From the Tree to the Labyrinth

8

The Use and Interpretation of Medieval Texts

8.1. The Modernity of a Paleo-Thomist

In 1920 Jacques Maritain published Art et scolastique (Art and Scholasticism)¹ a slim volume containing 115 pages of text and 73 pages of notes (the most important of which are given titles of their own in the book’s table of contents). In it the author assumed (i) that a medieval school of aesthetic thought, attributable in particular to Thomas Aquinas, had existed, and (ii) that this same school of thought was still sufficiently relevant to account for various aspects of contemporary modern art. Let us recall the climate of the time: avant-garde movements had been coming one after the other for forty years; French philosophy was washing down the last scraps of positivism with a strong draft of Bergsonism; Neo-Scholasticism, after its nineteenth-century revival, was still flourishing in the episcopal seminaries, in perpetual polemic against contemporary thought, which for its part paid it not the slightest bit of attention.

If, on the other hand, we can speak today of a medieval aesthetic school of thought, and if no one believes any longer that the allusions to the beautiful contained in the Summae and Commentaria were simply scattered and shapeless flotsam left over from the repertory of ancient philosophy, it was not so pacifically accepted, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, that the Middle Ages had had an aesthetic vision of its own (with differences and nuances from one thinker to another and from one historical moment to another). People persisted in believing that the object of investigation known today as the medieval school of aesthetic thought did not exist. Furthermore, its texts did not exist either, since the texts that are today recognized as such were understood at the time to be discussions of metaphysics or physics or of the banal rules and regulations of technical rhetoric.

There had of course been plenty of orthodox Neo-Thomistic thinkers, who had reconstructed, shrewdly at times, at other times more ingenuously, the aesthetic themes present in Thomas’s work, presenting their reconstructions as theoretically valid for the modern world (driven by a Neo-Thomistic faith in the philosophia perennis). But, on the one hand (and unlike Maritain), they had not attempted comparisons between medieval texts and the artistic problems of later centuries, and, on the other (providing Maritain with a series of negative examples), they had usually oscillated between historiographical reconstruction and their own theoretical projects, so that it was not always easy to tell when it was Thomas speaking and when it was them.² In any case, we had to wait until 1946 for the fundamental and historiographically correct texts of De Bruyne and Pouillon to appear. We will come to them in due course.

Art et scolastique, however, came out at the beginning of the 1920s. It was certainly not the work of a nineteenth-century Neo-Thomist, but clearly that of a modern who, though he would later acquiesce in the definition of “Paleo-Thomist” (1947: 9–10), also believed in Cocteau (still the irrepressible and acrobatic inventor of poetic fashions and fashionings) and enthused over the music of Satie, Milhaud, and Poulenc, and the paintings of Severini and Rouault. This man of the Middle Ages attempting to live in the contemporary world (he would eventually accentuate his social and political commitment with the publication of Humanisme intégrale), who had arrived at Saint Thomas without completely forgetting Bergson,³ now turned to interpret the problem of art and the beautiful according to the categories of Scholasticism. He did not address the problem of what was dead and what was still living in medieval thought: everything was evidently alive if he, well into the twentieth century, thought like a medieval. It was irrelevant that many of the Scholastic definitions he employed were filtered through a Bergsonian prism: indeed, this simply showed that the Middle Ages was not an island in history, but a dimension of the mind. It followed, according to what Maritain deemed to be “true,” that Bergson was himself part of the philosophia perennis.

It is in this psychological dimension, which also involved a methodological dimension, that Art et scolastique was intended to be read. Only thus could one appreciate its freshness, its unexpected connections, the sudden leaps from ancient to modern, its “militant” vehemence. The culture of the 1920s was thus induced to reflect on the existence of a medieval aesthetic, presented, for better or for worse, as an instrument capable also of defining the artistic polemics of the present day.

On the one hand, the innate Cartesianism of French culture, cross-fertilized by the neoclassicism of the time (this was the same period in which Cocteau was championing Satie and Stravinsky in Le coq et l’arlequin), proved especially receptive to certain proposals that Maritain borrowed from the Scholastic tradition but which modern culture hailed as new, buried as they had been for centuries in ecclesiastical libraries. The revelation of a view of art as recta ratio factibilium (“right judgment regarding things to be made”), as a technical and practical making, an arrangement of materials conforming to an order dictated not just by the sensibility but chiefly by the intellect—and the beauty synthesized in the three touchstones of integrity, proportion, and clarity—could not fail to play a liberating role with regard to the manifold Romantic and Decadent liens and encumbrances that still weighed so heavily on aesthetic speculation. The same considerations explain the fortune, somewhat later, of Maritain in the United States, where this aesthetic, so close in its way to the Aristotelian tradition that the Anglo-Saxon world had never in fact abandoned,⁴ would go so far as to garner the honors of widespread diffusion even in the pages of Time magazine.

Art et scolastique may deserve all the criticism we are about to level at it, but at the same time we are compelled to admit that it also encouraged many scholars to take up the study of medieval aesthetics. The price to be paid (and Maritain pays it down to the last cent) was that of not behaving in a historiographically responsible fashion and making free use of Thomas’s texts instead of interpreting them. But, for an adept of the philosophia perennis, the difference between use and interpretation was not that important: if Saint Thomas was still contemporary (because, as they said in Neo-Scholastic circles, there is no progress in metaphysics), he could be read through the sensibility of a contemporary.

8.2. A Tendentious Reading

Maritain had no qualms about inventing nonexistent Thomistic citations. Take the case of that “pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent” (“things that please when they are seen are called beautiful”) which in Maritain becomes “pulchrum est id quod visum placet” (“the beautiful is that which pleases being seen”). The difference appears to be negligible; but what in Thomas was practically a sociological observation (“people think that beautiful things are those that are pleasing to sight [or at the moment they are seen]”), is transformed into an essentialist definition, so much so that on the basis of that definition Maritain will proceed, as we will see, to identify this visio with an act of intuition of a very contemporary nature.⁵

What was the object discerned by the Thomistic visio? Thomas’s words were unequivocal: it was the claritas possessed by the substantial form actualized in an ordered substance. What was the only way in which, within the limits of Thomistic epistemology, this visio of the splendor of the substance was to be understood? As a complex act of judgment, permeated with intellect, that followed upon the primary abstraction of the simplex apprehensio (“direct apprehension”), and therefore as a mediated and complex act. This is the conclusion which, supported by the work of other scholars, we believe we have ascertained elsewhere (see Eco 1956).

For Maritain, on the other hand, the visio became the split-second and unique act of an “intellected sense” (“sens intelligencié”), grasping in a single instant, without the slightest effort at abstraction, the form at the very core of the matter. The beautiful for Maritain becomes:

id quod visum placet, what pleases when it is seen; the object, in other words, of an intuition.…. Contemplating the object in the intuition that the senses have of it, the intellect rejoices in a presence, it rejoices in the luminous presence of something intelligible.…. If it turns away from the senses to abstraction and reasoning, it turns away from its own joy, and loses contact with this luminosity. To understand this, let us represent to ourselves that it is intellect and sense becoming one, or, if we may put it this way, an intellected sense, which gives place in the heart to aesthetic joy.” (Maritain 1920: 174–175)⁶

What we have here is a typically modern kind of idea, which a medieval philosopher, rather than rejecting, would quite simply not have understood (see also, in this connection, Campanelli 1996: 93 et seq.). But even a contemporary historian would have to confess to a certain puzzlement reading that something that is seen, and therefore in some fashion perceived, must by the same token be intuited. We will return to this point. For the moment all that is needed is to record the fact that from this point on Maritain proposes an idea of poetic knowledge as knowledge through connaturality, an idea he will explore more deeply in his later works.

We encounter the same distortion in his recovery of the definition of art as habitus operativus (explicated, we must admit, in exemplary fashion, with a wealth of philological data). This definition could not remain anchored to its medieval interpretation: later on De Bruyne and others would point out that it is only in a Franciscan context imbued with Platonism—and timidly at that—and thereafter, and more decisively, only with the dissolution of Scholasticism, in a climate of protohumanism and with the dawn of the Mannerist doctrines of ingenium, that a conception of the productive act will emerge in modern thought that recognizes the nucleus of the creative process in the presence of an original inner idea. In Thomas the doctrine of art is still classical. The habitus operativus (“a disposition to produce certain operations or acts”) behaves according to fixed canons and, if the idea of art escapes being identified with mere imitation, it is only by having recourse to the recombining of memories of previous experiences, like that described by Horace in the first five lines of his Ars Poetica.

The limits of this doctrine prove too restrictive for Maritain. All he had to do was admit that he was speaking after Saint Thomas, but in that case he would not have been able to declare himself a “Paleo-Thomist.” Accordingly, he blithely grafts onto his supposedly Thomistic picture the lesson of Bergson, and already in Art et scolastique—admittedly among the notes—he speaks of the work in progress not simply as a complex of traditional rules, but also as “raison séminale,” intuition, and finally “schéma dynamique”:

“It is a simple vision, though virtually extremely rich in multiplicity, of the work to be made, grasped in its individual soul, seen as a spiritual seed or a seminal reason of the work, which has something to do with what Bergson calls the dynamic schema, which appeals not merely to the intellect but also the imagination and the sensibility of the artist” (Maritain 1920: 146–147, n. 93, my emphasis).⁷

Even as Maritain writes, surrealism is on the doorstep, and symbolism is yielding its final fruits; Satie’s neoclassicism cannot make him forget that the Late Romantic culture of symbolism has by this time identified art as a language appealing principally to feeling, the guardian of a mystery that ordinary words cannot reveal. Thus, in explicating the concept of claritas, he adheres to a definition he finds in De Pulchro et Bono, a little book that the most rigorous scholarship no longer attributed to Thomas but to Albertus Magnus (in point of fact even Maritain admits his uncertainty, deciding however to accept it as a reliable witness to Thomas’s ideas).⁸ The definition in question is of claritas as “resplendentia formae supra partes materiae proportionatas” (“a resplendence of form in the duly ordered parts of material objects”). But in Albertus Magnus there remains a Platonic emphasis, a dialectic between esse and essentia, in which form, shining through the matter it organizes, nevertheless is not fully identified with it, maintaining its ideal preeminence, whereas in Thomas, in the midst of a dialectic between essence and concrete act of existing, form becomes such only by individualizing itself in a concretely existing substance (see Eco 1956: ch. IV).

But this is not all. At this point Maritain, in a footnote, goes so far as to distance himself from Albertus Magnus, for whom the radiance of that form—be it Platonic or Aristotelian—was nonetheless comprehensible by whomsoever understood what type of object they were contemplating (a dog, a vase, a human body). For Maritain, on the other hand, the claritas, being clarity of form, is metaphysical clarity, clarity in itself, but not clarity for us. The principle of intelligibility of the thing, it is at the same time the principle of its mystery. Thus the beautiful is the splendor of a mystery. Moreover, it cannot be denied that Thomas himself, having reached the extreme limits of explanation of the essential reality of things, would have been brought up short before the mystery of participation by which they cling to being, thanks to the continuous creative intervention of the divinity. The only way he could have explained this reality is by appealing to the analogical force of the language of theology. But the analogia entis is not the analogy of the symbolist and, however inadequate it may be, it is an instrument of clarification of the metaphysical mystery, in a cultural climate in which the intellectual possibility of knowledge of being is taken as implicit and what is stressed is our perception of the clarity of being and not its mystery. Maritain, on the other hand, stresses the mystery, elbowing Saint Thomas over toward Saint John of the Cross (as he will do systematically in 1932’s Les degrés du savoir [The Degrees of Knowledge]) and medieval aesthetics toward the aesthetics of symbolism.

And let it not be thought that our suspicions are exaggerated: a few pages further on, as he prepares to explain the transcendental nature of the beautiful (that canonical given, by virtue of which, in medieval thought, the beautiful becomes concrete and solid and avoids the trap of subjective impression, becoming an objective attribute of truth and moral value, an inseparable property of being), Maritain has recourse to the words of Baudelaire, reminding us how, in its experience of beauty, the human mind has the sense of something that lies beyond it, of the tangible call of the beyond, and, in the melancholy of the ensuing moment, recognizes the evidence of a nature exiled in imperfection, aspiring toward the infinite that has just been revealed. Thus, little by little, the transcendental beauty of the Middle Ages is transformed into something akin to the Burkean and Kantian sublime, filtered through a Decadent sensibility.⁹

This, then, is the situation of Art et scolastique—a militant work that was to influence the writing of philosophical history, eliciting a number of studies (and saddling them with a series of interpretations as fascinating as they were incautious); a speculative work disguised as commentary, and hence fraught with contradictions.

8.3. After

Art et scolastique,

“Poetry” Takes Center Stage

In the essays gathered under the title of Les frontières de la poésie (1935), the author appeared to have rid himself of his false pose as historiographer to assume the physiognomy of the autonomous theorist; but it was only the diminished philosophical commitment of those essays that made him appear freer and more open-minded.

In Frontières the premises of Art et scolastique find ample development: if the medieval artist was the anonymous executor of the objective rules of his art, the artist that Maritain now portrays expresses “himself and his own essence,” “provided that things resonate within him.” The artist receives external reality “in the recesses of his feelings and his passion” (“dans les replis de son sentiment et de sa passion”), not as something other than himself but as something so completely identified with and absorbed in him as no longer to posit any difference between his own soul and the innermost aspects of the things he has made his own. Therefore poetic knowledge will be knowledge according to “resonance in subjectivity” (“résonance dans la subjectivité”) (Maritain 1935: 194–197).

If the Scholastic theory of art was a theory of production, Maritain’s theory becomes a theory of knowledge and, to get to this point, Maritain has evidently been compelled to enrich the Scholastic concept of ars. Hesitating to distort the category—so clear and well-defined—that Scholasticism had handed down to him (and that he himself in fact had expounded in Art et scolastique), he consequently sets alongside the concept of art that of poetry.

In the Scholastic tradition “poetry” is not an aesthetic category (as it is, let’s say, for Croce (1902), who also applies it to literature in prose), nor, as ars, is it a form of knowledge: it is quite simply an operative habitus or a practical ability. Maritain’s notion of poetry, then, is alien to medieval thought.

The nature of poetic practice is already sketched out in Art et scolastique and is also found, not only in Frontières, but also in subsequent works, as we will see in what follows. In short, while art is a practical operation governed by the laws of the intellect, poetry becomes an intentional emotion, the original inner spring that animates the rules of art from within. Art, therefore, begins later, with “the intellect and the will to choose” (“l’intellect et la volonté de choix”).¹⁰ Dangerously close to the idealistic formulation of a duality between lyrical intuition as inner expression and technical externalization as a mechanical addition, Maritain’s duality nonetheless allows him to rediscover a deep level of knowledge belonging to the poetic moment, something that the medieval notion of art did not allow.

The poetic moment is an intuitive moment which calls into play not merely intellect but also emotion and sensibility. At that moment, the work appears as already virtually complete; it is “an intuitive and intentional emotion that carries within it far more than itself” (“émotion intuitive et intentionnelle qui porte en soi beaucoup plus qu’elle-même”), eager to lend existence to its phantasm, “an intuitive flash in which the entire work is virtually contained and which will unfold itself in the work” (“éclair intuitif … où toute l’oeuvre est contenue virtuellement et qui s’expliquera dans l’oeuvre”), and finally “it is above all as a precise emotion that it appears to the consciousness” (“c’est surtout … comme une émotion décisive qu’elle apparaît à la conscience”) (Maritain 1935: 182–195). This is because it is the effect of a profound relationship with reality (the ultimate identification of the mystery of things with the mind of the artist): and therefore it can be understood as a moment of prelogical knowledge of reality, an instrument of metaphysical revelation.

All of this was not made explicit in Art et scolastique, nor does it appear in clear theoretical terms in Frontières. We find it, however, in a couple of later essays (which look forward to Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry of 1953). These essays are “De la connaissance poétique” (1938a) and “Signe et symbole” (1938b). The date is significant: contemporary culture has returned, as a result of the injection of Surrealism, to a Romantic conception of art as an instrument of philosophy. The absolute to which it provides access is no longer that of the Romantics; nevertheless, Maritain’s systematic framework allows him precisely to reinterpret the Surrealist lesson in terms of a metaphysic that is not that of the absurd but that of something significant and rich in positive determinations. In other words, poetry as an instrument, restored by Surrealism to its cognitive dignity, is now realigned according to the modalities of a Romantic aesthetic, but for the purposes of unveiling the universe of Saint Thomas, as seen by a Paleo-Thomist steeped in the modern aesthetic sensibility.

8.4. Poetic Discourse: Maritain vs. Thomas

There are a number of passages in Thomas in which he gives a definition of poetic discourse that is frankly discouraging (Summa Theologiae I, I, 9; II, 101, 2 ad 2). He speaks of poetry as an “infima doctrina” (“inferior learning”) and opines that “poetica non capiuntur propter defectum veritatis qui est in eis” (“poetic matters cannot be grasped because they are deficient in truth”). This definition of the modus poeticus as inferior is fully justified in the context in which Thomas proposes it: that is, in a comparison between vernacular poetry and Holy Scripture and subsequently between poetry and theology; and, within the hierarchical system in which the sciences derive their dignity from the dignity of the object to which they apply, poetry is fated to be the loser. Its defectus veritatis or deficiency of truth derives from the fact that it narrates nonexistent things; it uses metaphors for the purposes of representation and to provide delight; it evades the strict control of reason and claims to be an instrument, not of knowledge, but instead of pleasure.¹¹

It is true, as Curtius (1948: chs. XI and XII) clearly demonstrates, that it was on the basis of this same distinction between the poet and the theologian, and of certain affirmations made by Aristotle concerning the first poet-theologians, that protohumanists like Albertino Mussato began to adumbrate a notion of the revelatory role of poetry; but by then we will have abandoned the confines of Scholasticism and its inflexible epistemology. In the eyes of which, given its defectus veritatis, to interpret the modus poeticus as a perceptio confusa of the Baumgartian type would be, to say the least, a stretch.

Maritain (1938a–b), in contrast, goes back to Thomas’s own writings in order to identify the modus poeticus, precisely because of its imprecise and representative nature, as knowledge by “affective connaturality with reality” (“connaturalité affective à la réalité”), a knowledge that is nonconceptualizable, inasmuch as it awakens within itself the creative profundities of the subject. Poetic knowledge is “inseparable from the productivity of the spirit” (“inséparable de la productivité de l’esprit”) (1938a: 95–96).

What can the expressive and communicative instrument of this knowledge “by affective connaturality” be? It is the poetic symbol, which is a sign-image, something sensible that signifies its object by way of an analogy between sign and object, and therefore a sign, which, over and above its semantic effectiveness, obtains a practical result (by communicating an order, an appeal) by means of suggestion—an operation that Maritain does not hesitate to define as “magical” (1938a: 299 et seq.).

Nevertheless, no doubt because he did not believe that Thomas’s own texts would support this interpretation, Maritain seeks confirmation in a Scholastic of the Counter-Reformation, to be specific, in John of Saint Thomas (1589–1644; aka John Poinsot, hereinafter “John”).

Now, John’s linguistic theory is a theory of philosophical language and he does not have the slightest interest in the possibilities of poetic language. The linguistic expression or term is what the proposition can be reduced to, as occurs in the case of the subject and the predicate; the term is both vox and signum, both mental and written, and it is ex quo simplex conficitur propositio (“that out of which a simple proposition is made”); it is a vox significativa (and therefore is not meaningless, unlike, for instance, the sound blitiri); and it is such ad placitum, that is, by stipulation or convention. Meaningful words (voces significativae) that have not been agreed upon, such as moans and groans, are excluded.¹²

Maritain, for his part, endeavors to find allusions to the “symbolic” value of images in certain citations from John (such as “ratio imaginis consistit in hoc quod procedat ab alio ut a principio et in similitudinem ejus, ut docet S. Thomas” (“the rationale of an image, therefore, consists in this, that it proceeds from another as from a principle and in a similitude or likeness of that other, as Saint Thomas teaches”) (Deely 1985: 219). While it is true that Thomas states (in Summa Theologiae I, 35) that “species, prout ponitur ab Hilario in definitione imaginis, importat formam deductam in aliquo ab alio” (“the term species, as Hillary claims in his definition of the image, implies a form in one thing derived from another”), what he is talking about is the more traditional definition of the image as bound to the object by a relationship of likeness, not by convention, and this reading does not lend itself to a “symbolist” interpretation. Maritain, on the other hand, makes it the basis for a definition of the poetic symbol as a sign-image endowed with an analogical and ambiguous (or polysemic) relationship with the signatum. Thomas was not unaware of the existence of such sign-images capable of standing in a vaguely ambiguous position vis-à-vis the signatum; but he saw them as being the kind of visions that appear to prophets, announcing the fact, for instance, that there will be seven years of plenty by showing seven full ears of corn. This would be a purely poetic proceeding, and here again Thomas implies that it is inferior; so much so that he considers more valid and reliable those prophecies in which, instead of images, we have words, far less equivocal signs, and more desirable in a circumstance as delicate as that of the reception of the divine message.¹³

Saying, however, that in prophecy we encounter “poetic” procedures does not mean that prophecy and poetic procedures are one and the same thing.

Let us grant then, in order to get this false issue out of the way, that there does exist, in the authors to whom Maritain refers, a sign-image based on a relationship of analogy—and the fact that it is somewhat played down is surely not all that important, seeing that, here and elsewhere, what is at stake, as we have seen, is more a question of theology than one of aesthetics. Furthermore, the most reliable communicative vehicles are to be preferred, those that are, in other words, less “poetically” ambiguous. However, once the existence of sign-images had been recognized (as the entire allegorical tradition is there to attest), medieval thinkers invariably made every attempt to conventionalize them as much as they could, through their repertories of symbols, attributing a single meaning to every image (or at most a choice amongst four). If there are more—if, for example, in certain bestiaries, the lion may signify both Christ and the Devil—this is because of the overlapping of traditional associations. But the task of medieval hermeneutics, however much Maritain, as a reader of Baudelaire, would have preferred it, is not to cultivate a fruitful ambiguity, fraught with manifold suggestions, but on the contrary to identify as expeditiously as possible a definite meaning valid for the context at hand (which is usually scriptural).

The only way Maritain could have defended his position was by placing himself clearly outside the medieval tradition and declaring that modern man had turned the situation on its head. Incapable of choosing between the role of modern symbolist and that of ancient allegorist, on the one hand he throws a veil of ambiguity over his medieval sources, while on the other he undermines the comprehension of his personal proposals by making them sound like superannuated ruminations on Thomistic positions, whereas, if the truth were known, they are in reality assertions typical of contemporary aesthetics. It is not easy to keep one foot in Montparnasse and the other in the Street of Straw (Vicus Straminis = Ruelle au Fouarre). But this untenable ubiquity is the very essence of Maritain’s aesthetic. It explains its fascination, however outmoded today, as well as the reason why it was so short-lived.

8.5. Creative Intuition vs. Agent Intellect

And so we come at last to a book like Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), meditated and composed in an English-speaking context by a more mature Maritain, enriched by his intense experience as a reader of contemporary poetic texts and partially weaned from his strict deference to the texts of the Middle Ages.¹⁴

Here Maritain no longer presents himself as an interpreter of Saint Thomas but as an autonomous thinker, developing the concept of poetry as revelation already outlined in his previous essays.

By Poetry I mean … that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination. (3)

In other words, poetry obliges us to consider the intellect both in its secret well-springs inside the human soul and as functioning in a nonrational (I do not say antirational) or nonlogical way. (4)

The integral conclusion must, therefore, it seems to me, be set forth as follows: On the one hand, as we have seen apropos of Oriental art, when art only intent on Things succeeds in revealing Things and their hidden meanings, it does also reveal obscurely, despite itself, the creative subjectivity of the artist.… On the other hand, when art primarily intent on the artist’s Self succeeds in revealing creative subjectivity, it does also reveal obscurely Things and their hidden aspects and meanings—and with greater power of penetration indeed, I mean into the depths of this Corporeal Being itself and this Nature that our hands touch.… Our descriptive and inductive inquiry suggests that at the root of the creative act there must be a quite particular intellectual process, without parallel in logical reason, through which Things and the Self are grasped together by means of a kind of experience or knowledge which has no conceptual expression and is expressed only in the artist’s work. (33–34)¹⁵

Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that this theory of poetic knowledge is patently in conflict with the medieval conception of art as recta ratio factibilium (“right judgment regarding things to be made”), as an intellectual creation, that is, which adheres to certain rules, Maritain, revealing an unsuspected acrobatic talent, endeavors to demonstrate that his position is not in conflict with Thomistic theory. Although, for the Middle Ages, art was a virtue of the practical intellect, for Maritain the set of rules by which the intellect operates are not rules ossified into a canon that antedates the creation of the work. This is where the notion of “creative intuition” comes in, superimposing itself on the canonical rules of making and breathing new life into them by virtue of an act that proceeds from the depths of the spirit.

There is no need to stress the fact that it is precisely this concept of an intuitive moment permeating the action and superimposing itself on the rules that is nowhere to be found in Thomas’s aesthetics. Maritain seems to be affirming that the idea of creative intuition is peculiar to contemporary and modern poetics; and yet he reintroduces the intuitive moment in the context of classical philosophy when he states that all reasoning, deductive and syllogistic, is based in reality on an intuitive principle, on the existence, that is, of first principles that are not deduced but seen. The classical intuition of first principles, however, was still a modality of reason, the very law of its functioning; whereas the poetic intuition of the Moderns is an insight of the imagination: not a logical operation (which discovers) but the final effect of an imaginative operation (which creates).

Maritain does not appear sensitive to this difference. Indeed he maintains that there is no substantial difference between poetry and intellect, both are ascribable to the “same blood.” The madness of the Surrealists and Plato’s poetic mania, along with the profound intuition of principles (to say nothing of the mystical consciousness that ultimately constitutes the final step in any explicative process of being, as Maritain never tired of insisting), all have their common root in the spiritual makeup of mankind:

My contention, then, is that everything depends, in the issue we are discussing, on the recognition of the existence of a spiritual unconscious, or rather, preconscious, of which Plato and the ancient wise men were well aware, and the disregard of which in favor of the Freudian unconscious alone is a sign of the dullness of our times. There are two kinds of unconscious, two great domains of psychological activity screened from the grasp of consciousness: the preconscious of the spirit in its living springs, and the unconscious of blood and flesh, instincts, tendencies, complexes, repressed images and desires, traumatic memories, as constituting a closed or autonomous dynamic whole. I would like to designate the first kind of unconscious by the name of spiritual or, for the sake of Plato, musical unconscious or preconscious; and the second by the name of automatic unconscious or deaf unconscious—deaf to the intellect, and structured into a world of its own apart from the intellect; we might also say, in quite a general sense, leaving aside any particular theory, Freudian unconscious. These two kinds of unconscious life are at work at the same time; in concrete existence their respective impacts on conscious activity ordinarily interfere or intermingle in a greater or less degree.… But they are essentially distinct and thoroughly different in nature. (91–92)

It is enough to think of the ordinary and everyday functioning of intellect, in so far as intellect is really in activity, and of the way in which ideas arise in our minds, and every genuine intellectual grasping, or every new discovery, is brought about; it is enough to think of the way in which our free decisions, when they are really free, are made, especially those decisions which commit our entire life—to realize that there exists a deep nonconscious world of activity, for the intellect and the will, from which the acts and fruits of human consciousness and the clear perceptions of the mind emerge, and that the universe of concepts, logical connections, rational discursus and rational deliberation, in which the activity of the intellect takes definite form and shape, is preceded by the hidden workings of an immense and primal preconscious life. Such a life develops in night, but in a night which is translucid and fertile, and resembles that primeval diffused light which was created first, before God made, as Genesis puts it, “lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night” so as to be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.” (93–94)

If we are willing to forget the desperate syncretism of Maritain’s ploy and prepared to understand this “creative intuition” in terms of modern and contemporary aesthetics, his argument appears, if not acceptable, at least consistent.

What he is saying is that the foundation of a spiritual preconscious different from the unconscious of psychology is the foundation of a primum that is both psychological and ontological, a sort of archetypal Realm of the Mothers from which objective reality and personal spiritual activity itself both draw their nourishment. In this way we can understand poetic knowledge to be an affective connaturality that puts us into contact with the secret life of being itself, and whose principal organ is none other than intuition, prelogical imaginative activity, the only activity capable of grasping a deep reality that precedes logical distinctions and the duality of thought and being.

This is not an unheard-of philosophical position, and we cannot deny Maritain the right to espouse it. But Maritain insists on making Thomas’s doctrine of the intellect the foundation of this conception.

Over and above the conscious rational arguments by means of which reason makes itself manifest, he tells us, there exist the very springs of creativity and love “hidden in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul” (94). Now, he continues: “the Schoolmen were not interested in working out any theory about the unconscious life of the soul” (and we are grateful to him for this admission) “yet their doctrines implied its existence” (96).

To declare that in a given philosophical system a certain problematic issue is not openly mooted, but that its constituent elements, and to some extent its solution, emerge from the system’s very framework, is a legitimate position. A system is there to be interpreted, not only by contemporaries but also by posterity, and, since it claims to state truths about the world, it must be ready for any further developments in our knowledge of the world that might follow in its wake. But were the premises of this doctrine contained in Scholastic thought?

Maritain takes into consideration the Aristotelian notion of the agent intellect as inherited and elaborated upon by Thomas. The agent intellect engages in a process of intellectual abstraction performed on the contents of a possible intellect, which in and of itself would not be capable of a similar process of abstraction (given that it receives passively only what is presented to it by the senses). Maritain clearly embraces Thomas’s solution, which is opposed to Arabic attempts to locate the agent intellect somewhere outside of the individual soul.

But, in the Thomistic doctrine of the agent intellect, there is no suggestion of any sort of unconscious activity. We could at best speak of a lightning-fast operation, instinctive perhaps, but of which we are fully conscious at the moment we avail ourselves of it, at the moment, that is, when we recognize the universal form in the individual experience.

In fact, in the following comment the problem of the unconscious does not seem to arise (we might also say that Maritain is honest enough, in paraphrasing Thomas’s position, not to falsify its terms):

Thus, at a first step, the intelligible content present in the images, and which, in the images, was only intelligible in potency (or capable of being made capable of becoming an object of intellectual vision), is made intelligible in act in a spiritual form (specie impressa, impressed pattern), let us say, in an intelligible germ, which is received from the images by the intellect, under the activation of the Illuminating Intellect. But this is not yet enough for the attaining of knowledge. It is necessary that the intelligible content drawn from the images should be not only intelligible in act, or capable of becoming an object of intellectual vision, but intellected in act, or actually become an object of intellectual vision. Then it is the intellect itself, which, having been impregnated by the impressed pattern or intelligible germ, vitally produces—always under the activation of the Illuminating Intellect—an inner fruit, a final and more fully determined spiritual form (species expressa), the concept, in which the content drawn from the images is brought to the very same state of spirituality-in-act in which the intellect-in-act is, and in which this now perfectly spiritualized content is seen, is actually an object of intellectual vision. (97–98)

Here, Maritain’s seductive language is already beginning to color, with a kind of “imaginative efficacy,” what is, in Thomas’s version, one of the simplest procedures of the human intellect.

From all of the various texts in which Thomas expounds his doctrine of the intellect,¹⁶ we may derive the following cognitive moments:

(i) when our eyes rest upon a concrete object, our external senses receive by immutatio, or an act of receptivity on the part of the sentient bodily organ, the various qualitates sensibiles inherent in the object, classified as audibilia, visibilia, odorabilia, gustabilia and tangibilia—and they (our senses) receive them in the same way in which wax receives the imprint of the seal, as a species sensibilis, still a material phenomenon but already separate from the thing itself, and, so to speak, with a different makeup, “ut forma coloris in pupilla, quae non fit per hoc colorata” (“like the form of a color in the pupil of the eyes, which is not on that account colored”) (Summa Theologiae I, 78, 3);

(ii) the external senses transmit this species sensibilis to the internal senses (sensus communis, phantasia, memoria, vis aestimativa, or cogitativa);

(iii) common sense composes and reunites the various data received from the external senses and elaborates the kind of iconic image of the object known as the phantasma, which is received in the repository of forms or thesaurus formarum of the phantasia;

(iv) it is at this point that the agent intellect comes into the picture, abstracting from the phantasma (which displays all of the qualities of the object, including those that are accidental or individual) the species intelligibilis, which is no longer individual but universal (Stone, Tree, Human Being) and offering it to the Possible Intellect as locus specierum, which recognizes the quidditas of the object, elaborates its universal concept, and performs other operations of elaboration of what was offered to it;¹⁷

(v) there is of course nothing secret about these essential characteristics, but they are inscribed in the simple and immediate figure—considered as this topological terminatio—of the object, since they are at one and the same time its principle of existence and its principle of definability. Point v is fundamental if we are to grasp the full extent of the license taken by Maritain;

(vi) the intellect has only one way to reconsider the characteristics of the concrete object with which the cognitive process began, and it does so through the reflexio ad phantasmata; in this reconsideration it certainly knows all of the individual characteristics of the object (in the sense that it “sees” them, so to speak, in the phantasma), though it cannot be said that it enters into contact with the individual object, because cognitum est in cognoscente per modum cognoscentis (“the known is in the knower in ways peculiar to the knower”), and the phantasma is not a material entity like the object. When the external senses received an impression of heat, they “felt” heat by immutatio or immutation. When the intellect performs the reflexio ad phantasmata or abstraction from phantasms, it “knows” that the object was hot, but it does not “feel” it.¹⁸

There is no direct connection between the image in the pupil and the concrete stone. Therefore, in the context of Thomas’s epistemology a sort of transparent diaphragm is created situated between the intellect, the organ of abstraction, and the individual object, with all the properties that accrue to it from being made concrete in a materia signata quantitate (“quantatively determined matter”).

To bridge this gap that occurs in every act of perception, the intellect has but one recourse: on the basis of what it “sees” in the phantasma, it is able to proceed to judgments (“this stone has such and such dimensions, it lies in such and such a place, it is illuminated by the sun, etc.”). Therefore, in order to speak of the concrete stone, no act of intuition is involved (in Thomistic epistemology intuition does not exist), but an act of judgment, laborious, slow, agonizing, and painstaking.¹⁹ Nevertheless, even if we resolve the question in these terms, we cannot deny that Thomas does not provide a satisfactory theory of knowledge of the individual—and consequently thinkers like Duns Scotus and Ockham will be led to seek other solutions.²⁰

Hence, it is not possible that for Thomas the illuminating power of the intellect should instantaneously penetrate the individual recesses of the stone, seizing its eternal form in the quick of the matter with which it is imbued, in a unity that precedes the distinctions of reason, in an original and profound contact with the real, individualized in a form and made sensible in a matter dense with echoes and reverberations. Pace Maritain, Thomas’s intellect cannot be identified with the profligacy of an intuition (in the modern sense of the term, and provided this idea of intuition remains viable and that we do not embrace Peirce’s anti-intuitionist polemic) that seizes the veining of a piece of fruit, the nuances of a sunset, the texture of a layer of paint, and discovers in them the presence of that profound unity by means of which everything hangs together and is permeated by the same indivisible spiritual presence.²¹

We might be tempted to think that Maritain—who had few qualms, despite the four centuries that separate the two, about turning with a certain insouciance from Thomas to John—is attributing to the former what he finds in his Counter-Reformation disciple. But when we go back and read the pages (Cursus III, 10, 4, pp. 322 et seq.) that John devotes to this very question of how the intellect is able to know singular material things, we observe that the disciple does not in fact break with the teachings of his master, but on the contrary, with the example of the Scotist “heresy” before his eyes, he ups the ante: “Non potest intellectus dirette ferri ad haec objecta prout modificata illis materialibus conditionibus, quae singularizant, se prout ad illis abstractis.” It is only through the senses that an object is apprehended in its material particularities. When it is grasped “per modum quidditatis” (“in the mode of a definable character”) by the intellect, then it is grasped “sine materialibus conditionibus loci et temporis etc” (“without the material conditions of place and time”) (p. 325). To know means to abstract and to tend toward the individuation of the quidditas, setting aside those material particularities that make the object something singular. It is not so much that the intellect cannot grasp the singular; it cannot grasp the material that singularizes the object. John is citing Thomas (Summa Theologiae I, 86, 1 ad 3), where he says that “singulare non repugnat intelligibilitati inquantum est singulare, sed inquantum est materiale, quia nihil intelligitur nisi immaterialiter” (“the singular is incompatible with intelligibility not insofar as it is singular, but insofar as it is material, for nothing can be understood except immaterially”).

In Maritain’s account of the function of the agent intellect, when confronted with a concrete object such as a stone it confines itself to understanding “stone” and nothing else. For, if we insist on translating its function into modern terms, it has nothing to do with a preconscious activity of the soul, but constitutes at most the transcendental possibility of conferring a form on the data of the senses. Naturally, since Thomas is not Kant, the agent intellect does not “confer” anything of its own accord, it simply “recognizes” what was already there in the object but which, without its abstraction, would remain unknowable.

Now Maritain, in spite of being aware of all of the limitations of the Thomistic concept of the agent intellect, tends nevertheless to define this “fundamental source of light” as “hidden in the unconscious of the spirit.” And in so doing, what he means by unconscious is what is instead formal (or, in Kantian terms, transcendental). That the effect of the operation of the agent intellect (that is, the concepts of all the things that I see and recognize according to universal species) may be repressed and stored in the psychological unconscious is a phenomenon that concerns psychology, not the theory of knowledge—and in any case it concerns modern psychology, not the psychology of Thomas. Failure to insist on this distinction means taking the agent intellect for something that it is not.

To say that “we know what we are thinking, but not how we are thinking” may be ad mentem Divi Thomae; but this does not make it legitimate to affirm that our knowledge is therefore the beginning of an intuition, at least insofar as we attribute this conclusion to Thomas. If intuition is a nondecomposable act, a swift vision of the spirit, intuition has nothing to do with knowledge ad mentem Divi Thomae, precisely because the act of knowledge in Thomas is decomposable—swift, instantaneous, if you will, but decomposable. Whereas we, in other words people who perceive and think every day, “know what we are thinking, but not how we are thinking,” Thomas’s philosophy knows perfectly well (or presumes to know) how we are thinking and demonstrates how, breaking it down (or decomposing it) into each of its successive phases.

And if an act is decomposable, where does intuition come in, the category that philosophy has come up with to designate those acts that are not decomposable—rationalizable through a series of successive moments that render them by that very token a form of discourse?

Thomas, as Maritain realizes, speaks of knowledge by connaturality apropos of mystical knowledge.²² But, in extending the concept to the aesthetic experience (in saying, in other words, that aesthetic experience is a form of mystical experience or vice versa), the Paleo-Thomist runs a twofold risk. The first is for the aesthetic experience to seem closer to the noche oscura of the mystics than to the ordered Scholastic vision—and, if he were not determined to be seen as a Paleo-Thomist at all costs, Maritain might even admit it, since this after all is the position he arrives at. The second is for a position typical of the modern mind—and of the modern mind with which Maritain ought to find himself least in agreement—to be taken as implicit: namely, that for contemporary man there is only one type of mystical relationship—the aesthetic relationship—left (because God is probably dead). And this would be fin-de-siècle aestheticism. Stephen Dedalus’s confession at the end of Joyce’s Portrait points to no other conclusion. How does Maritain the Paleo-Thomist get there? He gets there in an ambiguous way, especially as far as his Thomism is concerned.

The same mystical emphasis reappears when Maritain revisits another typically Thomistic (but not exclusively Thomistic) notion—that of beauty as a transcendental property of being (which implies the realizability of value at all levels of existence, albeit in analogical form). Maritain distinguishes between poetry—defined as the primary intuition with its correlative expressive impulse—and beauty. And the latter appears to him as a kind of ever-receding goal which poetry is constantly trying to catch up with, without ever completely succeeding. The poetic impulse brings into play the artistic capability, but this process always retains an element of the inchoate; it is never resolved in a final conquest but remains instead in a permanent state of tension—which is mystical or Platonic in nature. This tension could also be inferred from Thomas’s doctrine of the transcendental nature of the beautiful, but only if Thomistic philosophy were to nurture such an anxiety in the face of the infinite that the presence of the analogia entis proved to be no longer satisfactory, and man were to seek, diabolically, by the roundabout routes of poetry, to violate a threshold that negative theology never crosses. A medieval notion if you will, though late medieval, typical of the Flemish and German mystics.

For Thomas, the beautiful is that “in cuius aspectu seu cognitione quietatur appetitus” (“in whose sight or cognition the appetite is quieted”), whereas the appetite for the infinite is never quieted in a mystic like Meister Eckhart: “nihil tam distans a quolibet quam ejus oppositum. Deus autem et creatura opponuntur ut unum et innumeratum opponuntur numero et numerato et numerabili” (In Sapientiam, VII, 14).²³

Maritain’s frequent citations from Poe and Baudelaire, as well as from other twentieth-century poets, are evidence of just how “modern” his anxieties are; but they fail to support his claim to be recovering Thomism. In point of fact, there is no need to go all the way back to medieval philosophy to clarify Maritain’s position; we must look instead to the core of Romantic aesthetics. We need only reread what Schelling, an author cited by Maritain, had to say about art (Werke I, III). All of philosophy, according to Schelling, has its origin in an absolute principle that cannot be grasped or communicated through descriptions and concepts, but can only be intuited. This intuition is the “organ of philosophy.” But since it is an intellectual intuition not a sensible one, it is a purely interior intuition, which can become objective only as a consequence of a second intuition—aesthetic intuition. Furthermore, if aesthetic intuition is intellectual intuition made objective, then art is the only true organ, and at the same time document, of philosophy, bearing constant and continual witness to what philosophy cannot represent externally, that is, the unconscious as it operates and produces. This is the root of the theoretical position spelled out in Creative Intuition.

In a form that has had such a telling influence on contemporary sensibility, especially in the Anglo-Saxon cultural circles that influenced the later Maritain, this same doctrine is to be found in Coleridge, as was usefully pointed out by Mayoux (1960).²⁴ It is not merely a question of similarities. Maritain is drawing on an entire tradition that nourished the poetry of the last two centuries (it is no accident in fact that he frequently cites Coleridge), and, though he may invoke Saint Thomas, he is in fact getting closer and closer to the spirit of Romantic idealism: a paradoxical conclusion that he would no doubt be reluctant to accept, but that a conscientious exegesis cannot set aside pro bono pacis.

A reader of Creative Intuition unaware of its medieval allusions would certainly be fascinated by the whole conception of poetry as a magical act and would have to concede that it is defended with considerable rhetorical ability. But what is disturbing is the specious use of a thinker from the past to support the author’s own theoretical position.

Still, what we have here, rather than a case of intellectual dishonesty, is a rather primitive conception of historiography. When someone operates with the metaphysical, historiographical, and methodological conviction that there exists only one philosophy and that that philosophy is a philosophia perennis, then the historiographical dimension, as understood by the modern philosopher, heir to historicism, ceases to exist. Nor is the initial act by which the attribute of perenniality is bestowed on a given historically determined philosophy an historiographical act: because its purpose is not to circumscribe the character of an historical phenomenon but to enunciate a truth regarding the nature of human thought.

Maritain’s method of reading his medieval sources has a lot in common with that of the medieval philosopher who declared his respect for the auctoritas of the Fathers while claiming to be a dwarf on a giant’s shoulders. When a medieval thinker was convinced of the truth of an assertion, he bolstered its legitimacy by claiming that it was to be found in his auctores. The most creative medieval philosophers, however, never recognized anything as true simply because it had been handed down from the Fathers. If anything, they did the opposite—when they found something they believed was true, they attributed it to the Fathers. They believed implicitly, then, not that everything that was part of tradition was true, but that everything that was true was part of tradition. Maritain does the same: attuned to all the subtleties of the modern sensibility, he welcomes its suggestions, attributing them, however, without further ado, to the sensibility of the Middle Ages. This behavior hides in fact an unconscious historicist conviction, which holds that the timeless treasure of truth grows and that the true Saint Thomas is not the Saint Thomas of the thirteenth century, for whom creative intuition does not exist, but the Saint Thomas of the twentieth century, who is now speaking through the lips of his faithful disciple. Philosophia is then perennis, not because, once formulated, it no longer changes, but precisely because it is constantly changing, and its definitive formulation always belongs to tomorrow. Which is an acceptable conclusion too, as long as it is made unequivocally clear (and even if, by making it clear, the appeal to the notion of a philosophia perennnis no longer has any meaning).

8.6. The Historiographical Lesson of De Bruyne

The extent of Maritain’s historiographical highhandedness becomes clear when we compare it with the work of another author who, though likewise a Catholic and a Thomist by formation, was nonetheless able, in his work as a historian, to keep a distance between his own thought and that of the authors he studied. That author was Edgar De Bruyne.

De Bruyne published his Études d’esthétique médiévale in 1946. In 1940 he had brought out his Philosophie van de Kunst and in 1942 Het Aestetisch beleven and De Philosophie van Martin Heidegger. It is impossible to believe that a work of the amplitude of the Études (around 1,200 pages in the 1998 Albin Michel edition) could have been composed in the space of the three intervening years—years that were in any case among the most terrible and turbulent in Belgian history. What we had was instead the fruit of over a decade of research. The problems of medieval aesthetics had already been the subject, as we will see, of an essay De Bruyne wrote in 1930. But even making allowance for decades of work we can only marvel at how such a vast quantity of material, often unearthed in out-of-the-way pages of hundreds of works from Boethius to Duns Scotus, could have been assembled by a single man in such a brief span of time. Furthermore, let us not forget that at that time electronic searches and scanning technology did not exist, and all the material had to be laboriously hunted down in the thousands of pages of the Patrologia Latina, not to mention the other sources, and diligently catalogued (by hand, one imagines, working in goodness knows what monastic libraries). So we can’t help smiling at the reaction, when the work appeared, of a number of critics who reproached De Bruyne for stopping at Duns Scotus and not considering Byzantine culture, for not citing Focillon and even for producing an anthology of quotations without arriving at a theoretical synthesis—thank heaven is all we can say, considering where the desire for a theoretical synthesis had led Maritain.²⁵

To assess the impact of the work on the historiography of medieval aesthetics we have only to conduct a brief bibliographical survey. Croce consecrated 398 pages of his Aesthetics (1902[1950]) to the history of the problem: of these pages only four were devoted to the Middle Ages, and only to conclude that “almost all the tendencies of ancient aesthetics were continued through tradition and reappeared by spontaneous generation in the medieval centuries,” but “it could be affirmed that the literary and artistic doctrines and opinions of the Middle Ages, with a few minor exceptions, are more valuable for the history of culture than for the general history of the science of aesthetics” (1902[1950]: 129).

Bosanquet in his History of Aesthetic (1904) allots a mere 30 out of a total of 500 pages to the Middle Ages, with the reductive heading “Some traces of the continuity of aesthetic consciousness throughout the Middle Ages.” But he begins with the reevaluation of the medieval centuries by the pre-Raphaelites and Walter Pater, treating medieval thought, then, as the object of Decadent nostalgia and reminding the reader that modern aesthetics begins only when the problem of art criticism and that of the reconciliation of reason and sensibility are formulated—problems that the Middle Ages had ignored until the fourteenth century.

Saintsbury, in his History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (1900–1904), speaks not of philosophers or theologians but of artists. He dedicates two chapters of the book to the Middle Ages (“Medieval criticism” and “The contribution of the medieval period to literary criticism”), discussing, however, only rhetorical theories, allegory, grammar, and so on.

Again, in 1935, Magnino’s Die Kunstliteratur devoted only twenty-four pages to the medieval theory of art, while in 1937 Die Literarästhetik des europäischen Mittelalters by Glunz was more concerned with the evolution of literary taste than with aesthetic theory, though in the case of a few authors he did take into account the philosophical influence of Neo-Platonism.²⁶ The decisive year was 1946. By an amazing coincidence (or maybe not, if you subscribe to the notion of the Zeitgeist), there appeared in the same year the three volumes of De Bruyne’s Études d’ésthétique médiévale, Pouillon’s essay, “La beauté, propriété transcendantale chez les Scolastiques (1220–1270),”²⁷ which gathered together for the first time the various texts concerning the inclusion of beauty in the list of the transcendental properties of being, and Panofsky’s book on Abbot Suger, in which the translation of Suger’s text and Panofsky’s commentary on it gave a lively and fascinating picture of the taste and aesthetic culture of a man of the twelfth century.²⁸

With these contributions two phenomena of capital importance occurred: in the first place they demonstrated that the aesthetic problem had been present throughout the medieval centuries, not in a repetitive fashion but through a series of changes in perspective and genuine theoretical innovations (though almost always camouflaged by the use of a uniform philosophical lexicon); and, secondly, the various thinkers were treated correctly from a historiographical point of view, attempting that is to demonstrate what they had said with reference to the historical and theoretical framework of the philosophy of their time, without endeavoring to modernize them at all costs.

By 1954, within fifteen years of the appearance of the Études, Montano, in volume 5 of the Grande Antologia Filosofica, could devote 160 pages to an anthology illustrating aesthetics in Christian thought with commentaries clearly inspired by the Études. In the same year the forty-three pages on the Middle Ages in the History of Aesthetics of Gilbert and Kuhn (revised edition), while they do not acknowledge De Bruyne, certainly take advantage of his work, presumably via secondary sources. There follow Eco (1956, 1959, 1987a), Simson (1956), Panofsky (1957), Holt (1957), Assunto (1961), and Kovach (1961). In 1962 the History of Aesthetics by Tatarkiewicz devotes an entire volume to the Middle Ages and, although the author advances a number of critical reservations with regard to the Études, he is clearly indebted to them. And we are entitled to wonder whether, without the Études, the four volumes of De Lubac’s Exégèse médiévale (1959–1964), with their countless references to De Bruyne’s pioneering work, would ever have seen the light of day.²⁹

And this is only to cite the more important monographs, without counting the shorter contributions. From the 4 pages in Croce to Assunto’s 500 and the 362 of Tatarkiewicz we can measure the extent of the change in perspective of which De Bruyne was the pioneer.

A development of these proportions can be explained, not only by the enormous mass of materials that De Bruyne made available to scholars, but also by the soundness of his historical method. Apart from Pouillon, who confined himself in any case to rediscovering and publishing texts, De Bruyne was the first to forget his own Thomism and to outline a genuine history of medieval aesthetic ideas as they had been formulated at the time, without any attempt to modernize them whatever it took. A commendable achievement, since only through this gesture of honest erudition was he able to render his idea of Middle Ages “up-to-date” (in the sense of interesting for the contemporary reader).

First and foremost, De Bruyne liberates the notion of a medieval aesthetic from its identification with the Thomistic aesthetic. He begins his Études by affirming that “studying the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas we frequently asked ourselves what was the historical and cultural background into which his reflections on art and beauty were to be placed.”³⁰

To respond to this initial query, he de-Thomisticizes medieval aesthetics, reminding us not only that the Middle Ages had reflected on art and the beautiful well before Thomas, but also that there had not been a single school of aesthetics but many, each of them different in some respect from the others.

On the one hand, he demonstrated how Thomas came at the end of a tradition that could be traced back to Augustine and Boethius, and before that to Neo-Platonism and Pythagoreanism. And merely by doing this, he made it possible for those who followed him in restudying Thomas’s aesthetics to see what sources had provided Thomas with some of his ideas; when he had followed in the wake of tradition without making any original contribution of his own; and when instead he had said something new. On the other hand, he pointed out that, side by side with a Thomistic aesthetics (to which previous scholarship had reduced the rich variety of medieval speculation),³¹ there existed the aesthetics of the school of Chartres, of the Victorines, of Grosseteste, of Albertus Magnus, of Bonaventure, of Duns Scotus (and our list must end here, otherwise it would amount to reproducing the index of the Études).³²

De Bruyne’s Études begin with Boethius and end with Duns Scotus. What changes occurred during this period? In this connection De Bruyne played a rather curious game—and it is unclear whether he was aware of the ambiguity of his position. On the one hand he endeavored to demonstrate that medieval aesthetics comprises a series of themes and ideas that span, often without modification, eight centuries of reflection on the beauty of God, nature, and art. Thus, in 1938, in a review of Glunz (1937), whereas Glunz had underscored, in our opinion correctly, an evolution in medieval taste, De Bruyne objected that it was problematic to speak, apropos of the Middle Ages, of evolution, because the various tendencies were always present, and he defined medieval artistic culture as “polyphonic.” But, at the same time (and we have only to read the general index to the Études), it is apparent that, even though over the centuries the various authors constantly come back to the same themes, the material is arranged according to a historical and not a thematic sequence, beginning with Boethius and arriving eventually at Duns Scotus, while in his introduction he writes that he would have liked to dedicate a fourth volume to the period 1300–1450, thereby anticipating the possible objection that he had ended the story too abruptly.

De Bruyne also published, between 1952 and 1955, a history of aesthetics (Geschiedenis van de aesthetica) which begins with Greco-Roman thought, picks up on his work on the Middle Ages, and arrives via Dante at Humanism and the Renaissance, touching (though rather summarily) on the thought of later medieval authors like Buridan and Ockham and ending up with Denis the Carthusian (it is in these last pages that he finally cites Huizinga!). In this history of aesthetics it is more readily apparent that De Bruyne had in mind an evolution over time of aesthetic thought—even if at this point he found himself having to come to grips with the phenomenon of the Renaissance, leaving behind the Middle Ages and its “polyphony.”

In the case of the eight centuries he is concerned with, and however much he may stress a certain thematic coherence, he continually draws our attention to the presence of lines of development and therefore of a certain “progress.” It would be going too far to attribute to him an Hegelian view of history, but he is certainly not unaware of transformations—we might go so far as to call them paradigm shifts—that do not allow us to speak of a Middle Ages that is constantly marking time. It would have been hard in fact for De Bruyne to deny that progress, when we consider how certain themes such as that of light assumed different valencies when they were transposed from the Neo-Platonic context of John Scotus Eriugena to that of the Aristotelian hylomorphism of the thirteenth century.

In 1947, fearful perhaps lest his Études not receive the circulation they deserved, De Bruyne published L’esthétique du Moyen Age, a more manageable volume of less than 300 pages, in a more compact format, in which he provided a kind of synthesis of his major work (this essay is reprinted as an appendix to the Études in the most recent Albin Michel edition of 1998). Unfortunately, out of concern perhaps that it would have made the book too cumbersome, De Bruyne fails to document any of his citations, referring his reader to the Études for his sources. As a consequence, the work, while too erudite for the nonspecialist reader, is of no use to the scholar. In any case, it is no longer arranged according to an historical sequence but thematically (the index refers to the sources, the sense of the beautiful, of art, and so on). The author is certainly at pains, in the context of one of these themes, to call attention to fresh developments,³³ but the polyphonic complexity previously mentioned becomes more evident, especially in a chapter devoted to the constants, in which the persistence throughout the period of the themes of musical proportion, light, symbolism, and allegory are underscored. We may say, then, that De Bruyne was probably aware that his study was continuously open to two readings or to a single reading capable of exploiting the ongoing opposition between constants and innovations.

Be that as it may, De Bruyne’s Middle Ages manages to deliver honest-to-goodness coups de théâtre (never of course announced with excessive stridency, in keeping with the custom of the day) perpetrated by authors who claimed to be nothing more than prudent and faithful annotators of the traditional texts whereas in reality, generation after generation, they were ensuring the evolution of both the aesthetic sensibility and the theories of art and the beautiful.

If one of the virtues of modernity is the intellectual courage whereby (according to a brilliant formulation by none other than Maritain) after Descartes every thinker is a debutant in the absolute, De Bruyne was not lacking in that virtue, as could be demonstrated by examining the texts in which he does not practice historiography but instead enunciates his own philosophy. If the Middle Ages made a virtue out of prudence, De Bruyne exercised that virtue as a historian. Reviewing in 1933, thirteen years before the publication of the Études, for the Revue néoscolastique a work by Wencelius, La philosophie de l’art chez les néo-scolastiques de langue française (1932), he contended that Thomas, contrary to what many Neo-Scholastic thinkers asserted, did not offer a complete aesthetic system: “we cannot see how the Angelic Doctor was able to reconcile in a truly organic whole what came to him from Neo-Platonism via Pseudo-Dionysius and what he borrowed from the Aristotelian theory of pleasures” (De Bruyne 1933: 416). Perhaps he had partially revised his judgment thirteen years later. What is striking, however, is his decision to consider his author in the light of philology and not apologetics.

8.7. The Problem of an Intellectual Intuition

In De Bruyne’s review of Wencelius, we may discern, occasionally, between the lines, a polemical stance with regard to the use to which Maritain had put the texts of Saint Thomas. He criticizes Wencelius’s exaggerated insistence on the objective and transcendental nature of the beautiful and insists instead on the relationship between beauty and the perceiving subject. As we have seen, this is the issue on which Maritain had overstepped the mark. De Bruyne makes it clear that to speak of the relationship with the subject is not the same as being “subjective” (an accusation that, especially given the historical moment, a philosopher inspired by Thomas could not countenance, given that subjectivity—what the nineteenth century had referred to as the “Kantian poison”—was the bête noire of the Neo-Thomists). He wrote that, if one wishes to speak about the transcendental nature of beauty, and at the same time about the relation of beauty to the knowing subject, all we need do is apply the Thomistic definition of God as Supreme Beauty to the pleasure of contemplating His beauty.

Maritain had attempted to identify both aesthetic pleasure and the creative act of the poetic imagination with an intuition that gave the impression of being overly subjective. As we see from his reading of the medieval authors, De Bruyne had realized that Maritain’s intuition did not have much to do with a “Kantian” subject, but had instead a great deal to do with a mystical intuition in which the subject identifies with (immerses himself in) the ontological splendor that fascinates and inspires him, in a union in which the two aspirations appear to become intermingled.

For De Bruyne on the other hand it was a question of establishing a distinction between the knowing subject and the object known, and at the same time between the function of the intellect and that of the sensibility. This is why he never speaks, as does Maritain, of creative intuition. He does, however, speak of intellectual intuition.

And here, De Bruyne is guilty of the same sin as Maritain, when he insists on finding in Thomas at all costs something it is difficult to attribute to him.

Already, in 1930, De Bruyne had written “Du rôle de l’intellect dans l’activité esthétique” (in Rintelen 1930), and he would take up a number of the same themes in his Esquisse d’une philosophie de l’art (1930b). He refused to speak of aesthetic intuition as an irrational act, but thought of it as a sort of instinctive synthesis in which the intellect played a constitutive role. What he had in mind was not an abstract synthesis but a process in which feeling played an essential role. In this essay the intellect in the intuition figured as the formal principle of the intuition of the concrete.

We have already observed how difficult it is to identify in Thomas a principle of intuition of the concrete, but De Bruyne attempted to balance the books as best he could. What De Bruyne actually theorizes is a variant of the Kantian idea of the aesthetic experience as disinterested pleasure, purposiveness without a purpose, universality without a concept, and regularity without law. What Kant meant was that not only may one feel pleasure in a beautiful object without wishing to possess it or to avail oneself of it physically in some way (and thus far Thomas would have been in agreement), but that we perceive it as organized toward a particular end, whereas its purpose is its own self-subsistence—this is why we view it as if it were the perfect incarnation of a rule, whereas it is simply a rule unto itself. Thus, a flower is a typical example of a beautiful thing, and in this sense we can understand why what is constitutive of the judgment of beauty is universality without a concept. The aesthetic judgment is not the affirmation that all flowers are beautiful, but the judgment that limits itself to saying that this flower is beautiful. The necessity that leads us to say that this flower is beautiful does not depend on an abstract chain of reasoning but on our sensation of that individual flower. This is why in this experience what we have is a free play of the imagination and the intellect.

I believe we can affirm that De Bruyne’s intellectual intuition is precisely this. Is it possible to find anything similar in the thought of Thomas? Can we speak of an intellectual intuition capable of bringing us to perceive an idea in the realm of the sensible without this idea being somehow already divorced from the sensible from which it has been abstracted?

In the same collection in which De Bruyne published his essay on the role of the intellect in aesthetic activity (Rintelen 1930), there appeared an article by Roland-Gosselin, “Peut-on parler d’intuition intellectuelle dans la philosophie Thomiste?”, in which this possibility is denied on convincing grounds citing a good number of persuasive textual references. Roland-Gosselin emphasizes the fact that—if we take the term “intuition” as it is defined in Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, as, in other words, “a direct and immediate view of an object of thought currently present to the mind and grasped in its individual reality”—we cannot find such an intuition of the individual in Thomistic epistemology. She added that an intuition of this kind could be found if anywhere in John of Saint Thomas (Cursus I; Logica II, 23, 1),³⁴ and it appears in any case in texts of the Franciscan school. In Thomas’s corpus direct knowledge of the object is possible only for creatures of pure spirit. As far as human knowledge is concerned, not even existence, place, or moment are the proper object of the senses, but are predicated by a more complex discursive act. In that first cognitive operation that is the simplex apprehensio (“direct apprehension”), all we have is the abstract apprehension of the essence. Human intellect is discursive and abstract—as a consequence (and this is my own personal comment on Roland-Gosselin), aesthetic pleasure too is perfected in the act of judgment that takes into account the individual elements recovered in the reflexio ad phantasmata.

Can we affirm that De Bruyne had occasion to reflect on the essay by Roland-Gosselin? Apparently not, since, even sixteen years later, in his Études, he is still seeking to identify in Thomas a theory of aesthetic intuition (in the second paragraph of the chapter dedicated to him).

In reconstructing Thomistic aesthetic thought De Bruyne insists particularly on what he considers the “discovery” of the Summa Theologiae, a discovery that for Thomas would mark a definite step forward with respect to his earlier writings.³⁵ De Bruyne points out how Thomas borrows from Alexander of Hales a principle that the other medieval authors had neglected: if for predecessors such as Albertus Magnus the beautiful was still definable in terms of objective qualities, Thomas defines it in relation to the knowing subject. The notion of visa placent accentuates the subjective act of enjoyment which becomes constitutive of the aesthetic experience.

De Bruyne obviously makes it clear that there can be no question of establishing a predominance of subjective activity over the objective qualities of the object, and he cites an unequivocal passage from Thomas’s commentary In de divinis nominibus (398–399): “non enim ideo aliquod est pulchrum, quia nos illud amamus, sed quia est pulchrum et bonum, ideo amatur a nobis” (“in fact a thing is not beautiful because we love it, but, because it is beautiful and good, it is loved by us”).³⁶ Still, it does not seem to him without importance that the good and the beautiful, although they are the same thing, are differentiated ratione: if the good is what everyone desires (“respicit appetitum”), the beautiful “respicit vim cognoscitivam” (“relates to the knowing power”), and therefore pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent (“those things are called beautiful which please when seen”) (Summa Theologiae I, 5 4 ad 1, my emphasis).

It is undeniable that for Thomas the beautiful, compared with the good, involves a relationship to the contemplative consciousness. Here, however, De Bruyne finds himself embarrassed by the fact that in the aesthetic experience there appear both a cognitive moment (apprehensio, visio) and what seems to him to be an emotive—today we would call it “passionate”—moment (placet, delectat). And he realizes the danger one might incur by following the route indicated by Maritain.

Can we concur with Maritain that aesthetic pleasure “is the quieting of our power of desire, which rests in the good that belongs to the cognitive power perfectly and harmoniously put into action” (“l’apaisement de notre puissance du désir, qui repose dans le bien propre de la puissance cognitive parfaitement et harmonieusement mise en acte”), to the point that “a being who, per absurdum, possessed only intellect, would have the perception of the beautiful in its roots and in its objective conditions, but not in the delight by means of which alone this perception is brought to completion” (“un ëtre qui, par l’absurde, n’aurait que l’intellect, aurait la perception du beau dans ses racines et dans ses conditions objectives, mais non dans le plaisir par lequel seule cette perception est portée à son achèvement”)? Or will we admit the thesis that Maritain is combating, namely, that the act of knowledge alone can produce the experience of the beautiful?³⁷

In an attempt to disentangle this knot, De Bruyne reminds us that every natural operation in Thomas, including that of intelligence, occurs with a specific end in mind and presupposes an inclination, a tendency, a love. The “passionate” moment, then, of the aesthetic experience should come into play at the stage of the initial act of the knowing intellect. But there is no pleasure in or love for an object without a “practical” consciousness and (De Bruyne does not use this expression, though his discourse implies the concept) its concrete and individual perception. Which is tantamount to saying that one always loves, not childhood or the feminine gender, but this individual child or this woman). And so, once more, we are faced with the disquieting problem of the intuition of the concrete.

It is at this point, in the space of a single page, without insisting unnecessarily, that De Bruyne ventures as follows: “there is no aesthetic sentiment except insofar as intuitive knowledge itself satisfies us, thanks to its qualities of pure intuition: ‘id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet, [the very apprehension of which pleases]’ ” (De Bruyne [1946]1998: 286).

Unfortunately, on this point the same objection already raised against Maritain is also valid for De Bruyne: do we have any reason to state that (in Thomas) the apprehension of something, if it is to produce pleasure, must be intuitive? It does not appear so, especially when we recall that the term apprehensio is used as a rule precisely for abstractive intellectual knowledge. And yet De Bruyne concludes that, when the apprehensio

has to do with the vision of corporeal beauty, it is neither purely sensible nor purely abstractive but essentially intuitive, in the sense that it presents itself psychologically as a synthetic unity. “Non enim proprie loquendum sensus aut intellectus cognoscunt, sed homo per utrumque.” Intuition is an act of the whole man, in whatever way the connection between sensibility and mind is conceived. But in this intuition of the individual form, of which sensation is the first condition, it is the intellect that grasps, not just the meaning of the thing perceived, but also the value proper to pure perception [se rapporte à la vision du beau corporel , elle n’est ni purement sensible ni purement abstractive mais essentiellement intuitive, au sens où elle se présente psychologiquement comme une unité synthétique. “Non enim proprie loquendum sensus aut intellectus cognoscunt, sed homo per utrumque.” L’intuition est l’acte de l’homme tout entier, de quelque forme que l’on conçoive le lien entre sensibilité et esprit. Mais dans cette intuition de la forme individuelle, dont la sensation est la première condition, c’est l’intellect qui saisit non seulement le sens de la chose perçue mais aussi la valeur propre de la perception pure.]

Is it enough to say that “non enim proprie loquendum sensus aut intellectus cognoscunt, sed homo per utrumque” (De veritate II, 6 ad 3—which, when you think about it, is practically a truism) to posit the concept of an intuitive synthesis? Not only does one statement not imply the other, Thomas always said the exact opposite: that sense and intellect, that is, do not know through a lightning synthesis, but in two separate phases. The senses appear first, and then, once the phantasm has been formed, the senses retire into the wings and the intellect steps onstage. But De Bruyne was in need of a principle of knowledge of the individual for which Thomas’s aesthetics, sadly, made no allowance.

Thomas affirms that “the mind knows singulars through a certain kind of reflection, as when the mind, in knowing its object, which is some universal nature, returns to knowledge of its own act, then to the species which is the principle of its act, and, finally, to the phantasm from which it has abstracted the species. In this way, it attains to some knowledge (aliqua cognitio) concerning singulars.”³⁸

But this aliqua cognitio is insufficient to explain the delight one feels in observing how the form shines from the proportionate parts of the matter it organizes, nor to evaluate all the varieties of proportion it exhibits, nor to judge the integrity of the object appreciated. For all of this we must proceed to acts of judgment, to an activity of division and composition, in which we seize “proprietates et accidentia et habitudines” (“properties, accidents and relationships”) (Summa Theologiae Ia, 85, 5 co.).

In this complex activity, which remains intellectual throughout, the aesthetic joy, even as it grasps the characteristics proper to the organized matter, remains an intellectual enjoyment, in which corporeality has a fairly reduced function. For Thomas the aesthetic visio is not something that differs from intellectual knowledge, but represents, if anything, one of its most complex levels. This is the limit of the Thomistic aesthetic (or for some readers, its strength, since aesthetic pleasure would no longer be an accident of the passions but a further exercise of the intellect).

This is Thomas’s position, which stems from his inability to explain the knowledge of the concrete. It is too late to have him change his mind.

De Bruyne was playing a tricky game. On the one hand, he took into account his Belgian predecessors, like De Wulf, who had insisted on the fact that for Thomas the subject has a fundamental role in aesthetic perception—and De Wulf was certainly correct. On the other, he found himself faced with Thomas’s unsatisfactory epistemology. He attempted therefore, relaxing his own historiographical rigor, to infer what Thomas ought to have said in order to make his position coherent and to lay the foundations for an aesthetic that would be satisfactory even to modern eyes.

He clearly shows his satisfaction when he is convinced that he recognizes an intellectual intuition in the Victorines or in Duns Scotus—and he is probably right; so this, we suspect, was why he considered his historical survey complete when he reached Duns Scotus. But if the Victorines and Duns Scotus agreed, so to speak, with De Bruyne, this does not mean that Thomas agreed with Scotus and the Victorines. In a word, the chapter on Thomas is really quite tormented and represents the “Maritainian fault” in De Bruyne’s otherwise impeccable work. Which goes to show how difficult it is for a militant Thomist to admit that Thomas cannot always satisfy the legitimate theoretical desires of someone who is attempting to come to terms not only with Thomas but also with modern thought.

And yet, perhaps in a fit of prudence, in the chapter of the Études dedicated to Thomas, De Bruyne avoids using the expression “intellectual intuition.” Maybe he really had been giving Roland-Gosselin’s reaction some thought.

If writing the history of thought means letting the authors of the past say what they actually said and not what we would have them say, we must be consistent and accuse De Bruyne of this historiographical inaccuracy. While recognizing, however, that he must have been somehow aware that he was treading on thin ice, since he confined his reflections on intuition in Thomas to a mere two pages, almost en passant. So that, forgiving him this single moment of weakness, or of excessive love for his author, we may continue to insist on the great distance that separates Maritain’s reading from his: the former consisting in a free use of the sources, the latter in an effort at interpretation.

This chapter is a revisiting of two previous texts: “Storiografia medievale ed estetica teorica” (Eco 1961) and “L’esthétique médiévale d’Edgar de Bruyne” (Eco 2004a). The latter was also published in Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 71 (2004): 219–232. On the difference between the use and the interpretation of texts, see Eco (1979, 1990). [Translator’s note: I am grateful to Hugh Bredin and to his translation of Eco (1988) for his example and for helpful suggestions.]

1. Art et scolastique, first written between 1918 and 1919 and published in the periodical Les lettres in 1919, was issued in book form by the Librairie de l’Art Catholique in 1920. A copy of this edition, held in the University of Toronto library, can be read online at http://archive.org/stream/artetscolastique00mariuoft#page/n0/mode/1up. A second, revised edition appeared in 1927 (Paris: Rouart), with additional notes, as well as several new annexes (appendices or excursuses). The pages on poetry were extrapolated and reprinted, along with essays and poems by other authors, in the miscellany Frontières de la poésie [The Frontiers of Poetry] (Maritain 1935). The standard English version, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry (Maritain 1962) was translated by Joseph W. Evans from the third and final revised French edition (1935).

2. We may cite Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (“Ragioni del bello secondo i principi di San Tommaso,” Civiltà cattolica, 1859–1860), Vincenzo Fortunato Marchese (Delle benemerenze di San Tommaso verso le belle arti, Genoa, 1974), Pierre Vallet (Idée du beau dans la philosophie de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Louvain, 1887), J. Biolez (Saint Thomas et les Beaux Arts, Louvain, 1896), Domenico M. Valensise (Dell’estetica secondo i principii dell’Angelico Dottore, Rome, 1903), Paolo Lingueglia (“Le basi e le leggi dell’estetica secondo San Tommaso,” in Pagine di d’arte e di letteratura, Turin, 1915), Octavio Nicolas Derisi (Lo eterno y lo temporal en el arte, Buenos Aires, 1942), as well as—but after Maritain—Leonard Callahan (Theory of Aesthetics: According to the Principles of Saint Thomas, Washington, DC, 1928), Adolf Dyroff (“Über die Entwicklung und der Wert der Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin,” Archiv für systematische Philosophie una Soziologie, 1929), Carlo Mazzantini (“Linee fondamentali di una estetica tomista,” Studium, 1929), Thomas Gilby (Poetic Experience: An Introduction to Thomistic Aesthetic, New York, 1934), Josef Koch (“Zur Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik, 1931), Francesco Olgiati (“San Tommaso e l’arte,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 1934), down to Mortimer Adler who, in his Art and Prudence (1937), attempted to apply Aristotelian aesthetics, seen through a Thomistic lens, to the cinema. Among these commentators perhaps the most original was Maurice de Wulf with his Études historiques sur l’esthétique de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain, 1896), which underscored the psychological elements in Thomistic aesthetics. Less historiographically reliable was his Art et beauté (1920), mixing as it does, and as did many similar works, philosophical historiography and militant metaphysics.

[Translator’s note: It may be useful to point out that in what follows Eco will be using the term “aesthetic,” not only with reference to the artistic experience, but in its broader sense of the appreciation of beauty. This is made clear in his 1956 dissertation on Aquinas, now translated into English by Hugh Bredin as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas: “The concept of the aesthetic refers to the problem of the possible objective character, and the subjective conditions, of what we call the experience of beauty. It thus refers also to problems connected with the aesthetic object and aesthetic pleasure. The experience of beauty does not necessarily have art as its object; for we ascribe beauty not just to poems and paintings but also to horses, sunsets, and women—or even, at its limits, to a crime or a gourmet meal” (Eco 1988: 3).]

3. Let us not forget that in 1944 he published a collection of essays entitled De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, essais de métaphysique et de morale (New York: Éditions de la Maison Française).

4. See my “The Poetics and Us” [“La Poetica e noi”] in Eco (2004b).

5. It is a known fact that nowhere in the Sherlock Holmes stories does Arthur Conan Doyle have his hero utter the famous phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson,” and yet the remark is as frequently cited as “To be or not to be.” The same thing has occurred with this formula of Maritain’s, which has continued to be repeated as authentically Thomistic by a multiplicity of authors. Even De Munnynk (1923), writing as a critic of Maritain’s method, continues to quote “pulchrum, est id quod visum placet” without batting an eyelid.

6. “id quod visum placet, ce qui plaît étant vu, c’est-à-dire étant l’objet d’une intuition.… Contemplant l’objet dans l’intuition que le sens en a, l’intellect jouit d’une présence, elle jouit de la présence rayonnante d’un intelligible qui ne se révèle pas lui-même à ses yeux tel qu’il est. Se détourne-t-elle du sens pour abstraire et raisonner, elle se détourne de sa joie, et perd contact avec ce rayonnement. Pour entendre cela, représentons-nous que c’est l’intelligence et le sens ne faisant qu’un, ou, si l’on peut ainsi parler, le sens intelligencié, qui donne lieu dans le coeur à la joie esthétique” (1927: 252–254, n. 55).

7. “C’est une vue simple, bien que virtuellement très riche en multiplicité, de l’oeuvre à faire saisie dans son âme individuelle, vue qui est comme un germe spirituel ou une raison séminale de l’oeuvre, et qui tient de ce que M. Bergson appelle intuition et schéma dynamique, qui intéresse non seulement l’intelligence, mais aussi l’imagination et la sensibilité de l’artiste” (1927: 277–278, n. 93).

8. Discovered in 1869 and at first attributed to Thomas, by the time Maritain was writing, the consensus inclined toward attributing it to Albertus Magnus (so much so that in 1927 Mandonnet would classify it among Thomas’s Opuscula spuria). Maritain had therefore a number of indications that ought to have encouraged him to a greater prudence.

9. See Maritain (1920: 42–44, 48–49, and 185–186, n. 73).

10. See Maritain (1920: 207, n. 130, and 217, n. 138), and Maritain (1935: 33, n. 1).

11. See, for a fuller treatment, Chapter 3 in the present volume.

12. See John of St. Thomas (1930). The terminus or term is “id, ex quo simplex conficitur propositio” (“that out of which a simple proposition is made”) or “vox significativa ad placitum ex qua simplex conficitur propositio vel oratio” (“a vocal expression significative by stipulation, from which a simple proposition or sentence is constructed”) (Deely 1985: 24); while the sign or signum is “id, quod potentiae cognoscitivae aliquid aliud a se repraesentat (“that which represents something other than itself to a cognitive power”) (Deely 1985: 25). “Essentialiter enim consistit in ordine ad signatum” (“For the being of a sign essentially consists in an order to a signified”) (Deely 1985: 218). See also Deely (1988) and Murphy (1991).

13. “Secundum autem diversificantur gradus prophetiae quantum ad expressionem signorum imaginabilium quibus veritas intelligibilis exprimitur. Et quia signa maxime expressa intelligibilis veritatis sunt verba, ideo altior gradus prophetiae videtur quando propheta audit verba exprimentia intelligibilem veritatem.… In quibus etiam signis tanto videtur prophetia esse altior, quanto signa sunt magis expressa” (“Secondly the degrees of this prophecy are differentiated according to the expressiveness of the imaginary signs whereby the intelligible truth is conveyed. And since words are the most expressive signs of intelligible truth, it would seem to be a higher degree of prophecy when the prophet … hears words expressive of an intelligible truth.… In such like signs prophecy would seem to be the more excellent, according as the signs are more expressive”) Summa Theologiae trans. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, II–II, 174, 3.

14. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry began life as a cycle of six A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1952, and was published in 1953 for the Bollingen Foundation by Pantheon Books. Our quotations are taken from this edition.

15. It is worth remarking that, in the second chapter of the book, Maritain appeals once more to the Scholastic theory of art, expounding it faithfully. But he continues to imply that primary intuition, a notion foreign to Scholastic theory, must preside over the organization of the operative rules. For Maritain creative intuition is the fundamental rule on which the artist’s fidelity depends, and by whose standard it should be judged. For the medieval mind, on the other hand, the rules precede the productive act and its mental conception.

16. For a reconstruction of the process in semiotic terms, see Pellerey (1984).

17. “Intellectus possibilis intelligit hominem non secundum quod est HIC homo sed in quantum est HOMO simpliciter, secundum rationem speciei” (“The possible intellect understands man, not as THIS man, but simply as MAN, according to man’s specific nature”) (Contra gentiles II, 73).

18. “Singulare in rebus materialibus intellectus noster directe et primo cognoscere non potest. Cuius ratio est, quia principium singularitatis in rebus materialibus est material individualis, intellectus autem noster, sicut supra dictum est, intelligit abstrahendo speciem intelligibilem ab huiusmodi material. Quod autem a materia individuali abstrahitur, est universale. Unde intellectus noster directe non est cognoscitivus nisu universalium. Indirecte autem, et quasi per quandam reflexionem, potest cognoscere singulare, quia, sicut supra dictum est, etiam postquam species intelligibiles abstraxit, non potest secundum eas actu intelligere nisi convertendo se ad phantasmata, in quibus species intelligibiles intelligit, ut dicitur in III de anima. Sic igitur ipsum universale per speciem intelligibilem directe intelligit; indirecte autem singularia, quorum sunt phantasmata. Et hoc modo format hanc propositionem, Socrates est homo” (“Directly and immediately our intellect cannot know the singular in material realities. The reason is that the principle of singularity in material things is individual matter, and our intellect—as said before—understands by abstracting species from this sort of matter. But what is abstracted from individual matter is universal. Therefore our intellect has direct knowledge only of universals. Indirectly and by a quasi-reflection, on the other hand, the intellect can know the singular, because, as mentioned before, even after it has abstracted species it cannot actually understand by means of them except by a return to sense images in which it understands the species, as Aristotle says [in De anima III]. Therefore, in this sense, it is the universal that the intellect understands directly by means of the species, and singulars (represented in sense images) only indirectly. And it is in this way that it formulates the proposition, ‘Socrates is a man’ ”) (Summa Theologiae I, 86, 1 co.). “Species igitur rei, secundum quod est in phantasmatibus, non est intelligibilis actu.… Sicut nec species coloris est sensata in actu secundum quod est in lapide, sed solum secundum quod est in pupilla” (“Wherefore the species of a thing according as it is in the phantasms is not actually intelligible … even so neither is the species of color actually perceived according as it is in the stone, but only according as it is in the pupil) (Contra gentiles II, 59).

19. On this resolution of the contemplation of the concrete in the discursive act of judgment, which characterizes Thomistic epistemology and is important if we are to understand the type of aesthetic that derives from it, we dealt at length in chapter 7 of Eco (1956) (English translation Eco [1988]). In what follows we will have occasion to mention the article by Roland-Gosselin, “Peut-on parler d’intuition intellectuelle dans la philosophie thomiste?” In open polemic with Maritain’s positions, he concluded: “Sensation is an intuition of the sensible as such. Reflection, or psychological awareness, is an intuition of our acts, but determined primarily by their object. The other ‘views,’ more or less direct and immediate, that we have at our disposal do not attain the single reality. To reach concrete existence, that of things or the substantial existence of the ego, a detour or a discourse is called for.” [“La sensation est une intuition du sensible comme tel. La réflexion, ou conscience psychologique, est une intuition de nos actes, mais déterminée premièrement par leur objet. Les autres ‘vues’ plus ou moins directes et immédiates, dont nous disposons, n’atteignent pas la réalité singulière. Pour rejoindre l’existence concrète, celle des choses ou l’existence substantielle du moi, un détour, ou un discours s’impose à elles”] (Roland-Gosselin 1930: 730).

20. Only the external senses know individual things, but it is probably a metaphor to say that they know, because in fact they register and do not know themselves (Contra gentiles II, 66). On the limits of Thomistic epistemology, see also Mahoney (1982).

21. In Eco (1956) we stated that this reconsideration of the concrete object occurs for Thomas only in the act of judgment. We could hardly compel him to say more, but the fact remains that in this way too the enjoyment of the concrete always takes place at rarefied intellectual heights, where the thing is considered only through the reflexio on what is already a phantasm. Could Thomas have failed to recognize that the thing, even after having been known (and reduced it to a phantasm), could be reconsidered through an activity that brought the senses into play once more? Not that he could not rule out the possibility that, after perceiving a thing a first time, we might perceive it again other times. He probably considered this event as a second act of perception, no different from the first, and his theory of knowledge obviously had to define the act of perception in its basic dynamic, without worrying about how often a human being may accidentally happen to perceive something. Which would perhaps explain why he was not interested in the type of experience that modern aesthetic theories have chosen to call intuitive because it seemed too complex to consider it as part of a process beginning over and over again, made up of hypotheses, inferences, trial and error. To conceive of such an idea, he would have had to speak not only of the possibility of a reflexio ad phantasmata but also of a subsequent reflexio ad qualitates sensibiles. In other words, he would have had to understand the comprehension of an object, not as a simple act, a simplex apprehensio, but as a never-ending process. Concerned, however, with guaranteeing the truth of our every perceptive contact with reality, he does not go so far; indeed he could not go so far. If we were to go back and come to terms with sensible experience after having grasped the quidditas, as if we might have made a mistake, then the entire doctrine of the intellect would be in trouble.

22. See Summa Theologiae II–II, 45, 2. There are certain acts of virtue that we can judge and evaluate in the light of intellectual knowledge. But at the moment of acting, if the habitus is deeply rooted in us, the rule acts via a certain connaturality by which it is realized without our having a clear intellectual awareness. Knowledge by connaturality, if you like, but of a fixed rule, not the intuition of a hitherto unknown possibility of being. Sapientia is a gift of the Spirit, the connate ability to apply the right rule at the right moment. But sapentia presupposes the existence of fixed rules, plastically adaptable to contingent situations, but always in accord with a possibility that the intellect will subsequently be able to clarify. This is not the kind of knowledge that implies a reconstruction of the world along lines forever foreign to the intellect, understood by many of the Romantic and contemporary poets whom Maritain cites in support of his claims (from Novalis to Rimbaud and on to Char, Eluard, and John Crowe Ransom, etc.; see Maritain 1953: ch. 4).

23. It has been pointed out that the whole of Eckhart’s implied aesthetics consists in the depiction of a tension toward a goal that is never realized, an aspiration that never finds rest. It finds its typical expression in the disproportionate verticalities of the Rhine cathedrals, whereas Thomistic aesthetics reminds us of the more composed Italian Gothic in which beauty is measured on a more human scale, capable of being perceived and enjoyed without requiring a violent laceration of the imagination and the sensibility (cf. Assunto 1961).

24. For Coleridge, poetry is an act of analogical knowledge based on love. As he states in On Poesy or Art: “The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure and discourses to us by symbols, as we unconsciously imitate those whom we love” (http://www.bartleby.com/27/17.html). There exists, beyond the language of artificially stimulated hallucination, the possibility of a more authentic language of nature, through which the invisible communicates its existence to finite being. Nature is an alphabet, says Coleridge, and, obsessed by the mystery of the hieroglyph, he declares that what we call nature is a poem that lies hidden in a secret and mysterious script. In the years during which he composed what was to become his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge breaks with Kant and turns to Schelling, because he cannot tolerate Kant’s critical inflexibility or confine himself to phenomena. In chapter 13 “On the imagination,” he makes a demiurgic claim: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Coleridge 1983, I, 304). See also the following quotation from Anima Poetae: “In looking at the objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolic language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.”

25. For a review of these critiques, see Michel Lemoine’s afterword to the 1998 Albin Michel edition. If we insist on looking for absences in De Bruyne’s three volumes, the first great absence (somewhat surprisingly, since he belongs to the same Netherlandic culture) is Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, published in 1919, which contains a number of acute observations on the medieval aesthetic sensibility (and not merely in the later centuries upon whose threshold De Bruyne chose to stop). On the other hand, talking about absences, Curtius, who had read everything, published his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter] in 1948, and in it he fails to mention De Bruyne—perhaps because the Bruges edition, published two years earlier, seems to have had a practically clandestine circulation.

26. But Edgar De Bruyne, reviewing Glunz in 1938 in the Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie, criticized him for not mentioning the great theoretical currents like the aesthetics of proportion and light, or the psychology of the Victorines.

27. See Pouillon (1946).

28. See Panofsky (1946).

29. In the index of names, however, the reader should remember to look for Bruyne and not De Bruyne.

30. The first study devoted by our author to Thomas is S. Thomas d’Aquin. Le milieu.—L’homme.—La vision du monde (Paris-Brussels: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1928).

31. Not by everyone of course. It is worth recalling the Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series by Edmond de Coussemaker (Paris, 1864–1876), Clemens Baeumker’s Witelo (Münster, 1908), E. Lutz, “Die Ästhetik Bonaventuras,” in Festgabe zum 60: Geburstag Clem, Baeumker (Münster, 1913), Johan Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters [The Waning of the Middle Ages] (Haarlem, 1919), Walter Müller, Das Problem der Seelenschönheit im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1926), Clare Riedl, Grosseteste On Light (Milwaukee, 1942), Karl Svoboda, L’esthétique de Saint Augustin et ses sources (Paris-Brno 1927), not to mention Menendez y Pelayo (1883), Edmond Faral (1924), J. Schlosser Magnino (1924), H. H. Glunz (1937), and Henri Pouillon (1939).

32. The goal of an historiographically correct reconstruction is not merely not to attempt to modernize one’s authors. Presenting them as they actually were sometimes renews their relevance, in the sense that it allows us to understand better the relationships between ourselves and certain cultural phenomena that had hitherto been difficult to fathom. We may take as an example one of the most intriguing chapters of the Études, that on Hisperic–Latin (or Hiberno-Latin) aesthetics (the fourth chapter of the first volume). Today we possess reliable critical editions of the Hisperica Famina (Herren, 1974) and of the Epitomae and Epistolae of Virgil of Toulouse (Polara, 1979), but De Bruyne was compelled to work with nineteenth-century sources or directly with the Patrologia. The literary sensibility with which he revisits the phenomenon of the Asiatic style is completely modern (and at times betrays a penchant for the stammering Latin of the dark centuries almost worthy of Huysmans), even if some of his critics have blamed him for appealing too casually to categories such as “Baroque.” True, he too was a man of his own day and had a number of reservations regarding that “barbaric” taste, whereas you and I might be tempted to see those barbarians as precursors of James Joyce. Lemoine (1998), however, reminds us that, at the same time and apropos of the same texts, Henri Leclerc in the Dictionnaire de l’Archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (1920), which he compiled with Fernand Cabrol, insisted that the Irish monks who composed and read the Hisperica Famina “were madmen who nowadays would find themselves relegated to an asylum for the mentally infirm.” De Bruyne on the other hand was able to identify the links between these “demential” exercises and the miniatures of the Book of Kells and other masterpieces of Irish art, with the result that the pages he devotes to the Hisperic aesthetic are among the finest ever dedicated to this mysterious chapter of medieval culture.

33. See, for example, on p. 508, apropos of the sentiment of the beautiful: “It is not until the 13th century that the problem of distinguishing between the higher and the lower senses is posited in an explicit fashion” [“Ce n’est qu’au XIIIe siècle que le problème de la distinction des sens supérieurs et inférieurs se pose de manière explicite”].

34. See Deely (1985: 29), where, however, it seems fairly clear that for John (Poinsot) the notitia intuitiva is that of things present to the senses and therefore is to be identified with sensation.

35. Which goes to show once again that De Bruyne had a keen awareness of a diachronic development in medieval aesthetic themes. And it was in an implied polemic vis-à-vis his professed conclusions, but using the same texts that he had made available, that I originally entitled my 1959 survey Sviluppo dell’estetica medievale (“The Development of Medieval Aesthetics”). The English translation, by Hugh Bredin, is entitled Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (Eco 1986).

36. The idea was already formulated in Augustine, De vera religione 32, 19.

37. The quotations from Maritain refer to the 1927 edition of Art et scolastique, pp. 257, 259, n. 1.

38. “mens singulare cognoscit per quandam reflexionem, prout, scilicet, mens cognoscendo objectum suum, quod est aliqua natura universalis, redit in cognitionem sui actus, et ulterius in specimen quae est actus sui principium, et ulterius in phantasma a quo species est abstracta; et sic aliquam cognitionem de singulari accipit” (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate X, 5 co., trans. James V. McGlynn, S.J. http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer10.htm.