This book is designed to present an arc: on the one side, at the beginning of the last century, a theology based in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and on the other side, at the century's end, a non-Thomist ‘nuptial mysticism’. The ‘model Thomist’ of the book is Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (p. 10), those in the middle, who leave such ‘Thomism’ behind, are Chenu, Congar, Schillebeeckx, Lonergan, Rahner and Küng and the advocates of a nuptial theology are de Lubac, John Paul II, von Balthasar and Ratzinger (each of these men has a chapter to himself). That looks like the basis for a solid, informative description of twentieth-century Catholic theology, on the lines marked out by the many objective historical accounts of modern theology and theologians by the author's confrère, Aidan Nichols.
However, a quotation on page 2 signals that Kerr intends to do something different. Instead of giving a historical explanation of the most important negative phenomenon in twentieth-century Catholic theology, he writes, ‘the modernism which’ Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) ‘attacks is amazingly like postmodernism: “Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation”’ (citing Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, p. vii). The leading modernists like Tyrrell and Loisy were in fact rationalist progressivists. Loisy's most famous line, used non-ironically, was that ‘Jesus preached the kingdom and it was the Church that came’ – impossible unless belief in progress had led him to consider that what Jesus originally meant is insignificant by comparison with what grew out of his preaching. The modernist focus on experience and subjectivity indicates that it had no problem with ‘identity’ – the typical postmodern bugbear. Readers may imagine that accuracy has temporarily given way to the desire to seize the reader's attention. But the stylistic trick seems to be built into the development of Catholic theology as Kerr sees it, for he adds that, today, ‘recourse to Aquinas seems mere antiquarianism, a failure to face up to the . . . implications of postmodernism. In the most influential movement currently in Catholic theology, the Song of Songs and the patristic and medieval commentaries thereon play a much more significant role than Thomas Aquinas’ work’ (p. 33).
The Black Legend of the maltreatment or marginalisation of theologians like Chenu, de Lubac and von Balthasar is widely seen to be in need of revision. So many will think that Kerr is simply redressing the balance when he tells us that the works which got these fellows into trouble, or left on the sidelines, were so densely packed with coded insults that it was not unnatural that their superiors slapped them down. Chenu's pamphlet, ‘Une école de théologie was needlessly polemical’. Its provocations ‘could not but anger most Catholic theologians at the time, Garrigou-Lagrange above all’. Were Garrigou or the Holy Office the intended audience of this privately published pamphlet, which found its way onto the Index in 1942, at a time when Garrigou could regularly be heard on Vichy Radio? This is what Kerr implies, by asking how Garrigou would have reacted to these calculated ‘insults’ (p. 23). But could the text have merely been intended for the left-wing Dominican's students at Le Saulchoir? Charles Péguy's ‘inclusion in Balthasar's list’ of aesthetic theologians cannot, Kerr says, have been ‘anything but intentionally provocative’, given the ‘controversial’ character of the French poet's opinions: this will surprise those who recall the cameo of bored French Catholic school boys taking Péguy as dictation in 1942, in Au Revoir les Enfants – Péguy was ‘controversial’ to the Action Française in 1910, but had ceased to be so decades before von Balthasar put him in his ‘list’, in the 1960s. Henri de Lubac's ‘provocative’ qualities are signalled by his composition of La Postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, a work in which, Kerr states, de Lubac ‘continued his rehabilitation of marginalized figures’ (p. 77). A late sequel to The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944) La Postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (1973) is a derogatory overview of the ‘Neo-Joachimism’ of writers such as Hegel and Marx. No one would know from Kerr's modest footnote denoting Joachim's heresies that, in de Lubac's book, all of Joachim's ‘heirs’ are criticized, not rehabilitated. In the chapter on ‘Thomas d'Aquin contre Joachim de Flore’ de Lubac remarks that, as Augustinians, Bonaventure and Thomas are both equally opposed to Joachim, a point which, as de Lubac notes, has been brought out by Ratzinger: ‘nothing has more contemporary relevance than this ancient debate between the Joachimites and the two princes of mediaeval theology’ (La Postérité, p. 160), he thinks, in the light of Jurgen Moltmann's assertion that ‘Joachim is more alive today than Augustine’ (ibid., p. 7). The claim that de Lubac's theology of grace ‘destroys standard natural theology’ is unsurprising, given the footnote indicating reliance, not on Surnaturel, but on The Suspended Middle (p. 75). The give-away here that ‘the natural desire for the supernatural’ is advanced on the virtue of its socio-political implications: the political implications of the ‘natural desire’ are evident, not in Surnaturel but in Theology and Social Theory. Far from aiming to tell both sides of the story, Kerr has learned to write history at the feet of John Milbank. If, as Kerr says, the reactions to the ‘provocations’ of Chenu and others were about ‘the nature of truth’, his book takes truth to be ideological rather than merely a matter of factual record.
One indication that Kerr conceives modern Catholic theology in a non-historical way is that he never considers the oddity of his proposal that a generation of theologians brought up on neo-Scholastic Thomism went away and invented a style of theology entirely different from what they had been taught. He tells us, for instance, that ‘From the start he [Chenu] broke completely with the style of expounding the Thomist synthesis as practised by Garrigou-Lagrange’; that ‘In Jesus Schillebeeckx explicitly breaks with the religious epistemology taught by De Petter. He now rejects the whole idea of implicit intuitive participation in being’ (pp. 18, 59). Any church historian, and indeed anyone claiming to have been brought up on Thomas's metaphysics of ‘causality’, would be bound to inquire further into the proximate causes of the ‘reaction’ of Chenu and others. If there had been no Kantian or ‘critical’ orientation to the subject in ‘the Thomist synthesis as practised by Garrigou-Lagrange’ is it entirely probable that Chenu's Une école de théologie should have linked theology to subjective spirituality? Would a historian readily imagine that Schillebeeckx could have dedicated the latter half of his career to hermeneutics if there were nothing phenomenological in De Petter's ‘religious epistemology’? Would a historian of modern thought not think twice about the fact that Garrigou's supposedly non-phenomenological and ‘moderately realist’ ontology was based in the principle of non-contradiction, the same principle which guides Husserl's Logical Investigations, a work contemporary with that of the ‘model Thomist’? Did these men learn nothing about how ‘truth’ is known from their teachers or their contemporaries? Was nothing a remix of the same old story?
Of course people sometimes have new ideas and don't always just take those of their teachers to their logical conclusion. Chenu certainly reversed the customary pedagogical order of approach to Aquinas. As Kerr says, ‘The message of Chenu's manifesto lies, most provocatively, in the layout: the chapter on philosophy comes after the one on theology. In effect, Thomas Aquinas is to be read as a theologian from the outset’ (p. 24). We don't hear why Chenu and others took this new step. We gather by implication that Kerr considers that philosophy was thereby undermined, but we are given no historical context within which to evaluate the innovation. We hear, of course, that Chenu objected to Garrigou's ‘taking’ Thomas's positions ‘out of theological as well as historical context, creating (as he used to say) a “sacred metaphysics”’. But he neglects to tell us that, if metaphysics, or nature, is sacred, the sacred is metaphysical, or natural. So it becomes difficult to grasp the leap by which, ‘for Rahner, celebrations of the eucharist are not occasional incursions of the sacred into a radically secular world but . . . manifestations of the always already graced state of the world’ (pp. 24, 99). A historian has to say what is really same-old and what is entirely new, a good training for the Christian theologian.
A second indication of the hand of ideology is unfalsifiability. Kerr states that Chenu's claim that Garrigou's thought is riddled with Wolffian rationalism is ‘preposterous’; he treats the complaint, that the theology taught to the Jesuits, Lonergan, Rahner and von Balthasar was Suárezian, as mildly risible. None of their kvetching had anything to do with the real theories of Wolff or Suárez, he hints, and von Balthasar's discussion of the repercussions of Suárez’ reduction of existence to essence could not be historically based, since it is meaningless: ‘Whether Balthasar's assertions are altogether intelligible, we must let pass . . . The “Suárezianism” which Balthasar denounces seems remarkably like the “Wolffianism” which we found Chenu detecting in Garrigou-Lagrange's Thomism’ (p. 126, i.e. equally phantasial). Kerr's describes von Balthasar's definition of Suárezianism like this:
Suárez reduces being, reality, to one level plane, fearing that if we allow the concept of being to function analogically then we open the way to uncertainty, since we have no guarantee that the concept of God has any content at all . . . The rot spreads into how the relationship is conceived between divine and human freedom. God and creatures have the same kind of being – that we are on all fours, ontologically speaking – then one seems to be in a position to compare God and creatures. . . . The existence supposedly of a concept of being that univocally embraces Creator and creatures is the precondition for the doctrine of Molinism, which leads to the creature's attaining an ultimate particularity and freedom which is independent of God's will’ (p. 125, citing von Balthasar's Glory V, p. 28).
Rejoicing in Ut Unum Sint's recognition that Catholicism can learn from Protestants, Kerr does not acknowledge that his scepticism about Wolffian-Suárezian influence within Catholic thought is falsified in his own descriptions of Karl Barth's objections to Catholic theology. Describing Hans Küng's book about Barth, Kerr writes that,
While acknowledging Hans Urs von Balthasar's ‘masterful book’ on Barth, Küng confronts the Swiss Calvinist's doctrine head on, in Justification, rather than reading Barth in the light of current debate in Catholic theology, as Balthasar does. He quotes Barth's damning characterisation of Catholicism as ‘a system embracing God and the creature’, ‘the attempt to see and correlate them on the same level’ which is nothing but ‘the kind of act in which the creature arrogates to itself the ability to control itself and therefore God . . . But this act precisely is the ground, the basic outlook of the entire Roman Catholic system down to its every detail.’ (pp. 147–8, citing CD II/1, pp. 582–3; see also the footnote about Barth's ‘unfair’ mockery of Catholic natural theology on p. 185)
Barth could not be objecting to Suárezianism actually present in ‘model’ ‘Thomism’, because that doesn't fit Kerr's ideology and therefore seems preposterous not merely as a point of historical fact, but a priori.
The church historian Carl Trueman has invented ‘the Toynbee principle’, discovered via beginning the study of history as an admirer of the philosophy of history of Arnold Toynbee and slackening in his admiration as he discovered that, whenever he gained detailed knowledge of any particular piece of history, Toynbee had it wrong: the ‘principle’ is that, if one can see a historian getting it wrong in an area one knows well, one has grounds to suspect he is making mistakes in areas one knows little about. The seminary rector under whom Ratzinger studied in 1945–7, Alfred Läpple, had spent the latter years of the war as a prisoner of war in an American camp in Le Havre, not, as Kerr records, ‘in England’ (p. 184). He doesn't note that Ratzinger and Läpple made a German translation of the Quaestio disputata of St Thomas on charity, which might have seemed interesting in the light of the fact that the first encyclical signed by Benedict XVI is called Deus Caritas Est. I happen to use Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity alongside Barth's Credo as textbooks for our introductory systematics course. This is Kerr's peculiar reading of the former:
Ratzinger's version of Catholic apologetics seems not to do the kind of justice to natural theology and the use of reason which an old fashioned Thomist would desire, especially one fearful of residual modernist tendencies. In his Introduction to Christianity, for example . . . published in German in 1968, . . . Ratzinger certainly avoids any sign of neoscholasticm. He begins with the idea of the theologian as clown, a picture taken from . . . Kierkegaard by way of a quotation from Harvey Cox . . . : what the theologian has to say is indeed unintelligible – provocatively and disorientatingly. Turning to Thérèse of Lisieux . . . and her famous temptations to atheism . . . Ratzinger ratches up this notion of how bizarre and disturbing theological questions are. Martin Buber . . . teaches us that faith is always a leap . . . yet there is also ‘the ineradicable positivity of Christianity’, we are always already inserted in an existing and ancient tradition. Vico, not a familiar name in neoscholastic seminary philosophy, has shown us that the old metaphysics is ended; nowadays we think historically. Finally, ‘Christian belief is not an idea but a life’ . . .
No doubt this approach is meant to wean or shock his mainly Catholic student audience out of their assumption that the only proper introduction to Christianity had to be the sort of neoscholastic apologetics they most likely encountered at school in those days (pp. 190–1). It is not difficult to know where to start here. Let's go from the first assertion. Calling it a ‘simplification’, Ratzinger cites Cox's description of the theologian as a clown in order to take it as paradigmatic for how not to approach theology in the modern world. Writing in German in 1968, as Kerr accurately states, Ratzinger treats Cox's story as an illustration of demythologisation, whose ‘subtle intellectualism’ he characterises derogatively as the idea that ‘the clown need only take off his costume and his makeup and everything will be all right’ (Introduction, pp. 54 and 41). Ratzinger's references to St Thérèse's temptations to atheism are balanced against what he claims are the non-believer's equivalent temptations to faith. The point is that faith cannot come down to the level of reason to make itself understood, because reason without faith has its own problems. The ‘ineradicable positivity of Christianity’ is not referred to being ‘inserted in an existing and ancient tradition’ but to the fact that it teaches that the ‘eternal’ has become ‘manifest for us to look upon and touch, so that he whom no one has ever seen now stands open to our historical touch’ (p. 54). The discussion of Buber has nothing about a ‘leap’ in it; it is the old Hasidic ‘perhaps it is true’ tale. Ratzinger states that Vico's verum quia factum – the notion that truth is historical – was superseded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Marxist verum quia faciendum: ‘the dominance of history is being supplanted by that of techne’, to which the theologies of Cox, Moltmann and Metz have sought to adapt themselves (pp. 64 and 67). The definitions of truth given by both Vico and Marx are contrasted with that which pertains for faith:
to believe as a Christian means . . . entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world . . . [it] means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things. . . . The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself. . . . understanding means seizing and grasping as meaning the meaning that man has received as ground. . . . this is the precise significance of . . . understanding: that we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and truth; that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning. If this is so, understanding not only implies no contradiction with belief but represents its most intrinsic property. . . . Understanding grows only out of belief. That is why theology as the understanding, logos-like (= rational, understanding through reason) discussion of God is a fundamental task of Christian faith. This context is also the basis of the inalienable right of Greek thought to a place in Christianity. (Introduction, pp. 73 and 77–8)
When Ratzinger states that Christian faith is not an idea but a life, he is explaining that Christianity is not a philosophical system which one can invent for oneself as one goes along, but a datum to be accepted as revealed from the believing community.
The second of the two paragraphs devoted to Ratzinger's Introduction is of the same cloth:
Ratzinger turns to the prologemena to the question of God. Here, where a traditional Thomist would expect natural theology, metaphysical arguments for the existence of God and so on, Ratzinger appeals simply and solely to anthropology and the history of religions. To understand what the word ‘God’ means we need to recall and analyse the sources of religious experience. In a lengthy, careful analysis he shows that the God self-revealed at the burning bush (Exod 3:14) is indeed to be identified with the Father of the one who says ‘I am’. What Ratzinger is doing, however, without saying so, is denying that we have to accept the idea that it takes Greek metaphysics to enable us to speak of God as ‘being’. Given the near-obsession with the claim that, when the Lord God tells Moses that His name is ‘I am’, we have the first word of ‘the metaphysics of Exodus’ (Gilson's famous phrase), Ratzinger's avoidance of all mention of Thomas Aquinas at this point cannot be an oversight. (p. 191)
This will strike some as a paragraph-long howler. The discussions of religious experience and Exodus 3 are in separate chapters, the former dealing with the phenomenology of religious experience, the latter, explicitly, with revelation as such. Like Thomas himself, Ratzinger begins with an objection: the men who translated the Hebrew of Exodus into Greek were already influenced by Greek philosophy and thus built a bridge between the two by translating ‘I AM WHO I AM’ into ‘I am he that is’. Ratzinger notes that the biblical scholars and the dogmatic theologians are lined up today against such a procedure. He instances Brunner's interpretation of Exodus 3, which sees it as ‘turning the Biblical idea of God into its opposite’, a philosophical concept. The rest of the chapter is Ratzinger's reply to the objection. The ‘God of the Fathers’ is, he says, ‘El’, who is a god of persons rather than one of the many gods of localities: the two names given to Moses, ‘I am’ and ‘the God of your fathers’ identify ‘I AM’ with ‘El’. Ratzinger then explicates the meaning of the ‘name’ by reference to later biblical ‘I am’ sayings, such as Deutero-Isaiah's ‘I, Yahweh, the first and with the last, I am he’: Deutero-Isaiah taught ‘that the things of this world pass away; that men . . . are in the end like flowers, which bloom one day and are cut off and withering away the next, while in the midst of this gigantic display of transience the God of Israel “is” – not “becomes”. Amid all the becoming and passing away he “is”. . . God is at the same time one who grants himself; he is there for us . . . the God who “is” is at the same time . . . our God, the “God of our fathers”’ (p. 129). ‘Becoming’ and ‘being’ are quite important oppositions in Greek philosophy. In John's Gospel, Ratzinger says, this ‘name’ is manifested as a person by Christ: ‘he himself is the name, . . . the invocability of God’ (p. 133). There are, Ratzinger has said, two sides to the self-naming of God in Exodus 3. On the one hand, replying ‘“I am who I am”, is . . . almost a rebuff . . . a hint of a God who is entirely different from “the gods”. The explanation of the name Yahweh by the little word “am” thus serves as a kind of negative theology . . . effect[ing] a sort of withdrawal from the only two well known . . . dissolv[ing] the name into mystery.’ But Moses is nonetheless empowered to say, ‘I AM has sent me to you’ (p. 128). The name given by God to Moses thus contains the conceptual, or philosophical, under which God remains ungrasped and the ‘invocable’, ‘mak[ing] him nameable’. On the one side, then, ‘the personal’, the proximate and on the other, the freedom of God's self-gift. Israel, Ratzinger says, used the conceptual side of the name ‘to interpret something of this second element to the surrounding peoples, to impress on them . . . the “otherness” of faith. It placed the “is” of God over and against the becoming and passing away of the world and its gods’: that is, the ‘paradox of Biblical faith in God consists in the conjunction and unity . . . that Being is accepted as a person and the person accepted as Being itself’ (p. 136). It was, Ratzinger says in the following chapter, ‘The God of Faith and the God of the Philosophers’, ‘in the wake’ of this that early Christianity was enabled to explain ‘its faith’ to pagans ‘by saying “When we say God, . . . we mean only Being itself, what the philosophers have expounded as the ground of all being, as the God above all powers – that alone is our God”’ (pp. 137–8). Gilson's ‘metaphysics of the Exodus’ was elaborated in works like God and Philosophy; I know of no better contemporary exposition of its thesis in modern, non-technical language than that found in the book composed ‘as lectures to students from all faculties at Tübingen’ (Kerr, p. 190). Kerr cannot have fallen foul of the Toynbee principle out of a literal-minded expectation that one can be Thomistic only by citing Aquinas, since he tells us in the same paragraph that Ratzinger is like Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty ‘though never mentioning them’ (p. 191). The bending of history is not the upshot of a too rapid post-conclave reading of Ratzinger's works. Rather, he needs to do so for his ideological opposition of, on the one side of Vatican II, ‘model’ Thomism and on the other side of it, extra-rational, perhaps postmodernist, ‘nuptial mysticism’.
In the chapter on John Paul II, an apparently detailed description of the argument about Anna-Maria Tymienieka's mis-translation of Wojtyla's The Acting Person fails to mention that the key Aristotelian-Thomistic terms which he uses and she left out, are subjectum and upokeimenon, in relation to the human person. This is essential, given that the nub of this chapter is John Paul's move from a Boethian (or as Kerr has it, Thomistic), definition of the person to a ‘communal’ one. Or, as John Paul put it, in an encyclical to which Kerr does not refer, ‘God . . . is the unity of the Trinity: unity in communion. In this way new light is also thrown on man's image and likeness to God, spoken of in the Book of Genesis. The fact that man “created as man and woman” is the image of God means not only that each of them individually is like God, as a rational and free being. It also means that man and woman, created as a “unity of the two” in their common humanity, are called to live in a communion of love and in this way to mirror in the world the communion of love that is in God, through which the Three Persons love each other in the intimate mystery of the one divine life’ (Mulieris Dignitatem, §2). Kerr can't very well cite this encyclical, because in his book, John Paul substitutes the ‘communal’ or nuptial definition of the imago Dei for the Boethian or Thomistic one; his ideology has no room for the text's ‘not only . . . but also’. ‘The traditional Thomist’, Kerr feels, ‘cannot but be somewhat disconcerted by John Paul II's references to Aquinas. According to the encyclical, “The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others . . . [because] even when it engages theology, philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods” (§49). For a hundred years . . . Thomistic philosophy was indeed the official philosophy’ (p. 170). Thirty-three years before Fides et Ratio, in 1965, Gilson had been delighted to hear in an allocution of Paul VI that, by designating Thomas as Doctor Communis, ‘the Church did not intend to exclude other doctors whose teaching was theologically sound’. Determined to dig out deviations from ‘model’ Thomism, Kerr finds in John Paul's designation of Thomism as ‘the philosophy of the praise of being, a chant in praise of what exists’, not the same old existential Thomism advanced by Gilson and recommended by Fides et Ratio, but ‘the doxological consummation of the philosophy of Being’ in which ‘metaphysics disappears into liturgy’ (p. 168). He misses the reference to the existential quality of John Paul's Thomism, not because of a Wolffian blindness to being, or even out of eagerness to genuflect to After Writing, but because he needs John Paul's ‘nuptial mysticism’ to be non-Thomistic.
Those who have read Ratzinger's best book, the last he wrote before taking over at the CDF, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, with its severe criticisms of liberation theologies, will be very surprised to hear that the documents the Prefect signed between 1982 and 2004 ‘do not seem particularly characteristic of his mindset’ (p. 193). From his Habilitationshrift on Bonaventure onwards, Ratzinger seldom published a book which contains no slighting references to the ‘spiritual posterity of Joachim of Flore’. Kerr makes this statement, which is fairly hair-raising in the light of Ratzinger's demotion of liberation theologians in those years, in order to set up a contrast between these documents, in which the personal predilections of the CDF were entirely absent from his work and Ratzinger's sole venture into ‘nuptial mysticism’ a 2004 CDF document entitled Letter on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World. This is the only text that Ratzinger signed before Deus Caritas Est which discusses marital love. Those who know little of ‘nuptial mysticism’ might do well to apply the Toynbee principle to Kerr's claim that it contains an ‘entirely new doctrine of the human creature as image of God is to the fore’, one untarnished by Thomistic anthropology and trinitarian theology (p. 201).
It would be unfraternal to conclude by concurring in the general appreciation with which this readable book will doubtless be greeted. For, knowing as little as I do about Küng or Rahner, I find it difficult to entrust myself to Kerr's hands in these areas. And even those things which one would like to commend, such as the depiction of Ut Unum Sint, are surrounded by such a weight of ideological bending that one has to suspect that they, too, found their place here in order to enable the author to imply that nuptial mysticism and Christian ecumenism are equally lost causes.
