In his earlier essay in aesthetics--after lengthily disposing of a number of Aristotelian-Thomist distinctions between the speculative order and the practical order, between the "useful" arts and the "fine" arts, and so on--M. Maritain, in the most interesting passages of Art and Scholasticism, concerned himself with this astonishing "growth of self-consciousness" in the modern artist. And what chiefly occupied him was the thought that, in submitting to the idea of making art out of the idea of art, the artist might (...) become so fascinated with technique and so estranged from the existential world of nature and the universe of man that he should forget that, unlike God, he cannot create ex nihilo. He wanted, then, to confront him with the futility of claiming any kind of aseity for his art, for pure art, he said, "involves nothing, the subject being completely whittled away. I call that a sin of idealism in relation to the matter of art: pushed to the extreme, a perfect building, with nothing to build." The idea of making poetry out of the idea of poetry or painting out of the idea of painting can, in other words, never yield anything but sterility, since the kind of "metaphysical vastness" that characterizes greatness in the arts has always been a result of vital transactions between the creative Self and the universes of Being. And for the poet or the painter to seek to allay the kind of "eucharistic passion" that arises at the very center of the artistic process is for him to run the risk of suicide, since it is for him to isolate his art from everything that is not "its own peculiar rules of operation." There is one long and wonderful sentence in which the lesson is summed up, as M. Maritain says that he would remind modern art that. (shrink)

Twelve scholars in religion and the humanities present Christian interpretations of tragedy in literature, including works by Nietzsche, Kafka, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Milton and others.

The novels and plays of such writers an Camus, Sartre, and Beckett plunged us into the existentialist experience--of nostalgia and anguish, of alienation and extremity. Now Nathan A. Scott, Jr., a leading interpreter of the literature of existentialism, reveals the literary origins and the philosophical and theological roots of this important movement. In perceptive biographies of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, and Buber, he shows how their thoughts were shaped by the events of their lives and their relationships to others; then (...) he traces the development of the philosophy of existentialism by these revolutionary thinkers. Dr. Scott gives us a clear and even encouraging understanding of existentialism as that type of philosophic and poetic vision which insists on the dignity and uniqueness of the human presence, and which represents the most important contribution of the twentieth century to the humanistic tradition. So, too, the works of the existentialist writers are a major contribution to modern literature.--From publisher description. (shrink)