Ferias Internacionales

Love, the free homage to the supreme Good, gives us new eyes. Being, become more visible, delights the beholder.

Pierre Rousselot1 In order to understand what motivated nouvelle the
ologie, we need to explore in some detail the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

DissatisWed with the dominant, neo-scholastic mindset in the Church, the nouvelle theologians looked further back. Throughout the nineteenth century, Catholic theologians had attempted to come to terms with the challenge of the Kantian turn to the human subject. The nouvelle theologians were much more attracted to some of these nineteenth-century approaches than to contemporary neo-scholastic attempts at outmanoeuvring Kant’s subjectivism by means of human reason. Other, more recent, scholars had also been turning their backs on the newer scholastic commentators of St Thomas. They, too, returned to the kind of questions that neo-scholastics hoped had been settled for good. Together with several nineteenth-century theologians—in particular the Tu¨bingen school—these early twentieth-century scholars, too, inXuenced the movement of nouvelle the
ologie.

In this chapter, therefore, I will begin with a brief description of the various nineteenth-century Catholic schools of thought and of the neo-scholastic reac-tion to these attempts at charting a new path for theology. Next, I will discuss four individual theologians who, to varying degrees and in diVerent ways, each impacted the movement of nouvelle the
ologie. Here I will Wrst go back to the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, to the Romanticism of Johann Adam Mo¨hler (1796–1838). Then I will look at several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars, each of whom deeply inXuenced nouvelle the
ologie: Maurice Blondel, Joseph Mare´chal, and Pierre Rousselot.

This chapter makes no claim to a complete theological sketch of these various scholars. I will highlight aspects of their thought that especially inXuenced nouvelle the
ologie. For each of the authors discussed, I hope to make clear that

1 Pierre Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith, trans. Joseph Donceel; id., Answer to Two Attacks, trans.

Avery Dulles (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 56.

there were elements in their theology that later enabled nouvelle the
ologie to develop a theology characterized by a sacramental ontology. It will become clear that what attracted the nouvelle theologians to these four authors was their common rejection of an apologetic based on ‘pure reason’ in favour of an approach that took more seriously the historical and experiential conditions of human existence, so that, to use Pierre Rousselot’s expression, ‘eyes of faith’

were necessary to detect the sacramental connection between nature and the supernatural.

N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U RY ‘ F O OT N OT E S ’ TO K A N T The impact of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) on modern theology has been profound. This is not to say that Kant is a modern-day Church Father. The most inXuential Catholic schools of thought in the nineteenth century expressed strong disagreement with the philosopher of Ko¨nigsberg, as they attempted to uphold the objectivity of divine revelation in the face of the immanentism and subjectivism that gained ground in the modern period following Kant. Modern theology’s critical interaction with Kant has thus been diVerent from the medieval appropriation of St Augustine; the oft-quoted statement of Jaroslav Pelikan that we must write the history of Western theology as a ‘series of footnotes’ to Augustine is not directly applicable to the impact that Kant has had on modern theology.2 But, of course, footnotes do not just contain references of approbation or even disapprobation; they also signal a critical interaction with their sources.

And there is little doubt that Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was engaged in a struggle to come to grips with the challenges that Kant had posed. In that sense it is true that modern Catholic (as well as Protestant) thought heavily footnotes Kant.

The problem that Kant posed for nineteenth-century theology concerned the possibility of divine revelation. Accepting the scepticism of David Hume (1711–76) with regard to the limited abilities of natural reason, Kant appeared to pull the rug from under the traditional Thomist arguments for the existence of God. If it was true, as Kant maintained, that theoretical or pure reason was limited to observable phenomena and that only moral or practical reason was able to posit the existence of God, then how was it still possible to retain the notion of supernatural revelation? An approach to religion that took its starting-point in the natural, subjective, immanent, and moral needs of human beings seemed diametrically opposed to a theology that began with supernatural, objective, external, and propositional revelation. Religion could be based either

2 Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, i The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 330.

on immanent experience or on external revelation. While Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788) might appear to have salvaged religion in some sense, it certainly was diYcult to reconcile the immanentism of the Kantian moral universe with the Catholic demand for divine revelation. In the period that followed, the question would be how to deal with the modern, Kantian interest in the subjective, experiential element of faith without losing the objective character of divine revelation.

In this context, three distinct Catholic schools of thought emerged in the nineteenth century: traditionalism, semi-rationalism, and ontologism.3 Trad-itionalism dealt with the post-Kantian situation by acknowledging that pure reason was unable to prove the existence of God. It went beyond Kant by arguing that one could not even insist on the existence of God as a moral postulate that made sense of human existence. Rather than begin with human reason—whether it be pure or practical in character—traditionalism insisted that one had to take one’s starting-point in a divine, paradisal revelation and in the Tradition that had passed on this primitive revelation. This traditionalist viewpoint became popular because it dovetailed with Romantic inclinations that were fashionable in theWrst half of the nineteenth century. In France, Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), Fe´licite´ de Lamennais (1782–1854), and Louis Bautain (1796–1867) were the most well-known advocates of the traditionalist position.

And the German Tu¨bingen school of Johann Sebastian Drey (1777–1853), Johann Adam Mo¨hler, and Johann Evangelist Kuhn (1806–87), made common ground with traditionalism in its anti-rationalist tendencies, its appeal to Trad-ition, as well as in its assertion that it was the organic and linguistic unity of society rather than the individual quest of deductive reason that enabled one to make truth claims.4 Pope Gregory XVI condemned Lamennais in 1834 for his acceptance of democratic liberalism as much as for his traditionalist epistemol-ogy5 while the Bautain aVair came to an end in 1844 when Bautain gave up his combination of traditionalism and Neoplatonic illuminationism after attending

3 For the next few paragraphs, I am indebted especially to the excellent introduction of Gerald A. McCool, Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York:

Crossroad/Seabury, 1977). McCool’s book has been republished as Nineteenth-century Scholasticism:

The Search for a Unitary Method (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989).

4 This is not to say that the Tu¨bingen school can be classiWed as traditionalist in the same sense as people like Lamennais and Bautain. Michael J. Himes points out that Mo¨hler became concerned that Bautain did not suYciently distinguish between a natural ‘intellectual faith’ (Vernunftglaube) and the faith thatXows from grace and that Mo¨hler insisted that the discursive reason of the preambles of the faith did serve a positive role, even though he would grant Bautain that the inner intuition of divine existence should be acknowledged (Ongoing Incarnation: Johann Adam Mo¨hler and the Beginnings of Modern Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 231–41).

5 For Lamennais, see Alec R. Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy: A Study of Lamennais, the Church, and the Revolution (London: SCM, 1954); W. G. Roe, Lamennais and England: The Reception of Lamennais’s Religious Ideas in England in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); Louis Le Guillou, Lamennais (Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1969).

Precursors to a Sacramental Ontology 37

the lectures of the Jesuit Thomist scholar, Giovanni Perrone (1794–1876) at the Roman College.6

Like the traditionalist position, the semi-rationalist approach responded to the Kantian critique by accepting Kant’s argument that speculative reason was incapable of reaching beyond the phenomenal world. While Georg Hermes (1775–1831) and Anton Gu¨nther (1783–1863) sharply diVered on some points, from the neo-scholastic perspective their semi-rationalism created a basic kin-ship.7 Hermes, following Kant, insisted that absolute certainty resulted from the moral categorical imperative—namely, the need to establish and preserve human dignity. One had to accept as true any statement that was necessary in support of this categorical imperative.8 Thus, while pure reason could not provide a foun-dation for the Christian faith, practical reason did provide that basis. Hermes’s position, whose Kantian moral categorical imperative appeared to obviate the need for divine revelation, was condemned shortly after his death, in 1837.

This condemnation of Hermes’s Kantian take on theology was an indication of neo-Thomism’s growing inXuence in Rome.

Its inXuence became even more apparent twenty years later, when the teach-ings of Anton Gu¨nther were also condemned and his writteach-ings were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.9 Gu¨nther, a private scholar from Vienna, employed the distinction of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), popular among the Romantics, between Vernunft and Verstand, the former referring to intuitive, the latter to discursive, knowledge. Gu¨nther saw the emphasis on Verstand, both in Aristotle and in G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), as inevitably leading to pantheism.10 Strongly opposing Hegelian pantheism, Gu¨nther insisted on a metaphysical dualism between Wnite spirits and inWnite Spirit, and on a dualism within the world between spirit and nature.11 The charge of semi-rationalism inevitably entered the picture when Gu¨nther took his meta-physical dualism as the starting-point for his argument that the human awareness of its ownWnite nature caused the intuition of faith (Vernunftsglaube) to posit the necessity of the existence of a God whom one could rationally demonstrate to be triune.12 Each in his own way, then, Hermes and Gu¨nther took on the challenge that Kant had posed to human reason, the former by adopting the Kantian moral

6 McCool, Catholic Theology, 48, 54. For Bautain, see Walter Marshall Horton, The Philosophy of the Abbe
Bautain (New York: New York University Press, 1926); Paul Poupard (ed.), L’Abbe
Louis Bautain (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1964).

7 For Hermes, see Karl Eschweiler, Die zwei Wege der neueren Theologie: Georg Hermes–Matt. Jos.

Scheeben: Eine kritische Untersuchung des Problems der theologischen Erkenntnis (Augsburg: Filser, 1926); Thomas Fliethmann, Vernu¨nftig Glauben: Die Theorie der Theologie bei Georg Hermes (Wu¨rzburg: Echter, 1997). For Gu¨nther, see Joseph Pritz, Glauben und Wissen bei Anton Gu¨nther:

Eine Einfu¨hrung in sein Leben und Werk mit einer Auswahl aus seinen Schriften, Wiener Beitra¨ge zur Theologie, 4 (Vienna: Herder, 1963); Karl Beck, OVenbarung und Glaube bei Anton Gu¨nther, Wiener Beitra¨ge zur Theologie, 17 (Vienna: Herder, 1967).

8 McCool, Catholic Theology, 62–3. 9 Ibid. 130.

10 Ibid. 91–3. 11 Ibid. 93–5. 12 Ibid. 96, 104, 109–10.

method, the latter by taking recourse to human intuition rather than to discur-sive reason in arguing for the existence of God.

Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52) and Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855) were the main theologians associated with what Gioberti called ‘ontologism’, a school of thought that for a while was rather inXuential in Europe, partially because of Gioberti’s inXuence at the University of Louvain.13 While accepting the trad-itionalist notion of a primitive revelation that was communicated in history through the gift of human language, Gioberti and Rosmini combined this notion with Augustinian illuminationism. Divine ideas illuminated the human Ver-nunft, so that intuitive knowledge of God was possible as a result of divine illumination. This meant, at least for Gioberti, that direct contact between God and the human mind was possible. The divine Idea of Being was directly present to the human mind. As a result, one did not need to rely on sense experience in order to arrive at a discursive argument for the existence of God. Ontologism’s moderate traditionalism and its rejection of discursive rational arguments for the existence of God proved to be obstacles to the ever stronger party of the neo-scholastic interpreters of St Thomas, who secured the ontologists’ demise by means of two subsequent condemnations, in 1861 and 1866.14

The neo-Thomists were concerned about the proliferation of theological novelties during much of the nineteenth century, and they were determined to prevent post-Kantian idealism from setting the theological agenda. They were particularly agitated by the seemingly cavalier way in which the various nine-teenth-century schools of thought appeared to follow Kant in casting aside Aristotelian appeals to sense experience and to discursive reason. While trad-itionalism, semi-rationalism, and ontologism certainly diVered from each other in terms of how they dealt with the post-Kantian situation, according to the neo-Thomist view, all of these approaches failed to make the appropriate distinction between nature and the supernatural. To put it diVerently, the lines separating the two realms appeared to get blurred, either by nature overtaking the supernatural, as in the case of traditionalism and ontologism, or by the natural gift of practical reason determining the actual contents of the Christian faith, as in the case of semi-rationalism. The neo-Thomists were convinced that by confusing nature and the supernatural, their theological opponents mixed supernatural grace with natural human striving, thereby undermining the gratuity of grace.15

The neo-Thomist movement originated with Luigi Taparelli (1793–1862) and SeraWno Sordi (1793–1865), and it became inXuential in part due to the Jesuit journal, Civilta` Cattolica, founded in 1850 by the Jesuit theologian, Carlo Maria Curci (1810–91). The 1878 papal election of Leo XIII, a former student

13 Cf. ibid. 113–28. 14 Ibid. 129–32.

15 For a helpful brief overview of the neo-Thomist views on fundamental or apologetic theology, see Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 7–25.

Precursors to a Sacramental Ontology 39

of Taparelli, secured the long-term success of the movement.16 Other theolo-gians, such as Alberto Lepidi (1838–1925), Louis Billot (1864–1931), and Re´ginald Garrigou-Lagrange strengthened the renown of neo-Thomist scholas-ticism throughout the early twentieth-century Modernist controversy and be-yond. The most famous of the neo-Thomists, however, were Joseph Kleutgen (1811–83) and Matteo Liberatore (1810–92). Kleutgen took on traditionalism as well as Gu¨nther’s semi-rationalism, while Liberatore was especially inXuential in the condemnation of ontologism. By 1866, the enemies of the neo-Thomist scheme had been soundly defeated. As McCool puts it: ‘Rome was determined to carry through the course of action that it had undertaken; and, in the momentous years between 1855 and 1870 the majority of the bishops and the mass of pious Catholics stood behind Rome and the pope. Rome’s intervention was also amazingly far-reaching. Almost every major force in Catholic theology had been condemned except scholasticism.’17

The neo-Thomist domination received oYcial sanction when, in 1870, the First Vatican Council issued the apostolic constitution Dei Filius and when, nine years later, Pope Leo XIII published his encyclical Aeterni Patris. Joseph Kleut-gen’s hand could be observed in both these documents. In the face of post-Kantian idealism, they reasserted the ability of discursive reason to prove the existence and some of the attributes of God. In one of its best-known statements, Dei Filius maintained that God, as the source and end of all things, could be

‘known with certitude by the natural light of human reason from created things’.18 Furthermore, the apostolic constitution insisted, in typically neo-Thomist fashion, that miracles and prophecies, ‘demonstrating as they do the omnipotence and inWnite knowledge of God, are the most certain signs of revelation and are suited to the understanding of all’.19 Likewise, according to Leo’s encyclical, ‘reason declares that the doctrine of the Gospel has even from its very beginning been made manifest by certain wonderful signs, the established proofs, as it were, of unshaken truth’.20 After having carefully explained the relationship between philosophy and theology, Aeterni Patris held up St Thomas as a continuous source of inspiration. Speaking of the medieval scholastic theologians, the Pope commented, ‘The doctrines of those illustrious men, like the scattered members of a body, Thomas collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order, and so increased with important additions that he is rightly and deservedly esteemed the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith.’21Dei Filius and Aeterni Patris Wrmly ensconced the neo-Thomist quest for a unitary method within the Catholic Church, both in philosophy and theology. Neo-Thomism’s avoidance of the human subject, its lack of a historical

16 McCool, Catholic Theology, 84. 17 Ibid. 132.

18 Dei Filius, chap. 2.1 (DS 3004). 19 Ibid. 3009.

20 ASS 12 (1879), 101; English trans.: Aeterni Patris, 5 <http://www.vatican.va>.

21 Ibid. 108 (Aeterni Patris, 5).

method, and its reliance on discursive reason would dominate Catholic theology until the rise of nouvelle the
ologie and its sacramental ontology.

E C C L E S I O L O G Y A N D D O C T R I N A L D E V E L O P M E N T I N J O H A N N A D A M M O¨ HLER

A Ressourcement Project

It is not surprising that in its reaction to neo-scholasticism, nouvelle the
ologie found in the nineteenth-century Tu¨bingen school, and particularly in Johann Adam Mo¨hler, a source of inspiration. Henri de Lubac was convinced that with regard to ecclesiology Mo¨hler had reopened ‘a great traditional path’.22 Like Mo¨hler, de Lubac turned to the Fathers and to their emphasis on the unity of the Church to inform his ecclesiology.23 De Lubac adopted Mo¨hler’s notion of the Church as ‘continued Incarnation’.24 He also appealed to Mo¨hler’s under-standing of the interpretation of Scripture, especially as the German Romantic theologian had expounded it in one of the appendices to Einheit in der Kirche (1825).25 And, although de Lubac never appealed to Mo¨hler in terms of the latter’s understanding of the nature–supernatural relationship, their anthropol-ogy was none the less remarkably similar.26

22 De Lubac, The Splendor of the Church, trans. Michael Mason (1956; repr. San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius, 1999), 92. Cf. ibid. 266 n. 114; id., The Motherhood of the Church Followed by Particular Churches in the Universal Church and an Interview Conducted by Gwendoline Jarczyk, trans.

Sergia Englund (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius, 1982), 278–9, 310.

23 The notion of the unity of the Church as opposed to individualist piety is present throughout de Lubac’s writings, perhaps most prominently in Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius, 1988);

and id., Corpus Mysticum; The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages: Historical Survey, trans.

Gemma Simmonds, Richard Price, and Christopher Stephens and ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons (London: SCM, 2006).

24 See e.g. de Lubac, The Church: Paradox and Mystery, trans. James R. Dunne (New York:

Ecclesia, 1969), 24. Cf. Susan K. Wood, Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), 83. The inXuence of Mo¨hler is also noted in Austin J. Lindsay, ‘De Lubac’s Images of the Church: A Study of Christianity in Dialogue’ (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, 1974), 28–33.

25 Johann Adam Mo¨hler, Die Einheit in der Kirche oder das Prinzip des Katholizismus, dargestellt im

25 Johann Adam Mo¨hler, Die Einheit in der Kirche oder das Prinzip des Katholizismus, dargestellt im