Eco, Umberto. The Æsthetics of Thomas Aquinas. MA: Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1988. Trans. Hugh Bredin. Originally published as Il problema estetico in Tommaso d’Aquino. Milan, Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri. 1970. pp. 1-2, 222.

  In 1931 Benedetto Croce wrote and published in his journal La Critica a review of Nelson Sella’s Estetica musicale in San Tommaso. (1) Much of the review was favourable; Croce praised it as a serious work. But his overall judgement was a repetition of what he had written previously about Aquinas and the history of aesthetics.

  The fact is that his [Aquinas’s] ideas on art and beauty are, not false, but extremely general. This is why they can in a sense be always accepted as correct … The essential thing is that the problem of aesthetics were not the object of any genuine interest, either to the Middle Ages in general, or to St. Thomas in particular. Aquinas’s labours took him in quite a different direction, so that he was satisfied with the generalities in question. For this reason, studies of the aesthetics of St. Thomas and other medieval philosophers make dull and unhelpful reading when (as is usually the case) they lack the restraint and good taste that characterise Sella’s work.

  During the years when Croce’s views still carried the weight in Italy, such a judgement was enough to discourage any research on medieval aesthetics. Even if someone should happen to agree that the medievals did write about aesthetic issues, issues moreover very similar to those addressed in the classical world, it was common to dismiss them in a perfunctory manner. The medievals, it was said, simply repeated the debates of the classical authors parrot fasshion, debates which in any case meant little to them. (2) This kind of judgement amounted almost to a denial of the claim that medieval thinkers continued with the questions of classical aesthetics, on the ground that medieval philosophy was smothered in theology. (3)

  The hollowness of all of this has been revealed in recent histories of the medieval period. In fact, even the medieval history of a century ago would have revealed the same error, if it had been read with any care. But careful reading is a difficult matter, as this book will show.

  The discussion could go on. The fact that it has gone on thus far is enough to show, perhaps, that this visit to the medieval philosophical world has not been without value – if, that is, it is always necessary to justify historical studies in terms of some immediate utility.

  But of course we reinterpret a philosopher of the past for many reasons, many of which remain forever closed to people who simply make use of the reinterpretation, and others of which, as I have said, are known but not to the interpreter. Out of all the possible reasons, there is one that I wish to mention, now at the end of my labours. It is that anyone who makes use of the thinking of the past is enriched by an experience which is organic and complete, and is enabled subsequently to reconsider the world from a higher level of wisdom. However malformed and misplaced the tower which he has clambered up, he will see a larger vista; and not necessarily behind him.

  As Bernard of Chartres remarked, with a genial, imperious, and spurious humility, we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.