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You know what they say: Theology – you can’t live with it, you can’t live without it.

Quite seriously: There is a problem inherent in theological study. This may not be obvious in prospect, but with even a little experience, the difficulty will likely prove troublesome. I can frame the issue through an analogy: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in a lecture to the Church Music Department of the State Conservatory of Music at Stuttgart, outlines a similar quandary in sacred music. On the one hand, communal inclusivity necessitates mediocrity, utilitarian function. Hymns must be accessible to that range, ability, and sensibility dictated by egalitarian principles. On the other, music that exerts artistic power is often an elite taste, alienated from the common cultural milieu of the flock. Religious art music, increasingly relegated to trained musicians who may themselves be religiously indifferent, becomes performance, rather than prayer. It seems almost as if sacred music were being forced to choose how it is to be irrelevant – artistically, or spiritually.

With theology, the problem both cuts more deeply and carries much higher stakes. “Utility theology” may preserve a necessary set of propositions, but drives people away from the pursuit of genuine, living theology. Yet a theology written by academically trained theologians solely for the use of academically trained theologians, according to a careerist mindset, is spiritually sterile, benumbed.

According to Eugenio Scalfari (for whatever his so-called interviews – without notes, reconstructed from memory – may be worth), Pope Francis said that religion without mystics is a philosophy. Yet there can be no mysticism without theology, and no theology without philosophy. In short, it’s all or nothing. Mysticism demands obedience and discernment. The mystical ladder is ascended through a purification that involves a constant sifting, separating what is to be discarded from what is to be retained. As Thomas Merton put it, “Reason plays an essential part in the interior ascesis without which we cannot safely travel the path of mysticism… Ultimately, the highest function of the human spirit is the work of the supernaturally transformed intelligence, in the beatific vision of God.”

On this basis alone, reason is indispensable. Folk piety, ungrounded in reason and by that very token dislodged from the tradition, cannot face up to modernity’s legitimate demands. A deficient theological sense debases liturgy; religion that entertains pseudo-mysticism is magic, and a fundamentalist disaster besides – and magic and fundamentalism alike lend themselves all too readily to personality cults.

And yet such functionalist theological training eviscerates theology; this obtained for almost a century following Aeterni Patris (“On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy in Catholic Schools in the Spirit (ad mentem) of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas”). Formulaic iterations of high doctrine, learned by rote and poorly understood, ultimately breed contempt – of the discipline, of the virtues of learning (which are quasi-integral to prudence, after all), of the salutary questioning and spiritual aspirations toward what is most noble – and of those who, prompted by the Holy Spirit, bear such questions and aspirations deep within their souls.

The neo-Scholasticism of the seminaries made the transcendent banal. It stifled the spirit, and stultified and repulsed precisely the able minds that should rightly have been its most ardent lovers and propagators. I was struck by this vividly expressed recollection from Larry Chapp (nobody’s progressive) of his seminary days:

Endless diatribes against “modernism, “subjectivism” and “historicism,” that only a steadfastly deductive “Thomistic” method could hold off, rooted in the certitudes of dogma as the first principles for all that then followed.  And that is what it was: a “holding off” of alleged errors in a defensive mode of thinking that was critical of any idea that did not arise from the scholastic tradition. Heck, we did not even read Thomas, lest we “misunderstand” him, and got instead a desiccated diet of arid commentaries.  It was fortress Catholicism contra mundum. And worst of all, it was so horrifically boring that no seminarian would ever remember a word of it out of pure self-defense. For me, it constituted a theodicy problem since I could not accept that an all-good God would allow his Church to turn the exhilarating exuberance of the Gospel into the coma-inducing pottage I was being forced to read.

For my own part, I recall having enrolled as a teenager in a class on Trinitarian dogmatics, the exam for which consisted in matching up words like “Persons,” “missions,” and “notions” from one column, with Arabic numerals from another, as if one were ordering Chinese takeout from a paper menu. As I was still extremely immature, I took this to be the end of the world – not that my quite spontaneous dismay was altogether misplaced.

I should say that, in my case, I have been astonishingly blessed, having at a tender age blindly stumbled upon Thomas Merton and Archbishop Sheen as first-rate mentors in the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, which had actually only a couple of books listed as theology at all. The Summa was another. Merton launched me straight into John of the Cross. By eighteen, I had a living genius to unlock the spirit and grandeur of metaphysics, who in turn afforded me peripheral access to a wider and rather genteel world of culture and the arts… not totally unfamiliar, as the Met and the Cloisters had never been more than a few subway transfers’ distance.

Need I say this was all contrary to my upbringing? — a fatherless waif, half-feral on the mean streets, slinging pies in a pizza joint on Grand Avenue at twelve to stay afloat. Books were a clandestine indulgence, and a source of shame to be sure, at home and otherwise. My point in sharing this is that the philosophia perennis is a living system; its flame must be passed on by masters. When it is so, nothing will dim its ardor. Should it remain a dead letter, no advantage – temporal, circumstantial, situational, or vocational – will foster an apt disposition toward it.

Regarding the ossified mode of this science, David Bentley Hart recounts sparring with one of its apologists in truly inimitable prose, too good not to reproduce:

A young, ardently earnest Thomist . . . you know, one of those manualist neo-paleo-neo-Thomists of the baroque persuasion you run across ever more frequently these days, gathered in the murkier corners of coffee bars around candles in wine bottles, clad in black turtlenecks and berets, sipping espresso, smoking Gauloises, swaying to bebop, composing dithyrambic encomia to that ­absolutely gone, totally wild, starry-bright and vision-wracked, mad angelic daddy-cat Garrigou-Lagrange.

Now that’s an establishment in which I’d be tempted to put down a five spot for an estate-sourced decaf java. Fr. Lagrange actually was cool enough to match the beat aesthetic, even if the majority of those imagining themselves his adherents are just, well, copycats.

It was tantamount to Lagrange’s life’s work to inculcate his readers with a salutary disdain for an accommodation of theology which is dull, blunted, and materialistically interpreted. It was the disunion of theology’s subdisciplines which troubled him the most; note, for example, his regret at the reduction of dogmatic theology to casuistry which he attributes to “several modern authors” (meaning thereby the manualists).

It is therefore very curious to me that it was Garrigou-Lagrange who emerged as the leading public opponent of ressourcement, which was demonstrably and thematically a response to the very same concerns. His own classroom teaching was said to have been lively, dramatic, infused with humor. His writing is precise, poetic, sublime. There is evidence of deep and mutual respect between Lagrange and many figures associated with the nouvelle théologie, which was itself no more than a loose affiliation, grouped in derision from without. That Lagrange encountered troubling propositions along the way is hardly of doubt; Küng and Schillebeeckx, for example, had been injudiciously classified with Rahner and de Lubac. Nonetheless, the antagonism remains surprising. One may, however, compare for context the censorious disposition found in Humani Generis, for all its progressivism regarding the natural sciences:

Another danger is perceived which is all the more serious because it is more concealed beneath the mask of virtue. There are many who, deploring disagreement among men and intellectual confusion, through an imprudent zeal for souls, are urged by a great and ardent desire to do away with the barrier that divides good and honest men; these advocate an “eirenism” according to which, by setting aside the questions which divide men, they aim not only at joining forces to repel the attacks of atheism, but also at reconciling things opposed to one another in the field of dogma. And as in former times some questioned whether the traditional apologetics of the Church did not constitute an obstacle rather than a help to the winning of souls for Christ, so today some are presumptive enough to question seriously whether theology and theological methods, such as with the approval of ecclesiastical authority are found in our schools, should not only be perfected, but also completely reformed, in order to promote the more efficacious propagation of the kingdom of Christ everywhere throughout the world among men of every culture and religious opinion.”

The nouvelle théologie saw its rehabilitation with Pope St. John XXIII, and the rest is history, from John Paul II naming Balthasar to the College of Cardinals to Ratzinger himself becoming Pope Benedict XVI. But the mediocritization of theology was not merely a modern problem. It had already proceeded apace in the generations after the death of Thomas, just as lavish and sprawling monuments were built to honor the Poverello. Occam, Buridan, the whole nominalist trend witnessed to decay from within.

Without the teloi of truth, universal sanctity, and inner conversion unto perfection, a moribund, taken-for-granted and triumphalist theology occupies itself with a tangle of idle hypotheticals, designed to make a display of its own prowess, in a Yurchenko double pike of metaphysical inquiry. That God be the obiectum formale, the formal object, of theology does not warrant objectifying God into a datum to be manipulated, rather than a Person (or Persons as the case may be) to be revered in awe. If you remove the soul, the whole organism dies; if you artificially extend the life of what is basically a corpse, the life and energy you pour in is at cross purposes, an engine of misery. In short, nominalism severs reason from God, and more, in its voluntaristic stance, rends God and any organic sense of goodness asunder. To adapt Ratzinger on the opposing camps in sacred music, these two millstones, of manualism and idly speculative theological musings, agree only in grinding the discipline to dust.

Aeterni Patris itself proposed Thomism as a means of integrating a “wealth of new discoveries” and the fruits of scientific investigation. Yet we find this in Humani Generis:

For, together with the sources of positive theology God has given to His Church a living Teaching Authority to elucidate and explain what is contained in the deposit of faith only obscurely and implicitly. This deposit of faith our Divine Redeemer has given for authentic interpretation not to each of the faithful, not even to theologians, but only to the Teaching Authority of the Church. But if the Church does exercise this function of teaching, as she often has through the centuries, either in the ordinary or extraordinary way, it is clear how false is a procedure which would attempt to explain what is clear by means of what is obscure. Indeed the very opposite procedure must be used. Hence Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, teaching that the most noble office of theology is to show how a doctrine defined by the Church is contained in the sources of revelation, added these words, and with very good reason: “in that sense in which it has been defined by the Church.”

That’s pretty harsh. It safeguards a purity of tradition, but a purity that risks corruption with the suffocation of the species, like a butterfly pinned under glass. Such a theology sets up walls around the truth which it imagines to be defensive, but are in fact more like the walls set up by Julius Caesar at the Battle of Alesia – a circumvallation, a barrier sealing one away from any aid, hope, or contact from without.

This is no criticism of Pius XII. Nor do I mean to imply, in discussing the aftermath of Aeterni Patris, any disparagement of Leo XIII – the pope of social justice, and of the Rosary… and of Thomism, which is indeed an apex of achievement. It’s just that the works of living saints and geniuses, as in the case of Francis of Assisi which I cited, will often be debased to their opposites in their absence. Too defensive a posture against sophistry will likely result in the fomenting of the same; as Bentley Hart decries, rightly: “Leave it to a two-tier Thomist to devise a definition of love that does not actually involve love.” Theology, no matter how airtight, systematized, orthodox and advanced, cannot really know anything unless it experimentally knows God, because the truth itself cannot be known at all unless it is also loved. Fr. Lagrange, who may have been the primary author of Humani Generis, and whose influence on the encyclical is indisputable, knew all of this. He was a man, a priest, a scholar on fire with the love of God. Somehow, through the lens of his own lived sanctity, he failed to see the larger, and more nuanced, horizon.

The experiences of the nouvelle théologie thinkers were often otherwise; less naive, less sheltered certainly. Jean Daniélou writes of the “rupture between theology and life.” So does another Jesuit who came before him:

Many, many people hereabouts are not becoming Christians for one reason only: there is nobody to make them Christians. Again and again I have thought of going round the universities of Europe, especially Paris, and everywhere crying out like a madman, riveting the attention of those with more learning than charity: “What a tragedy: how many souls are being shut out of heaven and falling into hell, thanks to you!”

I wish they would work as hard at this as they do at their books, and so settle their account with God for their learning and the talents entrusted to them.

The zeal of St. Francis Xavier is fully appropriate, even post Nostra Aetate. In the case at hand, souls are being shut out of heaven, losing the high grandeur of ecclesial and intellectual vocation and falling into the hell of distorted piety and abusive religion.

And so, in the mystery and providence of God, it comes full circle. Lagrange, the daddy-cat (a descriptor over which I admittedly am still puzzling), Lagrange the madman – as all true lovers of God are – was to have his most profound influence over the culture of theology in the person of his student, Pope St. John Paul II, who as Karol Wojtyła had completed his doctorate under the Dominican’s direction.

Pope John Paul wrote in the Apostolic Letter Inter Munera Academiarum:

At the dawn of the Third Millennium, many cultural conditions have changed. We can see profound developments of great importance in the field of anthropology, but above all substantial changes in the very way of understanding the condition of man before God, before other men and before the whole of creation. First of all, the greatest challenge of our time comes from a growing separation between faith and reason, between the Gospel and culture.

Building on the firm foundation of Fides et Ratio, published a year prior, John Paul II affirmed Leo’s commitment to Thomism and praised his predecessor, particularly as it was actually Leo who had established the First Vatican Council’s expression of the consonance between faith and reason (which Pius XII reaffirmed in Humani Generis). St. John Paul’s great contribution here was to emphasize two key points within Thomism.

The first of these was Thomas’s humanism, exemplified in his teachings on the dignity of the human person and the dignity of reason. In Inter Munera Academiarum, the pope of Redemptor Hominis, who began his prodigious cycle of papal teachings by placing the Redeemer of man at the center of the universe and became renowned for his development of the Theology of the Body, referred to St. Thomas as Doctor Humanitatis, “because he was always ready to receive the values of all cultures.”

Secondly, he called for a deeper study of “the metaphysical realism of the actus essendi,” so that “theology can enter into dialogue with the many directions in today’s research and doctrine.” In having crystallized what is truly essential to the system, fearlessly pruning cultural accretions and outdated science, St. John Paul restored Thomism to its original brilliance and glory, allowing it to be once again a living theology, at once wholly itself and fully inculturated in the contemporary world. In this, as in so many other ways, St. John Paul II opened wide the doors to Christ.


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V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport.  She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/

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