From the Tree to the Labyrinth

by Eco, Umberto

  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.