Pointed Remarks: Scholasticism and the Gothic in the English Counter-Enlightenment

Abstract

While history in prose and verse was ... made instrument of Church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for same was laid in England by a very original thinker, who ... instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way [Coleridge] made trial of his age, and succeeded in interesting its genius in cause of Catholic truth. --Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua 105 (1) Following William Morris, following Ruskin, we were in revolt against whole conception of art as being irrational. Without knowing it we were Thomistic and Aristotelian. --Eric Gill, Autobiography 136-37 (2) Two voices speaking in consonance across great spans of time seldom converse alone; intervening and later voices soon ask to be heard; among latter, living voices also chime in. It is from just such a dialogue-between John Ruskin and St. Thomas Aquinas--that this study originally germinated. When Ruskin writes that inherent of as compared to other styles of architecture is the sign of life in a mortal body ... of a state of progress and change, it is easy to assume with that last phrase that we are in presence of a vulgar Victorian meliorism even in this great critic of his age's self-image. But then he goes on: [The spirit] invented a series of forms of which merit was, not merely that they were new, but that they were capable of perpetual novelty. pointed arch was not merely a bold variation from round, but it admitted of millions of variations in itself; for proportions of a pointed arch are changeable to infinity, while a circular arch is always same. (Ruskin 156, 160) In these comments on pointed arch in The Nature of Gothic from Stones of Venice--and above all in implication that imperfection of producer and infinite novelty of product are necessarily bound up together--we hear, I will argue, a distant anticipation of neoscholastic inflection which was given to English culture and society debate by some highly articulate and self-consciously modernist of arts in early and middle twentieth century. I would emphasize practitioners because that is what they were, usually, rather than merely commentators; practitioners, too, whose practice is either in visual and plastic arts or a composite of those arts and verbal; practitioners, finally, who reflected volubly and cogently on that practice. We also have a hint in Ruskin of route that this aesthetic turn to medieval philosophy would follow: namely, toward art-work as a thing put into world by a single-minded labor of making and toward a relationship between that thing and its maker in which is figured a creatural similitude of relationship between creator and his world. Behind Ruskin, of course, there stands pioneering figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; it might indeed be said that these latter-day followers of St. Thomas Aquinas constitute an alternative to creeping Arnoldization of Coleridge's legacy: an alternative, that is to say, to progressive reduction of religious experience to moral experience, and of both to morality touched by emotion (Arnold, Literature and Dogma 47), (3) which poetry was said to give us pre-eminently--a reduction which those seasoned antireductionists I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis (critics exclusively of word, we should note, who have little to say about image) took to its neopagan conclusion and carried into latter part of twentieth century. With help above all of Jacques Maritain, this historically Puritan and immanentist line is sidetracked, religion and arts properly oriented to each other, and a new mutual articulation effected of metaphysical and creatural. I While it is no business of mine (and certainly beyond my competence) to emulate Erwin Panofsky, whose influential 1957 essay Architecture and Scholasticism develops an elaborate homology between structure of scholastic summa and that of cathedral, another striking suggestion of his will have its place in a later stage of my argument. …