An Avant-garde Theological Generation: The "nouvelle théologie" and the French Crisis of Modernity by Jon Kirwan (review)

There are some periods of the history of theology that cannot be told too often—the fourth century, for instance, or the stretch from the Council of Ephesus to Second or Third Constantinople, and in the West, the long hundred years from the Council of Carthage to Second Orange, and the sixteenth century. Then there is theology in the twentieth century, from Modernism to postconciliar disarray. The heart of this story is the nouvelle théologie, the story of Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, and Henri de Lubac and their impact on the Church at large before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. This last history is important for us first of all in coming to understand ourselves and our own moment in the life of the Church. But also, since this last history dwells on the very question of the historicity of the human mind, it turns out to be important for understanding how we tell all the histories of dogma and theology.

If there is one word by which to characterize the nouvelle théologie, it would be ressourcement. The men associated with it wanted to recover a usable history in the Fathers and in Aquinas, one that made an end-run around Baroque Scholasticism and its revival in the Neo-Scholasticism mandated by Leo XIII, one that would address modern philosophical and political concerns in their own terms with the ambition of making France wholly and vibrantly Catholic.

Kirwan's aim, he says modestly enough, is "to more fully understand twentieth-century French Catholic thought," and in this he succeeds (4). Kirwan thinks to accomplish his aim in two ways. First, he wants to insert the nouvelle théologie into the context of French thought and culture as a whole, where we can see how it was fueled by a general concern for a historically conscious philosophy, a philosophy turned toward the concrete phenomena of life and politics, and a philosophy committed to the dignity of workers and laborers, even as twentieth-century Marxism and Communism claimed to be. This he accomplishes especially in chapter 5, a canvas of French secular and philosophical thought in the 1930s that illumines the theological concerns and why they were posed as they were by the Catholic generation of the 1930s, the years of the coming of age of de Lubac and Chenu and company, which are treated in chapter 6. While the general culture could be looking for a new humanism that might repudiate old patterns of thought, a new political orientation that could contradict older ones, Catholics had to come to grips with change within continuity, with much less room to maneuver, for the central issue—and here Kirwan adopts the words of Thomas Joseph White—was "the relation between the historical character of human existence and human knowledge and the supposedly absolute, unchanging truth claims of Christian revelation" (5).

The second way Kirwan comes to understand the nouvelle théologie is by the kind of generational analysis of history inaugurated by Karl Mannheim, José Ortega y Gasset, and more recently such historians as Jean-François Sirinelli and Michel Winock. Kirwan explains this analysis in chapter 1. The identity of a generation—an intellectual generation, mark—is formed by a crisis to which those born within the same decade or so respond, not always in the same way but in a way that marks them as related to all the others of their generational cohort. So, the French distinguish first the génération de l'affaire Dreyfus that comes to maturity in the 1890s, which is also the generation of the Modernists, where the questions still driving theology in the nouvelle théologie are formulated. This is chapter 2. Chapter 3 deals first with such men as L...