It is in this psychological dimension, which also involved a methodological dimension, that Art et scolastique was intended to be read. Only thus could one appreciate its freshness, its unexpected connections, the sudden leaps from ancient to modern, its “militant” vehemence. The culture of the 1920s was thus induced to reflect on the existence of a medieval aesthetic, presented, for better or for worse, as an instrument capable also of defining the artistic polemics of the present day.
On the one hand, the innate Cartesianism of French culture, cross-fertilized by the neoclassicism of the time (this was the same period in which Cocteau was championing Satie and Stravinsky in Le coq et l’arlequin), proved especially receptive to certain proposals that Maritain borrowed from the Scholastic tradition but which modern culture hailed as new, buried as they had been for centuries in ecclesiastical libraries. The revelation of a view of art as recta ratio factibilium (“right judgment regarding things to be made”), as a technical and practical making, an arrangement of materials conforming to an order dictated not just by the sensibility but chiefly by the intellect—and the beauty synthesized in the three touchstones of integrity, proportion, and clarity—could not fail to play a liberating role with regard to the manifold Romantic and Decadent liens and encumbrances that still weighed so heavily on aesthetic speculation. The same considerations explain the fortune, somewhat later, of Maritain in the United States, where this aesthetic, so close in its way to the Aristotelian tradition that the Anglo-Saxon world had never in fact abandoned,4 would go so far as to garner the honors of widespread diffusion even in the pages of Time magazine.
Art et scolastique may deserve all the criticism we are about to level at it, but at the same time we are compelled to admit that it also encouraged many scholars to take up the study of medieval aesthetics. The price to be paid (and Maritain pays it down to the last cent) was that of not behaving in a historiographically responsible fashion and making free use of Thomas’s texts instead of interpreting them. But, for an adept of the philosophia perennis, the difference between use and interpretation was not that important: if Saint Thomas was still contemporary (because, as they said in Neo-Scholastic circles, there is no progress in metaphysics), he could be read through the sensibility of a contemporary.
8.2. A Tendentious Reading
Maritain had no qualms about inventing nonexistent Thomistic citations. Take the case of that “pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent” (“things that please when they are seen are called beautiful”) which in Maritain becomes “pulchrum est id quod visum placet” (“the beautiful is that which pleases being seen”). The difference appears to be negligible; but what in Thomas was practically a sociological observation (“people think that beautiful things are those that are pleasing to sight [or at the moment they are seen]”), is transformed into an essentialist definition, so much so that on the basis of that definition Maritain will proceed, as we will see, to identify this visio with an act of intuition of a very contemporary nature.5
What was the object discerned by the Thomistic visio? Thomas’s words were unequivocal: it was the claritas possessed by the substantial form actualized in an ordered substance. What was the only way in which, within the limits of Thomistic epistemology, this visio of the splendor of the substance was to be understood? As a complex act of judgment, permeated with intellect, that followed upon the primary abstraction of the simplex apprehensio (“direct apprehension”), and therefore as a mediated and complex act. This is the conclusion which, supported by the work of other scholars, we believe we have ascertained elsewhere (see Eco 1956).
For Maritain, on the other hand, the visio became the split-second and unique act of an “intellected sense” (“sens intelligencié”), grasping in a single instant, without the slightest effort at abstraction, the form at the very core of the matter. The beautiful for Maritain becomes:
id quod visum placet, what pleases when it is seen; the object, in other words, of an intuition.…. Contemplating the object in the intuition that the senses have of it, the intellect rejoices in a presence, it rejoices in the luminous presence of something intelligible.…. If it turns away from the senses to abstraction and reasoning, it turns away from its own joy, and loses contact with this luminosity. To understand this, let us represent to ourselves that it is intellect and sense becoming one, or, if we may put it this way, an intellected sense, which gives place in the heart to aesthetic joy.” (Maritain 1920: 174–175)6
What we have here is a typically modern kind of idea, which a medieval philosopher, rather than rejecting, would quite simply not have understood (see also, in this connection, Campanelli 1996: 93 et seq.). But even a contemporary historian would have to confess to a certain puzzlement reading that something that is seen, and therefore in some fashion perceived, must by the same token be intuited. We will return to this point. For the moment all that is needed is to record the fact that from this point on Maritain proposes an idea of poetic knowledge as knowledge through connaturality, an idea he will explore more deeply in his later works.
We encounter the same distortion in his recovery of the definition of art as habitus operativus (explicated, we must admit, in exemplary fashion, with a wealth of philological data). This definition could not remain anchored to its medieval interpretation: later on De Bruyne and others would point out that it is only in a Franciscan context imbued with Platonism—and timidly at that—and thereafter, and more decisively, only with the dissolution of Scholasticism, in a climate of protohumanism and with the dawn of the Mannerist doctrines of ingenium, that a conception of the productive act will emerge in modern thought that recognizes the nucleus of the creative process in the presence of an original inner idea. In Thomas the doctrine of art is still classical. The habitus operativus (“a disposition to produce certain operations or acts”) behaves according to fixed canons and, if the idea of art escapes being identified with mere imitation, it is only by having recourse to the recombining of memories of previous experiences, like that described by Horace in the first five lines of his Ars Poetica.
The limits of this doctrine prove too restrictive for Maritain. All he had to do was admit that he was speaking after Saint Thomas, but in that case he would not have been able to declare himself a “Paleo-Thomist.” Accordingly, he blithely grafts onto his supposedly Thomistic picture the lesson of Bergson, and already in Art et scolastique—admittedly among the notes—he speaks of the work in progress not simply as a complex of traditional rules, but also as “raison séminale,” intuition, and finally “schéma dynamique”:
“It is a simple vision, though virtually extremely rich in multiplicity, of the work to be made, grasped in its individual soul, seen as a spiritual seed or a seminal reason of the work, which has something to do with what Bergson calls the dynamic schema, which appeals not merely to the intellect but also the imagination and the sensibility of the artist” (Maritain 1920: 146–147, n. 93, my emphasis).7
Even as Maritain writes, surrealism is on the doorstep, and symbolism is yielding its final fruits; Satie’s neoclassicism cannot make him forget that the Late Romantic culture of symbolism has by this time identified art as a language appealing principally to feeling, the guardian of a mystery that ordinary words cannot reveal. Thus, in explicating the concept of claritas, he adheres to a definition he finds in De Pulchro et Bono, a little book that the most rigorous scholarship no longer attributed to Thomas but to Albertus Magnus (in point of fact even Maritain admits his uncertainty, deciding however to accept it as a reliable witness to Thomas’s ideas).8 The definition in question is of claritas as “resplendentia formae supra partes materiae proportionatas” (“a resplendence of form in the duly ordered parts of material objects”). But in Albertus Magnus there remains a Platonic emphasis, a dialectic between esse and essentia, in which form, shining through the matter it organizes, nevertheless is not fully identified with it, maintaining its ideal preeminence, whereas in Thomas, in the midst of a dialectic between essence and concrete act of existing, form becomes such only by individualizing itself in a concretely existing substance (see Eco 1956: ch. IV).
But this
