Maritian's Lost Sequel to The Degrees of Knowledge and the Future of Thomism

(Chapter 1 of Essays in Existential Thomism)

James Arraj

Summary
Jacques Maritain's The Degrees of Knowledge has rightly been recognized as one of the milestones of the 20th
century Thomistic renaissance, but what is virtually unknown is that after The Degrees of Knowledge his thought
underwent a profound transformation which could have a significant impact on the future of Thomism.

The Lost Manuscript

A manuscript is discovered in a trunk in Kolbsheim, France at the Maritain archives. It is Maritain's sequel to To
Distinguish in Order to Unite, or The Degrees of Knowledge. Its title reads The Degrees of the Spiritual Unconscious.
Unfortunately this is a fantasy, but the reality is just as exciting. Maritain did, indeed, write a second Degrees of
Knowledge, but much like the story of Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter, in which the detectives seek in vain for
the letter hidden in plain sight — a story that Maritain used to good effect, himself, in describing being — he hid
this second Degrees right in front of us, scattering clues to it throughout his later works. At the end of his life he
once told his friend, Antoinette Grunelius, that he continued to work, not to provide answers, but open up paths for
those who would come after him.[1] The second Degrees is like a map of many of those pathways that lead to the
future of Thomism. To uncover the clues that Maritain has left us and assemble them into this map we have to go
back more than 70 years.

After a prodigious effort that had included a sabbatical year, Maritain had finished his masterpiece, The Degrees of
Knowledge, and was signing the preface. The date was June 11, 1932 and it was not an accidental one. It was the 26th
anniversary of his baptism, and The Degrees was the culmination of the dream of those early years which was to
bring together the sciences of nature, philosophy, and the suprarational ways of knowing, especially Christian
mysticism, in a synthesis in which having been distinguished according to their proper epistemological characters,
they could dwell harmoniously in a metaphysical typology.

The Degrees represents the fruit as well of intensive conversations he had with his wife, Raissa, most of all, and with
people like Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Charles Henrion so that Maritain breaks with normal custom and
dedicates different parts of the book to each one of them as well as to Charles Du Bos. The writing of the book had
also been stimulated by the Thomist Circle meetings he and Raissa, had been holding in their home in Meudon
outside of Paris. There among philosophers, artists and scientists, they had boldly experimented in setting Thomism
free from the old scholastic forms that bound it to a former age, and letting it enter into the modern marketplace of
ideas. But for all its remarkable creativity, The Degrees still had its attention fixed on the objective natures of the
various ways of knowing.

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 auto-intellection 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 17th 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 17th 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 20th 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 pre-conciliar 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 19th 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 non-locality, 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 Poetry[18] 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 supra-rational
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 supra-rational 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 non-conceptual 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 neo-thomist. 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.