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 and insists instead on the relationship between beauty and the perceiving subject. As we have seen, this is the issue on which Maritain had overstepped the mark. De Bruyne makes it clear that to speak of the relationship with the subject is not the same as being “subjective” (an accusation that, especially given the historical moment, a philosopher inspired by Thomas could not countenance, given that subjectivity—what the nineteenth century had referred to as the “Kantian poison”—was the bête noire of the Neo-Thomists). He wrote that, if one wishes to speak about the transcendental nature of beauty, and at the same time about the relation of beauty to the knowing subject, all we need do is apply the Thomistic definition of God as Supreme Beauty to the pleasure of contemplating His beauty.
Maritain had attempted to identify both aesthetic pleasure and the creative act of the poetic imagination with an intuition that gave the impression of being overly subjective. As we see from his reading of the medieval authors, De Bruyne had realized that Maritain’s intuition did not have much to do with a “Kantian” subject, but had instead a great deal to do with a mystical intuition in which the subject identifies with (immerses himself in) the ontological splendor that fascinates and inspires him, in a union in which the two aspirations appear to become intermingled.
For De Bruyne on the other hand it was a question of establishing a distinction between the knowing subject and the object known, and at the same time between the function of the intellect and that of the sensibility. This is why he never speaks, as does Maritain, of creative intuition. He does, however, speak of intellectual intuition.
And here, De Bruyne is guilty of the same sin as Maritain, when he insists on finding in Thomas at all costs something it is difficult to attribute to him.
Already, in 1930, De Bruyne had written “Du rôle de l’intellect dans l’activité esthétique” (in Rintelen 1930), and he would take up a number of the same themes in his Esquisse d’une philosophie de l’art (1930b). He refused to speak of aesthetic intuition as an irrational act, but thought of it as a sort of instinctive synthesis in which the intellect played a constitutive role. What he had in mind was not an abstract synthesis but a process in which feeling played an essential role. In this essay the intellect in the intuition figured as the formal principle of the intuition of the concrete.