24. For Coleridge, poetry is an act of analogical knowledge based on love. As he states in On Poesy or Art: “The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure and discourses to us by symbols, as we unconsciously imitate those whom we love” (http://www.bartleby.com/27/17.html). There exists, beyond the language of artificially stimulated hallucination, the possibility of a more authentic language of nature, through which the invisible communicates its existence to finite being. Nature is an alphabet, says Coleridge, and, obsessed by the mystery of the hieroglyph, he declares that what we call nature is a poem that lies hidden in a secret and mysterious script. In the years during which he composed what was to become his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge breaks with Kant and turns to Schelling, because he cannot tolerate Kant’s critical inflexibility or confine himself to phenomena. In chapter 13 “On the imagination,” he makes a demiurgic claim: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Coleridge 1983, I, 304). See also the following quotation from Anima Poetae: “In looking at the objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolic language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.”
25. For a review of these critiques, see Michel Lemoine’s afterword to the 1998 Albin Michel edition. If we insist on looking for absences in De Bruyne’s three volumes, the first great absence (somewhat surprisingly, since he belongs to the same Netherlandic culture) is Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, published in 1919, which contains a number of acute observations on the medieval aesthetic sensibility (and not merely in the later centuries upon whose threshold De Bruyne chose to stop). On the other hand, talking about absences, Curtius, who had read everything, published his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter] in 1948, and in it he fails to mention De Bruyne—perhaps because the Bruges edition, published two years earlier, seems to have had a practically clandestine circulation.
26. But Edgar De Bruyne, reviewing Glunz in 1938 in the Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie, criticized him for not mentioning the great theoretical currents like the aesthetics of proportion and light, or the psychology of the Victorines.
27. See Pouillon (1946).
28. See Panofsky (1946).
29. In the index of names, however, the reader should remember to look for Bruyne and not De Bruyne.
30. The first study devoted by our author to Thomas is S. Thomas d’Aquin. Le milieu.—L’homme.—La vision du monde (Paris-Brussels: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1928).
31. Not by everyone of course. It is worth recalling the Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series by Edmond de Coussemaker (Paris, 1864–1876), Clemens Baeumker’s Witelo (Münster, 1908), E. Lutz, “Die Ästhetik Bonaventuras,” in Festgabe zum 60: Geburstag Clem, Baeumker (Münster, 1913), Johan Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters [The Waning of the Middle Ages] (Haarlem, 1919), Walter Müller, Das Problem der Seelenschönheit im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1926), Clare Riedl, Grosseteste On Light (Milwaukee, 1942), Karl Svoboda, L’esthétique de Saint Augustin et ses sources (Paris-Brno 1927), not to mention Menendez y Pelayo (1883), Edmond Faral (1924), J. Schlosser Magnino (1924), H. H. Glunz (1937), and Henri Pouillon (1939).
32. The goal of an historiographically correct reconstruction is not merely not to attempt to modernize one’s authors. Presenting them as they actually were sometimes renews their relevance, in the sense that it allows us to understand better the relationships between ourselves and certain cultural phenomena that had hitherto been difficult to fathom. We may take as an example one of the most intriguing chapters of the Études, that on Hisperic–Latin (or Hiberno-Latin) aesthetics (the fourth chapter of the first volume). Today we possess reliable critical editions of the Hisperica Famina (Herren, 1974) and of the Epitomae and Epistolae of Virgil of Toulouse (Polara, 1979), but De Bruyne was compelled to work with nineteenth-century sources or directly with the Patrologia. The literary sensibility with which he revisits the phenomenon of the Asiatic style is completely modern (and at times betrays a penchant for the stammering Latin of the dark centuries almost worthy of Huysmans), even if some of his critics have blamed him for appealing too casually to categories such as “Baroque.” True, he too was a man of his own day and had a number of reservations regarding that “barbaric” taste, whereas you and I might be tempted to see those barbarians as precursors of James Joyce. Lemoine (1998), however, reminds us that, at the same time and apropos of the same texts, Henri Leclerc in the Dictionnaire de l’Archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (1920), which he compiled with Fernand Cabrol, insisted that the Irish monks who composed and read the Hisperica Famina “were madmen who nowadays would find themselves relegated to an asylum for the mentally infirm.” De Bruyne on the other hand was able to identify the links between these “demential” exercises and the miniatures of the Book of Kells and other masterpieces of Irish art, with the result that the pages he devotes to the Hisperic aesthetic are among the finest ever dedicated to this mysterious chapter of medieval culture.
33. See, for example, on p. 508, apropos of the sentiment of the beautifuclass="underline" “It is not until the 13th century that the problem of distinguishing between the higher and the lower senses is posited in an explicit fashion” [“Ce n’est qu’au XIIIe siècle que le problème de la distinction des sens supérieurs et inférieurs se pose de manière explicite”].
34. See Deely (1985: 29), where, however, it seems fairly clear that for John (Poinsot) the notitia intuitiva is that of things present to the senses and therefore is to be identified with sensation.
35. Which goes to show once again that De Bruyne had a keen awareness of a diachronic development in medieval aesthetic themes. And it was in an implied polemic vis-à-vis his professed conclusions, but using the same texts that he had made available, that I originally entitled my 1959 survey Sviluppo dell’estetica medievale (“The Development of Medieval Aesthetics”). The English translation, by Hugh Bredin, is entitled Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (Eco 1986).
36. The idea was already formulated in Augustine, De vera religione 32, 19.
37. The quotations from Maritain refer to the 1927 edition of Art et scolastique, pp. 257, 259, n. 1.
38. “mens singulare cognoscit per quandam reflexionem, prout, scilicet, mens cognoscendo objectum suum, quod est aliqua natura universalis, redit in cognitionem sui actus, et ulterius in specimen quae est actus sui principium, et ulterius in phantasma a quo species est abstracta; et sic aliquam cognitionem de singulari accipit” (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate X, 5 co., trans. James V. McGlynn, S.J. http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer10.htm.