From the Tree to the Labyrinth (57 page)

Even as Maritain writes, surrealism is on the doorstep, and symbolism is yielding its final fruits; Satie’s neoclassicism cannot make him forget that the Late Romantic culture of symbolism has by this time identified art as a language appealing principally to feeling, the guardian of a mystery that ordinary words cannot
reveal.
Thus, in explicating the concept of
claritas,
he adheres to a definition he finds in
De Pulchro et Bono,
a little book that the most rigorous scholarship no longer attributed to Thomas but to Albertus Magnus (in point of fact even Maritain admits his uncertainty, deciding however to accept it as a reliable witness to Thomas’s ideas).
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The definition in question is of
claritas
as “resplendentia formae supra partes materiae proportionatas” (“a resplendence of form in the duly ordered parts of material objects”). But in Albertus Magnus there remains a Platonic emphasis, a dialectic between
esse
and
essentia,
in which form, shining through the matter it organizes, nevertheless is not fully identified with it, maintaining its ideal preeminence, whereas in Thomas, in the midst of a dialectic between
essence
and
concrete act of existing,
form becomes such only by individualizing itself in a concretely existing substance (see Eco 1956: ch. IV).

But this is not all. At this point Maritain, in a footnote, goes so far as to distance himself from Albertus Magnus, for whom the radiance of that form—be it Platonic or Aristotelian—was nonetheless comprehensible by whomsoever understood what type of object they were contemplating (a dog, a vase, a human body). For Maritain, on the other hand, the
claritas,
being clarity of form, is metaphysical clarity, clarity in itself, but not clarity for us. The principle of intelligibility of the thing, it is at the same time the principle of its mystery. Thus the beautiful is the splendor of a mystery. Moreover, it cannot be denied that Thomas himself, having reached the extreme limits of explanation of the essential reality of things, would have been brought up short before the mystery of participation by which they cling to being, thanks to the continuous creative intervention of the divinity. The only way he could have explained this reality is by appealing to the analogical force of the language of theology. But the
analogia entis
is not the analogy of the symbolist and, however inadequate it may be, it is an instrument of clarification of the metaphysical mystery, in a cultural climate in which the intellectual possibility of knowledge of being is taken as implicit and what is stressed is our perception of the clarity of being and not its mystery. Maritain, on the other hand, stresses the mystery, elbowing Saint Thomas over toward Saint John of the Cross (as he will do systematically in 1932’s
Les degrés du savoir
[
The Degrees of Knowledge
]) and medieval aesthetics toward the aesthetics of symbolism.

And let it not be thought that our suspicions are exaggerated: a few pages further on, as he prepares to explain the transcendental nature of the beautiful (that canonical given, by virtue of which, in medieval thought, the beautiful becomes concrete and solid and avoids the trap of subjective impression, becoming an objective attribute of truth and moral value, an inseparable property of being), Maritain has recourse to the words of Baudelaire, reminding us how, in its experience of beauty, the human mind has the sense of something that lies beyond it, of the tangible call of the beyond, and, in the melancholy of the ensuing moment, recognizes the evidence of a nature exiled in imperfection, aspiring toward the infinite that has just been revealed. Thus, little by little, the transcendental beauty of the Middle Ages is transformed into something akin to the Burkean and Kantian sublime, filtered through a Decadent sensibility.
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This, then, is the situation of
Art et scolastique
—a militant work that was to influence the writing of philosophical history, eliciting a number of studies (and saddling them with a series of interpretations as fascinating as they were incautious); a speculative work disguised as commentary, and hence fraught with contradictions.

In the essays gathered under the title of
Les frontières de la poésie
(1935), the author appeared to have rid himself of his false pose as historiographer to assume the physiognomy of the autonomous theorist; but it was only the diminished philosophical commitment of those essays that made him appear freer and more open-minded.

In
Frontières
the premises of
Art et scolastique
find ample development: if the medieval artist was the anonymous executor of the objective rules of his art, the artist that Maritain now portrays expresses “himself and his own essence,” “provided that things resonate within him.” The artist receives external reality “in the recesses of his feelings and his passion” (“dans les replis de son sentiment et de sa passion”), not as something other than himself but as something so completely identified with and absorbed in him as no longer to posit any difference between his own soul and the innermost aspects of the things he has made his own. Therefore poetic knowledge will be knowledge according to “resonance in subjectivity” (“résonance dans la subjectivité”) (Maritain 1935: 194–197).

If the Scholastic theory of art was a theory of production, Maritain’s theory becomes a theory of knowledge and, to get to this point, Maritain has evidently been compelled to enrich the Scholastic concept of
ars.
Hesitating to distort the category—so clear and well-defined—that Scholasticism had handed down to him (and that he himself in fact had expounded in
Art et scolastique
), he consequently sets alongside the concept of
art
that of
poetry.

In the Scholastic tradition “poetry” is not an aesthetic category (as it is, let’s say, for Croce (1902), who also applies it to literature in prose), nor, as
ars,
is it a form of knowledge: it is quite simply an operative
habitus
or a practical ability. Maritain’s notion of poetry, then, is alien to medieval thought.

The nature of poetic practice is already sketched out in
Art et scolastique
and is also found, not only in
Frontières,
but also in subsequent works, as we will see in what follows. In short, while art is a practical operation governed by the laws of the intellect, poetry becomes an intentional emotion, the original inner spring that animates the rules of art from within. Art, therefore, begins later, with “the intellect and the will to choose” (“l’intellect et la volonté de choix”).
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Dangerously close to the idealistic formulation of a duality between lyrical intuition as inner expression and technical externalization as a mechanical addition, Maritain’s duality nonetheless allows him to rediscover a deep level of knowledge belonging to the poetic moment, something that the medieval notion of art did not allow.

The poetic moment is an intuitive moment which calls into play not merely intellect but also emotion and sensibility. At that moment, the work appears as already virtually complete; it is “an intuitive and intentional emotion that carries within it far more than itself” (“émotion intuitive et intentionnelle qui porte en soi beaucoup plus qu’elle-même”), eager to lend existence to its phantasm, “an intuitive flash in which the entire work is virtually contained and which will unfold itself in the work” (“éclair intuitif … où toute l’oeuvre est contenue virtuellement et qui s’expliquera dans l’oeuvre”), and finally “it is above all as a precise emotion that it appears to the consciousness” (“c’est surtout … comme une émotion décisive qu’elle apparaît à la conscience”) (Maritain 1935: 182–195). This is because it is the effect of a profound relationship with reality (the ultimate identification of the mystery of things with the mind of the artist): and therefore it can be understood as a moment of prelogical knowledge of reality, an instrument of metaphysical revelation.

All of this was not made explicit in
Art et scolastique,
nor does it appear in clear theoretical terms in
Frontières.
We find it, however, in a couple of later essays (which look forward to Maritain’s
Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
of 1953). These essays are “De la connaissance poétique” (1938a) and “Signe et symbole” (1938b). The date is significant: contemporary culture has returned, as a result of the injection of Surrealism, to a Romantic conception of art as an instrument of philosophy. The absolute to which it provides access is no longer that of the Romantics; nevertheless, Maritain’s systematic framework allows him precisely to reinterpret the Surrealist lesson in terms of a metaphysic that is not that of the absurd but that of something significant and rich in positive determinations. In other words, poetry as an instrument, restored by Surrealism to its cognitive dignity, is now realigned according to the modalities of a Romantic aesthetic, but for the purposes of unveiling the universe of Saint Thomas, as seen by a Paleo-Thomist steeped in the modern aesthetic sensibility.

There are a number of passages in Thomas in which he gives a definition of poetic discourse that is frankly discouraging (
Summa Theologiae
I, I, 9; II, 101, 2 ad 2). He speaks of poetry as an “infima doctrina” (“inferior learning”) and opines that “poetica non capiuntur propter defectum veritatis qui est in eis” (“poetic matters cannot be grasped because they are deficient in truth”). This definition of the
modus poeticus
as inferior is fully justified in the context in which Thomas proposes it: that is, in a comparison between vernacular poetry and Holy Scripture and subsequently between poetry and theology; and, within the hierarchical system in which the sciences derive their dignity from the dignity of the object to which they apply, poetry is fated to be the loser. Its
defectus veritatis
or deficiency of truth derives from the fact that it narrates nonexistent things; it uses metaphors for the purposes of representation and to provide delight; it evades the strict control of reason and claims to be an instrument, not of knowledge, but instead of pleasure.
¹¹

It is true, as Curtius (1948: chs. XI and XII) clearly demonstrates, that it was on the basis of this same distinction between the poet and the theologian, and of certain affirmations made by Aristotle concerning the first poet-theologians, that protohumanists like Albertino Mussato began to adumbrate a notion of the revelatory role of poetry; but by then we will have abandoned the confines of Scholasticism and its inflexible epistemology. In the eyes of which, given its
defectus veritatis,
to interpret the
modus poeticus
as a
perceptio confusa
of the Baumgartian type would be, to say the least, a stretch.

Maritain (1938a–b), in contrast, goes back to Thomas’s own writings in order to identify the
modus poeticus,
precisely because of its imprecise and representative nature, as knowledge by “affective connaturality with reality” (“connaturalité affective à la réalité”), a knowledge that is nonconceptualizable, inasmuch as it awakens within itself the creative profundities of the subject. Poetic knowledge is “inseparable from the productivity of the spirit” (“inséparable de la productivité de l’esprit”) (1938a: 95–96).

What can the expressive and communicative instrument of this knowledge “by affective connaturality” be? It is the poetic symbol, which is a sign-image, something sensible that signifies its object by way of an analogy between sign and object, and therefore a sign, which, over and above its semantic effectiveness, obtains a practical result (by communicating an order, an appeal) by means of suggestion—an operation that Maritain does not hesitate to define as “magical” (1938a: 299 et seq.).

Nevertheless, no doubt because he did not believe that Thomas’s own texts would support this interpretation, Maritain seeks confirmation in a Scholastic of the Counter-Reformation, to be specific, in John of Saint Thomas (1589–1644; aka John Poinsot, hereinafter “John”).

Now, John’s linguistic theory is a theory of philosophical language and he does not have the slightest interest in the possibilities of poetic language. The linguistic expression or term is what the proposition can be reduced to, as occurs in the case of the subject and the predicate; the term is both
vox
and
signum,
both mental and written, and it is
ex quo simplex conficitur propositio
(“that out of which a simple proposition is made”); it is a
vox significativa
(and therefore is not meaningless, unlike, for instance, the sound
blitiri
); and it is such
ad placitum,
that is, by stipulation or convention. Meaningful words
(voces significativae)
that have not been agreed upon, such as moans and groans, are excluded.
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Maritain, for his part, endeavors to find allusions to the “symbolic” value of images in certain citations from John (such as “ratio imaginis consistit in hoc quod procedat ab alio ut a principio et in similitudinem ejus, ut docet S. Thomas” (“the rationale of an image, therefore, consists in this, that it proceeds from another as from a principle and in a similitude or likeness of that other, as Saint Thomas teaches”) (Deely 1985: 219). While it is true that Thomas states (in
Summa Theologiae
I, 35) that “species, prout ponitur ab Hilario in definitione imaginis, importat formam deductam in aliquo ab alio” (“the term
species
, as Hillary claims in his definition of the image, implies a form in one thing derived from another”), what he is talking about is the more traditional definition of the image as bound to the object by a relationship of likeness, not by convention, and this reading does not lend itself to a “symbolist” interpretation. Maritain, on the other hand, makes it the basis for a definition of the poetic symbol as a sign-image endowed with an analogical and ambiguous (or polysemic) relationship with the
signatum.
Thomas was not unaware of the existence of such sign-images capable of standing in a vaguely ambiguous position vis-à-vis the
signatum;
but he saw them as being the kind of visions that appear to prophets, announcing the fact, for instance, that there will be seven years of plenty by showing seven full ears of corn. This would be a purely poetic proceeding, and here again Thomas implies that it is inferior; so much so that he considers more valid and reliable those prophecies in which, instead of images, we have words, far less equivocal signs, and more desirable in a circumstance as delicate as that of the reception of the divine message.
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