I am grateful to Professor Marenbon for the points he makes with regard to an old text of mine and agree immediately with two of them. This was a piece of juvenilia, written when I was twenty-two and even when I republished it fifteen years later (with a few corrections but, as Professor Marenbon says, with relatively minor changes) I immediately specified in the preface that this was an “old book” and a “typically youthful work.” So it could be understood, as Marenbon specifies at the end of his essay, not so much as a text on Aquinas but as a text on “the young Umberto Eco.”
At this point Professor Marenbon has the right to wonder, as he does, why I agreed to publish it in another four languages, including English and French, thirty years later. I could say that it was a form of vanity. Three hundred copies of the first Italian edition of the book were printed, while the second edition sold a few thousand. When, after the success of The Name of the Rose, a novel set in the Middle Ages, foreign publishers became aware that in my youth I had written a book on medieval subjects, they asked if they might have it translated. I agreed, still pointing out from the start that this was an old book, because I had a fondness for my first book. In fact I recall having said in some interview, when they asked me about the advantages of the success of The Name of the Rose, that the first one had been the chance to rescue the book I loved above all others from dusty bookshelves. Perhaps this was not a good move and, as Marenbon says, I should have left “this rather obscure field behind” me and should have regarded my early medieval studies as juvenilia. Yet I believed that my youthful studies were still partly valid.
First of all, I thought that we should pose the problem as to whether medieval man had any notions of aesthetics. Certainly, if aesthetics begins with Baumgarten and the German Idealist philosophers, then medieval man did not practice aesthetics in the modern sense. But is it sufficient to say, as Professor Marenbon does, referring to the revisionists, that Edgar de Bruyne was “a learned but undiscriminating scholar,” and that his Études d’esthétique médiévale are “three large volumes on a nonexistent field”?
I believe I have criticized many of de Bruyne’s positions, but if the problem was whether in the Middle Ages they paid any attention to the problems of beauty, de Bruyne had every reason to rescue from oblivion all the texts that dealt with that issue to any extent. If anything, de Bruyne’s limitation consisted of attributing the same meaning to apparently similar definitions, while it seemed to me that over the centuries certain positions had changed radically. There is no doubt that de Bruyne did not give sufficient consideration to the medieval custom whereby, even when an author was breaking new ground, he made every effort to show that he was keeping faith with the tradition. This is why I called my second book on medieval aesthetics Sviluppo dell’estetica medievale (The development of medieval aesthetics; later published as Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages).
But to say that de Bruyne had not given this aspect sufficient consideration does not mean denying that he had attempted a monumental enterprise when he wondered whether an epoch that produced immense works of art and that could appreciate natural beauty (countless texts show this) might not have, albeit in ways that are sometimes implicit, an idea of beauty and the joy of aesthetic contemplation. In this he put himself in a new position compared with those who, like Croce, had denied the existence of such problems in an epoch he maintained was obscure. Did Saint Bernard perhaps not scourge himself to atone for the pleasure (which he deemed illicit) that the capitals of the columns of the Cluniac cloisters gave him? Did Abbot Suger rejoice only at the material value of the objects in the treasury of Saint Denis or did he have authentic aesthetic ecstasies on contemplating those marvels?
Let’s move on to the substantial objections that Professor Marenbon raises about my youthful work. The fundamental one is that I allegedly attribute to Aquinas “an elaborate theory of aesthetics,” while “none of the main elements in Eco’s interpretation . . . corresponds to what Aquinas thought and tried to make clear in his writings.” Here Professor Marenbon introduces a fundamental problem. A remote epoch can be studied according to strictly historiographic criteria, and in that case I should have dealt only with what Aquinas explicitly said, argued with authors such as Maritain who made him say what he didn’t say, and shown, as I did, that it was historically untenable that medieval man, or at least Aquinas, had an idea of intuition similar to the modern one, and so on.
But shouldn’t historians of philosophy do a little more? According to me, they should not only clarify what a philosopher has written (for example, by producing a critical edition of his text) but they must also extrapolate his thought from his writings. In other terms, if a systematic philosopher like Aquinas proposes a system, then from that system you can also extrapolate the things he did not say explicitly, but could not have failed to think. Professor Marenbon holds that philosophers such as Proclus, Spinoza, and Leibniz have proposed certain explicit fundamental principles from which you can deduce the rest of their ideas, so that the consequences deriving from their principles are considered as virtual parts of their system, even if they had not realized that these consequences could be deduced from it. I am basically in agreement. Nonetheless, according to Professor Marenbon, “Aquinas does not go about philosophizing in this way.”
It is clear that we don’t agree on this point. It seems to me that over the last fifty years historians of medieval philosophy have taken no interest in the great systems of the thirteenth century while concentrating on the period that followed. Gilson’s La Philosophie au moyen âge (1922) devoted about twenty-five closely written pages to Aquinas, Bréhier’s La Philosophie au moyen âge (1937) gave Albertus Magnus and Aquinas forty pages, but Vasoli’s La filosofia medievale (1961) had only eleven pages for Aquinas. Yet it is not only the Neoscholastic thinkers who maintain that Aquinas’s system was intended to be a coherent one. See the entire structure of the Summa Theologiae, without letting yourself be deceived by the sequence of quaestiones as if they were a set of disconnected discussions. To say that Aquinas strove merely to solve certain marginal problems, often without success, and that he was “battling for his controversial ideas in the to-andfro of debate and struggling, often unsuccessfully, to resolve contradictions” does not strike me as correct. It is perfectly possible to maintain that the Thomist system was full of contradictions (and I identified some of them with regard to his ideas on art and the beautiful) without denying the author’s systematic intention.
It may be that at the time I was strongly influenced by Gilson, who presented Thomist philosophy as a system, and certainly Gilson was a Neoscholastic, but he was also a great historian of philosophy and I believe that his reconstruction is still indisputable. But evidently Professor Marenbon does not see things that way. However, if we admit that Aquinas constructed a system, it seems to me that we may take a thought held to be systematic and deduce from it that which, according to the logic of the system, the author leads us to think even when he did not write it.
This leads to a problem worthy of further debate: is an attempt to deduce from a system that which has not been said explicitly only the task of a philosopher who tries to interpret a text independently of the intentions of its author, or is this yet another way of making the history of philosophy? I refrain from answering and I admit that I interpreted Aquinas as a philosopher, trying to understand what could be deduced from his system, and certainly in that sense I was interested in demonstrating that sometimes what could be deduced led us to certain philosophical positions of our own times. But when I tried to show that the system had certain contradictions (and Professor Marenbon recognizes that I did that) I was also behaving as a historian of philosophy by demonstrating the limitations of a past system.
If this principle is not accepted, then it is possible to raise many of the objections that Professor Marenbon makes against my position. For example, regarding certain passages in my text, he tells me that in some points Aquinas is not talking about beauty at all even though he talks about proportio. Yet, and here we have some explicit texts, Aquinas had said that proportio was one of the characteristics of beauty. Why should I not have taken into consideration those passages on proportio even though the author was not talking about beauty?
Professor Marenbon observes that (whereas) for Aquinas, proportion is a feature of beauty, it in no way follows that, whenever he talks about proportion, he has beauty in mind. Sure about that? Very well, Aquinas does not develop an aesthetic theory, but when he talks about proportion he is talking about one of the characteristics that lead to an aesthetic visio. In such cases was Aquinas really not talking about beauty? I believe that a history of philosophy must also reconstruct the feelings and the ideas that the author had in mind when he used arguments that strike us as insufficient for a historical reconstruction of his position. I am convinced that in those cases Aquinas was thinking about beauty.
And if by chance he was not thinking about it, anyone reading his texts is induced to think that he was. Professor Marenbon rightly points out that in my later writings I make a distinction between the intention of the author and that of the text. It may be that a historian of philosophy ought to deal solely with the intentions of the author (even though I’m not sure about that) but a philosopher certainly must also deal with the intentions of the text. Naturally, the intentions of the text should be consistently framed in the context it springs from so as not to make the text say things that the author (in his own time) absolutely could never have said. And so we can infer from the Thomist system that each time Aquinas talks about proportion we ought in any case to maintain that those passages also refer to the concept of beauty that he, thinking as a philosopher of his own day, held.
Let us move on to another point. Professor Marenbon suggests that the idea of understanding form as substance and not only as form in the Aristotelian sense of the term is not expressly formulated by Aquinas. Instead, I maintained that the system proposed by Aquinas nonetheless induced us to believe that. I am thinking of passages such as “Forma igitur et materia semper oportet esse ad invicem proportionata, et quasi naturaliter coaptata,” (Contra gentiles) and “Proportio hujusmodi non est forma, sicut ipsi credebant, sed est dispositio materiam ad formam” (De anima);1 and Aquinas, even though he did not follow the suggestions of Albertus Magnus in De pulchro et bono, knew that in that text Albertus talked of “Splendorem formae substantialis vel actualis supra partes materiae proportionatas et terminates.”2
I will not offend the reader by translating the medieval Latin but it appears clearly from this and other texts that every time Aquinas talked about splendor, resplendence, and claritas he was thinking about the enjoyment of a proportion that comes to pass between substantial form and matter, and so he appreciated a proportion (criterion of beauty) that could be grasped only by contemplating the entire substance. He did not say so explicitly but I believed that if he had been asked (in the course of a Quaestio disputata) to talk about beauty ex professo (and not only parenthetically) he could have or should have done so. So mine is a philosophical interpretation rather than a historical one? But that’s how I had decided to question a systematic philosopher.
Moreover, it suffices to understand the words of a philosopher by supposing he was a person of good sense. If Aquinas maintained that a rose was beautiful, did he perhaps think that by enjoying its beauty he considered only the universal form “rose,” or merely the elements of some as yet uncoordinated matter? I believe that he intended to refer to the whole, to that concrete rose, a synthesis of matter and form, and hence substance.
Another observation made by Professor Marenbon is that after that youthful work and the compendium of essays in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages I stopped dealing with medieval aesthetics. That would not in itself be a fault but the observation is contradicted by some bibliographical facts. I continued to deal with medieval studies, albeit not regularly, and a few years ago in Italy a book of mine was published containing everything I had written on medieval thought (Scritti sul pensiero medievale, 2012), a volume of over one thousand three hundred pages. There are, together with less important pieces, studies on Porphyry’s Tree, others on the reception of the Aristotelian theory of the metaphor in the Middle Ages, a study on Latratus canis, one on the medieval concept of denotation, and others on the theory of language and poetry in Dante, on falsification in the Middle Ages, on Llull, and on other subjects. In these essays many problems are tackled from a semiotic standpoint but there is no doubt that the two long essays on the medieval misunderstanding of Aristotelian texts on metaphor, the essays on Dante’s ideas on poetry, or on the way in which Joyce had (freely) used Aquinas’s aesthetic ideas to define the epiphany as an aesthetic ecstasy all had aesthetic relevance. Incidentally, those essays were also published in English in my recent From the Tree to the Labyrinth. A sign that over the years I returned every so often to my initial subjects.
Let us move on to other objections. It seems to Professor Marenbon that, as far as Aquinas is concerned, I dwelt on his ideas on natural beauty and left little room for art. But I did that because what Aquinas says about the arts merely repeats the ideas current in his day, whereas he offers us more original ideas when he talks about natural beauty. And I would observe that I insisted on this fact in order to dispute the idealist aesthetics of the 1950s, which considered that the aesthetic problem centered on the arts and gave little or no importance to natural beauty. Certainly medieval man had ideas about natural and artistic beauty that differed from our contemporary view and I think I showed that, but for them, the aesthetic problem was not a “nonexistent field.” It would be like saying that since cognitive studies were recognized as a scientific field only in our times Descartes did not pose himself the problem of cognition. Or that since we talk about semantics only today the Stoics did not pose themselves problems about semantics.
As for the problem of the visio, on one point I still disagree with Professor Marenbon, while on another I can only agree. The professor says that “Eco discovers an aesthetic visio at the end of the cognitive process, based on the act of judgment. But is anything of this sort actually discussed by Aquinas?” Here we return to the question whether it be legitimate to make deductions from what a systematic philosopher leaves implicit. I remain convinced that starting from Aquinas’s explicit principles you can only come to that conclusion. And on the other hand, I thought it was interesting to draw that conclusion in order to show how the medieval way of thinking about the pleasure of beauty was far distant from the modern one. In my interpretation there was an implicit issue, which I made explicit at various points in my work, namely, that the concept of aesthetic pleasure as intuition was extraneous to the medieval thinker, and I highlighted the typical medieval intellectualism, or at least the Thomist version of it.
On the other hand, I must admit that Professor Marenbon is right about the relationship between the idea of beauty as a transcendental and the function of the visio. I am convinced that, under the influence of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite and the entire previous tradition, Aquinas was induced to consider beauty as a transcendental, namely, as a property common to all being. But when he makes the act of the visio essential through the experience of beauty, it can be deduced that at that point beauty is no longer a property of being as such because something is perceived as beautiful only if it is—so to speak—focused by an act of seeing. Without the (human) eye that sees, being cannot be called beautiful. In this sense there is a contradiction between the canonical attribution of beauty to transcendentals and the function of the aesthetic visio. Agreed. Perhaps I did not bring out this contradiction sufficiently but may I be permitted to say that I was aware of it. In the chapter on transcendentals in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas I should have admitted that in the commentary to Pseudo-Dionysius Aquinas said explicitly “omne quod est, est ex pulchro et bono, quod est Deus” (but here Aquinas was explaining what Dionysius meant) and in that commentary he states something that Dionysius had not said, namely that beauty and good are the same thing, but ratione differunt: in fact “pulchrum addit supra bonum ordinem ad vim cognoscitivam.” This idea is picked up again in a far more explicit manner in the Summa Theologiae (for example in I q. 5 a. 4 ad 1), where, repeating that beauty regards the vis cognoscitiva, he concludes with “pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent.” And I also gave De Munnynck’s opinion whereby, as soon as you introduce the concept of visio, the debate about transcendentals becomes less important.
So Professor Marenbon is right about the fact that the concept of visio throws into crisis the attribution of beauty to transcendentals and maybe he is right in saying that I did not stress this point enough. But I think I was aware of it and my reply to Professor Marenbon’s objection should be clear from the sum of my interpretation of Thomist thought.
In conclusion, I admit that I am defending a piece of juvenilia and, if I had to rewrite that work today, I would have to take into account how much successive research has explained over the last seventy years. But I repeat, I am still fond of that work, as long as it is read bearing in mind the date when it was written. In those years I had gone through a full immersion course in Aquinas and, as happens to divers, too deep a dive can cause vertigo and visions. Perhaps I expected too much of my philosopher. But as we know, you never forget or repudiate your youthful loves, even when they lead to a few ecstasies that others find excessive.
U.E.
NOTES
1. Thomas Aquinas, Contra gentiles II, 81; De anima I, 9.
2. Albertus Magnus, De pulchro et bono, q. 1, a. 2 co.