Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 121

Jacques Maritain and Medieval Studies 117 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