Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 121
Jacques Maritain and Medieval Studies
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Theology encourages history to resist its reduction to a set o f philosophical
problems: the mind/body problem, the problem of other minds, the problem of
evil, and so on.
The same forces that promote the disappearance of theology, promote the
development of historical inquiry as a ‘'semblance of the divine,” something that
Maritain hoped his particular brand of medievalism might help “history” to avoid.
As a semblance of the divine, history is of little use except to those who wish to be
satisfied with the same old questions and answers.
Maritain, it seems, has anticipated our century’s “conflict of the faculties.”
In the humanities, disciplines can no longer assume an object of inquiry that is
separated from their investigations o f it. Such a statement is no doubt a
commonplace; however, we may still wonder how many have understood it. The
challenge for the academician is to construct an object of inquiry that does not
assume a singular, unified subject in order to pursue and/or construct some type of
knowledge. This challenge is not unknown to many feminist scholars who have
begun to work without the safety net of “one feminism” or “one woman.” Likewise,
many scholars in gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies have tried to move beyond the
assumption of one homosexuality. But this methodological (epistemological?) move
is not without its risks. If we accept that there is no singular object of inquiiy, it
does not seem sensible to go about finding and cataloguing representations of that
object, nor does it seem reasonable to rediscover the silent manifestations of these
singular objects/subjects.
The question of the relationship between medievalism and medieval
studies is a question that parallels this conflict of the faculties. If we cannot assume
that there is a Middle Ages that persists and insists unchanged in our investigations
of it, the simple move is to suggest that we then study representations of the Middle
Ages. Then, once we have tired of these investigations, we can proceed to give
voice and vision to the medieval in any age, action, or text. Of course, our friends
in cultural studies have already shown us the limitations, if not the horizon, for
such investigations, “If there is no singular object/subject of inquiry, then how can
you bear witness to its representations?” In a more classical age, we might have
found an answer to this question in Plato’s memory doctrine—which may, in fact,
be the case for many postmodern historians who trace and examine “the Middle
Ages as a radical genealogy of trope, discourse, and hermeneutical satisfaction.”
In this regard, as well, we find ourselves following our friends in cultural studies
and gender studies who ask, “Where is the history that places certain constraints
(other than an auditor’s satisfaction) on what might be said to be true?”^
The student of medievalism will be interested in these questions and may
even provide some answers. Following Maritain, for example, we might say that
such a history is impossible without theology. We say this not because of any