And let it not be thought that our suspicions are exaggerated: a few pages further on, as he prepares to explain the transcendental nature of the beautiful (that canonical given, by virtue of which, in medieval thought, the beautiful becomes concrete and solid and avoids the trap of subjective impression, becoming an objective attribute of truth and moral value, an inseparable property of being), Maritain has recourse to the words of Baudelaire, reminding us how, in its experience of beauty, the human mind has the sense of something that lies beyond it, of the tangible call of the beyond, and, in the melancholy of the ensuing moment, recognizes the evidence of a nature exiled in imperfection, aspiring toward the infinite that has just been revealed. Thus, little by little, the transcendental beauty of the Middle Ages is transformed into something akin to the Burkean and Kantian sublime, filtered through a Decadent sensibility.9
This, then, is the situation of Art et scolastique—a militant work that was to influence the writing of philosophical history, eliciting a number of studies (and saddling them with a series of interpretations as fascinating as they were incautious); a speculative work disguised as commentary, and hence fraught with contradictions.
8.3. After Art et scolastique, “Poetry” Takes Center Stage
In the essays gathered under the title of Les frontières de la poésie (1935), the author appeared to have rid himself of his false pose as historiographer to assume the physiognomy of the autonomous theorist; but it was only the diminished philosophical commitment of those essays that made him appear freer and more open-minded.
In Frontières the premises of Art et scolastique find ample development: if the medieval artist was the anonymous executor of the objective rules of his art, the artist that Maritain now portrays expresses “himself and his own essence,” “provided that things resonate within him.” The artist receives external reality “in the recesses of his feelings and his passion” (“dans les replis de son sentiment et de sa passion”), not as something other than himself but as something so completely identified with and absorbed in him as no longer to posit any difference between his own soul and the innermost aspects of the things he has made his own. Therefore poetic knowledge will be knowledge according to “resonance in subjectivity” (“résonance dans la subjectivité”) (Maritain 1935: 194–197).
If the Scholastic theory of art was a theory of production, Maritain’s theory becomes a theory of knowledge and, to get to this point, Maritain has evidently been compelled to enrich the Scholastic concept of ars. Hesitating to distort the category—so clear and well-defined—that Scholasticism had handed down to him (and that he himself in fact had expounded in Art et scolastique), he consequently sets alongside the concept of art that of poetry.
In the Scholastic tradition “poetry” is not an aesthetic category (as it is, let’s say, for Croce (1902), who also applies it to literature in prose), nor, as ars, is it a form of knowledge: it is quite simply an operative habitus or a practical ability. Maritain’s notion of poetry, then, is alien to medieval thought.
The nature of poetic practice is already sketched out in Art et scolastique and is also found, not only in Frontières, but also in subsequent works, as we will see in what follows. In short, while art is a practical operation governed by the laws of the intellect, poetry becomes an intentional emotion, the original inner spring that animates the rules of art from within. Art, therefore, begins later, with “the intellect and the will to choose” (“l’intellect et la volonté de choix”).10 Dangerously close to the idealistic formulation of a duality between lyrical intuition as inner expression and technical externalization as a mechanical addition, Maritain’s duality nonetheless allows him to rediscover a deep level of knowledge belonging to the poetic moment, something that the medieval notion of art did not allow.
The poetic moment is an intuitive moment which calls into play not merely intellect but also emotion and sensibility. At that moment, the work appears as already virtually complete; it is “an intuitive and intentional emotion that carries within it far more than itself” (“émotion intuitive et intentionnelle qui porte en soi beaucoup plus qu’elle-même”), eager to lend existence to its phantasm, “an intuitive flash in which the entire work is virtually contained and which will unfold itself in the work” (“éclair intuitif … où toute l’oeuvre est contenue virtuellement et qui s’expliquera dans l’oeuvre”), and finally “it is above all as a precise emotion that it appears to the consciousness” (“c’est surtout … comme une émotion décisive qu’elle apparaît à la conscience”) (Maritain 1935: 182–195). This is because it is the effect of a profound relationship with reality (the ultimate identification of the mystery of things with the mind of the artist): and therefore it can be understood as a moment of prelogical knowledge of reality, an instrument of metaphysical revelation.
All of this was not made explicit in Art et scolastique, nor does it appear in clear theoretical terms in Frontières. We find it, however, in a couple of later essays (which look forward to Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry of 1953). These essays are “De la connaissance poétique” (1938a) and “Signe et symbole” (1938b). The date is significant: contemporary culture has returned, as a result of the injection of Surrealism, to a Romantic conception of art as an instrument of philosophy. The absolute to which it provides access is no longer that of the Romantics; nevertheless, Maritain’s systematic framework allows him precisely to reinterpret the Surrealist lesson in terms of a metaphysic that is not that of the absurd but that of something significant and rich in positive determinations. In other words, poetry as an instrument, restored by Surrealism to its cognitive dignity, is now realigned according to the modalities of a Romantic aesthetic, but for the purposes of unveiling the universe of Saint Thomas, as seen by a Paleo-Thomist steeped in the modern aesthetic sensibility.
8.4. Poetic Discourse: Maritain vs. Thomas
There are a number of passages in Thomas in which he gives a definition of poetic discourse that is frankly discouraging (Summa Theologiae I, I, 9; II, 101, 2 ad 2). He speaks of poetry as an “infima doctrina” (“inferior learning”) and opines that “poetica non capiuntur propter defectum veritatis qui est in eis” (“poetic matters cannot be grasped because they are deficient in truth”). This definition of the modus poeticus as inferior is fully justified in the context in which Thomas proposes it: that is, in a comparison between vernacular poetry and Holy Scripture and subsequently between poetry and theology; and, within the hierarchical system in which the sciences derive their dignity from the dignity of the object to which they apply, poetry is fated to be the loser. Its defectus veritatis or deficiency of truth derives from the fact that it narrates nonexistent things; it uses metaphors for the purposes of representation and to provide delight; it evades the strict control of reason and claims to be an instrument, not of knowledge, but instead of pleasure.11
It is true, as Curtius (1948: chs. XI and XII) clearly demonstrates, that it was on the basis of this same distinction between the poet and the theologian, and of certain affirmations made by Aristotle concerning the first poet-theologians, that protohumanists like Albertino Mussato began to adumbrate a notion of the revelatory role of poetry; but by then we will have abandoned the confines of Scholasticism and its inflexible epistemology. In the eyes of which, given its defectus veritatis, to interpret the modus poeticus as a perceptio confusa of the Baumgartian type would be, to say the least, a stretch.
Maritain (1938a–b), in contrast, goes back to Thomas’s own writings in order to identify the modus poeticus, precisely because of its imprecise and representative nature, as knowledge by “affective connaturality with reality” (“connaturalité affective à la réalité”), a knowledge that is nonconceptualizable, inasmuch as it awakens within itself the creative profundities of the subject. Poetic knowledge is “inseparable
