Fumbling toward Ecstasy
A book review of Raïssa Maritain’s Poetry and Mysticism, published by Wiseblood with an introduction by James Matthew Wilson.
Jacques Maritain stands as one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. Among Catholics as well as those outside the Church, he is primarily viewed as a political thinker. Indeed, his writings on politics have been extremely influential on later twenty century Catholic thought. His 1936 work Integral Humanism influenced Pope Paul VI. Maritain further served as French ambassador to the Holy See and was involved int the creation of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a result, the name “Jacques Maritain” can draw very strong emotions of American and French Catholics. As one of the principal architects of the attempt to wed Thomism with post-Enlightenment liberalism, Maritain is often scorned among traditionalist Catholics. Although a friend and correspondent with the radical Saul Alinsky as well as a critic of certain elements of capitalism, Maritain is nonetheless primarily claimed by American Catholics who identify as conservative or neoconservative and who embrace the past nearly one hundred years of attempted rapprochement between American liberalism and Catholic teaching.
Even though he is principally known as a politic theorist, Maritain works Art and Scholasticism and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry are still read and studied among a budding Catholic literary and artistic world. Although lesser known, the work of Maritain’s wife Raïssa also covers poetry and aesthetics. Wiseblood Books, headed by Catholic novelist Joshua Hren, recently has published two of Raïssa’s essays, “Sense and Non-Sense in Poetry” as well as “Magic, Poetry, and Mysticism.” These essays are accompanied by an essay penned by the Catholic poet James Matthew Wilson, who, with Joshua Hren, heads the Catholic MFA program at the University of St. Thomas.
As James Matthew Wilson notes in his introduction, Raïssa’s essays were penned in dialogue with a long debate in French poetry since at least the time of Jean Racine, who abandoned his life of a playwright for monastic solitude. This debate, present in other strongly Catholic cultures, questioned whether poetry was, in fact, licit for Catholics to write and read. As James Matthew Wilson also notes, Raïssa is responded to another debate among Romantics and post-Romantics, such as Arthur Rimbaud, who argued that poetry could facilitate a mystical experience. Raïssa’s central question about the distinction between poetry and mysticism is very similar to that of her husband’s in his Art and Scholasticism. The Maritains were further writing in the wake of French surrealism, which included figures such as André Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire who claimed tremendous powers for poetry in providing experiences similar to that of religion.
In her essays, Raïssa argues that there is a poetic sense or form of a poem, which integrally tied to the meaning of the poem. For Raïssa, the words of a poem are both signs and objects, which means that the words are critical to a poem in a manner rather different from that of prose. Words in poetry have a relationship to transcendental beauty, and words as signs in poems further enable the poet to maintain psychological complexity as well as obscurity and mystery. Poetry thus is not required to adhere to logical sense (a point the surrealists would heartily embrace). The poem is, nonetheless, given an intelligible resonance. Poetry is not simply a flow of images. Rather, inspiration flows freely and this naturalness and vitality is not be restricted by the poet.
Raïssa identifies the obscurity in the poem as a point in which poetry somewhat resembles religious experience, the result of a natural ecstasy. This obscurity most often occurs when the poet experiences despair over the ability grasp all reality. Attempting to find fulfillment, poets such as Rimbaud realized that poet intuition was sufficient. He did not realize that the experience of being truly liberated can only be found in Christian mysticism. Seemingly echoing the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Raïssa writes that poetry can also conceal as well as reveal, showing the mystery of things, and each poetic work contains both intelligibility as well as obscurity.
Raïssa further writes that the poet is given quietude, which is similar to (but not synonymous with) mystical contemplation. However, Raïssa argues, even against Henri Bremond, that poetry is not mysticism. The poet reaches toward and touches the things of the world and not God. Poets and artists and mystics draw from the same divine source, but they do so with different dispositions. A poet is inspired to create poetry, but the mystic would return to contemplative life and draw closer to God.
Jacques and Raïssa Maritain are complicated figures who can not easily be pigeon-holed into ready-made descriptions. Certainly, Jacques’s political thought will continue to generate debate among well intentioned Catholics. Throughout his life, Jacques Maritain further underwent what one scholar has called a “sea change” in his thought regarding poetry and art. Raïssa Maritain’s own writings on poetry are valuable and deserving of attention. Wiseblood Books has happily made some of them available in a new edition.
