neoscholasticism and its discontents by kerr

A Different World: Neoscholasticism andits Discontents

FERGUS KERR*

Abstract: The anti-Modernist Oath (1910) sets the background for thishistorical account of the tension in twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologybetween those suspected of ‘Modernism’ and the exponents of AristotelianThomism. The article discusses the modernist crisis by tracing the thought ofRéginald Garrigou-Lagrange (a strict observer of Thomism) and his studentMarie-Dominique Chenu (a dissenter of the neoscholastic view). Chenuestablished the historical-contextualist reading of Thomas Aquinas which wasregarded as a threat to the standard neoscholastic exposition of Thomism, whichhe felt was heavily influenced by Wolffian rationalism. As a result, Vatican IIfinally rejects the neoscholastic conception of reason. The article concludes byrecognizing the need for a historical-contextualist reading of Thomas but fearsthat the new philosophical system is not sufficiently scrutinized.

By neoscholasticism I mean the way of doing theology that prevailed and indeedwas mandatory for clergy, seminary professors and suchlike, from the late nineteenthto the mid twentieth centuries, from the First to the Second Vatican Councils,throughout the Roman Catholic Church (the only significant alternative being insome of the German universities, at Munich and in the so called Catholic TübingenSchool).

No theology without the right philosophy

As Pope John Paul II writes, happily without the bombastic rhetoric of hispredecessor, the encyclical Aeterni Patris, issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, renewedinterest in the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, particularly in his ‘philosophy’.Historical study of medieval philosophers began to flourish; critical editions were undertaken, etc., and ‘new Thomistic schools arose’ (Fides et Ratio 1998, §57).What the encyclical seems to recommend is what we who inhabit this world know as Gilsonian existentialist Thomism – which needs to be distinguished from

© The author 2006. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA.

International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 8 Number 2 April 2006

* New College, University of Edinburgh, Mound Place EH1 2LX, Edinburgh UK.

A Different World 129

© The author 2006Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006

transcendental Thomism (Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan), not to mention fromKarol Wojtyla’s own ‘thomasizing phenomenology’ (as George Hunston Williamscalled it); and from ‘Thomism of the strict observance’ as in Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and the historical-contextualist approach favoured by Marie-DominiqueChenu – to the two of whom we shall return, in this sketch of the deep andacrimonious conflict over the place of reason in recent Roman Catholic theology.

If ‘the more distinguished of the Catholic theologians of this century, to whosereflections and researches Vatican II owes so much’, are ‘sons of this renewal ofThomistic philosophy’, a ‘powerful troop of philosophers’, all ‘educated in theschool of the Angelic Doctor’, as John Paul II says, there was never a sharedcommon reading and evaluation of Thomas Aquinas, as he concedes. On thecontrary, the supposedly normative philosophia thomistica split into rival ‘schools’,even before 1900, with much mutual hostility. Why this happened is an interestingquestion; but we must content ourselves here with the assumption in the encyclical,and in the neoscholastic tradition, that Catholic theologians are all ‘philosophers’.Putting this differently, Catholics engaged in teaching theology who are not qualifiedalso as philosophers may be good historians but they should not be regarded astheologians. There is no Catholic theology without – the right – philosophy.

Faith and reason at Vatican I

You can always go farther back into the genealogy of any theological crisis. But westart with the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius promulgated at Vatican I on 24 April1870. This text, principally about reason, sought to sort out problems urgent then,with a background one could trace and with a solution that stayed in place fordecades but which finally was abandoned at Vatican II, leaving an agenda we stillhave to deal with. According to Dei Filius the Council of Trent was a triumph,‘celebrated though it was in evil days’: reform of the church, foundation ofseminaries, better instruction of the laity, more frequent reception of the sacraments,an outburst of missionary activity, etc.

However – ‘we cannot subdue the bitter grief that we feel at most serious evils’:the ‘heresies’ condemned at Trent have led to more Christian disunity than ever, to loss of Christian faith altogether, to the Bible being regarded as myth, etc. But especially, ‘there came into being and spread far and wide that doctrine ofrationalism or naturalism, utterly opposed to the Christian religion’. This doctrine‘spares no effort to bring it about that Christ, who alone is our Lord and Saviour, isshut out from the minds of people and the moral life of nations’. In brief, theserationalists ‘would establish what they call the rule of simple reason or nature’,plunging people into ‘the abyss of pantheism, materialism and atheism’, etc. Indeed‘they strive to destroy rational nature itself, to deny any criterion of what is rightand just, and to overthrow the very foundations of human society’.

It has come about, alas, that many Catholics have had their ‘Catholic sensibility’weakened, ‘confusing nature and grace, human knowledge and divine faith’, etc. It

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is a matter of grave pastoral urgency, then, to save the faithful from the effects oferroneous concepts of reason held especially by seminary professors and suchlike.This is the purpose of Dei Filius. Chapter 1 culminates with anathemas againstpantheism, materialism etc. Chapter 2, de revelatione, insists strongly on scripture,opening however with the famous claim to the effect that the church holds andteaches that ‘God the source and end of all things can be known with certainty fromthe consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason, cf.Romans 1:20’.

That’s all, incidentally: it is a possibility: certo cognosci posse. Moreover, it isa knowledge that would count as cognoscere not scire, which might stretch tointuitive awareness and certainly need not be limited to apodictic demonstration. Itis a knowledge originating in consideration of created things, which might includeourselves of course. Finally, nothing is said one way or the other about the effect oforiginal sin on the natural power of reason. But it is clearly ruling out any idea thatthere is absolutely nothing, even in principle, that reason can achieve, in thinkingabout God, independently of biblical revelation. The point, as a glance at the minutesof the speeches would show, was not to exalt reason but to affirm that human beingsare not atheist by nature – there is always the possibility, in preaching to pagans, ofappealing to common ground, however minimal. Indeed, Scripture itself – we areassured – affirms this much ‘natural theology’.

Chapter 3 deals with faith: we believe what God has revealed to be true, etc.,‘not because we perceive its intrinsic truth by the natural light of reason, but becauseof the authority of God himself’. Having affirmed what is possible for the naturalpower of reason to achieve as regards knowledge of God, we now turn to deal withtemptations to rationalism. Indeed, we are anathematized if we say that Christianfaith is ‘not freely given but produced by arguments of human reason’. Rather: ‘Noone can accept the gospel preaching in the way that is necessary for achievingsalvation without the inspiration and illumination of the holy Spirit’ – which doesnot mean, however, that we are moved to faith ‘only by our own internal experienceor private inspiration’.

We cannot document all this here. These claims, as one can easily see, steerbetween the temptation to ground faith entirely on the believer’s internal experience,and the temptation to say that Christianity is so reasonable that one could work itout by reason alone. At the time, in the 1860s, the (Catholic) Tübingen School wassuspected of the former, while their attempts to rethink doctrine in the light of Kantand Hegel were thought to make the likes of Georg Hermes and Anton Günther, toname the two most influential Catholic theologians of the day, much too prone torationalism.

Chapter 4, dealing now with faith and reason, condemns those who would saythat all the dogmas of faith can be understood and demonstrated by properly trainedreason from natural principles (again); secondly condemns those who would say thatthere may be truths established by reason which contradict divine revelation; and,finally, anathematizes those who say that ‘it is possible that at some time, given theadvancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by



the church which is different from that which the church has understood andunderstands’. All this indicates the variety of problems, real or imagined, withinCatholic theology and sensibility, in 1870, regarding reason, and the network ofconnected concepts: experience, inspiration, development, knowledge, truth, etc.

The debate, by the way, was quite interesting. The draft ‘against the many errorsstemming from modern rationalism’, submitted for discussion on 28 December1869, was subjected to such savage criticism (‘obscure, not pastoral, too aggressive’etc.), that the presidency withdrew it, returning it to the doctrine commission forrevision. Rewritten, largely by Joseph Kleutgen, the most influential theologian inRome, it reappeared on 18 March 1870 and was passed unanimously on 24 April1870.1 Rationalism and naturalism, then, were regarded as the principal enemy(within the fold) which Vatican I sought to resist and discredit, without howeverabandoning a high doctrine of the place of reason in Catholic theology. As we cansee, a temptation to appeal to ‘internal experience’ was emerging as another threat.

Reason under oath

Paradoxically, as it might seem, the church that cultivated miracles, Marian shrines(Lourdes), and dogmas about the Virgin Mary (Immaculate Conception 1854,Assumption 1950), was the church that was determined to maintain a high place forreason within sacra doctrina. A handful of Jesuit scholars, learned patrologists aswell as competent historians of philosophy (like Kleutgen), made the decision, in the 1850s, to revive the ‘moderate realism’ they found in Thomas Aquinas,highlighting his debt to Aristotelian naturalism, as the only way to inoculate theclergy against the allurements of Descartes, Kant, Hegel and such. The way to dealwith neuzeitliches Denken, as Kleutgen put it, was to return to vorneuzeitlichesDenken: premodernity, as we might say (‘radical orthodoxy’?).

Canon law required that clergy attend lectures in philosophy, delivered in Latin,by professors who would treat everything according to the method, doctrine andprinciples of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas.2 One did not proceed tostudy theology until one passed philosophy examinations that were framed in termsof the Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses. Approved on 27 July 1914 by the SacredCongregation of Studies, this text was composed principally by Guido Mattiussi, SJ(1852–1925), author among much else of Il veleno Kantiano: Nuova ed anticacritica della ragione, immanenza, fililosofia dell’azione (1907), a diatribe againstKant for his alleged subjectivist epistemology and view that will takes precedenceover intellect; the only antidote for the Kantian ‘venom’ being the philosophy of StThomas Aquinas – they go as follows:

1 Mansi LI: 429–36; minutes of discussions of the commission LIII: 177–94; speeches LI:42–436.

2 Canons 1365–6.

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THE XXIV THOMISTIC THESES

ONTOLOGY

1. Potency and Act divide being in such a way that whatever is, is either pureact, or of necessity it is composed of potency and act as primary and intrinsicprinciples.

2. Since act is perfection, it is not limited except through a potency which itselfis a capacity for perfection. Hence in any order in which an act is pure act, itwill only exist, in that order, as a unique and unlimited act. But whenever it isfinite and manifold, it has entered into a true composition with potency.

3. Consequently, the one God, unique and simple, alone subsists in absolutebeing. All other things that participate in being have a nature whereby theirbeing is restricted; they are constituted of essence and being, as really distinctprinciples.

4. A thing is called a being because of ‘esse’. God and creature are not calledbeings univocally, nor wholly equivocally, but analogically, by an analogy bothof attribution and of proportionality.

5. In every creature there is also a real composition of the subsisting subjectand of added secondary forms, i.e. accidental forms. Such composition cannotbe understood unless being is really received in an essence distinct from it.

6. Besides the absolute accidents there is also the relative accident, relation.Although by reason of its own character relation does not signify anythinginhering in another, it nevertheless often has a cause in things, and hence a realentity distinct from the subject.

7. A spiritual creature is wholly simple in its essence. Yet there is still a twofoldcomposition in the spiritual creature, namely, that of the essence with being,and that of the substance with accidents.

8. However, the corporeal creature is composed of act and potency even in itsvery essence. These act and potency in the order of essence are designated bythe names form and matter respectively.

COSMOLOGY

9. Neither the matter nor the form have being of themselves, nor are theyproduced or corrupted of themselves, nor are they included in any categoryotherwise than reductively, as substantial principles.

10. Although extension in quantitative parts follows upon a corporeal nature,nevertheless it is not the same for a body to be a substance and for it to bequantified. For of itself substance is indivisible, not indeed as a point isindivisible, but as that which falls outside the order of dimensions is indivisible.But quantity, which gives the substance extension, really differs from thesubstance and is truly an accident.



11. The principle of individuation, i.e., of numerical distinction of oneindividual from another with the same specific nature, is matter designated byquantity. Thus in pure spirits there cannot be more than individual in the samespecific nature.

12. By virtue of a body’s quantity itself, the body is circumscriptively in a place,and in one place alone circumscriptively, no matter what power might bebrought to bear.

13. Bodies are divided into two groups; for some are living and others aredevoid of life. In the case of the living things, in order that there be in the samesubject an essentially moving part and an essentially moved part, the substantialform, which is designated by the name soul, requires an organic disposition, i.e.heterogeneous parts.

PSYCHOLOGY

14. Souls in the vegetative and sensitive orders cannot subsist of themselves,nor are they produced of themselves. Rather, they are no more than principleswhereby the living thing exists and lives; and since they are wholly dependentupon matter, they are incidentally corrupted through the corruption of thecomposite.

15. On the other hand, the human soul subsists of itself. When it can be infusedinto a sufficiently disposed subject, it is created by God. By its very nature, itis incorruptible and immortal.

16. This rational soul is united to the body in such a manner that it is the onlysubstantial form of the body. By virtue of his soul a man is a man, an animal,a living thing, a body, a substance and a being. Therefore the soul gives manevery essential degree of perfection; moreover, it gives the body a share in theact of being whereby it itself exists.

17. From the human soul there naturally issue forth powers pertaining to twoorders, the organic and the non-organic. The organic powers, among which arethe senses, have the composite as their subject. The non-organic powers havethe soul alone as their subject. Hence, the intellect is a power intrinsicallyindependent of any bodily organ.

18. Intellectuality necessarily follows upon immateriality, and furthermore, in such manner that the farther the distance from matter, the higher the degree ofintellectuality. Any being is the adequate object of understanding in general. Butin the present state of union of soul and body, quiddities abstracted from thematerial conditions of individuality are the proper object of the human intellect.

19. Therefore, we receive knowledge from sensible things. But since sensiblethings are not actually intelligible, in addition to the intellect, which formallyunderstands, an active power must be acknowledged in the soul, which powerabstracts intelligible likeness or species from sense images in the imagination.

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20. Through these intelligible likenesses or species we directly knowuniversals, i.e. the natures of things. We attain to singulars by our senses, andalso by our intellect, when it beholds the sense images. But we ascend toknowledge of spiritual things by analogy.

21. The will does not precede the intellect but follows upon it. The willnecessarily desires that which is presented to it as a good in every respectsatisfying the appetite. But it freely chooses among the many goods that arepresented to it as desirable according to a changeable judgment or evaluation.Consequently, the choice follows the final practical judgment. But the will isthe cause of it being the final one.

THEODICY

22. We do not perceive by an immediate intuition that God exists, nor do weprove it a priori. But we do prove it a posteriori, i.e., from the things that havebeen created, following an argument from the effects to the cause: namely, fromthings which are moved and cannot be the adequate source of their motion, toa first unmoved mover; from the production of the things in this world by causessubordinated to one another, to a first uncaused cause; from corruptible thingswhich equally might be or not be, to an absolutely necessary being; from thingswhich more or less are, live, and understand, according to degrees of being,living and understanding, to that which is maximally understanding, maximallyliving and maximally a being; finally, from the order of all things, to a separatedintellect which has ordered and organized things, and directs them to their end.

23. The metaphysical motion of the Divine Essence is correctly expressed by saying that it is identified with the exercised actuality of its own being, or thatit is subsistent being itself. And this is the reason for its infinite and unlimitedperfection.

24. By reason of the very purity of His being, God is distinguished from allfinite beings. Hence it follows, in the first place, that the world could only havecome from God by creation; secondly, that not even by way of a miracle canany finite nature be given creative power, which of itself directly attains the verybeing of any being; and finally, that no created agent can in any way influencethe being of any effect unless it has itself been moved by the first Cause.

Moreover, all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, andseminary professors, from 1910, swore the anti-Modernist Oath. Prescribed in themotu proprio, Sacrorum Antistitum, issued by Pope Pius X, 1 September 1910, the formulary of orthodoxy for clerics throughout the first half of the century,abrogated only in 1967, the Oath went as follows:

I __________, firmly embrace and accept all and each of the things defined,affirmed and declared by the inerrant Magisterium of the Church, mainly thosepoints of doctrine directly opposed to the errors of our time. And in the first



place I profess that God, beginning and end of all things, can be certainlyknown, and therefore also proved, as the cause through its effects, by the naturallight of reason through the things that have been made, that is, through thevisible works of creation. Secondly, I admit and recognize as most certain signsof the divine origin of the Christian religion the external arguments ofrevelation, that is, the divine deeds, and in the first place the miracles andprophecies. And I maintain that these are eminently suited to the mentality ofall ages and men, including those of our time. Thirdly, I also firmly believe thatthe Church, guardian and teacher of the revealed word, was immediately anddirectly instituted by the real and historical Christ himself, while dwelling withus; and that it was built upon Peter, prince of the apostolic hierarchy, and hissuccessors till the end of time. Fourthly, I sincerely accept the doctrine of thefaith handed on to us by the Apostles through the orthodox Fathers, always withthe same meaning and interpretation; and therefore I flatly reject the hereticalinvention of the evolution of dogmas, to the effect that these would change theirmeaning from that previously held by the Church. I equally condemn every errorwhereby the divine deposit, handed over to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfullykept by her, would be replaced by a philosophical invention or a creation of human consciousness, slowly formed by the effort of men and to behenceforward perfected by an indefinite progress. Fifthly, I maintain in allcertainty and sincerely profess that faith is not a blind feeling of religion wellingup from the recesses of the subconscious, by the pressure of the heart and ofthe inclination of the morally educated will, but a real assent of the intellect to the truth received from outside through the ear, whereby we believe that thethings said, testified and revealed by the personal God, our creator and lord, aretrue, on account of the authority of God, who is supremely truthful. I also submitmyself with due reverence, and wholeheartedly join in all condemnations,declarations and prescriptions contained in the encyclical Pascendi and in thedecree Lamentabili, mainly those concerning the so-called history of dogmas.Likewise I reprove the error of those who affirm that the faith proposed by theChurch can be repugnant to history, and that the Catholic dogmas, in the waythey are understood now, cannot accord with the truer origins of the Christianreligion. I also condemn and reject the opinion of those who say that the morelearned Christian has a two-fold personality, one of the believer and the otherof the historian, as if it would be lawful for the historian to uphold views whichare in contradiction with the faith of the believer, or to lay down propositionsfrom which it would follow that the dogmas are false or doubtful, as long asthese dogmas were not directly denied. I likewise reprove the method of judgingand interpreting Holy Scripture which consists in ignoring the tradition of the Church, the analogy of faith and the rulings of the Apostolic See, following the opinions of rationalists, and not only unlawfully but recklesslyupholding the critique of the text as the only and supreme rule. Besides, I rejectthe opinion of those who maintain that whoever teaches theological history, or writes about these matters, has to set aside beforehand any preconceived

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opinion regarding the supernatural origin of Catholic tradition, as well as thedivine promise of a help for the perpetual preservation of each one of the revealed truths; and that, besides, the writings of each of the Fathers should be interpreted only by the principles of science, leaving aside all sacredauthority, and with the freedom of judgment wherewith any secular monumentis usually studied. Lastly, I profess myself in everything totally averse to theerror whereby modernists hold that there is nothing divine in sacred tradition,or, what is much worse, that there is, but in a pantheistic sense; so that nothingremains there but the bare and simple fact to be equated to the common factsof history, namely, some men who through their work, skill and ingenuity,continue in subsequent ages the school started by Christ and his apostles.Therefore I most firmly retain the faith of the Fathers, and will retain it up tothe last gasp of my life, regarding the unwavering charisma of the truth, whichexists, has existed and will always exist in the succession of bishops from theApostles; not so that what is maintained is what may appear better or moresuitably adapted to the culture of each age, but so that the absolute andunchangeable truth preached by the Apostles from the beginning may never bebelieved or understood otherwise.

All these things I pledge myself to keep faithfully, integrally and sincerely, andto watch over them without fail, never moving away from them whether inteaching or in any way by word or in writing. Thus do I promise, thus do Iswear, so help me God, etc.

In short, bizarre as it may seem, theologians swore an oath to respect theprimacy of reason in the practice of Roman Catholic theology; and the test of rightthinking was set forth in the XXIV Theses.

The ‘Modernist’ crisis

The history of twentieth-century Catholic theology is the history of the conflictbetween those suspected of ‘Modernism’ – giving too much ground to life, practice,tradition, consensus, experience, will and feeling – and the exponents, in the seatsof academic power, of Aristotelian Thomism.3 The conflict is most easily accessedin George Tyrrell’s Medievalism (1908).4 Désiré Mercier, Cardinal Archbishop of

3 The literature is immense: the place to start remains Gabriel Daly, OSA, Transcendenceand Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1980).

4 George Tyrrell, Medievalism (London: Longmans, Green, 1908); third revised andenlarged edn 1909 repr. with foreword by Gabriel Daly (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates,1994). George Tyrrell (1861–1909), born in Dublin of Anglican parents, became aCatholic in London in 1880, entered the Society of Jesus, ordained 1891, appointed toteach philosophy to young Jesuits but his ‘pure Thomism’ against the official‘Suarezianism’ led to his becoming a writer and retreat master; 1897 met Baron Friedrichvon Hügel; 1906 expelled from the Jesuits at behest of Pope Pius X, against the wishes



Malines and Primate of Belgium, had addressed a letter to his flock on the subjectof Modernism.5 (Why, when he began by assuring them that the heresies, to be foundin France and Italy, had scarcely a single adherent in Belgium, remains mysterious.)Modernism he defines as the view that believers draw the object and motive of theirfaith from themselves, denying historically revealed truth and thus also the teachingauthority of the church. Modernism is therefore a form of Protestantism: faithunderstood as ‘private judgment’.

Mercier then picks out ‘the English priest Tyrrell’, and vehemently attacks hiswork. Undaunted, indeed exhilarated, by this attack, Tyrrell got his permission to translate and publish the letter and went on the offensive: ‘In spite of all theirtheological heresies and divisions, the religious interest still lives and grows inProtestant countries, whereas it languishes and dies among Catholics under thismodern craze for centralisation and military uniformity’. The ‘vitality of faith’ is thesource and criterion of doctrinal truth, certainly not the individual’s subjectivity, noris the ‘source and criterion’ to be found in the teaching of the hierarchy. Indeed, ifthere is an individualism threatening the church, it is the ‘individualistic conceptionof papal authority’, ‘this unhistorical latter-day ultramontanism’; this ‘heretical andfantastic innovation unknown to antiquity’.

The lay Catholic’s place is not just ‘to receive the faith passively as one receivesa traveller’s tale of regions beyond his ken; a tale which he repeats to others word for word for what it is worth, but with no guarantee of personal experience or conviction’. On the contrary: ‘You forget that every baptised Christian iscommissioned apostle and teacher; and as such is no mere telephone, but must speakfrom the fulness of a living personal interest in the truth of his religion.’ Of course,there is a distinction between the ‘Church Teaching’ and the ‘Church Taught’. Yet,priority lies with ‘a Divine Tradition of which the entire Church, and not merely theepiscopate, is the organ and depositary’:

Tradition is the faith that lives in the whole Church and is handed down fromgeneration to generation, of which the entire body, and not a mere handful ofofficials, is the depositary and organ of transmission. Of this rule and law theHoly Spirit diffused in the hearts of the faithful is the author; the episcopatemerely the servant, the witness, the interpreter.

Tyrrell was a journalist, not a scholar, as he would have agreed. The questionshe raised, however, were, and are, unavoidable: questions about tradition,experience, history, and, of course, truth.

of his superiors in England; D.G. Schultenover, SJ, George Tyrrell in Search ofCatholicism (Publisher: Shepherdstown, West Virginia, 1981); Ellen Leonard, CSJ,George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition (Place: Publisher, 1982); Nicholas Sagovsky,‘On God’s Side’: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

5 Desiré Mercier (1851–1926), first professor of Thomist Philosophy at Louvain, ardentpromoter of neoscholasticism; Cardinal Archbishop 1907; courageous opponent ofGerman occupying troops 1914–18; set up the Malines Conversations, 1921–5, cut shortby his death, to respond to Anglican initiative for reunion with Rome.

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Thomism ‘of the strict observance’

Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange taught in Rome at the Dominican college from 1909until 1960.6 Besides the thousands of seminarians who attended his lectures, he had M.-D. Chenu and Karol Wojtyla as students: he supervised their doctoraldissertations, and was unhappy with the results (but they knew what they wanted todo, whatever their supervisor thought). He detested the historically-contextualistapproach to Thomas Aquinas. How Thomas’s work interacted with that of hiscontemporaries, or how it might have been shaped by his inheritance from earlierChristian thinkers, or by Jewish and Moslem theologians, was of no interest.Situating Aquinas in historical context was likely only to make his doctrine seemrelative to its time and thus of passing interest.7

Consider a key text: Garrigou-Lagrange’s Reality: A Synthesis of ThomisticThought.8 Freely summarized it goes as follows: philosophy deserves to be studiedfor its own sake, but also to establish, by arguments drawn simply from reason, thatthe praeambula fidei – that God exists, etc. – are attainable by the natural force ofhuman intelligence. From philosophy alone, we can demonstrate that God’s creativeact is free, that the world need not exist from all eternity, that the human will is free,and that the human soul is characterized by personal immortality, etc. Theology,moreover, is not mere exegesis of scripture. Rather, theology expounds Christiandoctrine as a system, with objectivity and universal validity.

The first move that the student must make, however, is to appropriate the naturalmetaphysics of human intelligence, as Thomas finds it expounded by Aristotle.Beginning with sense experience of the world, the mind rises progressively until itreaches God, ‘pure act’ and ‘self-knowing’. Act, as Aristotle shows, is higher thanpotency; thus anything which passes from potency to act supposes, ultimately, an uncaused cause, something that is simply act, with no admixture of potentiality,or of imperfection. The principle of identity is the objective foundation fordemonstrative proofs of the existence of God, as pure act.

As this argument unfolds it delivers a philosophy of being, differing entirelyfrom a philosophy of appearance (phenomenalism), a philosophy of becoming(evolutionism), and a philosophy of the ego (psychologism). No student could beallowed to pass on to theology without having studied and understood the errors ofthese philosophies. The being, the reality, which our intellect first understands, is

6 Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964), somewhat disengaged Catholic upbringing,medical student, conversion experience through reading Ernest Hello; joined theDominicans, trained at Le Saulchoir but moved to Rome in 1909; see Richard Peddicord,The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of ReginaldGarrigou-Lagrange, OP (South Bend, IN: St Austins’s Press, 2005).

7 Wojtyla’s reluctance to refer to God as objectum prompted Garrigou-Lagrange to fearthat he wanted to interpolate modern notions of the subject into Aquinas’s theology.

8 Largely the entry he contributed to the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique.



not the being of God, nor its own nature, but the being, the reality, which exists inthe world. We have to head off the temptations to forms of theological ontologism(the reality of the divine is what we know, however implicitly or ‘pre-conceptually’);and forms of subjectivism (what we know directly is the contents of our own minds,the rest only by inference, etc.).

The point to note is, of course, the assumption that would-be Catholictheologians and philosophers are seriously tempted by these philosophies. They haveto be taken through a process of unlearning. It is not just the others, Protestants and such, that are affected. We have to learn the ‘moderate realism’ of Aristotle andThomas Aquinas, returning to that natural, spontaneous knowledge which we callcommon sense, and which modern philosophical theories occlude.

The first principle is the principle of contradiction, the natural recognition anddeclaration of opposition between being and nothing: ‘Being is not nothing’, ‘Oneand the same thing, remaining such, cannot simultaneously both be and not be.’Positively considered, this is the principle of identity: ‘If a thing is, it is: if it is not,it is not.’ Explicitated, the principle of contradiction yields the principle of sufficientreason: ‘Everything that is has its raison d’être in itself, if of itself it exists, insomething else, if of itself it does not exist.’ These are the principles of our naturalintelligence, first manifested in that spontaneous form of intelligence which we callcommon sense, that is, the natural aptitude of intelligence, before all philosophicculture, to judge things sanely.

The errors of modern philosophy

Garrigou-Lagrange offers an excellent picture of mid twentieth century philosophy.First is the neo-positivism of Carnap, Wittgenstein, Rougier and the Vienna Circle(Louis Rougier is the odd man out there!), which is the nominalism of Hume andthe positivism of Comte rehashed.9 But the phenomenology of Husserl belongs herealso, since all these philosophies focus, not on being or reality or the world, but onphenomena (so phenomenalism). The second tendency is evolutionist: idealist, inthe wake of Hegel (Gentile and Leon Brunschvicg); or empiricist (Bergson). Thethird tendency, including voluntarism (Max Scheler), natural philosophy (Driesch),both of whom lean on Aristotle; and ontology (Hartmann), who gives a Platonicinterpretation of Aristotle’s metaphysics, is more apt for neoscholastic purposes.

Thomism, since it is ‘the perennial philosophy’, assimilates all that is true inthese theories, while rejecting the errors. Unlike Hegelianism, for example, ‘the huge

9 Louis Rougier (1889–1982), the French link with the Vienna Circle, a sort of logicalempiricist, organized the Paris International Congress of Scientific Philosophy 1935;published in history of religious ideas (Celsus, Pythagoreans) and in politics (against theegalitarian-democratic ideology of 1789), as well as in philosophy of science; longneglected but receiving attention now.

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a priori construction of one bewitching genius’, Thomism is ‘a temple that rests on a broad inductive base, centuries old, but perpetually repaired by the mostattentive study of all attainable fact’. In the end, Thomistic philosophy recognizesthat reality itself is incomparably richer than our ideas. Thomism, characterized bya sense of mystery, the source of contemplation, awakens our natural (albeitconditional and inefficacious) desire to see God face to face.

Forgetting the twenty-four theses

Garrigou-Lagrange turns on colleagues. Lip service to Thomas Aquinas is universal,he avers, scornfully, but the theses defended under his name are often worlds apart,and even contradict his thought. Can a man be called Thomist by the mere fact thathe admits the dogmas defined by the church, while he follows Descartes in histeachings on the spiritual life? Or denies the metaphysics of causality, and in effectsettles for Hume? But are not the truths of common sense a sufficient foundation forCatholic philosophers and theologians? Indeed they are, but not when they aredistorted by philosophies that place all the emphasis on the individual.

See what is happening: ‘One theologian has said that speculative theology, aftergiving beautiful systems to the Middle Ages, does not today know what it wants, orwhither it is going, and that there is no longer serious work except in positivetheology’ (Jean Daniélou?). ‘Another theologian proposes to change the orderamong the chief dogmatic treatises, to put the treatise on the Trinity before that ofDe Deo uno’ (Karl Rahner?). ‘Further, on the fundamental problems relative tonature and grace, he invites us to return to what he holds to be the true position ofmany Greek Fathers anterior to St. Augustine’ (Henri de Lubac?).

Garrigou-Lagrange then attacks pragmatism: Peirce, William James andEdouard Le Roy (‘Dogma . . . is before all else a practical prescription. Dogma,speaking precisely, would not be true by its conformity with divine reality, but byits relation to the religious act to be performed, and the practical truth of the actwould appear in the superior success of that religious experience in surmountinglife’s difficulties’). These philosophies have implications in doctrine: the dogma ofthe incarnation would not affirm that Jesus is God, but that we must act towardsJesus as we do towards God; the dogma of the Eucharist would not affirm Christ’sreal presence, but that practically we ought to act as if that presence were objectivelycertain, etc.

But dogmatic formulas are not mere ‘norms of action’. What they express is not our religious experience, but divine reality, a reality which often transcendsexperience. Who can claim to ‘experience’ the hypostatic union, Garrigou-Lagrangeasks sarcastically? If you will, we may ‘experience’, not these mysteries themselves,but their effects in us. The Holy Spirit no doubt evokes in us a filial affection whichwe can ‘experience’ – yet even this’ experience’ cannot be absolutely distinguishedfrom a ‘mere sentimental affection’. On the pragmatist definition of truth, however,we would have to say, and it has been said, that theology is at bottom merely ‘a



system of spirituality, which has found rational instruments adequated to its religiousexperience’.

This position comes in great measure from Johann Adam Möhler: ‘theology isnothing but a spirituality which has developed its own regimen of intelligibility’:

Thus Thomism would be the expression of Dominican spirituality, Scotism thatof Franciscan spirituality, Molinism that of Ignatian spirituality. Hence, sincethe Church approves these three spiritualities, the theological systems, whichare their expression, would all be simultaneously true, as being each inconformity with the particular religious experience, which is their respectiveoriginating principle.

(Here he means Chenu, see below.) No: ‘these ingenious theories’ are ‘falsespiritualizations of theology’, in which theology is ‘reduced to a religiousexperience, wherein we look in vain for an objective foundation’. These theologiansregard truth as conformity of the mind with the exigencies of human life – worse, a conformity known by a constantly developing experience, moral andreligious.

Let us return to the traditional (Aristotelian) definition of truth. The first act ofthe intellect is to know, not its own action, not itself, not phenomena, but objectiveand intelligible being. The immutable judgements of faith cannot be preservedinviolate unless we cling to the immutable concepts of being, unity, truth, goodness,nature and person. And much more in the same vein. ‘Depreciating intellective truth,we cannot defend our love of God.’

Chenu’s historical approach

Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895–1990)10 completed the whole seven years ofneoscholastic philosophy and theology at the Angelicum. His doctorate thesis was supervised by Garrigou-Lagrange, who wanted him to remain in Rome as his assistant. Chenu’s dissertation is a philosophical and theological analysis ofcontemplation, as found in Thomas Aquinas, motivated, explicitly, by the desire tochallenge the assumption – then, at least – that spirituality was moralistic andconcerned with the individual soul, rather than theocentrically concerned with theobjectivity of God.11

The first course Chenu gave, when he returned to Le Saulchoir to teach, was on‘the patristic sources of the thought of St Thomas’. This indicates his departure from

10 For details see Christophe F. Potworowski, Contemplation and Incarnation: TheTheology of Marie-Dominique Chenu (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,2001), with bibliography, listing 1,396 items by Chenu.

11 ‘De contemplatione (Angelicum 1920), La Thèse inédite du P. M.-D. Chenu’, edited byCarmelo Giuseppe Conticello, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 75(1991), pp. 363–422.

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the Thomism of Garrigou-Lagrange. By 1936–7 he was expounding Bonaventure’sItinerarium mentis in Deum. He lectured on ‘Augustine and Denys: the twoPlatonisms of St Thomas’, etc. In 1937 Chenu composed a manifesto: Une école dethéologie: Le Saulchoir. Summoned to Rome in 1938 to be interrogated by a handfulof his fellow Dominicans, headed by Garrigou-Lagrange, he was so bullied that: ‘Igave in to a sort of psychological pressure, I let myself be intimidated. One of them– no doubt to pacify Roman irritations – asked me to sign a series of ten propositions.I signed.’12

This pathetic document shows how Chenu’s interest in recreating the historicalcontext was obviously taken to imply that truth was not ‘absolute and immutable’;that theology was only an expression of religious experience and not a ‘true science’,etc. It is incredible that grown men would come up with the proposition that ‘It isglorious that the Church has the system of Saint Thomas as truly orthodox’. But thefears are obvious.

In 1942, in German-occupied Paris, Chenu heard on the radio that his manifestowas now on the Index of Prohibited Books. He was deprived of his teaching post, on the authority of the Master of the Dominican Order, and denounced as a ‘Modernist’, for denying the place of intellect in doing theology, and forrecommending students to read the works of the Tübingen School, in particular ofMöhler.

12 The ten propositions Chenu signed were as follows:

1. Formulae dogmaticae enunciant veritatem absolutam et immutabilem. 2.Propositiones verae et certae, sive in philosophia sive in theologia, firmae sunt etnullo modo fragiles. 3. Sacra Traditio novas veritates non creat, sed firmitertenendum ut depositum revelationis, sue complexum veritatum divinitusrevelatarum, clausum fuisse morte ultimi apostoli. 4. Sacra Theologia non estquaedam spiritualitas quae invenit instrumenta suae experientiae religiosaeadaequata; sed est vera scientia, Deo benedicente, studio acquisita, cujus principiasunt articuli Fidei et etiam omnes veritates revelatae quibus theologus fide divina,saltem informi, adhaeret. 5. Varia systemata theologica, quoad ea in quibus abinvicem dissentiunt non sunt simul vera. 6. Gloriosum est Ecclesiam habere systemaS. Thomae tamquam valde orthodoxum, i.e. veritatibus Fide valde conforme. 7.Necesse est veritates theologicas per S. Scripturam et traditionem demonstrare,necnon earum naturam et intimam rationem principiis et doctrina S. Thomaeillustrare. 8. S. Thomas, etsi proprie theologus, proprie etiam philosophus fuit;proinde, philosophia eius in sua intelligibilitate et veritate non pendet ab ejustheologia, nec enunciat veritates mere relativas sed absolutas. 9. Theologo inprocessu scientifico suo valde necessarium est metaphysicam S. Thomae adhibereet ad regulas dialecticae diligenter attendere. 10. De aliis scriptoribus et doctoribusprobatis servandum est moderamen reverentiale in modo loquendi et scribendi,etiamsi in quibusdam defectum inveniuntur.

The Latin needs no translation; it would sound even more absurd in English; the text isin the hand, it is said, of Michael Browne, leading figure in the minority at Vatican II.See facsimile, Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir (Paris: Cerf, 1985), p. 35.



Baroque scholasticism

Years later, Chenu confessed to remaining marked by the Twenty-Four Theses. Theirimposition on all doctorate candidates he saw as one of the worst abuses of papalauthority. The approach to the study of Thomas Aquinas which he developed, onemay say, was very much a reaction against that project of extracting philosophicaltheorems from Thomas’s work, taking them out of theological as well as historicalcontext, as he was to think, creating a ‘sacred metaphysics’. In the end, it is a conflictabout the place and nature of reason and truth in the practice of Catholic theology.

Of course Chenu was provocative. He derided neoscholastic philosophy andtheology as pervaded by ‘Wolffian rationalism’. Natural theology had no morereligious character than eighteenth-century Deism. ‘The Augustinian sap and theDionysian mysticism’ had been allowed to leak away from Thomas Aquinas’stheology. Catholic theology needed to be ‘disinfected’ of ‘baroque Scholasticism’:‘the philosophy of clerical functionaries at the court of Joseph II’.13 The ‘Thomistorthodoxy’ of Cardinal Zigliara, the greatest nineteenth-century Dominican Thomist,was ‘contaminated by Wolffianism’; it suppresses the ‘Platonic’ interpretation of(say) Lepidi.14 And so on. Esoteric as these boutades now sound, they could not butinfuriate the doctrine teachers of the day, Garrigou-Lagrange above all. Chenu’smockery of his colleagues exacerbated the odium theologicum, which has longcharacterized Roman Catholic theology.

In short, neoscholastics paid no attention to ‘the problems of existence, action,the individual, becoming, and time’, preferring ‘a philosophy of essences, in whichwhat counts is the non-contingent, the universal, ideal and immutable relations –fine matters for definitions’. The second chapter of Chenu’s manifesto begins,approvingly and provocatively, with a quotation from George Tyrrell – surelycalculated to enrage fellow Thomists. The message is, however, in the layout: thechapter on theology precedes the chapter on philosophy. In other words, there is noneed to pass through the gateway of the testing Twenty-Four Theses before one maybe allowed to take up theological studies.

But the key passage runs as follows:

Theological systems are only the expression of spiritualities . . . The greatnessand the truth of Bonaventuran or Scotist Augustinianism are entirely in thespiritual experience of Saint Francis which became the soul in his sons;

13 Joseph II (1741–90), Habsburg Emperor, and leader of the Catholic Enlightenment,restricted papal intervention to the spiritual sphere, subjecting church to state: one of thespectres haunting the Vatican in 1869–70 – a rather arcane insult.

14 Tomasso Maria Zigliara, OP (1833–93), taught in Rome 1870–93, chief exponent ofAristotelian Thomism; Alberto Lepidi, OP (1838–1925), taught in France, Belgium andRome, emphasized the Augustinian elements in Thomas Aquinas: radically divergent‘Thomisms’ even within the Dominican Order from the start.

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the grandeur and the truth of Molinism are in the spiritual experience of SaintIgnatius’ Exercises. – A theology worthy of the name is a spirituality, whichfinds the rational instruments adequate to its religious experience. It is not theluck of history that Saint Thomas entered the Order of Saint Dominic; and it isnot by some desultory grace that the Order of Saint Dominic received SaintThomas Aquinas. The institution and the doctrine are closely allied with oneanother, in the inspiration that carried the one and the other into a new age, andin the contemplation, which, goal of both, guarantees the fervour, the method,the purity, and the freedom of their spirit’

– just what horrified Garrigou-Lagrange and the others in 1938.For a theologian, contemplation is not a practice in which to engage from time

to time, ‘a burst of fervour, beyond studying, as if an escape from its [theology’s]object and its method’. Contemplation is the theologian’s everyday environment,without which theology would be arid and pointless. As we exercise the theologicalvirtue of faith, Chenu paraphrases Thomas as saying, sacra doctrina andcontemplative life are one and the same thing. In brief, neoscholastic philosophy –‘under the patronage of Leibniz’ – adopted a false ‘ideal of intelligibility’ .

Chenu’s Thomas

With his Introduction (1950), Chenu inaugurated or anyway established thehistorical-contextualist reading of Thomas Aquinas. The division into questions deDeo uno and then questions de Deo trino, far from reflecting a decision to see whatmay be said about God by reason before proceeding to what may be said solely onthe basis of revelation, ‘results from an option characteristic of Latin theology, which implies a spiritual itinerary towards the God of revelation’ . The questions deDeo uno deal with the God of the book of Genesis, not the god of Aristotle’s Physics: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who points us towards Christ. We have to retain the ‘religious character’ of this text, never reducing it to a ‘deist’ theodicy. The link between the questions on God and the theology of creationis made by question 43 in the prima pars on the ‘missions’ of the Son and of the Spirit. Throughout the first part of the Summa, there is constant incorporation of biblical material. Placing the questions on the nature of religion in the context of the moral virtue of justice discloses a certain conception of spirituality.And so on.

In short, Chenu opens up a quite different way of reading the Summa Theologiaefrom the way inculcated by the exposition in the textbooks supposedly composedad mentem Sancti Thomae. Thomas’s theology, at its most systematic, Chenu insists,was never separated from continuous study of scripture, liturgically performed as well as in lectio divina. Failure to allow for the context which he took for granted – the Christian mystery, liturgically performed, inhabited in disciplinedcontemplation – leaves the Summa Theologiae as arid an exercise, as most



seminarians found it. Far from reducing the rigorously intellectual achievement ofthe Summa, as his critics feared, Chenu was arguing that we miss the achievementaltogether unless we recreate the context.

Fifty years ago, Chenu pioneered this approach. It is salutary to remember thatit was then regarded as a threat to the standard neoscholastic exposition of Thomismand, accordingly, to the maintenance of orthodoxy in Catholic theology. It may seemunbelievable to theologians in other church traditions, as perhaps also to Catholictheologians under the age of 70, that the grip of a neo-Thomism was so firm on mostinstitutions engaged in teaching theology in conformity with the orthodoxy tests aslaid down in the anti-Modernist oath. Essentially, Chenu insisted that ThomasAquinas was not a timeless thinker but could be understood only in historicalcontext; and, secondly, that his theology is a ‘spirituality’.

As regards Chenu’s approach the most obvious legacy is the great work by Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas d’Aquin: Maitre Spirituel; and the works of DavidBurrell, Gilles Emery, Matthew Levering, A.N. Williams and many others. It isinconceivable now to reconstruct and expound the theology of Thomas Aquinas intotal indifference to its historical context.

Wolffianism at Vatican II

In 1973, Chenu returned to the charge that Catholic theology was pervaded by‘Wolffianism’. The wholesale rejection by the bishops of the draft texts, composedmainly by theologians at the Roman universities, texts in which he detected signsof ‘Wolffian metaphysics’, was the final defeat of neoscholastic Thomism. Once andfor all, the spirit of eighteenth-century rationalism was expelled from Catholictheology.15 At Vatican II, then, there was an irreversible shift in theologicalsensibility, with immensely important implications, – however long it might take towork them out.

It is not clear how much of Christian Wolff’s prolific works Chenu (or anybodyelse) ever read. No doubt he knew that Wolff wanted to ground theological truthson evidence of quasi-mathematical certitude. Notoriously, Wolff’s Pietist Lutherancolleagues were enraged particularly by a lecture which he gave in 1721, instancingthe moral precepts of Confucius as evidence of the power of human reason to attainby its own efforts to moral truth. He was deprived of his post and had to leave Halleon pain of death. Chiefly, I guess, Chenu knew that Wolff invented the courses onlogic, ontology, rational psychology, natural theology, moral philosophy, etc., whichshaped Catholic seminary training into the 1960s.

This division of labour, thus fragmenting the subject, gave rise to theprofessionalization of academic philosophy with which we are familiar today,

15 M.D. Chenu, ‘Vérité évangélique et métaphysique wolfienne à Vatican II’, Revue desSciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 57 (1973), pp. 632–40.

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and the ruin of the idea of philosophy as pursuit of wisdom, or so you might say.Chenu got the idea from Gilson. Back in the 1940s, Gilson claimed, explicitly, that ‘Wolffianism’ had infiltrated the work of Garrigou-Lagrange.16 He traces theconception of God as causa sui, in Descartes (‘By cause of itself, I understand thatwhose essence involves its existence’); in Leibniz (‘The Necessary being has inhimself the reason for his own existence’), and in Suarez and Wolff. Unhappily,however, they all turn away from the true God: ‘As to that other God of Whom ithad been said that He was, not a God Whose essence entailed existence, but a Godin Whom what in finite beings is called essence, is to exist, He now seems to lie ina state of complete oblivion.’ The genuine Thomistic understanding of being – beingas existence, actus essendi, not mere ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ – was lost around 1729,Gilson says, ‘completely and absolutely forgotten’, the year when Wolff’s Ontologiaappeared.

For Wolff, ‘being’, ‘something’ and ‘possible’ are terms that are practicallysynonymous; metaphysics does nothing more than bring their implicit meanings intothe open and lay bare the interconnections. Wolff effectively established the doctrinethat existence is the complement of possibility, an accident, something ‘whollyforeign to its own essence’ – which means, Gilson notes, that ‘existence remainswholly foreign to being’.

Within the Wolffian division of philosophy, if we want to find the sufficientreason for the existence of God then we turn to natural theology; Cosmologyexplains how the beings which make up the natural world are, though contingent,yet determined; psychologia rationalis explains how, in the human mind, potencyis drawn into act:

The extraordinary readiness of so many modern textbooks in Scholasticphilosophy to welcome, together with the Wolffian notion of ontology, thebreaking up of the science of being into several distinct sciences is a sure signthat, to the extent to which it does so, modern Scholasticism has lost the senseof its own message.

The study of philosophy no longer yields the wisdom, the sophia, which Aristotleand Plato expected. Worse than this – the idea of the good which Plato envisagedand of being as such which Aristotle acknowledged, was recognized by ThomasAquinas as the act of being as such, ipsum esse subsistens. This, according to Gilson,is Thomas’s great insight.

However all that may be, Gilson’s story is that, in the work of Wolff, this failureto see being as existence (actus essendi) passed into the thinking of one generationof philosophers after another, including the philosophers of the Thomist revival. In effect, neo-Thomism was infiltrated by Wolffian and Leibnizian rationalism.Garrigou-Lagrange, it has to be admitted, attached great importance to the principle

16 See Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute ofMedieval Studies, 1949), passim, never naming Garrigou-Lagrange; but he had beendenouncing him in lectures for years as ‘Wolffian’.



of sufficient reason: ‘Everything that is, has a sufficient reason for existing’. This,as in the Twenty-Four Theses, is the principle on which the proofs for the existenceof God are based.

One of his earliest articles, in 1908, taken into his book Le sens commun (1909),and again into Dieu in 1919, refers us, on each occasion, to the work of AfrikanAlexandrovich Spir. Naughtily, Gilson suggests that Garrigou-Lagrange’s principleof sufficient reason brings with it the spirit of eighteenth-century rationalism.Chenu’s contention, in 1973, is that, through Spir, eighteenth-century rationalismgot into the Thomism he knew at the Angelicum. Moreover, he now says, this is at the bottom of the ‘bitter dispute’ when he and others contested the authenticity ofthe neoscholastic theology of which the deductivist rationalism put the ‘scientificity’against their appeal to ‘living experience’, ‘vital sources’, etc., in the history, theeconomy, of salvation, in the presence of the word of God in the church. Thepejorative phrase la nouvelle théologie was applied (first by Garrigou-Lagrange, in1946) to those who questioned the rationalistic tendencies which had ruined Catholictheology; they sought, on the contrary, to reopen traditional Catholicism – to recoverthe ‘old theology’, pre-modern and pre-neoscholastic.

Chenu examines the text of the chapter De cognitione veritatis in the documentDe deposito fidei pure custodiendo [sic!] drafted for the Council, by the Romanuniversity theologians (not including Garrigou-Lagrange, however: senile dementiahad already afflicted him). He shows, with little difficulty, that the text operates withan epistemology, where truth is lined up with immutability, necessity, universalrationality, etc.; the philosophy of being is contrasted with a philosophy of becoming,and being is reduced in Wolffian style to essence. Time and history do not figure.At last, Chenu concludes, the way begins to open for a renewal of theology, ‘beyondthe aporias of neo-Scholasticism, of which Wolffian rationalism was not the leastavatar’. Thus, at Vatican II, the neoscholastic conception of reason was finallyrejected.

The question of truth

Maybe so. Yet, this does not mean that many Catholic theologians find it necessaryor attractive to read Thomas Aquinas in Chenu’s or any other way. Some Thomistshave much the same reservations about Torrell as Garrigou-Lagrange had aboutChenu: Thomas’s theology as a spirituality. For most Catholic theologians thesedays, I guess, any recourse to Thomas Aquinas seems antiquarianism, a failure toface up to the rupture in Western thought inaugurated in the work of MartinHeidegger and in the effects that are generally labeled post-modernism. For thosewho doubt that the Heideggerian grand narrative is the only possible starting-point,however, the questions outlined by Garrigou-Lagrange remain the agenda.

The truth of biblical revelation cannot be reduced to the formal truth of thepropositions which state it, Chenu insists, in his demolition of pre-Vatican II’s

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neoscholastic Wolffianism. God is revealed in actions and events as well as in words.These events are not brute facts, illustrating divine ideas (as who might havethought?); they are God’s actions in history. It’s not good enough ‘to study theabstract conditions of the possibility of a revelation, deductively’, as Garrigou-Lagrange did, so Chenu says, ‘in the framework of a metaphysical conception oftruth’. ‘This analysis connects neither with the historical condition of man nor withsaving truth.’ It is the ‘purely extrinsic method of a certain fundamental theology,rendered obsolete by the Council’.

Fine. What we want, Chenu goes on to say, is ‘biblical truth, evangelical truth,according to the Hebrew mind’ – it ‘connects directly not with what is but with whatcomes about, with that of which one has experience’.

Greek thought developed by reflecting on the substance of beings, and issues into aphilosophy of immutability and permanence. It left out the proper characteristic ofbiblical thought: time, the fragility of things and persons. Biblical thought is turnednot to essences but to destinies; it questions itself about the feeblenesses and thepromises of life’, etc.

True, Chenu allows, it would be

giving in to a pernicious and historically controversial dualism to oppose thehistorical and concrete truth of the Gospel to the abstract truth of Greco-Latinphilosophy, defined as this latter is by adequatio rei et intellectus, in a judgmentwhich relates a statement with the truth of being as being. But . . .

– you can guess how Chenu goes on. Admittedly this is Chenu, thirty years ago, when the difference between ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Greek’ ways of thinking, and thus between biblical and metaphysical concepts of truth, was something of acommonplace. But is it perverse, after the history of Chenu’s conflict with Garrigou-Lagrange, to suggest that, for all one’s gratitude for the historical-contextualistreading of Thomas Aquinas, Chenu’s remarks about the biblical concept of truth areless than satisfactory?

Is it not a relief to turn to recent discussions of truth by philosophers in theanalytical tradition, from Michael Dummett to Donald Davidson? Is it a surprise tofind that they would be more at home with Garrigou-Lagrange’s anxieties about‘Modernist’ philosophies than with Chenu’s detection of ‘Wolffian rationalism’? Nodoubt it was high time that the grip of neoscholastic philosophy over Roman Catholictheology was broken, – we could not go on ignoring historical context; but some atleast of those who freed theology from rationalism reverted to assumptions abouttruth, experience, etc., which seem, to say the least, to need a bit of philosophicalscrutiny.

neoscholasticism and its discontents by kerr

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