March 2022 Print

By Fr. Robert MacPherson

The teaching and conduct of the current pontiff has shaken many Catholics to their core. The papacy of Pope Francis seems to be characterized by one shameful scandal after another. How could a pope be willing to sacrifice one dogmatic and moral teaching after another on the altar of globalism? Those that were adamant in their support of the preceding Pope are often the most severe and insulting to the present one: he is denounced as being demonically evil, as not being pope at all, of being a fool, and of many more derogatory attributes. By and large, the ones least surprised or shaken by this pontificate seem to be those in the SSPX. This is largely because the bad fruits of the current pontificate have not sprung out of thin air, but out of a bad tree that has been growing for years, one which had taken root even before Vatican II.

Yet it would be both wrong and simplistic to transpose the accusations of “demonically evil” and “non-Catholic” to all the forerunners of these ideas from a century ago. The truth is a little more complex; it is also far more instructive if we have the patience and wisdom to learn from the past.

Although any theology might be considered new when it is first conceived, the “Nouvelle Théologie” (the “New Theology”) refers now almost exclusively to the theological movement in the Church from the 1930’s to the 1950’s.¹ In brief, it was an attempt to revitalize and “Catholicize” the already condemned errors of modernism. To better understand why any Catholic should wish to do so, one must appreciate the political and philosophical influences of the era that characterized the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

On the political side, the growing antagonism of anti-Catholic governments towards the Church prompted a response from the Church and Catholics to insist upon the importance of adherence to Rome. The history of the First Vatican Council is itself a striking reminder of the opposition of the City of God and the City of Man. The Council, which was defining papal infallibility and the rights of the Church, was itself interrupted by a Freemasonic revolution intent on overthrowing the Church. This harsh division, so different from the ages of Faith, stamped its character not only on the evolving political powers, but upon the Church herself and upon her faithful. As anti-Catholicism was typified by opposition to Rome, so too fidelity was typified by an absolute adherence to Rome.

Rome, of course, had always been the head of the universal Church, but a simple example can highlight how varied the notion of “adherence” might be. Citizens of a nation at peace have little problem in critiquing government policy (at least until recently), the wisdom of their leaders’ decisions, or the like. Let the same citizens do so in time of war and they will soon find that a cloud of suspicion hovers around them. Are they challenging the authority? Do they sympathize with the enemy? The gravity of the external threat can compel an exaggerated and mistaken notion of loyalty. This is not to say that “war measures” are not reasonable during war, but that does not make those measures the inherently necessary methodology for times of peace.

The Church’s war had been intensifying for centuries. The principles and powers of Freemasonry had taken deep root, and they led to open war with the Church. The faithful responded by a deeper expression of loyalty to Rome; there was a greater insistence upon the authority of the magisterium and the infallibility of Rome. On the part of the hierarchy, there was a centralizing of power. Rome was to assume the brunt of the burden in dealing with the non-Catholic governments, against whom the local bishops were considered or assumed to be too weak and ineffective. Yet Rome’s interventions in national affairs did not always show the strength or prudence that would seem to accord with her divine claims. A sound Catholic recognized therein the human element in the Church hierarchy; more liberal minds felt the Church was becoming more insular and detached from the real world.

What solution lay at hand for a mind convinced that the Church was thus drifting from its apostolic mission and fading into irrelevance? As all too often is the case, many men turned to what was ultimately a worldly solution in order to answer the problem of the world. The fault—so argued these “new theologians”—was not with the Church as such, or with her revelation, but with the outdated formulae in which that revelation was ensconced. Such arguments manifested that these men had already become enchanted with the philosophy that they would then try to baptize, namely, existentialism.

Yet one would be mistaken to think that these men opened up a book on a clearly defined system of thought and memorized it by rote. Existentialism was a tangled web of prevalent ideas. It existed in many forms. It was an intoxicating atmosphere that promised purpose and vitality to thought and action. Fr. Dominique Bourmaud summarizes the movement accurately and generally by saying that it is “the philosophy of the concrete and of that phenomenon which is human existence,”² but such was not the definition its early adherents were reading. Another author describes its vision as follows: “the real is only that which exists, and the human existent is a striving to transcend himself in anguish without the possibility of help from any absolute… The striving is blind and the core of existence. Thinking is an instance of this striving; it is not the illumination of reality but merely another blind manifestation of it.”³ Part of its great appeal lay in its seeming vitality and dynamism, in its opposition to stale rationalism as well as to the detached idealism of Emmanuel Kant. It seemed to offer a way to present theology as more than a stoic ordering of ideas. For the Catholic existentialist, the Church is constituted by the religious strivings of Catholics and from the attitudes those strivings produce. All human life is supernatural, because God is always breaking into it; the Incarnation is simply the apex. These are seductive words to those wearied by syllogisms.

The First World War, which had not allowed much time for study, had thrown many Catholics and non-Catholics together in the French resistance movement. They surfaced with a conviction that the presentation of the Church’s position could only be made more attractive if it were placed in terms more vital and existential. In fact, St. Thomas was argued to be an authority for this existentialist approach. Fr. Rousselot, S.J. had written already in 1908 a work entitled “The Intellectualism of St. Thomas.” Fr. Gustave Weigel explains Rousselot’s position: “for St. Thomas the intellectual assent in judgment was a dynamic grasp of the real, and not a mere ordering of concepts in a pattern.”⁴ His work was to garner renewed interest after the war.

As a short aside, it is worthy to note that theology has never been a stagnant repetition of previous statements. There have been many schools of thought. Even among Thomists, there can be a wide variation of emphasis, understanding, and development. The distinctions may seem non-consequential to non-theologians, but there is great leeway of ideas where the Church has not intervened, reserving her solemn judgments for such occasions as the Faith itself was at stake.

Coming back to the case in hand, however, not all were happy with the leeway already given by the Church. In the philosophical arena (as in the political), they thought theology and apologetics were in need of a new energy. Reviving the notion of dynamism seemed to many the way this could be done. The Jesuits and Dominicans both had their representatives among the proponents of what would later become known as the “Nouvelle Théologie.” Most influential among the Jesuits were Fathers Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, and Henri Bouillard; among the Dominicans, Fathers Marie Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, and André Dubarle. All held prestigious editorial or teaching positions in France. In fact, this dominance of French theologians at the core of this movement seems to be one of the chief reasons for something of an academic oddity: the movement as such is virtually always referred to by its French appelation (“Nouvelle Théologie”) regardless of the language being used (rather than by its equivalent meaning in the given languages, e.g. “New Theology,” “Nueva Teología,” etc.).

As mentioned earlier in the article, these men did not examine a definition of existentialism and then embrace it as an abstract theory. They were entranced not so much by a theory as by a mood, an attitude, one that was sweeping Europe and which they became caught up in. At first it might have appeared only as an interior attraction, with the person little grasping his own reason for that attraction. “A Catholic with existentialist preoccupations will find the consideration of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, a living human thing, very congenial. On the contrary, a legalistic consideration of the Church as an abstractly fixed juridical institution will be annoying.”⁵ Or again, the one with existentialist leanings will see his purpose in Apologetics as being to inspire a longing for Catholicism rather to demonstrate the rational validity of the act of Faith. Nevertheless, where both attitudes may have their place, the existentialist philosophy could only support one of them. The reason for this will be more evident later in the article when we consider its corruption of the notion of truth and Faith. As a consequence, theologians promoting an existentialist viewpoint drifted ever further from seeing the perennial validity of the Church’s magisterium.

Before considering some of the “New Theologians” themselves, a word or two is due to the Catholic French philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861-1949). His influence on the Nouvelle Theologie is widely recognized, and particularly on De Lubac. In 1906, Blondel proposed a new definition for truth. Instead of the classic definition “the adequation of intellect and reality,” he substituted “the conformity of mind and life.” In his obscure and controversial work L’Action, (1893), he argued from “human experience, and maintained that it pointed to, and in the end required, the supernatural. Thus by what was known as “the method of immanence” he arrived at the transcendent. By “action” he did not mean only activity but all that is involved in the human response to reality, including affection, willing, and knowing.”⁶ In addition to its Pelagian spirit by which the natural somehow leads to and necessarily requires the supernatural, Blondel’s position undermines the absolute nature of truth. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange thought that Blondel little foresaw the terrible consequences that his theories would have for the Faith. The “New Theologians” preferred this new and “dynamic” definition of truth. But the error of all that they would build upon this foundation of sand can already be seen in Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s rebuttal:

What “life” is meant in this definition of “conformity of mind and life”? It means human life. And so then, how can one avoid the modernist definition: “Truth is no more immutable than man himself, inasmuch as it is evolved with him, in him and through him.” One understands why Pius X said of the modernists: “they pervert the eternal concept of truth.”⁷

Indeed, by binding truth to experience, existentialism—for all its assertions of believing in nothing but a “concretely lived reality”—cannot help but fall into hopeless subjectivism. “Everything beyond the subject is known only in its ‘I’ relevance, never in itself.”⁸

Having now an idea of the spirit that animated the new theologians, let us consider how they proposed to reform the Church. De Lubac listed four things that he perceived as “deficiencies” in the Church. These things, he said, accounted for the Church’s weakness in her interior life, in the sense of the supernatural, and for the corresponding rise of atheism. The first “deficiency”: the contrast in many men between their secular knowledge and their catechetical instruction which resulted in a certain dualism in their knowledge. For example: science, evolution, polygenism on one side and creationism and monogenism on the other. Once one recognizes that De Lubac was not simply advocating for Catholics to better understand and defend their position, but some kind of “dynamic understanding” that would allow a new presentation of Catholic doctrine, one sees how absurd such a position must be. No amount of representation can change the fact that the human race originated from a single pair of parents (monogenism) such that it can be made more appealing to a polygenist.

The second perceived “deficiency” was a “poorly balanced doctrinal edifice” whose “dominant concern is less to seek an understanding of faith, to be nourished on mystery, than to respond to heresies.”⁹ By this weak doctrinal edifice was meant too much emphasis on theological argumentation based on Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. De Lubac did not deny the validity of such reasoning, but he argued that it was only preparatory. The surest path to understanding the faith was not in the definitions and divisions of the scholastics, but in the contemplation and experience of the mystery of revelation. This desire for a more profound experience of revelation at its source invariably leads the existentialist to do two things: first, to set aside centuries of theological development and second, to “return to the sources,” for example the early Fathers of the Church. This was ostensibly to arrive at a purer expression of Faith before the stagnating effect of scholasticism had intervened. Among these, they preferred the Greek Fathers whose manner of expression was often more mystical, and whose theological precision did not develop as quickly. The more mystical and metaphorical the expressions, the more freedom they allowed for reinterpretation by contemporary theologians.

The third internal “deficiency,” according to De Lubac (and in his mind likely the most important), was “a duality going so far as to be a kind of separation between nature and the supernatural.” He argued that this had become so problematic that it would deny the “intimate relation between them, an ordination, a finality.” Although it is true that it is possible to separate these aspects (natural and supernatural) in an artificial and dangerous way, the distinction between the two is essential both for understanding the Faith and for progress in virtue. De Lubac’s assessment of scholastic theologians was that they had pushed the distinction too far. As will tie in with his next point, a “return to the sources” was necessary in order to reclaim what was lost. Effort must be focused on recovering “the ‘breadth and depth’ of the tradition, including the Scriptures and the Fathers. These were seen as crucial to the articulation of a ‘redemptive theology,’ which would bring the faith to bear more fully on the lives of Christians living in the world.”¹⁰

Although De Lubac’s writing is always touched with moderation, the mistake in his assessment seems to have been demonstrated all too quickly. For centuries, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church had found and taught the true relationship between nature and grace, showing their distinction and complementarity. De Lubac’s attempt to re-establish this doctrine by focusing on the “intimate relation” and common finality of grace and nature led unhappily in his disciples to the merging of the two elements—and consequently promoted two opposing errors: a naturalist spirit on the one hand and a pseudo-supernaturalism on the other. On one side, one’s natural efforts are considered salvific (and thus for example, we are told that there is “good” in every religion; it matters not that the religion is man-made. God is somehow obliged to reward natural goodness with supernatural beatitude). On the other side, there is a tendency to proclaim as divine any and every inspiration one has (and so for example, all the claims that every innovation that takes place in the Church is the “work of the Spirit”). This confused mixing of the natural and supernatural would later become one of the fundamental errors in John Paul II’s first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, which links the redemption of man more to the Incarnation than to the sacrifice of the cross.

Finally, De Lubac complained of the “rationalist spirit of those theologians who…can inventory, arrange, and label everything, and who have answers for all objections—but who have, unfortunately, lost sight of the mystery of the Lord.” It is quite true that a theologian may operate in a rationalist spirit; one might study God without loving Him. But the fundamental “mystery” in theology comes from the immensity and infinity of God—it does not require obscurity of language and abandonment of years of theological development to maintain the mystery. Quite the contrary, the more one penetrates the profundity of God, the more he understands how incomprehensible the Divinity really is. But what De Lubac was especially trying to highlight by this supposed “deficiency” in the Church’s magisterium was her neglect of ressourcement theology.

This desire for a “return to the sources” (ressourcement) was a universally held position by advocates of the Nouvelle Théologie. It has already been mentioned above how this allowed a means to circumvent the precisions of scholastic theologians. However, equally if not more important to these renovators was emphasizing the notion of history in positive theology. Positive theology is “the part of theology which seeks to establish the truth of the Church’s teaching from the evidence of Scripture, tradition, and the analogy of faith, i.e., consistency with the whole body of Catholic doctrine.”¹¹ History has its place in this labor, of course, because the work of salvation was realized in a particular time and place. But for the innovators, the role of history in revelation was considered intrinsically tied to the revelation. So intimately united are the two, that the revelation can only be understood by understanding the time. As the times and cultures evolve, then so naturally will the understanding of the revelation, which—if it is to be current—must evolve with the times. For example, the Jews had a notion of the spirit world, so Christ may well have spoken of “angels” simply to refer to a spiritual influence from above. But if our modern culture is not open to the notion of angels, then certainly there is no reason to say that this is part of revelation; Christ was only speaking according to His time. Contained in such principles were the seeds to undermine the whole body of divine revelation. Champions of the Church’s teaching were not long in stepping forward to denounce this re-packaging of liberalism and naturalism.

To Fr. Pietro Parente, one of the most eminent and respected of Italian theologians, belongs the credit of first employing the expression “Nouvelle Théologie” to describe this dangerous movement. He critically assessed the movement and condemned it in an article written for the L’Osservatore Romano in 1942. The innovators did not at all care for the title, as Parente clearly linked them to the already-condemned errors of Modernism.

A couple of years earlier, Pius XII’s personal theologian Mariano Cordovani had already warned against the “new theological tendencies” at a conference held at the Angelicum, the Dominican Order’s house of studies in Rome.

In 1946, Pius XII weighed in on the debate personally in two addresses directed towards the superiors of the two most illustrious orders emmeshed in the debate: one address was given to the superiors of the Jesuits, the other to those of the Dominican order. He urged them to abandon the new and dangerous theological approach and to return to its antidote, namely Thomism.

Deserving of special note, and whose article on the matter is as applicable today as it was when it was written is Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. He was one of the most competent and combative defenders of Catholic orthodoxy of his time. A professor at the Angelicum in Rome, he was also an advisor to the Holy Office. Recognizing the dangerous positions that many theologians were now promoting, the respected Dominican wrote an article which would later be published under the title, “Where is the New Theology leading us?” It should not be surprising that the publisher of the Revue Thomiste, an influential Dominican journal founded in France, was a fellow Dominican; however, what was disappointing (if not altogether unexpected from a liberal) is that although he showed every sign of “respect” to his liberal contemporaries, he simply refused to publish Garrigou-Lagrange’s article, the reason apparently being that too strong a blow from the representatives of the Magisterium would stifle “dialogue.” Fr. Garrigou Lagrange simply had the article published in the Angelicum’s own journal in 1946. The article came as a hammer blow upon the liberals. It expertly tackled the false principles and arguments of the new theologians.

Consider his response to the misleading attack against by Fr. Bouillard against Thomism. Fr. Bouillard had written that the Council of Trent had not intended to “canonize an Aristotelian idea, nor even a theological idea conceived under the influence of Aristotle. It simply wished to affirm, against the Protestants, that justification is an interior renewal. Toward this end, it used some shared theological ideas of the times. But one can substitute others for these, without modifying the sense of its teaching.” An old philosophical system, a new philosophical system—one might think there is merely a question of terminology. But Bouillard is not talking about paraphrasing and synonyms. He is attacking the very notion of whether there can be any stable, human ideas. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange responds: “But how can one maintain the sense of this teaching of the Council of Trent, namely that ‘sanctifying grace is the formal cause of salvation’? I do not say, ‘if one substitutes a verbal equivalent’; I say with Father Henri Bouillard ‘if one substitutes another idea.’ If it is another idea, it is no longer that of formal cause: Then it is no longer true to say with the Council: ‘Sanctifying grace is the formal cause of salvation.’”

Garrigou-Lagrange likewise points out that if the ideas themselves can be substituted, then the idea of truth can be substituted. Consequently, the very expression that “This thing is true” could mean different and even contradictory things in different centuries. He dissects in detail how the notions of striving, history, and progress had warped Catholic teaching based on the principle that “a doctrine which is no longer current, is no longer true,” giving special consideration to how the new theologians had twisted the doctrines of Original Sin and Transubstantiation.

On August 12, 1950, Pius XII published the encyclical Humani Generis. In it, he critiqued and condemned the novel teachings yet again with the full weight of papal authority. Unhappily, the tares had already been sown far and wide, and they would come to choke and smother centuries of the Church’s Magisterium at the Second Vatican Council. Yet the Nouvelle Théologie is already dated. Its aging adherents forever talk about life and vitality while all their work is marked by death and decay. There is only One who can “make all things new,” and His theology is eternal.

Endnotes:

¹ Cf. Mettepenningen, Jurgen: Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (2010), p. 18.

² Dominique Bourmaud, 100 Years of Modernism, p. 190.

³ Weigel, p. 221.

⁴ Weigel, p. 215

⁵ Weigel, p. 224

⁶ https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy-biographies/maurice-blondel

⁷ Where is the New Theology leading us?, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange

⁸ Weigel, p. 222

⁹ Quoted in Murphy, Thomas & the Nouvelle Théologie, p. 9

¹⁰ Murphy, p. 15

¹¹ “Positive Theology,” from Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary, excerpted at catholicculture.org.