For the Defense and Beauty of the Catholic Faith: The Rise of Neo-scholasticism Among European Catholic Intellectuals, 1824-1879

Introduction

HISTORY SOMETIMES CREDITS Pope Leo XIII, whose pontificate extended from 1878 to 1903, with inaugurating a neo-Scholastic revival among Roman Catholics that lasted essentially until the Second Vatican Council. On one level, there is good reason for making such a claim. After all, Leo's encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) commends Thomism as the apex of Christian learning. In his encyclical Leo entreats the leaders of the Church to "restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and . . . to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of the sciences." ¹ Certainly thereafter, partly due to Leo's own efforts through the Roman College, Scholasticism became the officially sanctioned method in Catholic theology in universities throughout Europe and America. ²

Yet, on another level, crediting Leo with inaugurating this revival obscures the fact that Thomism was already being rediscovered among Catholic philosophers and theologians, particularly in Germany and Italy, as early as the 1820s. What these Catholics rediscovered in Scholastic theology was a unified, adequate, and most important, orthodox theological method that could defend positive Christianity against the critiques of Enlightenment rationalism. Neo-Scholastics wrote treatises, published journals, instructed clergy, and debated with the proponents of emerging modernism, and thus gained increasing prominence in Catholic intellectual circles throughout Europe by mid-century. Under the reactionary conservatism of Pius IX's pontificate (1846-1878), these neo-Scholastics flourished brilliantly and cooperated with the proponents of ultramontanism to gain even greater prominence by the First Vatican Council. From this angle, it appears then that Leo's Aeterni Patris, rather than inaugurating a neo-Thomist revival, more likely gave official Church sanction to an existing trend among Catholic intellectuals.

The present study sketches the evolution of the neo-Scholastic revival from 1824 to the promulgation of Aeterni Patris in 1879. In one way, the historical end point of this study especially seems arbitrary. One could certainly argue effectively that Leo's neo-Thomism was the metaphysical framework of his social program, and thus his promulgation of Aeterni Patris is more properly understood as a starting point than as an end point for historical consideration. But doing so risks an unhappy historical conclusion that has already been alluded to, namely, that Leo single-handedly inaugurated the neo-Scholastic revival with his 1879 encyclical. Rather, the present study looks in the opposite direction—from Aeterni Patris backwards—and suggests that with his encyclical, Leo centralized and legitimated a movement in philosophical theology that had been in ascendancy for at least two generations. This point about Leo's encyclical is at least as important as its character as a charter for nascent social Catholicism.

Origins of Neo-Scholasticism: 1820-1840

There can be little doubt that, throughout the first third of the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment sent Catholic theologians throughout Europe scrambling for some apologetic platform from which to defend the moral and intellectual claims of positive Christianity. In France, for example, Catholicism's answer to Enlightenment rationalism generally took one of two forms: (1) the French Traditionalism of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) and Louis de Bonald (1754-1840), which advocated a return to the royalism and ultramontanism of pre-Revolution France; ³ or (2) the so-called French Liberalism of Félicité de Lamennais (1782-1854), which advocated the ideals of popular sovereignty, individual conscience, and the separation of church and state so that the Church could rely on its own resources rather than civil governments' for its success. ⁴ The Catholic Tuebingen School provided yet another platform: Johann Sebastian von Drey (1777-1853) and his student Johann Adam Moehler (1796-1838) formulated a historical-cultural apologetic greatly influenced by...