From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  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 someth
ing 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 cultur
e 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