The Impossibility of Ressourcement
The Latin Fathers by Pier Francesco Sacchi. From the left: St. Augustine, Pope Gregory I, St. Jerome and St. Ambrose.
Ressourcement is a gorgeous idea. Coined by Charles Péguy, the idea is that a tradition can be renewed—Péguy says* that it can become more traditional and its humanity more human. Tradition can be renewed by being re-sourced. What a wonder, and what a wonderful idea. Isn’t it?
But let me tell you my problem. As much as I like the idea of ressourcement, it is impossible.
In this first essay, I will show, through the work and thought of Charles Péguy and Maurice Blondel, how ressourcement is impossible. In the next essay, I will make it possible again, something I can only do by way of understanding its impossibility. Taken as a whole, what I do in these two essays will be less a performance of dialectic than it will be, itself, a practice of ressourcement in its (actual) possibility.
I begin with this fact: Charles Péguy makes fun of historians. It is a strange characteristic, from a man of many strangenesses. Even so, historians are a consistent source of irritation for him, and so is the historical science that at the time had invaded literary studies at French universities as much as it had history departments. For Péguy, this historical science is a problem, because it presumes in its work “[a] humanity that has become God by the total infinity of its knowledge, by the infinite amplitude of its total memory.” It is a history that knows too much.
Péguy refers at least partly to nineteenth-century Europe’s development of modern, scientific history, upon which we still rely today. Unlike previous notions of history, this modern notion bears the following two insights together: first, that historical context determines the meaning of things, people, and events; second, that historical context itself changes. It means, in a sense, that the past, even our own past, is permanently alien to us, because we ourselves have changed. Our world has changed. It means that we must consider the contexts of texts in order to understand them. It means that the very notion of anachronism is born.
But context, Péguy argues, always ultimately escapes us, especially when that context is gone—which it always is, which it always must be. For me to lift my hand twice in a row: that is not the same action, though it has the same figure, the same motor; it is not the same, because a heartbeat has passed between the actions, which are two, and not one. They are not the same, whatever their appearance, because I am a temporal creature. “You have to pay the temporal charges,” says Péguy.
Charles Péguy
He points out that history is not reality. Not anymore. For Péguy, reality is the present moment, the present that, he says, perpetually “wells up.” But history is about the past, about reality as it fades into memory, which is a kind of death. History in particular is a kind of construction or invention that only approximates what once was real, alive. In the essay “À nos amis, à nos abonnés,” in a passage indebted to Henri Bergson, Péguy argues, “The world is the real rose window (la rosace réelle) that is infinitely excavated; the world is the stone rose window, the real, stone rose window that is infinitely pressed, that is wonderfully, that is more than wonderfully, that is mysteriously re-grooved. History is the poor plaster tiles that, in our need, in our universal need, in our poverty, we put in roughly the same place.” In the same essay, he says, more sardonically, “History is not about realities. She does not care about reality. She is occupied with what makes a figure (qui fait figure).”
All of which makes ressourcement, an idea that is Péguy’s own, rather much a problem according to Péguy himself, if what it means is turning around to look at history as the “source” that we re-source to renew a tradition. For Péguy, this would be—at best—the act of borrowing a set of figures, poor plastic tiles. At worst, it would be yet another “modern” act of reducing the present moment to paper memory: the human gaze looks backward, instead of at the wellspring of presence, which is perpetually coming into being. In brief, Péguy’s central position is that modern historical method relies too much on method, as if method could redeem historians from the fundamental uncertainty that is studying what has passed away. It cannot.
Péguy’s most pointed essay about historical method provides a concise pivot to Blondel’s concerns, which center on the concreteness of human action. In Action, his first study of the question, he turns to the positive sciences specifically, and alongside them to mathematics, and he wonders what makes them so effective. Blondel notes that their procedures are quite different—science as rooted in experience, in contrast to the abstraction of mathematics—and he notes that, taken together, they seem to form a totality or whole that is entirely sufficient. All of reality receives, or appears to receive, explanation. Says Blondel, “What could be more beautiful and more solid, it would seem, than this triumphant construction of a science able to erect a universe and to imprison the world, all possible worlds, in its formulas! But it is only a spell to be broken.”
Maurice Blondel
Blondel’s position is not that the sciences do not give us understanding of reality. It is that the sciences do not understand this understanding. “[W]hat they know,” explains Blondel, “they do not know as they know it.” Here Blondel’s logic is relentless. Empirical reality, he notes, is “for the senses a chaos.” So what is it that makes science suppose empirical reality has intelligible order? What is it that makes mathematics, whose symbols are arbitrary with respect to experience, think that these symbols can be intelligibly related to one another, and intelligibly related to an empirical science that seems so much its opposite? In fact, science and mathematics cannot say. They merely operate according to what is, in their regard, a presumption or series of presumptions—which is basically the presumption that being is intelligible.
For Blondel, the “what” doing the supposing is we ourselves, in our action. Human action, which is rational action, is the secret, shaping operation that makes the sciences operate at all. It is we who presume the world to be intelligible, and who effect in science its intelligibility. Its effectiveness is the effective presence of our own élan, which Blondel calls the “mediating action in all knowledge.”
In a later text, “History and Dogma,” Blondel turns this critique of science upon scientific history. Historians, he points out, deal in “external facts,” which is to say, in what can be empirically observed. But it is human action that has made these facts come to be; human history is what human beings have done, and the problem is that our action is not only the truth of its facticity (so: that I did it). In reality, a countless number of complex causes cause our causing, cause our doing, and underneath them all is the élan of our very being. “It should never be supposed therefore,” explains Blondel, “that history by itself can know a fact which would be no more than a fact, and that would be the whole [reality].”
Thus Blondel and Péguy both in their ways break apart what appears to be solid and stable, what appears to be complete and within reach (what appears as Péguy’s ready-made, tout-fait). Both men break these apart to reveal instead a dynamism with a certain wildness that all method fails to suppress. Something always escapes our grip. For Péguy, that “something” is realité, which for him has a permanent temporal accent: it is the presence of the present. For Blondel, it is human action, which is ultimately at one with the action of a universe coming into being.
The Church Fathers, an 11th-century Kievan Rus' miniature from Svyatoslav's Miscellany
Both men sunder a ready-made understanding of ressourcement. From Péguy’s perspective, history’s artifice means that “history” cannot be what he means when he talks about re-sourcing a tradition. A turn to artifice would be self-defeating. From Blondel’s perspective, the effectiveness of human methodical inquiry is not to be found in method itself, which means that ressourcement cannot be its own assurance of a renewal. It is only human action that can render human procedures effective, and at the last it is not every human action that can do so. For in fact, human action rests upon an action that is not its own. But that action, and what it is, is for my next essay, and through it Péguy and Blondel will make possible for us the only possible ressourcement.
*Note: Many of my Péguy references are to untranslated French essays collected in Oeuvres en prose complètes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard) that I put into English. However, several of the pieces I quote from have been translated into English. An abridged version of “Notre jeunesse” appears in English in a reprint, alongside an abridged version of “Clio I,” in Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru. Charles Péguy’s Notes on Bergson and Descartes: Philosophy, Christianity, and Modernity in Contestation has also been translated by Bruce K. Ward.
Anne M. Carpenter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California.