Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 119

Jacques Maritain and Medieval Studies

115

If I say that it is, in my opinion, the only authentic existentialism,
the reason is not that I am concerned to "‘rejuvenate” Thomism,
so to speak, with the aid of a verbal artifice which I should be
ashamed to employ, by attempting to trick out Thomas Aquinas
in a costume fashionable to our day.. ..I am not a neo-Thomist.
All in all, I would rather be a paleo-Thomist than a neo-Thomist.
I am, or at least I hope I am, a Thomist... .A Thomist who speaks
of St. Thomas’s existentialism is merely reclaiming his own,
recapturing from present-day fashion an article whose worth
that fashion itself is unaware of, he is asserting a prior right.
(13-14)
Maritain avoids the charge of anachronism by evoking a common theme
in his work (which we’ve already talked about). He uses the theme of theft/gift/
reclamation to distinguish between progress (Thomism, existentialism) and what
is merely a change in discourse (the new-St. Thomas vs. the old-St. Thomas, oldexistentialism vs. new-existentialism). That is, the then current discussions of
existentialism took something (“the truth of Thomism”) from Thomism (“a
presumption of the primacy of existence to the intuition of an existential being”)
by learning how to produce that truth. Producing that truth, however, creates a
falsehood in two ways: (1) it situates knowledge, rather than truth, in a position of
agency by failing to appreciate the difference between what something is and what
something might be insofar as we might know it (the existent and not existence is
thereby given primacy); and (2) philosophy takes more and more the place of
theology as truth becomes associated with faculties rather than actualities. In
Reflections on America {\95S% Maritain tells us that this is the principal condition
of modernity which equates identity and will. The medieval invention of the
Christian state, however, offers another possibility but not by example. Rather,
Maritain traces this possibility of a Christian state from Aristotle through the
Catholic tradition and St. Thomas and beyond to what Maritain called, “the
American Experience” (Schall 77).
What sort of medievalism is this? I would say “A philosophical one,” a
medievalism consonant with all of the difficult questions that ""history” presents to
the philosopher. If historians of philosophy are philosophers, then philosophy is
just a good summary of what other people have said and thought. If historians of
philosophy are not philosophers, then history is not such a good summary of what
has been said and thought. A crude distinction to be sure, yet do we not find that
statements regarding history can be constrained by what it is we have to say as
well as by the historical objects to which our speech might refer? And do we not
find that our ability to recognize historical objects can be limited by our knowledge