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Modernism |
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The term “Modernism” refers to a spirit of philosophical and theological inquiry that developed in the later years of the nineteenth century. The pre-Modernist period, represented by the early critical work of the French Church historian Louis Duchesne (1843-1922), should be interpreted in light of the almost complete destruction of an active theological culture occurring in Western Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and after the period of the Napoleonic wars. The definitive condemnation of Félicité De Lamennais in 1834 illustrates the unhappy results of working for renewal in the Church and for a Christian reform of society without the intellectual formation that comes from a complete theological education. On his deathbed, Lamennais, a brilliant French essayist, remarked that his generation of theologians “never had a father” to instruct them. The French Dominican Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, who had been an early companion of Lamennais, later pronounced his theological notions bizarre. Because of ongoing political turmoil and other events in continental Europe during the nineteenth century, not much advance was made in establishing normative standards for Catholic theology. Even the documents of Vatican Council I (1869-1870) provided authoritative instruction only concerning Revelation and the authority of the Roman Pontiff. It is against this background of a theological vacuum, as well as the intense historical efforts to uncover the origins of Christianity, that one should approach the Modernist crisis. For while Modernism is commonly identified as a good-will attempt on the part of some nineteenth-century clerical and lay theologians to refresh Roman Catholic doctrine by appeal to then-modern notions in both philosophy and the historical and social sciences, the Modernist experience is better understood as a fledgling effort on the part of some European writers to develop a new intellectual culture for the Church. Unfortunately, the Modernists attempted to achieve this goal while lacking a sufficient acquaintance with Divine Revelation and without paying much heed to the Church’s Magisterium. History of Modernism • Scholars generally agree that it is anachronistic to use the term “Modernism” in reference to the usual list of persons included in an account of the Modernist movement. Modernism, then, was not a concerted plot to subvert the Church. The intellectuals involved did not consider themselves to be part of a planned program of renewal, even if they shared the same general cultural presuppositions of educated nineteenth-century gentlemen. Indeed, these authors worked to a large extent independently, and kept in touch mainly through the epistolary services of Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852-1925), an important religious figure in cultured English circles. Except for the Anglo-Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell (1861-1909), most of the better known figures of the Modernist period worked in France. It is commonly said that the publication of Maurice Blondel’s L’Action in 1893 marks an initial moment in the crystallization of the Modernist movement. A French layman, Blondel remained a devout Catholic throughout his life, even though his philosophy of “action” fueled some of the Modernists’ efforts to dissociate Catholic thought from the categories employed in a classical metaphysics of being. Blondel’s “method of immanence” favored an experiential method in philosophy, which Blondel assumed would more easily lead a person to accept the truth of Christianity. Experience also dominated in the mind of Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), “the Father of Catholic Modernism,” who worked in the field of biblical criticism. His relativist view of truth, based on broad philosophical reflections about the relationship of meaning to context, drew suspicion upon his 1902 book, L’Evangile et L’Eglise, which many held to be one of the principal targets of the condemnations in Pope Pius X’s 1908 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Loisy’s theory of truth as essentially changeable led him to advance an evolutionary account of the Church that had the unhappy result of suggesting that full efficacy of the Church’s mission must await the end time. Writing after Charles Darwin’s publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species, the Modernists were commonly influenced by popular views about evolution. One of the few Italian Modernists, the poet and philosopher Antonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911), merited a place on the Index of Forbidden Books because of his premature efforts to reconcile the theory of evolution with Church teaching. Nineteenth-century American pragmatism, as set forth by thinkers such as William James, influenced some Modernist authors, including the French Oratorian Lucien Laberthonnière (1860-1932). His view of “moral dogmatism” actually embodied a thoroughgoing pragmatic interpretation of religious truth. Like many Modernist authors, Laberthonnière assumed that the Kantian critique of both speculative and practical reason made it impossible henceforth to pursue theological reflection along the lines of realist metaphysics and teleological ethics, which had inspired the best of thirteenth-century Scholastic thought. Because they were captivated by popular intellectual trends, many Modernists rejected as too intellectual the efforts of some theologians to construct a new systematic theology inspired by the great medieval accomplishment of Sts. Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure and their followers. At the same time, however, the Church was actively encouraging the renewal of Catholic theology and philosophy according to the mind and the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, which Pope Leo XIII commended in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris. Because of its fundamentally deconstructionist program, the Modernist spirit spread quickly among the lower clergy and even among some Church officeholders. The Church recognized that the “supernatural sense of faith” belonging by right to the baptized was in danger of being replaced with tenets that, though culturally relevant, reflected more the philosophical fashions of the late nineteenth century than the teachings of the Gospel. In an effort to impress on candidates for Holy Orders and for other posts in the Church the serious danger in the Modernist mentality, the Holy See required that these clerics pronounce an “Oath against Modernism.” This requirement was in effect until Vatican Council II. Many of
the specific issues that were debated in the Modernist period have now
been resolved by authentic advances in theology. At the close of the
twentieth century, the Church has achieved at least a general agreement
about the requirements for doing Roman Catholic theology. There is a
lesson to be learned from the Modernist history, and it is not that the
official Church always crushes creative initiatives. Maurice Blondel,
who maintained a respectful spirit toward ecclesiastical authority
throughout the period when the Church was obliged to take disciplinary
action against the less submissive Modernists, died with a reputation
for sanctity of life; he was a daily communicant at his parish church in
Aix-en-Provence. His cause for beatification is presently under
discussion in Rome. See: Divine Revelation; Evolution; Inerrancy; Knowledge of God; Magisterium; Miracles; Rationalism; Sacred Scripture; Science and the Church; Teleological Ethics; Thomism. Suggested Readings: CCC 74-94. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis; Sacrorum Antistitum. Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, Lamentabili Sane Exitu. A. Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists. R. Haight, “The Unfolding of Modernism in France: Blondel, Laberthonnière, Le Roy,” Theological Studies 35 (1974). Romanus Cessario, O.P.
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