Modernists and Mystics

Preface

Preface William L. Portier At the 1976 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the late Ronald R. Burke of the University of Nebraska at Omaha convened the first session of a new consultation devoted to the study of what its members called Roman Catholic Modernism. The consultation soon graduated to become a permanent group. But after a review in 1994, the AAR program committee suppressed the group by refusing to renew its place on the program. It was given a five-year sunset reprieve until 1999. For twenty-three years, from 1976 up through 1999, the Roman Catholic Modernism Group (RCMG) continued to meet annually at the AAR. Georgetown’s Elizabeth McKeown has already made the RCMG the stuff of history. At a session of the Nineteenth-Century Theology Group at the 2001 annual meeting of the AAR in Denver, she thoroughly chronicled the Roman Catholic Modernism Group’s twentythree -year run. McKeown took the group’s work as a case study in “how scholarship gets made—specifically in the fields of historical theology and the history of religion, and more generally in the major professional organization devoted to the study of religion in the United States.”1 In the twenty-three preprinted copies of the group’s working papers , one can track the state of the question on scholarship relating to 1. Elizabeth McKeown, “After the Fall: Roman Catholic Modernism at the American Academy of Religion,” U.S. Catholic Historian 20/3 (Summer 2002): 111–31, at 113. ix x William L. Portier the Modernist crisis and the major figures involved in it. The longevity and continuity of the group, along with the practice of circulating papers and responses beforehand, contributed to a very high level of discussion .2 In addition to many individual books and articles, the fruits of the group’s near quarter century of collaboration include three topical, book-length collections: Sanctity and Secularity during the Modernist Period: Six Perspectives on Hagiography around 1900 (Société des Bollandistes , 1999), edited by Lawrence Barmann and C. J. T. Talar; Catholicism Contending with Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2000), edited by Darrell Jodock; and Personal Faith and Institutional Commitments , Roman Catholic Modernist and Anti-Modernist Autobiography (University of Scranton Press, 2002), edited by Lawrence Barmann and Harvey Hill. All the contributors to the present volume belonged to the AAR’s Roman Catholic Modernism Group. Lawrence Barmann and Michael Kerlin were charter members. C. J. T. Talar and Harvey Hill represent the group’s second generation. Modernists and Mystics will be the fourth book-length contribution to come from the group.3 The group’s collaborative work over twenty-three years provides the deep context for each of the essays in the present volume. Studying the Modernists Whole This book is part of the authors’ life after Modernism, in the AAR group sense. But the need for attention to life after Modernism for the Modernists was also a central insight of the group’s work over the years. With the exception of George Tyrrell, the dramatis personae of the Modernist crisis lived well beyond the antimodernist encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis in 1907 and the imposition of the Oath against Mod2 . Copies of the complete set of the Roman Catholic Modernism Group’s working papers are preserved, thanks to Elizabeth McKeown, in the Roesch Library’s U.S. Catholic Collection at the University of Dayton. 3. A book of biographies of those involved in the Modernist movement, Harvey Hill, Louis-Pierre Sardella, and C. J. T. Talar, By Those Who Knew Them: French Modernists Left, Right, and Center (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), also stems from the work done in the RCMG, although Saredella was not a member. Preface xi ernism in 1910. Of the subjects of this book’s essays, von Hügel died in 1925, Albert Houtin a year later, Henri Bremond in 1933, Alfred Loisy in 1940, and Maurice Blondel in 1949. Given their subjects’ longevity, an important part of the RCMG’s work, therefore, was to contextualize in their lives as wholes the involvement in the crisis of the varied Modernist personae. This emphasis resulted in a turn to autobiographies written by Modernist figures and eventually in the book on the topic edited by Barmann and Hill. The group’s turn to autobiography is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it underscores the importance of what Barmann has...