A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century

INTRODUCTION

     Jesus Christ, my child, did not come to tell us tales.

     During the little time that he had.

     What is three years in the life of a world.

     In the eternity of this world.

     He didn’t have any time to waste, he didn’t waste his time telling us tales and playing charades for us to figure out.

     Very witty charades.

     Very clever.

     A wizard’s riddles.

     Full of double-entendres and tricks and stupid subtleties and complexities.

     No, he didn’t waste his time and he didn’t take pains,

     He didn’t have the time,

     His pains, his great, his very great pain.

     He didn’t waste, he didn’t expend all of that, all of his being, everything.

     He didn’t spend himself, spend everything, he didn’t make this enormous, this terrible expense

     Of self, of his being, (of) everything.

     To come afterwards, with this, by means of this, at this price,

     To come at this price with some code to decipher To decode.

     Tricks, silly nonsense, quid pro quos, clever little antics like a fortuneteller from the town.

     Like a village clown.

     Like a traveling acrobat, a charlatan in his cart.

     Like the town prankster, like the funniest guy in the tavern.¹

These lines by Charles Péguy, a great genius amid many others in twentieth-century Catholicism, express one of the deepest truths about Christianity. In myriad ways, it is a faith that is quite straightforward, almost deceptively simple. A God who came into the world and proclaimed a universal mission of salvation has to be someone who can be broadly understood by everyone. He cannot be a God solely for philosophers, theologians, biblical scholars, psychologists, political theorists, poets, or intellectuals. Neither is his saving action a theory:

     He had an errand to run for us on behalf of his father.

     He did for us what he was sent to do and he went back.

     He came, he paid (what a price!), and he left.

     He didn’t come recount for us extraordinary stories.

     Nothing is simpler than the word of God.

     He told us things that were quite ordinary.

     Very ordinary.

     The incarnation, salvation, redemption, the word of God.

     Three or four mysteries.

     Prayer, the seven sacraments.

     Nothing is as simple as God’s glory.²

But Péguy obviously knows—and is consciously playing on—the vast intellectual tradition that has grown up within Catholicism because of The incarnation, salvation, redemption, the word of God. / Three or four mysteries. In his efforts to make people realize in very concrete terms what a direct act the Incarnation was—it is like a son being sent to the bakery for a loaf of bread, as he says elsewhere—he himself wrote thousands of pages of prose and poetry. In his poem Eve (almost twenty thousand lines long), the last eighty pages describe all the things we will not need on our deathbeds, among which:

     It will not be an Aristotelian who slips

     Under those thick laurel trees,

     And it will not be his thin lips

     That will give us the kiss of peace.

     Quite other lips, a bit more Catholic

     Will plant the kiss on our cheeks.

     A hand less blind, more apostolic,

     Will find us beneath the broad beech.³

Péguy disliked the dominant Catholic Scholastic philosophy (based in Aristotle and Aquinas) that existed in his day. But, as subsequent events in both the Church and the world have shown, although we may not need Aristotle or Aquinas on our deathbeds, we seem not to do well without them—or something very like them that gives us rational moorings—in our everyday lives. The great Irish novelist James Joyce, a lapsed Catholic, claimed to read a page of Aquinas every day, in Latin, to keep his mind sharp because Thomas’ reasoning was like a sharp sword.⁴ (Joyce’s later descent into impenetrable wordplay may make one question whether the tonic always works.) Even Péguy recognized as well as anyone the value of a clear mind like Aristotle’s. And he had a clear enough mind himself to know that philosophy and theology and other intellectual disciplines are natural human acts that will perennially spring into full bloom, particularly when questions of God and eternity present themselves. His own meditations resulted in a quite vivid and sophisticated version of the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s thought, for example, which seemed to him to solve various modern problems through its unique combination of closeness to life as it is actually lived and careful analysis that avoids mere intellectualism.

Such paradoxes are quite common to the Catholic intellectual tradition. And in the twentieth century, as in other centuries, they often enough gave rise to leaden treatises, empty sermonizing, and conventional piety—but also to philosophy, art, theology, poetry, fiction, drama, history, and spiritual writing equal to anything produced in any other tradition, religious or secular. Hardly anyone knows about this today, even among Catholics. This strange state of affairs owes something to the fact that in the last third of the twentieth century—that is, in the years following the Second Vatican Council (1962—1965)—notions of what was Catholic became confused and contested as they had not been earlier. Before that earthshaking event, which had consequences far beyond Catholicism, even secular observers often said: At least Catholics know what they believe. And talented Catholics who made creative use of that rich tradition were often recognized in secular institutions. To take just one example, the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (a protégé of Péguy’s as a young man and a prolific and original thinker) was invited to lecture on aesthetics at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1950 and, around the very same time, on political philosophy by the University of Chicago as well.⁵ Within twenty-five years, however, the kind of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy Maritain practiced so brilliantly in essence disappeared, even from Catholic universities, and the secular world turned back to an old view that Catholicism was some kind of anti-rational fundamentalism. No Catholic would likely be honored, as Maritain once was, by prestigious secular institutions today.

The Great Disruption

It is always difficult to ascribe causes to large-scale social changes, but the story of the modern Catholic intellectual tradition is also inextricably woven together with the seismic shift in global culture often associated with the year 1968, which Francis Fukuyama—a non-Catholic—has seen as the beginning of the great disruption.⁶ That year was a kind of watershed that featured not only the youth rebellion (and sexual revolution) in America and Europe, but the strong emergence of liberation theology in Latin America, tercermundismo and anti-colonialism in other parts of the developing world, and a general decline in respect for authority and institutions virtually everywhere. (It was also the year in which, in the encyclical Humanae Vitae—a radically countercultural and unpopular move—Paul VI repeated the constant Christian teaching since ancient times that artificial contraception is morally impermissible—but that is a story for later.) Radical doubt that philosophy and theology and related disciplines could give some sort of secure knowledge—a doubt that had existed earlier but had been confined to small and specialized groups—also seemed to emerge as almost a default cultural position. Even where spirituality continued to exist or people said in large percentages that they still believed in God, that belief tended more and more to be untethered to any institution and to morph into a kind of do-it-yourself perspective on faith and morals. Needless to say, none of this much helped Catholicism, which has always rested on tradition, authority (pope and bishops), an institution (the Church), and a developed body of thought.

Perhaps even more significant than the external changes, however, there were factors internal to Catholicism itself that led to a loss of familiarity with the Catholic intellectual tradition. Catholicism is by its nature and long practice a kind of community of memory, a Church that holds onto what she believes was revealed by God. And the pope and the bishops—since ancient times represented as shepherds protecting their flocks—are authoritative figures, a magisterium, who set boundaries on what they judge to be compatible or incompatible with the tradition. The opening to the world at Vatican II led to a much-needed decentralization: bishops were affirmed as successors to the apostles in their own dioceses and authoritative in their collegiality with the pope. And the Church rightly moved from an overly institutional and legalistic to a more communitarian and pastoral model that also affirmed the active role of laypeople in the Church and the world.

In the uncertainty of the postconciliar years, cultural currents that were quite distant from Catholicism also entered the Church. Bishops who maintained the ancient positions on faith and morals came to be seen as merely resisting liberal trends. Innovation became for some more important than fidelity—or (creating even greater confusion for ordinary people) it was argued that innovation was a kind of deeper fidelity. And contrary to the intentions of the Council, pope and bishops often found themselves with diminished authority, like their secular counterparts in government, medicine, law, and culture. In these circumstances, it became more difficult to identify what was distinctly Catholic even in the Church herself.

The highly influential Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once described the Second Vatican Council as a decisive break with what went before and even went so far as to say it was one of three such major disjunctions in the history of the Church.⁷ The first came with the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15), the first-century meeting of the apostles and other disciples that many regard as the point of emergence of the new religion, Christianity, from Judaism. The second began with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s official acceptance of Christianity, which began a long period in which Church and secular powers were intermingled. And the third, in the twentieth century, brought a new, indeed radical, reorientation—though toward what was not entirely clear, even to Rahner.

While Vatican II was certainly a massive and fresh impulse in the life of the Church, almost everyone today recognizes how much continuity there was and is between the pre- and postconciliar Church. To begin with, the same Creed that was recited at Masses prior to the Council is still being recited today. The manifold changes in liturgy, theology, biblical criticism, and everyday Catholic life that have roots in the Council are still all in the service of the basic affirmations of the faith. Rahner was right in that the Council was a major turning point, but wrong in suggesting—as he did to some people—that the Church had undergone a transformation that simply broke with virtually the entirety of her previous existence. That many quite well educated Catholics somehow came to believe in a disjunction like this—and that the new situation is somehow superior to what was experienced by the generations of Catholics who lived prior to it—is a sign that something went strangely awry among the faithful and even among quite brilliant Catholic minds.

The debate over continuity versus discontinuity persists into the new millennium. One recent scholar has described the choices facing the Council Fathers:

At stake were almost two different visions of Catholicism: from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from fault-finding to appreciation, from prescriptive to principled, from behavior modification to inner appropriation.⁸

Of course, both elements on either side of these alleged pairs of opposites belong in a fully Catholic vision—both-and, as has often been said, is one of the marks of Catholicity, not either-or. (Yet as the postconciliar period showed, there are limits to both-and. The harder task for the third Christian millennium may lie in discerning when fidelity to the full truth may require saying no in order to realize a larger yes.) Christ commands and threatens as much as he invites and persuades in the New Testament—the words of the founder of Christianity himself are both demanding and consoling, not merely one or the other, as has long been recognized. And they set up the standard. The impulse to raise one side of each pair over the other has led, in a very tangible sense, not only to a lack of fidelity to the Scriptures but to a narrowing and dispersal of the accumulated wisdom of Catholicity into all-too-familiar modern culture clashes between liberals and conservatives. The Catholic Church did well to open herself up at Vatican II to new social and intellectual currents, but just as not everything that went before was wrong, not everything that came after was right.

In the twentieth century, the Catholic Church still faced the age-old questions: eternal truths and contemporary applications, Christian unity and inescapable diversity, God’s word and man’s response. As in the past, such topics had to be handled with a combination of continuity and innovation: continuity, because Truth, though never finally possessed in this life, is always the same and is with us from age to age; innovation, because—perhaps especially in the twentieth century—a new set of temporal realities emerged that no one, Catholic or not, had ever faced before in quite the same terms. The digital revolution alone has altered global culture in ways we are still struggling to understand.

Further Paradoxes

Among the strange paradoxes of the century, the Church was more cohesive and better defined when she faced massive threats, particularly ideologies like Communism, Nazism, and Fascism. When those opponents disappeared, Catholicism often seemed to lose identity and become indistinguishable from other modern philanthropic activities. It is a symptom of this phenomenon that Catholicism succeeded against the Soviet Union, for example, but had a harder time gaining purchase on the open societies of the West. As the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, the distinguished translator and interpreter of the great modern thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, remarked at the conclusion of a powerful defense of papal teaching on sexuality: "The teaching which I have rehearsed is indeed against the grain of the world, against the current of our time. But that, after all, is what the Church as teacher is for. The truths that are acceptable to a time—as, that we owe it as a debt of justice to provide out of our superfluity for the destitute and the starving—these will be proclaimed not only by the Church: the Church teaches also those truths that are hateful to the spirit of an age."⁹ But such voices, especially among world-class Catholic thinkers, became increasingly rare as the twentieth century wore on.

Instead, after Vatican II, a dense jungle of diverse currents of thought came within Catholic academic circles, which more and more seemed to operate like their secular counterparts at non-Catholic institutions of higher learning. This clearly raised the intellectual bar at many such colleges and universities. But it also made it more difficult to see what was distinctively Catholic thinking in various fields, even though the metaphysical and ethical foundations in Augustine, Aquinas, and other great figures remained somewhere in the background. The specialists in various disciplines now only rarely had time to look deeply into the work of colleagues pursuing other modes of thought, and their labors therefore looked like isolated intellectual specialties—in the bad sense that Péguy had identified. It is not at all uncommon in the twenty-first century to find that a Catholic theologian formed in one school of thought knows little even of other Catholic theological currents, let alone of artistic or literary achievements by contemporary Catholics. And vice versa.

A Justification of the Present Book

If there is any justification for a single person trying to cover the various areas dealt with in the present volume—and in a way addressed to non-specialists—it lies in the simple fact that no one has tried to bring together the main strands that make up the modern Catholic intellectual tradition. Perhaps the principal reason that the Catholic intellectual tradition goes largely unacknowledged today is that it has just become too big to be easily grasped. But it is not an impossible task, I believe, to take a synoptic view of the main disciplines informed by Catholic thought, within some sharp limits.

I am quite aware of the dangers involved in this effort. Several years ago, I asked a colleague, a non-Catholic with a doctorate in philosophy from one of the most prestigious state universities, what he thought of Father Frederick Copleston’s A History of Philosophy, a massive eleven-volume, over five-thousand-page achievement and a landmark of twentieth-century Catholic intellectual life. To my surprise, he had nothing but praise: Look, it is the best thing out there by miles. And everybody knows it. The only problem is that everybody also thinks it is great—except in the area where he is a specialist. But philosophers differ so much even within single philosophical currents that you can’t always even get them to agree on the general outlines of a philosopher’s thought. Who else covers so much territory so well?

I am not so foolish as to invite comparisons of the present volume with the towering achievement by Father Copleston. Several friends who heard about the project, including some bishops, assumed I would put together a multi-author encyclopedia of some kind, since it was obvious that no one person could reasonably claim expertise even in a single one of the subjects to which the following chapters are devoted. Even a whole lifetime would not be enough to understand a figure such as Hans Urs von Balthasar or Karl Rahner, a complex movement like phenomenology or modern Thomism, or the intricacies of literature written in several languages by Catholics in the century just past. I am quite aware of these challenges, to say nothing of the limits of my own abilities, perhaps even more than my readers will be. But there are several reasons, if not full justifications, for an ambitious work like the present one.

To begin with, as my colleague noted, there is real value in a survey of a large intellectual field by a single person. Sections written by various authors would have inevitably clashed with one another—Thomists with phenomenologists, Balthasarians with Rahnerians—and might leave readers not only with conflicting interpretations but with real doubts about how the various pieces fit together under the Catholic rubric, if at all. I have my opinions and sometimes sharp judgments about the material offered here, but since I do not have a professional stake in many of these conflicts, I hope I have tried to present differing positions in as accurate and as sympathetic a light as possible. I have tried to do so using as little technical language as possible (although there are a few places where that is unavoidable) and in the hope of explaining at least why the great minds presented here did what they did. To the experts in each of these areas, let me say in advance that I realize there is a great deal more to be said than what I have sifted out. Without sharp limitations, a book of this kind would quickly have become unwieldy and unreadable—indeed, impossible.

But while I hope to have given as fair an account as I can of the various elements included here, I believe I have also presented them from a certain standpoint: that of a Catholicism opened up to the modern world by the Second Vatican Council—and the steps that led up to it—but one that consciously seeks to affirm what is perennially and robustly Catholic. There is a large difference between a confident Catholicism—with its rich theological, moral, and cultural tradition going back into the Ancient Middle East, Egypt, and beyond by way of its Jewish roots, and with its dynamic appropriation of cultural power from Greece, Rome, northern Europe, the Americas, the Far East, and various modern currents of thought—and one in which that richness is bracketed in favor of privileging, instead, the moment in which one happens to find oneself because of its seeming power or inevitability.

Further, even though at the end of the day it is important to thrash out what is true and what is not, there is an earlier, necessary phase of understanding of what has gone before that helps bring the deeper questions before us in their fullness. As Aristotle once wisely remarked:

For those who wish to get clear of difficulties it is advantageous to discuss the difficulties well; for the subsequent free play of thought implies the solution of the previous difficulties, and it is not possible to untie a knot of which one does not know. . . . One should have surveyed all the difficulties beforehand, both for the purposes we have stated and because people who inquire without first stating the difficulties are like those who do not know where they have to go; besides, a man does not otherwise know even whether he has at any given time found what he is looking for or not; for the end is not clear to such a man, while to him who has first discussed the difficulties it is clear. Further, he who has heard all the contending arguments, as if they were the parties to a case, must be in a better position for judging.¹⁰

One of the reasons Aristotle was absorbed into Catholic thought is that he is so Catholic avant la lettre, precisely in this recognition of the importance of examining how others have approached various questions prior to our own efforts to engage them.

Despite appearances, Catholicism has repeatedly returned to this procedure and is likely to be doing so again even now. As the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson remarked before the crisis of the 1960s, but with a historian’s prescience about the precariousness of modern culture: The Church as a divine society possesses an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them. Inevitably in the course of history there are times when this spiritual energy is temporarily weakened or obscured, and then the Church tends to be judged as a human organization and identified with the faults and limitations of its members. But always the time comes when she renews her strength and once more puts forth her inherent divine energy in the conversion of new peoples and the transformation of old cultures.¹¹

If I had to state in a single phrase the perspective from which the following pages proceed, it is this: a theological anthropology on the model broadly outlined by John Paul II, which is to say, a view of man and the world as only fully explicable by the data of revelation, but one that also affirms the modern emphasis on human freedom, the rights of conscience, and the value of reason. That perspective should be a common point of departure for Catholics today, even for those who may disagree with John Paul II about specific questions. In short, I hope to have written from a vision of faith and reason—Fides et Ratio, to borrow the title of one of his most fertile encyclicals—that is both Catholic and intellectually defensible. This approach both preserves the concreteness of God’s work, as Péguy understood it, and is properly modern in the way it seeks understanding of that work.

Intimately connected to this larger vision is a crucial question that still has not received an adequate answer and that runs through all of the following chapters: How does the Catholic Church in the twenty-first century integrate her renewed emphasis on community and pastoral awareness with the equally important and urgent renewal of firm defense of dogmas in faith and morals. Catholicism is not and has never been mere philanthropy, and it is not true to itself, as Anscombe noted, unless it both defines and promulgates its own truths, which shape what it means fully to love God and neighbor. Without those truths, the Church becomes something like a doctor who has a good bedside manner but knows little medicine. She can be comforting and pastoral but cannot really cure and save.

The Modern Context

This book does not move very far outside the Catholic intellectual (emphasis on both qualifiers) tradition in the twentieth century. And by design, it does not deal much with American Catholic thought, which I hope to treat in another volume. Still, before entering that arena, a brief survey of the world in which that tradition functioned may be useful for the understanding of why some ideas emerged, since thought never arises in a pure intellectual void. The general lines are fairly well known. In the developed world, we tend to focus on the progress that has been made in respect for human rights, raising the material level of existence for the people, and widespread literacy that—for the first time in human history—allows almost everyone to be an active protagonist in his own life. Despite the problems that come with all human endeavors, these are real achievements for Catholics and for anyone who believes in the dignity of all human persons, made in the image and likeness of God, and in the need to promote authentic human flourishing.

But there is another side to the story of which Catholics, perhaps more than most, are aware in very concrete terms. After the French Revolution, which as it transformed itself into the Terror notably persecuted and martyred many who had had no part in sustaining the old monarchical order, the Church faced a wholly new social situation. The former system of state churches slowly gave way to secular democracies that were at best indifferent and at worst hostile to religion. France was only the beginning. Germany passed quickly from a collection of jurisdictions to the unity of the Second Reich (1871—1918), which under Bismarck conducted a Kulturkampf (Culture War, 1871—1878) against the Church. In Italy, the unification of the nation in 1870 and the disappearance of the Papal States caused several popes to regard themselves as prisoners of the Vatican, in self-imposed isolation in the Leonine City, which the new Italian government allowed the papacy to retain. The situation was not regularized until the papacy of Pius XI and the Lateran Accords of 1929.

And there is much more. The Lateran Accords were negotiated with Mussolini’s Fascist government, which in some respects made more trouble for the Church after the agreements than before, though the Church operated with relative freedom in Italy compared to in the rest of Europe. The anti-clerical laws in France passed at the beginning of the 1900s by the socialist government of Émile Combes closed at least ten thousand Catholic schools and outlawed religious congregations. Germany’s crisis between the two world wars led to the rise of Adolf Hitler, who sought to wipe out Europe’s Jews. But it is often forgotten that even though he was raised a Catholic, Hitler also intended to crush the Church like a toad. The Third Reich was quite happy to intimidate, imprison, and murder Catholic priests in the meantime, over two thousand of whom wound up in German work camps. Elsewhere, notably in the Spanish Civil War, almost all the bishops were slaughtered along with whole convents, monasteries, and seminaries. When Communism came to the nations of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II, the Church in largely Catholic areas such as Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, among others, endured yet another round of serious persecution and deaths, until the peaceful demise of the Soviet system in 1989. Communist persecution of Catholics in China, Vietnam, and Cuba persisted into the new millennium. On many public fronts, Catholicism faced immediate and armed attacks in the twentieth century, to say nothing of intellectual and social opposition. It, therefore, needed to discern quite carefully what was and was not good in modern culture.

Culture itself, as John Paul II emphasized, became a central influence in the latter part of the twentieth century as perhaps never before, partly owing to the decline of high culture and what must frankly be described as the debasement of popular culture, which had earlier been a vehicle for a reasonably sound world view for the masses. The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, has argued that we have come to the point where culture is now an anti-culture or is so attenuated as to be virtually nonexistent.¹² It is worth adding that a certain scientism—a belief that empirical experiments are the only source of true knowledge—has also demolished even some of the humane secular elements in culture. It is as if all the world has become disillusioned, like Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited who flees the Catholic Marchmain family in the middle of that novel, saying, Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses. Ryder hastens to add, I have since learned that there is no such world.¹³ But many people in late modernity are not so sure, including no small number of Catholics.

The Shape of This Book

The plan of this book is simple. It begins with an account of some of the main currents in twentieth-century Catholic philosophy. This represents not a personal choice but the fact that without philosophy there is no theology. And without theology there is no such thing as a Catholic intellectual tradition. When John Paul II published his encyclical Fides et Ratio, less than two years before the start of the new millennium, he was affirming something that had roots in the Catholic tradition going back to the Gospels themselves: both faith and reason are necessary to a Catholic understanding of God and his world. Since Catholics believe God is the Creator of everything, the truths of faith and those of reason cannot contradict one another, for they refer ultimately to the one who is Truth. And truth allows for different avenues of approach. John Paul II gave a nod to Aquinas as a model for how to be a Catholic thinker, but he also made clear that Catholicism has no official philosophy. In the shift from Thomism, dominant in Catholic philosophy prior to Vatican II, to the other philosophies that later became more prominent, the pope himself—a practitioner of personalism and phenomenology—and Joseph Ratzinger—his successor (as Benedict XVI) and an Augustinian—were living examples of the philosophical pluralism that arose within the Church. The gains and losses of that shift are part of the main storyline in twentieth-century Catholic philosophy. In the end, however, Catholicism is by nature a faith that needs what John Paul II called "a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range" (Fides et Ratio, 83). Rediscovering that dimension among the pluralism inside and the skepticism and relativism outside of Catholicism remains an urgent task for any Catholicism worthy of the name.

Theology, of course, also has relations with several of the other cultural dimensions examined here. Catholic theology is dependent on a prior revelation. As Aquinas would say, in technical terms it is a subalternate science. Its data are the data of revelation just as the data of physics are the facts we observe in the empirical world. The three or four mysteries of which Péguy spoke can never be fully explained by theology because by definition a mystery is not a problem that can be solved. It is something that is presented to us and lies beyond our ability to grasp fully. A person may deny that the Christian revelation is true or even that communication from God as such is possible—or possible to understand—the standard atheist or agnostic premises. But the proper distinctions having been made, that is not the Catholic position, and careful attention both to revealed truths and to truths accessible to reason essentially defines Catholic theology. As John Paul II mentions in Fides et Ratio, the dialogue between faith and reason is never finally concluded. How that dialogue transpired over several tumultuous decades after Vatican II is a fascinating and little-known story.

Furthermore, the development of Catholic theology is not shaped solely by the efforts of individual theologians working on various problems. It is also significantly, and sometimes sharply, directed by authoritative statements from the Church’s magisterium, or teaching office. To outsiders, this may seem as though mere arbitrary exercises of power are used to prevent thought, roughly parallel to what would be the case if a secular government tried to interfere with the work of a research professor. There have been cases in Church history—most notably Galileo’s—when the Church has let herself be twisted sideways and gone beyond her proper competence in such matters, as a fuller Catholicism understands. And that has unfortunately cast habitual suspicion on her other authoritative statements for some people. But the parallels with the secular case are not quite appropriate because Catholic theology takes as its proper material of study the revelation found in the Bible and the tradition of understanding that revelation (even as it adds, with Aquinas, that the argument from authority based on human reason¹⁴ is the weakest of all arguments).

After Vatican II, the Church went through a period of catching up with modern Scripture studies. She also had useful criticisms and contributions to make to a method developed outside of her purview. Revelation is something larger than Scripture for Catholics: the reality of the history of Israel and the life of Christ and the witness of tradition, in addition to the actual biblical texts themselves, all have to be factored into any Catholic understanding of what God has done. But since scriptural studies underwent several revolutionary phases in Catholic circles during the twentieth century, those too need to be addressed here because of their significant impact on how scholars in various fields understood revelation to have occurred and also how they debated the place of newly won perspectives on the theological and philosophical enterprise. This process is, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, still only in its early stages. History, archaeology, textual criticism, and other disciplines await full integration into other fields of thought.

For a Catholic account of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, something also has to be said about liturgy. Since it is a firm Catholic principle that lex orandi, lex credendi, changes in various practices clearly reflect some prior changes in thought; however, it is often forgotten that they produce such changes as well. For example, it has often been said that the shift from Latin to the vernacular in the Mass, which was not mandated by the Second Vatican Council incidentally, gave lay people the notion that if something as basic as the Mass could change so drastically, then pretty much anything else could as well. Any real Catholic, traditionalist or progressive, would have to say there is something wrong with that attitude. But perhaps even worse than this attitude was the loss of mystery and elevation, also universally admitted, owing to the kinds of vernacular translations we have had. Some languages—I talian, for example—seem to retain some of the dignity of the old liturgy. But English has fared quite poorly. Whatever the intentions of the translators—and ideological suspicions are not entirely unfounded—ours is not a great era for exalted language. Much of the English Mass oscillates between the banal and the maudlin, even after the reform of the reform by Benedict XVI.

A similar problem has crept into contemporary translations of Scripture. It was inevitable and even necessary that the real achievements of modern scriptural scholars be reflected in newer translations. But it was doubtless also inevitable that those translations, at their best, though better from the standpoint of technical accuracy (happily the Good News Bibles and other gimmicky versions died a mercifully quick natural death), would not exactly rise to the level of the old King James or Lutheran Bibles or even the serviceable Douay-Rheims English version. The great Anglo-Catholic poet T. S. Eliot said of the Protestant New English Bible, which used dynamic equivalence rather than strict construal, that it astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.¹⁵ Catholics fared little better. At the very moment when the Catholic Church was for the first time really encouraging laymen to read the Bible themselves and be inspired by direct contact with the living Word of God, the Church was slow to provide the kinds of translations that might lift the hearts and minds of literate laypeople. The beautiful opening of Psalm 23 came out clunkily in the widely used Jerusalem Bible: Yahweh is my shepherd, I lack nothing. The highly gifted British convert Ronald Knox also flubbed: The Lord is my shepherd. How can I lack anything? The New American Bible, which appeared first in 1970 and then, revised, in 1986, did all right, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. But when even one of the best-known and loved lines gets such uneven treatment, it is a clear indication of a much wider problem of contemporary culture and its effects on the basics of belief.

Some of the main divisions of the subject in these pages may evoke skepticism. Do things like literature, culture, and historical studies really play a central role in an intellectual tradition? I thought so before I began writing, and my look into the kind of work produced in these three fields in the twentieth century convinced me still further. One of the main themes that will emerge later in the text is the cultural situation of an intellectual tradition in an age when the intellect itself has come to be distrusted, partly because of the use that has been made of it. I am not the first or the only person to have noticed that the kind of culture we now inhabit, which seems to limit reason to scientific and technical fields and to put all other manifestations of human thought into the category of fantasy, may need to undergo a very public, broad-based shift before it will even be possible to consider faith as something more than mere emotion or wish fulfillment. Literature and other cultural creations, with their ability to bring before us things that the dominant cultural forces may have marginalized or brought to premature closure, are particularly helpful under such conditions.

Some readers may remain doubtful that history, literature, and cultural studies can do the work that hard-nosed philosophy or theology can do. The past, we often hear, is just too complex, too susceptible to ideological distortions and anachronisms, and too past to be of much use in trying to sort out our problems today. If we take this view to its logical conclusions, however, faith rooted in sacred history, the stories of the Bible, and the traditions of the Jewish people and of the Church—which is one of the distinguishing features of Judaism and Christianity—simply becomes impossible. Whatever uncertainties, gaps, and conflicts of interpretation may exist with respect to biblical history and significant events in Catholic history, without some effort to hold on to the golden thread of the tradition and the action of Divine Providence in history amid the various twists and turns of the labyrinth, there simply is no maintaining the Catholic faith. Some of the literary figures examined here help to recover a living sense of Catholicity precisely within modern contexts. A need to do that even more effectively may in fact be one of the most difficult problems—and significant opportunities—for the Catholic intellectual tradition, as I hope I have shown in the concluding chapters.

So this is no exercise in what centuries ago Malebranche had already dismissed as mere polymathy. A central question that faces anyone who wants to present Catholicism in the modern world is whether any discursive account has much value beyond that of mere curiosity. Much of what the Catholic intellectual tradition faces today is the sheer stubborn assumption, fueled directly and indirectly by figures like Nietzsche, that Catholicism and all comprehensive explanations of human life are idols—partial, credulous, overconfident, power-seeking, compensatory, and discredited at the outset beyond all recall because nothing can be credited that is the result of any fallible human agent. Despite the depressing aspect this cultural attitude sometimes presents, it has an oddly salutary effect as well for those of us not inclined to place our trust in professors.

Jesus Christ did not argue much for himself or his Father or the whole sacred history that Catholicism presupposes. Rather, he did something that still has reverberations all over the world and will have into the future. After all the rational efforts, in the end, as Péguy and other great modern figures have noted, the Catholic intellectual tradition is held to a high—the highest—standard:

     He spoke to us without digressions or complications.

     He didn’t put on airs, embellish things.

     He spoke uniformly, like a simple man, crudely, like a man from town.

     A man from the village.

     Like a man in the street who doesn’t search for his words and doesn’t make a fuss.

     When he chats.

     Also, given that he spoke to us and that he spoke to us directly,

     Given that he spoke to us in parables,

     Which we call similitudes in Latin,

     Since he didn’t come to tell us tales,

     Since he always spoke to us directly and plainly

     To the letter,

     On the level,

     Always in response, we must always hear him and listen to him literally.

     Directly and fully on the level.

     Our brother, our big Brother did not trick us for the pleasure of being clever.

     We ought not to trick him for the pleasure of playing the fool.

     And it would be tricking him to look for mischief where he didn’t put it.

     To hear, to search, to want to hear; to imagine;

     To warp;

     To hear his word other than how he said it.

     Even to listen other than how he spoke.¹⁶

Part One

FAITH AND REASON

Chapter 1

The Thomist Revival and

Preconciliar Catholic Thought

In the summer of 1901, on the very threshold of the twentieth century, Jacques Maritain and Raïssa Oumansov, his future wife, were strolling through the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. It was not the usual lovers’ scene. They were both studying sciences at the Sorbonne and were in deep despair over the bleak picture of life entailed by scientific materialism. They swore a mutual suicide pact: if they could not find something more worthy to live for, they preferred to die, together. But things moved on swiftly from there. Charles Péguy took them to the lectures of Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, where they and many others heard that there might be other dimensions, more human and philosophically defensible dimensions, to reality. They read in Maurice Maeterlinck, a popular Belgian novelist, about a holy man—also a kind of novelist—named Léon Bloy, who lived in Paris near Sacre Coeur. They visited this poor and highly eccentric figure. In June 1906, Bloy was their godfather as they were received into the Catholic Church, not knowing what would follow, but prepared even to give up the life of the mind, if necessary, for an authentic and fuller existence.

This strange story, involving the most influential Catholic philosopher in the twentieth century, reflects what might be called the characteristic struggle to maintain both a life of faith and a life of reason in the century just past. The last sentence in Bloy’s novel La femme pauvre would be quoted by many Catholics—sometimes the most intellectually adventurous—during the following decades: The only sadness is not to be saints (Il n’y a qu’une tristesse, c’est de n’être pas des saints). Some would take this to mean that holiness has nothing to do with the head, that it is all a matter of Pascal’s famous contention that the heart has its own reasons and it is the heart that responds to God. In the face of rational objections to the mere idea of the divine, it is an understandable reaction. But it is not a wholly Catholic reaction, in that Catholicism, more than any of the other forms of Christianity, has always insisted on a connection of the head with the heart in response to God.

At the other end of the twentieth century, in September 1998, just two years before the beginning of the third Christian millennium, Pope John Paul II issued Fides et Ratio, one of the most far-seeing encyclicals of his globally influential papacy. As the name (On Faith and Reason) implies, the text—the fruit of his lifelong efforts as an academically trained philosopher and concerned pastor—aimed to bolster belief, of course. But it also asserted strong claims, in a skeptical postmodern age, for the powers of reason. (His successor, Benedict XVI, was to make a similar argument—pointing out the importance of believing in a God who is rational in order to avoid religious extremism and violence—tn a controversial 2006 speech¹ at the University of Regensburg, where he had taught as a young professor.) Catholicism, unlike several other religious traditions, has long recognized the importance of philosophy for theology. But it would no doubt have surprised Voltaire or other intellectuals since the Enlightenment that the Catholic Church and the popes of Rome would, at the end of two thousand years of Christianity, be championing reason in a strong sense at the very moment when most secular thinkers believed it to have quite limited scope.

Fides et Ratio was also, however, the product of a complex development within the Catholic Church over the whole course of the twentieth century, in which Catholic philosophy shifted from a heavy emphasis on the thought of Thomas Aquinas—the place where Maritain made his greatest contributions, for which he is cited by the pope (FR 74)—to an eclectic mix of various ancient and modern philosophical currents. Some of those currents, instead of encouraging the pursuit of perennial philosophic questions—Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life?, as John Paul summed them up—limit themselves to technical issues of ordinary language or logical consistency and declare more ambitious uses of reason illegitimate. John Paul II called upon philosophy—and philosophers, inside and outside the Church—to become more adventurous and ambitious and to regain confidence in the powers of reason to lay hold of all things, human and divine. For him, this was not only an abstract intellectual issue. He had suffered under both Nazism and Communism in his native Poland and was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet bloc in 1989. Wrong notions of truth or weak rational responses to dangerous ideologies had led to something like one hundred million deaths in the twentieth century.

Just prior to the twentieth century, another papal encyclical, Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879), had addressed a similar crisis by encouraging the study of the great medieval thinker Saint Thomas Aquinas. Contrary to widespread impressions, Thomism had not been particularly prominent in Catholic philosophical training prior to Leo’s efforts. In the nineteenth century, Catholic philosophers often drew on Descartes, Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant, or other modern figures in somewhat disjointed and unsystematic efforts to explain Catholic beliefs. Leo’s encyclical engendered a Thomist revival that provided Catholic philosophers with powerful intellectual tools well beyond the mid-point of the twentieth century. The kinds of Thomism that emerged ranged from the supple and creative to the rigid and plodding, from varieties of the strict observance to exotic and innovative hybrids involving modern thought.² But Leo, too, believed that philosophical renewal was needed to meet modern public questions and anticipated—in Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical that started the tradition of modern Catholic social thought—the bloody results that would follow if such renewal were not swiftly put in place.

The studies of Karol Wojtyła (later John Paul II) in philosophy at the seminary and, years after, as he prepared for academic teaching reflected the main arc in twentieth-century Catholic philosophy as a whole. In 1949, he wrote his doctoral dissertation in Rome under Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, a notoriously strict Thomist and earlier a mentor to Maritain as well.³ In the dissertation, which later commentators have rightly seen as an expression of the future pope’s constant pastoral and contemplative side, Wojtyła chose to use Aquinas to explicate the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross.⁴ But Garrigou-Lagrange himself was a gifted commentator on the spiritual life,⁵ which suggests that strict Thomism did not always lead to mere formulaic aridity or rationalism. Wojtyła’s second doctorate (Habilitationsschrift), however, the one most European countries require for appointment as a full professor, engaged the prominent modern philosophy known as phenomenology: An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics Based on the System of Max Scheler.⁶

Wojtyła studied Scheler’s system quite carefully and came to the conclusion that it was inadequate. The emotional dimension that Scheler emphasized—something that needed to be taken into account in any comprehensive view of human life—was not fully up to the modern task, at least not without some of the sturdier Thomist truths as a supplement, a position sometimes referred to as phenomenological or Lublin Thomism because the University of Lublin in Poland, where Wojtyła taught, was a center for approaches of this sort.⁷ Quite apart from the merits of the future pope’s analysis, it is telling that one of the greatest Catholic leaders in recent history chose to explore these sorts of modern philosophical challenges in a flexible yet firm way. It also says much about the larger Catholic dialogue between faith and reason that Leo XIII set in motion.

In keeping with the broad spirit of both Aquinas and the phenomenological method, John Paul’s Fides et Ratio offers a frank opening to other kinds of philosophy:

The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others. The underlying reason for this reluctance is that, even when it engages theology, philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods. Otherwise there would be no guarantee that it would remain oriented to truth and that it was moving towards truth by way of a process governed by reason. A philosophy which did not proceed in the light of reason according to its own principles and methods would serve little purpose. At the deepest level, the autonomy which philosophy enjoys is rooted in the fact that reason is by its nature oriented to truth and is equipped moreover with the means necessary to arrive at truth. A philosophy conscious of this as its constitutive status cannot but respect the demands and the data of revealed truth. (FR 49)

The final claim is, to say the least, not at all obvious to many modern philosophers. John Paul II was aware that several currents in contemporary philosophy, even contemporary Catholic philosophy, regard reason as weak, uncertain, self-contradictory, even self-undermining. But his whole aim in writing appears in his opening sentence: Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

In passing, he mentions the importance of Aquinas,

Although he made much of the supernatural character of faith, the Angelic Doctor did not overlook the importance of its reasonableness; indeed he was able to plumb the depths and explain the meaning of this reasonableness. Faith is in a sense an exercise of thought; and human reason is neither annulled nor debased in assenting to the contents of faith, which are in any case attained by way of free and informed choice. This is why the Church has been justified in consistently proposing Saint Thomas as a master of thought and a model of the right way to do theology. (FR 43)

As is evident in their writings, Aquinas and his great contemporaries welcomed and tried to integrate truths from every source available to them in the High Middle Ages: Greek and Latin, Jewish and Muslim. That is, in part, what it means to be Catholic, which is to say, universal. Leo XIII and John Paul II, each in his own way, encouraged precisely this kind of openness—an openness precisely to truth, as opposed to a characteristically modern open-ended, inconclusive search for truth—which led to remarkable developments in Catholic thought in the twentieth century.

A Century of Thought

Viewed from our perspective in the early twenty-Jirst century, the whole phenomenon sometimes looks like a failed project that has degenerated into incoherence. Unleashing thought as Leo XIII did led to a process beyond the capacity of anyone to predict—or control. If Thomism dominated Catholic philosophy for roughly the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it split quite early into competing schools and factions that were not even always on speaking terms (there were major figures who never read each other). The strict Thomism of some official Catholic institutions tried to remain rigidly close to the master himself but found itself with proliferating and differing interpretations of what that original philosophy in fact had been. Many who resisted strict Thomism (mostly in European seminaries) saw it as aiming to reply to problems about our knowledge of the world and the existence of God raised by figures like Descartes and Kant—the central modern philosophical problems, in other words, questions that Aquinas had never addressed in the modern terms of debate. The critics thought this approach mistaken because it replied to modern rationalism with another rationalism that drew on, but was foreign to, the richness of Thomas. Others took a different tack and sought to integrate certain modern thinkers into Thomism, giving rise to hybrids such as transcendental Thomism (basically Thomas + Kant) and existential Thomism (Thomas + contemporary awareness of the mystery of being). In a 1974 speech at the University of Chicago, Dom Hélder Câmara, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, went so far as to invoke Thomas in the context of liberation theology: We must take the categories of our age and do with Marx what Aquinas did with Aristotle.⁸ Marxism and liberation theology receded with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Thomist-inspired experiments continue—and continue to be contested.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Catholic philosophy also moved beyond these variations on Thomism into other forms of philosophy. It is quite common now for philosophy departments at Catholic universities to be populated with analytic philosophers, existentialists, poststructuralists and postmodernists, Heideggerians, Whiteheadeans, Teilhardians, Wittgensteinians, Derrideans, Foucauldians, Rawlsians, and others—lying at various angles to Catholicity. In one way, this phenomenon attests to a certain cultural vitality: Catholic thinkers in the twentieth century were not at all reluctant to use the various tools of the non-Catholic culture in interpreting the ancient tenets of the faith. In another way, however, this seeming richness might be looked upon as a dispersion. The tools borrowed from the secular culture seem to have created a discord of voices that make any straightforward philosophical understanding of revelation—always a difficult task anyway—all but impossible. In addition, all this borrowing seemed to blur the distinction between the sacred and the secular, giving rise to further confusions.

It is worth taking a closer look at these developments as a way of understanding both the intellectual gains and losses within one of the great religions and their sometimes considerable, if little known, effects on the contemporary world. The phenomenon is too varied and large for exhaustive treatment, but the main lines of development are relatively clear, as are the questions that the Catholic dialogue between faith and reason sought to answer.

The Thomist Revival

Since the Second Vatican Council (1962—1965), which rightly or wrongly has come to be thought of as a liberalizing movement in the Catholic Church, the revival of Thomism, on the rare occasions when it is even noticed, has frequently been viewed as a narrow and restrictive movement identified with the most reactionary and rigid elements in the Church. This myth contains a kernel of truth, particularly in terms of the ways that the teaching of Thomism took place in European seminaries during the first half of the twentieth century, to judge by some who lived through the experience. A frequent complaint is that simplistic and uninspiring Latin manuals of Thomist philosophy were drilled into young seminarians, who had little idea what such dry and abstruse material had to do with Catholicism or their future pastoral duties. There was almost no contact with the brilliant texts of Thomas himself. But the belief that this was all there was to modern Thomism cannot survive the slightest acquaintance with what was actually achieved by the many and diverse thinkers who belonged to a vigorous and creative current in Catholic thought that has continued well into the twenty-first century.⁹

The best-known figures, such as Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson, were in their day influential and highly respected even in prestigious non-Catholic intellectual circles. Both lectured extensively at institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, and other centers of secular learning in addition to Catholic universities. And with good reason: their work—often moving, deep, and eloquent—ranges boldly over subjects as diverse as metaphysics, history, political philosophy, social questions, spirituality, education, and aesthetics. It was only natural, for example, that Jacques Maritain would try to address the crisis in political philosophy posed by the two world wars and the intellectual fault lines—primarily mistaken notions of the human person and society—that enabled the rise of totalitarian movements such as Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. In the process, he virtually invented the mature form of the social philosophy that lies behind all the modern Christian democrat parties, the very parties that reconstructed Europe after the world wars. Maritain was also the principal drafter of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He and the philosophy he developed have, in this and many other ways, had immense influence on the whole modern world order.¹⁰

And there were other large currents within Thomism that sought to grapple with problems that arose in modern conditions. Naturally, not all of these proved to be equally fruitful, but it is perhaps a testimony to the perceived richness of Thomist thought that creative figures like Maurice Blondel, Henri Bergson, Pierre Rousselot, Joseph Maréchal, Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and many others drew on Thomas. Adapting Thomism to contemporary uses clearly meant going beyond and outside the questions that Thomas himself addressed, and this led to no little infighting among various schools. In some ways, this should not come as a surprise. Leo XIII did not seek a mere return to the past when he recommended the study of Aquinas in Aeterni Patris. He had long been engaged in modern public questions going back to his days as bishop of Perugia, and he recommended Thomas because he thought the Angelic Doctor was a rich source of precisely the kind of insight and careful thought the Church and the world needed as they approached the twentieth century. Aeterni Patris is sometimes read in retrospect as primarily an attempt to restore Aristotelian-Thomist theories of knowledge and metaphysics, as opposed to the more skeptical paths of post-Kantian thought. But Leo seems to have considered such studies as preliminaries to a much larger social renewal. As one scholar has noted: In Leo’s own work—some 110 encyclicals and other teaching letters—Thomas is rarely discussed or referenced apart from the social-political problems.¹¹

In Aeterni Patris, Leo quotes Cardinal Cajetan (1469—1534), a formidable thinker in his own right, in saying that Thomas had received, ordered, and integrated previous Christian wisdom in such a way that he seems to have inherited the intellect of all (AP 17). In the spirit of Thomas, Leo concluded that "we hold that every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a