A Piercing Light: Beauty, Faith, and Human Transcendence

The meeting of Jacques Maritain and the avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau in the summer of 1925 produced two significant results: Cocteau returned to his Catholic faith, and it led the poet and the philosopher to exchange letters reflecting on the relationship between art and faith. While Cocteau proclaimed that the spiritual nature of art orders man to God, Maritain tempers his new friend’s enthusiasm in asserting, “Between the world of poetry and that of sainthood there exists an analogical r...