Art as a Living and Spiritual Armor

Here in the fourth installment of our Virtual Summer Circle of Thomistic Studies, I want to take up one of the chief themes in Chapter IV of Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism—the idea that art is, as St. Thomas Aquinas and other medieval scholars put it, a habitus of the practical intellect.

In our previous discussions we’ve defined art as an activity of the mind in its practical mode, concerned with making something rather than with doing something in the moral sense. In Chapter IV Maritain adds another layer to this definition: art is a virtue of the practical intellect. And what is a virtue? Generally speaking, it is a habitus.   

Bringing in Latin doesn’t seem to help much. But it wouldn’t help, either, to try the most obvious translation of habitus: the English word “habit.” And that is because, as Maritain says, the word “habit” has to do with “mechanical bent and routine,” with activity that “resides in the nerve centers” (p. 11*). But habitus is anything but mechanical bent and routine. It is free, intelligent activity that resides in the spirit rather than the nervous system, springing as it does from the intellect or the will.

So with Maritain we’ll stick with the untranslated word habitus. In defining habitus (the plural in Latin is spelled the same), Maritain says that they are “essentially stable dispositions perfecting in the line of its own nature the subject in which they exist” (p. 10).

Or, more simply, a habitus is a perfection of a power of the soul.

Even now we are in the midst of trying to acquire a certain habitus—a habitus of the speculative mind (see our first session). We are each of us exercising, as it were, the power of our speculative mind, giving it a work-out, so that we might bring that power to perfection in the achievement of philosophical wisdom. The achievement of that perfection just is a habitus. There are physical habitus that we might be born with—beauty and strength, for example—but an intellectual habitus, whether of the speculative or practical mind, is an acquired achievement, presupposing strenuous effort and great application.

“The man who possesses a habitus, Maritain writes, “has within him a quality which nothing can pay for or replace; others are naked, he is armed with steel: but it is a case of a living and spiritual armor” (p. 11).

Art is thus a habitus, or virtue, of the practical mind. It is our mind being brought to perfection in the making of certain sorts of artifacts. Maritain likens the habitus of art to armor because a habitus is something stable and permanent. Interestingly, what makes the habitus of art so stable and permanent are the requirements of the art in practice—“the object” of the artistic activity, as Maritain puts it at the bottom of p. 11. What does this mean?

Think about learning how to draw. In that activity you put your practical mind to work, seeking to achieve a perfection of its power. But in any quest for perfection there are demands to be met. One doesn’t just take out one’s pencil and produce masterpieces. There are rules to be learned—or if not hard-and-fast rules, at least principles, as well as techniques to be trained in by masters, as well as “tricks of the trade” and “secrets” that can only be learned through much trial and error. In other words, the art of drawing has certain stable requirements—requirements that must be learned, as Picasso learned them, before one can start playing with and even breaking them.

So what happens as we learn how to draw is that the power of our practical mind is shaped (“specified” as Maritain puts it) by the requirements of the art. And because these requirements are stable and permanent, so is the resultant habitus of art stable and permanent.

In elaborating upon this point Maritain says rather forcefully, “Hence the force and rigidity of habitus; hence their irritability—all that deviates from the straight line of their object [the requirements of the art] galls them; hence their intransigence—what concession could they admit of? They are fixed in an absolute; hence their inconvenience in the social order. Men of the world, polished on all sides, do not like the man of habitus, with his asperities.”

Yet—how are we to square these thoughts about the rigidity of art as habitus with the inventive, playful side of art—and of the artist like Picasso who seems to want to destroy all “requirements”? 


* Page numbers refer to Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).