9. Even a contemporary Hebrew scholar like André Chouraqui translates: “Poétisez pour Elohim, chantez son nom; frayez passages au chevalier des nues: Yah est son nom! Exultez en face di lui!”
10. I am reminded of that nineteenth-century congressman from Texas who opposed the introduction of foreign language teaching in the schools declaring: “If English was good enough for the Lord Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me!”
11. All my information about Abulafia and the quotations that below come from Idel (1988a–c, 1989).
12. Other Kabbalists point out that Christians are lacking the letter heth and the Arabs do not have the pe; and in the Renaissance Yohanan Alemanno will be of the opinion that the variations in pronunciation with regard to the twenty-two Hebrew letters are comparable to the sounds made by the different animals (some are like the grunt of a pig, others like the croak of a frog, others still like the honking of a crane). So that the very fact that they produce different sounds reveals that the other languages belong to peoples who have abandoned the proper conduct of life. In this sense, the multiplication of letters is considered to be one of the results of the confusion of Babel. Alemanno is aware of the fact that other peoples have recognized their own languages as the best in the world, and he cites Galen, for whom the Greek tongue is the most pleasing and the most respondent to the laws of reason, but, not daring to contradict him, he admits that this is because there are affinities between Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Assyrian.
13. Zerakhya uses a proof that we shall encounter after the Renaissance in other, Christian authors—cf. Brian Walton, In Biblia polyglotta prolegomena (1657) or Francisco Vallesio, De sacra philosophia (1652)—if the divine gift of an original sacred language had ever been made, every human being, no matter what their mother tongue, would have to have an innate knowledge of the sacred language as well.
14. See Romano (2000). Cf. Battistoni (1995, 1999).
8
The Use and Interpretation of Medieval Texts
8.1. The Modernity of a Paleo-Thomist
In 1920 Jacques Maritain published Art et scolastique (Art and Scholasticism)1 a slim volume containing 115 pages of text and 73 pages of notes (the most important of which are given titles of their own in the book’s table of contents). In it the author assumed (i) that a medieval school of aesthetic thought, attributable in particular to Thomas Aquinas, had existed, and (ii) that this same school of thought was still sufficiently relevant to account for various aspects of contemporary modern art. Let us recall the climate of the time: avant-garde movements had been coming one after the other for forty years; French philosophy was washing down the last scraps of positivism with a strong draft of Bergsonism; Neo-Scholasticism, after its nineteenth-century revival, was still flourishing in the episcopal seminaries, in perpetual polemic against contemporary thought, which for its part paid it not the slightest bit of attention.
If, on the other hand, we can speak today of a medieval aesthetic school of thought, and if no one believes any longer that the allusions to the beautiful contained in the Summae and Commentaria were simply scattered and shapeless flotsam left over from the repertory of ancient philosophy, it was not so pacifically accepted, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, that the Middle Ages had had an aesthetic vision of its own (with differences and nuances from one thinker to another and from one historical moment to another). People persisted in believing that the object of investigation known today as the medieval school of aesthetic thought did not exist. Furthermore, its texts did not exist either, since the texts that are today recognized as such were understood at the time to be discussions of metaphysics or physics or of the banal rules and regulations of technical rhetoric.
There had of course been plenty of orthodox Neo-Thomistic thinkers, who had reconstructed, shrewdly at times, at other times more ingenuously, the aesthetic themes present in Thomas’s work, presenting their reconstructions as theoretically valid for the modern world (driven by a Neo-Thomistic faith in the philosophia perennis). But, on the one hand (and unlike Maritain), they had not attempted comparisons between medieval texts and the artistic problems of later centuries, and, on the other (providing Maritain with a series of negative examples), they had usually oscillated between historiographical reconstruction and their own theoretical projects, so that it was not always easy to tell when it was Thomas speaking and when it was them.2 In any case, we had to wait until 1946 for the fundamental and historiographically correct texts of De Bruyne and Pouillon to appear. We will come to them in due course.
Art et scolastique, however, came out at the beginning of the 1920s. It was certainly not the work of a nineteenth-century Neo-Thomist, but clearly that of a modern who, though he would later acquiesce in the definition of “Paleo-Thomist” (1947: 9–10), also believed in Cocteau (still the irrepressible and acrobatic inventor of poetic fashions and fashionings) and enthused over the music of Satie, Milhaud, and Poulenc, and the paintings of Severini and Rouault. This man of the Middle Ages attempting to live in the contemporary world (he would eventually accentuate his social and political commitment with the publication of Humanisme intégrale), who had arrived at Saint Thomas without completely forgetting Bergson,3 now turned to interpret the problem of art and the beautiful according to the categories of Scholasticism. He did not address the problem of what was dead and what was still living in medieval thought: everything was evidently alive if he, well into the twentieth century, thought like a medieval. It was irrelevant that many of the Scholastic definitions he employed were filtered through a Bergsonian prism: indeed, this simply showed that the Middle Ages was not an island in history, but a dimension of the mind. It followed, according to what Maritain deemed to be “true,” that Bergson was himself part of the philosophia perennis.
It is in this psychological dimension, which also involved a methodological dimension, that Art et scolastique was intended to be read. Only thus could one appreciate its freshness, its unexpected connections, the sudden leaps from ancient to modern, its “militant” vehemence. The culture of the 1920s was thus induced to reflect on the existence of a medieval aesthetic, presented, for better or for worse, as an instrument capable also of defining the artistic polemics of the present day.
On the one hand, the innate Cartesianism of French culture, cross-fertilized by the neoclassicism of the time (this was the same period in which Cocteau was championing Satie and Stravinsky in Le coq et l’arlequin), proved especially receptive to certain proposals that Maritain borrowed from the Scholastic tradition but which modern culture hailed as new, buried as they had been for centuries in ecclesiastical libraries. The revelation of a view of art as recta ratio factibilium (“right judgment regarding things to be made”), as a technical and practical making, an arrangement of materials conforming to an order dictated not just by the sensibility but chiefly by the intellect—and the beauty synthesized in the three touchstones of integrity, proportion, and clarity—could not fail to play a liberating role with regard to the manifold Romantic and Decadent liens and encumbrances that still weighed so heavily on aesthetic speculation. The same considerations explain the fortune, somewhat later, of Maritain in the United States, where this aesthetic, so close in its way to the Aristotelian tradition that the Anglo-Saxon world had never in fact abandoned,4 would go so far as to garner the honors of widespread diffusion even in the pages of Time magazine.