France - 1748–1771
Every chapter in this record has been about a moment of crisis. The psalter in the wall the night before the arrest. The chalice case in the sacristy before the commissioners arrived. The soup pot on the shelf when the delegation came through the door. I have organized the record around these moments because they are where the chain is most visible - the moments when keeping cost something, when the choice to hold on rather than let go was a choice that could have gone the other way.
But the chain is not only kept in crisis. It is kept in the ordinary years between the crises, by people doing unglamorous work in unremarkable circumstances, people who are not choosing between custody and self-preservation but simply doing what the week requires - rehousing a damaged document, updating the notation, writing down what the previous keeper told them so that the next keeper will have it.
Father Sébastien Renard did this work for twenty-three years in one of the most intellectually confident centuries in European history. He was a Jesuit, which meant he understood precisely what was happening to the world he lived in, and precisely what the world's new confidence was costing it, and precisely why the costing would not be apparent for another hundred years.
He kept the record anyway. Not heroically. Just carefully, week by week, the way you keep anything that matters.
What follows is drawn from the working journal of Father Sébastien Renard, SJ, kept between 1748 and 1771, recovered from the library of the Jesuit college at Clermont-Ferrand after the suppression of the Society in France in 1764 and deposited with a private family in the Auvergne, in whose possession it remained until 1889, when it was donated to the diocesan archive at Clermont along with several other papers of uncertain provenance. It came to my attention through a catalog reference in 1954. I am grateful to the archivist who flagged it.
- T.M., 1961
Father Sébastien Renard was forty-one years old in 1748, which was the year he received the materials from his predecessor in the custody, a Jesuit brother named Anselme who was dying of consumption in the infirmary of the college at Clermont-Ferrand and who had been waiting, with the patience of a man who had been waiting for twenty years, for someone the materials could go to next.
He had been watching Renard for three years. The watching had been, by Anselme's own account in the transfer notes, less systematic than Father Novák's watching of Teodor two centuries later - Anselme had neither the health nor the time for systematic observation - and more instinctive. He had watched the way Renard engaged with difficult texts: not to defeat them but to understand them, which was different. He had watched the way Renard treated students who were slower than the others: not with impatience dressed as encouragement but with genuine attention, the attention of a man who understood that slow and careful was not lesser than fast and brilliant, was sometimes better. He had watched the way Renard prayed, which was private and therefore difficult to observe directly, but which could be inferred from other things, the way most important things could be inferred from other things if you paid attention long enough.
He handed over the materials on a Tuesday in March, which was also, as it happened, the feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which Anselme noted in the transfer document with a brevity that suggested he found the coincidence fitting and did not need to explain why.
Renard spent three days reading what Anselme had left him. On the fourth day he went to the infirmary and sat with Anselme for two hours and asked the questions that the reading had produced. Anselme answered what he could. On the sixth day Anselme died, quietly, in the Jesuit way - prepared, unremarkable, complete.
Renard began keeping the journal the following week.
The journal is not a dramatic document. This is the first thing to say about it, because the reader who has followed this record through the psalter and the chalice case and the soup pot and the chalice case again and the prior's conversation with the wool merchant might expect drama and will not find it here. The journal is the record of ordinary custody in an extraordinary age - the weekly work of maintenance and attention that the chain required regardless of whether the world outside was in crisis or not.
The world outside was not in crisis. Not yet. The crisis was coming - Renard knew it was coming, understood it with the specific clarity of a man who had spent twenty years teaching the history of ideas and could see the trajectory clearly - but in 1748 the world was confident and rational and pleased with itself and the Enlightenment was producing its extraordinary efflorescence of thought, and Renard engaged with that thought seriously, as Jesuits did, because the alternative was to cede the conversation to people who had no interest in what was being lost.
He read Voltaire and wrote careful marginal notes. He corresponded with a mathematician in Paris about the implications of Newton's mechanics for the Aristotelian understanding of causation. He taught his students Descartes without apology and Aquinas without embarrassment and tried, with the tools available to him, to show them that the two were not as incompatible as the century assumed.
And in the evenings, after the students had gone and the common room was quiet, he worked on the record.
What the journal shows, across twenty-three years of entries, is a man learning a craft.
The early entries are tentative - he is still decoding what Anselme left him, still working out the notation system's internal logic, still making errors that he catches and corrects with the scrupulous honesty of a good scholar applied to a new field. By 1755 the entries are more confident. By 1760 they have the quality of a man who has internalized the work - the notation is no longer something he deciphers but something he thinks in, the way you eventually think in a language rather than translating from your own.
He updated the record systematically. Documents that had been damaged were rehoused. Materials whose provenance was uncertain were cross-referenced against what could be confirmed. The notation system was extended - carefully, conservatively, in ways that were consistent with its existing logic - to cover materials that had entered the custody since the previous systematic update, which had been in 1692.
He also wrote, in a section at the back of the journal, a document he called the state of the chain - a summary, as complete as he could make it, of what was held, where it was held, and what was known about the gaps. He updated this document every five years. There are four complete versions in the journal, dated 1750, 1755, 1760, and 1765. A fifth version, dated 1770, is incomplete - he died before he could finish it, and the remaining pages are blank.
The incomplete fifth version is among the most affecting documents in the record. Not because of what it contains but because of what it doesn't. Four neat columns, the handwriting as precise at sixty-three as it had been at forty-one, and then halfway through the fourth column the entries simply stop, mid-sentence, in a way that suggests not haste or distress but simply the ordinary running-out of time that comes for everyone eventually.
Someone else finished what he started. The fifth column, in a different hand, completes the inventory. I do not know who wrote it.
There is one passage in the journal that I return to more often than any other. It is from 1763 - the year before the Society was suppressed in France, the year Renard understood that the institutional structure that had housed his work for twenty-three years was about to be dismantled, the year he began making arrangements for what would happen to the materials when the college closed.
He writes:
I have been thinking about what it means to keep something that the age regards as settled. The reasonable men of this century - and they are genuinely reasonable, this is not a complaint - have concluded that the old ordering was a story the powerful told to justify their power. They have good arguments. Voltaire has good arguments. The philosophers have good arguments. I teach their arguments to my students because the arguments deserve to be understood, which is different from the arguments being right.
What I cannot explain to the reasonable men, because it requires a category they have decided not to use, is that the ordering was not invented by the powerful to justify power. It was discovered, imperfectly and at great cost, by people trying to understand how human beings could live together under God without destroying each other. The powerful corrupted it. They always corrupt everything. But corruption is not invention. The thing they corrupted was real before they got to it.
I keep the record because I believe this. Not because I can prove it to the reasonable men's satisfaction. Because I believe it the way you believe something that you have spent twenty years living close to - not as a conclusion you have argued your way to, but as a fact you have been in the presence of long enough to trust.
The reasonable age will pass. They always pass. I will not live to see what comes after. I keep the record for whoever does.
He kept it for eight more years. The Society was suppressed in France in 1764 and Renard spent the remaining seven years of his life as a secular priest in the diocese of Clermont, doing what secular priests do - saying Mass, visiting the sick, burying the dead - and in the evenings, in a room in a house near the cathedral that smelled of tallow candles and old paper, working on the record.
He died in 1771. He was sixty-four years old. He had been keeping the record for twenty-three years and had never, in the journal's eight hundred pages, expressed doubt about whether it was worth keeping.
He expressed doubt about many things. Not that.
- T.M., 1961