Jacques Maritain had published Art and Scholasticism in France in 1927…. His field of interest was aesthetics, and in Art and Scholasticism he took up Aquinas’s idea of the “habit of art,” arguing that artists rely on the faculty of intelligence called the “practical intellect,” not the “speculative intellect” of philosophers, and that the confusion of the two had lead artist astray – with Romanticism as the consequence.
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Maritain had distilled this point into a dictum: “art is a virtue of the practical intellect.” [Thomas] Merton quoted it approvingly, then made a further point: “The presence of virtue in the work now is necessary to the goodness of the work. As a man is, so are his works. The tree is known by its fruit.”
On the face of it, that seems obvious, and it is true to the letter of Aquinas, who says that the true artist must possess virtue. But it is actually a conclusion Maritain had written Art and Scholasticism to refute. For Maritain’s conclusion (following Aquinas) is that the artist must possess the virtue proper to his activity. That is, the person who would be a good artist need not be virtuous in manners or behavior, so long as he possesses the virtues necessary for his art: those of line and form and color, or those of meter and rhyme, or those of plot and character and motivation.
—Paul Elie, The Life You Save may Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
