Symposium – Thomism, Creativity and the Arts: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain

A one-day symposium on artistry, religion and culture in the modern world.

Tuesday 1 July, 2025, 9am – 6pm. Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.

Building on last year’s landmark conference on the lives and legacy of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, this exciting collaborative day symposium draws together philosophers, theologians, musicians, poets, liturgists and other artists, to converse around the theme of human creativity. The Maritains remain at the heart of our dialogue, being uniquely well-situated to confront the problems, principles and complexities of artistry in the modern era – illuminated by the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas. Jacques Maritain’s belief in the artist’s mission to ‘shelter the prayer, instruct the intelligence, and rejoice the eyes and the soul,’ provides an inspiring mandate to investigate art-making in the present age, in all its depth and variety.

The conference includes plenary talks, panel discussions, poetry reading, music and film, and gathers a rich and diverse range of presenters from across the UK and USA, with the final keynote talk given by Sir James MacMillan, renowned Scottish composer and conductor. Registration is open to scholars, students, lay and religious: in fact, anyone with an interest in the creative arts, and those whose scholarship or praxis lies at the convergence of aesthetics and faith. Attendees are warmly invited to join in the midday Office of Readings and Evening Mass and Vespers with sacred choral and organ music. Lunch is provided, and the day will end with a drinks reception for those attending in person.

 

8.30	Registration
9.00 – 9.15	Welcome & Introduction: Fr Dominic White OP
9.15-10.00	Plenary with questions Prof Alice Ramos, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at St. John’s University in New York: Jacques Maritain on the Artist’s Vision and Moral Character
10.00-11.00	Panel: 2 philosophers Rev Dr Brad Elliott OP, Professor of Moral Theology, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley: Art and Imitation: The Role of Nature in the Human Artistic Act Dr Jan Bentz, Lecturer in Philosophy, Blackfriars Studium, Oxford: Creative Intuition and Being in Art: Maritain and Gilson on Beauty
11.00-11.30	Coffee
11.30-12.15	Plenary with questions Prof James Matthew Wilson, Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature: Form as ‘Ontological Secret.’
12.15-1.00	Plenary with questions Dr Katja Frimberger, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow: Learning to just be there:  Film as Public Pedagogy. The recent Sci-Fi feature film “The Silent Messenger” (Dir. Simon Bishopp), in which Katja collaborated as performer, was nominated for the Heimspiel Award at BIFF (Braunschweig International Film Festival, Germany) in November 2024. [The Silent Messenger – Trailer]
1.00-1.30	Midday Prayer with the Dominican Community, including choral music by James MacMillan, directed by Peter Carter of the Catholic Sacred Music Project.
1.30-2.15	Lunch (sandwiches)
2.15-3.15	Panel: Raïssa Maritain Fr Albert Robertson OP, assistant chaplain at Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy to the University of Cambridge; Lector in Anthropology, Blackfriars Studium: Raïssa Maritain at Prayer: Suffering, Virtue, and Religious and Creative Perception. Prof Emma Mason, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick: ‘Nocturnal navigations’: Raïssa Maritain’s poetic and mystical gifts.
3.15-3.35	Tea
3.35-4.35	Panel: Maritain, Poetics and Music Dr Chris Grey, Research Fellow at Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, and Lecturer in Theological Aesthetics at London School of Theology: The Underscore of Maritain’s Poetics Prof Greg Kerr, Associate Professor of Philosophy, DeSales University: Imitation and Distortion: Jacques Maritain and Flannery O’Connor and the Power of the Story. Prof Margarita Mooney Clayton, Associate Professor in the Department of Practical Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary: Imitation and Creativity: Music as Formative and Expressive.
4.45-5.30	Keynote Plenary with questions Sir James MacMillan, Setting the words of the Mass to music in the secular environment of our time: a Catholic composer’s experience. James MacMillan is the pre-eminent Scottish composer of his generation. He first attracted attention with the acclaimed BBC Proms premiere of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (1990). His percussion concerto Veni, Veni Emmanuel (1992) has received over 500 performances worldwide by orchestras including London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics and Cleveland Orchestra. Other major works include the cantata Seven Last Words from the Cross (1993), Quickening (1998) for soloists, children’s choir, mixed choir and orchestra, the operas Inès de Castro (2001) and The Sacrifice (2005-06), St John Passion (2007), St Luke Passion (2013) and Symphony No.5: ‘Le grand Inconnu’ (2018).
5.30	Closing remarks: Fr Dominic White OP
5.40	Close
6.00	Mass and Vespers with the Dominican Community, including choral and organ music by SirJames MacMillan, Peter Carter and Dominic White OP.
7.00	Drinks reception

 

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Want to know more about Jacques and Raïssa Maritain?

Who was Jacques Maritain? As the Canadian philosopher William Sweet succinctly puts it: ‘Jacques was perhaps the best-known and most admired Catholic philosopher of the mid-twentieth century.’ A convert from agnosticism, Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) authored over seventy books, passionately advocating the perennial wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas, and influencing philosophers, theologians, politicians, popes, painters, and poets. At the time, his sphere of influence was spectacularly wide, yet he remained somewhat under the radar – in old age describing himself as ‘a secret agent of the King of Kings.’ Maritain’s well-known masterworks include The Degrees of Knowledge, The Range of Reason, The Person and the Common Good, Integral Humanism, Art and Scholasticism, and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry; but most corners of philosophy were subject to his Thomist interpretation – sometimes well-received, sometimes less so.

Who was Raïssa Maritain? Raïssa was a Russian-Jewish émigré who also converted to Catholicism following extreme disillusionment with the prevailing winds of logical positivism at the turn of the last century. She wrote of her Sorbonne professors: ‘they despaired of truth, whose very name was unlovely to them.’ Dramatically, she and Jacques agreed to throw themselves into the Seine unless their nihilism could be relieved – which, thankfully it was, at the hands of Leon Bloy and Aquinas. Although an academic, Raïssa’s true vocation was more intimate – as a poet and contemplative; and having married Jacques in 1904, she remained his ‘muse’ in the most elevated sense, until her death in 1960. As one contemporary noted: Jacques ‘attached a peerless value to her vigilant and penetrating judgement.’ Decades of illness and intense suffering marked her life.

The Maritain home was a place of prayer, hospitality, and intellectual discovery. The very idea of a Thomistic study circle was born in the Maritain’s living room in Paris, and their Sunday afternoon meetings in Meudon drew visitors from every walk of life. A cause for the canonization of both Maritains began in 2011, although this has not yet been advanced.

Partnerships

Blackfriars Hall, Oxford is pleased to partner with The Margaret Beaufort Institute ; the Scala Foundation; the Thomistic Institute; and the Catholic Sacred Music Project for this event.

Tickets

Bookings via EventBrite. Concessions for students and for online participants.

Tickets: £35
Venue: Blackfriars Hall - St Giles Oxford, OX1 3LY United Kingdom Array ( [lat] => 51.756248 [lng] => -1.259881 )

Contact:
Blackfriars Hall
http://www.bfriars.ox.ac.uk