In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: Defending the Faith from Pascendi dominici gregis to Humani Generis Michael Kerlin Introduction O n 8 September 1907, Pope Pius X issued the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, condemning Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies” and establishing rigorous norms within the Roman Catholic Church for dealing with this perceived threat. Modernism itself was at the time a relative neologism in theological discourse, coined to cover and attack a diverse set of movements in philosophy , theology, biblical studies, apologetics and politics. The term may have been a neologism and may have created a false unity, but the currents embraced under it were quite real. On its intellectual side, the side at issue in this essay, Roman Catholic Modernism revolved around three main questions or sets of questions: an apologetic question, a biblical question and a dogmatic question.1 The first set of questions engaged the impact of modern philosophy upon the traditional Catholic apologetics, particularly insofar as this philosophy from René Descartes through Immanuel Kant and beyond forced an inquiry into the subjectivity of human knowing. Thus a devout thinker like Maurice Blondel, working outside ecclesiastical institutions, tried in his now famed 1893 dissertation, L’Action, to enter sympathetically into this inquiry and to show how taking this route itself led to transcendence, a strategy quite foreign to the reigning “classicism” of Catholic philosophers and apologists.2 The second set of 97 1. See R.D. Haight, “The Unfolding of Modernism in France: Blondel, Laberthonnière, Le Roy,” Theological Studies 33 (1974): 631-666. 2. See Blondel, L’Action (1893): Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). Oliva Blanchette’s translation appears as Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). The term “classicism” comes from Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Minneapolis, Minn.: The issues should really be described as the “historical” since they went beyond the more restricted question of the nature of biblical inspiration that dominated Catholic thinking in the early 1890s. Historical critical exegesis of the Bible threatened not only the received interpretation of many biblical texts, but spilled over to the radical questioning of Christian origins by a Catholic scholar like Alfred Loisy in L’Évangile et l’Église (1902).3 This intrusion of historical consciousness into Catholicism inspired not only anxiety but a profound sense of threat among those committed to the reigning philosophy and theology. These developments in philosophy and in biblical scholarship led in turn to an effort to rethink the meaning of dogma itself in a work like Edouard Le Roy’s 1907 “Qu’est-ce un dogme?” an article that provoked an immense body of theological literature in subsequent years.4 Le Roy, like Blondel, will play a major role in the pages that follow in this essay. Although the collective impact of critical history on Catholic intellectuals was massive, the Vatican response framed the controversial issues in resolutely philosophical terms. Pascendi begins its synthetic construction with Modernism’s philosophical foundations, closely ties the historical practices of its innovators to that philosophy , and sees its consequences in deformations of fundamental theological notions such as revelation, faith, dogma and ecclesiastical authority. What is more, the encyclical finds its primary solution to the Modernist threat in a reassertion of the role of scholastic, particularly Thomistic, philosophy in Catholic education.5 It is hardly surprising, then, that the encyclical’s portrayal of the Modernist peril would find some of its staunchest defenders among committed neo-Thomists, especially those with a particularly strong philosophical bent. Prominent among their number was the French Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964). His philo98 U.S. Catholic Historian Seabury Press, 1979). Thus, Lonergan defines the classicist notion of culture as normative: “at least de jure there was but one culture that was both universal and permanent. . .” (xi). Lonergan contrasts the classicist notion with the empirical and sometimes the pluralist notion of culture. The dominant Roman Catholic thinkers of Blondel’s day were certainly classicists by this definition although interestingly Blondel himself fits under the definition taken broadly. 3. See Alfred...

pdf

Share