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.

Reflections on Thompson's "Laus Legis"

IN HIS POEM "LAUS LEGIS," "Praise to Law," Francis Thompson, the poet of the "Hound of Heaven" fame, praises the Eternal Law in its manifestation in the irrational world, in other words, outside of its manifestation in man, either in Divine Law, or in the Natural Law. The poem is structured in the form a dialogue between two voices, the voice of the Law, Vox Legis, and the voice of an inquirer, the Vox Quaerentis.

Thompson's subject matter is the Law that issued forth from the mind of God eternally upon his command "Fiat lux!" "Let there be Light!" (Gen. 1:3) From the unordered chaos, the "growl" and "frowning terror" of a freshly "unleashed Creation" that beckoned "discord," the Eternal Law brought forth order, an order, a ratio or logos, which provided a "rampart round security," within which life could then flourish. This Eternal Law is what gives order to chaos, and without the Eternal Law, the created world and its order would dissolve back into chaos. The Eternal Law exercises its authority over disorder, like a dog's master may "stamp" the ground and cause his "warden-hound of Paradise" to "cower." So disorder cowers beneath the greater authority of the Eternal Law, whose voice commands impersonal fate.

From the ordered world--chaos being held at bay--the Eternal Law follows God's directives: Fiat firmamentum! and Congregentur aquae! and separates the water from the waters, and the land from the waters below. (Gen. 1:6, 9.) So the land comes forth from the lower waters, as if it were the back of a giant, scaly sea serpent, a "Leviathan earth," coming out of the sea. Here come the mountains! The "woody fells," the "Aetnean spiracle"s." All is ordered with the law of "adamantean gossamer," a Law of suave gossamer spirit yet able easy to mold adamantine rock.

Earth and Sea are named, and the command issues from God for grass, plants, and fruitful trees both to be, and from thence to issue forth their prolix fruit and abundant grain. And who to bring forth the "rainbow-rain" required cool the "flame-grassed sod," so that the "paradisal grain" would bear fruit and issue seed? Among the "mailed birds of God," as Dante called the angels (e.g., the l'uccel divino of Canto 2 or the l'uccel di Dio of Canto 4 of the Purgatorio), the Eternal Law cast the first seed "'mid the clangour, clangour, clangour" of the "tinkling justle" of their seraphic silver wings.

The Eternal Law is also "Captain of the stars," those "stellar hordes" that shine in the sable field, the dark sky, the "champain of the night." The Eternal Law, too, orders their intricate form in constellations, those "wheeling ranks intrinsicate," that will forever grace the nights until earth's rotted end.

The Eternal Law is also the enchanter of the skies and their strange electrical potency. It is the unblinking Law with the "moveless gaze" who orders lightning to issue from the dark and "caverned clouds," whose command cause "levins" to "stroke and pause" or "twitch the sting from their hot jaws."

The Eternal Law is what fixes the course of the moon, and manages the regularity of its phases; the same Law who steers the sun from its morning glow, to the "vibrant rays" of noon, to its crepuscular "red" of dusk. And from its sinking, foundering in the West, restores it to the East for the next days' rising, as if the sun embarked on some celestial boat beyond our sight, unmoored from the morning star, and captained with "silver oars" for the new day's dawning.

The Eternal Law brings forth the lily's bloom, and from its hidden shroud in the earth, the "sepulchral mold," brings forth the leafy "green garment," the white-limbed shoot, and the fragrant flower symbol of a Saint's purity, or a Christian death hopeful of the raising of the dead, that day when the "lids o' their golden tombs" will "burst" open.

It is the Eternal Law that one hears behind the "pipings" "so diverse," "who steers the throngs of note on note," of our feathered friends. Can we really fathom the hidden maestro behind the scream of the eagle and hawk, the chant of falcons, the caw of the crow, the fink of the finch, the chatter of the jay, the pipe and warble of the nightingale, the whistle of the blackbird, the boom of the bittern, the chuckle of the linnet, hoot of the owl, the wail of the loon, the coo of the dove, the honk of the goose, the quack of the duck, the cackle of the hen, the twitter of swallows, and the chirp of the sparrow? What marvelous Law is that!

But the Eternal Law is also behind the griefs, the sorrows, that always follow the coat tails of the ephemeral "joyance" in hac lacrimarum valle. Through it, through it--alas--do sorrows come, but sorrow's refining, through God's Eternal Law, also brings forth love. And so the world goes under the Eternal Law's providential guidance on and on and on and on: from joy to grief, and from grief to love. For it is the mystery of this world that "sadness sitteth . . . a portress at the gate of hearts." This is the mystery that Gerard Manley Hopkins's Margaret would experience, and she grew wiser:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

And so deep is this mystery, this "Deep Magic," that even God become Man, had to bow to the Eternal Law, and had to suffer and die. What, after all, is Jesus on the Cross, and what, after all, is Mary's sword of sorrow, her gladius doloris, but the raw, bloody exhibition of the Eternal Law's mystery that joy is short, that grief is long, but that love is longer still?

And when the end of the world arrives, "upon the peal of doom" come from the bells of the Word's belfry, the Eternal Law's restraint, its "pinion" on chaos will be released, the firmaments will collapse in fire, and the whole universe will go "rocking down to night." There shall be no more Providence, at least as we now know it, and the "fates may gorge to their content." The continents, "redly riven, and bleeding fire," shall "drift asunder" and collide in a last pangaea. And the sky, which by then will have tired of witnessing the constant sins of Man against the good God, will droop, turn sick, and like a sickly bird, "moult its stars" as if they were feathers. With the world, time shall end, and the eternal present reign. And then Eternal Law will cry:

By me what sprung, by me shall die:
Back to God's stretched hand I fly,
To perch there for eternity.

And our souls, and those of our loved ones, and those of all who have shunned evil and done good, we hope, shall be with God, and we shall be able to go beyond the Eternal Law, and see God as He is, and live in the Light of Glory, ensconced in the divine rhythm of the Trinitarian Life of God Himself.

Amen.

"Laus Legis"

Laus Legis
by Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
_____

Vox Quaerentis
When the great floodgates God first sundered
Of Himself on desolation,
And round reverberate Heaven there thundered
The growl of an unleashed Creation,
What voice could cry to discord: ‘Be
Thou rampart round security?’

Vox Legis
I bade the frowning terror be
Citadelled o’er security
Yea, at my stamp she cowers, and lies
The warden-hound of Paradise.

Vox Quaerentis
Leviathan earth, with back upstood from
Chaos, shook its woody fells;
Belching a conflagrant flood from
Its Aetnean spiracles;
And where then was there found a hand
That could draw it to the land?

Vox Legis
I, with the finger of my hand,
Plucked it to the heaven-strand;
And with a twist I bound it there
Of adamantean gossamer.

Vox Quaerentis
Whose the hand that strews the manna
For the mailèd birds of God,
When congregating pennons fan a
Flicker from the flame-grassed sod,
With tinkling justle, and the clangours
Intersweeping of sweet angers?

Vox Legis
I cast the paradisal grain
In a sudden rainbow-rain;
’Mid the clangour, clangour, clangour,
Of their wings in argent anger.

Vox Quaerentis
Threating occidential rampires
When the stellar hordes alight,
Kindling their innumerous camp-fires
On the champain of the night;
What tactic ranks their rangèd wars?
Who is Captain of the stars?

Vox Legis
My nod their linked battalia wait,
Their wheeling ranks intrinsicate;
Until this rotten earth become
An apple ’twixt the jaws of doom.

Vox Quaerentis
Who hath seen the broods of lightnings
Seething in their caverned cloud,
And endured their dreadful brightenings
With lids unblenched, with front unbowed?
Whose countenance the strong thunders mutes,
When they tear Heaven up by the roots?

Vox Legis
With moveless gaze enchant I these,
And interspheral harmonies;
I bide the levins’ stroke and pause,
Or twitch the sting from their hot jaws.

Vox Quaerentis
When Eve’s blown vestures half uncover
The lucence of her moonèd breast;
And a red vortex gurges over
The foundered sun in the tossed West,
Who to the heavens’ high-seas restores
And sets it round with silver oars?

Vox Legis
I bid its banks of vibrant rays
Beat to bright froth heaven’s water-ways
Unmooring from Phosphorian shores
The long flash of those silver oars.

Vox Quaerentis
When the lady lily, slipping
Her green garment, stands up slight,
With her white limbs newly dripping
From the laving of the light;
What hand can gird her safely pure,
From her funeral mold renew her?

Vox Legis
I engird her safely pure,
From sepulchral mold renew her;
Till the dead stars that night enwombs
Burst the lids o’ their golden tombs.

Vox Quaerentis
Who hath piped to every bird
Pipings of so diverse noise?
Given each its little unknown word?
Perfumed with tone its diverse voice?
Who steers the throngs of note on note
That shake its multitudinous throat?

Vox Legis
I teach their passionate souls, small, strong
To break and curdle into song;
Allay or perturbate all notes
That swarm within their populous throats.

Vox Quaerentis
Who graved grief’s face, a signet-ring for
God’s own signet-hand to wear?
Made smooth joy a mirroring for
Grief to see her own self fair?
The fount of tears so near to rise,
Their spray perturbs the calm-mered eyes?

Vox Legis
Through me, through me, doth joyance prove
The way to grief, and grief to love;
Yea, sadness sitteth, by my arts,
A portress at the gate of hearts.

Vox Quaerentis
Who is he of dread dominion,
That, upon the peal of doom,
Weighs two firmaments of pinion,
Constellate of burning plume?
Under his foot off-pushing into flight,
The universe goes rocking down to night.

Vox Legis
That is I, oh, that is I!
By me what sprung, by me shall die:
Back to God’s stretched hand I fly,
To perch there for eternity.
The fates may gorge to their content,
To implacable desire,
On the shapes that drift asunder
Down the inundating thunder,—
Carrion hulks of continent,
Redly riven, and bleeding fire:
But I shadow with supernal
Wings of sway the fields eternal,
There my great empery feels not jars,
Though the sick heaven shall moult its stars.

Notes: Aetnean spiracles = from orifices from Mt. Aetna; rampires = ramparts; intrinsicate = intricate; levins = lightning flashes; gurges = surges; Phosphorian = fm Phorphorus, the morning star.

"The Hidden Law"

"The Hidden Law" by W. H. Auden

The Hidden Law does not deny
Our laws of probability,
But takes the atom and the star
And human beings as they are,
And answers nothing when we lie.

It is the only reason why
No government can codify,
And verbal definitions mar
The Hidden Law.

Its utter patience will not try
To stop us if we want to die;
If we escape it in a car,
If we forget It in a bar,
These are the ways we're punished by
The Hidden Law.

The “Hidden Law” was published in The Double Man, a book of poems written by W. H. Auden and published in 1941. See W. H. Auden, The Double Man (New York: Random House 1941). The Double Man is also known under its English title New Year Letter. The poems included in The Double Man or New Year Letter document Auden’s return to the Anglican faith of his childhood after his lengthy flirtation with Communist and other leftist thought.

The Double Man includes the poem “New Year Letter,” which is accompanied by a series of idiosyncratic and often cryptic “Notes,” and it is these that contain this poem. Though published (untitled) as a note to the lengthy poem “The New Year Letter” in The Double Man, “The Hidden Law,” also appeared under the title "Aera sub Lege" in 1945. See Collected Poems (New York: Vintage International, 1991) (Edward Mendelson, ed.), 905.

The title "Aera sub Lege" (trans. = “The Era under Law”) would suggest that Auden intended to contrast the Aera sub Lege (the time before the Christian dispensation) with the Aera sub Gratia (the Christian dispensation). In choosing to publish the poem under this title, perhaps Auden intended to show how Grace may be found in Law, like Law may be found in Grace, sort of following the Augustinian concept relating to the Scriptures: Novum in vetere latet, vetus in novo patet. (The New [Testament] is hidden in the Old [Testament], the Old [Testament] is made manifest in the New [Testament]). So, then Grace is hidden in the Law, and the Law is made manifest in Grace.

Prior to writing “The Hidden Law,” Auden had written his poems “Law Like Love” and the “New Year Letter,” where he also struggles with the notion of Law and Freedom and their relationship to God. In this poem, however, Auden adopts the Isaiahan or Pascalian image of the mysterious, hidden God—the Deus absconditus of Isaiah and Pascal—and applies it to the mystery he perceived in his encounter with Law. For Auden, Law participates in the very life of the divine mystery and so shares in this mystery. Law is a Lex abscondita, a hidden Law.

Auden’s message is Augustinian and apophatic: Si comprehenderis non est Lex. In a sense, perhaps, Law, like God, may be known only through a negative jurisprudence, an apophatic jurisprudence. Auden, however, does not reject the notion of a positive or cataphatic jurisprudence based on analogy. This analogia Legis or analogia Iuris , as one may call it, is handled in his earlier poem “Law Like Love,” where Auden concludes that the best analogy for understanding Law is Love. In “The Hidden Law,” however, Auden stresses that for whatever we may think it is, Law remains, in a very real sense, hidden from us.

The notes in The Double Man that precede this poem when originally published may be found in The Double Man, 112-13.

762. The Lex Abscondita
Natural law is not to be confused with human political law. The latter is a generalized will imposed by force upon particular wills. If it is broken it does not cease to be the law. Human law rests upon Force and Belief, i.e., belief in this rightness.
In Natural law, on the other hand, there can be no opposition between the will of the whole and the separate wills of the parts. It is simply what happens in the field under consideration if there is no interference from outside. Our knowledge of Natural Law is derived from an observation of particulars. If we find a single exception, it means that our formulation of Natural Law has been incorrect.
There is therefore no Natural Philosophy, only a Natural Way. The way rests upon Faith and Doubt: Faith that Natural Law exists and that we can have knowledge of it; Doubt that our knowledge can ever be perfect or unmixed with error.
Our grounds for Faith: the unhappiness of Man
Our grounds for doubt: the same.
(Definition. I believe X=I believe the proposition X to be true.
I have faith in X=The existence of X is, for me, an absolute presupposition.
I doubt X=I admit the possibility that, at some future unspecified date, and for reasons also unspecified, I may come
either to believe the proposition X to be false
or to find that, for me, the presupposition that
X exists in longer absolute but relative.)
[Here the poem “The Hidden Law” followed]