I

To the Carolingian revival of the arts there corresponds, in philosophy, the phenomenon of John the Scot (ca. 810-877), equally magnificent, equally unexpected, and equally charged with potentialities not to be realized until a much later date. About a hundred years of fermentation in both fields were followed, in art, by the variety and contrariety of Romanesque which ranges from the planar simplicity of the Hirsau school and the severe structuralism of Normandy and England to the rich proto-classicism of southern France and Italy; and, in theology and philosophy, by a similar multiplicity of divergent currents, from uncompromising fideism (Peter Damian, Manegold of Lautenbach and, ultimately, St. Bernard) and ruthless rationalism (Berenger of Tours, Roscellinus) to the proto-humanism of Hildebert of Lavardin, Marbod of Rennes and the school of Chartres.

Lanfranc and Anselm of Bec (the former died in 1089, the latter in 1109) made a heroic attempt to settle the conflict between reason and faith before the principles of such a settlement had been explored and formulated. This exploration and formulation was initiated by Gilbert de la Porrée (died 1154) and Abelard (died 1142). Thus Early Scholasticism was born at the same moment and in the same environment in which Early Gothic architecture was born in Suger’s Saint-Denis. For both the new style of thinking and the new style of building (opus Francigenum)—though brought about by “many masters from different nations,” as Suger said of his artisans, and soon developing into truly international movements—spread from an area comprised within a circle drawn around Paris with a radius of less than a hundred miles. And they continued to be centered in this area for about one century and a half.

Here High Scholasticism is generally assumed to begin with the turn of the twelfth century, precisely when the High Gothic system achieved its first triumphs in Chartres and Soissons; and here a “classic” or climactic phase was reached in both fields during the reign of St. Louis (1226-1270). It was in this period that there flourished such High Scholastic philosophers as Alexander of Hales, Albert the Great, William of Auvergne, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas and such High Gothic architects as Jean le Loup, Jean d’Orbais, Robert de Luzarches, Jean de Chelles, Hugues Libergier, and Pierre de Montereau; and the distinctive features of High—as opposed to Early—Scholasticism are remarkably analogous to those which characterize High—as opposed to Early—Gothic art.

It has justly been remarked that the gentle animation that distinguishes the Early Gothic figures in the west façade of Chartres from their Romanesque predecessors reflects the renewal of an interest in psychology which had been dormant for several centuries; Note 2 but this psychology was still based upon the Biblical—and Augustinian—dichotomy between the “breath of life” and the “dust of the ground.” The infinitely more lifelike—though not, as yet, portraitlike—High Gothic statues of Reims and Amiens, Strassburg and Naumburg and the natural—though not, as yet, naturalistic—fauna and flora of High Gothic ornament proclaim the victory of Aristotelianism. The human soul, though recognized as immortal, was now held to be the organizing and unifying principle of the body itself rather than a substance independent thereof. A plant was thought to exist as a plant and not as the copy of the idea of a plant. The existence of God was believed to be demonstrable from His creation rather than a priori.  Note 3

In formal organization, too, the High Scholastic Summa differs from the less comprehensive, less strictly organized, and much less uniform encyclopedias and Libri Sententiarum of the eleventh and twelfth centuries much in the same way as does the High Gothic style from its ancestry. In fact, the very word summa (first used as a book title by the jurists) did not change its meaning from a “brief compendium” (singulorum brevis comprehensio or compendiosa collectio, as Robert of Melun defined it in 1150) to a presentation both exhaustive and systematic, from “summary” to summa as we know it, until the final lustra of the twelfth century. Note 4 The earliest fully developed specimen of this new kind, the Summa Theologiae by Alexander of Hales, which, according to Roger Bacon, “weighed about as much as one horse can carry,” was begun in 1231, the very year in which Pierre de Montereau began the new nave of St.-Denis. 

The fifty or sixty years after the death of Saint Louis in 1270 (or, if we prefer, that of St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas in 1274) mark what is called the end phase of High Scholasticism by the historians of philosophy, and the end phase of High Gothic by the historians of art—phases in which the various developments, however important, do not as yet add up to a fundamental change in attitude but rather manifest themselves in a gradual decomposition of the existing system. Both in intellectual and in artistic life— including music, which from about 1170 had been dominated by the school of Notre-Dame in Paris—we can observe a growing trend towards decentralization. The creative impulses tended to shift from what had been the center to what had been the periphery: to South France, to Italy, to the Germanic countries, and to England, which, in the thirteenth century had shown a tendency toward splendid isolation. Note 5

A decrease of confidence in the supremely synthetic power of reason which had triumphed in Thomas Aquinas may be discerned, and this resulted in a resurgence—on an entirely different level, to be sure—of currents suppressed during the “classic” phase. The Summa was again displaced by less systematic and ambitious types of presentation. Pre-Scholastic Augustinianism (asserting, among other things, the independence of the will from the intellect) was vigorously revived in opposition to Thomas, and Thomas’s anti- Augustinian tenets were solemnly condemned three years after his death. Similarly, the “classic” cathedral type was abandoned in favor of other, less perfectly systematized and often somewhat archaic solutions; and in the plastic arts we can observe the revival of a pre-Gothic tendency toward the abstract and the linear.

The doctrines of “classic” High Scholasticism either stiffened into school traditions, or were subjected to vulgarization in popular treatises such as the Somme-le-Roy (1279) and the Tesoretto by Brunetto Latini, or were elaborated and subtilized to the limits of human capacity (not without reason does the greatest representative of this period, Duns Scotus, who died in 1308, bear the agnomen Doctor Subtilis). Similarly, “classic” High Gothic either became doctrinaire, to use Dehio’s phrase, or was reduced and simplified (especially in the mendicant orders), or was refined and complicated into the harpwork of Strassburg, the embroidery of Freiburg, and the flowing tracery of Hawton or Lincoln. But it was not until the end of this period that a basic change announced itself; and it was not until the middle of the fourteenth century—in histories of philosophy the conventional date for the shift from High to Late Scholasticism is 1340, when the teachings of William of Ockham had made so much headway that they had to be condemned—that this change became thoroughly and universally effective.

By this time the energies of High Scholasticism—setting aside the ossified schools of Thomists and Scotists that persisted much as academic painting survived and survives after Manet—had either been channelled into poetry and, ultimately, humanism through Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch; or into anti-rational mysticism through Master Eckhart and his followers. And insofar as philosophy remained Scholasticism in the strict sense of the term, it tended to become agnostic. Apart from the Averroists—who became more and more an isolated sect as time went on —this happened in that mighty movement, rightly called “modern” by the later schoolmen, which began with Peter Aureolus (ca. 1280-1323) and came to fruition in William of Ockham (ca. 1295-1349 or 1350): in critical nominalism (“critical” as opposed to the dogmatic, pre-Scholastic nominalism associated with the name of Roscellinus and apparently quite dead for nearly 200 years). In contrast even to the Aristotelian, the nominalist denies all real existence to universals and grants it only to particulars, so that the nightmare of the High Scholastics—the problem of the principium individuationis by virtue of which The Universal Cat materializes into an infinite number of particular cats— dissolved into nothingness. As Peter Aureolus puts it, “everything is individual by virtue of itself and by nothing else” (omnis res est se ipsa singularis et per nihil aliud).

On the other hand, there reappeared the eternal dilemma of empiricism: since the quality of reality belongs exclusively to that which can be apprehended by notitia intuitiva, that is, to the particular “things” directly perceived by the senses, and to the particular psychological states or acts (joy, grief, willing, etc.) directly known through inner experience, all that which is real, viz., the world of physical objects and the world of psychological processes, can never be rational, while all that which is rational, viz., the concepts distilled from these two worlds by notitia abstractiva, can never be real; so that all metaphysical and theological problems—including the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and in at least one case (Nicholas of Autrecourt) even causation—can be discussed only in terms of probability. Note 6

The common denominator of these new currents is, of course, subjectivism—aesthetic subjectivism in the case of the poet and humanist, religious subjectivism in that of the mystic, and epistemological subjectivism in that of the nominalist. In fact, these two extremes, mysticism and nominalism, are, in a sense, nothing but opposite aspects of the same thing. Both mysticism and nominalism cut the tie between reason and faith. But mysticism—much more emphatically divorced from Scholasticism in the generation of Tauler, Suso, and John of Ruysbroeck than in that of Master Eckhart—does so in order to save the integrity of religious sentiment, while nominalism seeks to preserve the integrity of rational thought and empirical observation (Ockham explicitly denounces as “temerarious” any attempt to subject “logic, physics, and grammar” to the control of theology).

Both mysticism and nominalism throw the individual back upon the resources of private sensory and psychological experience; intuitus is a favorite term and central concept of Master Eckhart as well as of Ockham. But the mystic depends on his senses as purveyors of visual images and emotional stimuli, whereas the nominalist relies on them as conveyors of reality; and the intuitus of the mystic is focused upon a unity beyond the distinction even between man and God and even between the Persons of the Trinity, whereas the intuitus of the nominalist is focused upon the multiplicity of particular things and psychological processes. Both mysticism and nominalism end up with abolishing the borderline between the finite and the infinite. But the mystic tends to infinitize the ego because he believes in the self-extinction of the human soul in God, whereas the nominalist tends to infinitize the physical world because he sees no logical contradiction in the idea of an infinite physical universe and no longer accepts the theological objections thereto. Small wonder that the nominalistic school of the fourteenth century anticipated the heliocentric system of Copernicus, the geometrical analysis of Descartes, and the mechanics of Galileo and Newton.

Similarly, Late Gothic art broke up into a variety of styles reflecting these regional and ideological differences. But this variety, too, is unified by a subjectivism which, in the visual sphere, corresponds to what can be observed in intellectual life. The most characteristic expression of this subjectivism is the emergence of a perspective interpretation of space which, originating with Giotto and Duccio, began to be accepted everywhere from 1330-40. In redefining the material painting or drawing surface as an immaterial projection plane, perspective—however imperfectly handled at the beginning— renders account, not only of what is seen but also of the way it is seen under particular conditions. It records, to borrow Ockham’s term, the direct intuitus from subject to object, thus paving the way for modern “naturalism” and lending visual expression to the concept of the infinite; for the perspective vanishing point can be defined only as “the projection of the point in which parallels intersect.”

We understandably think of perspective as a device of only the two-dimensional arts. However, this new way of seeing— or, rather, of designing with reference to the very process of sight—was bound to change the other arts as well. The sculptors and architects also began to conceive of the forms they shaped, not so much in terms of isolated solids as in terms of a comprehensive “picture space,” although this “picture space” constitutes itself in the beholder’s eye instead of being presented to him in a prefabricated projection. The three-dimensional media, too, supply, as it were, material for a pictorial experience. This is true of all Late Gothic sculpture —even if the pictorial principle is not carried so far as in Claus Sluter’s stagelike portal of Champmol, the typical fifteenth-century “Schnitzaltar,” or those trick figures that look up a spire or down from a balcony; and it is also true of “Perpendicular” architecture in England and of the new types of hall church and semi-hall church in the Germanic countries.

All this applies not only to those innovations which may be said to reflect the empiristic and particularistic spirit of nominalism: the landscape and the interior with concomitant emphasis on genre features, and the autonomous and completely individualized portrait which represents the sitter, as Peter Aureolus would say, as “something individual by virtue of itself and nothing else,” where somewhat earlier likenesses merely superimpose, as it were, a Scotian haecceitas upon a still typified image. It also applies to those new Andachtsbilder which are commonly associated with mysticism: the Pietà, St. John on the Bosom of the Lord, the Man of Sorrows, Christ in the Winepress, etc. In their own way, such “images for worship by empathy,” as the term may be paraphrased, are no less “naturalistic,” often to the point of gruesomeness, than are the portraits, landscapes, and interiors which have been mentioned; and where the portraits, landscapes, and interiors induce a sense of infinity by making the beholder aware of the unending variety and limitlessness of God’s creation, the Andachtsbilder induce a sense of infinity by permitting the beholder to submerge his being in the boundlessness of the Creator Himself. Once more nominalism and mysticism prove to be les extrêmes qui se touchent. We can easily see that these apparently irreconcilable tendencies could variously interpenetrate in the fourteenth century and ultimately merge, for one glorious moment, in the painting of the great Flemings, much as they did in the philosophy of their admirer, Nicholas of Cusa, who died in the same year as Roger van der Weyden.