Keeping Tradition Alive
Maurice Blondel and Charles Péguy
In my last essay, Charles Péguy and Maurice Blondel united in order to make ressourcement, the re-sourcing of a tradition in order to renew it, impossible. So ressourcement is doubly dead, since the past is dead (at least for now), and since methods themselves (methods like ressourcement) are not alive.
Let me begin with a key point from the last essay. In Blondel’s thinking, empirical historical facts can be known. Nevertheless their facticity speaks to the human action that made them, and human action is not only a fact. Historical inquiry is always constrained to be only part of the story. The real or fullest version of the question about ressourcement is in this sense not so much about historical method as it is about the nature of human action.
Everywhere, Blondel perforates human action. While human action originates in the individual, the individual is also always perforated by the action of other human beings, human beings who—as individuals but also as collectives—are perforated by the action of the cosmos. “To act,” Blondel says,* “is in a way to entrust oneself to the universe.” But the élan or momentum of human action is also perforated within itself, within its own power, by new horizons that escape their supportive scaffolds. For example: I cannot summarize myself with a single act, for my élan (which effects each action) escapes my acting. Nothing I do or am ever summarizes “me.” This is because all human action is perforated by the supernatural.
What Blondel means by “the supernatural” is not only divine grace. The supernatural is necessary to all human action, and yet also disproportionate to all human action, or in Blondel’s terms “impracticable” to it. “The supernatural order,” he says, “is completely free and absolutely transcendent; but it is not only superimposed [from above], it is supposed and responsible for the natural order, being such that it can never be naturalized; it is intended to penetrate it and to assume it in itself without being confused with it.”
If, for Péguy, the problem with ressourcement, understood temporally, is temporality, then for Blondel the solution cannot be to restore to temporality a simple sense of continuity, for this continuity is not linear. It is enacted. To put it another way: if I myself “have” any coherence as an “I,” that coherence resides in the determinism of my action, in the élan of my being, which means that my coherence is less a stability and more like the creative action that is always transcending every scaffold, including the scaffold that we might call “the present as it arrives.” My own integration as a self is continually an action, an action that is constantly iterating an original synthesis. Again, the supernatural acts in my action: “it is because action is a synthesis of man with God that it is in perpetual becoming.”
This notion of self brings us near to Péguy, whose response to the problem of temporality means making an original or unique gesture, one which must be made today. “To choose,” says a young Péguy, “there is the great word. To choose is a means of art.” Here, in my action now, is the only juncture for newness. I am in fact the source that must be resourced; I am the principle of my tradition’s renewal when I act in a new and original way, when I am that élan of mine escaping the scaffold. “Il dépend de nous,” Péguy says in his long poem on hope, “it depends on us,”
To make it so that hope does not deceive the world
That is to say, it must be said, it depends on us
To make it so that the greater does not lack the lesser
[…] To make it so that the infinite does not lack the finite.
That the perfect does not lack the imperfect.
Jean-Louis Chrétien says of Péguy: “The inexorable [passage of time] mercilessly requires the safety of the unique gesture, and therefore the place of possible loss is also the place of the highest nobility, and the place of its improvisation, which must be apodeictic, because it has no choice.” Indeed, for Péguy, one must meet the present with an arduous and precarious commitment that must always be re-committing itself. “The honest man,” Péguy argues, “must be a perpetual renegade […]. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to the truth must be incessantly unfaithful to all incessant, successive, indefatigable re-emerging errors.”
For Blondel, human action has to face a decision about “the one thing necessary” to itself, which is God. “There is at the bottom of my consciousness an I that is no longer I; I reflect my own image in it.” And I face a decision about it: either accept this supernatural will that is not my own in all of my willing, and therefore be changed, or else refuse. But this refusal, which is a refusal to endure change, is also the death of action. “Yes or no, will man will to live, even to the point of dying, so to speak, by consenting to be supplanted by God?” Thus Blondel and Péguy meet at the decision over whether to live or to die, to be changed or to stay the same.
In his major work on tradition, Blondel calls tradition a “consciousness of a consciousness,” a synthesis of thought in a life or lives, a “living unity.” For, though a tradition is always historical, it is also always more than the facts of history. It is presently alive. Since it is a present living, Blondel says, “Tradition is less concerned to conserve than to discover.”
The facts of the past speak to an élan that they also are not: to human beings in action. So if I would reach into the past for a source in the past, the operation underway is not—or cannot remain, if it desires any consonance with itself—the registering of contingent empirical data. That would be like hearing a voice but not looking at the face behind it. For instance, I can tell you what Thomas Aquinas said, such as the fragments testify. I can even understand what he said, which is harder. But the real challenge is to reach, against all memory, into the striving testified to in the texts. The life, the élan. Here understanding does not suffice. According to Blondel, “To think in our day in precisely the same terms as five centuries ago is inevitably to think in a different spirit.”
The arduous, the precarious—Péguy says the “poor”—measure of a tradition’s renewal is the measure of our own lives, in our own responses to the one thing necessary. It is we ourselves who look back, and it is we who look forward. The measure of my fidelity to my tradition is not the measure of my fidelity to the dead: my own fidelity to Péguy and to Blondel, here in these essays, is not ultimately measured by my understanding of them. That is at most a scaffold, plaster tiles that cannot be mistaken for an élan. My fidelity is in the original synthesis that is my task to struggle into being: myself, and whether I am willing to change, to commit to an original gesture, to renew these dead men with that newness that they never had, that they could not imagine, which is me. In such a struggle, Blondel’s hope is fulfilled: “new instaurations: instaurare, that is not simply to redo the past, but to keep up the constant progress of life, to sow tradition anew.” “There is the crowning of thorns,” says Péguy, “but there is also the crowning of hope.” A hope which must be renewed every day.
Joan of Arc depicted on horseback in an illustration from a 1504 manuscript
In his last set of essays before his death, Péguy writes of Jeanne d’Arc. He describes her as embattled against a Christianity reduced down to memory. “She had to break that long habitude,” says Péguy, “She had to climb back up that long memory. That’s what I call being a saint and martyr twice.” Her battle, waged with her life, is for the life of a Christian tradition understood as itself a being-alive. If Péguy remembers her, if he resources her, it is not because she is memorable; it is because she fought so hard to live, because her élan is the face underneath her facts; it is because we can—and can only—touch the flame of her striving in our own. She lives in my striving if I am willing to be changed; she dies in my refusal, and so do I.
*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. Similarly, several of my Blondel references are to Une alliance contre nature: catholicime et intégrisme (Brussels: Éditions Lessius, 2000). There is a recent translation of Blondel from Oliva Blanchette that I highly recommend: Philosophical Exigencies of Christian Religion.