In a form that has had such a telling influence on contemporary sensibility, especially in the Anglo-Saxon cultural circles that influenced the later Maritain, this same doctrine is to be found in Coleridge, as was usefully pointed out by Mayoux (1960).24 It is not merely a question of similarities. Maritain is drawing on an entire tradition that nourished the poetry of the last two centuries (it is no accident in fact that he frequently cites Coleridge), and, though he may invoke Saint Thomas, he is in fact getting closer and closer to the spirit of Romantic idealism: a paradoxical conclusion that he would no doubt be reluctant to accept, but that a conscientious exegesis cannot set aside pro bono pacis.
A reader of Creative Intuition unaware of its medieval allusions would certainly be fascinated by the whole conception of poetry as a magical act and would have to concede that it is defended with considerable rhetorical ability. But what is disturbing is the specious use of a thinker from the past to support the author’s own theoretical position.
Still, what we have here, rather than a case of intellectual dishonesty, is a rather primitive conception of historiography. When someone operates with the metaphysical, historiographical, and methodological conviction that there exists only one philosophy and that that philosophy is a philosophia perennis, then the historiographical dimension, as understood by the modern philosopher, heir to historicism, ceases to exist. Nor is the initial act by which the attribute of perenniality is bestowed on a given historically determined philosophy an historiographical act: because its purpose is not to circumscribe the character of an historical phenomenon but to enunciate a truth regarding the nature of human thought.
Maritain’s method of reading his medieval sources has a lot in common with that of the medieval philosopher who declared his respect for the auctoritas of the Fathers while claiming to be a dwarf on a giant’s shoulders. When a medieval thinker was convinced of the truth of an assertion, he bolstered its legitimacy by claiming that it was to be found in his auctores. The most creative medieval philosophers, however, never recognized anything as true simply because it had been handed down from the Fathers. If anything, they did the opposite—when they found something they believed was true, they attributed it to the Fathers. They believed implicitly, then, not that everything that was part of tradition was true, but that everything that was true was part of tradition. Maritain does the same: attuned to all the subtleties of the modern sensibility, he welcomes its suggestions, attributing them, however, without further ado, to the sensibility of the Middle Ages. This behavior hides in fact an unconscious historicist conviction, which holds that the timeless treasure of truth grows and that the true Saint Thomas is not the Saint Thomas of the thirteenth century, for whom creative intuition does not exist, but the Saint Thomas of the twentieth century, who is now speaking through the lips of his faithful disciple. Philosophia is then perennis, not because, once formulated, it no longer changes, but precisely because it is constantly changing, and its definitive formulation always belongs to tomorrow. Which is an acceptable conclusion too, as long as it is made unequivocally clear (and even if, by making it clear, the appeal to the notion of a philosophia perennnis no longer has any meaning).
8.6. The Historiographical Lesson of De Bruyne
The extent of Maritain’s historiographical highhandedness becomes clear when we compare it with the work of another author who, though likewise a Catholic and a Thomist by formation, was nonetheless able, in his work as a historian, to keep a distance between his own thought and that of the authors he studied. That author was Edgar De Bruyne.
De Bruyne published his Études d’esthétique médiévale in 1946. In 1940 he had brought out his Philosophie van de Kunst and in 1942 Het Aestetisch beleven and De Philosophie van Martin Heidegger. It is impossible to believe that a work of the amplitude of the Études (around 1,200 pages in the 1998 Albin Michel edition) could have been composed in the space of the three intervening years—years that were in any case among the most terrible and turbulent in Belgian history. What we had was instead the fruit of over a decade of research. The problems of medieval aesthetics had already been the subject, as we will see, of an essay De Bruyne wrote in 1930. But even making allowance for decades of work we can only marvel at how such a vast quantity of material, often unearthed in out-of-the-way pages of hundreds of works from Boethius to Duns Scotus, could have been assembled by a single man in such a brief span of time. Furthermore, let us not forget that at that time electronic searches and scanning technology did not exist, and all the material had to be laboriously hunted down in the thousands of pages of the Patrologia Latina, not to mention the other sources, and diligently catalogued (by hand, one imagines, working in goodness knows what monastic libraries). So we can’t help smiling at the reaction, when the work appeared, of a number of critics who reproached De Bruyne for stopping at Duns Scotus and not considering Byzantine culture, for not citing Focillon and even for producing an anthology of quotations without arriving at a theoretical synthesis—thank heaven is all we can say, considering where the desire for a theoretical synthesis had led Maritain.25
To assess the impact of the work on the historiography of medieval aesthetics we have only to conduct a brief bibliographical survey. Croce consecrated 398 pages of his Aesthetics (1902[1950]) to the history of the problem: of these pages only four were devoted to the Middle Ages, and only to conclude that “almost all the tendencies of ancient aesthetics were continued through tradition and reappeared by spontaneous generation in the medieval centuries,” but “it could be affirmed that the literary and artistic doctrines and opinions of the Middle Ages, with a few minor exceptions, are more valuable for the history of culture than for the general history of the science of aesthetics” (1902[1950]: 129).
Bosanquet in his History of Aesthetic (1904) allots a mere 30 out of a total of 500 pages to the Middle Ages, with the reductive heading “Some traces of the continuity of aesthetic consciousness throughout the Middle Ages.” But he begins with the reevaluation of the medieval centuries by the pre-Raphaelites and Walter Pater, treating medieval thought, then, as the object of Decadent nostalgia and reminding the reader that modern aesthetics begins only when the problem of art criticism and that of the reconciliation of reason and sensibility are formulated—problems that the Middle Ages had ignored until the fourteenth century.
Saintsbury, in his History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (1900–1904), speaks not of philosophers or theologians but of artists. He dedicates two chapters of the book to the Middle Ages (“Medieval criticism” and “The contribution of the medieval period to literary criticism”), discussing, however, only rhetorical theories, allegory, grammar, and so on.
Again, in 1935, Magnino’s Die Kunstliteratur devoted only twenty-four pages to the medieval theory of art, while in 1937 Die Literarästhetik des europäischen Mittelalters by Glunz was more concerned with the evolution of literary taste than with aesthetic theory, though in the case of a few authors he did take into account the philosophical influence of Neo-Platonism.26 The decisive year was 1946. By an amazing coincidence (or maybe not, if you subscribe to the notion of the Zeitgeist), there appeared in the same year the three volumes of De Bruyne’s Études d’ésthétique médiévale, Pouillon’s essay, “La beauté, propriété transcendantale chez les Scolastiques (1220–1270),”27 which gathered together for the first time the various texts concerning the inclusion of beauty in the list of the transcendental properties of being, and Panofsky’s book on Abbot Suger, in which the translation of Suger’s text and Panofsky’s commentary on it gave a lively and fascinating picture of the taste and aesthetic culture of a man of the twelfth century.28
With these contributions two phenomena of capital importance occurred: in the first place they demonstrated that the aesthetic problem had been present throughout the medieval centuries, not in a repetitive fashion but through a series of changes in perspective and genuine theoretical innovations (though almost always camouflaged by the use of a uniform philosophical lexicon); and, secondly, the various thinkers were treated correctly from a historiographical point of view, attempting that is to demonstrate what they had said with reference to the historical and theoretical framework of the philosophy of their time, without endeavoring to modernize them at all costs.
By 1954, within fifteen years of the appearance
