Ressourcement Theology

A Sourcebook

Patricia Kelly, Patricia Kelly

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567672513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Ressourcement Theology: A Sourcebook offers a collection of texts previously unavailable in English from leading Dominicans and Jesuits, who initiated a movement for renewal that contributed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. In the last decade, theologians have undertaken a serious reappraisal of the contribution of Ressourcement theology to 20th century theology in the Catholic tradition and beyond. This 'return to Ressourcement' has resulted in many of the principal texts being translated into English and (re-)issued, ensuring their accessibility to scholars across the globe. Despite this, many of the earliest documents relating to the history of Ressourcement theology are unavailable to most English-speaking scholars, as they are largely journal articles and book chapters published in French.
Patricia Kelly has selected the most significant texts that so far have been unavailable in English, including the controversial piece by Jean-Marie LeBlond (' The Analogy of Truth ') that was condemned in the 1950s by the Vatican, as well as the response to Labourdette's attack on LeBlond, penned anonymously by a group of Jesuits. All of these documents will help students and scholars to engage deeply with the history of the Ressourcement movement and its relevance for the developments of the Catholic tradition.

Part One

The sources of theology

Introduction

1 Marie-Dominique Chenu, ‘Theology’

Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895–1990) was at one time possibly the most notorious of the ressourcement scholars, variously seen as a rigorously academic Church historian and as a trouble-making ‘young Turk’. Having joined the French Dominicans at Le Saulchoir in 1913, he studied in Rome at the Dominican ‘Angelicum’ university, ending with a doctorate on ‘Contemplation in Aquinas’ supervised by none other than Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. Garrigou-Lagrange, indeed, had wanted Chenu to stay on in Rome to teach; but Chenu was drawn back to Le Saulchoir, where he joined the teaching team, becoming Regent of Studies in 1932 – successor, as he noted, to Thomas Aquinas, who had been the Regent of Studies at the Dominican house of study in Paris.

It was as Regent that Chenu gave the annual celebratory address for the Feast of St Thomas in 1937, which became Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir. Privately published by the Dominican press, only some 800 copies were printed,¹ although it found its way quickly enough to Rome, where it was added to the Index of Prohibited Books in 1942 – famously, Chenu heard the news on the radio. The work should be considered to be his charter for theological education: starting with the general context, it moves first to theology and then to philosophy, in marked contrast to the neo-scholastic curriculum of the time. Chenu also fired a number of salvos at what he described as ‘baroque’ scholasticism – the scholasticism of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators, whose accretions had covered and destroyed the original work of Thomas – and he took not a little provocative pleasure in naming and praising those who had been condemned a few decades earlier as ‘Modernists’.

As observed in the ‘Note on Translations’ above, a key phrase in this text, and elsewhere in Chenu’s writing on theology, is le donné révélé, which I have translated variously as ‘the data of revelation’, ‘the data of divine revelation’, ‘divinely revealed data’, or ‘revealed data’. He took this phrase from his predecessor as Regent at Le Saulchoir, Antoine Gardeil.

2 Henri Bouillard, ‘Conversion and grace in Aquinas’

Henri Bouillard (1908–1981) joined the Jesuits in his twenties and was sent to Rome to complete his theological studies at the Gregorian university. His doctoral thesis, ‘Conversion et grâce chez S. Thomas d’Aquin. Étude historique’, completed in 1940, was defended in Lyon after he had returned to France following the outbreak of war. In 1944 it was published as the first in the new ‘Théologie’ series sponsored and edited by the Lyon Jesuits, and the resulting backlash may be followed in the articles by Labourdette, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Labourdette and Nicolas in Part Two of this book.

It is fair to say that Conversion et grâce dealt a veritable body blow to the certainties of neo-scholastic thought. The latter took what Bouillard described as the ‘manualist’ position – the study of theological statements, discussed in a scholastic manner – and entirely rejected a historical or developmental approach. Theology, particularly the writings of St Thomas, was seen as a monolithic, unchanging structure. Bouillard’s painstaking historical analysis of Aquinas’s position on grace and how it leads first to the conversion of the human person to God, and ultimately to their justification, blew this unchanging monolith out of the water. If his analysis were correct, Thomas’s position had changed significantly between his Commentary on the Sentences and the Summa theologiae, particularly following his discovery of the semi-Pelagian controversy while he was writing the Summa Contra Gentiles. Bouillard insisted that Thomas’s works needed to be read in chronological order, located in the context of Aquinas’s life, and with an awareness of the intellectual context in which he was working.

By 1946 Bouillard’s position would be battered by two of the French Dominican neo-Thomist heavyweights, Garrigou-Lagrange and Labourdette. First, the emphasis on ‘context’ appeared to them to be, in Garrigou’s words, a ‘return to Modernism’, not to mention to whiff of relativism. Second, Bouillard was relatively critical of Aquinas’s use of Aristotle, suggesting this was something of a novelty. Finally, they were deeply concerned that Bouillard’s description of grace removed its gratuitous nature and forced God into making this gift.

3 Jean-Marie Le Blond, ‘The analogy of truth’

Unlike his Jesuit confreres whose work also appears in this book, Jean-Marie Le Blond SJ (1899–1973) was neither a theologian nor an academic. The philosopher, whose 1936 Paris thesis, Logique et méthode chez Aristote (‘Logic and method in Aristotle’), was published in 1939, at the same time as a shorter work, La definition chez Aristote (‘Definition in Aristotle’), had taught at the Gregorian university and by 1947 was teaching philosophy at the Jesuit collège of Mongré. Much of his life’s work was dedicated to producing translations and commentaries of Aristotle’s works (Physics and Treaty on the parts of animals), although he also published on St Augustine and the knowledge of God.

With its critique of Aquinas’s ‘novel’ introduction of Aristotelian categories into Christian theology, Bouillard’s Conversion et grâce chez St Thomas d’Aquin was clearly attractive and interesting to Le Blond, who penned a discreet rebuttal of Labourdette’s attack on Bouillard. Bouillard is not named in the article; rather, Le Blond takes Conversion et grâce as his starting point for a discussion on the appropriateness of Aristotelian philosophy as the basis for twentieth-century theology. In particular, he moved the discussion away from the anaologia entis, or ‘analogy of being’, insisting that the concept of analogy should be extended to all the ‘Transcendentals’, including Truth. The suggestion that human truths – including those taught by the Church about God – might only be analogous and imperfect, acted, entirely predictably, like a red rag to a bull, and Le Blond’s article was in turn lambasted by Labourdette and Nicolas the following year. Le Blond’s article was also one of those removed from library shelves in 1950 at the orders of the Jesuit General, Jean-Baptiste Janssens, following the publication of Humani Generis.

4 Henri de Lubac, ‘Supernatural and superadded’

Henri de Lubac (1895–1990) is perhaps the best known ressourcement theologian in the English-speaking world. A significant proportion of his prodigious output has been translated and is readily available. Surnaturel. Études historiques, his third book, remains one of the few exceptions never translated into English – perhaps because it was felt to be so obviously in the sights of Humani Generis and also because the later Mystère du Surnaturel was itself translated.

Like both Catholicisme (1937) and Corpus Mysticum (1944), the ideas in Surnaturel had been on de Lubac’s mind since his student days. The book had its roots in articles published in Recherches de Science Religieuse in the early 1930s. Like Corpus Mysticum, much of the manuscript was completed in the extraordinary circumstances of the German invasion and occupation of France during the Second World War, Corpus Mysticum during the initial phase of German invasion, Surnaturel in 1943–4 when de Lubac was in hiding and in fear of his life due to his activities in the Resistance. And like the earlier titles with which it shares the étude historique epithet, Surnaturel drew on de Lubac’s extensive and profound reading of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church.

At the heart of the book, de Lubac was dealing with a knotty problem at the centre of the debate between neo-Thomism and ressourcement theology: Can there be such a thing as ‘pure nature’? As de Lubac demonstrated, the concept of ‘pure nature’ – a nature entirely separated from and denuded of divine grace or ‘supernature’ – was one which would have been completely alien to Thomas himself and to his scholastic contemporaries and successors. On the contrary, it was a device invented by commentators in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to enable hypothetical debate about grace/supernature. Could God, they wondered, have created a purely ‘natural’ humanity without access to the ‘supernatural’ divine gift of sanctifying grace?

De Lubac took the question a step further. Underpinning both the patristic and scholastic teaching on grace is the concept of the desiderium naturale, the desire, natural to all human beings, for the beatific vision which ultimately leads us to God. However, neo-Thomism insisted on a separation of nature and supernature, with the result that in this anthropology the desiderium naturale was no longer innate but must come about as the gratuitous divine gift of grace: ‘supernature’ or, as he refers to it, ‘super-added’.

5 Jean Daniélou, ‘Current trends in religious thought’

Études, founded in 1856, was the ‘house journal’ of the French Jesuits. Originally focused on theology and philosophy, the journal expanded its reach to include art, literature and other aspects of culture, particularly with regard to their interaction with theology and philosophy. Daniélou’s article, with its sharp critique of the ‘rupture’ between theology and real life, was itself the cause of a huge rupture in French academic theology in the 1940s, between those who, like Daniélou, argued that theologians and the Church had an obligation to try to meld theology to the reality of daily life in the twentieth century and those who, like Labourdette, Garrigou-Lagrange and other neo-Thomists, insisted that the natural and supernatural – heaven and earth – should be strictly separated in theology and in the life of faith. In reality, of course, the argument had been brewing for a number of years, with Chenu’s blistering attacks on the neo-scholastic methodology in ‘Theology’ only the tip of the iceberg. The ‘historical studies’ published by de Lubac and Bouillard were further grist to the mill, and Daniélou’s approving comments about Modernism, Marxism, existentialism, the Formgeschichte school of biblical studies, Kierkegaard and other proscribed ideas seem deliberately provocative.

6 Anon. ‘Response to “The sources of theology”’

Daniélou’s article and Bouillard’s book were apparently the triggers for the virulent attacks by Garrigou-Lagrange, Labourdette and Nicolas which may be found in Part Two of this book. Labourdette’s article, ‘Les sources de la théologie’, was taken personally by the Fourvière Jesuits he had in his sights. The ‘response’ penned by de Lubac, Bouillard and Daniélou, in which de Lubac let rip the sarcasm for which he was well known, lacerated Labourdette. They pointed out that he was calling into question not only their own orthodoxy but also that of their Religious superiors and censors, without whose permission and approval they were unable to publish. In the climate of the late 1940s, the political differences between Toulouse and Fourvière were still raw, which only added to the violent language on both sides. Crucially, however, de Lubac records that Fr Nicolas, Provincial of the Toulouse Dominicans, visited Fourvière in late 1947 when the troubled waters were smoothed over.²

¹ See Fergus Kerr, ‘Chenu’s Little Book’, New Blackfriars 66 (1985), 108–12; and Francesca Murphy, ‘Gilson and Chenu: The Structure of the Summa and the Shape of Dominican Life’, New Blackfriars 85/997 (2004), 290–303 (298–9).

² See de Lubac, Service, 195.

1

‘Theology’

‘Theology’. Chapter 3 of Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir (Kain-Lez-Tournai: Le Saulchoir, 1937; republished Paris: Cerf, 1985), 129–50.

Marie-Dominique Chenu OP

‘Le Donné révélé et la Théologie’ [‘The data of divine revelation and theology’] was not just any title for one of the works of Fr Gardeil, whose role at Le Saulchoir we discussed in chapter 2 [of Une École …] above. This antithetical statement defines the axis along which the work was organized,...