A View from Rome: On the Eve of the Modernist Crisis

The “Modernist Crisis” whose background David Schultenover’s book addresses is a Roman Catholic phenomenon. “Modernism” in this context refers to attempts on the part of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Catholic intellectuals to bring dogma into harmony with modern scholarship. The modernist issues that led to the crisis concerned historical and bibliographical questions that, in turn, affected the interpretation of Biblical texts. The most highly developed system of scriptural exegesis in the previous history of Western Christianity had reached its first great flowering in the twelfth century and was based on the four-fold meaning of scripture. It was a kind of exegesis grounded in theory, and that treated scriptural texts as being different from other texts in important ways. The unity of faith and dogma made it inconceivable that such texts could ever mean something that conflicted with dogma.

The late nineteenth century saw a revolution in the understanding of the Old Testament. Although the attitude that animated nineteenth-century scholarship could be seen as early as Spinoza’s essay on the interpretation of Scripture (1670), it was the German Protestant Hebrew scholar Julius Wellhausen’s work that definitively revised the dating of the Old Testament canon and revealed the conflicts and issues that successive redactions had attempted to resolve. “Modernist” interpretations—Wellhausen’s was the prototype—drew their authority from a kind of scholarship quite different from that of the great medieval exegetes. To the alarm of most ecclesiastical authorities, it was a kind of scholarship not controlled by dogmatic considerations. Wellhausen caused consternation and conflict within Protestant theological faculties by establishing the non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. It was a most inconvenient conclusion for many church authorities, but no competent scholar could deny it.

It was only a matter of time before this issue became a point of conflict between Catholic scholars and an insular, parochial, and intellectually backward Roman hierarchy. A committee of cardinals was established as the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1903. In 1906, this commission issued a decision that required scholars to hold that Moses was “substantially” the author of the Pentateuch. There followed the predictable opposition of scholars to the attempts of a committee of bureaucrats with no scholarly credentials to control their conclusions. Henry Poels, a Dutch priest who was a professor of Scripture at the Catholic University of America, was dismissed by the board of trustees, all of whom were American bishops, over the issue of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch in 1910.

The crisis was brought about by modernism’s most determined and institutionally most highly placed opponent: Pius X (Giuseppe Sarto, reigned 1903–14), the only pope to become a canonized saint since the canonization of the sixteenth-century Pope Pius V (Antonio-Michele Ghislieri) in 1712. Pius X not only condemned modernism in a 1907 encyclical but by 1910 required professors of philosophy and theology to take an oath against it. The premise of Schultenover’s book is an interesting one: What did modernism mean to its enemies? If someone wanted to pursue this question, there is every reason to consider Pius’s thinking and its sources.

Unfortunately, A View from Rome quickly subordinates Pius’s view of modernism to his perception of modernism. The rib-poking italics are typical of the crass and vulgar style of the book. The author claims that drastic and destructive as Pius’s condemnations and required oaths may have been, they were really quite moderate responses to what he perceived modernism to be. The book then loses sight both of Pius X and of modernism itself in order to offer an excursion into the private diaries of the Jesuit general Luis Martín and a review of his disputes with the English province of Jesuits, which in turn leads to an excursus into “the Mediterranean Mind” (passim). This “application of anthropology to historiography” is described by Father...