Introduction to the Mystery of the Church by Benoît-Dominique de la Soujeole, O.P (review)

IN THE PREFACE to the original edition, this introductory volume is presented modestly as something of a textbook for a course in ecclesiology that the author has taught at the University of Fribourg. In fact, the book amounts to more than an introduction and much more than a textbook. The author says that he intends to fill a lacuna in the enormous theological literature that followed after the Second Vatican Council. He observes, rightly, that much of this literature involved specialized studies on a point of doctrine or historical studies on the development of doctrine. These things are all valuable and necessary, but what are needed—especially if the Council’s teaching is to be received—are synthetic studies of the doctrine on the Church situated in the continuity of the entire Catholic Tradition. The principal goal of the book is to present this kind of study, and the author succeeds admirably. He achieves a comprehensive systematic doctrinal synthesis that is rare in ecclesiological studies since the Council. The synthesis is nourished by Thomistic categories and resources, above all by the attention to the unity of theology. The Thomistic understanding of mediation informs the entire synthesis. The principles of St. Thomas’s exposition of the New Law are employed to point out a fruitful way toward explaining the unity of the Church that conjoins all the elements of the Church as a complex being. The notion of a potential whole contributes to an understanding of the unicity of the Church and the relationship of separated churches and ecclesial communities to the one, unique Church of Christ, the Catholic Church.

The author says he has been guided by two principal recommendations of the Second Vatican Council: “Dogmatic theology should be based on a solid theology of sources (positive theology) followed by speculative theology that grasps the interconnection of the mysteries of salvation with the help of St. Thomas” (citing Optatum Totius, the Decree on Priestly Training, §16). The author understands a theology of sources as involving an overview of sources from Scripture and Tradition following a progressive order of discovery connected to the history of Church. Doctrinal history is seen as being characterized as having a unity, coherence, and continuity that present day dogmatic theology needs to enter into if it is to remain in continuity with it.

A great a merit of the book is that the author gives an exceptionally clear explanation about what is required for achieving a scientific doctrinal synthesis. The theology of sources prepares the way for, but does not arrive at, a synthesis because it does not distinguish what is first from what is second. This is the task of speculative theology, which strives for knowledge of things by its causes. This means that speculative theology is an order of science and wisdom. It is not limited to asking whether a truth is revealed, but rather seeks to go further and ask what the revealed divine realities are in themselves. What can be discovered through analysis of the inner relations between revealed truths? What is the first truth fundamental to other truths of faith and how does it explain the rest? For the author, a rigorous speculative theology will try to attain “the highest understanding of what is and how it is” (10). It will aim toward a scientific synthesis “in which the partial and derived truths are reconnected to those that explain them (first truths or sources), and altogether these truths will make up the supreme truth.” A synthesis, the author insists, is not a summary, but something organic that is an “explanation of the whole showing the coherence of the constituent elements” (18).

The book is divided into two parts according to its methodology. The first part is a theology of sources which...