1. Or again: “Nihil est enim aliud loqui ad alterum, quam conceptum mentis alteri manifestare” (“For to talk to someone else means precisely to make known one’s thoughts to them”) (Summa Theologiae I, 107, 1.). This idea of a relationship with another person or persons reappears in various other authors.
2. Biblical quotes, here and elsewhere, are from the King James Version.
3. “Oportuit ergo genus humanum ad comunicandum inter se conceptiones suas aliquod rationale signum et sensuale habere; quia, cum de ratione accipere habeat et in rationem portare, rationale esse oportuit; cumque de una ratione in aliam nichil deferri possit nisi per medium sensuale, sensuale esse oportuit; quare, si tantum rationale esset, pertransire non posset; si tantum sensuale, nec a ratione accipere, nec in rationem deponere potuisset. Hoc equidem signum est ipsum subiectum nobile de quo loquimur: nam sensuale quid est, in quantum sonus est; rationale vero, in quantum aliquid significare videtur ad placitum” (DVE I, iii, 2–3). “So it was necessary that the human race, in order for its members to communicate their conceptions among themselves should have some signal based on reason and perception. Since this signal needed to receive its contents from reason and convey it back there, it had to be rational; but, since nothing can be conveyed from one reasoning mind to another except by means perceptible to the senses, it had also to be based on perception. For, if it were purely rational, it could not make its journey; if purely perceptible, it could neither derive anything from reason nor deliver anything to it. This signal, then, is the noble foundation that I am discussing, for it is perceptible, in that it is a sound, and yet also rational, in that this sound, according to convention, (ad placitum) is taken to mean something” (Dante 1996: I, iii, 2, p. 7. Subsequent citations in English are from Steven Botterill’s translation (Dante 1996). Botterill’s facing Latin text is based on the critical text established by Mengaldo (1979).
4. “Qua quidem forma omnis lingua loquentium uteretur, nisi culpa presumptionis humane dissipata fuisset, ut inferius ostendetur. Hac forma locutionis locutus est Adam; hac forma locutionis locuti sunt omnes posteri eius usque ad edificationem turris Babel, que ‘turris confusionis’ interpretatur; hanc formam locutionis hereditati sunt filii Heber, qui ab eo dicti sunt Hebrei. Hiis solis post confusionem remansit, ut Redemptor noster, qui ex illis oriturus erat secundum humanitatem, non lingua confusionis, sed gratie, frueretur. Fuit ergo hebraicum ydioma illud quod primi loquentis labia fabricarunt” (DVE I, vi, 4–7).
5. Maria Corti’s thesis has been challenged, especially by Pagani (1982) and by Maierù (1983): (i) there is no convincing proof that Dante knew Boethius of Dacia’s work, (ii) in a number of instances Corti draws untenable analogies between the two texts, and (iii) the linguistic notions we find in Dante were already circulating among other philosophers and grammarians even before the thirteenth century. Even if we grant the first two points, however, there still remains the third, that the idea, that is, of a universal grammar enjoyed wide circulation in medieval culture and, as none of Corti’s critics has placed in doubt, Dante was familiar with these discussions. To say, as Maierù says, that there was no need to be acquainted with Boethius’s writings to know that “grammar is one and the same in all languages, even though there may be surface variations,” because the same affirmation is already to be found in Roger Bacon, is if anything proof that Dante could indeed have been thinking of a universal grammar.
6. It was thought in the Middle Ages that the panther had a richly perfumed breath and left a trace of its passage wherever it had been. But, for the hunters who attempted to entrap it, it was practically impossible to locate. So they would smell its perfume but never succeed in catching it. This explains how the panther became a metaphor for poetry itself.
7. See in Marmo (1994: 124, n. 39) the interesting reference to Simon of Faversham, who claimed that there exists in language a difference between natural signification and positive (or conventional) signification.
8. “The tongue I spoke was all extinct before Nimrod’s race gave their mind to the unaccomplishable task; for no product whatever of reason—since human choice is renewed with the course of heaven—can last forever. It is a work of nature that man should speak, but whether in this way or that nature then leaves you to follow your own pleasure. Before I descended to the anguish of Hell the Supreme Good from whom comes the joy that swathes me was named I on earth, and later He was called El; and that is fitting, for the usage of mortals is like a leaf on a branch, which goes and another comes” (Dante 1961: 379).
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).
15. The Use and Interpretation of Medieval Texts

8.1. The Modernity of a Paleo-Thomist

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