POETRY AND M. MARITAIN
397
with its: "The word of the Lord came to him saying,
I . ..
"-for·
mula of the possessed. And among the.Chinese the poet has been
defined as "one who can endure great quantities of wine."
In the Middle Ages a practical opposition developed between
the production of the poem as a visible thing and the creative enthu–
siasm of the poet. This was due mainly to the persecutions of here–
tics by the Church. Under the threat of an Inquisition, art (as well
as science and philosophy) quickly tends to become a submissive
"activity of the working reason." But even under these "material
conditions of existence," so intense were the medieval collective
beliefs
th~t
the arts continued to be penetrated by them and were
never entirely assimilated with the crafts. The medieval poet was
identified with a community, even though it was a community in
a state of suppression. From the popular supernatural magic of
Grace, possessing powers of inspiration equivalent, to a very lim–
ited extent, to the daemons of the Greeks, painting and the poetic
image derived a peculiar physical quality of
light
not available
to the working reason. Haloes, beams
fr~~
heaven, ranked angelic
hosts, soft-gold surfaces, inner irradiations, ascending strata of
clarity-it is as a Catholic, forgetting the labor of art and proud
of the creative "mania" of his creed, that Maritain boasts of the
eclat of Christian art: "There is a higher refulgence, that of Grace,
which the Greeks did not know."
(Art
et
Scolastique.)
Whatever
may have been the inner condition of the cabinet maker visited by
the shining
"habilus,"
his chairs were scarcely the medium for
embodying this divine glow.
Hence poetry has not been an "activity of the working reason"
in general, but under specific conditions and from the point of
view of specific social interests. Could that poet of the Middle Ages
participate in the Good Life of the Church who neglected to guard
against the rebellious possibilities of the "soul" of the poem?
Poetry was indeed then a practical activity carried on in a danger–
ous relation to spirit. Maritain's theory is an attempt to perpetuate
the universals with which the Scholastics generalised the position
of the arts in their own time. In so far as modern poetry is also
faced with a conflict between inspiration and social practice, medie–
val theories bear an abstract relevance to it. But the historiCal
content of our dilemma is entirely different and cannot be ex–
plained in terms of the contradictions of the Middle Ages-contra-
