Pearl Diving in the Archives
Poem by Sangi no Takamura (Ono no Takamura) by Katsushika Hokusai
To do genealogical work in the context of a department of Catholic theology presents a unique kind of intellectual or even existential friction. In my own experience, I have found that friction to be a source of real intellectual creativity.
To step back, when I was a doctoral student around fifteen years ago and preparing for my comprehensive exams, we had to pick two theorists who would help us think methodologically about the study of religion. I picked Michel Foucault and the Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau, both of whom still serve as invisible inner guides and conversation partners in my work. My area of research was French Catholic intellectual history, and since Foucault and de Certeau were both from that context, but at the same stood apart from it, I found them useful to think with.
I vividly remember reading Foucault’s 1977 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” and finding it deeply compelling. In it he criticized the traditional historical method and compared it to the genealogical method: History, he argued, did not move by a sort of rational unfolding of events, in which A led to B, and B led to C and D in a logical way, nor was it the accumulated record of the thoughts and deeds of great men. Instead, Foucault claimed history was something much more chaotic, each historical moment a tangle of passions, people, contingencies, and even cruelties that conspire not just to move the world along (declare wars and convene church councils, for instance) but which actually imprint themselves on our inner lives and shape our subjectivities. “In each of the souls” of the past and present, as he puts it, we do not find something “immutable” or “natural” but “we find a complex system of events.” Drawing on Nietzsche, Foucault said that which we feel is without history—sentiment, love, morality—is what the genealogist especially shows to be historically contingent. And on top of that, exposing the regimes of power that conspired—unconsciously or not—to shape our sentiments gave genealogy a kind of moral and emancipatory purpose.
As a student this all felt so exciting, because I was rather early on in my research of twentieth-century Catholic theology, especially the Ressourcement movement, which was predominantly European, clerical, and male. But using the genealogical method, I found you could focus on meticulous historical research and archival study to probe the formation of sentiments, shifts in consciousness. This was very much connected to the world of theology, but it also pointed to something wider, more abundant. It let me look at other kinds of sources besides the formal published work of male systematic theology—correspondence, diaries, newsprints, eulogies, material in obscure, out-of-print journals. I started to see a vibrant, complex world of Catholic thought, feeling, and consciousness emerging from behind the popes, cardinals, and canonical theologians.
Doing this research, I had in mind Hannah Arendt’s vision of the scholar as a pearl diver who “descends to the bottom of the sea” to “pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface.” I began to see genealogical work as a method that could “pry loose” materials from private archives or long-out-of-print Catholic periodicals that were part of the feverish creativity among Catholics in the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council.
Raissa Maritain
As I traveled to do this kind of archival research in France and the US, what I found was not so much power-shaping subjectivities (though that was certainly present) so much as voices that had been forgotten, buried, exiled from mainstream narratives of Catholic theology. I found references to women who had entire lives full of intellectual theological creativity that needed to be recovered, such as Raïssa Maritain, who I wrote about in my first book, Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944). There were many more men and women who worked alongside Jacques Maritain and the Ressourcement theologians in Paris, from the 1930s until the Second Vatican Council, who are rarely recognized today. These people include Marie-Magdeleine Davy, the Nazi Resistor and scholar of Cistercian monasticism who worked closely with Jean Daniélou and the Jesuits on the Ressourcement project. They also include Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral, from Chile, a close friend of Jacques Maritain as well as a poet and Franciscan Oblate who was responsible for disseminating Maritain’s ideas in Chile, where they remain influential today. I also came across Claude McKay, a Black poet of the Harlem Renaissance who lived in France in the interwar period and later converted to Catholicism in the United States. These men and women, pried loose from the archives, revealed a Catholic Paris that was far more diverse than I originally thought. Interwar Paris, as Langston Hughes put it, was packed with the “seeking wandering ones” from “all over the world.”
Claude McKay
When it comes to Catholic intellectual history, women and people of color are too often treated as suffering, silent, or asleep until the rise of feminist and liberation theology in the years following Vatican II. But as early as the 1920s, they were extraordinarily prolific scholars. I appreciate how Paul Mendes-Flohr describes Martin Buber and his world of Jewish thinkers and dreamers from this same period as members of “the non-academic literati . . . ‘free-floating intellectuals’ who lived on the margins of academia.” Through the genealogical method, I began to discover Catholicism’s own “non-academic literati” of educated thinkers at some distance from the institutional powers of the university and the church.
I began to lift them up not only as thinkers who, as women and people of color, were subjected to the cruelties of modernity, as Foucault might point out. But I see them also as friends, agents, creators, dreamers, artists, men and women who experienced joy, pleasure, creativity, and courage. These lives were centered for the most part on the intensities of spiritual friendship (this is the subject of my forthcoming book, Kindred Spirits), and thus they give us an alternative archive of love in Catholic modernity.
In moving from genealogy to the history of exiled and forgotten lives in Catholicism, I realize that my genealogical work is no longer primarily only critical or deconstructive. Rather than trying to deconstruct, I have tried through my research to uncover something more constructive and affirmative. Rita Felski’s work The Limits of Critique has been helpful here. Another source that has been helpful to me, as I remain inspired by genealogists like Foucault and Nietzsche but want to move beyond critique, is David Tracy’s new theological work Fragments. He returns to the notion of the fragment as that which is forgotten in Christian history. If recovered, fragments can become resources for people’s lives and their thinking about their own traditions. By finding histories that now exist merely as fragments—those histories which are exiled or considered weak and which do not lead us directly to the centers of power in our own day—we resist conforming to what is already celebrated. Tracy also uses fragment in another sense, to refer to some buried aspects of history that are fragmenting and possess the capacity to break things open. Tracy invites us to try and “blast the marginalized fragments of the past alive with the memories of suffering and hope” and release them from their “seeming coherent place in the grand narratives we have imposed upon them. Learn to live joyfully, not despairingly, with and in the fragments of traditions we do in fact possess.”
I think all the Catholic thinkers I have uncovered in my own work were also mining for lost fragments: Mistral’s poetry about Saint Francis; Maritain’s work on Thomas Aquinas; Davy’s studies of Cistercian mystics; McKay’s late-in-life interest in recovering the African history of Christianity. They mined for voices who had become fragments of the past and who, once recovered, might offer spiritual and ethical alternatives to the violent undertow of modernity. But they were also fragmenting, in Tracy’s sense: they were sources of light in the darkness of the twentieth century. Through my work in the archives, then, I am now a bit more removed from my genealogical enthusiasm as a graduate student. I agree with Tracy that recovering fragments from the archives is less about exposing power that has shaped subjectivity, consciousness, sentiment and more about exhuming lost voices and recovering lives rendered invisible who might point us to paths not yet taken.
But I wonder if I should return again to what genealogists like Nietzsche and Foucault were trying to teach us. I think of my own students: those who were raised in white Catholic suburbs in the tri-state area and taught to stay in their lane and to believe that there’s only one way to success. Foucault and Nietzsche remind me to show them that their sentiments and dreams and expectations are arbitrary, not a given. Their futures are not pre-determined. There are other possibilities for thinking and feeling their way through the world–other sources of joy, other ways a life can look, more freedom to choose. At the same time, they don’t have to make up their own paths or start completely from scratch. There are lives in the past we can look to that point to other possibilities, other models of what success and what holiness look like. After all, isn’t that really what Ressourcement is? A turn to the sources of the past to bring more vitality, and even spiritual vitality, into the present.
Brenna Moore is Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University and author of the forthcoming “Spiritual Friendship at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (1920-1960).”
This article is from a series of articles on Christian Genealogical Thinking centered on the theme Deep in History.