Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Inclination and Law, Part 2

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES of the notion that the fundamental moral experience is gained, not through rational, conceptual, discursive knowledge, but through intellectual knowledge gained by means of inclination, connaturality, or congeniality? What does it mean that moral knowledge is, at its heart, gained through"intellectual feltness"*?

Maritain identifies three consequences that result from this fundamental feature of the classical natural law theory. First, there is a marked restriction upon the borders of what natural law encompasses and what is outside of it. Second, in the area of knowledge by inclination we enter into an area of the self-evident, that is, indemonstrable, pre-philosophical knowledge, givens, as it were. Third, this givenness suggests that the fundamental principle of natural law is given and is discovered or found or encountered--indeed it is divine and must be confronted as Moses did the burning bush--and not something man creates out of whole cloth as if conventional.

Since the natural law is founded upon inclination or what we have called intellectual feltness, it follows that, strictly speaking, the positive law--which is founded upon human reasoning--is not part of the natural law, though is some cases, clearly, positive law is an expression of this fundamental law or at least its determinations. Analogously, those tenets of moral law known through the exercise of practical reason, that is, through the "spontaneous or philosophical exercise of conceptional and rational knowledge," are not, strictly speaking, part of natural law, though they may be so intimately tied to it that to reject them is to reject the very natural law itself. Natural law, however, in its most strict in rigorous sense, applies only to the knowledge that is gained by connatural means, by inclination, by this intellectual feltness. Once conceptual and rational knowledge is applied to these inclinations, this intellectual feltness, one travels beyond the strict border of natural law into moral philosophy, a form of knowledge which Maritain calls a "reflective knowledge, a sort of after-knowledge." Maritain, 22.

Natural Law, dealing only with regulations known through inclination, deals only with principles immediately known (that is known through inclination, without any conceptual and rational medium) of human morality.

Maritain, 21. The discipline of natural law, defined in its most restrictive sense, is therefore extremely narrow since it addresses only this non-discursive knowledge gained by inclination. In practice, however, the moral knowledge gained through the application of discursive, conceptual knowledge upon these inclinations or connatural knowledge is also called "natural law," though it is not, in fact, the natural law in sensu stricto, in the strict sense, but only by loose analogy based on the fact that these conclusions, reached through discursive and conceptual knowledge, are based or predicated upon the inclinations or intellectual feltness which precedes it.

The consequence of the fact that moral knowledge is, at its heart, one based upon intellectual feltness or inclination is that the fundamental precepts gained thereby are indemonstrably true. In other words, their truth is simply beyond the ken of philosophy because the truth gained by inclination or intellectual feltness is pre-philosophical. At best, philosophy can show that denial of this intellectual feltness, of these inclinations leads to absurdity, to relativism, to no morality at all and to denial of any possible grounds for it. But it remains fundamentally true that the basis of morality is simply philosophical unprovable. It is a given, like all creation:

Thus it is that men . . . are unable to give account of and rationally to justify their most fundamental moral beliefs: and this very fact is a token, not of the irrationality and intrinsic invalidity of these beliefs, but on the contrary, of their essential naturality, and therefore of their greater validity, and of their more than human rationality.

Maritain, 21. Si comprehenderis, is the upshot of Maritain's thesis, non est lex naturalis. If you comprehend it using human concepts and human discursive knowledge, if you are able to prove it, it is not the natural law, strictly so called. In the area of intellectual feltness, or inclinations, we are in the area where God, not man, has writ the script. Man will never comprehend, much less govern or rule, this intimate area where God the Creator has writ his law in the heart of every man and in the hearts of all men. It is here, in the area of intellectual feltness, the knowledge gained by inclination or connaturality, that man must bow down, venerate, listen, learn, and obey. This is the most natural, the greatest, the most noble and divine source of human moral knowledge. It is, at heart, unutterable, like the very name of God himself. It is, in a manner of speaking, the I am who am, the אהיה אשר אהיה‎, the ehyeh asher ehyeh, of morality. It is God with us in us. It is Emmanuel, צמנוּאל, in us. That is why this knowledge will recognize, if uncorrupted by convention or other moral flaw, Christ and his body the Church, which are likewise God with us. The natural law is Christ, and Christ is the natural law. This is the meaning behind Tertullian's claim: Anima naturaliter Christiana. The word of God in us should recognize, in theory if not always in practice, the word of God in Jesus, and will recognize the word of God in the Church Jesus founded.

Moses Before Burning Bush, Mosaic from Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy

It is for this reason that Maritain distinguishes a third feature of this law accessed by inclination. Since it is pre-philosophical, pre-conceptual, pre-discursive in nature, the natural law is based, not upon created, that is human, reason, but upon uncreated Reason. It participates, then, in the very Reason of God, the eternal law. In entering this inner sanctum within us, where the natural law dwells, we enter, as it were, the inner sanctum of our temple. We confront, like the high priest of the Jews in the Holy of Holies, the Kodesh Hakodashim, the Ark of the Covenant, wherein lies the very presence, the Shekinah (שכינה), of God. We encounter by this intellectual feltness the light of the Lord which travels ahead of us, like it did the Jews wandering in the desert, in a pillar of cloud to guide us by day, and in a pillar of light to guide us by night, so that we may walk in both light and darkness under the guidance of the Lord God. (Cf. Exodus 13:21) Is it any wonder that human reason, in its conceptual and discursive or created form, must remain mute when confronted by this knowledge gained by inclination?

[U]ncreated Reason, the Reason of the Principle of Nature, is the only reason at play not only in establishing Natural Law (by the very fact that it creates human nature), but in making Natural Law known, through the inclinations of that very nature, to which human reason listens when it knows Natural Law. And it is precisely because Natural Law depends only upon Divine Reason that it is possessed of a character naturally sacred, and binds man in conscience, and is the prime foundation of human law, which is a free and contingent determination of what Natural Law leaves undetermined, and which obliges by virtue of Natural Law.

Maritain, 22.

As humans, we, of course, cannot encounter God and sit idly by. We are commanded to love God with all our heart, minds, soul, and strength. (Mark 12:30; Deut. 6:4, 5) Similarly, we are commanded to love this moral inclination in us with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. We are called to exercise discursive, conceptual reason to understand this moral encounter with God by inclination. We are called to practice, to the exercise of virtue, by asceticism to habituate ourselves to life in accordance with this inclination, and to shun vice, that is any habitual or even singular act that may insult this inclination.

In applying human reason to the moral truths gained by inclination, however, we travel outside the realm of natural law strictly speaking and into the threshold of moral philosophy. "Philosophers and philosophical theories supervene," as it were, "in order to explain and justify, through concepts and reasoning, what, from the time of the cave-man, men have progressively known through inclination and connaturality." Maritain, 22. This is moral philosophy. But "[t]he moral law was discovered by men before the existence of any moral philosophy." The moral law existed before Thales of Miletus.** The moral law existed in Adam. Where man has been, it has always been, and will always be.

And yet, moral philosophy ought not to be shunned, though it be a servant, and not master, to the law learned by inclination:

Moral philosophy has critically to analyze and rationally to elucidate moral standards and rules of conduct whose validity was previously discovered in an undemonstrable manner, and in a non-conceptual, non-rational way; it has also to clear them, as far as possible, from the adventitious outgrowths or deviations which may have developed by reason of the coarseness of our nature and the accidents of social evolution.

Maritain, 22. Moral philosophy since the Enlightenment has apparently forgotten its subservient role, its reflective role. Man's reason has usurped the role of inclinations, and thereby supplanted the eternal, divine, and uncreated source of moral knowledge and replaced it with temporal, human, created knowledge. So human reason, and not divine reason, has become the source of modern, post-Enlightenment theories of natural law.

Eighteenth-century rationalism assumed that Natural Law was either discovered in Nature or a priori deduced by conceptual and rational knowledge, and from there imposed upon human life by philosophers and by legislators in the manner of a code of geometrical propositions. No wonder that finally 'eight or more new systems of natural law made their appearance at every Leipzig booksellers' fair' at the end of the eighteenth Century, and that Jean-Paul Richter might observe that "every fair and every war brings forth a new natural law."

Maritain, 23 (quoting Heinrich Rommen, The Natural Law).

This notion that moral knowledge is, at its fundament, gained by an intellectual feltness, by inclination, and not by discursive and conceptual knowledge consequently takes the classical theories of natural law completely outside the Kantian critique of moral knowledge. The Kantian critique of knowledge is part of metaphysics, and thus enters human thought as part of its discursive, conceptual aspect. It does not, indeed cannot, address that human knowledge which is non-discursive, which is gained by pre-philosophical, pre-metaphysical knowledge. The knowledge it critiques is that knowledge gained a priori through intuition or a posteriori following sense experience. But knowledge gained by inclination is outside the categories of a priori or a posteriori knowledge. "[N]either in this intellectual intuition nor in sense-perception is there the smallest element of knowledge through inclination." Maritain, 23. Applying metaphysical concepts to knowledge gained by inclination is a fool's errand since it "confuses the planes and orders of things." Maritain, 23. When metaphysics ventures into the land of inclination, and inclination into the land of metaphysics, it is as if they are foreigners who venture into a land of unknown tongue. So "everyone loses his head, [and] knowledge through inclination and metaphysics are simultaneously spoiled." Maritain, 24.

For a philosopher, Kantian or otherwise, to enter into the realm of knowledge by inclination or intellectual feltness with his blunt metaphysical tools, and claim to rule as if he were king in that realm, is a manifest absurdity. It is as foolish a proposition as if a son were to suggest that he had sired his father. It is perhaps this foolish proposition, which is at the heart of the Enlightenment Project, that has thrown mankind into the intellectual infinite, absurd loop of a son who insists he has engendered the one who has engendered him. This is the absurdity of modern man, who insists that he is father to his own morality, that he is the sire of who he is.

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*For an explanation of the term "intellectual feltness," see the footnote in the earlier posting in this series, Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Inclination and Morality, Part 1.
**Thales of Miletus (ca. 624-546 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor. Considered one of the Seven Sages of Greece, he is generally regarded as the first philosopher in the Greek, and hence Western, tradition.

Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Inclination and Law, Part 1

IT IS THE COMMON EXPERIENCE OF MEN to encounter knowledge of morality through connatural means or as a result of inclination. For Maritain, the moral experience is par excellence knowledge gained by connaturality or, what is the same thing, by inclination. Many men throughout history have not experienced the grace of contemplation, that is, mysticism natural or supernatural. Similarly, most men do not have the natural grace of poetic knowledge. These are graces, gifts--talents--either natural or supernatural that God dispenses, for reasons we do not know, as he, the Lord, sees fit. Recipients of these gifts, we are not to bury them, but to use them ad majorem Dei gloriam. On the other hand, the moral experience, and the connatural knowledge or inclinations that are part of it, is one that is given all men barring some sort of mental, or perhaps even moral, defect such as psychopathy. Morality is first of all experienced, lived, coming from the heart. It is not known conceptually as if some sort of Athena sprouting forth from the mind of man fully formed. Morality is first felt, though it be an intellectual feltness.* Moral philosophy, which is conceptual, discursive knowledge, follows this intellectual feltness.

It is through connaturality that moral consciousness attains a kind of knowing--inexpressible in words and notions--of the deepest dispositions--longings, fears, hopes or despairs, primeval loves and options--involved in the night of the subjectivity.

Maritain, 19. There is in man and intellectual feltness, that is "secret elements of evaluation which depend upon what he is, and which are known to him through inclination, through his own actual propensities and his own virtue, if he has any." Maritain, 19-20. It is, Maritain acknowledges, at least modernly, a "most controversial tenet" in the moral philosophy known as the classical natural law theory, and yet one absolutely essential to it, that moral knowledge is natural in the sense that it is naturally known, that is it is first and most fundamentally known through inclination or by connatural means, by an intellectual feltness, and not through conceptual knowledge or by way of reasoning.

The genuine concept of Natural Law is the concept of a law which is natural not only insofar as it expresses the normality of functioning of human nature, but also insofar as it is naturally known, not through conceptual knowledge and by way of reasoning.

Maritain, 20. This notion--that the natural law is principally one that is known through connaturality or inclination--was largely jettisoned by the Enlightenment theories of natural law and their progeny. In Maritain's view, it is on account of the rejection of moral knowledge by connaturality or inclination that these post-Enlightenment theories of "natural law" are not natural law theories at all, but cheap imitations, disguises, even falsifications of the classical natural law theory.

Eighteenth-century rationalism assumed that Natural Law was either discovered in Nature or a priori deduced by conceptual and rational knowledge, and from there imposed upon human life by philosophers and by legislators in the manner of a code of geometrical propositions. . . . I submit that all the theories of Natural Law which have been offered since Grotius (and including Grotius himself) were spoiled in disregard of the fact that Natural Law is known through inclination or connaturality, and not through conceptual and rational knowledge.

Maritain, 22-23. Against the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theories of natural law, Maritain insists that any viable theory of natural law must incorporate an understanding of the moral experience as being fundamentally one known by inclination, by connatural means, or what he also calls congenial means. The moral experience is not one first gained through conceptual knowledge or by some knowledge imposed from on high through revelation. It is a deeply internal, "felt" notion, arising out of subjective experience, yet intellectual in origin and objective all the same because it involves a form of objective knowledge, albeit one not conceptual. This knowledge by inclination or connaturality may be later studied or analyzed using conceptual analysis--hence we have moral philosophy--and yet at its center the moral experience is fundamentally inside each individual man and is intellectually known in another form before the practical reason is exercised:

My contention is that the judgments in which Natural Law is made manifest to practical Reason do not proceed from any conceptual, discursive, rational exercise of reason; they proceed from that connaturality or congeniality through which that what is consonant with the essential inclinations of human nature is grasped by the intellect as good; what is dissonant, as bad.

Maritain, 20. Some of these inclinations are, we might point out, intimately tied to our animal nature. They are, for all that, no less human. The inclinations, Maritain points out, "even if they deal with animal instincts, are essentially human, and therefore, reason-permeated inclinations." Maritain, 20. Thus, the urge to procreate, the yearning to live and to survive against threats to our survival, to live in common with others of our kind, and so on, while tied to our animal nature, are not somehow inhuman or ignoble desires. Though in some respects shared with the brutes, they are, in man, wrapped up in reason and are no less noble than any purely intellectual yearning.** These inclinations, however "earthy" or "base" they may seem to a Platonic philosopher or a Jansenist theologian, are "inclinations refracted through the crystal of reason in its unconscious or preconscious life." Maritain, 20. It is this understanding of these basic drives that allows the advocate of a natural law theory to skirt the accusation that natural law advocates advance some sort of primitive biologism. The accusation is nonsense. It is this deep understanding of the body/soul union in man that allowed John Paul II to advance his theology of the body, which is as far from biologism as any theory can be. Without neglecting the soul, the body, and its inclinations--those things connatural to it or congenial to it--inform us of God's pattern for us, it is part of God's creation of us and so within it can be found his norms, his pattern, his law.

Since these inclinations are intimately tied to our nature, they are also intimately tied to the fact that man, by nature, is social and therefore historical. We ought therefore not be surprised--indeed we must understand--that these inclinations, this knowledge by congenial or connatural means, is affected by where man is in history. Sometimes our intellectual feltness is wrong, is missteered by convention or historical circumstances, and requires correction.***

There is therefore a complex relationship between the connatural knowledge that man, both individual and in the aggregate, has of the moral experience and where he happens to have been placed in society and history. We ought not be surprised, therefore, that social man, that historical man has both experienced times where these inclinations, this knowledge of moral right and wrong, develops and corrupts, ebbs and flows. We ought not be surprised that there are cultures, social structures, that are conducive to the flowering of these inclinations, that promote the connatural knowledge of the moral experience. Equally, we ought not be surprised that there are cultures, social structures and conventions, that inhibit the flowering of the bloom, sometimes even squelch the germination of the seed entirely, of this form of moral knowledge. Man is too tied to his time and place in history for any moral philosopher to pull him out of his conventional, historical state, place him in a "state of nature," and then claim that the "state of nature" where he has place man defines man truly. And yet though man travels through history, and always find himself placed in convention, there is a kernel, a golden thread, even a patrimony that may be recognized, gained, and seized:

[M]an being an historical animal, these inclinations of human nature either developed or were released in the course of time: as a result, man's knowledge of Natural Law progressively developed, and continues to develop. And the very history of moral conscience has divided the truly essential inclinations of human nature from the accidental, warped or perverted ones. I would say that these genuinely essential inclinations have been responsible for the regulations which, recognized in the form of dynamic schemes from the time of the oldest social communities, have remained permanent in the human race, while taking forms more definite and more clearly determined.

Maritain, 21. The development which Maritain points to is not monolithic. And Maritain may be criticized for his naive, if well-meaning, historical optimism. There is an ebb and flow in the human moral patrimony. There is both development and corruption, and development may be found in one portion of mankind in both time and place, and corruption and brutality in another in both time and place. So we have such advances as a near unanimous rejection of human chattel slavery, which in times past has been tolerated if not promoted.
"I submit that all the theories of Natural Law which have been offered since Grotius (and including Grotius himself) were spoiled in disregard of the fact that Natural Law is known through inclination or connaturality, and not through conceptual and rational knowledge."
--Jacques MaritainYet, accompanying such development, we have also such moral retrogression, indeed moral blindness, such as a near universal acceptance of artificial contraception as a "good," and abortion as a "right." Not so long ago, we might remember, a sophisticated people denied humanity to a good part of their fellow men. And before that, a sophisticated king performed enormities on his African brothers in the Congo. Modernly, there is a good part of Islam--it is impossible to measure the proportion--that apparently finds it good to kill innocent civilians in the name of their bloodthirsty Allah, when who they actually worship is Moloch or Huitzilopochtli by another name. Modernly, we are utterly blind to fundamental sexual sins, that is, fundamental misuse, abuse of the sexual faculty. Indeed, so perverse have we become that we call access to contraception, to abortion, to homosexual sex "rights." These corruptions show that not all progress is upward. So long as man travels through history, there will be patches of light, and splotches of darkness. At the same time, we would hope that man may have learned from historical mistakes, and may, as he travels through time, become a little wiser.

There are, Maritain notes, important consequences that the natural law is known through inclination or connaturality, and not through discursive, conceptual knowledge. Maritain identifies three, and we will discuss them in our next blog posting in this series.

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*In struggling with this concept of knowledge by inclination or by connaturality, I have coined the term "intellectual feltness." The term is intended to express the inclinatory, connatural, or congenial aspect of this intellectual knowledge. At the same time, it is meant to distinguish this experience from mere "feelings" or "urges" that are corrupt or have no basis in reason. It is this deep, unutterable reason, which is what the concept of knowledge by inclination, connaturality, or congeniality is intended to express, that I hope to encompass by this word.
**And yet, they are not absolute values. They may be yielded or abandoned, not because they are evil, but from some greater good. Hence the desire to procreate may be given up in a vow of celibacy for the glory of God, in the manner of Catholic religious. A man, imitating the Son of God, may give up his life for another such as St. Maximilian Kolbe. Similarly, a hermit gives up the natural inclination to live in common so as to achieve a closer union with God. Exceptional, these exceptions prove the general rule.
***Hence the practical need for Revelation and the Magisterial teaching of the Church.

Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Poetry and Morality

POETRY PROVIDES US WITH ANOTHER KIND of knowledge obtained through a process of connaturality, rather than knowledge through syllogistic type reasoning. At its most essential, the poet "feels" his knowledge: he does not derive it by hammering out syllogisms and enthymemes. In Maritain's view, then, there is such a thing as "poetic knowledge," a knowledge that is obtained through connaturality. Particularly since German Romanticism, poets (and therefore mankind at large) have become aware of poetry's unique intellectual vision, the "poetic knowledge," a short of intuition and feel, which is at the heart of the poetic expression.

The poet has realized that he has his own way, which is neither scientific nor philosophical, of knowing the world. Thus the fact of that peculiar kind of knowledge which is poetic knowledge has imposed itself upon philosophical reflection. . . . Poetic knowledge is non-conceptual and non-rational knowledge: it is born in the preconscious life of the intellect, and it is essentially an obscure revelation both of the subjectivity of the poet and of some flash of reality coming together out of sleep into one single awakening.

Maritain, 18. For Maritain, the decisive features of poetic knowledge are its reliance on the "instrumentality of emotion," as well as its tendency towards "utterance and creation." Maritain, 18, 19. This subjective emotion derives from a "preconscious life of the [poet's] intellect," and grasps an "existential reality" through intention and intuition, and so allows for a "grasp" by the poet upon some "existential reality as one with the Self it has moved." Maritain, 19. This deeply subjective grasp is, at the same time, desirous of exhibiting itself "in the manner of a sign." Maritain, 19. The subjective reality of the poet, his response to some reality, therefore, is a blend of experience and intuition and desire for expression. It seeks to "have the self known in the experience of the world and the world known in the experience of the self." Maritain, 19.

While they may be confused, this poetic experience and the knowledge that comes from it is distinct from philosophical or scientific knowledge. It is also distinct from mystical knowledge--whether that mystical knowledge is supernatural or "natural". At germ, its source is subjective. Its unique vision is both inward and outward, and so it both captures the world in some poetic way, but also expresses it outwardly by word, and "terminates in a word proferred." It is therefore clearly unlike mystical experience which, at its heart, is silent. Poetry tends, moreover, to derived from "free creativity of the spirit," whereas mystical experience is patently more submissive to the reality outside of ourselves, or the reality that is within ourselves, but which is nonetheless greater than ourselves. It would therefore be wrong to equate poetic knowledge with mystical knowledge. We are talking about two difference kinds of connatural knowledge:

Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being. In itself it has nothing to do either with the void of an intellectual concentration working against the grain of nature or with the union of charity with the subsisting Love.

Maritain, 18. And yet, poetic knowledge is not a mutually exclusive knowledge. It need not elbow out mystical knowledge. Indeed, both poetic knowledge and mystical knowledge tend to appear together, and act in a mutually cooperative way. The poetry of St. John of the Cross or the hymns of Lactantius or Jacopone da Todi, or, more secularly, the poetry of Czesław Miłosz, come readily to mind as examples of this. In some cases we have a blended union of poetic, mystical, and conceptual knowledge mixed together in a beautiful synthesis--the hymns and prayers of St. Thomas Aquinas might be cited as examples of this.

Poets, of course, ascribe great value to their experience and their unique type of knowledge. And properly so. Yet in some cases, poets have virtually idolized this form of knowledge as the only true form of knowledge. Whereas, for example, Kant overemphasized conceptual reason, "pure" reason to the detriment of other forms of connatural knowledge, someone like Shelley, overemphasized poetic knowledge over other forms of knowledge. Poetry is but one of the divinities in the Pantheon of human knowledge, it is not the one God, nor is it the revealed word of that God. But this was not the view of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, in his famous essay, "A Defence of Poetry," puts upon the poet and his poetry, too much of a burden. He absolutizes poetry and the poetic experience:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Pace Shelley, poets are not prophets or priests nor are they legislators. There may be prophets that are poets, and poets that are prophets. There may be priests that are poets, and poets that are priests. There may be legislators that are poets, and poets that are legislators. But the offices are different, and they ought not be confused, though often, when blended and rightly synthesized, provide marvelous instances of harmony and a remarkable beauty of expression. A poet can take us to heaven, but he can also lead us--one may cite Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal--to hell.

Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Connaturality and Knowledge

KNOWLEDGE IS MORE THAN CONCEPTS AND LOGIC. In Maritain's Thomistic theory of natural law, there is a kind of knowledge that may be gained by means other than through discursive process or logical application of concepts. The existence of such other knowledge, of course, causes problem to some, like Kant and his disciples, who maintain that all thought is based upon "pure" reason. By ignoring this other source of knowledge, what Maritain (following St. Thomas) calls "knowledge through connaturality," the Kantians leave a great part, perhaps the more important part, out of the equation in their analysis of speculative and practical knowledge, and of judgment. In guarding their neat little boundaries, in arbitrarily ruling this knowledge outside the pale of human knowledge, they leave out a whole universe of knowledge from their ken.

There are several aspects of "knowledge by connaturality" that should be understood:

• First, it is a form of intellectual knowledge, and so has as much dignity as knowledge based upon rational concepts and demonstration, that is, connatural knowledge is equally as valid as discursive knowledge; though connatural knowledge is obscure, and though it is not rational in the sense of based upon intellectual concepts and demonstration, it is not irrational.
  
• But knowledge by connaturality is more than intellectual knowledge. It is a form of intellectual knowledge not acting alone, but aided by"affective inclinations and dispositions of the will." Maritain, 15. Thus, it includes the whole man, not just a small intellectual sliver of him.
  
• Knowledge by connaturality works through inclinations, through a sort of embodiment or habitual tendencies (in moral contexts, virtues, but knowledge by connaturality is valid in other contexts, say, mysticism, poetry, etc.). It suggests a congeniality, a union, a connaturality with that concept. It informs us by means of "inner bents and propensities or our own being." Maritain, 15. It is more that the mere experience or pragmatism of William James. It is more than Bergsonian intuition. It is felt, it is learned, it is given.
  
• Knowledge by connaturality plays an important part, perhaps the more significant part, in our human existence. It is the more common form by which we fashion judgments in many contexts, moral, speculative, poetic, mystical.
• It helps us realize the analogical overlap behind various kinds of knowledge, that is knowledge as conceptual and logico-discursive, and knowledge, by connaturality.

Knowledge by connaturality is used day to day, "especially in that knowing of the singular which comes about in everyday life and in our relationship person to person." Maritain, 16. Indeed, one wonders if humans could function without having a sort of connatural knowledge with respect to day to day affairs. If one had to use syllogistic, discursive reasoning at every turn, confronting every situation, things would slow down to a snail's pace. Most decisions day to day are made by a snap reaction, a sort of immediate apprehension of the situation and applied judgment, in short, as a result of knowledge by connaturality. No man, after he has learned to drive, thinks discursively on his way to work that he must stop his car at a red light. If he has been driving for any length of time, he knows by connaturality, by a sort of acquired reflexivity, that he should stop at red, and his body responds by inclination without forming concepts and thinking discursively. What happens in the most mundane of affairs can also happen in more important affairs. To help us understand knowledge by connaturality, Maritain looks at this kind of knowledge within four contexts: mysticism, poetry, morality, and metaphysics.

Though this sort of notion, or something similar to this notion, has had "a long history in human thought," awareness of knowledge by connaturality appears to have been the fruit, at least in the West, of efforts to understand the mystical experience of contemplatives. Maritain, 14, 16-17. The knowledge of God gained by mystics is not derived through concepts, through logic and discourse, through human effort. But it is knowledge seized, as it were, by faith and by the union caused by love. This sort of knowledge is ultimately brought about by a loving response to God's inspiration and grace, a God that inhabits, as it were, that very human soul. The theologians grasped that they were dealing with a different sort of knowledge here:

They observed that obviously a fruitive experience of the deity cannot be provided by our concepts or ideas which, as true as they may be, make us know divine things at a distance, and through the analogy of creatures. Consequently, such supra-conceptual knowledge can come about only through connaturality, through the connaturality that love of charity, which is a participation in God's very love, produces between man and God.

Maritain, 16. This form of knowledge was perceived as objective, equally as objective as, though perhaps even of greater dignity than, conceptual knowledge. It was, in fact, the only adequate knowledge of God, since conceptual knowledge of God was impossible. If our concept of God comprehended God, then it would not be God, for God was greater than our intellect, and certainly greater than our concepts. What our intellect comprehended could therefore not be God (si comprehenderis non est Deus). Thus the mystical experience engendered by love was transformed into a form of objective knowledge, amor transit in conditionem objecti per connaturalitatem. This form of knowledge replaced, or increased our understanding of, that sort of knowledge which is properly conceptual, where the intellect grasps the thing known, that is, knowledge as adequatio rei et intellectus. The latter form of knowledge being, with respect to God, inadequate, in any event, since, at the "summit of our knowledge," we can only "know God as unknown," tanquam ignotus cognoscitur. Maritain, 17. So in assessing the contemplative experience, the theologians distinguished an appreciation of two forms of knowledge: conceptual and connatural.

In Maritain's view, there is also an analogous natural mystical experience that man, outside of the Christian revelation, also partakes in. As examples, Maritain cites Plotinus or the Indian mystics. One may also cite Plato or Muslim or Buddhist mystics as examples of this naturally-based mysticism. By definition, this sort of experience would not be grace-based; nevertheless, it is authentically human and consists of a sort of forced, disciplined introspection along with self-emptying that leads one to a supra-conceptual, connatural understanding of Being. It may be better to let Maritain speak:

The reality to be experience [in this sort of connatural form of knowledge] is the very Existence, the very Esse of the Self in its pure metaphysical actuality--Atman--and as proceeding from the One Self . . . .

Maritain, 18. This form of knowledge, of course, is subject to being misunderstood, misinterpreted, guided by forces, spirits that can work to our destruction. Naturally, such sort of human knowledge, like all human knowledge, remains subject to the guidance of the Magisterium of the Church.