Ferdinand Cavallera, SJ “Positive Theology”
Much has been written over the past thirty years or so concerning positive theology, its nature, and its relations with scholastic theology.1 Running through this long bibliography, one feels the desire that a greater number of articles had been written by authors having personal familiarity with the methods of positive theology, thereby being able to speak about it from their own experience. Thus, this discipline suffered, at once, from: overly zealous friends claiming on its behalf place that it could not reasonably dream of demanding for itself; and prejudiced enemies, mistaken about the dangers it would supposedly, of necessity, pose to Catholic learning. Hence, the discipline remains subject a malaise that is far from dissipating. This situation sustains unjustified suspicions and hinders necessary progress that ought to be desired by all. Moreover, obscurity reigns in a certain number of minds concerning the very subject of the controversy: critiques and panegyrics alike often rest on veritable equivocations. In the present article, I would like to make a contribution to dispelling them.
I. [Positive and Scholastic Theology]
A first difficulty concerns the very meaning to be given to the expression “positive theology.” To say nothing of those who reject it as improper, there is no shortage of people who attribute quite various significations to the term. This initial equivocation or—if you wish—this lack of precision, has had baneful consequences. Moreover, this is not a new state of affairs; rather, it is, in fact, the vexing inheritance reaching back several centuries.
In the current state of research [admittedly in 1925], I do not think that anyone is positioned to fix the moment when the expression “positive theology” was employed for the first time. The first equivalent mention I know of is mentioned in St. Ignatius’ rules ad sentiendum cum Ecclesia. The eleventh expresses itself thus:
[To think with the Church, one must] praise positive and scholastic doctrine, for just as it is more proper to the positive doctors, such as St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory, etc., to move the affections to love and serve God our Lord in all things, so it is more proper to the Scholastics, such as St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and the Master of the Sentences, etc., to define or declare for our times the things necessary for eternal salvation, and the better to impugn and expose all errors and all fallacies. For the scholastic doctors, being more modern, not only avail themselves of the true understanding of Sacred Scripture and of the positive and holy Doctors but also, being themselves illumined and enlightened by the divine power, are aided by the Councils, Canons, and Constitutions of our holy Mother Church.
So precise a teaching furnishes us reasonable grounds for thinking that this was current doctrine in the theological milieux of the first part of the sixteenth century, notably at Paris, where St. Ignatius had studied the sacred sciences. The term itself—“positive theology”—was commonly employed in the seventeenth century, but progress in its meaning is far from sight. Then, and ever since, the greatest confusion has prevailed. Sometimes it is synonymous with scriptural theology or exegesis: certain catalogues of Jesuit professors of theology, those of the College of Bordeaux, for example, will, depending on the year, indifferently refer to one and the same person, for the same subject matter, as professor of Holy Scripture or as professor of positive theology. Sometimes it designates the teaching of controversy, that new science owing its origins to the necessary reaction against Protestantism, having Bellarmine and Valentia as distinguished practitioners. Sometimes it is taken as equivalent to moral theology, and this acceptation—however strange it may appear at first sight, determined no doubt by a supposed equivalence between positive and practical, in opposition to speculative—is still today, for some, the obvious signification of the word. It is not rare for a professor of positive theology to receive consultations having as their object the resolution of a case of conscience. In another use, “positive theology” even designates, relative to higher studies, where scholasticism dominates, an inferior kind of theological instruction, for the use of those whose intellectual resources or time are limited, one presumed to confine itself to the essentials: an elementary knowledge of Scripture, the canons, and casuistry. Finally, and quite naturally, we find, once again, somewhat broadened, the acceptation already suggested by the passage of St. Ignatius cited above, the one which comes closest to the true notion of the positive discipline. Works entitled Apparatus theologiae positivae, like that of Pierre Annat, for example, are a veritable introduction to the study of the documents in which revealed truth is contained. One sees, moreover, that the notion of document is the real but confused idea presupposed, at bottom, by the various acceptations enumerated. It alone explains the application of one and the same term to such disparate realities.
Indeed, if we go to the bottom of things, we easily realize that of the two sources of knowledge already recognized by ancient philosophy, auctoritas and ratio, it is auctoritas that constitutes the proper object of positive theology, ratio being that of scholasticism. Auctoritas is the ensemble of testimonies bringing us the divine revelation; ratio is speculation exercised on the occasion of these testimonies and striving to render them explicit in such a way as to coordinate them into a satisfying intellectual synthesis—and thus, we can see at once the distinction and necessary union of these two disciplines for the constitution of sacred science. Each indispensable, they each have their own proper task and, by the very nature of Christian dogma, cannot ignore one another. And so, as soon as we can set aside practical problems, such as the elementary teaching of theology in the major seminaries, if we remain in the domain of pure science, then the question of precedence of the one relative to the other appears rather idle. It is a matter of perspective. We only need to let each develop as best it can. By the very fact that it is theology, the positive discipline is, moreover, not to be confused with history properly so called. It claims a role for reasoning, for discursive intelligence. It cannot take as its motto Scribitur ad narrandum non ad probandum [“It is written to narrate, not to prove”]. But if it is agrees with scholastic theology on this point, its own proper method will nonetheless, on this very point, be rather different. Scholastic theology, for its part, however enamored it may be of speculation and however desirous of satisfying the mind by opening to it the hidden meaning of revealed truths, by showing their harmonies with the data of reason, by striving to establish as much unity as possible in our knowledge, nevertheless cannot forget that it has revelation—that is, auctoritas—as its point of departure, and that this alone suffices to limit its terrain rather narrowly. It does not have the liberties of philosophy. It cannot forget that the mysteries admit of no explanation that would be necessary and drawn from the nature of things. The theologian must ever remember that, however plausible certain reasons may be, in the presence of what is the exclusive work of the divine will, it can discover only arguments of fittingness, and that, consequently, primacy remains with auctoritas. Thus, the positive and the scholastic disciplines could not, without suffering damage, ignore one another. But it remains the case that each has its own distinct domain in the study of Christian dogma.
II [Auctoritas and the Matter of Positive Theology]
This auctoritas, the domain of positive theology, presents itself under multiple forms. It is not idle to look at it more closely, since this will be, by that very fact, to define the material object of this science. It seems indeed that agreement on this point has now been reached, and that the labors of which the treatise on faith and the treatise on the Church were the object over the course of the last century have brought about greater precision and clarity in these matters. We can say that the immediate object of positive theology—auctoritas to be considered first of all—is that of the ecclesiastical magisterium. The decisions of this magisterium, under their various forms and with the varied degrees of authority they carry, are what it must study first, and the very substance of its object. They represent, in effect, living dogma, such as it adapts itself for each generation by the sole authority qualified to interpret it—which directly constitutes for all, at a given moment in time, the formal expression of Catholic belief: the expression which, by formulating the essential, virtually contains all the rest, and in which the Church, according to the word of the Gospel, profert ex thesauro suo nova et vetera [“brings forth from her treasure things new and old”]: vetera, the immutable truth, as the Church received it in deposit from the divine Founder through the intermediary of the Apostles; nova, those precisions of expression or of explicitation incorporated into her teaching, all of which the ceaseless labor of Christian thought effects under her control over the course of the centuries. Therefore, the first task of positive theology must be to gather as exactly as possible the documents of the ecclesiastical magisterium from the beginning, and to keep up to date the repertory in which the teaching—whether solemn or ordinary—of the Holy See, the Councils, and the bishops dispersed yet united in the profession of the same doctrine makes itself the echo of revealed truth.
However, we know that the Church, and consequently the magisterium, are careful not to claim for their teaching the privilege of autonomy and originality. We do not belong to a sect of philosophers. The Church is only the interpreter of revelation and its guardian. She is not its author. This is why she assures us that she transmits to us only what she has herself drawn from the sources of revelation: from Scripture, the word spoken by God himself, inspiring the sacred authors; and from tradition, repeating and completing Scripture by way of an oral teaching transmitting itself over the course of the centuries and reverberating in the writings that form Christian literature properly so called. It is here, obviously, that the task of the positive discipline grows larger and becomes formidably complex. If Scripture already represents a vast, yet defined, domain how much broader still is that of tradition. In theory, it appears rather easy to delimit. In practice, it is not easy, for one must, in reality, conduct as complete an inquiry as possible into everything that has come down to us attesting, in any manner whatsoever, the state of Catholic belief at a given moment of history. Nothing of it may be neglected, from the primitive period down to our own days, when, before our eyes, there continues the vital movement that sustains theological speculation as well as the practical life of Catholicism and which, in perfecting the work of the past, prepares the achievements of the future. It would be a vexing error to imagine that tradition is confined to the first centuries of the Church. In fact, one must hold to the very comprehensive concept of the primitive paradosis and annex to it—while leaving a place of honor to the apostolic data—the work of elaboration represented by intellectual activity within Catholicism, in opposition to the invariable text of the Scriptures. We belong, in fact, to a living body, which has never ceased to deploy her energy from the first moment of her existence. Christian generations have not succeeded one another like mutual strangers; on the contrary, from the beginning, they have interpenetrated one another, so that, from day when the Apostles’s were sent forth by the Lord, the chain that transmits their teaching to us presents itself as uninterrupted, without there ever having been a rupture.
The writings of ecclesiastical authors—the Fathers especially—are the most palpable and most striking testimony to this transmission. But, we must not forget that they do not contain all the manifestations of this reality, that this reality overflows them, to the point that at present, in each particular Church as in the universal Church, if one considers the uninterrupted succession of pastors and faithful, one can ascend, by way of oral teaching, to the very founders of the Church bringing the good news as they had received it from Jesus Christ. Consequently, it is absolutely impossible to discern what, in the belief of us all, comes from the written word—the sacred page and the works of ecclesiastical authors, Fathers, and theologians—and what goes back to the still more ancient and more direct, though more elementary, action of the living preaching, perpetuating itself substantially identical across all the generations.
Let us not this in passing: do we not here have a very strong argument against the Protestant pretensions to represent the spirit of primitive Christianity? How could an artificial creation by a few sixteenth-century rebels prevail against the magnificent testimony that the uninterrupted succession of Christian generations brings to the authenticity of the Catholic faith? Grouped, from the beginning, around their pastors, these generations transmit to one another—without, at any moment, the possibility of universal alteration, thanks to their compenetration—the teaching that the first among them received, authentic, from the very men whom Christ had chosen to dispense it.
It is important, therefore, to gather all its manifestations in the writings directly devoted to the exposition or the defense of dogma, but also in the other testimonies, written or not, which will confirm, complete, and sometimes rectify what the writers report, and which themselves often receive from those writers a supplement of light and of value. We know how much, in certain domains, the liturgy, archaeology, epigraphy, and the life of the Church manifested in ecclesiastical history add to the data already furnished by patristics.
But what must not be lost sight of is that this effort must not confine itself to the Church’s first centuries. If, in later periods, the disciplines I have just recalled do not always present so lively an interest, nor offer testimonies of equal importance, on the other hand the history of theology there plays a new role, and one of the first rank. If we choose to remain insufficiently trained in it, we will find ourselves exposed to errors freighted with consequences. However easy, in theory, may be the distinction between the decisions of the ecclesiastical magisterium and the data of theological speculation—between what is of faith or imposes itself in varying degrees, and what is freely discussed in the schools—in practice it is impossible to set out of consideration these latter testimonies in any serious study of what belongs to the faith. They reciprocally compenetrate. The decisions of the magisterium are not the product of chance. They are conditioned by the very circumstances that provoke them. They reflect a certain state of theology. They answer to particular preoccupations and are the echo of determinate controversies. Even while professing, as at the Council of Trent, the intention of formulating only Catholic doctrine, to the exclusion of the various theological systems, they can be explained only as a function of the theology that preceded them. To distinguish them, to characterize them in their exact bearing, to accurately comment on their content as well as their expression, it is indispensable to be conversant with the diverse theories that provoked them, to know the discussions they aroused, to be able to retrace, so to speak, in detail the road traveled from the first appearance of a doctrine to its definition and its consecration, or its rejection, by the competent authority.
To be sure, the positive theologian will bring to this work a kind of interest altogether different from the speculative theologian’s concerns. As a positive theologian, where the theories of the schools are concerned, he does not need to take sides. In his inquiry into the past, he does not seek arguments in favor of one system or against others. Since, by hypothesis, these systems are free—that is to say, each represents a distinct perspective from which the same truth is considered, and each appeals to different applications of the analogy of faith2—what interests him directly is the relation of these theories to the decisions of the magisterium, their repercussion upon its work, the light they can cast upon this or that document whose meaning and bearing he must determine. To go further, to make a choice among these systems which, by definition, are freely professed, would be to encroach upon the domain of the speculative theologian and to seek unduly to press the data of history into the service of a discussion that belongs solely to religious “metaphysics.”3 Whatever fallacious pretext one may invoke in order to draw to oneself the authority of this or that Father and, thereby, justify one’s own position, it escapes no one that a truly theological system is governed above all by intrinsic reasons, is a function of a “metaphysics” and not of a person, and is worth what that “metaphysics” is worth, and nothing more. Consequently, it is absolutely illusory to want to settle the controversy by way of authority, and to hope, by the subtle exegesis of this or that text, to win over the decisive patronage of a Father of the Church who wrote at a moment when the problem was not yet under discussion.
Moreover, we must recognize that if there is abuse on this point, it hardly comes from the positive theologians. Instead, they are right to protest against the intrusion into their domain—where object and methods are clearly characterized—by speculative theologians ill-prepared by their formation and their habitual task for handling texts and the delicate argument from tradition, men who are unwilling to remain content with settling their quarrels in the closed field of speculation, where they can freely bring to bear the only arguments valid in such cases. Furthermore, since no one is under any illusion about the value of these pseudo-historical demonstrations, it would be a serious step forward to abandon these practices definitively and to strive better to respect the proper domain of auctoritas and of ratio—not to make the latter intervene abusively in the interpretation of the former, but also not to invoke the former indiscriminately in order to resolve the conflicts begotten by the latter.
This does not mean, however, that positive theology—which can itself only gain by seeking light from scholastic theology, the better to penetrate the nature of Catholic dogma and its rational repercussions—cannot in its turn be useful to speculation. It illuminates and guides speculation by helping it to discern what is in the line of tradition, to distinguish better between what belongs to dogma and what is free opinion, to rectify its positions, and to set its rational constructions upon more solid foundations.
Thus, we see what the proper task of positive theology is and—to employ a technical expression—what its formal object is. Being theology, it does not propose merely to gather the documents of auctoritas in matters of Catholic faith, to describe and inventory them, nor even to reconnoiter the road by which this faith has come down to us from the distant era when the Apostles dispersed. It includes, in addition to these historical tasks, a task it has in common with every other theology, but of which it must acquit itself according to its own proper method. It must interpret these documents and, after having established their material sense according to the rules of philological, literary, and historical criticism, bring into relief their theological signification and determine—itself enlightened by the teaching of the ecclesiastical magisterium—their real bearing for the sake of the exposition and justification of that teaching. Therefore, it also involves a scientific construction, like scholastic theology, though one fashioned by other means. It comments on revelation and its present-day given by means of the documents of the past. It determines their precise sense, drawing light from all the testimonies history can furnish it. It aims to reconstitute, in the whole as in the details, Catholic doctrine as it is formulated in the teachings of the magisterium and, secondarily, in the teaching of the theologians, taking account of the diverse degrees of confidence their assertions deserve. Then it justifies this teaching by a dual procedure: negatively, by demonstrating the inefficacy of the objections that the history of the past may suggest against it; positively, by striving, to the extent of its resources, to show the real conformity of this teaching with that of the past. Such is the proper task of the positive discipline, and this is how it is truly bound to dogmatic theology, since it participates in the demonstration of the Catholic faith and offers a reasoned historical exposition of it.
Consequently—and precisely because it is theology—positive theology cannot be purely and simply identified with what is called the history of dogmas, of doctrines, or of theology. It is not content to expound. It aims to demonstrate and to justify. Therefore, it goes beyond them in its goal, but it is clear that it attains that goal by utilizing the data of these historical disciplines and that, as a result, it is closely akin to them. For a Catholic, their tasks are almost identical in practice, for the results of historical inquiry cannot be in contradiction with dogmatic truth. One could say, in sum, that positive theology is nothing other than the ensemble of conclusions furnished by the history of dogmas and of theology, studied from the Catholic perspective. This is to affirm that, in his work of assembling and interpreting the facts, the historian that the positive theologian must be, instead of following naturalist principles of the rationalist, guides himself by the principle of the absolute truth of Catholicism, whose transcendent reality he knows, moreover from elsewhere. It would be perfectly puerile to engage in a quarrel over words on this subject. Every historian has his prejudices. Whoever handles facts and draws a synthesis from them must be oriented by principles. Thanks be to God, we are not at a loss to demonstrate that ours are the best and, in certain cases, the only reasonable ones.
III. [Dogmatic Development and Positive Theology]
It is on this question of method that some clarifications remain to be given. First of all, it is clear that, in so complex a labor, the positive theologian must have a clear view not only concerning the task to be accomplished but also of the principle that governs and illuminates it in its entirety. The point is to recount the history of the present-day datum in relation to the primitive revelation, to demonstrate their identity amid the more or less pronounced variety of the expressions that convey them, to explain the effectuation of the long labor that brought dogma to its present state of full flowering, and to reconstitute the various periods of its history. Here, only a firm notion of dogmatic development can assure a sure course and guard against the two reefs upon which the demonstration founders. One could, by analogy, name them fixism and transformism: fixism, that is to say, a too material way of conceiving the immutability of dogma, which rejectes every idea of progress, even accidental and extrinsic progress; transformism, which assigns to dogma as its law a ceaseless heterogeneity in its development. In the past—there is no need to dwell on demonstrating it—people often stumbled into the first. The necessities of defense against the Protestants, in particular, led certain controversialists to insist to excess upon the absoluteness of revelation and to exaggerate its nature. Thus, we have Bossuet’s controversy with Richard Simon, which offers us more than one striking example of this kind of fixism. In our own days, on the other hand, under color of registering the results of historical inquiry, we have seen a religious metaphysics, inspired by Hegelianism and strongly systematized by Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and, following them, Louis August Sabatier, attempt to acclimatize itself even within Catholic learning and claim to explain everything by a radical evolutionism in which only the words retain their identity, veiling realities that are ever new and sometimes contradictory.
Neither of these positions—which are, moreover, of very different value in relation to Catholic truth—can be that of the positive theologian. Too high a price has been paid for the pledges given to the one or the other for there not to be every interest in establishing that middle way which remains the only one leading to the truth. What is needed is a theory of dogmatic development of such a nature as to satisfy fully the exigencies of history as well as those of reason and of faith. What is needed is a theory that takes equitable account of all the elements of the question and makes it possible to explain and justify all the facts as they present themselves after an objective inquiry, conducted according to the only legitimate methods and with no other concern than that of discovering the truth. We can admit neither the heterogeneity of dogma—that is, that ceaseless internal change which substitutes new thoughts for the old and breaks every real relation between the truth of yesterday and that of today (truth remains ever one and identical with itself)—nor fail to recognize the transformations that it has had to undergo in its expression over the course of the ages. It is an illusion, testifying to an all too rudimentary psychology, to want to find formally at the beginning of the evolution what is in reality its term, which marks the point of arrival following upon long labors of the mind permanently in contact with the same truth. Theological elaboration is not an empty word. It is a reality that one must strive to grasp, in order to specify, delimit, and—with the help of the teachings of the [First] Vatican Council, theology, and history—to establish its nature and its process.
The first principle in this matter—without which one is no longer Catholic—is that there can be, since the foundation of the Church, no substantial change: the truth that we believe today is the same truth believed yesterday by our fathers. On this point, no equivocation can be admitted. But it is just as incontestable that there is non-essential (“accidental”) progress, both through the explicitation of dogma in itself or in its applications, and through the more luminous comprehension of it that the Christian consciousness obtains, thanks to the continuous and repeated efforts of the centuries—whether it be a question of a simple adaptation to the new cast of mind that differentiates the later generations from those that preceded them, or of a deeper labor of elaboration in which there is a reaction of the perceived truth upon the mind, and of the mind upon that same truth, rendered clearer and manifesting more fully the richness of its content, until then insufficiently exploited.
However this development—or, rather, this full flowering of the immutable truth—what law does it follow? And must we consider it a simple result of the normal play of human forces applied to this kind of intellectual activity, so that one should assimilate it to the normal process of every doctrinal development, in the philosophical order, for example? It is clear that the answer is no, and that the Catholic theologian must remember first of all that the essential factor of this development is the Holy Spirit, always present in the Church, of which He is the soul: Himself directing this evolution, watching over its stages, always assuring its success by his invisible action, despite all the human causes of error and failure, and guaranteeing the magisterium in the exercise of its infallibility. Nothing is more certain than this truth, the foundation of Christian belief, nor more encouraging for the Catholic scholar. He thus possesses a precious thread that will keep him from going astray amid the labyrinth of human waywardness, amid all the lengthy detours through which Christian thought may have passed prior to a magisterial decision closed the era of controversies and fixed, beyond appeal, the expression of a truth which, until then, was not at all, or insufficiently, formulated. We know that revelation is infallible, in its development as at its origin, because beneath its human appearances this development is a divine work, and because the indefectible assistance promised by Christ to his Church, and the intervention of the Paraclete who is to teach us all things, are realities ever present and ever efficacious.
However, if the results bear clear witness to this for the sincere believer, it is clear that the modalities of this supernatural intervention ordinarily evade us, and that normally the historian can scarcely grasp anything but the action of the human factors, the immediate instruments or occasions of the development. Consequently, since what is at issue is human activity—necessarily fallible when left to itself—one must not be astonished at the groping and stumbling stages that can be noted along the itinerary and which, by their very existence, only throw into greater relief the beneficence of the divine action safeguarding the truth in spite of everything and assuring its triumph. Every theory that does not give due place to this dual element, that sacrifices the one to the other or refuses to recognize their distinct existence and their respective influence, is erroneous and dangerous. It can only compromise the results of the inquiry undertaken.
These human factors, multiple in themselves, can rather easily be reduced to a few groups. Dogmatic development is most generally prepared by the controversies with heretics. This is a thought familiar in antiquity, and one that St. Augustine, among others, formulated most felicitously in this passage of the Confessions: “For the censure of heretics makes stand forth what your Church holds and what sound doctrine maintains.”4 Next, we must note the influence of the intimate life of the Church, of the piety of the faithful oriented by the Holy Spirit: often has it outrun theological speculation, slowed as the latter is by its traditions and by scruples unknown to “the man in the street.” Finally there is the action of various intellectual groups and of individuals exercising, by their genius or by their position, decisive influence in inclining hesitant thought in one direction rather than another and opening new paths by bringing to light certain analogies until then neglected or misunderstood. Who, for example, could measure the influence of a St. Augustine upon Latin theology, which, until him, identified itself so completely with Greek Christian thought and which, ever since, has on so many points given dogma a theological interpretation so clearly differentiated? And upon this same theology, as St. Augustine had stamped it, how great in its turn has been the action of Aristotelianism, in its various stages, from Boethius to the representatives of the great scholasticism, to whom we owe the definitive elaboration of our theology?
It is clear that, if analysis can distinguish these various factors, in practice their influences intermingle, and it is often difficult to distinguish in the final result what belongs to each. They exercise mutual action and reaction. Piety pushes speculation forward, and speculation channels and rectifies piety. And thanks to both, the day at last comes when this long and laborious efflorescence, accomplished by reason in the service of faith and invisibly brought to its goal by the Holy Spirit, becomes the object of an intervention of the ecclesiastical magisterium which, most often, discerns, authenticates, and sanctions it after having sometimes, of its own initiative, called it forth or given it direction.
If one wishes thus to retrace in its entirety the process of this development, in which these different factors intervene, each with its own distinct role, one can perhaps reduce it to these broad lines. At the beginning, there is the revealed deposit that the Apostles received by word of mouth and that they transmitted, for the most part, in the same manner—not a summa of theology, that is, not as an already systematized ensemble in which the truths are harmoniously distributed and coordinated, in which the consequences are drawn from the principles, and in which at a single glance one can appreciate both the unity of the plan and the variety of the pieces that realize it—but a deposit of truths delivered in a living, concrete fashion, truths which do not appear as being necessarily interlinked and which are more or less developed according to the needs and sometimes the accidents of circumstances. They are juxtaposed more often than coordinated. Sometimes they present themselves as being included in this or that institution that is altogether practical in character, touching the liturgy and ecclesiastical discipline rather than as formally expressed. They will have to be drawn out; one will need to learn how to recognize them. And this labor may be more or less long and delicate, more or less facilitated by the degree of culture or orthodoxy of those who devote themselves to it.
To these oral truths is joined the treasure of the truths already contained in the Scriptures, which the Apostles transmit along with their own teaching. To the riches of the Old Testament, representing nevertheless a still imperfect revelation, are added those of the New, in which revelation is perfect, but—just like the living teaching—delivered likewise in a dispersed state, without any concern, on the part of the inspired author, to compose a doctrinal summa, or to exhaust everything he knows about the revealed dogma, or even to express it in the best possible way. It is this deposit, with its internal plenitude—but also with the possible insufficiencies of its expression relative to the human mind and to the variable necessities of the times—that is to become the object of the continuous labor of the generations, and upon which the action of the factors enumerated above is to be exercised. It is a ceaseless labor of subjective adaptation, explicitation, and coordination, not all of whose manifestations are necessarily fortunate ones, but which has for its term the disengagement of new truths implicitly contained in the preceding ones—in eodem sensu et eadem sententia [“in the same sense and the same judgment”]—and a real improvement [amélioration] in the perception and expression of the same truth.5 Directed, as has been recalled, by the Holy Spirit, despite the infirmities of human intelligence, his collaborator and his instrument, this labor contains nothing of a nature to trouble or shock us. It is only a prolongation, under another form, of the life and action of the Word who was made flesh to dwell among us. It is not a human work, despite the appearances. It is a divine work. Consequently, no more for the past than for the present or the future can we feel any fear on its account. No historical inquiry, impartially conducted, can arrive at results contrary to the infallible decisions of the ecclesiastical magisterium. If it sometimes appears otherwise, the blame must be laid only upon the insufficiencies of the historian.
IV. [The Institutional Practice of Positive Theology]
But we must, moreover, take account of the difficulties of the task and, in a domain imperfectly explored until now and where sure guides do not abound, not add still further to obstacles already so great by an unreflective distrust of those who devote themselves to it. In a general way, it would be good if, among scholars occupied with different disciplines but animated by the same love of the Christian faith and the same desire to promote Catholic learning and to secure for it the influence it ought to have in the intellectual world, agreement were reached upon a few evident principles, of such a nature as to make possible and stable an intellectual atmosphere assuring the freedom of mind and the security without which it is illusory to hope for progress. It ought to be understood that, in exchange for his loyalty toward the Church and her faith, whoever devotes himself seriously to a science and consecrates his efforts to it has a right to confidence and must not be suspected a priori either in his intentions or in his works. It must next be recognized that each science has its methods, technique, vocabulary, and habits or preferences, and that, in judging of them, it is not the layman who is to be trusted, but those of the same specialty. It seems that some tacitly admit that whoever has followed the ordinary clerical formation is, by that very fact, fit to judge of all the disciplines related to it. Nothing is more disastrous for the formation of a sound Catholic opinion. Every science, as soon as one passes beyond the elementary level of popularization, ceases to be accessible to those who have only a general culture: it is a prejudice to set apart the speculative sciences as if they alone were beyond the reach of the common run of men. In reality, all our disciplines, if they are to be practiced or appraised exactly, demand men of the trade. Whoever wishes to meddle in them without sufficient preparation risks going astray in them and leading astray, in his wake, those whom he teaches.
How many misunderstandings would have been avoided, and how many missteps fatal to the cause of Catholic learning, if these principles had been more fully taken into account in the polemics. It is every bit as damaging to want to appraise the results of positive theology with the habits of mind of a scholastic as to contest the legitimacy of speculative constructions in the name of history and tradition. What is needed is to recognize the distinction of the two domains and of the two methods: not to seek the absolute in the domain of the relative, and to avoid—where everything is a matter of nuances, where the words have been carefully chosen and weighed to say what they say and nothing else—instituting a trial over intentions, substituting a priori reasonings for observations of fact, and, for clearly delimited conclusions, consequences deduced with the help of principles that completely denature the original thought. What is needed is to examine each assertion in itself and in its milieu of origin, according to the conventions and the intellectual habits to which it appeals, according credit first of all to an author esteemed to be serious, and supposing that, conscious of the responsibilities incumbent upon every Catholic writer, it is not lightly that he has set his signature beneath the pages in which he has published the result of his labors. One must further abstain from envisaging science only from the practical point of view of clerical formation. This is the affair of ecclesiastical government, and one understands that particular precautions are thus necessary. I shall return to this in a moment.
Apart from this case, science must be envisaged in itself, and one can say that then there can be, properly speaking, no question of precedence or preference. In reality, there can only be a question of legitimacy and necessity. Whether it be a matter of the defense of Catholicism or of the simple flowering of Christian thought, every science legitimates itself by the very fact that it contributes to this twofold task. In its place, modest or more considerable, each has the right to live and to develop according to its own laws and in the atmosphere of intellectual freedom indispensable to scientific work. It is an elementary truth that the regular means by which a science progresses is free discussion among those who devote themselves to it, guaranteed by the impartial sympathy of those who remain outside it. It is not only in relation to scholastic thought that the axiom recently recalled again by Pius XI—that full liberty in controverted matters must be left to Catholic scholars—possesses its full truth. It is the absolute condition of progress in the ecclesiastical sciences as in the profane. The necessity of it is all the greater here in that Catholics do not find themselves alone in this field: beside them, facing against them, adversaries multiply who, consciously or not, labor to thwart their work and thereby render its success more difficult and more laborious. Moreover, the problems arise whether one wishes it or not. Minds that are more and more cultivated, which take an interest in religious things and which are formed by the methods of the historical and positive sciences, just as much as those practiced in speculation, demand that they be furnished answers adapted to their intellectual necessities. They would not understand being offered [scholastic] arguments where they ask for well-established facts. If certain conclusions of these sciences are new, or appear to be in disagreement, not with dogma, but with certain generally widespread opinions, there is no cause to be moved beyond measure, nor to grow indignant. There is only cause to let the specialists discuss them freely and appraise their soundness. It would be astonishing if, approaching these historical problems with an abundance of documents unknown to the past, and with a method far more rigorous than formerly and careful to eliminate all chances of error and all vices of demonstration, one did not arrive, on many points, at results more precise and new. There is no reason why this phenomenon, observed in the other sciences as they perfect their equipment, should not occur in ours as well. Furthermore, one may lay down the principle that there would be far fewer questions passing for insoluble, and far fewer interminable controversies, if all those who occupy themselves with them were equally qualified and brought to their study, along with the same severe methods, the same exclusive concern to will nothing but the truth. These are principles upon which an understanding can and must be established among Catholic scholars, whoever they may be, and of such a nature as to reassure pastors and faithful concerning their activity. The latter, sure of their good will, will then be able, without apprehension and with serenity, to await the results of their work and of their emulation.
As concerns positive theology in particular, if it is true that there have been those who seriously thought of making it the essential element of elementary theological instruction, it is evident that they have understood nothing of its true role. One might recall, in this regard, the the knife imprudently placed in the hands of a child or a madman. The seminarian must, before all else, steep himself in the dogmatic teaching as it is presently formulated by the Church; in matters of theology, he must learn what is necessary for giving a good account of that teaching and being able to expound it fruitfully to the simple faithful. As for positive and scholastic theology, he must receive what will put him in a position to obtain this result. Just as there would be a disadvantage in letting him become entangled in the various systems imagined over the course of the centuries for presenting Catholic truth more opportunely or more rationally, so too there would be harm in throwing him into the historical controversies and—instead of making him know the edifice in all its majesty—in wanting to lead him through the scaffolding, so as to draw his attention first to the defects of the work and to the traces of groping or of negligence in the enterprise. On this point, then, there is nothing to do but observe the prescriptions wisely established by the Church and strive to give the young student a precise knowledge of Christian dogma and its proofs, which will serve as the basis for later, more thorough studies. These studies—whether they be undertaken for the very legitimate and very laudable personal satisfaction of one who wishes to give a better account of his faith and to be able to keep it and defend it with greater security, or whether they be necessary in view of teaching—demand expositions that are up to date. Consequently, they require that the normal place be made, in one way or another, for the positive discipline in the series of the ecclesiastical sciences. Its results must necessarily take their place parallel to those of speculative research, since one cannot know Catholic theology well—any more than any other science—unless one is in a position both to expound it well in its present state and to retrace its history from the origins.
It is here, it seems to me, that there would be some interest in perhaps modifying the usages currently followed, and in drawing more clearly upon the decision prescribing the adoption, alongside the Summa of St. Thomas serving as the text for the speculative part, of a manual giving the order of the questions of a treatise and furnishing the data of positive theology. Even as represented by the best recent works on theology, the usual method of demonstration does not seem to have succeeded in suppressing the grave disadvantages it presents. I mean that method which consists in proving the theses of classical theology at once by arguments from tradition and from reason—leaving the scriptural argument out of the question for the present. It is precisely for having developed the argument from tradition more than in the past, and for having tried to perfect it, that most of the difficulties have arisen. One often finds oneself embarrassed as to the attitude to take: on the one hand, there is a certain necessity, an essential one in a religion founded upon auctoritas, of expounding at length the proof from tradition that justifies this claim; on the other hand, it is incontestable that there is sometimes a disproportion between the proof alleged and the truth it is supposed to justify. It seems that this comes from a failure to recognize the reality of theological development and from a lack of adaptation. It should not be forgotten that a thesis belongs normally to speculation and is its product. Consequently, it forms one body with a system of argumentation from which it must not be separated. Our theology was constituted as such with the help of reasoning and of the Aristotelian system. It is an error to want to justify it by foreign elements of demonstration. It is also the result of a long development, characterized by stages often quite dissimilar: to want to reduce them all to a single formula is to risk shattering the mold into which one wants to force them. All that one will have is the illusion of a historical demonstration, though in reality doing nothing other than multiply the difficulties concerning details. The mind, far from being satisfied by the mixture of two demonstrations setting out from very different principles, will feel ill at ease and uneasy.
This is particularly true for those parts of theology, such as sacramental doctrine, which became the object of theological speculation only late, and which were for a long time simply lived in liturgical observance. Their history comprises two quite distinct periods of very dissimilar character. Except for baptism and, to a lesser degree, the Eucharist and Orders, the other sacraments—and the theory of the sacraments in general—did not truly attract the attention of the speculative theologians until the beginnings of scholasticism in the twelfth century. Therefore, they present themselves under conditions altogether different from those of the other dogmas which, from the beginning, were the object of controversies, such as the Trinity or the Incarnation. A first period is characterized by their ritual existence, with all the practical complexity and all the flexibility that liturgical development involved during those first eleven centuries, in a time when the initiative of the particular Churches was so little controlled. Immediately afterward comes a period altogether different in character, in which theological speculation applies indiscriminately to all these rites, so diverse in their presentation, the same rigid framework of the hylomorphic theory and of the other principles of Aristotelian metaphysics. It is under this influence that sacramental theology was organized and took on its particular shape. Who does not see, therefore, the impossibility—or at least the extreme difficulty—of directly proving statements formulated according to the results of these speculations by arguments borrowed from a state of theology totally different? One risks compromising everything and explaining nothing. In wanting to force ancient history into the frameworks of recent theology, one exposes oneself to sacrificing either history or sound theology: one will make artificial rapprochements, masking the true state of the question; one will risk maximizing the testimonies that appear favorable, minimizing those that appear contrary, substituting a lawyer’s plea for an objective demonstration and, by confounding times and places, multiplying the difficulties instead of suppressing them. For it is a prejudice to think that positive theology is of itself nothing but an inextricable source of difficulties. If this is the case, the fault lies not with positive theology, but with those who employ it inopportunely and out of place. In reality, it carries with it the answer to the objections and, when well presented, can be extremely beneficial. Only, it must be left in its place—that is, treated separately and for its own sake, with respect for its exigencies and its methods.
Now, to come to the practical: if we wish to emerge from a crisis that has already lasted only too long and to accomplish durable and solid work, there is, it seems, an advantage, in the exposition of theology, in clearly separating the speculative part and the historical part. Instead of mixing the historical data with the data of reason in the course of the theses, each treatise should be clearly divided into two parts. The one would contain the doctrine as the best theologians formulate and expound it, insisting on the real arguments—which are not always the most apparent ones—justifying their position: most often arguments of fittingness, when systematic theses are at issue; arguments drawn from the decisions of the ecclesiastical magisterium and from the express affirmations of Scripture, when the truths of faith or their applications are at issue. These, in effect, are the decisive arguments. The positive part would consist in the very history of the treatise and of the doctrine it contains, expounded separately, objectively, with all the necessary particulars and precisions. Stage by stage, one would thus witness the development of this doctrine; one would see how the primitive truth became explicit; one could often mark the moment when, for the first time, a given thesis was clearly formulated; what circumstances brought about this result; what reasons explain the particularities which today astonish or shock us. One would find, in the concrete conditions of this development, the reason for a given lacuna filled only much later, or the justification of a given usage since fallen into desuetude. One would thus have neither to magnify nor minimize the testimony for the needs of the demonstration: the simple historical exposition would often suffice to eliminate the difficulties that another way of proceeding sometimes raises without managing to resolve them suitably. Whoever, for example, has well understood that the twelfth century, with the advent of scholasticism, opens an altogether new period in the theological development of sacramental doctrine, and how it is only then that this doctrine is systematized and developed with an inflexible rigor, will not be scandalized to observe the uncertainty and variety that reign beforehand in several of its applications. Instead of wanting to force certain ancient particularities and certain theories into the framework of what was practiced or taught later, he will no doubt find in them the essentials of Catholic dogma but, at the same, time he will also understand more easily that this dogma had not yet produced all its effects nor manifested all its plenitude. Faith will be reassured in observing the real identity of the better-understood content of revelation in these different epochs, but reason will be reassured as well. Thus, we will not appear to be imposing upon him the acceptance of proofs that are insufficient and that, all the while claiming to hold strictly to historical methods, would seem to grant to documents of an ecclesiastical order an exceptional demonstrative value—such that where, under the same conditions, the demonstration would not be peremptory for a profane document, it could be so for our own documents. The day when, for each treatise, one would thus possess a distinct historical exposition, as solid in its method and its own conclusions as the speculative theses of the best scholastics, great progress will have been accomplished. It would be all to the profit of doctrinal security as well as of the legitimate satisfaction of the mind. It is along this path alone that positive theology will be able, without lurches and with success, to accomplish its task.
This is a translation of Ferdinand Cavallera, "La théologie positive," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 26 (1925): 20–42.↩︎
[Translator's note: On this point, I must register some difference with Fr. Cavallera, for there are real differences of truth among the schools—sometimes able to coexist, sometimes standing in genuine opposition. Theological schools really do differ in the structure and meaning of their conclusions. Their truths are not equivalent, even if they are perhaps (indeed, surely) less often opposed as false to true than some Thomists might once have seemed to universally claim. And yet there are also such oppositions—real oppositions of false to true—that must not be dismissed either. The notion of “free opinion” is, perhaps, overstating the “freedom”—for such “freedom” is only in view of what is required on the explicit authority of the Church; there remains, however, both the authority of the theologians themselves as well as the arguments that more or less well defend such positions.]↩︎
[Translator’s note: The language of a kind of “metaphysics” for theological reflection—used by other authors, including Schwalm—raises certain concerns. However, I will here merely gesture in the direction of important critiques made against Journet by Labourdette, recorded here: https://www.athomist.com/articles/ambroise-gardeil-the-notion-of-a-theological-locus-complete-text#fn168.]↩︎
See Augustine, Confessions, bk. 7, ch. 19.↩︎
[Trans. note: Note well: it is an amelioration in the perception and expression of the same truth. I would qualify, though, “improvement in expression,” for the simplicity of the Scriptures and Tradition contain, by a powerful force, all the strength of all future ages of the divine life revealed and communicated in Christ. One cannot improve on the words of Scripture. One can take up a derivative, secondary task, serving Scripture, refracting it and explicating it. Yet, one can always return back to the locus continens as to a fontal source. There is no reason to think Fr. Cavallera would have disagreed.]↩︎
