Modernism revisited and ressourcement theology defended

As most close observers of Catholicism today are no doubt aware, there has arisen over the past 15 years or so a movement that goes by the rather vague moniker of “radical traditionalism”. The exact theological and sociological contours of the movement need not concern us here. But the one thing that many traditionalists seem to have in common is a strong belief that the Church, since Vatican II, has become infected with the theological errors of “Modernism”. The accusation goes beyond the usual identification of very liberal prelates and theologians as Modernists and now includes a strong revisionist rereading of all modern popes, from John XXIII to Pope Leo XIV, as at least “tainted” with Modernism.

This narrative then becomes the raison d’être for an advocacy of an ecclesial discipline that is a retrenchment and a restoration of the anti-Modernist form of the Church. The vast majority of traditionalists stop short of the silliness of the sede vacantists. But their position involves the claim that the Council, the theologians who formed the Council, and the papacies that followed, are all “compromised” by an essentially Modernist impulse. You see this view expressed constantly on social media, in comboxes, and in my email inbox. Yes, this is anecdotal and impressionistic, but I stand by those impressions.

What was Modernism? 

But what was Modernism? And is it true that many influential modern theologians, usually thought of as orthodox, as well as many prelates and even popes, are, in fact, Modernists?

The accusation is important because many of the theologians who influenced Vatican II are alleged to have been Modernists or, at the very least, as noted, were “tainted” with Modernism. The list of names so accused is a long one. To name just a few: Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Joseph Ratzinger, Karol Wojtyla, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jean Danielou. Two of those men later became pope, so these are serious accusations that go beyond theological quibbles over trivial matters. Indeed, they cut to the very core of the authenticity and legitimacy of the contemporary Church.

However, Modernism as a theological movement is notoriously difficult to define. Like its binary opposite, “fundamentalism,” it is a term often misused in a dismissive and lazy manner to cast suspicion at a thinker without the hard work of actually engaging in his arguments. My claim is that many contemporary self-identifying “traditionalist” Catholics, when they accuse thinkers such as Joseph Ratzinger, Wojtyla, Henri de Lubac, or von Balthasar of Modernism, are using the term in precisely the lazy way mentioned above.

Nevertheless, and despite the difficulty of arriving at a precise definition, we need to get a handle on just what is meant by the term, to assess the claim that many seemingly orthodox theologians, prelates, and popes are infected with the bacillus of Modernism.

Early in the twentieth century, there were a few Catholic theologians whose theology was viewed by Rome as overly influenced by modern scripture scholarship, modern philosophy, and deeply subjectivist modern understandings of the act of faith. This prompted the Vatican under St. Pius X to label them as “Modernists”, which led to the pope’s September 1907 anti-modernism encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”). Earlier in July of that same year, the Holy Office had already issued, with papal approval, the document, Lamentabili Sane (“With Lamentable Results”), which contained a new version of the “syllabus of errors” that were theological propositions which the Holy Office condemned as heretical.

Most theologians, even conservative ones, agree that there probably was no organized movement of theological thought that can be easily pinpointed as Modernist. Instead, there was a generalized rejection in secular and liberal Protestant circles of the main claims of Catholicism, which made use of the categories of modern philosophy, science, and historical-critical exegesis of the Bible.

As Pius X notes in Pascendi, the assault on Catholicism by non-Catholics was bad enough. But the real problem resided in the fact that there were Catholic priests theologizing while using these same modern academic tools and calling for radical changes to the Church in both governance and doctrine. In other words, the enemy outside the gates had important sympathizers within the gates. And for Pius X, this was a bridge too far.

The two men everyone agrees were the main targets of the Vatican were the French priest Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) and the Anglo-Irish Jesuit and convert George Tyrrell (1861-1909). Pope Pius X especially condemned any such theology that placed modern scripture scholarship, modern philosophy, and subjective religious experience above the magisterium of the Church.

Whether the thought of those two theologians condemned by Pius X was accurately described need not concern us here. The important thing is to note what Pius X considered to be the essence of the Modernist view. And that was Modernism’s emphasis upon using the categories of modern philosophy (especially Kant) to champion a purely subjective and expressivist view of religious truth; the use of modern, anti-supernaturalist, secular historical critical exegesis of the Bible; and a form of religious agnosticism and relativism that flows from these premises.

It has become fashionable in some theological circles to view Pascendi as a huge step backward. However, the text is remarkably sophisticated and prescient. It identified real theological problems in much of modern thought. Nevertheless, overall, it is an almost completely defensive document, and when combined with later disciplinary action from the Holy Office, it caused a dark pall to descend upon Catholic theology in the form of a stifling intellectual atmosphere of fear. The anti-modernist forces had committed the Church to a scorched-earth rejection of all things intellectually modern, and many fine theologians found themselves under deep suspicion from Rome.

The rise of ressourcement theology

Many of those theologians came from a theological movement in the early to mid-20th century best described as “ressourcement theology”. Ressourcement means a “return to the sources”, which in the context of the times denoted a retrieval of the theology of the Church fathers (patristics) as well as a greater emphasis on the Scriptural foundations of theology. The Church was rightfully suspicious of modern scripture scholarship at that time due to its strong anti-supernaturalist biases. But the ressourcement theologians believed that, nevertheless, there was much of value in that scholarship that could be put to use in an orthodox manner once stripped of its errors.

To put ressourcement theology into further historical context, the theologians involved were concerned with the then reigning hegemony of scholastic/Thomistic theology in the Church and the subsequent sclerotic narrowing of the Church’s intellectual life to a single strand of her grand tradition. For these thinkers, the challenge presented by the explosion of scientific knowledge in the modern world, as well as the rise of liberal democracy (often in ways in direct opposition to the Church), and the increasing power of secular modes of thought and culture, made it imperative that the Church not meet this challenge with one hand tied behind its back. They sensed that there was a need to retrieve the fullness of the Tradition, confident that the broader Catholic intellectual tradition possessed the necessary resources to deal with the challenge presented to it by modernity.

I hasten to add that this attempt at broadening the Church’s theology beyond the confines of the Thomistic/scholastic synthesis did not entail, in either theory or in practice, the denial of the importance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, von Balthasar quotes Thomas more than any other thinker in his grand theological trilogy, even attributing to him what Balthasar considers to be the greatest breakthrough in the history of philosophy: Thomas’s famous “real distinction” between essence and existence in creaturely being. And de Lubac spent the better part of his theological career attempting to prove that the theology of Thomas Aquinas did not posit a sharp distinction between nature and grace, with grace being viewed as an extrinsic “add on” to an already complete in itself human nature. He further accused the neo-scholastics of holding to this erroneous view of the relation between nature and grace, and therefore that they did not understand Thomas very well at all, at least on this topic.

Was de Lubac correct in this? I think he was, but that need not detain us here. The point I am making is that the debate was not one where the Church fathers were pitted against Thomas, with the ressourcement thinkers and the neo-scholastics on opposite sides of the skirmish line. It was instead, at least in part, a debate about the proper interpretation of Thomas as such, with ressourcement thinkers placing him within the broader context of patristic thought (as well as a retrieval of the platonic elements in Thomas), and the neo-scholastics who wanted to keep Thomas firmly within the commentatorial tradition (e.g. the brilliant Cardinal Cajetan and Francisco Suárez, et al.) with a nod toward thinkers who emerged after Leo XIII and his reenergizing of Thomistic studies with his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879).

In contemporary circles, the ressourcement movement is largely identified with the journal Communio: International Catholic Review, and now also with the new Word on Fire journal, The New Ressourcement. There is also now a wonderful neo-Thomist revival going on, which we can see in journals including Nova et Vetera and The Thomist. The ongoing conversations between these two movements are both exhilarating and deeply helpful for the modern Church. May it flourish and prosper.

Vindication amid continued challenges

But such irenic debates between two orthodox schools of thought were not always so peaceful. The detractors of ressourcement theology in the first half of the twentieth century described it pejoratively as la Nouvelle theologie (“The New Theology”). In order to grasp why this is a derogatory (and even dangerous) label, one needs to understand two things.

First, these critics were in the main the old vanguard of the neo-scholastic synthesis (e.g., Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange), and they dominated the Roman Pontifical universities and wielded tremendous influence within the Holy Office. They were wedded to the notion that orthodox Catholic doctrine was deeply embedded within the Thomistic and scholastic intellectual tradition, and so any deviation from this theological system was a threat to the stability of Catholic doctrine as such, and potentially, Modernist. Therefore, theological stability over time was seen as one of the hallmarks of the glories of “fortress Catholicism”, and theological “novelty” was treated in an a priori fashion as inherently suspicious. Calling a theological movement “new” was considered an insult, as if it represented the repackaging in shiny new ways of what were nothing more than tired and stale old Modernist heresies.

Second, it is a dangerous label precisely because of the implications for theology as a true ecclesial vocation in the Church. Most, if not all, of the ressourcement theologians were not “Modernists” in the sense spelled out by Pascendi. They were thoroughly orthodox theologians, and most of them, including de Lubac, Ratzinger, and von Balthasar, were dismissed by the mainstream academic theological guild after the Council as hopelessly conservative reactionaries. I discovered this during my Ph.D. studies at Fordham, where Balthasar and Ratzinger were deeply frowned upon.

Therefore, it is an indication of how oppressive the intellectual atmosphere had become in the pre-conciliar Church that the accusation against these same thinkers, later thought to be hopelessly reactionary, was that they were engaged in a dangerous theological “novelty” by the Holy Office. For example, Henri de Lubac suffered greatly in the “anti-Modernist” pre-conciliar atmosphere, especially after Pius XII appeared to condemn de Lubac’s views in the encyclical Humani Generis. He was later rehabilitated by St. Pope John XXIII and played an important role at the Council and was subsequently made a cardinal by St. Pope John Paul II.

The main pre-Conciliar Roman concern with the ressourcement thinkers was that they dared to read Thomas anew through the lens of the Fathers. Furthermore, they dared to make use of modern philosophical movements such as phenomenology and existentialism, even though they were at pains to use only those elements that were fruitful for the elucidation of orthodox forms of theology. They also dared to emphasize the importance of viewing human nature as constitutively relational and embedded within an eschatological historical horizon, even as they were clear that the Church is indeed in the here and now, the Kingdom of God in nuce. They further dared to emphasize that the objective and subjective modes of truth are not at odds with one another and are mutually involved with one another in a kind of epistemological perichoresis.

In short, they challenged no central doctrines of the Church and merely sought to deepen our understanding of the same. Fortunately, they were vindicated at the Council, and two of them (Wojtyla and Ratzinger) became popes. The Council they helped to shape was, obviously, not without its flaws, as all councils have flaws. But the ecclesiology, soteriology, Christology, and theological anthropology it championed were anything but “Modernist” as any fair reading of the actual texts proves.

There were indeed theological elements at the Council that seemed to modify, or even reverse, some elements of previous teaching. The teachings on religious freedom, interreligious and ecumenical dialogue, collegiality, stand out as, at the very least, different in tone and tenor from previous teachings. All of that can be debated. All of it can be held up for further theological scrutiny.

But what it is not is “Modernism” in the sense that Pascendi understood that term. Neither the Council nor the main ressourcement theologians were champions of an aggressively secular use of historical-critical exegesis. Nor were they champions of a runaway subjectivism and expressivist religious relativism. Nor did they replace Thomas Aquinas or the Fathers with Kant and Hegel.

There are indeed radically revisionist and improper revolutionary elements in the Church today. They must be resisted. But Popes John Paul and Benedict, and the main ressourcement thinkers, and the Council itself, are not among them.

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