And this is only to cite the more important monographs, without counting the shorter contributions. From the 4 pages in Croce to Assunto’s 500 and the 362 of Tatarkiewicz we can measure the extent of the change in perspective of which De Bruyne was the pioneer.
A development of these proportions can be explained, not only by the enormous mass of materials that De Bruyne made available to scholars, but also by the soundness of his historical method. Apart from Pouillon, who confined himself in any case to rediscovering and publishing texts, De Bruyne was the first to forget his own Thomism and to outline a genuine history of medieval aesthetic ideas as they had been formulated at the time, without any attempt to modernize them whatever it took. A commendable achievement, since only through this gesture of honest erudition was he able to render his idea of Middle Ages “up-to-date” (in the sense of interesting for the contemporary reader).
First and foremost, De Bruyne liberates the notion of a medieval aesthetic from its identification with the Thomistic aesthetic. He begins his Études by affirming that “studying the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas we frequently asked ourselves what was the historical and cultural background into which his reflections on art and beauty were to be placed.”30
To respond to this initial query, he de-Thomisticizes medieval aesthetics, reminding us not only that the Middle Ages had reflected on art and the beautiful well before Thomas, but also that there had not been a single school of aesthetics but many, each of them different in some respect from the others.
On the one hand, he demonstrated how Thomas came at the end of a tradition that could be traced back to Augustine and Boethius, and before that to Neo-Platonism and Pythagoreanism. And merely by doing this, he made it possible for those who followed him in restudying Thomas’s aesthetics to see what sources had provided Thomas with some of his ideas; when he had followed in the wake of tradition without making any original contribution of his own; and when instead he had said something new. On the other hand, he pointed out that, side by side with a Thomistic aesthetics (to which previous scholarship had reduced the rich variety of medieval speculation),31 there existed the aesthetics of the school of Chartres, of the Victorines, of Grosseteste, of Albertus Magnus, of Bonaventure, of Duns Scotus (and our list must end here, otherwise it would amount to reproducing the index of the Études).32
De Bruyne’s Études begin with Boethius and end with Duns Scotus. What changes occurred during this period? In this connection De Bruyne played a rather curious game—and it is unclear whether he was aware of the ambiguity of his position. On the one hand he endeavored to demonstrate that medieval aesthetics comprises a series of themes and ideas that span, often without modification, eight centuries of reflection on the beauty of God, nature, and art. Thus, in 1938, in a review of Glunz (1937), whereas Glunz had underscored, in our opinion correctly, an evolution in medieval taste, De Bruyne objected that it was problematic to speak, apropos of the Middle Ages, of evolution, because the various tendencies were always present, and he defined medieval artistic culture as “polyphonic.” But, at the same time (and we have only to read the general index to the Études), it is apparent that, even though over the centuries the various authors constantly come back to the same themes, the material is arranged according to a historical and not a thematic sequence, beginning with Boethius and arriving eventually at Duns Scotus, while in his introduction he writes that he would have liked to dedicate a fourth volume to the period 1300–1450, thereby anticipating the possible objection that he had ended the story too abruptly.
De Bruyne also published, between 1952 and 1955, a history of aesthetics (Geschiedenis van de aesthetica) which begins with Greco-Roman thought, picks up on his work on the Middle Ages, and arrives via Dante at Humanism and the Renaissance, touching (though rather summarily) on the thought of later medieval authors like Buridan and Ockham and ending up with Denis the Carthusian (it is in these last pages that he finally cites Huizinga!). In this history of aesthetics it is more readily apparent that De Bruyne had in mind an evolution over time of aesthetic thought—even if at this point he found himself having to come to grips with the phenomenon of the Renaissance, leaving behind the Middle Ages and its “polyphony.”
In the case of the eight centuries he is concerned with, and however much he may stress a certain thematic coherence, he continually draws our attention to the presence of lines of development and therefore of a certain “progress.” It would be going too far to attribute to him an Hegelian view of history, but he is certainly not unaware of transformations—we might go so far as to call them paradigm shifts—that do not allow us to speak of a Middle Ages that is constantly marking time. It would have been hard in fact for De Bruyne to deny that progress, when we consider how certain themes such as that of light assumed different valencies when they were transposed from the Neo-Platonic context of John Scotus Eriugena to that of the Aristotelian hylomorphism of the thirteenth century.
In 1947, fearful perhaps lest his Études not receive the circulation they deserved, De Bruyne published L’esthétique du Moyen Age, a more manageable volume of less than 300 pages, in a more compact format, in which he provided a kind of synthesis of his major work (this essay is reprinted as an appendix to the Études in the most recent Albin Michel edition of 1998). Unfortunately, out of concern perhaps that it would have made the book too cumbersome, De Bruyne fails to document any of his citations, referring his reader to the Études for his sources. As a consequence, the work, while too erudite for the nonspecialist reader, is of no use to the scholar. In any case, it is no longer arranged according to an historical sequence but thematically (the index refers to the sources, the sense of the beautiful, of art, and so on). The author is certainly at pains, in the context of one of these themes, to call attention to fresh developments,33 but the polyphonic complexity previously mentioned becomes more evident, especially in a chapter devoted to the constants, in which the persistence throughout the period of the themes of musical proportion, light, symbolism, and allegory are underscored. We may say, then, that De Bruyne was probably aware that his study was continuously open to two readings or to a single reading capable of exploiting the ongoing opposition between constants and innovations.
Be that as it may, De Bruyne’s Middle Ages manages to deliver honest-to-goodness coups de théâtre (never of course announced with excessive stridency, in keeping with the custom of the day) perpetrated by authors who claimed to be nothing more than prudent and faithful annotators of the traditional texts whereas in reality, generation after generation, they were ensuring the evolution of both the aesthetic sensibility and the theories of art and the beautiful.
If one of the virtues of modernity is the intellectual courage whereby (according to a brilliant formulation by none other than Maritain) after Descartes every thinker is a debutant in the absolute, De Bruyne was not lacking in that virtue, as could be demonstrated by examining the texts in which he does not practice historiography but instead enunciates his own philosophy. If the Middle Ages made a virtue out of prudence, De Bruyne exercised that virtue as a historian. Reviewing in 1933, thirteen years before the publication of the Études, for the Revue néoscolastique a work by Wencelius, La philosophie de l’art chez les néo-scolastiques de langue française (1932), he contended that Thomas, contrary to what many Neo-Scholastic thinkers asserted, did not offer a complete aesthetic system: “we cannot see how the Angelic Doctor was able to reconcile in a truly organic whole what came to him from Neo-Platonism via Pseudo-Dionysius and what he borrowed from the Aristotelian theory of pleasures” (De Bruyne 1933: 416). Perhaps he had partially revised his judgment thirteen years later. What is striking, however, is his decision to consider his author in the light of philology and not apologetics.
8.7. The Problem of an Intellectual Intuition
In De Bruyne’s review of Wencelius, we may discern, occasionally, between the lines, a polemical stance with regard to the use to which Maritain had put the texts of Saint Thomas. He criticizes Wencelius’s exaggerated insistence on the objective and transcendental nature of the beautiful
