I would not like to leave the impression that the metaphysics of The Degrees was simply a repetition of the metaphysics of the Thomistic manuals of the times. It was certainly not. Maritain will write, for example, that the concept of being is “not only transindividual, but trans‑specific, transgeneric, trans‑categorical, as if in opening a blade of grass one started a bird greater than the world.. it is polyvalent, it envelops an actual multiplicity; the bird we spoke of a moment ago is at the same time a flock.”² This is neither the language nor the thought of the manuals. What is stirring here is the primacy of existence which comes more to the forefront when in a powerful passage Maritain will write:

“There is much more in a hundred existing dollars than in a hundred possible dollars. But still more, existence is perfection par excellence, and, as it were, the seal of every other perfection... Doubtless of itself it says only positio extra nihil, but it is the positing extra nihil of this or that. And to posit outside of nothingness a glance or a rose, a man or an angel is something essentially diverse, since it is the very actuation of all the perfection of each of these essentially diverse subjects. Existence is itself varied and admits all the degrees of ontological intensity according to the essences that receive it. If anywhere it is found in the pure state, without an essence that receives it ‑ in other words, if there exists a being whose essence is to exist ‑ existence must ‑there be identical with an absolutely infinite abyss of reality and perfection.”³  

But what we are not seeing is Maritain asking himself how we can come to the intuition of being, that is, a deep perception of the mystery of being that all things murmur. He is certainly aware of the important role that these kinds of insights played in this or that individual’s development, for he recounts some of Raissa’s metaphysical experiences, but then he comments on them “But, far from being integral parts or necessary requisites of metaphysical science, these kinds of metaphysical experiences or intuitions... transcend the proper sphere of metaphysics...”⁴

This shows Maritain’s classical perspective, for he is looking at metaphysics from the side of its own proper intelligibility, and thus such intuitions appear not to be an intrinsic part of its scientific articulation. But what would happen if his vantage point shifted?

The Turning Point

When Maritain finished this massive project, he could not rest. He had lectures to prepare for a course in metaphysics that he was to give that fall at the Institut Catholique, and more importantly, the intellectual momentum and deep stirring of his mind that accompanied the completion of his synthesis was driving him toward new horizons. The lectures at the Institut Catholique that have come down to us as Sept leçons sur l’être deal with the same metaphysics treated so profoundly in The Degrees, but from a very different perspective. When, for example, he ponders again the question of the intuition of being as the way in which we see into the heart of the metaphysics of St. Thomas, he will now sketch the various concrete approaches that could lead to this intuition: Bergson’s duration, Heidegger’s anguish, and Marcel’s fidelity. He has begun to see metaphysics from the point of view of the subject, and this gives these lectures a very different flavor. The metaphysician, Maritain tells us, should be “plunged into existence, steeped ever more deeply into it… experiencing the suffering and struggles of real life.”⁵

This shift is critical for the transformation of The Degrees that is to come, and it goes together with an advance in Maritain’s own metaphysical perception in which he, himself, sees more deeply into the primordial relationship between essence and the act of existence. He now characterizes essences as “positive capacities of existence,” and goes on to write “A Digression on Existence and Philosophy” in which he will call Thomism an “existential philosophy.”⁶ In this way he becomes a forerunner of the rediscovery of the primacy of the act of existing in the metaphysics of St. Thomas which was to take place around World War II. Indeed, Etienne Gilson, who had an important role in this development, acknowledged his debt to Maritain, and his existential Thomism. Now, instead of his previous view expressed in The Degrees of Knowledge in which he said, “these metaphysical experiences or intuitions … transcends the proper sphere of metaphysics,” taking this new perspective he asserts, “It is intuition that makes the metaphysician.”⁷ Or, in other words, he begins to see metaphysics from within. It is the very same metaphysics seen from its concrete dwelling within the human person.

The Degrees of the Spiritual Unconscious

This is how Maritain began to write his second Degrees which we could call The Degrees of the Spiritual Unconscious. Later he would inspire us to see this spiritual unconscious, or preconscious of the intellect, as a vast sea of interiority that lay beneath the waves of our conscious activities, but in these early years it lay hidden in his own depths from where it exercised an inexorable gravitational pull like a hidden planet on the evolution of his thought, and from time to time sent to the surface signs of this inner transformation.

Some further examples will give us the flavor of this inner evolution. We need only read Maritain’s 1920 Art and Scholasticism and then follow it by reading his 1952 Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry to realize that along the way there has been a dramatic change in Maritain’s thought. The emphasis on the objective requirements of art as a virtue of the practical intellect has given way to seeing art and poetry located in the depths of the spiritual unconscious, a notion that receives considerable articulation and development in this later work. A critical point in this trajectory was his 1938 essay, “The Experience of the Poet” where he talked about poetic knowledge as “unconscious” or “hidden in the unconscious.”⁸ This was the same year in which he wrote an essay on Freudian psychoanalysis, and despite his reservations about Freud’s work, was stimulated to reflect on the fact that the classical tradition of St. Thomas implicitly spoke of an unconscious when it described how the human soul did not have even a partial autointellection of itself, but arrived at conscious awareness as a result of a reflection on its acts.

The same kind of eruption of the spiritual unconscious in Maritain’s thought can be seen in his essay, “The Immanent Dialectic of the First Act of Freedom” which first appeared in 1945, and then in revised form in 1947. The second version contains a new “Theological Parenthesis” that will speak of “the unconscious and pre-conscious life of the mind.”⁹ This modification, however, did not satisfy him, and so in his On the Church of Christ, with a preface dated June 11, 1970, he will tell us that the essay needed to be reworked in the light of the spiritual unconscious.¹⁰

We can find a further example of this transformation of Maritain’s thought along the route that led from his 1923 essay, “A Question on the Mystical Life and Contemplation”¹¹ in which he talked about an atypical or masked contemplation, to his and Raissa’s Liturgy and Contemplation in 1959 in which this masked contemplation has now sunk into the spiritual unconscious, and then finally to his 1966 The Peasant of the Garonne in which he accuses himself of having made a mistake, for it is not just masked contemplation that is to be found in the spiritual unconscious, but contemplation in its typical and manifest forms.¹²

It would be possible to plot these eruptions of the idea of the spiritual unconscious in Maritain’s work in more detail,¹³ and thus demonstrate that Maritain did, indeed, carry out a wide-ranging, if not fully conscious, transformation of his thought around the idea of the spiritual unconscious. Maritain is slowly transposing The Degrees of Knowledge into a new register. Once we recognize what he has been doing, we can attempt to articulate this sequel to The Degrees of Knowledge more formally, and are confronted with new possibilities to explore.

If this transformation in Maritain’s thought exists, and represents a major development in his way of seeing, then why has it gone virtually unnoticed? Several reasons can be suggested. First of all, Maritain, himself, lived out this transformation but did not formally focus on its extent and implications. Secondly, the fortunes of Thomism changed dramatically while this transformation was going on, and with Thomism marginalized in many places the circumstances were not favorable for its recognition. Thus on the rare occasion when Maritain’s ideas on the spiritual unconscious were examined their true import remained unrecognized.¹⁴

The Scope of the Spiritual Unconscious

The term spiritual unconscious, or preconscious of the intellect, means the natural depths of the human soul. As such, it was implicitly recognized in the past in language that spoke of the center of the soul or the depths of the heart, and in the scholastic account not only of self-consciousness, but the agent, or illuminating intellect. But it was one of Maritain’s greatest achievements to make it explicit and begin to explore its contours, but he left this work incomplete as a legacy to the future. Let’s look at the major dimensions of the spiritual unconscious, and at the new ways of seeing it can stimulate. The spiritual unconscious can be said to be composed of a suprarational, or mystical unconscious, a metaphysical unconscious, and a psychological unconscious which includes an unconscious of nature.

The Suprarational Unconscious

The suprarational unconscious is the spiritual unconscious as transformed by grace. It is the home not only of mystical experience, but faith and theology, as well. By recognizing, for example, that contemplation takes place in the spiritual unconscious, we immediately gain a new vantage point from which to look at two of the most difficult and intractable, and intertwined problems in the modern history of Western Christian mysticism, which are the perceptibility of contemplation, that is, how it enters into consciousness, and what we can do to achieve it. Vast quantities of ink have been spilled wrangling about these questions since the beginning of the 17^th century in the wake of the writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and still widely accepted solutions have not emerged.

These debates over what was called acquired, or active, contemplation are important not only for the history of contemplative spirituality, but in evaluating contemporary attempts to renew the contemplative life. Their first phase stretched the length of the 17^th century from Tomás de Jesús, the prolific Carmelite spiritual writer who advanced his own interpretation of John of the Cross, to Miguel de Molinos whose condemnation helped usher in a night of the mystics that was to last until the beginning of the 20^th century. Then, no sooner had mystical studies revived, these arguments reignited in the writings of Saudreau, Poulain, Garrigou-Lagrange and many others, and became both repetitive and combative without arriving at any consensus.¹⁵ But if mystical experience, or infused contemplation, is centered in the spiritual unconscious and radiates out its influence from there, then it becomes more comprehensible how it could exist, yet at certain stages be imperceptible to consciousness, and how its relationship to the conscious faculties cannot be that of the end product of their efforts. Instead, we can think of contemplation flooding the faculties from below, as it were. Further, if contemplation takes place in the spiritual unconscious, then one of its neighbors there is the psychological unconscious, and one of the greatest challenges of a mystical theology of the future is to explore the interaction between these two dimensions of the spiritual unconscious.

The Metaphysical Unconscious

In the metaphysical unconscious we find the home of the intuition of being, as Maritain indicated. This fact is of singular importance because it sheds light on one of the greatest mysteries in the history of Thomism. How could Thomas speak so clearly and forcefully about the central role of the act of existing in his metaphysics, and yet those who came after him often miss the profundity of what he was saying? The history of Thomism can be seen as the discovery and forgetting and rediscovery of esse, and this forgetting of existence is intimately connected with the arch-sin of Thomism, which is its over-conceptualization as illustrated by the preconciliar neo-scholastic manuals which contributed directly to the eclipse of Thomism that we are presently enduring. Maritain, for example, described Josephus Gredt’s Elementa philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae, as an aerolite fallen from heaven. The thought of Aristotle and Thomas is expounded in great detail in the form of syllogisms, and thus laid out for all to see, but the interior philosophical processes that gave birth to these thoughts is invisible. Novice philosophers, trying to learn from manuals of this sort, ended up being able to parrot various Thomistic theses, but had much greater difficulty penetrating beyond the words, or as Maritain would put it, arriving at the seeing so vital in understanding the metaphysics of St. Thomas.

If the locus of the intuition of being is found in the metaphysical unconscious, then we can understand more readily how this forgetting could take place, and we are led to a question close to the heart of Thomism’s revival and future: can this intuition of being be cultivated?

But the intuition of being does not dwell in the spiritual unconscious in isolated splendor. It shares that interior space with a mysticism of the Self, which Maritain felt was at the heart of Hindu mysticism, and, we can add, at the heart of Buddhist enlightenment, as well. He described this experience in his 1938 essay, “Natural Mysticism and the Void” as at once an experience of the existence of the soul, and of God as the author of this existence in an experience which takes place in a night of all concepts. Just where should we locate this night but in the depths of the spiritual unconscious, or more exactly in the metaphysical unconscious?

Maritain’s ideas on natural mysticism were developed by Olivier Lacombe in regard to Hinduism, and Louis Gardet in regard to Islam,¹⁶ but they have not as yet played a significant role in the dialogues that Christianity is presently carrying on with those religions. Seeing the mysticism of the Self and the intuition of being as dwelling in the metaphysical unconscious opens the door to a deeper level of East-West dialogue.

The Psychological Unconscious

The psychological unconscious is, to the modern mind, the unconscious, but on Maritain’s map it is but one dimension of the spiritual unconscious. Indeed, he had some hard things to say about Freud’s unconscious which is important in itself, he asserts, but too often functions as a deaf and automatic unconscious split off from the rest of the personality. But this should not mislead us to mentally sequester the psychological unconscious from the rest of the spiritual unconscious. It is not by nature deaf and automatic, but can be described in one of its principle aspects as an empirical psychology which examines images and affects as they emerge into consciousness and traces them back to the psychic structures which, though invisible in themselves, can be hypothesized to have caused them. Thus, Jung, by an extensive study of similar motifs in dreams and mythology from around the world inductively arrives at his theory of archetypes which function as the structural components of the collective unconscious.

There is also another dimension to the psychological unconscious that we could call the unconscious, or within of nature. There the 19^th century mechanistic view of separate objects interacting solely by way of efficient causes, gives way to a more interior and mysterious sense of nature that is expressed in theories as diverse as David Bohm’s views on nonlocality, Rupert Sheldrake’s biological forms and their morphic resonance, and Jung’s synchronicity.¹⁷ In each of these hypotheses objects, far from being closed in upon themselves, begin to appear as subjects in dynamic communion with each other. And in what should be of particular interest to a Thomist philosophy of nature, they appear to enter into this communion, not by efficient causality, but by what could be called various modalities of formal causality. This unconscious of nature corresponds to Maritain’s detailed examination in The Degrees of the sciences of nature while the roots of a philosophy of nature is to be found in the metaphysical unconscious.

These various dimensions of the spiritual unconscious are naturally and inevitably drawn into dynamic interaction with each other. The sciences of nature, for example, are drawn to a philosophy of nature to articulate the philosophical principles upon which they are founded, while it, in its turn, needs the empirical sciences lest it be locked up in a limbo of abstraction. This dialogue between the philosophy of nature and the sciences of nature was one of the dreams of Maritain, and one for which he carefully prepared its epistemological foundations. The lively dialogue that could take place is, unfortunately, still part of Thomism’s future.

The Structure of the Spiritual Unconscious

It is natural enough to imagine the various dimensions of the spiritual unconscious like the floors of a house. The psychological unconscious would be the basement, the metaphysical unconscious the first floor, and the suprarational unconscious the top floor. But there is another way to look at the intimate structure of the spiritual unconscious that might be more fruitful in the long run. Maritain was self-admittedly fond of diagrams and drew one for his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry¹⁸ that showed three cones inside of each other. The largest cone represented the intellect, while the second largest represented the imagination, and the smallest the external senses.

He explains, somewhat counterintuitively to common sense, that the imagination emanates from the intellect, and the senses from the imagination. We could say that the senses are in a certain way contained in the imagination in which they take on a higher life, and the imagination, in turn, is contained in the intellect where it, too, transcends a purely animal imagination.

If we let ourselves be inspired by this diagram, we can imagine the spiritual unconscious, again as three cones, but this time the largest represents the suprarational unconscious, and it embraces the metaphysical unconscious which, in turn, embraces the psychological unconscious. Then we are led to the hypothesis that the psychological unconscious emerges from the metaphysical unconscious which, in turn, emerges from the suprarational unconscious. This does not, of course, mean that the psychological unconscious as it expresses itself in the sciences of nature is dependent in its intimate workings on the metaphysical unconscious, as if it had no proper autonomy of its own. Rather, it is exercised in the wider enveloping atmosphere of the metaphysical unconscious. The metaphysical unconscious, in turn, while it must be clearly distinguished from the suprarational unconscious, is distinguished from it, as Maritain would have it, in order to be united to it.

The bases of the three cones in Maritain’s diagram represented for him the conscious products of each power, that is, concepts coming from the intellect, images from the imagination, and sensations from the powers of sensing. In contrast, the volume of each cone represents the power, itself, that is, the intellect, imagination, and external senses. In regard to the spiritual unconscious, the bases of the cones represent conscious products, as well, but this time of the particular dimensions of the spiritual unconscious, that is, the theories of the sciences of nature, a metaphysics elaborated in concepts, and a theology, and even contemplative experience to the degree that it is articulated. The volume of the cone illustrates the depth of the spiritual unconscious from which these products emerge. The primary lesson to be drawn in each case is an important one. Any conceptualization, that is, a fixation on particular formulations as somehow exclusively representing reality is undercut by the height and breadth and depth of the inner nonconceptual world that gave birth to it.

This way of imagining things symbolizes something subtler, as well, something Maritain made great use of in terms of his distinction between nature and state. Each cone has its own distinctive nature, its proper way of knowing, and finality. But the nesting of one cone within the other represents the concrete or existential state in which they are found. Maritain used this distinction to good effect when trying to unravel the much debated issue of whether there could be a Christian philosophy. There cannot be a Christian philosophy, he concluded, in the sense that this philosophy in its nature and way of proceeding is directly derived from faith. Then it would be no philosophy at all. But there can be a philosophy that dwells within a Christian soul and receives inspiration, strength and guidance from its Christian beliefs and practices. He makes use of this distinction again when he considers what he calls moral philosophy adequately considered. Moral philosophy when seen according to its own nature and finality is complete in itself, but inadequate when seen in regard to the supernatural state to which we are called.

If we apply this same distinction between nature and state to the relationship of the various degrees of the spiritual unconscious, granted some poetic license, we could say that each cone is a cone of light of a particular color. And these colors, while distinct in themselves, interpenetrate each other and create new shades of color. A concrete example would not be amiss in order to see how these relationships play out in practice. Let’s imagine someone who has received a genuine contemplative grace in the depths of the suprarational unconscious. This grace has its own dynamism. We could say it has its own inner tendency to make its impact felt throughout the realms of the spiritual unconscious, and even to make its way into consciousness. Therefore we can imagine that as it transverses the psychological unconscious, the psychological unconscious is stimulated to attempt to grasp this transcendent reality in images in order to understand it. We might say that in a complex process, mostly hidden from awareness, the memory and the imagination work together to represent this grace to the imagination. Would we be surprised, then, if the recipient of these numinous images, stirred up under the impact of a genuine contemplative grace, canonizes the whole experience of grace and images, especially since he or she is keenly aware that the creation of these images was not the work of consciousness? The contours of the problems such a person faces begins to become clear. How well will the recipient be able to distinguish the genuine grace from its adventitious clothing it has received in the psychological unconscious? Certainly this problem was well known to John of the Cross, and he responded to it with a sophisticated discussion of the ways in which we can be deceived, and the rules that should guide our behavior. In more recent time Karl Rahner in his monograph, Visions and Prophesies,¹⁹ gives an excellent analysis of how a supernatural grace can have less than purely supernatural effects because of the reverberations it sets up in the psyche. But looking at this issue from the point of view of the spiritual unconscious makes more explicit how this takes place.

The Future of Thomism

Even if we now grant that Maritain’s thought underwent a significant evolution and became centered on the spiritual unconscious, and even we admit how extensive this idea is, we could still be inclined to ask whether it really has something significant to say about the future of Thomism. Isn’t is a rather grandiose claim to assert that the degrees of the spiritual unconscious could have a major impact on the Thomism of the future? I don’t think so.

There are any number of reasons for the decline of Thomism, but there is wide-spread agreement that one of them was due to the fact that it succumbed to a kind of essentialism or conceptualism that made it more a matter of words than a seeing into the mystery of being. This notionalism went against the tenor of modern times which had brought forth in many guises the central role of the subject. Some Thomists realized this and expended a great deal of energy to bring the Thomism of the schools in living contact with this sense of the subject. Thus we have a transcendental Thomism, or a Thomism influenced by phenomenology, or by existentialism and so forth. But each of these approaches faces particular challenges because the fundamental epistemological and metaphysical principles that formed the foundation of various schools of modern philosophy need to be carefully examined and even transformed in order to be in harmony with Thomistic ones.

Maritain had discovered St. Thomas after his encounter with Bergson, and so he was already sensitive to the problems involved in these kinds of outreaches to modern philosophy, and he even insisted that he would rather be called a paleothomist rather than a neothomist. But his whole personality was forward-looking. The Degrees of Knowledge was a distillation of much of the best of the Thomism of the past. The Degrees of the Spiritual Unconscious, in its turn, is a way to bring a sense of the subject – or subjectivity in the most ontological sense of the term – into the heart of Thomism without disrupting its fundamental principles. In short, the sense of subjectivity to be found in the guiding idea of the spiritual unconscious is rooted in the Thomistic tradition, itself, and therefore avoids the difficulties that come from having to make over another philosophical tradition.

It will do a Thomist of the future little good to be in possession of certain invaluable insights and principles if they are kept locked away by an antiquated language, and even a style of proceeding that is inaccessible to most who come in casual contact with it. Then Thomism will remain isolated from many of the most interesting debates and dialogues going on today. A Thomism of the spiritual unconscious, on the other hand, could help us move from a too historically conceived Thomism to an authentically philosophical one, that is, a Thomism that has the self-confidence and a firm enough grasp of its own nature to deeply engage contemporary problems and apply the treasures it has accumulated over the ages to them. The spiritual unconscious allows us to remain firmly in touch with the best Thomism of the past, and yet be open and eager to see it engage important contemporary issues.

In summary, the spiritual unconscious was at the heart of the inner evolution of Maritain’s thought, and he did, indeed, write a second Degrees of Knowledge, and it remains for us to take this revolutionary map and see what treasures it leads to.

NOTES
 

1. Antoinette Grunelius, “Jacques Maritain et Kolbsheim” in Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 4-5, p. 95.

2. Jacques Maritain, Distinguish To Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge, Newly translated from the fourth French edition under the direction of Gerald Phelan, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959, p. 212.

3. Ibid., p. 216-217.

4. Ibid., p. 279.

5. Jacques Maritain. A Preface to Metaphysics. Mentor Omega Books. 1962. p. 30.

6. Ibid., p. 28.

7. Ibid., p. 49.

8. “The Experience of the Poet” in The Situation of Poetry, , NY: Philosophical Library. 1955. p. 80.

9. Jacques Maritain. “The Immanent Dialectic in the First Act of Freedom” in The Range of Reason. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1952. p. 80.

10. Jacques Maritain. On the Church of Christ. Univ. of Notre Dame Press. 1973. p. 261, note 23.

11. This article appeared as an appendix in Prayer and Intelligence. NY: Sheed & Ward. 1927.

12. Jacques Maritain. The Peasant of the Garonne. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1968. p. 228, note 103.

13. James Arraj. Mysticism, Metaphysics and Maritain: On the Road to the Spiritual Unconscious. Chiloquin, OR: Inner Growth Books. 1993.

14. See, for example, Martín Federico Echavarría, “El inconsciente espiritual y la supraconsciencia del espíritu según Jacques Maritain” in Sapiencia, 56, 2001, page 175-189. 

15. For an account of this long saga and its implications see: James Arraj. From St. John of the Cross to Us: The Story of a 400 Year Long Misunderstanding and What it Means for the Future of Christian Mysticism. Chiloquin, OR: Inner Growth Books. 1999.

16. See especially Louis Gardet and Olivier Lacombe. L’expérience du Soi. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1981.

17. James Arraj. The Mystery of Matter: Nonlocality, Morphic Resonance, Synchronicity and the Philosophy of Nature of Thomas Aquinas. Chiloquin, OR: Inner Growth Books. 1996.

18. Jacques Maritain. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Cleveland and NY: Meridian Books. 1953. p. 77.

19. Karl Rahner. Visions and Prophecies. NY: Herder and Herder. 1963.