International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 7 Number 4 October 2005

The Nouvelle Théologie and the Patristic

Revival: Sources, Symbols and the
Science of Theology
BRIAN DALEY*

Abstract: A historical survey of the various controversies between thinkers

associated with the nouvelle théologie and the Roman Catholic hierarchy
suggests that three matters were particularly at stake. First was an ecclesiology,
whether the church was to be understood primarily as a historically-continuing
structure of authority and obedience, or in more sacramental and spiritual ways.
Second, the nature of theological language was at stake: is theology merely a
set of logical deductions from divinely revealed, but universally accessible,
propositions, or is faith and commitment necessary to any serious grasp of the
import of theological claims? Finally, and undergirding these two issues, is a
disagreement about the reception of the biblical witness, and so the recovery
within the nouvelle théologie of patristic and medieval modes of figurative,
typological or spiritual exegesis can be seen to be central to the movement.

In the April 1946 issue of the Jesuit cultural journal Études, Fr Jean Daniélou,
a member of the editorial staff and a professor at the Institut Catholique in
Paris, published an article entitled ‘Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse’.
It was an enthusiastic, wide-ranging piece, aimed at a broad circle of readers: a kind
of manifesto calling for a broad change of emphasis and style in the development and
communication of theology within the Catholic Church. The 40-year-old Jesuit began
by observing that those heady days of cultural and political revival in France, less
than a year after the formal end of the Second World War, offered the church urgent
new challenges, as well as new opportunities; Christian leaders were now demanding,
in the face of post-war atheism, ‘a more substantial doctrinal and spiritual
nourishment than has normally been available’. Daniélou continued:
The future is full of promise; this great call of spirits and souls who seek a living
form of Christian thought makes us more sharply aware than ever . . . of what
our normal teaching of theology or apologetics or biblical interpretation too

* University of Notre Dame Dept. of Theology, 130 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN46556,
USA.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Nouvelle Théologie and Patristic Revival 363

often fails to do. If people today insist that theology be present to the thinking
world, that is doubtless because it has been absent from it.1
The staleness of theology in the decades before the war, Daniélou went on to
observe, was doubtless a continuing reaction to the crisis of modernism in the first
two decades of the twentieth century. The ‘modernists’ had accused the Catholic
theology of their time, represented by the neo-scholastic system of the standard
seminary textbooks, of being rigidly rationalistic, out of touch both with the
philosophical and scientific movements of contemporary culture and with the
religious desires and sensibilities of ordinary Christians. Doubtless, Catholic
modernists like Alfred Loisy had overreacted against such rigidity, finding in the
historical criticism of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship grounds for reducing
the Christian narrative of salvation to an edifying myth – a symbolic projection of
the longings of the human spirit for permanence, community and fulfilment, without
any valid claim to truth in the ordinary sense. But the Catholic neo-scholastic
response, in the first decades of the twentieth century, had been to withdraw even
more decisively than before from intellectual contact with contemporary culture, and
to restrict the activity of theology to the confines of an Aristotelian ontology and
dialectic that ended in being its own brand of self-defining literalism, and which
looked with suspicion on the historical study of both the Bible and the development
of doctrine.
For Daniélou, Catholic theology at the end of World War II, if it was going to
speak powerfully to its time, faced a triple challenge:
It must treat God as God – not as an object, but as the Subject par excellence,
who reveals himself when and as he will; as a result, it must be penetrated, first
of all, with a religious spirit. Second, it must respond to the experiences of the
modern mind, and take cognizance of the new dimensions which science and
history have given to mind and society. Finally, it must become a concrete
attitude before existence – one unified response that engages the whole person,
the inner light of a course of action in which the whole of life is engaged.2
Theology must become overtly spiritual, in other words – must be permeated by an
attitude of worship, as well as governed by rational consistency; it must speak in a
language that contemporary non-Christians can at least understand and regard as
plausible; and it must be more than simply an intellectual exercise – it must lead a
believer to deeper concern for society’s needs, based on the exigencies of faith.
Daniélou goes on to develop these three characteristics of a renewed theology
at greater length, suggesting that they are already realized, in a beginning way, by
certain distinctive features of ‘contemporary religious thought’. The first of those
features – a more personal and historical view of God and a more overtly religious

1 Jean Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse’, Études 79 (1946), p.

5 [translation mine].
2 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 7.

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364 Brian Daley

approach to conceiving him – is evident what he calls ‘the return to the sources’:
new, thematic focus by Catholic thinkers on the Bible, the Fathers of the church,
and the history and practice of the liturgy.3 In the new emphasis on patristic studies
that was already under way in France, in fact – the new availability of complete
translations of long-neglected works from the early church, as well as a new
scholarly attention to the theology of the Fathers – Daniélou sees a kind of
connecting link between all three facets of renewal, since ‘the work of the Fathers
is in large part a vast commentary on Holy Scripture’, while the patristic style of
spiritual biblical interpretation, ‘which invites us to look for figures of Christ in the
Old Testament’, is itself a continuing structural principle of Catholic liturgy.4 The
problem for contemporary Catholic thinkers, he suggests, ‘is to rediscover what was
fruitful in this [exegetical] method of the Fathers, which alone is capable of letting
the Old Testament cease to be an archaeological curiosity and become living
nourishment for souls’.5 Any recovery of figural exegesis, he is quick to point out,
must be carried out through ‘courteous and fruitful contacts between scientific
exegetes and exegete-theologians’6 – our modern understanding of the formation of
canonical texts, and our commitment to interpreting them as far as possible within
their original context of meaning, cannot simply be put aside; but patristic models
can help us to develop ‘a new theology of prophecy – that is, a theology of the
relation of the Old and New Testaments, a notion called to play a central role in the
theology of tomorrow’.7
What contemporary theology looks for in the Fathers, Daniélou insists – the
driving goal behind the series Sources chrétiennes, which he and Henri de Lubac
had founded in 1943 – is not simply evidence for the history of religious ideas, but
religious substance.8 And what it abundantly finds in their writings is both a sense
of God as an active presence in human history, preparing humanity in stages to
receive the incarnate Word,9 and the news that God’s desire is not simply to save
individual souls but ‘humanity, conceived as a single reality which Christ has
penetrated with divine life’.10 ‘The return to the dogma of the Mystical Body,’ he
adds – referring to the strong current in Catholic ecclesiology since the 1930s,
moving towards conceiving the reality of the church not simply in the polemical

3 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 7.

4 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 9.
5 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 9.
6 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 9.
7 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 9.
8 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 10. For the role of de Lubac, Daniélou and
others in the patristic revival of the 1940s and in the conceiving and founding of Sources
chrétiennes, see Marie-Josèphe Rondeau, ‘Jean Daniélou, Henri-Irénée Marrou et le
renouveau des études patristiques’, Les Pères de l’Église au XXe siècle. Histoire-
Littérature-Théologie: ‘L’aventure des Sources chrétiennes’ (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1997), pp. 351–78.
9 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 10.
10 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 11.

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categories of the Counter-Reformation, but as the concrete social and liturgical

setting in which we encounter God in Christ – ‘has led us to re-emphasize the
value of patristic texts, where this doctrine bursts forth on every page’.11 In the
writings of the Fathers, in fact, Daniélou points out that ‘we find precisely a certain
number of categories which are distinctive of contemporary thought, and which
scholastic theology had lost’.12 The renewal of theology for the post-war church, in
his view, must begin by taking the origins of Christian thought more seriously, as
sources and models for reflecting on the word of faith.
Despite the fact that it was written for a general Catholic readership, Daniélou’s
article obviously touched some sensitive theological nerves: it seemed to sound a
call to arms for revolution.13 In a review article in Revue Thomiste in the summer
of the same year, 1946, the Toulouse Dominican Marie-Michel Labourdette surveyed
the first-fruits of two new publishing enterprises that the French Jesuits had begun
during the war years: a series of monographs entitled Théologie, authored by such
promising young thinkers as Henri de Lubac, Henri Bouillard, Gaston Fessard
and the lay theologian Jean Mouroux, all written from a predominantly history-of-
doctrine perspective; and the patristic translations-with-commentary that had been
launched, three years earlier, under the title Sources chrétiennes – a name that
implied an implicit challenge to anyone brought up in the manualist tradition.
Although he was polite, even generous in recognizing the scholarly quality of both
series, Père Labourdette made it clear in his review that he sensed an agenda, ‘un
esprit commun’ running through most of the monographs in Théologie, as well as
coloring the choice of texts in the patristic series – up to that date, ten volumes, all
works from the Greek tradition, all representing either a robust Christian humanism
or a call to Christ-centered mysticism14 – and determining the style of commentaries

11 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 11.

12 Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, p. 10.
13 For a thorough survey of the debates that wracked French Catholic theology in the early
twentieth century, see especially Christofer Frey, Mysterium der Kirche, Öffnung zur
Welt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969). For Frey’s discussion of the nouvelle
théologie, see especially pp. 55–108. See also the useful survey of the controversy by
Raymond Winling, ‘Nouvelle Théologie’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1977– ) 24.668–75.
14 Probably because the world of the scholastic manuals was so exclusively Latin, those
who sought new ‘sources’ for theological renewal tended, in the 1930s and later, to look
primarily to the early Greek and Eastern tradition. This interest is reflected in the early
volumes of Sources chrétiennes. It was not until 1948, with vol. 21, that the first Latin
work appeared in the series: the Itinerarium of the fourth-century Spanish pilgrim Egeria
(Etheria), a work mainly prized for its information on the early Jerusalem liturgy.
Subsequent volumes of Latin patristic works also represented a liturgical or exegetical
interest, rather than dogmatic argument: a volume of Pope Leo I’s sermons (vol. 22:
1948), St Ambrose’s De sacramentis and De mysteriis (vol. 25: 1949), Pope Gregory the
Great’s Moralia in Job (vol. 32: 1950). A second new series of published patristic texts,
all from the Latin tradition, was the Belgian collection Corpus Christianorum, founded
by the Benedictine liturgical and patristic scholar Dom Eligius Dekkers in 1953. The

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and notes. Labourdette obviously regarded this theological agenda as tendentious

and alarming. To flesh out his reservations, he included in his review article generous
excerpts from Daniélou’s recent essay in Études, which he seems to have taken,
despite its obviously popular aim, as a piece of intentional propaganda for the larger
Jesuit project of ‘returning to the sources’.15 What clearly annoyed him in that article
was not only ‘the somewhat cavalier fashion in which P. Daniélou, thanks to the
efforts of P. Teilhard de Chardin’ (a behind-the-scenes villain frequently alluded to
in the French theological controversies of the 1940s), ‘annexes for contemporary
theology the benefits of Marxist analysis and existentialist reflection’, even while
showing ‘such a naïve disdain for contemporary neo-Thomism’.16 It was, even more,
Daniélou’s implied understanding of theology itself, as something embedded in
history, expressive of personal faith, articulated and communicated inescapably in
symbol, and primarily focused on human relationships with a God who always
eludes conceptual understanding, – a theology that always resists clear formulation
and adequate systematization, and that is kept alive by the witness of great writings
from every period of the church’s history, rather than a theology of rational definition
and argument, brought to more or less permanent fullness in the great intellectual
structure built by Thomas Aquinas and his interpreters.
‘To speak the truth,’ Labourdette observes of the two new series of publications,
‘the whole problem of theology, and its ambition to form itself into knowledge in
the proper sense, is posed here’.17 For him, the end-point of the intellectual trajectory
launched by the monographs in Théologie and the first volumes of Sources
chrétiennes was nothing less than an anti-intellectual historical relativism and a
vaguely spiritual personalism, accompanied by the abandonment of the great
Thomist construction of theology as an organized science, dealing with ultimate and
timeless truth. So, towards the end of the article, he sums up his criticism of what
he sees as the theological vision of all these Jesuit productions, with an irony verging
on bitterness:
The idea of speculative truth, expressing in its own right a relationship of
conformity between an utterance and things, is thus twisted towards a very
different meaning: that of sincerity of witness and of expression, of authenticity
in the formulation of experience. The interest of a philosophy or of a theological
synthesis will no longer be its significance as a whole, considered in the
coherence of its assertions; it will no longer be the value of its doctrine as a

volumes in this series lacked historical and theological introductions and notes, and were
apparently intended simply to make available the best possible texts of all major Latin
patristic works in a more readable format than Migne’s Patrologia. A Greek series, by
now made up – as was the Latin – entirely of critical editions, under the direction of
Marcel Richard, was added to Corpus Christianorum in 1977.
15 Marie-Michel Labourdette, ‘La Théologie et ses sources’, Revue Thomiste 46 (1946), p.
369, n. 1.
16 Labourdette, ‘La Théologie et ses sources’, p. 369 and n. 1.
17 Labourdette, ‘La Théologie et ses sources’, p. 356.

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Nouvelle Théologie and Patristic Revival 367

transmission of permanent truths. From this point of view, is not every system
of ideas subject to aging and death? Its interest, if it is a great and truly human
philosophy, is above all in the inner experience from which it emerges, in the
‘spirituality’ from which it comes forth and which is its real value . . . What we
can never accept is the complete evacuation, in a perspective like this, of the
idea of speculative truth. And to anyone who asks if we believe that truth is
accessible to us, we are naïve enough to reply, ‘Yes’. We understand by ‘truth’
the conformity of the knowing intelligence with a reality which for it is a
‘given,’ never a ‘construct’ . . . Put another way, we hold for valuable, on the
level of timeless truth, the philosophical explanation that St. Thomas gives us
of the problem of knowledge.18
In Labourdette’s view, the Jesuits’ attempt to administer to the church a new,
energizing dose of early Christian theology and exegesis, with all its figural
hermeneutic and its emphasis on the transformative value of union with Christ in
the ecclesial life of faith, was in effect a call to abandon the more cerebral, objectified
world of neo-Thomism, with its systematic clarity and its ready identification
with the statements of the papal magisterium. The patristic project, especially,
seemed to be an invitation to step off into a world of exotic symbolism, of collectivist
ecclesiology and trendy social projects, of subjectivity and conceptual
impermanence: into that very rejection of propositionally formulated truth that had
been the core of the modernist spirit.19

18 Labourdette, ‘La Théologie et ses sources’, pp. 367–9.

19 One can get some sense of the modernist spectre feared by Labourdette and others from
a passage in a letter of George Tyrrell (1861–1909) – the English Jesuit expelled from
the Society and suspended from the exercise of his ministry in 1906, on grounds of
suspected modernist tendencies – to his friend the Baron Friedrich von Hügel, written
on 10 February 1907. Tyrrell is here reflecting on the doctrine of the virginal conception
of Jesus, within the wider context of the whole Gospel. He writes:
Hence I am driven to a revolutionary view of dogma. As you know, I distinguish
sharply between the Christian revelation and the theology that rationalizes and
explains it. The former was the work of the inspired era of origins. It is prophetic
in form and sense; it involves an idealised reading of history past and to come. It
is, so to say, an inspired construction of things in the interests of religion; a work
of inspired imagination, not of reflection and reasoning. It does not develop or
change like theology; but is the subject-matter of theology . . . The whole has a
spiritual value as a construction of Time in relation to Eternity. It gives us the world
of our religious life. But I do not feel bound to find an independent meaning in each
element; or to determine prematurely what elements are of literal, and what of
purely symbolic value – which is the core of historic fact and which of idealization.
My faith is in the truth, shadowed by the whole creed; and in the direction it gives
to spiritual life – in the Way, the Life and the Truth. (M.D. Petre, ed., George
Tyrrell’s Letters [London: Fisher Unwin, 1920], pp. 57–8)
Tyrrell here clearly believes that God has revealed himself in time, in Jesus who is ‘the
way, the truth and the life’, and that that revelation engages the believer in an absolute

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Alarmist though he may have been, Labourdette was clearly right in seeing the
inner tendency of the new series Sources chrétiennes as expressing a spirit critical,
even potentially subversive, of the scholastic ideal of systematic theology. A
prefatory note originally published in the first volume, early in 1943, makes this
intention clear:
The collection of which this is the first volume presents a very precise character,
which it would be good to define from the beginning. It is intended to put at
the disposal of the educated public complete works of the Church Fathers,
adding to them all the tools that will allow their full understanding . . . It seems
to us that if the Fathers are hard to read, it is because we are completely ignorant
of their style of thought. They represent for us a cultural realm almost as distant
as that of India or China. What we need to do is to explain that world from
within, to introduce people to it, to give a view of its surroundings and a
description of its byways, and then to hand the keys over to the reader, leaving
him or her the pleasure of discovering treasures that he would not otherwise
have guessed exist . . . We know, by all the encouragement we have received,
that our effort corresponds to the expectations of many people. We hope that
these expectations will not be disappointed, and that this collection will allow
a number of readers direct access to these ‘sources’ of spiritual life and
theological teaching, always springing up new, which are the Fathers of the
Church.20
This sense that the Fathers, when understood in context, offer the contemporary
reader locked and hidden treasure, more life-giving than the theological synthesis
of the manuals but also more distant, more exotic, more ‘shocking’ (in a healthy
way) to traditional Catholic apologetics and piety, received measured criticism from
another Dominican in the same issue of Revue Thomiste, summer 1946, in which
Labourdette had launched his rockets against the Jesuits of Fourvière: a generally
favorable review, by Père Marie-Joseph Nicolas, of Henri de Lubac’s magisterial
treatment of early medieval eucharistic ecclesiology, Corpus Mysticum, published
two years earlier.21 Nicolas concedes de Lubac’s main point: that the original

commitment. But he also clearly understands God’s revelation to have been made
primarily in persons and events, and to have been communicated to us in imaginative or
symbolic narrative, rather than in propositions claiming to be taken as literally true.
Theology, which is the human attempt to make sense of these revealed symbols in words,
is of less permanent value than dogma, despite its greater claims to intellectual clarity.
While the French Jesuits of the 1940s would doubtless have been much more careful in
defining the historical character of revelation, or the necessarily figural nature of biblical
hermeneutics, they would doubtless have been more sympathetic to Tyrrell’s general
point of view than would Labourdette and his colleagues.
20 ‘Note liminaire du no. 1 de la Collection’, republished in Claude Mondésert, Pour lire
les Pères de l’Église dans la Collection ‘Sources Chrétiennes (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1988), p. 19.
21 Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen Âge (Paris:
Aubier, 1944).

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identification of the eucharistic ‘mystery’ of Christ’s Body with the ecclesial

‘mystery’ came to be forgotten in the debates of thirteenth-century scholasticism,
even if, as he argues, the essential value of that earlier usage entered fully, in other
terms, into the Thomistic synthesis. Nicolas concludes:
It is by the Eucharist that the Mystical Body [the church] is effectively formed,
and by which it lives. In the end, this is the point Père de Lubac wants to make,
and the only thing for which we reproach him is to see, in the forgetting of
Eucharistic symbolism, the necessary consequence of the scientific form taken
by medieval theology, as well as to see in this scientific form the expression of
a bygone mentality: perhaps less accessible to our minds, but in any case less
traditional, than the ‘symbolist’ mentality of the Fathers.22
The Fathers were, both for the first editors of Sources chrétiennes and for their
critics, an emblem for a new, different way of thinking and speaking about the central
realities of Christian faith: not the ‘scientific’ neo-Thomist system of the seminaries,
formed in the centuries of apologetic argument that grew out of Reformation debates
and had been hardened by Enlightenment critique, but an earlier, pre-scholastic style
of writing from the first six or seven centuries of Christianity, which defied easy
conceptual harmonization, but which invited the reader to ponder and to pray, and
prodded him to think anew about Christian institutions, Christian worship and
Christian unity.
The tension that lay at the heart of the criticisms of Labourdette and Nicolas
was not simply the centuries-old rivalry between Dominicans and Jesuits, transferred
to the post-war French church. Its roots lay deep in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
discussions of what the task and appropriate intellectual method of theology really
is, as ‘faith seeking understanding’, and it was beginning to show itself even in
internal debates within the Dominican order itself. St Thomas Aquinas, in the very
first question of the Summa Theologiae, had argued for what became the classical
Catholic understanding of theology, as a ‘science’ in the Aristotelian sense of
episteme: an organized body of knowledge concerning some aspect of human
experience, arranged according to the causal explanation of phenomena in a chain
of deductive reasoning from ever-more-general, ever-more-universally-accepted
principles.23 In Thomas’s view, formally organized Christian teaching – sacra
doctrina – is itself a ‘science’ in this Aristotelian sense; it uses human logic to draw
and prove its conclusions,24 but its ‘principles’ or axioms are the revealed ‘data’ of
God’s own knowledge of himself and all creation, communicated to humanity in the

22 Revue Thomiste 46 (1946), pp. 388–9.

23 See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I, 2 (71b8–72b4). For a thorough discussion of the
scholastic notion of theology as a science, its background and development, and
the twentieth-century debates about the implications of this conception, see Tarcisse
Tshibangu, Théologie positive et théologie speculative: Position traditionnelle et
nouvelle problématique (Louvain: Publications universitaires, 1965).
24 ST I, q. 1, a. 8.

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events and words of revelation, and shared most fully by the saints in heaven.25
Although the science of theology deals with many things – the contents of scripture,
the person and the significance of Christ, the continuing life of the church and its
members – its formal object or intellectual focus, for Thomas, is simply God: all
the details of Christian teaching are of concern to theology ‘insofar as they have
reference to God’.26 Our knowledge of God, communicated to us in revelation and
reflected on in faith by the graced human reason, is the unifying principle that makes
Christian teaching a single science, a single subject for comprehensive study in a
university, alongside medicine, law and the liberal arts. This conception of theology
as a science was the founding assumption of what came to be known as
scholasticism: theology developed as an academic discipline, in and for the
‘schools’.
It was open to a number of different interpretations, however, by the start of the
twentieth century. From the time of the Reformation controversies on, Catholic
scholastic theologians had tended to color their presentation of the science with anti-
Protestant apologetics, and to stress more and more – in defiance of Enlightenment
critique – the rational process of thinking out the ‘data’ of revelation, by which
premises lead to conclusions, as the proper work of theology. Following a chain of
reasoning to its end, in the eyes of many, was the process by which the church came
to an awareness of the truths it proclaimed as dogmas; the Belgian Dominican
Tuyaerts, for instance, in a book on the development of doctrine published in 1919,
stated: ‘The nature of dogma, and of our mind, make possible only one single process
in the evolution of dogma: the dialectical process, which is reasoning.’27 Theology,
in such a view, was taken to be a single coherent system, drawn by logical
demonstration from the basic principles God has revealed to us in sacred history;
anyone who accepted those principles as true, because of a prior conviction of the
reliability of God’s revelation of himself, could join in the process of drawing out
their conclusions, and the church’s official teaching was simply her officially
sanctioned theological system; since the time of Pope Leo XIII, this was identified,
implicitly at least, with the system of Thomas Aquinas, as digested and interpreted
in Thomist seminary textbooks.28

25 ST I, q. 1, a. 2.
26 ST I, q. 1, a. 7.
27 M.M. Tuyaerts, L’Évolution du Dogme. Étude théologique (Louvain: Nova et Vetera,
1919), p. 236; cited by Henri de Lubac, ‘Le problème du développement du dogme’,
Théologie dans l’histoire 2 (Paris: Desclée, 1990), pp. 38–9.
28 Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (4 August 1879) recognized the Thomist form of
scholasticism as the normative synthesis of the earlier Catholic philosophical and
theological tradition, and ‘urged strongly, for the protection and embellishment of the
Catholic faith, for the good of society, for the growth of all the sciences, that you [= the
bishops] restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas and propagate it as widely as possible’.
See Heinrich Denzinger and Peter Hünermann, Enchiridion symbolorum (Freiburg/
Basel/Rome/Vienna: Herder, 1991), cols 3139–40, pp. 845–6. This was taken as a
programmatic principle by Catholic seminaries, and was given legislative force in the
new Codex Iuris Canonici of 1918 (col. 1366.2).

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There were other voices, however, even within the Thomist milieu, which resisted
this highly intellectual and deductive understanding of the task of theology and its
relation to the preaching of the gospel. In a richly synthetic article published in the
Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques in 1935, for instance, entitled
‘Position de la Théologie’, the French Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu –
explicitly drawing on the work of the nineteenth-century Tübingen school of Catholic
theologians, as well as on John Henry Newman and the mystically-inclined German
neo-scholastic Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–88) – offered a vision of theology as
‘faith in statu scientiae’. In Chenu’s approach, the primary weight clearly lay less on
the side of ‘science’ and more on that of faith, the divinely empowered human ability
to encounter the Mystery of God in time, and to reflect on that experience – to let it
become intellectually ‘incarnate’29 – with all the powers of human thought. To do
theology authentically, Chenu insists, one must begin with faith as a habitus, a God-
given power – not simply with the concepts proclaimed in the church’s catechesis; in
the phrase of the Tübingen theologian Johannes Kuhn, cited as the article’s epigraph,
‘There is no theology without new birth’. And faith, as Chenu presents it, is always
urgently personal, in that it deals ‘not just with any intelligible matter, but with the
very reality of my beatitude’.30 Faith is always limited in its present grasp of the God
who is its object, always longs for the fulfilment of eschatological vision.31 And
because God’s revelation of himself takes place in the events and words of human
history, faith, and the theology which arranges our reflection on faith in a ‘scientific’
form, themselves always begin from history, and are filtered through contingent,
historical knowledge. Chenu writes that, unlike the philosopher,
the theologian works with a history. His ‘data’ are not the natures of things, or
the timeless forms; they are events, corresponding to an economy, whose
realization is bound to time, just as extension is bound to the body – beneath
the order of essences. The real world is this one, not the abstraction of the
philosopher. The believer, the believing theologian, enters by his faith into this
plan of God; what he seeks to understand, quaerens intellectum, is a divine
initiative, a series of absolute divine initiatives, whose essential trait is to be
without a reason – both the general initiatives of creation, the incarnation,
redemption, grace, and the particular initiatives of the gracious predestination
of individuals: the sweet and terrible contingency of a love which needs give
no account of his benefits or his refusal to benefit. This world is the true world
of contemplation, and of theological understanding . . . 32

29 M.D. Chenu, ‘Position de la Théologie’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et

théologiques 25 (1935), p. 237. An ET of this article by Denis Hickey, entitled ‘What is
Theology?’ is included in the collection of Chenu’s essays, Faith and Theology (New
York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 15–35. I have translated all passages here directly from the
French original.
30 Chenu, ‘Position de la Théologie’, p. 234.
31 Chenu, ‘Position de la Théologie’, pp. 234–5.
32 Chenu, ‘Position de la Théologie’, p. 247.

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So the work of the theologian is always inseparable from a contemplation of

the presence and saving acts of God in history, as presented in the scriptures and
interpreted in the continuing, time-bound tradition of the community of faith. When
theology becomes so preoccupied with building a coherent intellectual system that
it loses conscious contact with either scripture or tradition, it loses its focus and its
identity. Chenu writes:
The philosopher can ignore the history of philosophy – in theory, at least –
without suffering any disadvantage; because it is not the historians [of thought]
who give him his material, but things in themselves. The theologian, on the
other hand, has no object apart from the auditus fidei, of which the historian,
working in the light of faith, gives him the content – not simply a catalogue of
propositions arranged by some Denzinger or other, but living material, in its full
abundance, always active in the treasury of the Church, laden with divine
intelligibility.33
Chenu further developed this distinctive vision of theology as a science – at
once historical and systematic, at once positive and speculative – in a small
monograph published in the fall of 1937, under the title of Une École de Théologie:
le Saulchoir.34 As regent of the studium of the Paris province of the Dominicans, a
faculty that had been exiled to a place called Le Saulchoir, just across the Belgian
border, by the French anticlerical legislation of 1903, Père Chenu – already
recognized as a distinguished scholar of medieval theology – originally wrote the
essay as a commemorative address to his own community, for the feast of St Thomas
Aquinas in March, 1936. At the urging of his confreres, he expanded it into a
pamphlet and had it privately distributed to friends and sympathizers: a detailed
manifesto for the approach to the study of theology he had sketched out more
theoretically in his article of 1935. After amply sketching out the history of
philosophical and theological studies in the Dominican order, Chenu again attempts,
in this monograph, to characterize what the science of theology really involves, for
Thomas and his authentic interpreters. He stresses that Thomas, in the first question
of the Summa theologiae, speaks of theology not simply as an intellectual system,
but as wisdom: a participation in God’s wisdom, which is both cognitive and
practical, and which for creatures is centered in a contemplative sharing in God’s
knowledge of himself.35 This gives theology its organic unity and its centrally
religious, liturgical character; it also means that one learns theology best by sitting
(at least metaphorically) at the feet of those who have themselves been imbued by
grace with the wisdom of God. For a theology faculty, this means le retour aux

33 Chenu, ‘Position de la Théologie’, p. 245.

34 M.D. Chenu, Une École de Théologie: le Saulchoir, privately published, 1937;
republished, with accompanying essays by Giuseppe Alberigo, Étienne Fouilloux, Jean
Ladrière and Jean-Pierre Jossua, and a postscript by Chenu (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1985).
35 ST I, q.1, a. 6; see Chenu, Une École de Théologie, pp. 121–2.

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sources: leaving modern manuals and secondary, synthetic works behind, to study
the complete, original works of great Christian saints and scholars – Thomas’s
Summa, in the first place, rather than the tracts of neo-Thomist systematizers – but
also Augustine, Anselm and Bonaventure:
One of the ways by which a program in philosophy and theology such as this
can be realized is by returning to the sources, directly studying the masters of
Christian thought . . . More than being a consequence of a program modeled on
university practice, this comes from our conviction that the real work needs to
be done not on surrogates, however clear and practical they may be, but on fresh
documents, for which their inexhaustible richness truly merits the name
‘sources’.36
And because God has revealed himself in history, because the content of revelation
– the ‘datum’ of theology – is communicated to us in the teaching and liturgy of
a historical church, enlivened by the contemplation and intelligent reflection of
historical believers, the theology of any ‘school’ is for Chenu always inescapably
historical in character, and must be studied with a refined awareness of the historical
conditions of theological discourse, if one is to find in it the incarnate presence of
God’s timeless reality. Mastering a deductive system can be deceptive, if one takes
it simply as having permanent value in itself, and forgets the temporal conditions
and creative liberty of mind in which it originally came to be.37 So he adds, a few
pages further on:
The return to the sources is, in history, what recourse to first principles is
in speculation: the same spiritual power, the same rejuvenation, the same
fruitfulness . . . Let us observe the general shape of this program of work: a
distinction of the formal objects [of study] within the very unity of knowledge
and of contemplative simplicity; attention to posing problems more than to
solving them; confidence in reading texts, and in the historical method which
gives them value; the primacy of initial perception over logical elaboration.
These attitudes, in themselves and as they work together, gain for the mind,
along with the freedom to do its work, the technique which guarantees success;
along with fidelity to its sources, the freshness of its intellectual appetite.38
Chenu’s elegant, ringing call for a new, intellectually daring model of
historically grounded theological teaching and research was essentially an invitation
to let each student, each believer, take up the work of constructing a coherent
theological system for himself or herself, guided by a common fund of classical
sources and rooted in a common scriptural canon. To many of his confreres, he
seemed to be sounding the call to abandon scholasticism altogether. In the year after
the publication of Une École de Théologie, Fr Chenu was called to Rome to explain

36 Chenu, Une École de Théologie, p. 124.

37 Chenu, Une École de Théologie, pp. 122–3.
38 Chenu, Une École de Théologie, p. 127.

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himself to the authorities of his order, and was asked to sign a paper containing ten
brief, anonymoustly authored, handwritten theses in Latin, which were presumably
intended to counteract the dangerous tendencies of his monograph. These included
the following statements:
1. Dogmatic formulas express absolute and unchangeable truth.
4. Sacred theology is not some ‘spirituality which finds instruments adequate
to its religious experience’ [a direct citation from the pamphlet39], but is a true
science, acquired – with God’s help – through study, whose principles are the
articles of faith and also all revealed truths, to which the theologian adheres by
divine faith, at least on the implicit level.
5. The various theological systems, in so far as they are in disagreement with
each other, are not equally true.
7. It is necessary to demonstrate theological truths through holy scripture and
tradition, and also to illustrate their nature and inner meaning by the principles
and teaching of St Thomas.40
In the beginning of 1942, after several years of veiled further criticism of Chenu
and his theological colleagues in French and Roman periodicals, his book Une École
de Théologie was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Holy See, along
with a work on theological method by the Belgian Dominican, Louis Charlier.41 In
an article published in L’Osservatore Romano at that time (9–10 February 1942),
Msgr Pietro Parente, a professor of theology in Rome and a definitor in the Holy
Office, explained the condemnation of both books as being due to their dismissive
critique of the scholastic method and its conclusions, and their implied sympathy
with such modernist notions as the constant evolution of dogma and the primacy of
religious feeling over reason in theology. Although Parente’s article appeared in
Italian, it referred explicitly to Charlier and Chenu, and by implication to the faculty
of Le Saulchoir, as representing la nouvelle théologie, suggesting that behind both
books lay the beginnings of a movement, and that the language of the movement
was French.42

39 See Chenu, Une École de Théologie, pp. 148–9: ‘A theology worthy of the name is a
spirituality which has found rational instruments adequate to its religious experience.’
40 See Chenu, Une École de Théologie, p. 35, where a facsimile of the sheet containing
these theses is appended to Alberigo’s introductory chapter to the book.
41 Louis Charlier, Essai sur le problême théologique (Thuillies: Ramgal, 1938). For a list
of the documents and communications critical of the approach to scholastic theology
represented by Chenu, see Étienne Fouilloux, ‘Le Saulchoir en procès (1937–1942)’,
Chenu, Une École de Théologie, pp. 56–7.
42 Parente’s article, ‘Nuove tendenze teologiche’, Osservatore Romano, 9–10 February
1942, appeared later in Latin in the canonical journal Periodica de re morali, canonica
et liturgica 31 (1942), pp. 184–8, and in the conservative French Catholic newspaper La
Croix, 26 February 1942. For this information, see Alberigo in Chenu, Une École de
Théologie, pp. 23–4, and n. 32. In a curious sequel a quarter-century later, Pietro Parente
– now a curial cardinal – delivered an address to the Urbaniana university in Rome on

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Parente was not entirely wrong about a movement. Other French Dominicans,
particularly professors at Le Saulchoir, surely shared in the basic convictions about
the nature of theology that Chenu had expressed – convictions that represented the
legacy of distinguished earlier members of the faculty, such as Ambroise Gardeil,
Antoine Lemonnyer and Pierre Mandonnet. In 1937, Chenu’s younger confrere,
Yves Congar, began a new series called Unam Sanctam with the Dominican
publisher Les Éditions du Cerf, by bringing out his own volume on the principles
for a Catholic ecumenism, Chrétiens désunis. The series would soon contain
important monographs on historical, biblical and liturgical theology, as well as
translations and republications of earlier works that offered a theological alternative
to the familiar scholastic style.
A number of French-speaking Jesuits, too, in the early decades of the twentieth
century, shared Chenu’s reservations about the method and ecclesiological
implications of post-Reformation scholasticism. Léonce de Grandmaison (1868–
1927),43 for instance, and Jules Lebreton (1873–1956)44 were pioneers in the careful
historical study of patristic texts, precisely as sources offering vital support to the
content and method of the modern church’s reflection on the person of Christ and
the Mystery of the Trinity. In Belgium, the Jesuit theologian Émile Mersch
(1890–1940), with a series of studies deeply rooted in the study of New Testament
and patristic writings, became the main proponent of an ecclesiology centered on
the eucharistic image of the Mystical Body of Christ: a line of thought that invited
Catholic theologians to conceive of the church more widely, more inclusively,
and less apologetically than neo-scholastic ecclesiology had done since the
Reformation.45 De Lubac’s own monumental study of the development of the phrase

11 November 1967, in which, without reference to his previous position, he drew on the
documents of the Second Vatican Council to offer a picture of theology not at all unlike
that promoted by Chenu in his writings of the 1930s: see ‘Fede, dottrina della fede e
teologia ieri e oggi’, Euntes Docete 20 (1967), pp. 5–14; cf. Alberigo in Chenu, Une
École de Théologie, p. 26 and n. 38.
43 Two of de Grandmaison’s posthumously-published course-packets in ‘fundamental
theology’ or Catholic apologetics became important sources for a more historically-based
approach to dogma by other theologians: Dogme chrétien: sa nature, ses formules, son
développement (Paris: Beauchesne, 1928), and Jésus Christ: sa personne, son message,
ses preuves (Paris: Beauchesne, 1928).
44 Père Lebreton, a professor of early church history at the Institut Catholique in Paris and
later editor of Recherches de science religieuse, is especially known for his classical
work on the early development of trinitarian dogma, Histoire du dogme de la Trinité, 2
vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1910–28); he also wrote on the spirituality of early Christianity:
La vie chrétienne au premier siècle de l’Église (Paris: Grasset, 1927). For an analysis
of his struggles to avoid the heretical forms of modernism while maintaining his integrity
as a theologian and a patristic scholar, in the troubled early decades of the twentieth
century, see the posthumously-published essay of Henri de Lubac, ‘La doctrine du Père
Lebreton sur la Révélation et le dogme d’après ses écrits antimodernistes’, in Théologie
dans l’histoire 2 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1990), pp. 108–56.
45 See Émile Mersch, Le corps mystique du Christ: Études de théologie historique, 2 vols.
(Leuven: Museum Lessianum, 1933); Théologie du corps mystique (Paris: Desclée de

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‘mystical body’ in theological writings before the scholastic synthesis of the

thirteenth century, Corpus Mysticum (1944), was really an elaborate, reflective
documentation of the implications of Mersch’s work, in the light of Pope Pius XII’s
encyclical of 29 June 1943, Mystici Corporis.
It was Henri de Lubac, in fact, and the younger confreres he influenced during
his years of residence at the theological faculty of Fourvière in Lyons, who became
the main Jesuit representatives of this ‘new’ theological approach in the France of
the 1940s and 1950s. De Lubac’s influential work, Catholicisme,46 a plea for a more
social, more culturally inclusive understanding of the reality of the church, appeared
first in 1938, as the third volume in Congar’s new series. Even a quick look at this
book, with its myriad of footnote textual references, mainly to the Fathers, reveals
that the heart of de Lubac’s theological method is historical: the portrait of the
universal Catholic body, which he sketches out as the core reality of the church, is
drawn above all from scripture and the pre-scholastic theological tradition. It is in
the patristic practice of spiritual or figural exegesis, derived from Israel’s habit of
continually reinterpreting its own history and historical documents in the light of its
present religious experience of God as active in history, that de Lubac finds the key
to the traditional Christian understanding of the church: not simply as an institutional
structure, but as the living, corporate Mystery formed by the Holy Spirit to unite all
humanity with the redeeming God.47 At the end of the work, de Lubac suggests that
the task of renewing the Catholic understanding of the social, human reality of
the church, its rescue from ‘the bitter fruits of individualism’48 and rigid clerical

Brouwer, 1946); Morale et corps mystique (Brussels: Éditions Universelles, 1949); Le

Christ, l’homme et l’univers: Prolegomène à la théologie (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer,
1962).
46 Henri de Lubac, Catholicisme: Les aspects sociaux du dogme (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1937). The most recent English translation is Catholicism: Christ and the Common
Destiny of Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988).
47 See especially chapter 6 (ET pp. 165–216). For a thorough and perceptive study of the
relation of De Lubac’s advocacy of spiritual or figural exegesis, in the patristic tradition,
to his understanding of the church, see Susan K. Wood, Spiritual Exegesis and the
Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Wood
writes (pp. 68–9):
De Lubac’s study of spiritual exegesis concludes that Jesus Christ is the center of
history in the sense that his Incarnation is the event by which history is interpreted.
With the Incarnation history is not merely fulfilled, but transformed . . . De Lubac’s
study of the term corpus mysticum, having placed the Eucharist within the
relationships of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture, makes it clear that Christ’s
continued historical presence is achieved eucharistically . . . That is, if the Eucharist
reflects the unity within history expressed in the dialectic between the two
Testaments, it is because the Eucharist is the sacramental presence of the risen Christ
within history and therefore participates in the same relationship of type/anti-type
as Christ does within that dialectic. Give this matrix which constitutes de Lubac’s
vision of the interrelation between history, liturgy, and exegesis, it is not surprising
that in his view the Church is situated as the very heart of that interrelation.
48 De Lubac, Catholicism (ET), p. 319.

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institutionalism, must include a revival of the spiritual exegesis of the early church,
in terms compatible with modern critical scholarship and adapted to contemporary
needs. For de Lubac, this sense of the importance of spiritual exegesis was a result
of a larger awareness that theology, in order to remain Catholic, must remain
in contact with the whole tradition in which biblical faith has continually sought
understanding, rather than being enclosed in an intellectual system, whether
scholastic or modern, that has lost sight of its own historical and cultural limitations.
So, in a posthumously published essay on the theology of Père Lebreton, de Lubac
writes:
To the degree that theology organizes itself in a more rigorous way, in an effort
to be more ‘scientific’ – to the degree that it tends, in its own trajectory, towards
a higher level of systematic perfection – it is undoubtedly fatal for it to leave
outside of its grasp any part of the concrete riches conveyed, century after
century, by the single yet multiform tradition of the Church. How could it
embrace at once the full infinity of the Mystery? How could it do justice to all
its aspects at once? The theologian, too, must avoid, as a trap, the temptation
to enclose all of his theological thought in his own system. No great theologian
has even done this. For the same reason, one ought not expect that any
developed state of theological speculation, however satisfying it may be, will
ever annul in any way the states that preceded it. The best kinds of progress
never lack some kind of regress. The gain is never complete.49
The ‘return to the sources’, for de Lubac, including the perennial Christian ‘source’
of biblical interpretation, is simply the condition required to maintain the genuinely
Catholic character of theology.
In late November 1946 an unnamed group of Jesuit theologians – those
presumably, who had been criticized by Père Labourdette in his article published
that summer in Revue Thomiste, as well as in the first of several articles by the
Roman Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange50 – issued an impassioned, often

49 Henri de Lubac, ‘La doctrine du Père Lebreton’, p. 148.

50 See especially R. Garrigou-Lagrange, ‘La nouvelle théologie où va-t-elle?’ Angelicum
23 (1946), pp. 126–45; ‘Vérité et immutabilité du dogme’, Angelicum 24 (1947), pp.
124–39; ‘Necessité de revenir à la definition traditionnelle de la vérité’, Angelicum
25 (1948), pp. 185–98; ‘L’immutabilité du dogme selon le concile du Vatican et le
relativisme’, Revue Thomiste 49 (1949), pp. 309–32; ‘Le relativisme et l’immutabilité
du dogme’, Revue Thomiste 50 (1950), pp. 219–46. The message conveyed by these
rather loosely constructed articles is essentially the same: that truth is, of itself, free of
historical limitation; that the dogmas of the Catholic Church express such unchanging
truth; that the task of the ‘science’ of theology is to draw true conclusions from
these dogmas; and that certain fashionable currents of modern thought – represented
philosophically by the works of Maurice Blondel, in particular, and given their most
dangerous form in the evolutionary speculations of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – threaten
to undermine this conception of dogma and theology, replacing it with a historical
relativism and vague spiritualism reminiscent of the modernism condemned early in the
twentieth century.

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somewhat testy, defense of their theological project in the Jesuit periodical,

Recherches de science religieuse.51 Entitled ‘La Théologie et ses sources’, this
anonymous response spoke critically of any theological system so enclosed in its
own principles and its own logic as to lose functional contact with scripture and
earlier tradition. So the whole purpose of publishing a series of patristic translations
such as Sources chrétiennes, the article insisted, was
to give the reader an awareness of the fraternal bond which, across so many
centuries and in spite of revolutionary changes in mental habits, makes of both
the thought [the Fathers] convey, and that in which we live today, an expression
of a single faith. One might go so far, in fact, as to hold that in some respects
– and only in some – the Fathers of the Church appear to be often closer to us
than later theologians. Does such a spirit really seem disturbing?52
To some, both in Rome and in France, it undoubtedly did. At the end of the article,
the authors hint darkly of their suspicion that behind the recent criticisms of their
work by Labourdette and others lay ‘a wider “design” ’.53 Signs of growing official
opposition were not hard to discover. In a single week of late September 1946, Pope
Pius XII had addressed the official general gatherings of both the Jesuit and
Dominican orders – for both, the first such meeting since the war’s end – and had
denounced the ‘new theology’ being espoused in ‘some’ Catholic quarters as an
attempt to undermine the consciousness of unchanging truth that had traditionally
been conveyed by the scholastic system.54
By 1950, these warning signs had been fulfilled. In his encyclical Humani
Generis (12 August 1950) – a work whose main drafter is usually thought to have
been Père Garrigou-Lagrange – Pope Pius XII again asserted the necessity of
maintaining the immutable truth of Catholic dogma, and of the theological systems
which articulated it.55 In a sweeping survey of the dangerous tendencies the
Pope recognized in contemporary thought, the encyclical condemned the idea of
evolution, applied to both the cosmos and to Christian teaching, as a historicist,
potentially pantheistic notion opposed both to the value of human reason and to the
authority of the church.56 It condemned as ‘eirenism’ the recent attempts by Catholics
such as Congar to promote ecumenical dialogue (thereby casting doubts on the truth
of Catholic teaching), and flatly rejected all proposals to reform the established

51 ‘La Théologie et ses sources’, Recherches de science religieuse 33 (1946), pp. 385–
401.
52 ‘La Théologie et ses sources’, pp. 393–4.
53 ‘La Théologie et ses sources’, p. 399.
54 The Pope’s address to the 29th General Congregation of the Jesuits, delivered on 17
September 1946, was published in L’Osservatore Romano on 18 September. His address
to the General Chapter of the Dominican Order, of 22 September, was published in the
same paper on 22–3 September. See Alberigo, École, p. 24 and n. 34.
55 Humani Generis, 16–17.
56 Humani Generis, 5–8.

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scholastic method of teaching Catholic theology.57 Central to both the ecumenical

and the theological projects, the encyclical argued, was the desire of certain unnamed
theologians
to bring about a return, in the explanation of Catholic doctrine, to the way of
speaking used in Holy Scripture and by the Fathers of the Church. They cherish
the hope that when dogma is stripped of the elements which they hold to be
extrinsic to divine revelation, it will compare advantageously with the dogmatic
opinions of those who are separated from the unity of the Church, and that in
this way they will gradually arrive at a mutual assimilation of Catholic dogma
with the tenets of the dissidents [a reference, perhaps to Congar]. Moreover,
they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a
way will be found to satisfy modern needs [see the writings of de Lubac and
Daniélou], that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of
modern philosophy, whether of immanentism [a code-word for Blondel’s
approach to metaphysics] or idealism [alluding perhaps to Henri Fessard’s
interest in Hegel] or existentialism [an object of fascination to many], or any
other system . . . It is evident from what We have already said that such attempts
not only lead to what is called dogmatic relativism, but that they actually contain
it.58
The cannon-shot had finally been fired; no names had been mentioned in
Humani Generis, but Jesuit and Dominican superiors felt called to act. De Lubac
(never much of a teacher, in any case) was permanently removed from all teaching
duties at the Jesuit faculty of Fourvière, and his books withdrawn from publication.
Daniélou, always a survivor, managed to remain active at the Institut Catholique in
Paris, but Fessard, Bouillard and Congar were all temporarily exiled from the
classroom. Teilhard de Chardin eventually moved to New York to continue his
research outside French intellectual circles, and died there, alone, an obscure
intellectual alien, on Easter Sunday, 1955. Yet the most striking postscript to the
story is that the Second Vatican Council would begin in 1962, little more than a
decade after Humani Generis: a Council whose purpose it was to promote Catholic
ecumenism, to restore the Catholic liturgy according to its ancient sources, to offer
a dogmatic description of the church predominantly in biblical and patristic images,
as the sacramental sign of God’s universal call to holiness, and to insist that God’s
revelation of himself in time takes place not simply through the communication of
ideas but ‘through deeds and words bound together by an inner dynamism’, and is
summed up most fully in the person of Christ.59 In the decrees of Vatican II, Père

57 Humani Generis, 11.

58 Humani Generis, 14–16 (translation altered).
59 See Dei Verbum 2, 7. De Lubac, who was a peritus at the Council and was involved in
the preparatory theological commission, wrote a dense and brilliant commentary on the
preface and first chapter of Dei Verbum, which implicitly reveals how much this decree

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de Lubac’s patristic footnotes – as well as the central concerns of the nouvelle

théologie – had found an official home.60
At the conclusion of this rapid survey of the revolution in Catholic thought
brought about, in good part, through the renewed emphasis on early Christian
sources by many of the authors whose thought had been branded suspiciously as
‘new’, a few words must be said about the issues that lay hidden beneath the
troubled, sometimes technical surface of this twentieth-century patristic revival. One
of those issues, clearly, was how best to conceive of the reality of the church.61
In the scholasticism of the manualist tradition, most of the energy devoted to
ecclesiology since the Baroque period had been focused on defending Catholic
structures of authority, in both teaching and discipline, against the attacks of the
Reformation, and on arguing that the Roman Catholic community alone, because of
those structures, represented the original community of disciples gathered around
Jesus. The ‘new’ theologians of the 1930s and 1940s, on the other hand, looked to
the Bible and to the church Fathers for a different, unequivocally metaphorical set
of concepts to describe the church: it was the Body of Christ, identified with his
risen humanity through his ‘mystical’ or sacramental body present in the Eucharist;
it was the new form of God’s pilgrim people, in damaged yet real continuity with
ancient Israel, whom God had chosen once and for all; it was the Bride of Christ,
as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa had discovered in their reading of the Song of
Songs. It was, in other words, not only a human society, with all the objectifiable,
institutional features, all the boundaries of membership and ranking societies must
have; it was also a sign, present through all the changes of human history and
pointing to the eschatological kingdom, a sacrament – as Lumen Gentium would put
it – that already makes real, in a veiled yet life-giving way, the thing it signifies.62
The sign’s natural orientation was to be Catholic, to represent and to be a communion
of smaller, local, visible eucharistic assemblies, to be culturally and religiously
inclusive, naturally oriented towards unity rather than exclusion. For representatives
of more traditional ecclesiological thinking in the years before the Second Vatican
Council, this scriptural and patristic way of speaking about the church was
uncomfortably vague, dangerously near to compromising the church’s role as sole
authoritative witness to Christian truth.
Secondly, the ‘new theology’s’ recourse to the church Fathers, as sources
equally important with Thomas Aquinas and his interpreters, suggested a new

embodied his own theological concerns: La Révélation divine (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1983).
60 For a perceptive synthesis of the mainlines of de Lubac’s thought, see Hans Urs von
Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1991).
61 See Frey, Mysterium der Kirche, pp. 109–72.
62 For the anticipation of this sacrament-language for the church in the works of De Lubac,
see Wood, Spiritual Exegesis and the Church, pp. 144–8.

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conception of theology itself. Most of the authors labeled as ‘new’ thinkers did
not question theology’s character as an integrated academic discipline, a ‘science’
developing the implications of its own revealed principles by the powers of human
reason. But they were insistent that the medieval, scholastic model for developing
those implications was not the only one, or even the best one available; that other
philosophical tools than those of Aristotle were perhaps more suggestive for the
modern mind; and that the character of theological truth was always radically bound
up in the historical limits of human language and culture, because God has revealed
himself in the events and words of human history. Any Christian theology that
attempts to be ‘systematic’, without being at the same time explicitly historical and
Biblical, in their view, fails in its mission from the start. And because theology is
the thinking side of faith, theology for the ‘new’ theologians had to be rooted in the
‘new birth’ of faith, in the life of prayer, in the Christian community’s contemplative
and liturgical encounter with God; as Chenu said, ‘a theology worthy of the name
is a spirituality that has found rational instruments which do justice to its religious
experience’.63 The writings of many of the Fathers, especially long-neglected voices
from the early Greek tradition like Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the
Confessor, seemed to make this spiritual and biblical core of theology accessible to
modern Christians in a way that the nineteenth-century scholastic tradition, with its
emphasis on systematic consistency and apologetic proof, did not. Yet to many more
traditional theologians, this turn to the distant past threatened to swallow up the
church’s body of teaching in subjectivity and private emotion, to deprive Catholic
theology of its probative intellectual edge.
Behind both of these issues in the patristic revival, finally, lay hermeneutical
questions about the significance of theological language.64 Can language about God
ever be understood with the same analytical clarity, the same literal assurance of
reference, which common sense normally attaches to scientific statements about
worldly experience? Is the whole of theology, as the organized articulation of the
church’s faith, to be understood as making the same kind of epistemological claim on
the believer as the central core of dogma, summed up in creeds and conciliar
definitions? Are our concepts of God always, necessarily, not only analogical but
symbolic – not only proportioned to human understanding, but also invitations to
worship and contemplation?65 For de Lubac and his disciples, especially, the greatest

63 See above, n. 38.

64 On the hermeneutical aspects of the debate over the nouvelle théologie, in the context
of the theological tensions in Catholic theology during the first half of the twentieth
century, see Christoph Theobald, ‘L’entrée de l’histoire dans l’univers religieux et
théologique au moment de la “crise moderniste” ’, in Jean Greisch, Karl Neufeld and
Christoph Theobald, La Crise contemporaine: du modernisme à la crise des
herméneutiques (Paris: Beauchesne, 1973), pp. 7–85.
65 Père Labourdette, in his critical remarks on the publications of de Lubac and Bouillard
in Revue Thomiste 1947, caricatures their ‘symbolic’ understanding of theological
language with more than a little irony:

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treasure offered the contemporary church by the Fathers was their practice of spiritual
or figural exegesis: their ability to find in all the events and persons of the Bible, and
even in its most puzzling details of language, a privileged disclosure of the one
Mystery that makes all history a single story of fall and redemption – the Mystery of
the Word made flesh. Thomas Aquinas, certainly, had recognized that the scriptures
often speak in figural terms, and that Christian scriptural interpretation must often
distinguish a variety of meanings in a biblical text in order to grasp what God intends
us to understand through it;66 but the scholasticism of the manuals had largely
forgotten this Christian art of biblical reading, adopting instead its own version
of post-Enlightenment historicism. The nouvelle théologie was really about the
rediscovery of sacramental modes of thought, through renewed contact with Christian
authors who thought and read scripture in sacramental as well as literal terms.
In one of his Paradoxes, Henri de Lubac remarks of the biblical narrative:
Nothing is more wonderful, in the reality of things, than the way the two
Testaments hinge on one another. But neither is there anything trickier than
the accurate perception of such a fact. Christian Tradition has been meditating
on this for two thousand years, and will go on doing so. It will go on, from
one age to another, finding in it the mainspring of a solution for the most
contemporary and seemingly unknown problems.67
Figural exegesis, in its way of reading all history as really speaking of Christ, was
the heart of the nouvelle théologie, the greatest lesson it had learned from reading
the Fathers. Perhaps, as de Lubac suggests, it is this that makes all theology new.

One must speak of all our concepts no longer in terms of analogy but of symbolism,
and judge them by their value of expressing a ‘living’ reality in the human person: an
expression so impoverished and so dry, so reified, as soon as one takes it in its logical
signification, in comparison with the experience from which it springs forth, of which
one might perhaps say that it is the diminution rather than the fruit. How can one shut
up life in such concepts? How, above all, can one enclose there that kind of life which
is contained in our relationship with God, and which culminates in the obscure
awareness of a mysterious contact, where one lays claim to the reality of true
experience? Is there not a truth more precious than what one can transmit in clear
teaching: that which bears witness to a spiritual experience? Must one not look for the
significance of great spiritual works in this direction – at least, the significance of
works whose object is the knowledge of the human person and God? (p. 360)
66 ST I, q. 1, a. 9–10. Aquinas even includes a variety of meanings, in some passages at
least, as part of the originally intended, and therefore ‘literal’, sense of a scriptural text:
‘Since the literal sense is that which the author intends, and since the author of Holy
Scripture is God, who by one act comprehends all things by his intellect, it is not
unfitting, as Augustine says (Confessions 12), if, even according to the literal sense, one
word in Holy Scripture should have several senses.’ ST I, q. 1, a. 10; trans. Fathers of
the English Dominican Province 1 (New York: Benziger, 1948), p. 7 (altered). Once one
begins reading the scripture from the perspective of faith rather than simply as a human
document, multiple levels of significance seem to impose themselves on the reader.
67 Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 145–6.

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