From the Tree to the Labyrinth (56 page)

9
. Even a contemporary Hebrew scholar like André Chouraqui translates: “Poétisez pour Elohim, chantez son nom; frayez passages au chevalier des nues: Yah est son nom! Exultez en face di lui!”

10
. I am reminded of that nineteenth-century congressman from Texas who opposed the introduction of foreign language teaching in the schools declaring: “If English was good enough for the Lord Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me!”

11
. All my information about Abulafia and the quotations that below come from Idel (1988a–c, 1989).

12
. Other Kabbalists point out that Christians are lacking the letter
heth
and the Arabs do not have the
pe;
and in the Renaissance Yohanan Alemanno will be of the opinion that the variations in pronunciation with regard to the twenty-two Hebrew letters are comparable to the sounds made by the different animals (some are like the grunt of a pig, others like the croak of a frog, others still like the honking of a crane). So that the very fact that they produce different sounds reveals that the other languages belong to peoples who have abandoned the proper conduct of life. In this sense, the multiplication of letters is considered to be one of the results of the confusion of Babel. Alemanno is aware of the fact that other peoples have recognized their own languages as the best in the world, and he cites Galen, for whom the Greek tongue is the most pleasing and the most respondent to the laws of reason, but, not daring to contradict him, he admits that this is because there are affinities between Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Assyrian.

13
. Zerakhya uses a proof that we shall encounter after the Renaissance in other, Christian authors—cf. Brian Walton,
In Biblia polyglotta prolegomena
(1657) or Francisco Vallesio,
De sacra philosophia
(1652)—if the divine gift of an original sacred language had ever been made, every human being, no matter what their mother tongue, would have to have an innate knowledge of the sacred language as well.

14
. See Romano (2000). Cf. Battistoni (1995, 1999).

8

The Use and Interpretation of Medieval Texts

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.

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