georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

History of Art, Practice 21bertus Magnus to Saint Antoninus, shaped Angelico’s culture and hisform of belief; we must reopen the Artes Memorandi still in use inDominican monasteries of the fifteenth century, and indeed those deliriousmedieval ‘‘encyclopedic’’ compilations called Summae de exempliset similitudinibus rerum ...Now what do we find in these summae? Compilations of knowledge?Not exactly. Rather labyrinths in which knowledge loses its wayand becomes fantasy, in which the system becomes a great displacement,a great multiplication of images. Theology itself is not construedhere as a knowledge such as we understand the word today,which is to say as something that we can possess. It treats of an absoluteOther and submits to it wholly, a God who alone commands andpossesses this knowledge. If there is any knowledge at all, it is not‘‘caught’’ or grasped by anyone—not even by Thomas Aquinas himself.It is scientia Dei, the science of God, in all senses of the genitive‘‘of.’’ That is why it is said in principle to transcend—to ground inone sense and to ruin in another—all human knowledges as well asall other ways and pretensions to knowledge. ‘‘Its principles do notcome to it from another science but imminently from God, by revelation[per revelationem].’’ 6 Now revelation offers nothing for the grasping:it offers, rather, its being grasped in the scientia Dei, which itselfremains by right, until the end of time—a time when all eyes willostensibly open for good—ungraspable, which is to say productive ofan inextricable loop of knowledge and not-knowledge. How could itbe otherwise, in a universe of belief that ceaselessly asks one to believein the unbelievable, to believe in something put in the place of everythingthat one doesn’t know? There is, then, a real work, a constraintof not-knowledge in the great theological systems themselves. It iscalled the inconceivable, the mystery. It offers itself in the pulse of anever singular, ever dazzling event: that obscure self-evidence thatSaint Thomas here calls a revelation. Now it is troubling for us to findin this structure of belief something like an exponential constructionof the two aspects experienced almost tactilely before the utterly simplechalky material of Fra Angelico: a symptom, then, delivering simultaneouslyits single blow and the insistence of its virtual memory, itslabyrinthine trajectories of meaning.