For Thomas, the beautiful is that “in cuius aspectu seu cognitione quietatur appetitus” (“in whose sight or cognition the appetite is quieted”), whereas the appetite for the infinite is never quieted in a mystic like Meister Eckhart: “nihil tam distans a quolibet quam ejus oppositum. Deus autem et creatura opponuntur ut unum et innumeratum opponuntur numero et numerato et numerabili” (In Sapientiam, VII, 14).23
Maritain’s frequent citations from Poe and Baudelaire, as well as from other twentieth-century poets, are evidence of just how “modern” his anxieties are; but they fail to support his claim to be recovering Thomism. In point of fact, there is no need to go all the way back to medieval philosophy to clarify Maritain’s position; we must look instead to the core of Romantic aesthetics. We need only reread what Schelling, an author cited by Maritain, had to say about art (Werke I, III). All of philosophy, according to Schelling, has its origin in an absolute principle that cannot be grasped or communicated through descriptions and concepts, but can only be intuited. This intuition is the “organ of philosophy.” But since it is an intellectual intuition not a sensible one, it is a purely interior intuition, which can become objective only as a consequence of a second intuition—aesthetic intuition. Furthermore, if aesthetic intuition is intellectual intuition made objective, then art is the only true organ, and at the same time document, of philosophy, bearing constant and continual witness to what philosophy cannot represent externally, that is, the unconscious as it operates and produces. This is the root of the theoretical position spelled out in Creative Intuition.
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