Creative Simulacrum? Maritain’s Creative Intuition and Tolkien’s Sub-Creation applied to Large Language Models

Jacques Maritain and J.R.R. Tolkien are titans of 20th-century thought. The former, born Paris 1882, a philosopher and theologian whose 1906 conversion to Catholicism, alongside his wife Raïssa, shaped the course of his intellectual life. His political theory, notably Integral Humanism shaped modern Catholic social teaching, even as his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry contributed to metaphysics in both aesthetics and epistemology. Like Maritain, Tolkien lived through both World Wars. Born a decade later, Bloemfontein, 1892, he was a philologist and fantasy writer, penning The Lord of the Rings, whose imaginative world-building left an indelible mark on Western culture. They died in the same year, 1973, symbolically closing a chapter in Christian anthropological insight.

This article explores the relevance of Maritain’s concept of creative intuition and Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation for evaluating the basis of AI ‘creativity’. Engaging Maritain’s Thomistic view that artistic creation stems from an intuitive, non-discursive grasp of being, and Tolkien’s Christianized Platonism, which understands human creativity as a form of participation in divine creation, this article examines the nature and legitimacy of machine-generated content. It argues that, taken together, they offer a perspective that renders the claims of generative AI to authentic ‘creativity’ as, at best, simulacrum—and at worst, a medium for the diabolic.

Maritain’s Theory of Creative Inspiration

Nurtured in the fertile milieu of early twentieth-century Paris, when the city rivalled Athens in its intellectual dynamism, Maritain was exposed to Bergsonian vitalism, scientific positivism, the Orthodox theological diaspora, and the seedbed of Catholic intellectual renewal. At the Sorbonne, he met Raïssa Oumansoff, who became his Russian-Jewish wife and life-long collaborator. In Paris, Maritain sought a philosophie chrétienne capable of withstanding the dual threats of nihilism and authoritarianism. The shadow of the Modernist Crisis in the Catholic Church, coupled with the resurgent medievalism encouraged by Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris, nourished the “Thomistic revival,” which turned to Aquinas to counteract the fragmentation of modern discourse.

Maritain is predicated upon Thomistic actus essendi (act of being), with a clear emphasis on esse over essential, which supports a metaphysical vision in which the contingency of created being is participation in divine Being itself. His reading of Aquinas’s distinction between essence and existence becomes a hermeneutic key for understanding finitude and the transcendent basis of nature. In this way, Maritain resists the flattening ontologies of analytic nominalism. Moreover, Maritain rejects the positivist and materialist reduction of art to technical craft or subjective impulse, insofar as genuine art arises from a connatural grasp of being that transcends empirical cognition. “The artist does not think his way to creation; he feels his way. He creates as he knows, by connaturality.”1placeholder This pre-rational, pre-conscious “creative intuition” arises from the depths of the intellectus and the synderesis, where the soul bathes in the clarity of divine illumination and perceives truth within the imagination.

For Maritain, then, beauty is a transcendental property of being itself, and artistic creation, in this schema, is properly contemplative receptivity. The artist discerns in order to incarnate what is actually pre-existent within an intelligible order that underpins reality. Such intuition is the fruit of interior discipline, whereby the soul is receptive to connatural knowledge, as knowledge born of love: “The poet is not only moved by the imagination, but also by an affective intuition of being.”2placeholder Artistic creation is akin to the mystic’s gaze or the saint’s prayer, as both an epistemological endeavour and a moral vocation. Maritain’s Thomism is here filtered through Étienne Gilson, who emphasized the historical and ontological grounding, insofar as his theory corresponds with the divine illumination found in St Bonaventure, where truth is not constructed but unveiled by a light that exceeds human faculties. “Art is an effect of the light of intelligence,” Maritain insists, “a light touched by the vibration of being itself.”3placeholder In this schema, the artist is a prophetic witness insofar as they speak in response to, and address their creation to, an order that transcends their person. “The aesthetic encounter,” he writes, “invites the spectator to perceive the immutable beauty that orders the cosmos.”4placeholder In a marvellous way, Maritian tempers Thomist with Bonaventure to cut a new path, extending the frontier of Christian aesthetics, by extrapolating from the former while drawing from the latter.

Gilson, his friend and interlocutor at the Sorbonne, advocated historical reconstruction and conceptual genealogy, whereas Maritain’s Thomism was oriented toward creative transformation as systematic development and speculative synthesis. Maritain presents a pluralistic epistemology grounded in the realist conviction that the intellect is patently capable of apprehending reality.5placeholder Later, of course, he would employ this grounding for the basis of his work on Human Rights. Gilson’s study of Bonaventure presents the Franciscan doctor as promulgator of a rival philosophical tradition to Aquinas, one that prioritizes divine illumination and participation. Maritain, though more invested in Aquinas, subtly draws on Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God in his emphasis on connatural knowledge as the soul’s participation in being.

The ‘artistic approach’ relies upon a Thomist understanding of aesthetic perception as knowledge gained through ‘connaturality’. In this sense the dialogical ‘artistic’ encounter is the primary encounter. Indeed, for Plato, wonder is the “primitive intellectual impulse” as the beginning of all philosophy. While Xenophon sought to purge religion of myth, Plato sought within it a ‘purified’ form. Later Proclus inspired Aquinas’s participatory ‘analogy of attribution’, which concerns an ineffable belonging together of the diverse in a hierarchical ascent.6placeholder Despite not directly addressing aesthetic perception, Aquinas laid a foundation by qualifying the beautiful as the good, so that aesthetic experience harmoniously motivates the whole person via the senses, intellect, emotion, and will.7placeholder

Aquinas proceeds from the human person as an undividable composite yet unitary substance, integrating matter and spirit (including the senses, imagination, emotion, and intellect). Aesthetics relies upon the five senses, conceiving both speculative knowledge and aesthetic cognition. Maritain applied Thomas’ knowledge through connaturality” to artistic creation, whereby human powers co-operate as a whole harmoniously in aesthetic perception. Firstly, the conceptual and rational knowledge of virtues (as intellectual conformity with truths), and secondly, the possession of the virtue embodied in ourselves.8placeholder The latter goes beyond science, to inclination. Thus a virtuous man may be utterly ignorant of moral philosophy, and ‘know’ more about virtues—through connaturality.9placeholder To Maritain, connaturality (how the artist creates) unlocks Thomas’ aesthetic experience.10placeholder The “spiritual unconscious” is interplay of the senses, intellect, imagination, emotion, and memory.

Dissimilarly, generative AI systems devoid of intellectual apprehension or creative intuition rely upon probabilistic synthesis. Trained on vast corpora of preexisting human language and symbolic representation, these models generate outputs by calculating statistically probable continuations of input sequences. The process remains, at its core, an exercise in mimetic reconfiguration, insofar as “artistic creation is not a product of calculation or imitation, but of intuition and revelation,” in that the primacy of creative intuition is a supra-rational movement of the intellect, infused with love, toward being itself.11placeholder This intuition is not reducible to pattern recognition or inferential logic, insofar as it entails “divination” that opens into the invisible.12placeholder The “spiritual unconscious” is an interplay of the senses, intellect, imagination, emotion, and memory.

Moreover, Maritain follows the fundamental Aristotelian distinction between the speculative, knowledge for the sake of knowledge (as correspondence between the mind and reality), and the practical intellect. To Maritain, the latter underpins the artistic creative process because it governs both moral action and artistic creativity.13placeholder To Maritain, art is a habit, a disposition of the mind and virtue of the practical intellect, which consists in the creation of objects: “Art . . . is the straight intellectual determination of works to be made.”14placeholder

Beautiful creations, in this sense, are beyond use other than for themselves (Contra les beaux arts). Maritain offers a historical narrative of the emergence of beauty as an object sought for itself which is coextensive with the emergence of the self and the self as its own subject for artistic inspiration and creation. Conventionalist definitions fail to positively identify criteria for art and beauty, which essentialist projects later attempted. Concerning the question of how an artist creates something beautiful, Maritain maintains that creative inspiration comes through preconceptual intuition which, like moral reasoning, occurs in the moment, judging against a myriad of avenues open to it. The precise stroke of a brush or the particular employment of a simile possess artistic genius in the sense that they harmonize within an existing universal oscillation of beauty. This ‘experience knowledge’ through the senses divines the ‘secret meaning’ of things. Distinct from a subconsciousness in the Freudian sense, Maritain locates a ‘spiritual preconscious’, which rests on the ‘Illuminating Intellect’.15placeholder

The artist’s intellective yet practical creativity is connatural “because the resonance between the artist’s self and things such as objects, events and other people is more than emotion as we normally conceive it.”16placeholder The illuminating intellect turns the emotion toward the spiritual preconscious, which by association, then transforms the emotion into an ‘intentional emotion’, giving it aspects of the muse of which it is an emotion. The emotion fuses with the object, in the respective stages of cognitive grasp and creative fulfillment. Genuine aesthetic experiences are properly anamnestic insofar as they move the person through recognition of depth. Poetry, as natural to everyone with functioning cognitive faculties, is the ‘secret life of each and all the arts.’17placeholder The ‘cognitive’ ‘stage’ of aesthetic experience is universally appreciable, whereas the creative ‘stage’ is the domain of the artist. The artist, by definition, creates. The honing of one’s abilities in inspiration and creation—the virtue of art—is to perceive in things their ‘secret meanings’ and create objects or events filled with the personal significance of intentional emotion.18placeholder

Maritain follows Aquinas whereby beauty, specific to human beings as material-spiritual composites, is accessible through the senses. Thus sensual delight accompanies an intellectual delight upon the perception of beauty as integrity and proportion,  harmony and clarity.19placeholder Such properties are made intelligible through the senses enabling the mind to recognise matter so intelligibly arranged as to be beautiful whereupon it recognizes its own nature. The effect of beauty is that the intellectual appetite rejoices in delightful contemplation of being itself. Thus, the intellect, in its creative impulse, yearns to create the beautiful. Universal beauty (i.e. a sunset) is transcendental: a property of being as being, or God. As an inexhaustible transcendental, beauty can be expressed in an infinite number of ways by artists.20placeholder

Henri Bergson’s notion of intuition as a temporal immediacy informs Maritain’s emphasis on the artist’s non-discursive insight.21placeholder Maritain, wary of Cartesian dualism, insists on the unity of soul and body in artistic expression: “It is not man’s intelligence alone, nor his senses alone, that create, but the man entire, moved as a whole by the impulse of love.”22placeholder As Maritain emphasizes, “The creative intuition of the artist is born in the preconscious depths of the soul, where the intellect and the imagination are wedded in love.”23placeholder This nuptial union of faculties is categorically irreducible to algorithmic synthesis and inference. AI mimics the external forms of artistic output, but it lacks access to the act of being from which beauty flows. It cannot transfigure either its creations or its audience, because it does not stand in relation to being, truth, or the good. In this light, while LLMs can simulate insight they cannot bear witness to it, insofar as they lack the inner flame, the fire described by Blaise Pascal, that allows the artist to become a seer of the invisible.

Maritain elaborates a hierarchy of knowledge that reflects the analogical structure of reality itself. Empirical science, philosophical reflection, mystical contemplation, and creative intuition are autonomous, insofar as each possesses its own methodology. Totalitarian ideology is birthed in the presumed pre-eminence of methodological uniformity, whereby all modes of knowledge cohere within a single paradigm. Contra Cartesian rationalism and Kantian constructivism, Maritain reasserts the Thomistic correspondence theory of truth rooted in ontological participation. Crucially, this epistemology is non-reductive, insofar as it affirms the legitimacy of modern science while safeguarding the irreducibility of metaphysical and subsequent moral judgments from annihilation by scientific materialism, as the progenitor of totalitarianism. The great feat of Maritain’s creative intuition is the avoidance of both materialist reductionism and romantic subjectivism.

Maritain affirms ontological and epistemological objectivity of beauty, and while affirming difference of taste, he qualifies this with respect to genuine aesthetic experience engendered by intentional emotion as opposed to feigned aesthetic experience engendered by sentimentality. Maritain’s descriptive definition of art consists of necessary and sufficient conditions—free art as an activity aims at the production of beautiful physical creations. A definition vested, epistemologically, in the artist and his activity first, from which the ontology of art is made intelligible. Moreover, Maritain’s definition explains the cross-cultural recognizability of art. The illumination of form through preconceptual spiritual intuition is the essential qualifier of art. Genuine creativity, then, is not invention ex nihilo, but recollection that necessarily references the source. AI cannot participate in this recollective process because it has no soul (and thus no pre-existent memory of the Good). Its productions are shadow assemblies drawn from the accumulated detritus of human culture. The question of AI creativity, then, is really predicated upon the nature and purpose of the human person. Once syntactic coherence is conflated with meaning, and simulation with creation, creativity itself is debased to mere production (as opposed to participation). And thus, the annihilation of the human person begins. As Maritain writes, “To create is to give being a new existence… But such a power belongs only to God—and to the artist, in a participative sense, because he touches, in his work, the mystery of being.”24placeholder