 While Maritain rejects the subordination of the artist to politics and to religious authority, he also denies that artists are answerable only to themselves. The creative self, he writes, “dies to itself in order to live in [its] work” (Creative Intuition, 1953: 144). Moreover, Maritain writes that art ‘perfects’ the artist; that by engaging in this activity there is “a perfecting of the spirit” (Art and Scholasticism, 1920 [1962: 62]). The freedom that Maritain ascribes to artists, then, is not a lawless freedom.