Scope:
Much of the Catholic theology of the 20th century was dedicated to overcoming the antimodemism that had been instituted at the First Vatican Council in 1869. This meant rethinking the church’s view of Thomas Aquinas. Proponents of the “new theology” argued that the particular interpretation of Aquinas instituted by the church was historically problematic, more modern than traditional in its emphasis on a universal philosophy that provided a foundation for theology. They sought to recover Aquinas the “theologian” and a theology grounded not in tradition but in the spiritual life, guided by the church. They also sought to recover the rich theological resources of other premodern theologians, such as Augustine. This allowed them to criticize the church’s sharp separation between the natural and the supernatural that, they argued, was a product of modernity.
Outline
I. The story of Catholic theology in the first six decades of the 20th century centers on the effort of a range of Catholic thinkers to overcome the antimodemist legacy of the 19th century.
A. The Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s institutionalized many of the modernist reforms these theologians sought.
B. Following Vatican I, called in 1869, the church required all clergy, pastors, and seminary professors to swear the Anti-Modemist Oath.
II. In this lecture, we explore the theological innovations that led up to Vatican II.
A. At the end of the 19th century, the church declared that all teachings should be based in the official interpretation of the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas. This was the basis of what came to be called “neo-scholastic” theology.
B. In 1914, Pope Pius X decreed that the basic theses of St. Thomas were the foundations of church doctrine and not to be debated.
III. Although this form of neo-scholastic Thomism remained the official teaching of the church up to Vatican II, many Catholic theologians departed from it to greater or lesser degrees throughout the first half of the 20th century. Their work is generally referred to as the “nouvelle theologie,” or “new theology.”
A. A major line of criticism of the official teachings took the form of historical study that questioned the reigning interpretation of Thomas.
B. Neo-scholasticism, according to its critics, was based in an interpretation of Aquinas that was deeply entwined with Counter-Reformation polemics against Protestantism and with the kind of modern universalistic rationalism we find in Descartes.
C. The theologians who were dissatisfied with neo-scholasticism trained their historical lenses on that vein of theology, as well as the early Christian tradition and Aquinas himself
IV. In large part based on this kind of historical work, proponents of the new theology stressed two themes in their effort to forge a modem Catholic theology.
A. According to the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, the neo-scholastics had misunderstood Aquinas on the relationship between nature and grace.
B. Some proponents of the new theology, most importantly Hans Urs von Balthasar, argued that rather than starting from a general philosophical understanding of reality and the human, theology should begin with faith in a particular God encountered in and testified to by the Bible and the church and in the context of the life of worship.
1. Of all the new theologians, von Balthasar is the one who perhaps developed these ideas most extensively, influenced deeply by Karl Barth’s vision of theology as faith seeking understanding and by de Lubac’s view of our natural openness to God.
2. Balthasar argued that in the creation, God established a relation among humans, nature, and God that was oriented to the communion among them.
V. In addition to the new theology, another important trend in modernizing Catholicism was Karl Rahner’s “transcendental Thomism.”
A. Rahner had much in common with new theology, though his was a more philosophically oriented effort to link Aquinas’s thought to Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
B. The transcendental question for Rahner was this: What are the conditions that must be in place for us to experience the presence of God at the center of our existence?
C. All human beings are oriented to what he calls “absolute being” and “absolute mystery,” and we are attuned to this mystery in such a way that we are able to hear it speak to us, not just or even primarily in the form of propositions about its nature but in the fonn of personal communion.
D. As human beings, we are constituted by an orientation to absolute mystery, but as particular kinds of human beings, we live this orientation in particular, concrete Ways, for example, Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist.
E. The Christian believes that all grace of God is mediated through Christ and that all human beings, whether Christian or not, also participate in this grace, even if they do so as “anonymous Christians.”
VI. As these Catholic theologians tried to open the church to modemity, they found that the strategies the church had used to combat modernity were themselves modern, even if they were presented as the product of Aquinas’s medieval thought.
Suggested Reading:
Kerr, After Aquinas.
-----, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians.
Rahner and Dych, Foundations of Christian Faith.
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the basic claims of neo-scholastic theology?
2. What claims did the “nouvelle theologie” make about Aquinas as they sought to go beyond neo-scholasticism?
Lecture Twenty-Six-Transcript
20th-Century Catholicism
In our discussion of Barth, Tillich, and Henry, we saw how modernity becomes the object of some suspicion for at least some Protestant theologians of the 20th century. In our earlier lecture on Catholic theology in the 19th century, though, we saw that modernity was not just an object of suspicion, but -- at least for the official theologians of the Church -- it was anathema. Not surprisingly, then, the story of Catholic theology in the first six decades of the 20th century is quite different from the story of Protestant theology: It’s the story of efforts to overcome Catholic anti-modemism. In many respects, this effort was rather successful, though not uncontested. In fact, questions and controversies over modemism have even today not been totally resolved in the Catholic Church.
But these creative theological efforts that we’ll talk about in this lecture to rethink Catholicism and its relation to the modern world in the period up to 1960 culminated in the Second Vatican Council, Vatican II, which opened in 1962 -- and in which the Church took a number of measures that signaled a greater openness to the modern world. It authorized the use of the vernacular instead of Latin in the mass. It accepted the importance of higher biblical criticism. It approved new ecumenical efforts to build bridges between the Church and other branches of Christianity and other religions, It strengthened its sense of the social mission of the Church. Given the power of anti-modernism in the Church at the end of the 20th century these were major changes.
Lets recall for a moment the forces of anti-modemism that the reforms of Vatican II were responding to. In the decades following the First Vatican Council that was called in 1869, the anti-modernists of the Catholic Church took charge by, among other things, instituting the dogma of papal infallibility -- and in 1910 requiring that all clergy, pastors and Seminary professors swear the Anti-Modernest Oath. With this oath, they swore to “firmly hold and accept each and every definition of the unerrant teaching of the Church, with all she has maintained and declared, but especially those points of doctrine which expressly combat the errors of our time." More specifically, those who pledged the oath pledged to uphold the following ideas -- first, that the Church was to be considered “the guardian and exponent of the revealed Word, was proximately and directly founded by Christ Himself, the true person of history, while He dwelt amongst us”; second, that the truth affirmed and guarded by the Church is unchangeable; third, that faith is a matter of the assent of the intellect to revealed truth as mediated by the Church and not “a blind religious sense making its way out of the hidden regions of the subliminal consciousness.” The fourth thing that the oath required was that God can be known and God’s existence can be proved by the natural light of reason. I’m going to come back to that. We can see from this list that the Church’s Anti-Modernist Oath was directed at many of the ideas that those Protestants and Catholics of the 19th century that we have called liberals or modernists were espousing. Most importantly, the oath rejected the idea that faith was experientially grounded in feeling, as well as the idea that historical study of the Bible and the Church could show us that fundamental Christian doctrines and institutions had developed or evolved.
In this lecture, I want to explore the theological innovations that led up to Vatican II. I’ll begin with an account of Catholic Neo-Scholasticism, the reigning philosophical and theological doctrine that was authorized by the Church in the early 20th century. I’ll then turn to some of the basic criticisms that Catholic thinkers leveled at the New Scholasticism as they began to develop a new theological paradigm that came to be called Nouvelle Théologie -- “the New Theology.” I’ll then highlight some of the major ideas of the New Theology and of a related Catholic movement called “Transcendental Thomism.”
In addition to a detailed definition of anti-modemism, the Catholic Church in the early 20th century took a second important step by declaring that the official teachings of the Church were to be based in the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas -- or, I think we have to say in retrospect, based in a particular interpretation of Aquinas’s thought. In 1914, Pope Pius X decreed that: “the capital theses in the philosophy of St. Thomas are not to be placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another, but are to be considered as the foundations upon which the whole science of natural and divine things is based.” This meant that at the risk of being called to Rome to defend one’s ideas, being stripped of one’s teaching post, or having one’s books banned, all Catholic teachers and theologians had to adhere to Aquinas’s thought -- or, as,it came to be called. Neo-Scholasticism. Note that in this papal declaration, Pius speaks in terms of the "science of natural and divine things."
Central to Neo-Scholasticism is the effort to combat what the Church saw as the crises of historicism and relativism that had been created by modem thought. Like the Protestant Fundamentalists, then, the church sought to defend a philosophical perspective on knowledge and being, epistemology and ontology, that would secure a view of “both the natural world and divine reality with the certainty of "science." Where the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge developed a 'philosophical justification for the inerrancy and authority of the bible to serve as a foundation for faith, the Catholic Church turned to Aquinas -- and not just to Aquinas the theologian, but Aquinas the philosopher, who had, they claimed, developed a comprehensive philosophical vision, one that was indebted to Aristotle -- that had grounded faith in certain knowledge.
This philosophy held that we gain true knowledge of the world -- not just as it appears to us, but as it really is -- through sense perception -- and all that we can reason from this knowledge of the world to metaphysical reality. Most importantly, we can reason from this knowledge gained through sense impression to God as the cause of all that is. This is no innate idea of God or a feeling of God but cognitive knowledge based in our experience of the world. As we’ve seen in earlier modern thinkers, this is a form of reasoning that moves from effects -- that is, things in he world -- to their cause, God.
It's not perfect knowledge of God, but it is real knowledge and it is based in the idea that our minds, beginning with its knowledge of sensory objects, can transcend the sensory world by virtue of what had been called since the medieval period the “analogy of being."Put slmply, this is the idea that things in the world bear an analogy, or a resemblance, to that which creates them -- that is to God. By means of this analogy, then, and although God is ultimately unknowable in any finite way, this resemblance allows us to claim some knowledge of, and apply predicates to, God -- such as wise, or good, or just -- that we use to talk about the things that God created. So, we move from our sense of a just person to God as being just. The main point to keep in mind here is that with this Neo-Scholastic philosophy, Catholic thinkers were trying to establish a philosophical foundation for theology -- for those truths of God, the world and humanity that are not available through the use of natural reason, but are revealed to us by God, through the Church.
Neo-Scholasticism remained the official teaching of the Church up to Vatican II. Nonetheless, many Catholic theologians departed from this official line to a greater or lesser extent throughout the first half of the 20th century. These new theological efforts were informed by a strong historical sensibility that accomplished two things. First, it put Neo-Scholasticism into historical context. lt raised questions about Neo-Scholasticism’s claims to represent an absolute, ahistorical philosophical foundation. Second, it grounded itself in the historical study of the early Christian period -- thereby connecting Aquinas more clearly to the tradition he had inherited, and in this way it offered resources for new interpretations of Aquinas’s thought.
I want to explore both of these in a little more detail before moving on to some of the particulars of the new Catholic theology. Perhaps the most important result of the historical consideration of Neo-Scholasticism was the recognition that this appeal to a theology that had supposedly been developed by Aquinas in the Middle Ages and considered by the Church to be valid for all time really had its origins in the 16th and 17th centuries. That is, Neo-Scholasticism, according to its critics, was based in an interpretation of Aquinas that was deeply entwined with Counter-Reformation polemics against Protestantism -- and with the kind of modern, unrversalistrc rationalism we find in Descartes.
For a theologian such as Marie-Dominique Chenu, one of the critics of New Scholasticism, this interpretation of Aquinas was so indebted to models of truth found in 17th-century rationalism that it distorted the dynamism of Aquinas’s thought, where God was more an actor revealed in history than in propositions about the nature of the world. Another critic of Neo-Scholasticism, Hans Urs von Balthasar, argued that Neo-Scholastic focus on the intelligibility of God -- its conceptual rationalism -- loses the sense of divine mystery, which for him was such a crucial aspect of what he called the “glory of God,”and that he thought had pervaded Christian theology through the Middle Ages -- and it was a vision of God and a vision of theology that was not just rationalistic, but depended on close links between thought and feeling. So, from the perspectives of Chenu and Balthasar, we might say Catholic Neo-Scholasticism maintains the same ironic relation to modernity that we find in Protestant Fundamentalism: Both respond to what are perceived as the threats of modem historical consciousness and secularism with efforts' to absolutize some aspect of Christianity perceived to be “traditional” -- yet, according to its critics, both Fundamentalism and Neo-Scholasticism in order to do this, actually employ modem ideas to address modem problems.
As I’ve said, the theologians who were dissatisfied with Neo-Scholasticism did not only train their historical lenses on Neo-Scholasticism itself; but also went back to think more historically about the early Christian tradition and about Aquinas. In their historical studies of the concept of the Church, for instance, French thinkers such as Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac developed a picture of an early Church that was deeply engaged with the world and much less against or above the world than the Neo-Scholastic vision had it. We’ll see the significance of this shortly.
In addition, Chenu, de Lubac, and others studied the ways in which Aquinas had been influenced by earlier theological traditions. They focused especially on his relation to Augustine, and they began to stress Aquinas the theologian rather than Aquinas the philosopher. For them, this meant, above all, that it was necessary to consider the ways in which Aquinas’s thought was grounded in spirituality -- that is, grounded in the religious life of prayer, and worship, and faith. For Chenu in particular, we miss something crucial if we read Aquinas as an abstract metaphysician or as a rationalistic philosopher expounding absolute philosophical truths. Instead, we have to consider how his ideas and his arguments were grounded in his reading of the Bible, and how they presupposed the life of worship and contemplation. To fail to do this, Chenu said, is to miss the point that Catholic thought is not primarily a matter of the natural intellect knowing the world, but of the religious self and community engaging God.
These historically informed studies of Neo-Scholasticism and Thomas Aquinas provided crucial resources for criticizing the hold of Neo-Scholasticism on 20th-century Catholic theology -- and, in this, these studies shaped the constructive theological work of the Catholic New Theology. I’ve already referred to the thinker who was perhaps the most influential member of this group -- the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac. We might also add, though, he really was in many ways a unique thinker not really associated with any movement the Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar.
Let me stress two central elements of the New Theoggy. I've already mentioned that de Lubac explored Augustine's influence on Aquinas, and I first want to return to this issue to develop it further. The Neo-Scholastics tended to focus on Aquinas's debt to Aristotle and his naturalistic metaphysics, and this led them focus on the human being, as Aristotle did, as having a purely natural destiny. But recall the discussion -- way back in the first four or so lectures of this course -- of nature and grace. There I said that as we move into the modern period we see the distinction between nature and grace in the modern period becoming wider and sharper.
I'll say now that in making this claim, I Was following the work of theologians, such as de Lubac, who argued that by overemphasizing Aristotle's on Aquinas, Neo-Scholastics had read the modern distinction between nature and grace back into Aquinas. On de Lubac's reading, however, Aquinas, like Augustine and the early Church fathers, saw God's grace at work in nature and in human nature -- not as an extra, supernatural interruption of nature, but as grace that was part of the creation of the world. Thus, they believed that human beings are naturally oriented to God -- and so naturally desire fulfillment in God.
As the contemporary theologian Fergus Kerr, and I’ve been relaying heavily on his work in this reading of the Catholic New Theology, as Fergus Kerr puts it in his treatment of de Lubac: "human beings were destined by nature to enjoy by divine grace everlasting bliss with Godd . . . the human and the natural had always already been embraced within the supernatural." The point is that, according to de Lubac, the Neo-Scholastics had misunderstood Aquinas on the relationship between nature and grace, and this had led them to focus on an abstract, philosophical conception of god. By sharply separating nature and grace, Counter-Reformation theologians first, and then Neo-Scholastic theologians, thought they were protecting the supernatural by enclosing it in a realm apart from, and above, the world.
But de Lubac argues that they ended up taking it out of the world in a way that created room, as if it had created a vacuum, for a fully naturalistic and secular view of human existence. So he argue, ironically enough. that secularism, humanism, and atheism were the creation of Catholicism -- that by separating nature and grace so strongly, by making grace so transcendent or otherworldly, they had left the world open to be interpreted by the scientists and the secular philosophers. So faith, on this reading, becomes faith in something outside the world, not a form of engagement with the world, and it was this kind of engagement that de Lubac wanted to emphasize. So, in contrast to this Neo-Scholastic approach, de Lubac articulated a more-worldly faith by talking about our natural desire for God-and by claiming that the only telos, the only goal, we have, the only completion open to human beings, comes with God’s grace and offers a vision of human life in which we encounter God’s grace in and through our life in the world.
I’ll get at the second aspect of the New Theology that I want to discuss by returning to a question we have discussed at various points in these lectures: How do we think religiously? Do we start from a general philosophical understanding of reality and of the human, and then move to an account of religion as a possible way of life for this human being -- and then, finally, to the Christian religion, or the Jewish religion, or the Muslim religion as a particular form of this human religious life? Or, do we begin with the concrete religious life and view reality and the human through the lens of that life or that faith? These are two extremes, and there are numerous possibilities in between, but the point here is that the Neo-Scholastics tended to take the first route to Christian thought by establishing a philosophical foundation and stressing the knowledge of God that is reached through natural reason. Again, despite the appeal to Aquinas, it is this approach that makes Neo-Scholasticism distinctly modern.
In the New Theology, however, we see something more like the second approach, a more distinctly theological approach -- at least if we think of theology in Saint Anselm’s terms as faith seeking understanding. On this view, theology begins not with an abstract, philosophical conception of reality -- of the human, of God -- but with faith in a particular God encountered in and testified to by the Bible and the Church, and in the context of the life of worship. To put the contrast starkly: The Christian’s affirmation of God is not the result of a philosophical argument, but -- to follow de Lubac -- is already present in consciousness, in life, and must be articulated and understood, not proven philosophically. So, theology, on this account, should begin in the religious life of worship and contemplation as well in human life more generally -- and should seek to clarify and deepen our understanding of the God that is encountered there and the kind of life that this God demands.
Balthasar is the one who perhaps develops these ideals. most extensively. He was influenced deeply by Karl Barth's vision of theology as faith seeking understanding, and by Henri de Lubac's view of our natural openness to God. .With respect to the later, Balthasar writes: "when one freely submits in faith to the knowledge of God as Lord and Creator, one is at the same time obeying one's nature. Balthasar also argues that theology always must be grounded in the theologian's spiritual life, a personal faith, yet at the same time must always be guided by the Church. Indeed, as he himself attested, his massive theological output was indebted to his close work and long association with the mystic Adrienne von Speyr. Balthasar's God is a God of mystery -- a God that can never be fully comprehended by human reason or human words, but only approached more or less adequately and always with the consciousness that our relation to God, indeed our "sense" of God, is never just conceptual.
Central to this spiritual life, for Balthasar, is the idea of the contemplative knowledge of God's glory -- that is, what might best be described as a kind of aesthetic appreciation of the divine glory as it's manifested in the world. Although Balthasar, more so than any Catholic thinker of the 20th century, was -- as I've said -- influenced by Barth, he was critical of Barth's rejection of what is called "natural theology." Barth had argued that God only reveals himself in Jesus Christ, as attested to in the Bible, and though he moderated this strong claim in hi later theology, he remained very suspicious of the longstanding idea that we can learn about God from our engagement with nature. Bat Balthasar argued than in the creation, God established a relation between human, nature, and God that was oriented to the communion between them. This, or course, is yet another way of saying, with de Lubac, that God creates human beings with a natural desire to be completed in him.
For Balthasar, natural theology is not a matter of grasping the essence of things, what they really are behind their appearance, or of trying to grasp God in any final way -- but rather a kind of seeing of the wholeness and coherence of that which we encounter in the world, in all its variety and concreteness, as they give themselves to us. It’s in this giving to us that we find God’s work manifested to us as a kind of light shining from within all of creation.
To conclude this lecture on Catholicism after the New Scholasticism, I want to mention briefly another important trend in 20th-century Catholic thought -- one often referred to as Transcendental Thomism and associated, above all, with the work of the German theologian Karl Rahner. Rahner has much in common with the New Theology, though his was a more philosophically oriented effort to link Aquinas’s thought to Kant’s critical, transcendental philosophy. Thus, where theologians such as de Lubac tended to think about Aquinas in the context of the early Christian tradition, Rahner was interested in showing how Aquinas and Catholic theology could generally cohere with a certain kind of modern philosophy. You’ll recall that in the discussion of Kant, the idea of “transcendental philosophy” referred to a philosophical method that examined the conditions of possibility for experience.
In other words, given experience in general -- or particular kinds of experience, say, religious experience -- one asks: What must be the case about human beings, or about the human mind, that this kind of experience is possible -- what are the conditions that must be in place for this kind of experience to happen? This is the transcendental question. In Rahner’s case, the focus was on the conditions that must be in place for us to experience the presence of God at the center of our existence -- and from there, to know God. Or, to put it just a little differently, Rahner sought to show that the structures of human existence as transformed by grace are the necessary conditions for the experience of Christian faith and life. For Rainier, the basic condition here is what has been called “transcendental experience,”or the experience of transcending finitude. What this basically means is that, for Rahner, in every experience and in every act of knowing and willing, there’s an element of self-transcendence by which human beings are open to the source of their existence.
Here, I won’t go into the arguments that Rahner makes to defend this claim -- but simply to state them. For Rahner, all human beings are oriented to what he calls “Absolute Being” and “Absolute Mystery,”and we’re attuned to this Mystery in such a way that we’re able to hear it speak to us -- not just or even primarily in the form of propositions about nature, but in the form of personal communication from God. One upshot of this approach to theology is that not only is Rahner making an argument about the concrete Christian experience of God, but -- and here he differs in sone ways from the New Theology -- but about the possibility of religious experience more generally. As human beings, he's arguing we are constituted by an orientation to Absolute Mystery, but as particular kinds of human beings we live this orientation in particular, concrete ways -- for example, as Christians, as Jews, or as Buddhists. That is, for Rahner, different religions are different interpretations of this basic orientation, and this links Rahner with modern religious thinkers, such as Schleiermacher, even, though they have very different understanding of what this religion in general is.
ln the context of 20th-Century Catholic thought, however, the significance of this approach is that Rahner articulates a way to think about the concreteness of Christianity in relation to other kinds of religious experience. He articulates this with the controversial concept of “anonymous Christianity." The Christian believes that all grace of God is mediated through Christ. But, if Rahner is correct, Christians must also recognize that all human beings, whether Christian or not, are also oriented to Absolute Mystery -- and so, in some sense, also participate in this grace, even if they do not explicitly affirm that it come through Christ.
On the one hand then, Rahner will claim the supremacy of Christianity -- yet, at the same time, he's trying to conceptualize an opening to the truth of other religious traditions. In conclusion I want to summarize these efforts of 20th-Century Catholic theology by tying them more closely to the theme of faith and suspicion. I've already suggested that, starting with Kierkegaard and coming into full flower in Barth, Protestants turned from an apologetic defense of Christianity as modern to a more confessional proclamation of faith that is willing to criticize modernity. In short we see a shift in the questioning from: Is Christianity compatible with modernity -- to: Is modernity compatible with Christianity?
But as we’ve also seen, the historical trajectories of Protestant and Catholic thought in the modem period are quite different -- since for well into the 20th Century, the Catholic Church refused the mainstream Protestant strategy of accommodating to modernity. So we find in thinkers like de Lubac, Balthasar and Rahner that they're trying to forge theological perspectives that leave behind the Church’s reactive criticisms -- and to take modernity seriously, In these efforts, we find a range of positions. Where Rahner, in many respects, tries -- like Schieiermacher and like Tillich -- to integrate Christian theology and modern secular thought, Balthasar is more like Barth, who focuses intensely on the story of Jesus as the lens through which the world and God must be understood.
Interestingly, though, as these Catholic theologians tried to open the Church to modernity they found that the strategies the Church had used to combat modernity were themselves modern. This is what I was saying about the modernity or the modernism of Neo-Scholasticism -- even if the Church had presented this way of looking at things as the product of Aquinas’s medieval thought. One might say, then, that the new theologians, even as they opened Catholic theology to modernity, were also rethinking the tradition in a way that released the tradition from the Neo-Scholastic efforts to make it an unquestioned foundation -- and they brought the tradition, then, living and dynamic, into 20th-century thought. As we’ll see in a future lecture, by doing this, the new theologians were rethinking the meaning of tradition in a way that makes it a resource for modern religious thought -- and even in a way that anticipates certain elements of postmodem religious thought.
