Marie-Benoît Schwalm, “The Two Theologies: Scholastic and Positive”
Are these theologies truly distinct?1 Does each possess its own proper object, irreducible to the other’s?—Considering this problem as a theologian, I will take up this question concerning respective competencies. It is a topic that spontaneously comes to the mind of a Catholic as soon as he seeks to explain the data of his faith by means of his reason.
It is a problem concerning comparison. Therefore, how could I approach it without first recalling the particular object of scholastic theology? Of the two, it is the more classical within the Church, more fully developed, and better known: it is therefore well suited to provide us with the initial term for the comparison. It is all the more suitable in that the precise object of positive theology is still a topic under discussion: these discussions bear witness to the need for more complete clarifications.2 Without in any way claiming to provide them at once, I hope at least to indicate their direction, thanks to the orientations emerging from earlier works.
But theology presupposes faith, as I just noted. Thus, we shall understand its existence and nature only by recalling the vital process by which the mind of the believer passes from pure and simple faith to the science of revealed truths. In this way, we shall catch sight of how theology is born in that supernatural and interior light within which its subsequent development unfolds. It is under the projection of this same light that two theologies—if indeed there are two—could then be distinguished: they would proceed like two rays issuing from the same source, though illuminating two different aspects of the same divine realities.
I. The Genesis of the Problem of Theology in the Life of Faith
Faith lives in its fullness when its convictions blossom into works, but its essential act, the first sign of its proper life, is the very act of believing. Therefore, we must closely examine the characteristics of this act: they have a fundamental influence on the origins and nature of theology.
Given the revelation issuing from Jesus Christ and transmitted to this day by the Catholic Church, the mind of the believer truly adheres to divine things. But these are expressed in human terms in the form of statements. This fragmentation of what is simple and infinite is necessary if it is toenter into our limited, analytical, reasoning mind.
Among the statements to be believed, some present to us the intimate life of God—Father, Son, or Spirit. Most refer to the grace-bestowing action of the Divine Persons, by which they communicate to us their own life. Now, all these objects, in themselves, surpass the sphere of natural truths, which reason discovers and philosophy can demonstrate with regard to God. Consequently, the God of revelation demands from those who adhere to His message a conviction that exceeds the efficacy of mere reason and pure science.
No doubt, this conviction is rationally and scientifically justified by motives of credibility (historical, moral, psychological, social). Nonetheless, these motives prepare for it and do not produce it. The believer’s assent to the revealed statements thus corresponds to that word of the Father which makes the Son known, to that intimate testimony of God, to that docility or teachableness of the soul spoken of in Scripture.3 Though the believer will always be subject to potential inward uneasiness regarding the object of his faith—for, it is believed, not seen—he remains firm in the security given him by the First and Absolute Truth.4 Such is the life of faith, considered simply in its essential act, which is to believe in God.
However, this life animates a human reason, and this reason naturally seeks to penetrate the being of things. Thus, the believer will raise pursue various inquiries regarding the objects of his faith—according, of course, to his speculative capacity and rational culture, which are stimulated at times by religious experiences and at other times by practical needs. Some objects of faith are exclusively spiritual in nature (e.g., God and His grace). Though bodily in the Incarnation and in the sacraments, they still contain God or His action. Thus, on that account, they belong to the spiritual order. Therefore, in various ways, all these realities call for that particular science of the immaterial and the divine which is called metaphysics—but a metaphysics of a distinct kind. Its fundamental notions, its generative axioms are given by revelation: by the light of these principles, the theologian will study the constitutive relations of the Divine Persons, the Union of the Word with human nature in Jesus Christ, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the just, the action of the sacraments.
This metaphysics of the supernatural is none other than so-called “scholastic” theology, so named after the School, whose works reflect the academic setting and didactic method.5 But all that the School synthesized in Summae for the use of readers and students had once been developed in fragments by the writers of Christian antiquity, the Fathers, for a mixed audience, according to the controversies of their times and cities. From the day the Church’s belief and Greek philosophy met within an orthodox and reflective mind, scholasticism began its germination. By virtue of these origins, its theology was constituted—and still lives on—traditional in its maxims, rational in its procedures. This is why, despite all innovators who imagine it obsolete, the Church still upholds to this day the educational and scientific discipline inherited from the School.6
But then, does scholastic theology possess a monopoly? Is it to remain forever the sole kind of theology admissible in the Church? Should we deny the name of theology to that which calls itself “positive,” classifying it in reality among the historical sciences?—Probably not, when master theologians such as Melchior Cano, Maldonatus, Petavius, Morin, and Thomassin labored to organize it. Certainly not, since Fathers such as Saint Athanasius or Saint Cyril of Alexandria had already engaged in it: for they opposed to the inventions of heretics the continuous testimonies of their predecessors and the constant faith of their churches. Therefore, if we wish to harmonize with the sensus Ecclesiae, we shall follow a rule formulated for that purpose by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises: “To hold in high esteem Sacred Doctrine, both that which is called positive and that which is called scholastic.”7 This is not merely a maxim of orthodoxy, or a subtle counsel of prudence. It is also a fruitful principle of integral formation.
However, we must not content ourselves here with presumptions or authorities. Since we are dealing with a question of method, we are bound to resolve it by reasons inherent to the nature of things.
A moment ago, we recognized the metaphysical study of the supernatural as the object of a science founded on faith, thereby giving us the formal principle for the grouping of theologians known as the School. So too, we shall now examine whether there might not exist another aspect of the supernatural that escapes this science: it would consequently require another group of specialists.
Now, there is indeed an aspect of the supernatural which, in certain respects, escapes the grasp of scholasticism. In these respects, it requires a theology that is no longer [a kind of supernatural] metaphysics, yet remains truly theology. Let us first pause to characterize this aspect; then we shall see from what angle it calls for a distinct theology.
II. The Social Transmission of Revelation
Jesus teaches with authority, as the witness of His Father, tanquam potestatem habens.8 The Apostles likewise teach with authority, as witnesses of Jesus, charged with His message.9 Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians: “I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.” and Pope Stephen, to those who rebaptize: “What we received from the Apostles, we observe.”10 The testimonial act of Jesus and of the Church is thus a concrete fact, situated in time and space, an object of observation and experience. Here, then, is a positive fact in the proper sense of the term.
It is more than a simple fact. Jesus said: “No one knows the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.” A Gospel text from Saint John so perfectly corresponds to this logion that it appears, in turn, to be its most faithful apostolic echo: “No one has ever seen God; but the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has told Him forth.”11 Jesus here presents Himself as the only one capable of manifesting what He sees in His Father, to the exclusion of any foreign witness. Man’s inability to see God entails the essential necessity of hearing the One who has seen Him. However eternally free God remains to reveal Himself in one manner or another, once it is Himself that He reveals—and in His intimate life—only one witness is suited to the object of that revelation. This witness will not arise, however immanent, from the intuitions of our conscience. On the contrary, we shall hear Him who alone has seen God and whom God sends to us as His very word. But how, then, shall we hear this witness?
We are not angels, but men, who are taught by means of material signs. Interior words, even when they come from God, are too indiscernible for the multitude and too liable to deceptive admixtures in the mystical elite who have become capable of hearing them. In order for the divine testimony to be objectively assured, Jesus had to bring it to us in the mode that is connatural to our manner of receiving information: perceptible to the ear. Saint Paul clearly understood this need for external testimony when he said to the Romans: “Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved; but how shall they call upon Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe without having heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they be sent?... Faith, therefore, comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”12
Thus, by reason of the same supernatural reality—humanly undiscoverable and revealed to men—the logic of externalized testimony, the positive authority of the messenger who has seen, takes the place of the logic of internal proof and the natural right of free inquiry, from the moment Jesus tells His disciples of the Father. This is the immediate effect of an inner necessity, rooted in what the revealed realities are in themselves and in what the recipients of the revelation are. This supernatural fact of divine communications addressed to humanity positively required this social form of authorized testimony.
This particular form was not to be restricted to the wholly personal teaching of Jesus. Beyond the narrow circle of the Twelve and even of the Jewish people, Jesus lifted His eyes toward all the multitudes who would come to Him from East and West, toward all nations until the end of time.13 Therefore, in order that His testimony might be universalized and perpetuated without alteration of its essential content, Jesus took measures to guarantee its success—once again, social measures. For even the most pious and learned man, however he may appear, is never capable of preserving on his own a truth that is undiscoverable by reason. It surpasses him too greatly not to tempt him, in isolation, to accommodations suited to his own perspective or to the ideas from his own environment, even at the cost of disfiguring it. This is what Saint Paul feared when writing to Timothy: “Guard the traditional deposit. Avoid profane novelties and the contradictions of a knowledge falsely so called.”14 All the more, then, is the Gospel exposed to adulteration within society, for most men are credulous, thoughtless, and docile toward those who flatter their passions.
Weaknesses of nature, collective weaknesses: Protestantism remains the great historical proof of this. From the moment of its original rejection of the authorized messengers whom the Church sent to it, Luther, Calvin, or anyone else became pope unto himself, yet could not dispense with the need to teach others or to be taught by them. The antagonistic confessions disputed among themselves, even while united against Rome. The faith of the Reformation underwent a perpetual dissolution. More than ever, this disintegration is at work in our own day. It is accelerating radically under the corrosive influence of free criticism—always so subjective on the one hand, and on the other, continually yielding to the suggestions of fashionable masters, even while presenting itself under the grave appearance of impersonal science. We possess, historically and still before our eyes, the crucial experience of the necessity of the principle of authority for the preservation and propagation of the Gospel. Consequently, it is easy to see to what extent the supernatural issuance of revelation would have compromised its future, had God not Himself provided to guarantee the faithful transmission of it by later messengers. Hence the promise made to the college of Apostles, considered as representing a permanent society: “Behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of time.”15 This completes the precept to teach all nations: it is the grace required by the duration of this mission. Here again, the soul of the positive fact is a rational adaptation of ecclesiastical testimony to the ends of revelation.
Hence, we see the supernatural character that sets this testimony apart from and above every other in the world. Boethius—and with him, the School—said that testimony is, humanly speaking, the weakest of our means of information: Locus ab auctoritate est infirmissimus.16 Not only does it fail to give the intimate evidence of the things it reports, but it is also, by its very nature, subject to the treacheries of memory in both the giver and the receiver—if not to outright dishonesty—subject even in the most honest to the whims of imagination, to unconscious distortions of sensibility and temperament, to popular currents which create legends, and to the calculated manipulations of opinion. Every soul, in its particular way, and every society as a whole, works to falsify everything that reaches us by way of testimony. Therefore, it was necessary that this fragile instrument to be divinely corrected, if it was to render the same unaltered sound from Jesus to [the current Pope].17 If, in fact, history establishes this continuity of Catholic doctrine in the original sense of the Gospel, then—both psychologically and socially—this is something that surpasses human possibility. This supernatural fact is, in its order, what the resurrection of Lazarus was in its own: it is a permanent miracle. It astonishes reason when it is verified in history and in the teachings of the contemporary Church: in both cases, it is willed by the program of universal testimony that Jesus Christ intended.
Thus, it is by a grace of God, essential to its object, that the Church transmits to us the message of Christ in all its purity. Here again, the same law of social order remains the soul of the fact: a fact of testimony, divinely guaranteed.
Let us go further. The same character of presentation by an authorized society remains always essential to the successive developments that the message of Christ receives. The data of the Gospel were never fixed in the forms of parables, maxims, paradoxical truths, or interrogative discourses, by which the Lord delighted to awaken the reflections, questions, and inquiries of His disciples. Thus, when Saint Paul commands Timothy to reject profane and novel words, he excludes only those lacking affinity with the sense of faith. He never refrains from giving a Christian meaning to classical or popular terms, nor from coining entirely personal expressions.18 The Church always acts with the same power of assimilation, as Newman so aptly named it.19 To the textual and authentic preservation of the Sacred Books, she continually adds the translation of words, the explanation of realities, the creation of formulas, whose elements she borrows from the general language or from that of the learned. “Mother of God” was spoken among the people before it was written in the Councils; “transubstantiation” was in use in the schools [prior to its use by the Council of Trent]. At once conservative and assimilative, the development of doctrine essentially involves a succession of generations. Nowhere is it truer than in the Church to say, “The dead speak,” for they are expressed in risen and rejuvenated form by the living. Saint Augustine still speaks, in thoughts that are truly our own, concerning the inward motions and prevenient workings of grace—thoughts from which the faith, study, and piety of Catholics will always be nourished without ever exhausting them. Harnack is struck by our Augustinian mysticism,20 but Augustine is more than Augustine in this bequest of his soul to the Catholic soul. His interior religion remains nourishing for us only through a sound feeding upon the pure and original datum of revelation. It is nourished by Saint Paul, who is nourished by Jesus. Thus, the dogmatic testimonies and moral influences of the Fathers reach us as social products. This is essential to their transmission through time. They were elaborated in perpetual collaboration with the revealing Christ. The ancients did not think of us. Often, for the most part, we scarcely know them. But the thoughts they expressed circulate in the Church. From soul to soul, they transmit impulses and awaken life. Present each day to His Church, the original author of these thoughts, Christ, unifies their development in a continuous direction, always consistent with itself.
All the more, this social structure of Catholic doctrine is found among contemporaries. From 526 to 530, Saint Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, lamented the success of the doctrines of Cassian21 concerning the natural beginnings of the act of faith and of salvation. Owing to the connections, learning, and renown of the Cassianite monks—whether from Lérins or from Marseilles—these questions stirred public opinion from the Var to the Pyrenees. Here already are the social factors of a suspect doctrine: a regional milieu, a protagonist, a school, a current of opinion. The local authority takes alarm. Represented by Caesarius, it seeks the judgment of the supreme Pastor. For the matter concerns, more than a group of cities and monasteries to be pacified, a grave cause in the order of faith. Accordingly, Pope Felix IV sends his correspondent a series of Capitula, which the latter proposes to the fourteen bishops assembled in synod at Orange for the consecration of a basilica. And thus, the universal bishop, from Rome, collaborates with an assembly of particular bishops, guiding its work. Likewise, Boniface II, successor of Felix, will in 531 approve the Acts of the synod, bringing to completion the pontifical collaboration at its appointed time. His supreme approbation universalizes the doctrine of the Provençal synod as a rule of faith for the entire Church.22
Here is the sixth canon, which declares that faith—its first act and its first desire—is the effect of an inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the unbeliever on the path to conversion. By reason of the hierarchical factors by which it was brought about, this canon does not possess merely its logical character as a statement and proposition, nor merely its “metaphysical” character as concerning divine things known through formal analogies, nor merely its moral character as a truth of faith demanding a free and upright assent, nor merely its mystical character, as expressing a supernatural touch wherein God is experienced, acting within the soul and giving it the pledge of eternal beatitude. This canon of the Council—like all others—is brought into existence as a social product. It synthesizes the action of the Pope, of the bishops, and even of the theologians who were consulted without having a deliberative voice, and all these coordinated actions are themselves synthesized with the action of an eternal contemporary, always present to the Church: Jesus Christ in person. He acts externally through the data of His revelation, always fundamental and received as axioms in the debates of the Councils, and internally through the graces of assistance and direction which the Popes, Legates, Fathers, and plenary Assemblies obtain from Him, according to their respective offices.
Heretics themselves contribute, willingly or not, to the progress of doctrine. They raised new problems or revived old ones in a new way. The negation opposed to them includes an affirmation of the revealed datum, which develops a virtuality that, until then, was dormant. To the naturalistic psychology of faith proposed by Cassian,23 the Second Council of Orange opposed a new clarification of the apostolic dogma concerning the supernatural beginnings of the good or of salvation and concerning the gracious gift of faith.24 Thus, in the course of its developments, as at the first moment of its revelation, the doctrine of the Church remains essentially a social work.
It is, consequently, a cause of social effects. Consider the canons of a Council: they are laws of belief for all and each of the faithful, the pope not excepted, for every pastor is also a believer. From the perspective of the act of faith, everyone is part of the people in the Church, including the hierarchy. In believing herself what she teaches, the Church is strong and worthy of trust. Whether a simple woman uses naïve images to picture the heavenly Father, or a bishop uses learned abstractions, it matters not: these are human accessories to the same article of faith concerning the same divine reality. The statements of faith are egalitarian rules.
Hence another social effect: the canons of faith bind especially theologians, exegetes, apologists, and even philosophers, insofar as their methods concern religious questions and their conclusions bear upon the objects of faith. These scholars are not answerable solely to their own discoveries, but also—and above all—to the teachings and directives of the Church. Thus, when one speaks of them as the Ecclesia discens, the “teaching Church,” one must always remember that they are disciples of the teaching Church before being disciples of any school or human master, as are all scholars. This had been forgotten in recent times. Hence the Decree Lamentabili censured the proposition: “In the definition of truths of faith, the Ecclesia discens and the Ecclesia docens collaborate in such a way that the role of the latter is reduced to ratifying the opinions of the former.”25 This was a purification of the notion of the Ecclesia discens from a certain Protestant savor. It was to restore the meaning given to it so clearly by Bishop Eudoxe-Irénée Mignot, at the time he borrowed the term from a English Catholic review. In a discourse on the method of theology, the professors at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse were reminded by the Archbishop of Albi that they must interiorly submit to the teaching Church, whether as individual theologians or as a university body. Before these distinguished representatives of the Ecclesia discens, the prelate reproved the error of the unfortunate Döllinger, who compared theologians to those Hebrew prophets who stood above the priestly class.26 On the contrary, the Church that studies and learns must receive the documents and impulses of the teaching Church as factors of unanimity, as laws for its labor.
Constraining in one respect (when the Church closes off fallacious prospects to reckless minds), the directives of the teaching Church are in other respects liberating: they respond not only to the instincts of the true Catholic sense in those who are troubled by such novelties, but also free the revealing perspectives of Jesus Christ from heterodox interpretations that did them violence. They preserve Catholic thought and life within the spontaneous logic of their principles and their sound assimilations. These great acts of authority remain liberating, even when they strike painfully at misguided thinkers—why must certain men’s fascination for certain ideas compel the sacrifice of individual regard for the public good of doctrine! Yet the recompense for this sacrifice lies in the groups of minds whom these interventions console or confirm. For them, at the same time that the terms of a condemnation close the path to error, they open the field to new inquiry. They mark the way for future progress.
In sum: the Church’s teaching is a social product of hierarchical factors; the teaching of the Church is also a social factor of unity in faith and of Catholic progress in the science of divine things. Among all these causalities, the First Cause is Jesus Christ, through the harmonized action of His past revelation and His present immanence in the midst of the Church. Such is the essential chain of revealing testimonies and explanatory judgments that I earlier called the social transmission of revelation. It is a positive fact, whose constancy and force prompt us to explore its tangible manifestations and its laws more deeply.
It is easy to discern the order of science to which such a fact belongs. Since this collective shaping of Catholic truths is brought about by a principal efficient cause, which is the Hierarchy, and by an auxiliary and subordinate cause, which is the body of theologians, and since the Hierarchy develops dogma with the assistance and under the particular direction of the Holy Spirit, and since theologians are not lacking in graces proper to their state, it is clear that the organized transmission of Catholic truth is an object of theology. One could not doubt this without entirely failing to recognize the supernatural character of the Church.
Once this character is admitted, no other competence—whether historical, philosophical, or social, though purely human—will appear sufficient to study ex professo the dogmatizing society that is the Church. Purely human scholars will grasp only its human aspects, always with irreducible residues that escape their explanations, though always observable. At its core, the supernatural eludes the grasp of purely natural sciences: these, by definition, remain confined within the determinism of the universe or of the human species. At their height, metaphysics discovers God only as a necessity, under the name of First Cause, First Being, Supreme Good. Outside theology [although as guided by revealed truth and, hence, as a kind of office of theology], only apologetics considers the supernatural fact of the Church, but it observes it through purely natural means, according to its miraculous signs. This observation is limited to demonstrating that God sustains the Church apart from and above the social laws common to other civil or religious groups. However, the science of this supernatural society, of its properties and its life, remains wholly to be fashioned—and it is the work of theology alone.
Now, here is the critical point of the difficulty: to what exact extent does the scholastic method make the Church known?
Here we are compelled to undertake the always somewhat delicate task of rigorously delimiting scientific boundaries. We shall proceed by first exploring what properly belongs to scholastic theology.
III. The Treatise on the Church from the Scholastic Point of View
A believer who reasons out his faith as a [, so to speak, supernatural] metaphysician applies himself as spontaneously to the study of the Church as to that of the Incarnation or the Sacraments. Thus, the treatise on the Church was already drawing the attention of theologians even before it existed. Saint Thomas sketched it in fragments, as occasion required: Utrum pertineat ad Summum Pontificem fidei symbolum ordinare — Utrum haeretici errantes in uno articulo habeant fidem de aliis articulis — Utrum haeretici sint tolerandi,27 etc. Such fragments can be found in the works of Saint Thomas in such abundance that a monograph was recently composed from them on the Church, with the suggestive title: The Doctrine of Saint Thomas on the Church as the Work of God: Its Place in the Thomistic Synthesis and in the History of Medieval Theology.28 Without yet standing forth in architectural form like the completed plan of a basilica, ecclesiology had long been known in its main lines. Even before Saint Ignatius of Antioch—struck by the universal plan established by Jesus and spurred on by the necessity of maintaining unity among the many particular churches springing up with such vitality—coined the term “Catholic Church,” the doctrine lived in the practice of the churches and in their rallying around that of Rome.29 But for a long time it remained implicit, lived more than debated, in the background of speculation—even among the scholastics—present in minds potentially rather than in act within books.
By relegating this topic to a kind of second rank, in an incomplete state, such penetrating and tireless researchers were not being negligent; rather, a need was lacking. The Church, like civil society, lived in the thirteenth century upon foundations too generally respected—both by domestic customs and by universal religion—for the wise to set about discussing the foundations, powers, and functions of the hierarchy. Such serious undertakings are only undertaken for purposes of Catholic or social defense. That is why the doctors only spoke about these matters in passing, in connection with a virtue or a duty: the object of faith leads Saint Thomas to consider the question of the creeds and definitions that constitute the papacy. The consideration of vices and sins opposed to peace, a gracious daughter of charity, introduces the questions: is schism a specific sin? Does the schismatic still possess powers in the Church?30 And indeed, had not the numerous schisms in the age of the Fathers and since then occasioned those particular developments of ecclesiology? A society, like an individual, analyzes itself only when it feels itself to be unwell. It demonstrates its rights only when it sees them contested. Whether in the case of the Church or of nations, the science of societies always arises in times of revolution.
According to this constant law, the divisions of Christendom between popes and antipopes in the fourteenth century, the forerunners of Protestantism in the fifteenth, and its preachers and pamphleteers in the sixteenth, led Catholic theologians to formulate theses concerning the Church. Numerous opuscula—what we would now call pamphlets or tracts—were produced in response to this challenge. Thus it was that Luther gave rise to Cajetan. Without abandoning his commentaries on the Summa, Cajetan wrote De comparatione auctoritatis Papae et Concilii; De Romani Pontificis institutione et auctoritate; De usu Sacrarum Scripturarum ab Ecclesia.31 Time and again, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the same pattern: heretical propaganda provoked development in Catholic doctrine, just as had already occurred in the time of the Donatists and Saint Augustine.
However, the dominating perspective in all these efforts was that of controversy or apologetics: theologians responded to the attack of the day with a corresponding counterattack. This is why the treatise on the Church is absent from our patristic or scholastic libraries—absent in its full scope as a scientific exposition. The ancients elaborated a good number of its theses, but always subordinated them either to polemical aims or to other treatises, in which they remained accessory.32
Nevertheless, by the accumulation of these timely works and fragmentary insights, questions of principle became increasingly clarified, marking out the way forward. Numerous materials emerged as prepared for works that would be more synthetic and less occasional.
Yet always, the same heterodox provocation of Catholic works has been verified, and is still being verified before our eyes: it is once again a social law of theological progress, the law of reactions. The close of the nineteenth century saw the development of philosophies of revelation based on history and psychology—Protestant, to be sure—not without a mixture of believing pietism and critical rationalism in the manner of Kant. The problem of the Church and of dogma was claimed to be posed in all its breadth. Auguste Sabatier concluded his critical exposition of the “great historical forms of Christianity” with a theory on the “pedagogical mission of the Church.”33 An ecclesiology of sorts is also sketched in Harnack’s Lectures on the Essence of Christianity.34 Do such attempts not call for Catholic responses? The question of the Church ought to be set forth in all its breadth, with the tone and means proper to science.
The Church herself facilitates the task. In response to the ecclesiological errors that appeared over the past century, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, the First Vatican Council, and Leo XIII recalled the traditional truth or illustrated it at the opportune moment, in the face of new problems being incorrectly resolved. More recently still, Pius X continued these timely teachings that draw forth what is eternal: in this regard, one should examine closely propositions 1–8 and 52–56 of Lamentabili.
By reason of all these accumulated and converging elements, never perhaps has the ground been better prepared by controversy, nor more clearly marked out by authority, for the composition of a treatise on the Church that is both integral and profound. “If Saint Thomas were to return and saw the doctrine of the Church as it has developed in our own day,” writes Fr. Gardeil, “I have no doubt that he would assign it a large place in the third part of the Summa Theologica, between the treatise on the Incarnation and the treatise on the Sacraments.”35
To bring about this renaissance in the line of Saint Thomas, it belongs to his school to provide him with forerunners: like every great work of doctrine, the future Ecclesiology will synthesize the scattered acquisitions of the centuries. May God inspire—if He has not already36—some young theologian, preferably a professor who teaches these subjects and is thereby in habitual communion of thought with the Fathers, the Popes, and the Theologians who were the elaborators of the doctrine to be expounded, a man studious and recollected, who knows the active value of contemplation and solitude, a patient and generous soul, capable of dedicating “the long hopes and vast thoughts” that illumine youth to the patient and humble maturation of the long-awaited synthesis. If it is true that every fruitful and beautiful life fulfills in its maturity the enthusiasm of its twentieth year, what worthier consummation could there be for a professorial and academic ministry than this treatise on the Church—a treatise on the Son of God made social?
To such a work, a theologian would apply the rational means of the scholastic method to a subject that is social in nature, though in a distinctly supernatural way. Instead of resting upon the manual labor that draws upon the resources of a region, instead of registering the accumulated effect of prior labors, across diverse regions, amid educative migrations, as is the case with working-class families and with nations, the Church rests wholly upon the testimony of her founder, perpetuated through authentic representatives. Instead of organizing the goods of this present life, she guides men toward eternal beatitude. Given this end and this origin, one would possess, along with their notions, insight into the irreducible and constitutive principles of the Catholic Church. From these, one would seek her elements, flowing from that end and that origin: on the one hand, her autonomy, powers, and agents proceeding from God; on the other hand, her human materials and the states of life upon which its supernatural action communicates to them. From there, one would proceed to the Church’s external relations—within the time in which she lives and toward the eternity to which she returns. In due course, one would show the sequence and synthesis of these great elementary social facts by an exact determination of their mutual influences. One would begin, of course, with the simplest [truth], that which rests upon no other, and advance step by step in order of complication and dependence.
Through this graduated enterprise, the elements and principles of the Church would seem to fall under the following categories, which I have sought to define in order to highlight clearly the social scope of the scholastic method:
I. THE DIVINE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH: (1) Her supernatural end, established by Jesus Christ. (2) Revelations and institutions proceeding from Him or from the apostles during the founding period.
II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHURCH (Due to the human elements of its foundation).—Development: (1) In doctrine. (2) In institutions.
III. THE AUTONOMY OF THE CHURCH. (1) Subsisting in herself as a perfect society by reason of her end. (2) The outflow of her autonomy into the temporal aspects of its existence: property, governance, administration.
IV. THE POWERS OF THE CHURCH. (1) Testimonial and doctrinal. (2) Sanctifying and sacramental. (3) Disciplinary, legislative, and judicial.
V. HIERARCHICAL AGENTS. (1) Ordinary forms and daily acts. (2) Solemn and intermittent forms and acts (Councils, definitions of faith, etc.).
VI. THE GOVERNED MULTITUDE. (1) Baptized faithful. (2) Delinquents: heretics, schismatics, apostates. Rights concerning them.
VII. GROUPINGS BY STATES OF LIFE. (1) Laity and clergy. (2) Secular clerics and religious. (3) Simple believers and scholars. (4) Ascetics and mystics. (The relations of these partial groups with the life of the whole).
VIII. RELATIONS WITH OTHER SOCIETIES. (1) Temporal dependencies of the faithful and of pastors. (2) Respective autonomies of the groups upon which they are temporally dependent: families, schools, universities, professional associations, sovereign states. (3) Catholic, dissident, neutral, and persecuting societies.
IX. RELATIONS BEYOND THIS WORLD. (1) With the Church triumphant. (2) With the Church suffering. (3) Power over demons.
This summary nomenclature is presented here, of course, only as a tentative outline for an instrument to be used in analysis and research. Its terms would need to be explored more deeply—but strictly from the perspective of the cooperation of Jesus, His apostles, and His representatives and collaborators in relation to these various ends. Problems incidentally raised—and sometimes inappropriately—in moral theology, canon law, or apologetics would here be scientifically grouped around the a unified object. It would constitute a social metaphysics of the Church. Once again, the problems raised within and around her, together with the markers established by her authorities, call for this universal inventory of centuries of work, this solid foundation for the ever-possible progress of Catholics in the penetration of revealed doctrine.
But, however perfect one may suppose it to be, would this “philosophical” sociology of the Church suffice to contain all that the reason of the believer and the theologian must account for in the nature and life of this great supernatural body?
I think not. If anyone were surprised by this categorical denial, I would ask him to meditate on the account of reasons that follows. May I offer it with self-denial, free from any merely personal view, in humble openness to the demands of truth.—Here is the formal object of theological knowledge in which it seems that, on the one hand, scholasticism no longer reaches, and, on the other hand, another science—no less theological—must prove competent.
IV. The Social Structure of Dogmatic Progress in its Concrete Phases
It is certain, first of all, that scholastic theology refrains from following step by step the particular phases through which the exposition, defense, and development of dogma have passed over the course of the ages. This kind of abstraction properly belongs to the metaphysician: he transports himself outside of times and movements, into the realm of the most universal causes, of pure essences, of the primary qualities of being—and this is not illegitimate in dogmatic matters. All the explanations that these have gradually received have simply unfolded, in more abstract, more distinct terms, in deeper and more comprehensive formulas, what Jesus or the Apostles had already perfectly condensed at the outset in a few revelatory words. We shall always draw upon these divine words, never exhausting their sap of truth. From the beginning, they contained the very essence of revelation, the most universal principles of its future explanations, and the supreme generative causes of all dogmatic progress realizable by the Church.37
But Jesus made God and His perfect designs accessible to men—to the Jews of Palestine, He spoke in Aramaic, in a concrete style, filled with parables and maxims, more affirmative than discursive, well suited to vine-growers, shepherds, and fishermen—men as foreign as possible to analytical precision, abstract nuance, and the logical syntheses of Platonic dialogue or Aristotelian prose. Saint Paul, to be sure, spoke Greek—but what Greek! It was the everyday idiom of Mediterranean ports, a merchants’ tongue, thickly interwoven with Hebraisms, as it was spoken in the Ghetto and the synagogues of the Diaspora. This Greek and this Aramaic are among the strangest of languages to pure Hellenes or Latins. Thus, since the perfect and “international” truths of revelation were clothed in these regional and imperfect forms, a labor was required as the Gospel entered new civilizations. The philosophical Greek of the Fathers and the Eastern Councils, the Augustinian vocabulary of the Councils of Carthage and Orange, the scholastic Latin of the Councils of Vienne, Florence, or Trent—the latter tinged more with classical humanism—in short, the varying styles of the Councils, in step with the progress of theological language, were gradually obliged to articulate an analytical rendering of the primitive data of faith.
However, in his supratemporality, the metaphysician of dogma does not pause to consider each individual phase of these various translations. The perspective of time has, in his eyes, merged into the full light acquired and condensed in the moment in which he lives. If he is at all excessive and resistant to observation, he will deny that one Council expresses itself differently from another; if he is more moderate and less closed to the facts, he will still lack interest in the concrete and particular stages that brought dogma to its present state of explanation.
The most he can do in this regard is to consider in abstracto the universal law of doctrinal development. But he is careful not to trace its material applications in individual cases, examined in their concrete state. He touches upon them only by way of examples viewed from above. This is sufficient to justify his general commentary on the Gospel saying: “The Kingdom of God is like a householder who brings forth from his treasure things new and old.”38
But if this is the case, a real element, a property of the magisterium and of dogma, escapes the scholastic by reason of his method. Namely, he fails to heed their phases of development through hierarchical factors, their phases in what I have just called the concrete and singular state. Now, this is not an object one can afford to disregard, this concrete becoming of the teaching organs and of the doctrines taught. Here is why:
In general, first of all, to neglect particular facts is to diminish one’s understanding. A metaphysician assures us of this—one who personally practiced the most perfect synthesis of very high abstraction with living and realistic observation: “Cognoscere singularia pertinet ad perfectionem nostram.”39 The scholastics would have incurred less of the reproach of knowing only generalities and of lacking a full cultivation of the mind, had they always put such words of St. Thomas into practice.40
Secondly, to neglect the concrete phases of the teaching organism and of the doctrine taught is to misunderstand a property common to both, flowing from their nature: successive development. This succession is essential in the transmission of revealed data by social agents. Essential—not to the divine content, for Christian revelation, issuing from Jesus Christ as definitive in this world, is perfect from the outset, in the infinite richness of its simplest words. Bossuet saw this clearly, though he seems not to have noticed that only gradually would the human intellect penetrate the density of these treasures. According to him, “the truth which the Holy Spirit teaches has always one and the same language,” even where Saint Thomas recognizes “new editions” of the Catholic symbol, promulgated by successive Councils. “The one that followed did not compose a. new symbol to replace the prior one; rather, the implicit content contained therein received explanatory additions against the heresies that arose.”41 In this development, it is the human element of the Church that acts—though not without divine assistance and guidance—but according to the natural mode of its operations. If reason already brings its own discoveries into act only in stages, how much more progress will it require to deepen its understanding of the words of the Infinite, the Absolute, and the Perfect! The Apostolic Fathers did not draw from Saint Paul all that Paul himself received from Jesus; but their successors would penetrate it more deeply. If, therefore, “evolution of dogma” were to mean that revelation itself passes from vagueness to precision, from obscure feeling to clear idea, there would be no evolution: Jesus saw in full what the generations gradually discovered by exploring His Gospel. The evolution lies entirely in the minds of believers, progressing from potency to act, from implicit to explicit, from principle to consequence.42
In like manner, from the perspective of institutions, Jesus in fact laid down the permanent foundations, the typical principles of powers and organs which, once again, gradually developed under the impulse of their internal life, in reaction against the shocks and deviations that threatened them in various contexts. The whole pre-existed eminently in the original functions of the apostolic college and its head.
But here lies the difficulty. It belongs to the metaphysics of dogma or of the Church to define this evolutionary law in general. However, to whom, then, will it belong to discern in particular each of these phases, while viewing them as the successive stages of Eternal Truth as it explains itself to men, through the Church and in time? Are we then to forbid ourselves this science of the concrete? For it is a true science. Each singular phase of dogmatic progress is illuminated therein by a general light drawn from the data of revelation. Must we renounce it?
Never! That would be to poke out one of our eyes. The segment of the horizon rendered invisible to us would nonetheless continue to exist, filled with life and light. The entire successive progress of the teaching organs and of the doctrine taught would still unfold—in the past and in our own day—as a splendid fact of supernatural social life, of which the Holy Spirit remains the soul through the ages. We would remain blind to this unfolding, like the intellectually maimed. Therefore it requires from us that religious attentiveness to the divine sense of things, that vision of God as omnipresent, which is the theologian’s proper light. This light illumines the concrete as well as the abstract, times and their changes as well as essences in their fixity. Let us not fear here to go beyond metaphysics: there are, in the Church and in the Gospel, more truths than metaphysics can perceive. Thus, a proper object of theological science reveals itself.
A positive object, as well—we already know this—whether one considers the initial issuance of revelation or follows the phases of its growing explanation throughout the ages.43 All of this has been seen and attested by eyewitnesses; all of it is recounted historically based on the data of their testimony. Moreover, the divine action upon dogmatic progress leads the sCouncils to issue canons and theologians to compose works. Here again is the positive—that is, the tangible and the observable—in the form of documents: these arise as the effects and signs of the progress brought about by God.
And from that point on, their positive study becomes singularly complex. Since these documents of the Church are, by their nature, material signs—charters, inscriptions, manuscripts, printed texts—they fall within the scope of various kinds of positive knowledge, which we must carefully distinguish. This is the best means of arriving at the pure and formal object of what is called positive theology: an eliminative method by way of comparison. We shall then be able to define, as precisely as possible, under what aspect this second theology considers the concrete and individual phases of dogmatic progress.
V. Documentary Positivity and Theological Positivity
The documents, first of all, come down to us written in a particular language—here, the Latin of Saint Augustine, elsewhere, the Greek of Saint Basil. Do we possess their pure and original text? The answer belongs: (1) to philological and grammatical analysis, based on what is known of the language used in the author’s milieu and of his personal style; (2) to the comparative examination of manuscripts or printed editions. Which are original and normative for the others? What readings do they authorize? Here we recognize the task of textual criticism.
Assuredly, this is something positive, but it is not theology. Specialists here apply philological, bibliographical, and paleographical knowledge to the examination of a document. Their proper object is to furnish an unaltered text. By that very fact, they remain within the realm of documentary positivity.
But let the theologian not disdain these questions of Greek and Latin, of variants and punctuation! If a theology of the concrete phases of dogma exists, it imperatively requires the verification of the texts that document it. The critic of these texts thus performs the first stage of a positive inventory, in which the theological datum is verified as sound from the purely material perspective of its transmission within the Church. Without having anything to decide for or against the dogma, this specialist acts as a first preparer of theological materials. He works most usefully for the theologian’s laboratory.
What variety there is, again, among the documents! The letter of Pope Leo to Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople is a true encyclical addressed to the Council of Chalcedon. It explicitly formulates the profession of faith of the Holy See concerning the Hypostatic Union.44 Quite different in character are the two letters of Pope Gregory to Eulogius, Patriarch of Alexandria, concerning the Agnoete heresy and Christ’s knowledge. These are intimate letters: the indomitable bedridden pontiff laments therein his gout and its stabbing pains. At the same time, he sets forth the opinions of Saint Athanasius, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, and Saint Cyril of Alexandria. It is for literary criticism, likewise, to examine how and from whom the Pontiff gathered his knowledge of these authors, for he admits his ignorance of Greek.45 This analysis of the methods and forms of composition is called literary criticism.
Still positive in nature (since it describes its objects or explains them by means of observation, analysis, and comparison) this work is not yet theology; it remains within the realm of documentary knowledge. To classify, date, and characterize the documents—this is the object assigned to it by its own specialists.46 Thanks to their labors, our inventory of the materials supplying theology’s data takes the shape of a synthesis: they compile their catalogues by epochs and genres. They do not omit the delicate problems of authenticity and apocrypha. Though not themselves theologians, they still form a category of documentary preparers for the theologian’s workshop. And the theologian owes them rightful gratitude for the positive data they teach him to verify.
But this is not all. Whatever its form or date, an apocryphal or authentic document expresses a doctrine. By that very fact, it constitutes essentially an event—whether great or small—in the explanatory labor of dogma or in the effects of its elucidation. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of the Pseudo-Dionysius, the three books of Saint Augustine Against the Letters of Petilianus, Donatist Bishop of Cirta, each represents a phase in the elaboration of ecclesiological doctrine. Likewise, it is Christological dogma, at different moments, that we find expressed in 381 in the canons of the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople and in those of Chalcedon in 451. Here, then, we are confronted no longer with a question of wording or text, of composition or attribution, but one of substance and reality. What is the place of this Council, this Father, this pseudonymous author, and their respective works in the development of doctrine?
To this problem, a third critic responds: the historian. In possession of documents that the two others have delivered to him in good condition—dated, attributed, characterized, and classified—he aims directly at the realities of which those documents speak. No doubt, he will often practice textual and literary criticism himself; but as a historian, his task is to see the facts clearly, to grasp their causal connections, and to present them as clearly and truthfully as possible.47 He strives to accomplish this through observation, analysis, and documentary comparison. In doing so, he synthesizes the results of the two preparatory critiques into a third, which works in its own right to penetrate the real and to bring the past to life.48
This view of facts and their sequence, established through documents, is still very much within the realm of the positive—yet it remains documentary positivity. It is not theology; it is history. Theology will never result from a purely historical method,. Theology will, no doubt, supply necessary materials for such accounts, since one aims to recount the doctrinal phases through which the Church has passed. But it is the method, not merely the material, that specifies a science.49 It would be right to accuse us of ambiguity were we to use the term positive theology for what is, in fact, simply the history of doctrines developed in and by the Church.
On this point, moreover, well-informed historians do not forget the generally incomplete character of even the richest documentary collections: parchments, stelae, and libraries restore the past only in scattered or mutilated fragments. On every side, the documents leave obscure periods and insoluble problems. In our history of the early Christian ages—despite Eusebius, that “fortunate accident”—how many unknowns still remain! “Critical and historical documentation may well provide us with sketches, with hypotheses about how things may have happened, with genuine documentary truth. But it is powerless to reconstitute the whole of Reality.”50
Aware of this insufficiency, the most honest historians do not hesitate to supplement it precisely by hypotheses—suggested by the document itself, though not necessitated by it. The contribution of documentary sources is completed by that of other sources, varied but always scientific and nourishing human understanding: geography, sociology, psychology, and even metaphysics, for the latter probes the depths of things everywhere. Thus, the history which Maurice Blondel called “critical and technical” is extended into what he called “real” history; and the two form but one, as Fr. Allo rightly observed.51
Are we then to suppose that our documentary science of doctrinal phases is to be completed merely by hypotheses? That would indeed be our only recourse if the Church had developed like a purely human society, without any supernatural intervention—or if we had no faith. And this is why, on the pen of an unbeliever, the history of our doctrines so easily becomes inadequate and conjectural. It resembles music history written by someone who has no ear for music, yet who spent time researching among musicians—what fragile theses, what gaps and misunderstandings abound in such a work!
“If you do not believe, you will not understand.” This ancient saying of Isaiah, applied by Saint Anselm to the penetration of divine things, remains just as true in the science of doctrinal phases as it is before the metaphysical depths of dogma. For us who possess the faith, we consider the scattered and fragmentary documents of doctrinal epochs in a light that emanates directly from the Supreme Intelligence who governed their development. This light, interior to our soul, falls upon objects guaranteed to us externally by the contemporary magisterium of the Church. This teaching gives us the actualized expression of the native virtualities of the revealed datum. And so, without claiming—which would be historical madness—that the Apostolic Fathers professed our explicit metaphysical formulas concerning the Hypostatic Union, we nonetheless recognize, in such a famous passage of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, our very faith in Jesus Christ, “the one physician, both fleshly and spiritual, begotten and unbegotten, God come in the flesh and born of Mary.”52 Our present-day faith clearly recognizes itself there, though not yet specified in metaphysical formula by the notions of nature and person. That would take four hundred years.
It is not merely the content of ancient dogma that we know well through its contemporary actualization. We also discover the ways, by logical consequence or normal assimilation, by which the philosophical notions of nature and person were incorporated into ecclesiastical dogma. We see them elaborated by Saint Cyril of Alexandria and by Leontius of Byzantium, stamped with authority by the Councils.53 Then, with an intelligent view of faith, we retrace the rational curve of this long development. It encompasses and surpasses the fragments of life and time manifested in the documents. What these offer to our observation through material and empirical externals—through sensible and natural signs, always inadequate to the intelligible and the supernatural—with intervals of darkness and prolonged periods of silence, our faith in dogmatic growth allows us to behold as a continuous synthesis, wherein the minute textual, literary, and historical problems take on new breadth and higher vitality. They reappear there as partial and spaced monuments, the milestone columns of the great sacred road always followed by the Church in her commentary on the Gospel. In other words, we bring our incomplete data of erudition and criticism into a coordinated view of the stages that mark doctrinal progress in the Catholic Church. To documentary criticism and purely historical criticism, there is thus added a higher criticism, penetrating the divine meaning of doctrinal phases and marking their continuous unity amid the diversity of languages and times.54
It will still truly be positive criticism. Not only will it record the documents which constitute its proper and immediate material, but above all, it will observe the signs they contain of a logical, living, and unbroken continuity of Catholic doctrine, beginning from the revelatory testimony of Jesus and His Apostles. These signs, perpetuated from age to age and from question to question, will allow it to recover experimentally the pure substance of the revealed data—sometimes in their direct explanations and consequences, sometimes in the assimilation of scholarly or popular terms, some furnished by theologians, others adopted by the faithful, and sanctioned here and there by Bishops, Councils, and Popes in writings which found faith. To relate these successive developments of sacred doctrine to the texts containing their first principles or marking their phases will not be to step outside the realm of the positive—that is, of what manifests itself sensibly in time and space. But it will be supernatural positivity: the theologian’s observation and criticism view the monuments of revelation and dogma in the light of faith. Instead of limiting himself to analyses and comparisons of mere reason, like a botanist or a sociologist, the positive theologian will examine his documents as the direct expression or authorized commentary of divine testimony. Just as the notion of law or natural order among phenomena governs all laboratory or observational research, so too the notion of divinely continued and socialized testimony will govern the positive theologian’s method.
A particular classification of theological documents will follow from this. According to the apodictic character of the teaching of Popes or Councils, and the simply55 probable character of the teaching of theologians—in the sense these terms bear in the Treatise on Theological Loci (De locis theologicis)—positive theology will assign to the documents it collects various notes, precisely graduated from the point of view of faith and certitude.56 But let us be very clear: this necessary characterization will always reduce the value of a positive document to the documentary testimony of a hierarchical person or group, as well as to its proper and immediate cause in the order of supernatural revelation and ecclesiastical teaching. The doctrinal weight of the statements admitted by theologians or by the Church is outlined in relation to the teaching organ from which they proceed, and in proportion to the mode of their issuance. Their qualification—of faith, proximate to faith, certain, etc.—thus reveals a logical property and a claim to a particular kind of adherence, whose complete scientific grounding will only be attained through a single and unique mode of demonstration: the positive linkage of this property to the act and the teaching organ from which it proceeds and by which it is specified.
And thus, if the scholastic theologian is the metaphysician of dogma, the positive theologian is a sociologist of it—not the abstract sociologist, like the scholastic studying the Church, but the sociologist in the concrete. If one had to propose a scriptural motto for positive theology, one would recall that in the everyday—the familiar and variable, in the individual detail of each doctrinal phase—the continuity of the revealed datum issued by Jesus is verified through the commentaries He entrusted to His envoys. The fitting motto would therefore be: “With you, all days, even to the end of the ages.” There is perhaps no evangelical word in which the collaboration of the revealing Christ and His interpreting Authorities is more forcefully summed up—a collaboration which, in our eyes, gives rise to positive theology’s social perspective.
In proposing this point of view, I am not unaware that its social aspect presents an element of novelty within the teaching of theologians. However, let me observe that this novelty arises within a line of thought that is entirely traditional. Here is how.
First, in reading works—whether ancient or modern—on positive theology, and in reading the Fathers, Doctors, and Councils to which those works referred me, I increasingly observed that both hierarchical bodies and private groups, always in continuity with their predecessors, elaborated the exposition, defense, development, and authentic formulation of Catholic dogma. Some Fathers acted after their death upon other Fathers who followed and completed them. Some collaborated among themselves through harmonious exchanges or through polemics. Even isolated individuals contribute—without knowing it—to thoughts that others, also working in isolation, are developing: on all sides, work proceeds upon the same data of the revealing Christ, in communion with His present assistance through the Church. I must confess in particular that the documentation in Pétau’s Dogmata Theologica was one of the most decisive sources for this experimental observation regarding the workshops and workshop-groups where doctrines are forged. I’m not actually quite sure what Pétau himself thought in theory about positive theology. He is less concerned with defining it than with employing it in a rather complex body of research. While it appears there with its own proper object, it is also subordinated to studies on the origins of major scholastic questions among the Fathers and to critical examinations of Protestant criticism.57
Secondly, moreover, the most classical definitions of positive theology themselves seemed, to my eyes, to be heading in the direction of the sociological perspective. According to Franzelin, for example, positive theology has for its object the word of God as preserved in Scripture and Tradition and proposed by the Church.58 But since it is the Church that brings to us, guarantees, and interprets the Bible and Tradition, I would observe here—along with Fr. Lemonnyer—that to obtain the object of positive theology in its final determination, one must consider the proposition of these documents by the Church as the formal and specifying59 element of their theological and positive character. And this keeps us within the great traditional line of all sound theology.60
But what then? Shall this formal element of our definition remain merely a word underlined on a label, or shall it not become, according to its value, a principal element of explanation and proof? If it is truly formal in the classical definition, it will be the soul of the science that this definition summarizes. It will be the organizing principle of its structure and life. Now, I believe I have shown it: the [objective] presentation of revealed dogma by the Church is essentially the proper work of the Hierarchy—a collective work progressing by phases, on the one hand in the Councils, and on the other, in the dispersed yet still-social Magisterium of the particular churches in communion with Rome. To this principal work theologians, schools of thought, and thinkers contribute, either by preparing materials for the judgments of the Hierarchy or by commenting upon its sovereign decisions. It is therefore impossible for us to coordinate positively the phases of dogmatic teaching and theology—its accessory—without everywhere recognizing the development of the revealed datum through social factors. If there is in this some element of novelty, it arises directly from the most classical definitions of positive theology and its most reliable documentation. I therefore offer this as a respectful homage to the theologians, to the masters, to the elders, whose works have led me toward this more explicit view.
The present translation is taken from Marie-Benoît Schwalm, “Les deux théologies: La scolastique et la positive,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 2 (1908) 674–703.↩︎
M. Th. Coconnier, "Positive et Spéculative," Revue thomiste, January 1903; A. Lemonnyer, "Théologie positive et Théologie historique," Revue du Clergé français, March 1, 1903; "Comment s'organise la Théologie catholique," October 1, 1903; P. Batiffol, "Évolutionisme et Histoire," Bulletin de Littérature ecclésiastique, June 1906; M. Jacquin, "Question de mots: Histoire des dogmes, Histoire des doctrines, Théologie positive," Revue des Sciences Théologiques et Philosophiques, January 1907.↩︎
Mt. 11:27; Rom. 8:16; 1 Jn. 5:10; Jn. 6:45.↩︎
ST II-II, q. 2, a. 1; De veritate XIV, a. 1, corp. § Patet ergo, and ad 5.↩︎
Timothée Richard, "Étude critique sur le but et la nature de la Scolastique," Revue thomiste, May–June 1904, 179–80.↩︎
Leo XIII, Encyclical Aeterni Patris; Pius X, Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis.↩︎
Exercitia spiritualia, Regulae aliquot servandae ut cum orthodoxa Ecclesia vere sentiamus (no. 11).↩︎
Mk. 1:22.↩︎
Acts 1:8; 2:32; 3:15; 5:32; 10:39.↩︎
1 Cor. 11:23; Stepheni decretum, in Denzinger–Stahl, no. 15.↩︎
Mt. 11:27; Jn. 1:18; 3:31, 36.↩︎
Rom. 10:14, 17; cf. Constitutiones Concilii Vaticani, Session III, Constitutio de fide Catholica, chap. 2, De Revelatione, § Huic divinae revelationi.↩︎
Mt. 8:11; 28:20.↩︎
1 Tim 6:20.↩︎
Mt. 28:19, 20.↩︎
Boethius, In Topic. Ciceronis ,bk. 6; De Differentiis topicis, bk. 3; St. Thomas, ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2.↩︎
Translator’s note: Literally “Pius X”, the pope at the time of his writing.↩︎
Jacquier, Histoire des Livres du Nouveau Testament, I, 61–62.↩︎
Newman, Essai sur le développement de la doctrine chrétienne, part 2, chap. 5, sec. 3 (Collection La Pensée chrétienne, ed. Brémond).↩︎
Harnack, L'Essence du christianisme, Fourteenth Lecture, 271, 273 (French translation); Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, III, 129.↩︎
Translator’s note: Admittedly, St. John Cassian is recognized as a saint in the Catholic East, where a certain sensitivity regarding his supposed semi-pelagianism is less acute. Moreover, he was of immense influence on later spirituality, being read by many religious, even throughout the western high middle ages.↩︎
Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, VIII, 712–35.↩︎
Translator’s note: See remark above.↩︎
Concilium Arausicanum II, can. 5; this canon refers to Phil. 1:6; 1:29; Eph. 2:8, and it names these texts apostolica dogmata.↩︎
Decretum Lamentabili, proposition IV.↩︎
Mgr Mignot, La Méthode de la théologie, Revue du Clergé français, 15 December 1901, pp. 125, 127;
Weekly Register, 19 July 1901 — Docens discendo.↩︎ST II-II, q. 1, a. 10; q. 5, aa. 3–4. [Translator’s note: One might add, even more profoundly, ST III, q. 8, on Christ's capital grace.]↩︎
Grabmann, Die Lehre des heiligen Thomas von Aquin von der Kirche als Gotteswerk: Ihre Stellung im thomistischen System und in der Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Theologie (Ratisbonne: Manz, 1903)..↩︎
Ignatius, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans VIII.2; cf. Funk, Patres Apostolici, I, 241; Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes, I, 140.↩︎
ST II-II, q. 39, aa. 1 and 3.↩︎
Opuscula Cajetani, vol. I, opusc. I, III, XXX (Antverpiae, 1612).↩︎
Translator’s note: For a history of the gradual development of the treatise on the Church, see Joseph C. Fenton, “Towards an Adequate Theological Treatise De Ecclesia,” in The Church of Christ, ed. Christian D. Washburn (Providence: Cluny Media, 2016), 1–19; see also Jean Bellamy, La théologie catholique au XIXe siècle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1904), 210–42; Richard Redmond,”"How Should De Ecclesia Be Treated in Scientific Theology?,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 17 (1962): 139–60; Avery Dulles, S.J., “A Half Century of Ecclesiology,” Theological Studies 50 (1989): 419–42.↩︎
Auguste Sabatier, Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion, d'après la psychologie et l'histoire, 253; Book 2, Chapter 2; and Book 3, Chapters 2 and 3.↩︎
Harnack, L’Essence du Christianisme, Ninth Lecture and the following.↩︎
Ambroise Gardeil, La Crédibilité et l’Apologétique, 147, 148.↩︎
[Translator’s note: He arguably would in the person of Charles Journet.]↩︎
St. Thomas, ST IIa-IIae, q. 1, a. 7, ad 2m, ad 4m; B. Allo, "Germe et Ferment," Revue des Sciences religieuses et théologiques, I, 38, 43; Ambroise Gardeil, "La Réforme de la Théologie catholique," Revue thomiste, September–October 1903, 447–48; Schaezler, Introductio in Sacram Theologiam, 148, 150.↩︎
Mt. 13:52.↩︎
ST I, q. 14, a. 11.↩︎
Timothée Richard, "Usage et abus de la Scolastique," Revue thomiste (November–December 1904): 565ff.↩︎
ST II-II, q. 1, a. 7; a. 10; I, q. 36, a. 2, ad 2; — Bossuet, Premier avertissement aux protestants.↩︎
[Translator’s note: Obviously, one must take care—and Fr. Schwalm would—not to present development as though all that comes later is subjectively richer than what came before. This would collapse the special status of the Fathers and, ultimately, even the Apostolic era itself. ]↩︎
See above, II. The Social Transmission of Revelation.↩︎
Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 54, 1173; Harduin, Acta Conciliorum, vol. 2, 386.↩︎
St. Gregory, Regesta epistolarum X, 35, 39; Patrologia Latina, vol. 94, 1091 and 1096; cf. Reg. ep. VII, 32; XI, 74.↩︎
Batiffol, Anciennes littératures chrétiennes, 1.14.—Lagrange, La Méthode historique, 11.↩︎
Duchesne, Lettre-préface, in Funk–Hemmer, Histoire de l’Église.↩︎
Lagrange, La Méthode historique, 187.↩︎
[Translator’s note: Technically, it is the formal object that specifies the science, with the method being fitted to that object.]↩︎
Ambroise Gardeil, "La Réforme de la Théologie catholique," Revue thomiste (March–April 1903): 18.↩︎
Allo, "Extrinsécisme et historicisme," Revue thomiste (September–October 1904): 453–454.↩︎
Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians VII.2; Funk, Patres Apostolici, I, 178–79; Ambroise Gardeil, "La Réforme de la Théologie catholique," Revue thomiste, September–October 1903, 445–46; Newman, Histoire du développement de la doctrine chrétienne (Paris, 1848), 161.↩︎
Tixeront, "Des concepts de nature et de personne dans les Pères et les écrivains ecclésiastiques des Ve et VIe siècles," Revue d'Histoire et de Littérature religieuses, November 1903.↩︎
A. Lemonnyer, "Comment s'organise la Théologie catholique," Revue du Clergé français, October 1, 1903, 241.↩︎
Translator’s note: As has been discussed elsewhere on To Be a Thomist (e.g., in my “An Introduction to Dialectical Logic: The Recovery of Probable Certainty as the Labor of the Human Intellect”), probable certainty is not at all a merely optional dubiety.↩︎
Ambroise Gardeil. La notion du Lieu théologique, p. 45 and 80. [Translator’s note: A draft of this in English is available here.]↩︎
Petavius, Dogmata Theologica, Prolegomena, IX, 9–10.↩︎
Franzelin, De Divina traditione, 613; idem., De Deo uno, 14.↩︎
Translator’s note: One must be careful, however, concerning the formal constitutive of the theological virtue of faith. For Thomas and the best Thomists, it is the First Truth speaking supernatural truth, not the magisterium’s proposal thereof. The latter is a necessary condition for the objective proposal of the object (and thus too can be said to be a kind of “proximate rule” of faith).↩︎
ST II-II, q. 5, a. 3, corp. and ad 2m; Petavius, Dogmata Theologica, Proleg. I, 7; Lemonnyer, "Théologie positive et Théologie historique," Revue du Clergé français, March 1, 1903, 6–7.↩︎
