From the Tree to the Labyrinth (61 page)

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.

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