1. Introduction.
The term “modernism,” when used
in the context
of the history of religions, refers most
precisely to the cluster of
critical, philosophical, and
ecclesiological ideas advanced by a number
of
European Roman Catholic intellectuals in the period
1890-1910, and especially to the systematic condem-
nation of these ideas by Pope Pius X in 1907. It
also
denotes the liberal (broad) and radical movement for
reform in
the Church of England which began in the
late nineteenth century and
reached its peak in the
years after World War I. The term has also served
very
loosely and without precise theological reference as
the opposite
of fundamentalism, or the equivalent of
liberal Protestantism, especially
in the United States.
Even more generally the attempts of all
traditional
religions, including those of the East, to come to terms
with the secular and scientific culture of the modern
Western world have
been described as modernism.
The words “modernist” and “modernism”
were
originally negative and polemical in meaning. To be
a modernist
was to be a heretic. For three generations
in Roman Catholicism
“the taint of modernism”
effectively destroyed
careers and ended serious consid-
eration
of new ideas. In what follows the word
“modernism” is
used to refer to the papal synthesis,
and the word
“modernist” is restricted to the ideas of
men
directly involved in the condemnation. It must
be understood, however, that
the terms have also been
used by participants in it and by sympathetic
historians
of the movement (Houtin, 1913; Petre, 1918; Vidler,
1934,
1970). And it should be clear that for many
contemporaries of the crisis,
inside and outside the
Church, the ideas of all
nonscholastic or more gener-
ally, non-Curial
thinkers, from J. A. Mohler of
Tübingen to Cardinal Newman of
Oxford and Maurice
Blondel of Aix, were suspect for several decades.
Two tasks concerned the handful of Roman Catholic
clerical and lay
intellectuals who were to emerge as
the central figures of the crisis at
the turn of the cen-
tury. The first was the
development of a biblical criti-
cism which
was both scientific by the standards of
nineteenth-century historiography
and supportive of
the essentials of Catholic teaching. The second was
the
creation of a new philosophical language which would
provide
Catholicism with an apologetic tool suited to
men of the twentieth century.
Two principles con-
trolled both efforts. The
first was the conviction that
if change was to come to Roman Catholicism in
either
criticism or theology it would have to come from
within: the
new ideas must be introduced by men
whose loyalty and personal faith were
above criticism.
The second was that the Catholic faith and culture
could be shown to be complementary to the vision of
man and society which
modern thinkers had developed
since the Reformation.
In “reconciling” traditional Catholicism and the
modern world these intellectuals drew deeply on sev-
eral major currents of thought. First was the tentative
tradition of liberal Catholicism. Two attempts had
already been made to break the intellectual and politi-
cal isolation of the intensely
ultramontane church.
Félicité de Lamennais and his
followers during the
1830's, and then Marc-René, marquis de
Montalembert,
Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, and Lord
Acton
in the 1860's served as examples of Catholics generat-
ing a more vigorous approach to their religion, as
well
as examples of the personal dangers such an effort
entailed. For
the Italian modernists in particular the
social concerns of early liberal
Catholicism were to
be influential; but both Alfred Firmin Loisy and
George Tyrrell cite in their autobiographical writings
the great impact of
reading books by Lamennais,
Montalembert, and J. B. Henri Lacordaire. And
more
recently there was the great figure of John Henry
Newman, whose
idea of development seemed to have
been at least indirectly endorsed by his
elevation to
the cardinalate by Leo XIII in 1879, and the work of
American Catholics like John Ireland and Thomas
Hecker.
French Catholic intellectuals interested in applying
nineteenth-century
historical techniques to the Bible
could find a model in their own church:
Richard Simon,
the tireless critic who had been politically, if not
intellectually bested by Bishop Bossuet. But there were
more contemporary
stimulants in Germany. The long
“quest for the historical
Jesus” which Albert
Schweitzer was summarizing in his 1906
study, Von
Reimarus zu Wrede had produced new
techniques for
studying the new and old testaments, as well as a
variety of scandalously “naturalistic”
interpretations.
These made Christian revelation subject to Kantian,
Hegelian, and Darwinian concepts and produced sev-
eral major bêtes noires for the
polemicists, notably
D. F. Strauss, and the high priest of scientism in
France,
Ernest Renan. More recently attention had come to
focus on
Albert Ritschl and Adolf Harnack, and exe-
getes like J. Wellhausen, J. Weiss, and H. J. Holtzmann.
By the end of the century the ferment of German
Protestant theology and
criticism had produced two
images of Jesus Christ, and by implication, of
the
Church, with which Catholic scholars would have to
come to terms.
The first and better known was the
liberal Protestant image of Jesus as the
God-
enlightened founder of an
ethical and moral kingdom.
On this idea had been built an interpretation of
the
Church as the embodiment of human progress. The
approach was
initially very attractive to some Catholic
critics of their church's social
backwardness. The sec-
ond image was quite
different. Called the radical or
consistent eschatological school, it
presented the Jesus
of the Gospel as a messianic figure who preached a
kingdom completely at odds with that of the world
and who died to force it
into life. This second version
of the gospel brought those who adopted it to an
impasse.
Though initially stimulating it offered a poor
foundation for building an
apologetic for the century
of science, progress, and bourgeois order. Theolog-
ically, it demanded a
demythologization—or in terms
of the day, a
“symbolic” approach—not only to the
gospel
but to the whole Catholic tradition: and that
undertaking called for a new
language, one which also
could be found in German thought.
Thomism, of course, was the official philosophy of
the Catholic Institutes
started in response to Leo XIII's
call for a revival of Catholic learning,
but by the mid-
1890's the new or revitalized
Catholic journals and
reviews were responding to the stream of French
translations of German philosophers, and some early
enthusiasts of the new
scholasticism were agreeing with
Marcel Hébert who declared in
1881 that “Kant had
the great distinction of giving to
philosophical minds
a powerful impulsion.” In 1885 the Thomist
Society
in Paris heard Hébert's paper on “Thomism
and
Kantianism”: in the succeeding decade the roster of
names evaluated in the more progressive publications
grew to include
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The
major channel through which German thought
reached
the progressive wing of the French Catholic commu-
nity was the work of Maurice Blondel, who drew
major
elements of his complex philosophy of action from
Spinoza,
Fichte, and Schelling as well as from Kant
and Hegel, after finding these
writers sympathetically
discussed at the École Normale by his
teacher Émile
Boutroux and his friend Victor Delbos.
At the same time other currents of thought were
moving over Europe and even
across the Atlantic.
Baron Friedrich von Hügel in England was
reading
the neo-Kantian Rudolf Eucken and recommending his
books;
Englishmen and Frenchmen were learning
neo-Hegelianism from the popular
works of John
Caird; Frenchmen and then Englishmen were enthus-
ing over the mixture of Schleiermacher
and evolu-
tionary thought in Auguste
Sabatier's Outlines of a
Philosophy of Religion
(1892). Besides drawing on the
Germans Blondel could point to an indigenous
alterna-
tive to scholasticism in the
works of Ollé-Laprune, and
much earlier, Maine de Biran and
Ravaisson. All these
intellectual exchanges were among those committed
to one form or another of traditional Christianity, but
they were
paralleled by a remarkable renaissance of
interest in religion among
secular intellectuals which
began in the mid-1890's. The philosophies of
intuition
and pragmatism developed by Henri Bergson and
William James
had their impact, but the “neo-
Christianity” of the 1890's was fostered more
dramatically by the novels of Paul Bourget, whose Le
Disciple (1889) dramatized for many the “bankruptcy
of science,” even as the editor of the influential
Revue
des Deux Mondes, Ferdinand
Brunetière, was an-
nouncing, after
a visit to the Vatican, that the time
had come for intellectuals to
recognize the great power
for moral order which was embodied in
Catholicism.
With republican anticlericals suddenly criticizing
Taine
and Renan and finding good words to say for
the pope, the moment for a
Catholic offensive into
the learned world had come.
