A Classical Resourcement

 A word that has been going around my head the last few months happens to be a French word.  That is a bit odd for me because my French is so poor that it is rare for any French word to stick, but this one has. It is resourcement. Its original meaning relates to a Roman Catholic theological movement of the early 20th century which set the stage for the Vatican II reforms by an re-examination of the past in order to re-examine the accretions of the past. Oddly, it, also, seems to be seeping into the world of the spirituality of education as a term whereby one shifts the emotional tone of a conflict to allow for a new and creative response. In itself, this shift is intriguing, but I'm not sure what to do with that. I don't normally quote Wiktionary, but here are some quotations for that usage: Wiktionary-resourcement

Now, what is it about this word that is causing it to stick in my mind? After all, it is a term for a somewhat obscure theological movement or a  new word emerging in a strange, but intriguing corner of the educational world. That is a good question, if I say so myself. What fascinates me about resourcement is that, at least in my mind, it is a word that seems to look both backwards and forwards. The backwards part is easy, of course. The most common cry of those interested in resourcement is "ad fontes!" or 'To the sources!" and, if that isn't a cry that every self-respecting historian can get behind, I don't know what is. In its own way, isn't it just a historian's slogans which we keep shouting at each other as we beaver through the archives. How is all this resourcement talk supposed to relate to now?

Yet, somehow it does. Hidden in that strange French word is a hint that we don't just go back to the past for its own sake or because we'd like to escape there or for our own edification. We go back to try to understand. We go back because we look around this world and wonder, how did we get here and is all this all have be the way we say it is. It is reflecting on the past, but with different questions in our mind- 'did our source actually say that?' 'why did we think it said something else?' 'where did it get that idea?' 'is there some other way we could go?' We may find some surprising things which cause us to see our world and our practices with new eyes or we may find there are something about the past that we don't want to emulate anymore, which are no longer good for us (if they ever were). It is this sense of using the past to disturb the status quo which fascinates me. 

I could go in so many different directions with how practically the word can be used in my varied interests, but I'll confine myself to just one- the field of Classics. Let me propose that there now, thankfully, a resourcement underway. We heard the first rumblings of it in the 1990s when I was in grad school with the Black Athena controversies, but it has burst forth with greater and greater momentum in the late 2010s and in COVID-tide. It is a call to look again at our sources with an anti-racist lens to ask new questions: 'what are the connections of the Graeco-Roman world to the rest of the world?' 'how does white supremacy influence how we read our sources?' 'how have we marginalized non-white voices in the past and how are we doing it now?' 

Those are critical questions and ones whose answers are not just a matter of academic interest, but which need to inform our decisions about our future as a discipline as well as what we bring to the wider non-scholarly world. For too long, we have believed our privilege was our justification for our place in the educational world- knowing Latin and Greek as the marks of 'civilized' people. Yet, what we've discovered is that there are so many civilized peoples, so many flourishing cultures that we no longer have the corner of that market, if we ever truly did. What we are scrambling to do is try to figure out why Graeco-Roman Classics is worth studying, amid all these other choices out there? What makes us compelling when we remove our assumed privilege? The answer- I don't know, but one path to get that answer is resourcement- filtering for white privilege and recasting ourselves in a new way.