by Umberto Eco
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
has to do with the vision of corporeal beauty, it is neither purely sensible nor purely abstractive but essentially intuitive, in the sense that it presents itself psychologically as a synthetic unity. “Non enim proprie loquendum sensus aut intellectus cognoscunt, sed homo per utrumque.” Intuition is an act of the whole man, in whatever way the connection between sensibility and mind is conceived. But in this intuition of the individual form, of which sensation is the first condition, it is the intellect that grasps, not just the meaning of the thing perceived, but also the value proper to pure perception [se rapporte à la vision du beau corporel , elle n’est ni purement sensible ni purement abstractive mais essentiellement intuitive, au sens où elle se présente psychologiquement comme une unité synthétique. “Non enim proprie loquendum sensus aut intellectus cognoscunt, sed homo per utrumque.” L’intuition est l’acte de l’homme tout entier, de quelque forme que l’on conçoive le lien entre sensibilité et esprit. Mais dans cette intuition de la forme individuelle, dont la sensation est la première condition, c’est l’intellect qui saisit non seulement le sens de la chose perçue mais aussi la valeur propre de la perception pure.]
Is it enough to say that “non enim proprie loquendum sensus aut intellectus cognoscunt, sed homo per utrumque” (De veritate II, 6 ad 3—which, when you think about it, is practically a truism) to posit the concept of an intuitive synthesis? Not only does one statement not imply the other, Thomas always said the exact opposite: that sense and intellect, that is, do not know through a lightning synthesis, but in two separate phases. The senses appear first, and then, once the phantasm has been formed, the senses retire into the wings and the intellect steps onstage. But De Bruyne was in need of a principle of knowledge of the individual for which Thomas’s aesthetics, sadly, made no allowance.
Thomas affirms that “the mind knows singulars through a certain kind of reflection, as when the mind, in knowing its object, which is some universal nature, returns to knowledge of its own act, then to the species which is the principle of its act, and, finally, to the phantasm from which it has abstracted the species. In this way, it attains to some knowledge (aliqua cognitio) concerning singulars.”38
But this aliqua cognitio is insufficient to explain the delight one feels in observing how the form shines from the proportionate parts of the matter it organizes, nor to evaluate all the varieties of proportion it exhibits, nor to judge the integrity of the object appreciated. For all of this we must proceed to acts of judgment, to an activity of division and composition, in which we seize “proprietates et accidentia et habitudines” (“properties, accidents and relationships”) (Summa Theologiae Ia, 85, 5 co.).
In this complex activity, which remains intellectual throughout, the aesthetic joy, even as it grasps the characteristics proper to the organized matter, remains an intellectual enjoyment, in which corporeality has a fairly reduced function. For Thomas the aesthetic visio is not something that differs from intellectual knowledge, but represents, if anything, one of its most complex levels. This is the limit of the Thomistic aesthetic (or for some readers, its strength, since aesthetic pleasure would no longer be an accident of the passions but a further exercise of the intellect).
This is Thomas’s position, which stems from his inability to explain the knowledge of the concrete. It is too late to have him change his mind.
De Bruyne was playing a tricky game. On the one hand, he took into account his Belgian predecessors, like De Wulf, who had insisted on the fact that for Thomas the subject has a fundamental role in aesthetic perception—and De Wulf was certainly correct. On the other, he found himself faced with Thomas’s unsatisfactory epistemology. He attempted therefore, relaxing his own historiographical rigor, to infer what Thomas ought to have said in order to make his position coherent and to lay the foundations for an aesthetic that would be satisfactory even to modern eyes.
He clearly shows his satisfaction when he is convinced that he recognizes an intellectual intuition in the Victorines or in Duns Scotus—and he is probably right; so this, we suspect, was why he considered his historical survey complete when he reached Duns Scotus. But if the Victorines and Duns Scotus agreed, so to speak, with De Bruyne, this does not mean that Thomas agreed with Scotus and the Victorines. In a word, the chapter on Thomas is real
ly quite tormented and represents the “Maritainian fault” in De Bruyne’s otherwise impeccable work. Which goes to show how difficult it is for a militant Thomist to admit that Thomas cannot always satisfy the legitimate theoretical desires of someone who is attempting to come to terms not only with Thomas but also with modern thought.
And yet, perhaps in a fit of prudence, in the chapter of the Études dedicated to Thomas, De Bruyne avoids using the expression “intellectual intuition.” Maybe he really had been giving Roland-Gosselin’s reaction some thought.
If writing the history of thought means letting the authors of the past say what they actually said and not what we would have them say, we must be consistent and accuse De Bruyne of this historiographical inaccuracy. While recognizing, however, that he must have been somehow aware that he was treading on thin ice, since he confined his reflections on intuition in Thomas to a mere two pages, almost en passant. So that, forgiving him this single moment of weakness, or of excessive love for his author, we may continue to insist on the great distance that separates Maritain’s reading from his: the former consisting in a free use of the sources, the latter in an effort at interpretation.
This chapter is a revisiting of two previous texts: “Storiografia medievale ed estetica teorica” (Eco 1961) and “L’esthétique médiévale d’Edgar de Bruyne” (Eco 2004a). The latter was also published in Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 71 (2004): 219–232. On the difference between the use and the interpretation of texts, see Eco (1979, 1990). [Translator’s note: I am grateful to Hugh Bredin and to his translation of Eco (1988) for his example and for helpful suggestions.]
1. Art et scolastique, first written between 1918 and 1919 and published in the periodical Les lettres in 1919, was issued in book form by the Librairie de l’Art Catholique in 1920. A copy of this edition, held in the University of Toronto library, can be read online at http://archive.org/stream/artetscolastique00mariuoft#page/n0/mode/1up. A second, revised edition appeared in 1927 (Paris: Rouart), with additional notes, as well as several new annexes (appendices or excursuses). The pages on poetry were extrapolated and reprinted, along with essays and poems by other authors, in the miscellany Frontières de la poésie [The Frontiers of Poetry] (Maritain 1935). The standard English version, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry (Maritain 1962) was translated by Joseph W. Evans from the third and final revised French edition (1935).
2. We may cite Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (“Ragioni del bello secondo i principi di San Tommaso,” Civiltà cattolica, 1859–1860), Vincenzo Fortunato Marchese (Delle benemerenze di San Tommaso verso le belle arti, Genoa, 1974), Pierre Vallet (Idée du beau dans la philosophie de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Louvain, 1887), J. Biolez (Saint Thomas et les Beaux Arts, Louvain, 1896), Domenico M. Valensise (Dell’estetica secondo i principii dell’Angelico Dottore, Rome, 1903), Paolo Lingueglia (“Le basi e le leggi dell’estetica secondo San Tommaso,” in Pagine di d’arte e di letteratura, Turin, 1915), Octavio Nicolas Derisi (Lo eterno y lo temporal en el arte, Buenos Aires, 1942), as well as—but after Maritain—Leonard Callahan (Theory of Aesthetics: According to the Principles of Saint Thomas, Washington, DC, 1928), Adolf Dyroff (“Über die Entwicklung und der Wert der Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin,” Archiv für systematische Philosophie una Soziologie, 1929), Carlo Mazzantini (“Linee fondamentali di una estetica tomista,” Studium, 1929), Thomas Gilby (Poetic Experience: An Introduction to Thomistic Aesthetic, New York, 1934), Josef Koch (“Zur Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik, 1931), Francesco Olgiati (“San Tommaso e l’arte,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 1934), down to Mortimer Adler who, in his Art and Prudence (1937), attempted to apply Aristotelian aesthetics, seen through a Thomistic lens, to the cinema. Among these commentators perhaps the most original was Maurice de Wulf with his Études historiques sur l’esthétique de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain, 1896), which underscored the psychological elements in Thomistic aesthetics. Less historiographically reliable was his Art et beauté (1920), mixing as it does, and as did many similar works, philosophical historiography and militant metaphysics.
[Translator’s note: It may be useful to point out that in what follows Eco will be using the term “aesthetic,” not only with reference to the artistic experience, but in its broader sense of the appreciation of beauty. This is made clear in his 1956 dissertation on Aquinas, now translated into English by Hugh Bredin as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas: “The concept of the aesthetic refers to the problem of the possible objective character, and the subjective conditions, of what we call the experience of beauty. It thus refers also to problems connected with the aesthetic object and aesthetic pleasure. The experience of beauty does not necessarily have art as its object; for we ascribe beauty not just to poems and paintings but also to horses, sunsets, and women—or even, at its limits, to a crime or a gourmet meal” (Eco 1988: 3).]
3. Let us not forget that in 1944 he published a collection of essays entitled De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, essais de métaphysique et de morale (New York: Éditions de la Maison Française).
4. See my “The Poetics and Us” [“La Poetica e noi”] in Eco (2004b).
5. It is a known fact that nowhere in the Sherlock Holmes stories does Arthur Conan Doyle have his hero utter the famous phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson,” and yet the remark is as frequently cited as “To be or not to be.” The same thing has occurred with this formula of Maritain’s, which has continued to be repeated as authentically Thomistic by a multiplicity of authors. Even De Munnynk (1923), writing as a critic of Maritain’s method, continues to quote “pulchrum, est id quod visum placet” without batting an eyelid.
6. “id quod visum placet, ce qui plaît étant vu, c’est-à-dire étant l’objet d’une intuition.… Contemplant l’objet dans l’intuition que le sens en a, l’intellect jouit d’une présence, elle jouit de la présence rayonnante d’un intelligible qui ne se révèle pas lui-même à ses yeux tel qu’il est. Se détourne-t-elle du sens pour abstraire et raisonner, elle se détourne de sa joie, et perd contact avec ce rayonnement. Pour entendre cela, représentons-nous que c’est l’intelligence et le sens ne faisant qu’un, ou, si l’on peut ainsi parler, le sens intelligencié, qui donne lieu dans le coeur à la joie esthétique” (1927: 252–254, n. 55).
7. “C’est une vue simple, bien que virtuellement très riche en multiplicité, de l’oeuvre à faire saisie dans son âme individuelle, vue qui est comme un germe spirituel ou une raison séminale de l’oeuvre, et qui tient de ce que M. Bergson appelle intuition et schéma dynamique, qui intéresse non seulement l’intelligence, mais aussi l’imagination et la sensibilité de l’artiste” (1927: 277–278, n. 93).
8. Discovered in 1869 and at first attributed to Thomas, by the time Maritain was writing, the consensus inclined toward attributing it to Albertus Magnus (so much so that in 1927 Mandonnet would classify it among Thomas’s Opuscula spuria). Maritain had therefore a number of indications that ought to have encouraged him to a greater prudence.
9. See Maritain (1920: 42–44, 48–49, and 185–186, n. 73).
10. See Maritain (1920: 207, n. 130, and 217, n. 138), and Maritain (1935: 33, n. 1).
11. See, for a fuller treatment, Chapter 3 in the present volume.
12. See John of St. Thomas (1930). The terminus or term is “id, ex quo simplex conficitur propositio” (“that out of which a simple proposition is made”) or “vox significativa ad placitum ex qua simplex conficitur propositio vel oratio” (“a vocal expression significative by stipulation, from which a simple proposition or sentence is constructed”) (Deely 1985: 24); while the sign or signum is “id, quod potentiae cognoscitivae aliquid aliud a se repraesentat (“that which represents something other than itself to a cognitive power”) (Deely 1985: 25). “Essentialiter enim consistit in ordine ad signatum” (“For the being of a sign essentially consists in an order to a signified”) (Deely 1985: 218). See also Deely (1988) and Murphy (1991).
13. “Secundum a
utem diversificantur gradus prophetiae quantum ad expressionem signorum imaginabilium quibus veritas intelligibilis exprimitur. Et quia signa maxime expressa intelligibilis veritatis sunt verba, ideo altior gradus prophetiae videtur quando propheta audit verba exprimentia intelligibilem veritatem.… In quibus etiam signis tanto videtur prophetia esse altior, quanto signa sunt magis expressa” (“Secondly the degrees of this prophecy are differentiated according to the expressiveness of the imaginary signs whereby the intelligible truth is conveyed. And since words are the most expressive signs of intelligible truth, it would seem to be a higher degree of prophecy when the prophet … hears words expressive of an intelligible truth.… In such like signs prophecy would seem to be the more excellent, according as the signs are more expressive”) Summa Theologiae trans. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, II–II, 174, 3.
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.
