From the Tree to the Labyrinth (63 page)

14
.
Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
began life as a cycle of six A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1952, and was published in 1953 for the Bollingen Foundation by Pantheon Books. Our quotations are taken from this edition.

15
. It is worth remarking that, in the second chapter of the book, Maritain appeals once more to the Scholastic theory of art, expounding it faithfully. But he continues to imply that primary intuition, a notion foreign to Scholastic theory, must preside over the organization of the operative rules. For Maritain creative intuition is the fundamental rule on which the artist’s fidelity depends, and by whose standard it should be judged. For the medieval mind, on the other hand, the rules precede the productive act and its mental conception.

16
. For a reconstruction of the process in semiotic terms, see Pellerey (1984).

17
. “Intellectus possibilis intelligit hominem non secundum quod est HIC homo sed in quantum est HOMO simpliciter, secundum rationem speciei” (“The possible intellect understands man, not as THIS man, but simply as MAN, according to man’s specific nature”) (
Contra gentiles
II, 73).

18
. “Singulare in rebus materialibus intellectus noster directe et primo cognoscere non potest. Cuius ratio est, quia principium singularitatis in rebus materialibus est material individualis, intellectus autem noster, sicut supra dictum est, intelligit abstrahendo speciem intelligibilem ab huiusmodi material. Quod autem a materia individuali abstrahitur, est universale. Unde intellectus noster directe non est cognoscitivus nisu universalium. Indirecte autem, et quasi per quandam reflexionem, potest cognoscere singulare, quia, sicut supra dictum est, etiam postquam species intelligibiles abstraxit, non potest secundum eas actu intelligere nisi convertendo se ad phantasmata, in quibus species intelligibiles intelligit, ut dicitur in III de anima. Sic igitur ipsum universale per speciem intelligibilem directe intelligit; indirecte autem singularia, quorum sunt phantasmata. Et hoc modo format hanc propositionem, Socrates est homo” (“Directly and immediately our intellect cannot know the singular in material realities. The reason is that the principle of singularity in material things is individual matter, and our intellect—as said before—understands by abstracting species from this sort of matter. But what is abstracted from individual matter is universal. Therefore our intellect has direct knowledge only of universals. Indirectly and by a quasi-reflection, on the other hand, the intellect can know the singular, because, as mentioned before, even after it has abstracted species it cannot actually understand by means of them except by a return to sense images in which it understands the species, as Aristotle says [in
De anima
III]. Therefore, in this sense, it is the universal that the intellect understands directly by means of the species, and singulars (represented in sense images) only indirectly. And it is in this way that it formulates the proposition, ‘Socrates is a man’ ”) (
Summa Theologiae
I, 86, 1 co.). “Species igitur rei, secundum quod est in phantasmatibus, non est intelligibilis actu.… Sicut nec species coloris est sensata in actu secundum quod est in lapide, sed solum secundum quod est in pupilla” (“Wherefore the species of a thing according as it is in the phantasms is not actually intelligible … even so neither is the species of color actually perceived according as it is in the stone, but only according as it is in the pupil) (
Contra gentiles
II, 59).

19
. On this resolution of the contemplation of the concrete in the discursive act of judgment, which characterizes Thomistic epistemology and is important if we are to understand the type of aesthetic that derives from it, we dealt at length in chapter 7 of Eco (1956) (English translation Eco [1988]). In what follows we will have occasion to mention the article by Roland-Gosselin, “Peut-on parler d’intuition intellectuelle dans la philosophie thomiste?” In open polemic with Maritain’s positions, he concluded: “Sensation is an intuition of the sensible as such. Reflection, or psychological awareness, is an intuition of our acts, but determined primarily by their object. The other ‘views,’ more or less direct and immediate, that we have at our disposal do not attain the single reality. To reach concrete existence, that of things or the substantial existence of the ego, a detour or a discourse is called for.” [“La sensation est une intuition du sensible comme tel. La réflexion, ou conscience psychologique, est une intuition de nos actes, mais déterminée premièrement par leur objet. Les autres ‘vues’ plus ou moins directes et immédiates, dont nous disposons, n’atteignent pas la réalité singulière. Pour rejoindre l’existence concrète, celle des choses ou l’existence substantielle du moi, un détour, ou un discours s’impose à elles”] (Roland-Gosselin 1930: 730).

20
. Only the external senses know individual things, but it is probably a metaphor to say that they know, because in fact they register and do not know themselves (
Contra gentiles
II, 66). On the limits of Thomistic epistemology, see also Mahoney (1982).

21
. In Eco (1956) we stated that this reconsideration of the concrete object occurs for Thomas only in the act of judgment. We could hardly compel him to say more, but the fact remains that in this way too the enjoyment of the concrete always takes place at rarefied intellectual heights, where the thing is considered only through the
reflexio
on what is already a phantasm. Could Thomas have failed to recognize that the thing, even after having been known (and reduced it to a phantasm), could be reconsidered through an activity that brought the senses into play once more? Not that he could not rule out the possibility that, after perceiving a thing a first time, we might perceive it again other times. He probably considered this event as a second act of perception, no different from the first, and his theory of knowledge obviously had to define the act of perception in its basic dynamic, without worrying about how often a human being may accidentally happen to perceive something. Which would perhaps explain why he was not interested in the type of experience that modern aesthetic theories have chosen to call intuitive because it seemed too complex to consider it as part of a process beginning over and over again, made up of hypotheses, inferences, trial and error. To conceive of such an idea, he would have had to speak not only of the possibility of a
reflexio ad phantasmata
but also of a subsequent
reflexio ad qualitates sensibiles.
In other words, he would have had to understand the comprehension of an object, not as a simple act, a
simplex apprehensio,
but as a never-ending process. Concerned, however, with guaranteeing the truth of our every perceptive contact with reality, he does not go so far; indeed he could not go so far. If we were to go back and come to terms with sensible experience after having grasped the
quidditas,
as if we might have made a mistake, then the entire doctrine of the intellect would be in trouble.

22
. See
Summa Theologiae
II–II, 45, 2. There are certain acts of virtue that we can judge and evaluate in the light of intellectual knowledge. But at the moment of acting, if the
habitus
is deeply rooted in us, the rule acts via a certain connaturality by which it is realized without our having a clear intellectual awareness. Knowledge by connaturality, if you like, but of a fixed rule, not the intuition of a hitherto unknown possibility of being.
Sapientia
is a gift of the Spirit, the connate ability to apply the right rule at the right moment. But
sapentia
presupposes the existence of fixed rules, plastically adaptable to contingent situations, but always in accord with a possibility that the intellect will subsequently be able to clarify. This is not the kind of knowledge that implies a reconstruction of the world along lines forever foreign to the intellect, understood by many of the Romantic and contemporary poets whom Maritain cites in support of his claims (from Novalis to Rimbaud and on to Char, Eluard, and John Crowe Ransom, etc.; see Maritain 1953: ch. 4).

23
. It has been pointed out that the whole of Eckhart’s implied aesthetics consists in the depiction of a tension toward a goal that is never realized, an aspiration that never finds rest. It finds its typical expression in the disproportionate verticalities of the Rhine cathedrals, whereas Thomistic aesthetics reminds us of the more composed Italian Gothic in which beauty is measured on a more human scale, capable of being perceived and enjoyed without requiring a violent laceration of the imagination and the sensibility (cf. Assunto 1961).

24
. For Coleridge, poetry is an act of analogical knowledge based on love. As he states in
On Poesy or Art:
“The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure and discourses to us by symbols, as we unconsciously imitate those whom we love” (
http://www.bartleby.com/27/17.html
). There exists, beyond the language of artificially stimulated hallucination, the possibility of a more authentic language of nature, through which the invisible communicates its existence to finite being. Nature is an alphabet, says Coleridge, and, obsessed by the mystery of the hieroglyph, he declares that what we call nature is a poem that lies hidden in a secret and mysterious script. In the years during which he composed what was to become his
Biographia Literaria,
Coleridge breaks with Kant and turns to Schelling, because he cannot tolerate Kant’s critical inflexibility or confine himself to phenomena. In chapter 13 “On the imagination,” he makes a demiurgic claim: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Coleridge 1983, I, 304). See also the following quotation from
Anima Poetae:
“In looking at the objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolic language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.”

25
. For a review of these critiques, see Michel Lemoine’s afterword to the 1998 Albin Michel edition. If we insist on looking for absences in De Bruyne’s three volumes, the first great absence (somewhat surprisingly, since he belongs to the same Netherlandic culture) is Huizinga’s
Waning of the Middle Ages,
published in 1919, which contains a number of acute observations on the medieval aesthetic sensibility (and not merely in the later centuries upon whose threshold De Bruyne chose to stop). On the other hand, talking about absences, Curtius, who had read everything, published his
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
[
Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter
] in 1948, and in it he fails to mention De Bruyne—perhaps because the Bruges edition, published two years earlier, seems to have had a practically clandestine circulation.

26
. But Edgar De Bruyne, reviewing Glunz in 1938 in the
Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie,
criticized him for not mentioning the great theoretical currents like the aesthetics of proportion and light, or the psychology of the Victorines.

27
. See Pouillon (1946).

28
. See Panofsky (1946).

29
. In the index of names, however, the reader should remember to look for Bruyne and not
De
Bruyne.

30
. The first study devoted by our author to Thomas is
S. Thomas d’Aquin. Le milieu.—L’homme.—La vision du monde
(Paris-Brussels: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1928).

31
. Not by everyone of course. It is worth recalling the
Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series
by Edmond de Coussemaker (Paris, 1864–1876), Clemens Baeumker’s
Witelo
(Münster, 1908), E. Lutz, “Die Ästhetik Bonaventuras,” in
Festgabe zum 60: Geburstag Clem, Baeumker
(Münster, 1913), Johan Huizinga,
Herbst des Mittelalters
[The Waning of the Middle Ages] (Haarlem, 1919), Walter Müller,
Das Problem der Seelenschönheit im Mittelalter
(Berlin, 1926), Clare Riedl,
Grosseteste On Light
(Milwaukee, 1942), Karl Svoboda,
L’esthétique de Saint Augustin et ses sources
(Paris-Brno 1927), not to mention Menendez y Pelayo (1883), Edmond Faral (1924), J. Schlosser Magnino (1924), H. H. Glunz (1937), and Henri Pouillon (1939).

32
. The goal of an historiographically correct reconstruction is not merely
not
to attempt to modernize one’s authors. Presenting them as they actually were sometimes renews their relevance, in the sense that it allows us to understand better the relationships between ourselves and certain cultural phenomena that had hitherto been difficult to fathom. We may take as an example one of the most intriguing chapters of the
Études,
that on Hisperic–Latin (or Hiberno-Latin) aesthetics (the fourth chapter of the first volume). Today we possess reliable critical editions of the
Hisperica Famina
(Herren, 1974) and of the
Epitomae
and
Epistolae
of Virgil of Toulouse (Polara, 1979), but De Bruyne was compelled to work with nineteenth-century sources or directly with the
Patrologia.
The literary sensibility with which he revisits the phenomenon of the Asiatic style is completely modern (and at times betrays a penchant for the stammering Latin of the dark centuries almost worthy of Huysmans), even if some of his critics have blamed him for appealing too casually to categories such as “Baroque.” True, he too was a man of his own day and had a number of reservations regarding that “barbaric” taste, whereas you and I might be tempted to see those barbarians as precursors of James Joyce. Lemoine (1998), however, reminds us that, at the same time and apropos of the same texts, Henri Leclerc in the
Dictionnaire de l’Archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie
(1920), which he compiled with Fernand Cabrol, insisted that the Irish monks who composed and read the
Hisperica Famina
“were madmen who nowadays would find themselves relegated to an asylum for the mentally infirm.” De Bruyne on the other hand was able to identify the links between these “demential” exercises and the miniatures of the Book of Kells and other masterpieces of Irish art, with the result that the pages he devotes to the Hisperic aesthetic are among the finest ever dedicated to this mysterious chapter of medieval culture.