Hence the tyrannical and absorbing power of Art, and also its astonishing power of soothing; it delivers one from the human; it establishes the artifex—artist or artisan—in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute, in which he puts the energy and intelligence of his manhood at the service of a thing which he makes. This is true of all art; the ennui of living and willing ceases at the door of every workshop.

But if art is not human in the end that it pursues, it is human, essentially human, in its mode of operating. It's a work of man that has to be made; it must have on it the mark of man: animal rationale.”

That is why slang cannot really be translated into ordinary language without losing its meaning and flavor. More than an object of thought, it means the overtones that accompany this object in terms of human and social subjectivity. The human despair and abjection with which certain abject writers have to saturate the world of things could not be expressed except in their slang.

Now, if it is true that the essence of language is to manifest thought and objects of thought, it is difficult not to conclude that the various slangs of which I spoke involve a kind of perversion of the function of language.

No doubt an element of reverse or inverted signification is inseparable from the direct signification of the words. But genuine language, while expressive of the group’s subjectivity, gives unquestionable prevalence to objectivity, and direct sign, and to the universality of direct, intellectual meaning; and then the secondary function of language, i.e., the intention of expressing subjectivity, remains itself open, it is oriented toward a communication of the collective self, which tends to make itself sincerely known to others. The risk of impurity of which I am speaking materializes when this intention of expressing subjectivity becomes oriented toward the self-assertion of the group in a closed, aristocratic, or resentful manner, and as against all other groups.

The primary and the secondary functions of language are both human. Language attains complete freedom, and the excellence of its own nature, when these two functions are perfectly fused. The subjective function, however, is, as I have said, secondary. Furthermore it remains, as a rule, in an inchoate and unsatisfactory condition, because our words are primarily destined to designate material and external things. As a result, in their secondary function itself they signify the subjectivity of the social group rather than that of the individual person, and they do so in a more or less awkward and rough manner, which depends on the particular history and accidental experiences of the group. Let me say, therefore, that if Angels used words, it is only in the language of Angels that the two functions of which I am speaking would be really and perfectly fused. It is only in the tongue of Angels that language could attain complete freedom and the excellence of its own nature.

But Angels use no words.

Poets, in mankind, desperately endeavor to achieve a certain similarity of the language of Angels, or of perfect language, capable of expressing things and the self together in one and the same breath. Thus, what birds realize by music only, man can somewhat realize by poetry, and his music has also an intelligible significance, a spiritual meaning.

"Two crucial truths [...] are at stake here. On the one hand, all are held by the divine precept to tend to the perfection of charity, each one according to his condition and his possibilities. And it is clear that if this precept is violated, in other words, if charity is not in the soul, there is no worship rendered to God in spirit and in truth.

"TO BE FREE IS OF THE ESSENCE OF EVERY INTELLECTUAL BEING." JACQUES MARITAIN 

“We do not need a truth to serve us; we need a truth that we can serve.” ~ Jacques Maritain [Annunciation (detail), 1440 - 1442 - Fra Angelico] 

• Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), French philosopher and political thinker, was one of the principal exponents of Thomism in the twentieth century and an influential interpreter of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas. More: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maritain/