Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ: A Model Theologian, 1918–2008 (review)

The author, long serving theology professor at Marquette University, organizes his comprehensive biography chronologically in sixteen chapters. They paint a picture of a dynamic mind moving from a youthful relativism, to a mid-career rapprochement with modernity, to a final synthesis. Dulles’ conversion to Catholicism and his interpretation of Vatican II serve as touchstones of this journey.

Scion of an eighteenth-century American family prominent in the ministry and government service, the cardinal once told me that Dulles represents a corruption of fleur- de-lis, the family hailing from Huguenot stock. Accordingly, three of these French emblems embellished his coat of arms. Carey notes that other family members trace their descent from a Scottish veteran of the Battle of the Boyne possibly named Douglas. Whatever his remote origins, the youthful Avery manifested scant interest in religion. In fact, something of the aesthete marked his precocious prep school career. At Choate, for instance, he published short pieces in the school’s literary magazine. These display an impressive range, embracing Perugino, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Goethe, Ibsen, and O’Neill. Although he practiced Protestantism, scientism and skepticism circumscribed his view of transcendence. He later remarked that these errors hindered his ability to make the submission required by an authentic act of faith. One immediately thinks of Cardinal Newman, mentor and hero of the later Dulles, who recalled in his own biography that, about the same age, he preferred intellectual to moral excellence. This tendency defines that false freedom of thought, or liberalism, which Newman, and Dulles following him, devoted their ripened creative energies to combat.

The road to Rome began with his exposure to the ancients and medievals as a Harvard undergraduate. Philosophical realism countered skepticism, even as it enabled him to integrate his aesthetic interests into a higher synthesis. By his senior year, he was writing on the eclectic mind of Pico della Mirandola, whose Renaissance system bears the influence of Platonism, Thomism, and Cabbalist mysticism. We might be surprised by this nascent interest of the future ecclesiologist. Aidan Nichols observes, however, that Dulles’ prize winning essay contains themes that would later occupy him, including reconciling opposites. Models of the Church and Of Revelation come to my mind as examples. They use a range of paradigms to describe their subject from diverse perspectives. Each is critically evaluated so that a single, enriched vision of the reality investigated can emerge. Although this imitation of Pico runs the risk of syncretism, Dulles insistently defended himself against the relativism imputed to it by critics.

In another striking similarity with Newman, Dulles explains how a religious experience in 1938 enabled his will decisively to surrender to God in faith. Having finished reading parts of Augustine’s City of God, he went outdoors to walk along the Charles River. While randomly studying a tree, he grasped with strength and novelty that the cosmic ordering of ends, and the adapting of means to suit them, could only obtain through the purposeful action of the divine. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James underscores ‘passivity’ as a defining mark of mystical experiences. The subject feels his own will held in abeyance while it is grasped by a higher power. Effectively integrating intellectual and moral excellence, this passivity brought the maturing Dulles to pray for the first time in years. We might also see in this experience the fruition of his aesthetic sensitivity. As St. Thomas avers, “beauty is the pleasure that we take in response to the intrinsic symmetry of truth and goodness. Now freed like the young Augustine after hearing ‘take and read,’” Dulles entered the church as the denouement following the climax.

Dulles reached mid-career just as Vatican II finished, and so became an early interpreter of its legacy. Now teaching first at the Jesuits’ Woodstock College and then at Catholic University, he followed, according to Carey, a “quasi-hermeneutic of discontinuity.” He labeled himself a “progressive” who aimed to rethink Catholic theology. This entailed addressing...