International Journal of Systematic Theology

Volume 8

Number 2

April 2006

A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents

FERGUS KERR*

Abstract: The anti-Modernist Oath (1910) sets the background for this historical account of the tension in twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology between those suspected of Modernism and the exponents of Aristotelian Thomism. The article discusses the modernist crisis by tracing the thought of Rginald Garrigou-Lagrange (a strict observer of Thomism) and his student Marie-Dominique Chenu (a dissenter of the neoscholastic view). Chenu established the historical-contextualist reading of Thomas Aquinas which was regarded as a threat to the standard neoscholastic exposition of Thomism, which he felt was heavily inuenced by Wolfan rationalism. As a result, Vatican II nally rejects the neoscholastic conception of reason. The article concludes by recognizing the need for a historical-contextualist reading of Thomas but fears that the new philosophical system is not sufciently scrutinized.

By neoscholasticism I mean the way of doing theology that prevailed and indeed was mandatory for clergy, seminary professors and suchlike, from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries, from the First to the Second Vatican Councils, throughout the Roman Catholic Church (the only signicant alternative being in some of the German universities, at Munich and in the so called Catholic Tbingen School).

No theology without the right philosophy

As Pope John Paul II writes, happily without the bombastic rhetoric of his predecessor, the encyclical Aeterni Patris, issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, renewed interest in the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, particularly in his philosophy. Historical study of medieval philosophers began to ourish; critical editions were undertaken, etc., and new Thomistic schools arose (Fides et Ratio 1998, 57). What the encyclical seems to recommend is what we who inhabit this world know as Gilsonian existentialist Thomism which needs to be distinguished from
* New College, University of Edinburgh, Mound Place EH1 2LX, Edinburgh UK.
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transcendental Thomism (Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan), not to mention from Karol Wojtylas own thomasizing phenomenology (as George Hunston Williams called it); and from Thomism of the strict observance as in Rginald GarrigouLagrange, and the historical-contextualist approach favoured by Marie-Dominique Chenu to the two of whom we shall return, in this sketch of the deep and acrimonious conict over the place of reason in recent Roman Catholic theology. If the more distinguished of the Catholic theologians of this century, to whose reections and researches Vatican II owes so much, are sons of this renewal of Thomistic philosophy, a powerful troop of philosophers, all educated in the school of the Angelic Doctor, as John Paul II says, there was never a shared common reading and evaluation of Thomas Aquinas, as he concedes. On the contrary, the supposedly normative philosophia thomistica split into rival schools, even before 1900, with much mutual hostility. Why this happened is an interesting question; but we must content ourselves here with the assumption in the encyclical, and in the neoscholastic tradition, that Catholic theologians are all philosophers. Putting this differently, Catholics engaged in teaching theology who are not qualied also as philosophers may be good historians but they should not be regarded as theologians. There is no Catholic theology without the right philosophy.

Faith and reason at Vatican I

You can always go farther back into the genealogy of any theological crisis. But we start with the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius promulgated at Vatican I on 24 April 1870. This text, principally about reason, sought to sort out problems urgent then, with a background one could trace and with a solution that stayed in place for decades but which nally was abandoned at Vatican II, leaving an agenda we still have to deal with. According to Dei Filius the Council of Trent was a triumph, celebrated though it was in evil days: reform of the church, foundation of seminaries, better instruction of the laity, more frequent reception of the sacraments, an outburst of missionary activity, etc. However we cannot subdue the bitter grief that we feel at most serious evils: the heresies condemned at Trent have led to more Christian disunity than ever, to loss of Christian faith altogether, to the Bible being regarded as myth, etc. But especially, there came into being and spread far and wide that doctrine of rationalism or naturalism, utterly opposed to the Christian religion. This doctrine spares no effort to bring it about that Christ, who alone is our Lord and Saviour, is shut out from the minds of people and the moral life of nations. In brief, these rationalists would establish what they call the rule of simple reason or nature, plunging people into the abyss of pantheism, materialism and atheism, etc. Indeed they strive to destroy rational nature itself, to deny any criterion of what is right and just, and to overthrow the very foundations of human society. It has come about, alas, that many Catholics have had their Catholic sensibility weakened, confusing nature and grace, human knowledge and divine faith, etc. It
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is a matter of grave pastoral urgency, then, to save the faithful from the effects of erroneous concepts of reason held especially by seminary professors and suchlike. This is the purpose of Dei Filius. Chapter 1 culminates with anathemas against pantheism, materialism etc. Chapter 2, de revelatione, insists strongly on scripture, opening however with the famous claim to the effect that the church holds and teaches that God the source and end of all things can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason, cf. Romans 1:20. Thats all, incidentally: it is a possibility: certo cognosci posse. Moreover, it is a knowledge that would count as cognoscere not scire, which might stretch to intuitive awareness and certainly need not be limited to apodictic demonstration. It is a knowledge originating in consideration of created things, which might include ourselves of course. Finally, nothing is said one way or the other about the effect of original sin on the natural power of reason. But it is clearly ruling out any idea that there is absolutely nothing, even in principle, that reason can achieve, in thinking about God, independently of biblical revelation. The point, as a glance at the minutes of the speeches would show, was not to exalt reason but to afrm that human beings are not atheist by nature there is always the possibility, in preaching to pagans, of appealing to common ground, however minimal. Indeed, Scripture itself we are assured afrms this much natural theology. Chapter 3 deals with faith: we believe what God has revealed to be true, etc., not because we perceive its intrinsic truth by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God himself. Having afrmed what is possible for the natural power of reason to achieve as regards knowledge of God, we now turn to deal with temptations to rationalism. Indeed, we are anathematized if we say that Christian faith is not freely given but produced by arguments of human reason. Rather: No one can accept the gospel preaching in the way that is necessary for achieving salvation without the inspiration and illumination of the holy Spirit which does not mean, however, that we are moved to faith only by our own internal experience or private inspiration. We cannot document all this here. These claims, as one can easily see, steer between the temptation to ground faith entirely on the believers internal experience, and the temptation to say that Christianity is so reasonable that one could work it out by reason alone. At the time, in the 1860s, the (Catholic) Tbingen School was suspected of the former, while their attempts to rethink doctrine in the light of Kant and Hegel were thought to make the likes of Georg Hermes and Anton Gnther, to name the two most inuential Catholic theologians of the day, much too prone to rationalism. Chapter 4, dealing now with faith and reason, condemns those who would say that all the dogmas of faith can be understood and demonstrated by properly trained reason from natural principles (again); secondly condemns those who would say that there may be truths established by reason which contradict divine revelation; and, nally, anathematizes those who say that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by
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the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands. All this indicates the variety of problems, real or imagined, within Catholic theology and sensibility, in 1870, regarding reason, and the network of connected concepts: experience, inspiration, development, knowledge, truth, etc. The debate, by the way, was quite interesting. The draft against the many errors stemming from modern rationalism, submitted for discussion on 28 December 1869, was subjected to such savage criticism (obscure, not pastoral, too aggressive etc.), that the presidency withdrew it, returning it to the doctrine commission for revision. Rewritten, largely by Joseph Kleutgen, the most inuential theologian in Rome, it reappeared on 18 March 1870 and was passed unanimously on 24 April 1870.1 Rationalism and naturalism, then, were regarded as the principal enemy (within the fold) which Vatican I sought to resist and discredit, without however abandoning a high doctrine of the place of reason in Catholic theology. As we can see, a temptation to appeal to internal experience was emerging as another threat.

Reason under oath

Paradoxically, as it might seem, the church that cultivated miracles, Marian shrines (Lourdes), and dogmas about the Virgin Mary (Immaculate Conception 1854, Assumption 1950), was the church that was determined to maintain a high place for reason within sacra doctrina. A handful of Jesuit scholars, learned patrologists as well as competent historians of philosophy (like Kleutgen), made the decision, in the 1850s, to revive the moderate realism they found in Thomas Aquinas, highlighting his debt to Aristotelian naturalism, as the only way to inoculate the clergy against the allurements of Descartes, Kant, Hegel and such. The way to deal with neuzeitliches Denken, as Kleutgen put it, was to return to vorneuzeitliches Denken: premodernity, as we might say (radical orthodoxy?). Canon law required that clergy attend lectures in philosophy, delivered in Latin, by professors who would treat everything according to the method, doctrine and principles of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas.2 One did not proceed to study theology until one passed philosophy examinations that were framed in terms of the Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses. Approved on 27 July 1914 by the Sacred Congregation of Studies, this text was composed principally by Guido Mattiussi, SJ (18521925), author among much else of Il veleno Kantiano: Nuova ed antica critica della ragione, immanenza, lilosoa dellazione (1907), a diatribe against Kant for his alleged subjectivist epistemology and view that will takes precedence over intellect; the only antidote for the Kantian venom being the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas they go as follows:

1 2

Mansi LI: 42936; minutes of discussions of the commission LIII: 17794; speeches LI: 42436. Canons 13656.

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132 THE XXIV THOMISTIC THESES ONTOLOGY

Fergus Kerr

1. Potency and Act divide being in such a way that whatever is, is either pure act, or of necessity it is composed of potency and act as primary and intrinsic principles. 2. Since act is perfection, it is not limited except through a potency which itself is a capacity for perfection. Hence in any order in which an act is pure act, it will only exist, in that order, as a unique and unlimited act. But whenever it is nite and manifold, it has entered into a true composition with potency. 3. Consequently, the one God, unique and simple, alone subsists in absolute being. All other things that participate in being have a nature whereby their being is restricted; they are constituted of essence and being, as really distinct principles. 4. A thing is called a being because of esse. God and creature are not called beings univocally, nor wholly equivocally, but analogically, by an analogy both of attribution and of proportionality. 5. In every creature there is also a real composition of the subsisting subject and of added secondary forms, i.e. accidental forms. Such composition cannot be understood unless being is really received in an essence distinct from it. 6. Besides the absolute accidents there is also the relative accident, relation. Although by reason of its own character relation does not signify anything inhering in another, it nevertheless often has a cause in things, and hence a real entity distinct from the subject. 7. A spiritual creature is wholly simple in its essence. Yet there is still a twofold composition in the spiritual creature, namely, that of the essence with being, and that of the substance with accidents. 8. However, the corporeal creature is composed of act and potency even in its very essence. These act and potency in the order of essence are designated by the names form and matter respectively. COSMOLOGY 9. Neither the matter nor the form have being of themselves, nor are they produced or corrupted of themselves, nor are they included in any category otherwise than reductively, as substantial principles. 10. Although extension in quantitative parts follows upon a corporeal nature, nevertheless it is not the same for a body to be a substance and for it to be quantied. For of itself substance is indivisible, not indeed as a point is indivisible, but as that which falls outside the order of dimensions is indivisible. But quantity, which gives the substance extension, really differs from the substance and is truly an accident.
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11. The principle of individuation, i.e., of numerical distinction of one individual from another with the same specic nature, is matter designated by quantity. Thus in pure spirits there cannot be more than individual in the same specic nature. 12. By virtue of a bodys quantity itself, the body is circumscriptively in a place, and in one place alone circumscriptively, no matter what power might be brought to bear. 13. Bodies are divided into two groups; for some are living and others are devoid of life. In the case of the living things, in order that there be in the same subject an essentially moving part and an essentially moved part, the substantial form, which is designated by the name soul, requires an organic disposition, i.e. heterogeneous parts. PSYCHOLOGY 14. Souls in the vegetative and sensitive orders cannot subsist of themselves, nor are they produced of themselves. Rather, they are no more than principles whereby the living thing exists and lives; and since they are wholly dependent upon matter, they are incidentally corrupted through the corruption of the composite. 15. On the other hand, the human soul subsists of itself. When it can be infused into a sufciently disposed subject, it is created by God. By its very nature, it is incorruptible and immortal. 16. This rational soul is united to the body in such a manner that it is the only substantial form of the body. By virtue of his soul a man is a man, an animal, a living thing, a body, a substance and a being. Therefore the soul gives man every essential degree of perfection; moreover, it gives the body a share in the act of being whereby it itself exists. 17. From the human soul there naturally issue forth powers pertaining to two orders, the organic and the non-organic. The organic powers, among which are the senses, have the composite as their subject. The non-organic powers have the soul alone as their subject. Hence, the intellect is a power intrinsically independent of any bodily organ. 18. Intellectuality necessarily follows upon immateriality, and furthermore, in such manner that the farther the distance from matter, the higher the degree of intellectuality. Any being is the adequate object of understanding in general. But in the present state of union of soul and body, quiddities abstracted from the material conditions of individuality are the proper object of the human intellect. 19. Therefore, we receive knowledge from sensible things. But since sensible things are not actually intelligible, in addition to the intellect, which formally understands, an active power must be acknowledged in the soul, which power abstracts intelligible likeness or species from sense images in the imagination.
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Fergus Kerr 20. Through these intelligible likenesses or species we directly know universals, i.e. the natures of things. We attain to singulars by our senses, and also by our intellect, when it beholds the sense images. But we ascend to knowledge of spiritual things by analogy. 21. The will does not precede the intellect but follows upon it. The will necessarily desires that which is presented to it as a good in every respect satisfying the appetite. But it freely chooses among the many goods that are presented to it as desirable according to a changeable judgment or evaluation. Consequently, the choice follows the nal practical judgment. But the will is the cause of it being the nal one. THEODICY 22. We do not perceive by an immediate intuition that God exists, nor do we prove it a priori. But we do prove it a posteriori, i.e., from the things that have been created, following an argument from the effects to the cause: namely, from things which are moved and cannot be the adequate source of their motion, to a rst unmoved mover; from the production of the things in this world by causes subordinated to one another, to a rst uncaused cause; from corruptible things which equally might be or not be, to an absolutely necessary being; from things which more or less are, live, and understand, according to degrees of being, living and understanding, to that which is maximally understanding, maximally living and maximally a being; nally, from the order of all things, to a separated intellect which has ordered and organized things, and directs them to their end. 23. The metaphysical motion of the Divine Essence is correctly expressed by saying that it is identied with the exercised actuality of its own being, or that it is subsistent being itself. And this is the reason for its innite and unlimited perfection. 24. By reason of the very purity of His being, God is distinguished from all nite beings. Hence it follows, in the rst place, that the world could only have come from God by creation; secondly, that not even by way of a miracle can any nite nature be given creative power, which of itself directly attains the very being of any being; and nally, that no created agent can in any way inuence the being of any effect unless it has itself been moved by the rst Cause.

Moreover, all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and seminary professors, from 1910, swore the anti-Modernist Oath. Prescribed in the motu proprio, Sacrorum Antistitum, issued by Pope Pius X, 1 September 1910, the formulary of orthodoxy for clerics throughout the rst half of the century, abrogated only in 1967, the Oath went as follows: I ________ __, rmly embrace and accept all and each of the things dened, afrmed and declared by the inerrant Magisterium of the Church, mainly those points of doctrine directly opposed to the errors of our time. And in the rst
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place I profess that God, beginning and end of all things, can be certainly known, and therefore also proved, as the cause through its effects, by the natural light of reason through the things that have been made, that is, through the visible works of creation. Secondly, I admit and recognize as most certain signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion the external arguments of revelation, that is, the divine deeds, and in the rst place the miracles and prophecies. And I maintain that these are eminently suited to the mentality of all ages and men, including those of our time. Thirdly, I also rmly believe that the Church, guardian and teacher of the revealed word, was immediately and directly instituted by the real and historical Christ himself, while dwelling with us; and that it was built upon Peter, prince of the apostolic hierarchy, and his successors till the end of time. Fourthly, I sincerely accept the doctrine of the faith handed on to us by the Apostles through the orthodox Fathers, always with the same meaning and interpretation; and therefore I atly reject the heretical invention of the evolution of dogmas, to the effect that these would change their meaning from that previously held by the Church. I equally condemn every error whereby the divine deposit, handed over to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully kept by her, would be replaced by a philosophical invention or a creation of human consciousness, slowly formed by the effort of men and to be henceforward perfected by an indenite progress. Fifthly, I maintain in all certainty and sincerely profess that faith is not a blind feeling of religion welling up from the recesses of the subconscious, by the pressure of the heart and of the inclination of the morally educated will, but a real assent of the intellect to the truth received from outside through the ear, whereby we believe that the things said, testied and revealed by the personal God, our creator and lord, are true, on account of the authority of God, who is supremely truthful. I also submit myself with due reverence, and wholeheartedly join in all condemnations, declarations and prescriptions contained in the encyclical Pascendi and in the decree Lamentabili, mainly those concerning the so-called history of dogmas. Likewise I reprove the error of those who afrm that the faith proposed by the Church can be repugnant to history, and that the Catholic dogmas, in the way they are understood now, cannot accord with the truer origins of the Christian religion. I also condemn and reject the opinion of those who say that the more learned Christian has a two-fold personality, one of the believer and the other of the historian, as if it would be lawful for the historian to uphold views which are in contradiction with the faith of the believer, or to lay down propositions from which it would follow that the dogmas are false or doubtful, as long as these dogmas were not directly denied. I likewise reprove the method of judging and interpreting Holy Scripture which consists in ignoring the tradition of the Church, the analogy of faith and the rulings of the Apostolic See, following the opinions of rationalists, and not only unlawfully but recklessly upholding the critique of the text as the only and supreme rule. Besides, I reject the opinion of those who maintain that whoever teaches theological history, or writes about these matters, has to set aside beforehand any preconceived
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Fergus Kerr opinion regarding the supernatural origin of Catholic tradition, as well as the divine promise of a help for the perpetual preservation of each one of the revealed truths; and that, besides, the writings of each of the Fathers should be interpreted only by the principles of science, leaving aside all sacred authority, and with the freedom of judgment wherewith any secular monument is usually studied. Lastly, I profess myself in everything totally averse to the error whereby modernists hold that there is nothing divine in sacred tradition, or, what is much worse, that there is, but in a pantheistic sense; so that nothing remains there but the bare and simple fact to be equated to the common facts of history, namely, some men who through their work, skill and ingenuity, continue in subsequent ages the school started by Christ and his apostles. Therefore I most rmly retain the faith of the Fathers, and will retain it up to the last gasp of my life, regarding the unwavering charisma of the truth, which exists, has existed and will always exist in the succession of bishops from the Apostles; not so that what is maintained is what may appear better or more suitably adapted to the culture of each age, but so that the absolute and unchangeable truth preached by the Apostles from the beginning may never be believed or understood otherwise. All these things I pledge myself to keep faithfully, integrally and sincerely, and to watch over them without fail, never moving away from them whether in teaching or in any way by word or in writing. Thus do I promise, thus do I swear, so help me God, etc.

In short, bizarre as it may seem, theologians swore an oath to respect the primacy of reason in the practice of Roman Catholic theology; and the test of right thinking was set forth in the XXIV Theses.

The Modernist crisis

The history of twentieth-century Catholic theology is the history of the conict between those suspected of Modernism giving too much ground to life, practice, tradition, consensus, experience, will and feeling and the exponents, in the seats of academic power, of Aristotelian Thomism.3 The conict is most easily accessed in George Tyrrells Medievalism (1908).4 Dsir Mercier, Cardinal Archbishop of
3 The literature is immense: the place to start remains Gabriel Daly, OSA, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 4 George Tyrrell, Medievalism (London: Longmans, Green, 1908); third revised and enlarged edn 1909 repr. with foreword by Gabriel Daly (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1994). George Tyrrell (18611909), born in Dublin of Anglican parents, became a Catholic in London in 1880, entered the Society of Jesus, ordained 1891, appointed to teach philosophy to young Jesuits but his pure Thomism against the ofcial Suarezianism led to his becoming a writer and retreat master; 1897 met Baron Friedrich von Hgel; 1906 expelled from the Jesuits at behest of Pope Pius X, against the wishes
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Malines and Primate of Belgium, had addressed a letter to his ock on the subject of Modernism.5 (Why, when he began by assuring them that the heresies, to be found in France and Italy, had scarcely a single adherent in Belgium, remains mysterious.) Modernism he denes as the view that believers draw the object and motive of their faith from themselves, denying historically revealed truth and thus also the teaching authority of the church. Modernism is therefore a form of Protestantism: faith understood as private judgment. Mercier then picks out the English priest Tyrrell, and vehemently attacks his work. Undaunted, indeed exhilarated, by this attack, Tyrrell got his permission to translate and publish the letter and went on the offensive: In spite of all their theological heresies and divisions, the religious interest still lives and grows in Protestant countries, whereas it languishes and dies among Catholics under this modern craze for centralisation and military uniformity. The vitality of faith is the source and criterion of doctrinal truth, certainly not the individuals subjectivity, nor is the source and criterion to be found in the teaching of the hierarchy. Indeed, if there is an individualism threatening the church, it is the individualistic conception of papal authority, this unhistorical latter-day ultramontanism; this heretical and fantastic innovation unknown to antiquity. The lay Catholics place is not just to receive the faith passively as one receives a travellers tale of regions beyond his ken; a tale which he repeats to others word for word for what it is worth, but with no guarantee of personal experience or conviction. On the contrary: You forget that every baptised Christian is commissioned apostle and teacher; and as such is no mere telephone, but must speak from the fulness of a living personal interest in the truth of his religion. Of course, there is a distinction between the Church Teaching and the Church Taught. Yet, priority lies with a Divine Tradition of which the entire Church, and not merely the episcopate, is the organ and depositary: Tradition is the faith that lives in the whole Church and is handed down from generation to generation, of which the entire body, and not a mere handful of ofcials, is the depositary and organ of transmission. Of this rule and law the Holy Spirit diffused in the hearts of the faithful is the author; the episcopate merely the servant, the witness, the interpreter. Tyrrell was a journalist, not a scholar, as he would have agreed. The questions he raised, however, were, and are, unavoidable: questions about tradition, experience, history, and, of course, truth.
of his superiors in England; D.G. Schultenover, SJ, George Tyrrell in Search of Catholicism (Publisher: Shepherdstown, West Virginia, 1981); Ellen Leonard, CSJ, George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition (Place: Publisher, 1982); Nicholas Sagovsky, On Gods Side: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Desir Mercier (18511926), rst professor of Thomist Philosophy at Louvain, ardent promoter of neoscholasticism; Cardinal Archbishop 1907; courageous opponent of German occupying troops 191418; set up the Malines Conversations, 19215, cut short by his death, to respond to Anglican initiative for reunion with Rome.

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Thomism of the strict observance

Rginald Garrigou-Lagrange taught in Rome at the Dominican college from 1909 until 1960.6 Besides the thousands of seminarians who attended his lectures, he had M.-D. Chenu and Karol Wojtyla as students: he supervised their doctoral dissertations, and was unhappy with the results (but they knew what they wanted to do, whatever their supervisor thought). He detested the historically-contextualist approach to Thomas Aquinas. How Thomass work interacted with that of his contemporaries, or how it might have been shaped by his inheritance from earlier Christian thinkers, or by Jewish and Moslem theologians, was of no interest. Situating Aquinas in historical context was likely only to make his doctrine seem relative to its time and thus of passing interest.7 Consider a key text: Garrigou-Lagranges Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought.8 Freely summarized it goes as follows: philosophy deserves to be studied for its own sake, but also to establish, by arguments drawn simply from reason, that the praeambula dei that God exists, etc. are attainable by the natural force of human intelligence. From philosophy alone, we can demonstrate that Gods creative act is free, that the world need not exist from all eternity, that the human will is free, and that the human soul is characterized by personal immortality, etc. Theology, moreover, is not mere exegesis of scripture. Rather, theology expounds Christian doctrine as a system, with objectivity and universal validity. The rst move that the student must make, however, is to appropriate the natural metaphysics of human intelligence, as Thomas nds it expounded by Aristotle. Beginning with sense experience of the world, the mind rises progressively until it reaches God, pure act and self-knowing. Act, as Aristotle shows, is higher than potency; thus anything which passes from potency to act supposes, ultimately, an uncaused cause, something that is simply act, with no admixture of potentiality, or of imperfection. The principle of identity is the objective foundation for demonstrative proofs of the existence of God, as pure act. As this argument unfolds it delivers a philosophy of being, differing entirely from a philosophy of appearance (phenomenalism), a philosophy of becoming (evolutionism), and a philosophy of the ego (psychologism). No student could be allowed to pass on to theology without having studied and understood the errors of these philosophies. The being, the reality, which our intellect rst understands, is

7 8

Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (18771964), somewhat disengaged Catholic upbringing, medical student, conversion experience through reading Ernest Hello; joined the Dominicans, trained at Le Saulchoir but moved to Rome in 1909; see Richard Peddicord, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP (South Bend, IN: St Austinss Press, 2005). Wojtylas reluctance to refer to God as objectum prompted Garrigou-Lagrange to fear that he wanted to interpolate modern notions of the subject into Aquinass theology. Largely the entry he contributed to the Dictionnaire de thologie catholique.
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not the being of God, nor its own nature, but the being, the reality, which exists in the world. We have to head off the temptations to forms of theological ontologism (the reality of the divine is what we know, however implicitly or pre-conceptually); and forms of subjectivism (what we know directly is the contents of our own minds, the rest only by inference, etc.). The point to note is, of course, the assumption that would-be Catholic theologians and philosophers are seriously tempted by these philosophies. They have to be taken through a process of unlearning. It is not just the others, Protestants and such, that are affected. We have to learn the moderate realism of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, returning to that natural, spontaneous knowledge which we call common sense, and which modern philosophical theories occlude. The rst principle is the principle of contradiction, the natural recognition and declaration of opposition between being and nothing: Being is not nothing, One and the same thing, remaining such, cannot simultaneously both be and not be. Positively considered, this is the principle of identity: If a thing is, it is: if it is not, it is not. Explicitated, the principle of contradiction yields the principle of sufcient reason: Everything that is has its raison dtre in itself, if of itself it exists, in something else, if of itself it does not exist. These are the principles of our natural intelligence, rst manifested in that spontaneous form of intelligence which we call common sense, that is, the natural aptitude of intelligence, before all philosophic culture, to judge things sanely.

The errors of modern philosophy

Garrigou-Lagrange offers an excellent picture of mid twentieth century philosophy. First is the neo-positivism of Carnap, Wittgenstein, Rougier and the Vienna Circle (Louis Rougier is the odd man out there!), which is the nominalism of Hume and the positivism of Comte rehashed.9 But the phenomenology of Husserl belongs here also, since all these philosophies focus, not on being or reality or the world, but on phenomena (so phenomenalism). The second tendency is evolutionist: idealist, in the wake of Hegel (Gentile and Leon Brunschvicg); or empiricist (Bergson). The third tendency, including voluntarism (Max Scheler), natural philosophy (Driesch), both of whom lean on Aristotle; and ontology (Hartmann), who gives a Platonic interpretation of Aristotles metaphysics, is more apt for neoscholastic purposes. Thomism, since it is the perennial philosophy, assimilates all that is true in these theories, while rejecting the errors. Unlike Hegelianism, for example, the huge
9 Louis Rougier (18891982), the French link with the Vienna Circle, a sort of logical empiricist, organized the Paris International Congress of Scientic Philosophy 1935; published in history of religious ideas (Celsus, Pythagoreans) and in politics (against the egalitarian-democratic ideology of 1789), as well as in philosophy of science; long neglected but receiving attention now.

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a priori construction of one bewitching genius, Thomism is a temple that rests on a broad inductive base, centuries old, but perpetually repaired by the most attentive study of all attainable fact. In the end, Thomistic philosophy recognizes that reality itself is incomparably richer than our ideas. Thomism, characterized by a sense of mystery, the source of contemplation, awakens our natural (albeit conditional and inefcacious) desire to see God face to face.

Forgetting the twenty-four theses

Garrigou-Lagrange turns on colleagues. Lip service to Thomas Aquinas is universal, he avers, scornfully, but the theses defended under his name are often worlds apart, and even contradict his thought. Can a man be called Thomist by the mere fact that he admits the dogmas dened by the church, while he follows Descartes in his teachings on the spiritual life? Or denies the metaphysics of causality, and in effect settles for Hume? But are not the truths of common sense a sufcient foundation for Catholic philosophers and theologians? Indeed they are, but not when they are distorted by philosophies that place all the emphasis on the individual. See what is happening: One theologian has said that speculative theology, after giving beautiful systems to the Middle Ages, does not today know what it wants, or whither it is going, and that there is no longer serious work except in positive theology (Jean Danilou?). Another theologian proposes to change the order among the chief dogmatic treatises, to put the treatise on the Trinity before that of De Deo uno (Karl Rahner?). Further, on the fundamental problems relative to nature and grace, he invites us to return to what he holds to be the true position of many Greek Fathers anterior to St. Augustine (Henri de Lubac?). Garrigou-Lagrange then attacks pragmatism: Peirce, William James and Edouard Le Roy (Dogma . . . is before all else a practical prescription. Dogma, speaking precisely, would not be true by its conformity with divine reality, but by its relation to the religious act to be performed, and the practical truth of the act would appear in the superior success of that religious experience in surmounting lifes difculties). These philosophies have implications in doctrine: the dogma of the incarnation would not afrm that Jesus is God, but that we must act towards Jesus as we do towards God; the dogma of the Eucharist would not afrm Christs real presence, but that practically we ought to act as if that presence were objectively certain, etc. But dogmatic formulas are not mere norms of action. What they express is not our religious experience, but divine reality, a reality which often transcends experience. Who can claim to experience the hypostatic union, Garrigou-Lagrange asks sarcastically? If you will, we may experience, not these mysteries themselves, but their effects in us. The Holy Spirit no doubt evokes in us a lial affection which we can experience yet even this experience cannot be absolutely distinguished from a mere sentimental affection. On the pragmatist denition of truth, however, we would have to say, and it has been said, that theology is at bottom merely a
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system of spirituality, which has found rational instruments adequated to its religious experience. This position comes in great measure from Johann Adam Mhler: theology is nothing but a spirituality which has developed its own regimen of intelligibility: Thus Thomism would be the expression of Dominican spirituality, Scotism that of Franciscan spirituality, Molinism that of Ignatian spirituality. Hence, since the Church approves these three spiritualities, the theological systems, which are their expression, would all be simultaneously true, as being each in conformity with the particular religious experience, which is their respective originating principle. (Here he means Chenu, see below.) No: these ingenious theories are false spiritualizations of theology, in which theology is reduced to a religious experience, wherein we look in vain for an objective foundation. These theologians regard truth as conformity of the mind with the exigencies of human life worse, a conformity known by a constantly developing experience, moral and religious. Let us return to the traditional (Aristotelian) denition of truth. The rst act of the intellect is to know, not its own action, not itself, not phenomena, but objective and intelligible being. The immutable judgements of faith cannot be preserved inviolate unless we cling to the immutable concepts of being, unity, truth, goodness, nature and person. And much more in the same vein. Depreciating intellective truth, we cannot defend our love of God.

Chenus historical approach

Marie-Dominique Chenu (18951990)10 completed the whole seven years of neoscholastic philosophy and theology at the Angelicum. His doctorate thesis was supervised by Garrigou-Lagrange, who wanted him to remain in Rome as his assistant. Chenus dissertation is a philosophical and theological analysis of contemplation, as found in Thomas Aquinas, motivated, explicitly, by the desire to challenge the assumption then, at least that spirituality was moralistic and concerned with the individual soul, rather than theocentrically concerned with the objectivity of God.11 The rst course Chenu gave, when he returned to Le Saulchoir to teach, was on the patristic sources of the thought of St Thomas. This indicates his departure from

10 11

For details see Christophe F. Potworowski, Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie-Dominique Chenu (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), with bibliography, listing 1,396 items by Chenu. De contemplatione (Angelicum 1920), La Thse indite du P. M.-D. Chenu, edited by Carmelo Giuseppe Conticello, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Thologiques 75 (1991), pp. 363422.

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the Thomism of Garrigou-Lagrange. By 19367 he was expounding Bonaventures Itinerarium mentis in Deum. He lectured on Augustine and Denys: the two Platonisms of St Thomas, etc. In 1937 Chenu composed a manifesto: Une cole de thologie: Le Saulchoir. Summoned to Rome in 1938 to be interrogated by a handful of his fellow Dominicans, headed by Garrigou-Lagrange, he was so bullied that: I gave in to a sort of psychological pressure, I let myself be intimidated. One of them no doubt to pacify Roman irritations asked me to sign a series of ten propositions. I signed.12 This pathetic document shows how Chenus interest in recreating the historical context was obviously taken to imply that truth was not absolute and immutable; that theology was only an expression of religious experience and not a true science, etc. It is incredible that grown men would come up with the proposition that It is glorious that the Church has the system of Saint Thomas as truly orthodox. But the fears are obvious. In 1942, in German-occupied Paris, Chenu heard on the radio that his manifesto was now on the Index of Prohibited Books. He was deprived of his teaching post, on the authority of the Master of the Dominican Order, and denounced as a Modernist, for denying the place of intellect in doing theology, and for recommending students to read the works of the Tbingen School, in particular of Mhler.

12

The ten propositions Chenu signed were as follows: 1. Formulae dogmaticae enunciant veritatem absolutam et immutabilem. 2. Propositiones verae et certae, sive in philosophia sive in theologia, rmae sunt et nullo modo fragiles. 3. Sacra Traditio novas veritates non creat, sed rmiter tenendum ut depositum revelationis, sue complexum veritatum divinitus revelatarum, clausum fuisse morte ultimi apostoli. 4. Sacra Theologia non est quaedam spiritualitas quae invenit instrumenta suae experientiae religiosae adaequata; sed est vera scientia, Deo benedicente, studio acquisita, cujus principia sunt articuli Fidei et etiam omnes veritates revelatae quibus theologus de divina, saltem informi, adhaeret. 5. Varia systemata theologica, quoad ea in quibus ab invicem dissentiunt non sunt simul vera. 6. Gloriosum est Ecclesiam habere systema S. Thomae tamquam valde orthodoxum, i.e. veritatibus Fide valde conforme. 7. Necesse est veritates theologicas per S. Scripturam et traditionem demonstrare, necnon earum naturam et intimam rationem principiis et doctrina S. Thomae illustrare. 8. S. Thomas, etsi proprie theologus, proprie etiam philosophus fuit; proinde, philosophia eius in sua intelligibilitate et veritate non pendet ab ejus theologia, nec enunciat veritates mere relativas sed absolutas. 9. Theologo in processu scientico suo valde necessarium est metaphysicam S. Thomae adhibere et ad regulas dialecticae diligenter attendere. 10. De aliis scriptoribus et doctoribus probatis servandum est moderamen reverentiale in modo loquendi et scribendi, etiamsi in quibusdam defectum inveniuntur. The Latin needs no translation; it would sound even more absurd in English; the text is in the hand, it is said, of Michael Browne, leading gure in the minority at Vatican II. See facsimile, Une cole de thologie: le Saulchoir (Paris: Cerf, 1985), p. 35.
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Baroque scholasticism
Years later, Chenu confessed to remaining marked by the Twenty-Four Theses. Their imposition on all doctorate candidates he saw as one of the worst abuses of papal authority. The approach to the study of Thomas Aquinas which he developed, one may say, was very much a reaction against that project of extracting philosophical theorems from Thomass work, taking them out of theological as well as historical context, as he was to think, creating a sacred metaphysics. In the end, it is a conict about the place and nature of reason and truth in the practice of Catholic theology. Of course Chenu was provocative. He derided neoscholastic philosophy and theology as pervaded by Wolfan rationalism. Natural theology had no more religious character than eighteenth-century Deism. The Augustinian sap and the Dionysian mysticism had been allowed to leak away from Thomas Aquinass theology. Catholic theology needed to be disinfected of baroque Scholasticism: the philosophy of clerical functionaries at the court of Joseph II.13 The Thomist orthodoxy of Cardinal Zigliara, the greatest nineteenth-century Dominican Thomist, was contaminated by Wolfanism; it suppresses the Platonic interpretation of (say) Lepidi.14 And so on. Esoteric as these boutades now sound, they could not but infuriate the doctrine teachers of the day, Garrigou-Lagrange above all. Chenus mockery of his colleagues exacerbated the odium theologicum, which has long characterized Roman Catholic theology. In short, neoscholastics paid no attention to the problems of existence, action, the individual, becoming, and time, preferring a philosophy of essences, in which what counts is the non-contingent, the universal, ideal and immutable relations ne matters for denitions. The second chapter of Chenus manifesto begins, approvingly and provocatively, with a quotation from George Tyrrell surely calculated to enrage fellow Thomists. The message is, however, in the layout: the chapter on theology precedes the chapter on philosophy. In other words, there is no need to pass through the gateway of the testing Twenty-Four Theses before one may be allowed to take up theological studies. But the key passage runs as follows: Theological systems are only the expression of spiritualities . . . The greatness and the truth of Bonaventuran or Scotist Augustinianism are entirely in the spiritual experience of Saint Francis which became the soul in his sons;

13 14

Joseph II (174190), Habsburg Emperor, and leader of the Catholic Enlightenment, restricted papal intervention to the spiritual sphere, subjecting church to state: one of the spectres haunting the Vatican in 186970 a rather arcane insult. Tomasso Maria Zigliara, OP (183393), taught in Rome 187093, chief exponent of Aristotelian Thomism; Alberto Lepidi, OP (18381925), taught in France, Belgium and Rome, emphasized the Augustinian elements in Thomas Aquinas: radically divergent Thomisms even within the Dominican Order from the start.

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Fergus Kerr the grandeur and the truth of Molinism are in the spiritual experience of Saint Ignatius Exercises. A theology worthy of the name is a spirituality, which nds the rational instruments adequate to its religious experience. It is not the luck of history that Saint Thomas entered the Order of Saint Dominic; and it is not by some desultory grace that the Order of Saint Dominic received Saint Thomas Aquinas. The institution and the doctrine are closely allied with one another, in the inspiration that carried the one and the other into a new age, and in the contemplation, which, goal of both, guarantees the fervour, the method, the purity, and the freedom of their spirit

just what horried Garrigou-Lagrange and the others in 1938. For a theologian, contemplation is not a practice in which to engage from time to time, a burst of fervour, beyond studying, as if an escape from its [theologys] object and its method. Contemplation is the theologians everyday environment, without which theology would be arid and pointless. As we exercise the theological virtue of faith, Chenu paraphrases Thomas as saying, sacra doctrina and contemplative life are one and the same thing. In brief, neoscholastic philosophy under the patronage of Leibniz adopted a false ideal of intelligibility .

Chenus Thomas
With his Introduction (1950), Chenu inaugurated or anyway established the historical-contextualist reading of Thomas Aquinas. The division into questions de Deo uno and then questions de Deo trino, far from reecting a decision to see what may be said about God by reason before proceeding to what may be said solely on the basis of revelation, results from an option characteristic of Latin theology, which implies a spiritual itinerary towards the God of revelation . The questions de Deo uno deal with the God of the book of Genesis, not the god of Aristotles Physics: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who points us towards Christ. We have to retain the religious character of this text, never reducing it to a deist theodicy. The link between the questions on God and the theology of creation is made by question 43 in the prima pars on the missions of the Son and of the Spirit. Throughout the rst part of the Summa, there is constant incorporation of biblical material. Placing the questions on the nature of religion in the context of the moral virtue of justice discloses a certain conception of spirituality. And so on. In short, Chenu opens up a quite different way of reading the Summa Theologiae from the way inculcated by the exposition in the textbooks supposedly composed ad mentem Sancti Thomae. Thomass theology, at its most systematic, Chenu insists, was never separated from continuous study of scripture, liturgically performed as well as in lectio divina. Failure to allow for the context which he took for granted the Christian mystery, liturgically performed, inhabited in disciplined contemplation leaves the Summa Theologiae as arid an exercise, as most
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seminarians found it. Far from reducing the rigorously intellectual achievement of the Summa, as his critics feared, Chenu was arguing that we miss the achievement altogether unless we recreate the context. Fifty years ago, Chenu pioneered this approach. It is salutary to remember that it was then regarded as a threat to the standard neoscholastic exposition of Thomism and, accordingly, to the maintenance of orthodoxy in Catholic theology. It may seem unbelievable to theologians in other church traditions, as perhaps also to Catholic theologians under the age of 70, that the grip of a neo-Thomism was so rm on most institutions engaged in teaching theology in conformity with the orthodoxy tests as laid down in the anti-Modernist oath. Essentially, Chenu insisted that Thomas Aquinas was not a timeless thinker but could be understood only in historical context; and, secondly, that his theology is a spirituality. As regards Chenus approach the most obvious legacy is the great work by JeanPierre Torrell, Saint Thomas dAquin: Maitre Spirituel; and the works of David Burrell, Gilles Emery, Matthew Levering, A.N. Williams and many others. It is inconceivable now to reconstruct and expound the theology of Thomas Aquinas in total indifference to its historical context.

Wolfanism at Vatican II
In 1973, Chenu returned to the charge that Catholic theology was pervaded by Wolfanism. The wholesale rejection by the bishops of the draft texts, composed mainly by theologians at the Roman universities, texts in which he detected signs of Wolfan metaphysics, was the nal defeat of neoscholastic Thomism. Once and for all, the spirit of eighteenth-century rationalism was expelled from Catholic theology.15 At Vatican II, then, there was an irreversible shift in theological sensibility, with immensely important implications, however long it might take to work them out. It is not clear how much of Christian Wolffs prolic works Chenu (or anybody else) ever read. No doubt he knew that Wolff wanted to ground theological truths on evidence of quasi-mathematical certitude. Notoriously, Wolffs Pietist Lutheran colleagues were enraged particularly by a lecture which he gave in 1721, instancing the moral precepts of Confucius as evidence of the power of human reason to attain by its own efforts to moral truth. He was deprived of his post and had to leave Halle on pain of death. Chiey, I guess, Chenu knew that Wolff invented the courses on logic, ontology, rational psychology, natural theology, moral philosophy, etc., which shaped Catholic seminary training into the 1960s. This division of labour, thus fragmenting the subject, gave rise to the professionalization of academic philosophy with which we are familiar today,

15

M.D. Chenu, Vrit vanglique et mtaphysique wolenne Vatican II, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Thologiques 57 (1973), pp. 63240.

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and the ruin of the idea of philosophy as pursuit of wisdom, or so you might say. Chenu got the idea from Gilson. Back in the 1940s, Gilson claimed, explicitly, that Wolfanism had inltrated the work of Garrigou-Lagrange.16 He traces the conception of God as causa sui, in Descartes (By cause of itself, I understand that whose essence involves its existence); in Leibniz (The Necessary being has in himself the reason for his own existence), and in Suarez and Wolff. Unhappily, however, they all turn away from the true God: As to that other God of Whom it had been said that He was, not a God Whose essence entailed existence, but a God in Whom what in nite beings is called essence, is to exist, He now seems to lie in a state of complete oblivion. The genuine Thomistic understanding of being being as existence, actus essendi, not mere essence or substance was lost around 1729, Gilson says, completely and absolutely forgotten, the year when Wolffs Ontologia appeared. For Wolff, being, something and possible are terms that are practically synonymous; metaphysics does nothing more than bring their implicit meanings into the open and lay bare the interconnections. Wolff effectively established the doctrine that existence is the complement of possibility, an accident, something wholly foreign to its own essence which means, Gilson notes, that existence remains wholly foreign to being. Within the Wolfan division of philosophy, if we want to nd the sufcient reason for the existence of God then we turn to natural theology; Cosmology explains how the beings which make up the natural world are, though contingent, yet determined; psychologia rationalis explains how, in the human mind, potency is drawn into act: The extraordinary readiness of so many modern textbooks in Scholastic philosophy to welcome, together with the Wolfan notion of ontology, the breaking up of the science of being into several distinct sciences is a sure sign that, to the extent to which it does so, modern Scholasticism has lost the sense of its own message. The study of philosophy no longer yields the wisdom, the sophia, which Aristotle and Plato expected. Worse than this the idea of the good which Plato envisaged and of being as such which Aristotle acknowledged, was recognized by Thomas Aquinas as the act of being as such, ipsum esse subsistens. This, according to Gilson, is Thomass great insight. However all that may be, Gilsons story is that, in the work of Wolff, this failure to see being as existence (actus essendi) passed into the thinking of one generation of philosophers after another, including the philosophers of the Thomist revival. In effect, neo-Thomism was inltrated by Wolfan and Leibnizian rationalism. Garrigou-Lagrange, it has to be admitted, attached great importance to the principle
16 See Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949), passim, never naming Garrigou-Lagrange; but he had been denouncing him in lectures for years as Wolfan.
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of sufcient reason: Everything that is, has a sufcient reason for existing. This, as in the Twenty-Four Theses, is the principle on which the proofs for the existence of God are based. One of his earliest articles, in 1908, taken into his book Le sens commun (1909), and again into Dieu in 1919, refers us, on each occasion, to the work of Afrikan Alexandrovich Spir. Naughtily, Gilson suggests that Garrigou-Lagranges principle of sufcient reason brings with it the spirit of eighteenth-century rationalism. Chenus contention, in 1973, is that, through Spir, eighteenth-century rationalism got into the Thomism he knew at the Angelicum. Moreover, he now says, this is at the bottom of the bitter dispute when he and others contested the authenticity of the neoscholastic theology of which the deductivist rationalism put the scienticity against their appeal to living experience, vital sources, etc., in the history, the economy, of salvation, in the presence of the word of God in the church. The pejorative phrase la nouvelle thologie was applied (rst by Garrigou-Lagrange, in 1946) to those who questioned the rationalistic tendencies which had ruined Catholic theology; they sought, on the contrary, to reopen traditional Catholicism to recover the old theology, pre-modern and pre-neoscholastic. Chenu examines the text of the chapter De cognitione veritatis in the document De deposito dei pure custodiendo [sic!] drafted for the Council, by the Roman university theologians (not including Garrigou-Lagrange, however: senile dementia had already aficted him). He shows, with little difculty, that the text operates with an epistemology, where truth is lined up with immutability, necessity, universal rationality, etc.; the philosophy of being is contrasted with a philosophy of becoming, and being is reduced in Wolfan style to essence. Time and history do not gure. At last, Chenu concludes, the way begins to open for a renewal of theology, beyond the aporias of neo-Scholasticism, of which Wolfan rationalism was not the least avatar. Thus, at Vatican II, the neoscholastic conception of reason was nally rejected.

The question of truth

Maybe so. Yet, this does not mean that many Catholic theologians nd it necessary or attractive to read Thomas Aquinas in Chenus or any other way. Some Thomists have much the same reservations about Torrell as Garrigou-Lagrange had about Chenu: Thomass theology as a spirituality. For most Catholic theologians these days, I guess, any recourse to Thomas Aquinas seems antiquarianism, a failure to face up to the rupture in Western thought inaugurated in the work of Martin Heidegger and in the effects that are generally labeled post-modernism. For those who doubt that the Heideggerian grand narrative is the only possible starting-point, however, the questions outlined by Garrigou-Lagrange remain the agenda. The truth of biblical revelation cannot be reduced to the formal truth of the propositions which state it, Chenu insists, in his demolition of pre-Vatican IIs
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neoscholastic Wolfanism. God is revealed in actions and events as well as in words. These events are not brute facts, illustrating divine ideas (as who might have thought?); they are Gods actions in history. Its not good enough to study the abstract conditions of the possibility of a revelation, deductively, as GarrigouLagrange did, so Chenu says, in the framework of a metaphysical conception of truth. This analysis connects neither with the historical condition of man nor with saving truth. It is the purely extrinsic method of a certain fundamental theology, rendered obsolete by the Council. Fine. What we want, Chenu goes on to say, is biblical truth, evangelical truth, according to the Hebrew mind it connects directly not with what is but with what comes about, with that of which one has experience. Greek thought developed by reecting on the substance of beings, and issues into a philosophy of immutability and permanence. It left out the proper characteristic of biblical thought: time, the fragility of things and persons. Biblical thought is turned not to essences but to destinies; it questions itself about the feeblenesses and the promises of life, etc. True, Chenu allows, it would be giving in to a pernicious and historically controversial dualism to oppose the historical and concrete truth of the Gospel to the abstract truth of Greco-Latin philosophy, dened as this latter is by adequatio rei et intellectus, in a judgment which relates a statement with the truth of being as being. But . . . you can guess how Chenu goes on. Admittedly this is Chenu, thirty years ago, when the difference between Hebrew and Greek ways of thinking, and thus between biblical and metaphysical concepts of truth, was something of a commonplace. But is it perverse, after the history of Chenus conict with GarrigouLagrange, to suggest that, for all ones gratitude for the historical-contextualist reading of Thomas Aquinas, Chenus remarks about the biblical concept of truth are less than satisfactory? Is it not a relief to turn to recent discussions of truth by philosophers in the analytical tradition, from Michael Dummett to Donald Davidson? Is it a surprise to nd that they would be more at home with Garrigou-Lagranges anxieties about Modernist philosophies than with Chenus detection of Wolfan rationalism? No doubt it was high time that the grip of neoscholastic philosophy over Roman Catholic theology was broken, we could not go on ignoring historical context; but some at least of those who freed theology from rationalism reverted to assumptions about truth, experience, etc., which seem, to say the least, to need a bit of philosophical scrutiny.

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