From the Tree to the Labyrinth (60 page)

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).

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.