that at the depths of the concrete world lies “the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality,” which is that divine life from which all sensible things proceed (O’Connor, MM 157). Thus she brings together surface and depths, “manners” and “mystery” in her attempt to illumine in sensible things, as Maritain says, “a secret which it first discovered in them, in their invisible substance or in their endless exchanges and correspondences” (Maritain, AS, 74):

…if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery…

I would not like to suggest that this kind of writer, because his interest is predominantly in mystery, is able in any sense to slight the concrete. Fiction begins where human knowledge begins—with the senses—and every fiction writer is bound by this fundamental aspect of his medium. (O’Connor,MM, 41-42)

By now it should be fairly evident that O’Connor explicitly shares Maritain’s affirmation of the analogia entis (O’Connor, MM 71-72), as well as the possibility of an “intuition of being” whereby the artist make the brilliance of a form, the light of being, shine” upon the concrete realities of the world (Maritain, AS, 45-46). Imaginative literature can indeed, in O’Connor’s view, reveal the participation of the sensible world in “mystery” of the divine life. What we have yet to examine is how, precisely, O’Connor goes about accomplishing this in her fiction, and here we must take a closer look at both her debt to New Criticism on the use of symbols, and suggest several ways in which she surpassed it.

In addition to a theological impetus, in both the Eucharist and the Incarnation, for her close attention to the detailed texture of the sensible, O’Connor clearly drew upon the insights of New Criticism and its emphasis on the integrity of the literary text as an interconnected series of symbols and images. Having taken a course at Iowa under Austin Warren, and being constantly fed the most recent critical developments of Allen Tate’s thought through his wife and her close friend, Caroline Gordon, O’Connor was quite immersed in the New Critical scene (Fodor 72). Of course the connection to Maritain is not lost here, since his strong emphasis, through Thomas, on “the good of the work” itself as opposed to Romantic notions of art as self-expression, was itself quite formative for many of the leading proponents of New Criticism.[7] However, the point to get at here is the way in which O’Connor went beyond New Criticism in her understanding of the literary symbol, and its efficacy as a catalyst for precisely the revelation of being that Maritain suggests is possible in a work of art.

It is fair to say that none of the New Critical thinkers, with the exception perhaps of Tate, clearly connected the literary symbol with “universals” or “transcendentals” in the way that Maritain did.[8] The effect of Maritain’s emphasis, which O’Connor only discovered after prolonged exposure to New Criticism, was that it provided her with the metaphysical framework for placing confidence in the real, intelligible power of the literary symbol to reveal and mysteriously participate in the truth and splendor of being (Sykes 45). Even though O’Connor does not draw her understanding of literary symbols from him, it is important to note, as we examine her view of symbols and their revelatory function in the fictional text, that Maritain effects a shift in her thinking.[9]