From the Editor's Desk
An important centenary looms. On September 8, 1907, Pope Pius X's Pascendi dominici gregis defined and condemned "Modernism" as "the compendium of all heresies" and established vigilance committees in every diocese to ferret out suspected Modernists. In 1910, the motu proprio Sacrorum antistitum mandated an oath against Modernism as a condition for ordination, ecclesiastical advancement, and teaching philosophy and theology in Catholic colleges and universities. Why Modernism was condemned and so vehemently has occupied me for many years—in conversation with many colleagues around the world, some of whom recently gathered at Lake Como to assess Modernism's history and the current state of the question. Over time, I passed from youthful outrage at the condemnation of a "movement" that promisingly engaged questions posed by modernity, to a tempered understanding of how and why the condemnation occurred.
Hans Küng analyzed what was happening in the Church at the time of the Modernist Crisis as a paradigm shift. Appealing to Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he pointed out that paradigm shifts do not occur without a fight, because they challenge the authority of the regnant constellation of powers by forcing fundamental questions: What if this authority were no longer the leading authority? What if it had to admit of new ways of construing human knowledge and authority that would unseat the old ways?
The paradigm shift under way during the Modernist Crisis—and still under way—was precipitated more than a century earlier by the paradigm shift that was the Enlightenment. Its enthronement of reason as an authority above any other (revelation, church tradition, and ordained authorities) led to the American, French, and other revolutions throughout Europe. Monumental changes followed, among them the loss of the Papal States, which for many symbolized culture's emancipation from religion. With modernity's secularization of mind came a secularization of property and services, such as education and health care. This shift established an authority for personal and social organization over against religious authority and so dramatically reduced the Church's direct political control over large populations around the world, freeing the Church—albeit shockingly—to come to rely, finally at Vatican II, on the authority of the Gospels and the lived faith of the whole people of God.
Enlightenment thought raised important questions about the nature of religious knowledge, the relationship of faith and reason, and the interrelationships among religions: If there is but one God, why all these religions? Are all equally valid? Is there but one true religion or many? What, after all, is truth? Who arbitrates these questions and with what authority? A world so enlightened viewed the state as the realm of reason and the church as the realm of faith and sought to build a high wall between these opposed authorities.
Fides et ratio never really left the world stage, but they are once again thrust front and center by Pope Benedict's September 12 address at the University of Regensburg, in which he (now famously) quoted Emperor Manuel II Paleologus's comment on the truth of Christianity and Islam. Where secular states of the 18th and 19th centuries attempted to arrogate reason to themselves—defining it very narrowly, as Benedict pointed out—over against the alleged irrationalism of dogmatic religious authority, the Church attempted to right the record by arguing at Vatican I (1869–1870) to the reasonability of faith: faith sans reason is sheer fideism and reason sans faith is sheer naturalism. Benedict expanded this argument to say that the attempt to ignore rationality in God's nature in favor of voluntarism (or an exaggerated transcendence) leads to a severe distortion of God's image that can have horrific consequences.
In an atmosphere of violent revolutions, Vatican I and Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris (1879) mandating Thomism as the Church's approved system of philosophy and theology ironically led an ultramontane hierarchy to push the Church's theology into erroneous interpretations of Aquinas and the very sort of narrow rationalism that Benedict decries. During the post-Vatican I implementation of Leo's mandate, numerous Catholic scholars were alarmed by excessive truth claims of ultramontane Scholasticism; they saw that it was leading the Church into the same rationalist trap it sought to avoid by vilifying Kantianism. Had these neo-Scholastics embraced a less fear-ridden reading of Vatican I's Dei Filius, they might have broadened the notion of reason rather than restricting it. They might have seen that Kant himself, with his concept of practical reason, was attempting to broaden reason as a faculty that gave "access to reality as a whole" (Benedict's address). They might even have warmed to Schleiermacher's attempt to go beyond Kant by positing an epistemic operation that underlies both knowing and willing and seen that Schleiermacher's anthropology is not the subjectivism critics made it out to be.
The Modernists' alarm at the restriction of reason led some scholars to investigate non-Thomistic systems of thought to see whether they might be serviceable to the Church's mission. In so doing, they laid themselves open to charges of dining with the devil with a very short spoon. Indeed, some unduly venturesome scholars deserved the charges leveled at them. Many others, however, were circumspect, devoted churchmen and churchwomen, whose publications—had they been read in the spirit of their writing—might have saved the Church generations of counterproductive shunning of all modern thought with its emphasis on critical, historical scholarship. After all, most Modernists agreed with Nietzsche's critique of historicism (in The Use and Abuse of History [1874]), namely, that it is antithetical to the transcendence that Catholicism and all great religions proclaim as what makes us most human. What I am suggesting, therefore, is not a capitulation to modernity, but what Friedrich von Hügel and George Tyrrell pleaded for: a critical openness to the best of modern thought (and of postmodern and post-postmodern thought as well).
David G. Schultenover, S.J.
Editor in Chief