"Under the Ban: Modernism, Then and Now"
by Russell Shaw - September 4, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
On July 3, 1907, in a decree bearing the lachrymose Latin title Lamentabili, the Vatican's Holy Office, predecessor of today's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, condemned 65 propositions that it had found contrary to Catholic orthodoxy. Pope Pius X followed up two months later, on September 8, with an encyclical named Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Feeding the Lord's Flock), in which he linked the condemned propositions to a heresy called Modernism and went on to identify its philosophical and theological roots. In conclusion, the encyclical specified stern disciplinary measures for stamping out the heresy.
Considering these events from the pope's point of view, he could hardly have done less. For according to St. Pius X, who was to be canonized in 1954, Modernism was the very "synthesis of all heresies." Its condemnation and eradication were essential to protecting the Faith.
Still, a century later three questions about Modernism do need answering: Did it actually exist? What was it all about? What difference does it make?
Whether there really was something corresponding to what Pius X called Modernism isn't so easy to say. After all, it was the pope himself who gave Modernism its name and provided theoretical coherence to what up till then had been a gaggle of ideas identified with a loosely linked group of Catholic intellectuals in France, Italy, and England. Modernism's leading figure, the Scripture scholar Alfred Loisy, was not entirely wide of the mark when he complained that Pius X not only had condemned Modernism but "invent[ed] the system" he condemned.
Even so, it would be foolish to dismiss Modernism as a figment of the papal imagination. Pius X's account, as Loisy conceded, was drawn from actual sources. These he identified as "[Maurice] Blondel and [Lucien] Laberthonniere's philosophy of immanence… intimate religious experience and moral dogmatism, into which had penetrated a certain Kantian element… [George] Tyrrell's mystical theology, which exhibited a certain Protestant individualism and illuminism," and especially evolutionism, as it was reflected in Loisy's own "evolutionary history of the Hebrew religion and Christianity, of Catholic dogma, cult and constitution."
Regarding the threat that all this posed, it is necessary to begin with some historical background.
Descartes, Kant, and DarwinModernism's remote origins are usually traced to Descartes and Kant and their theories of knowledge, especially knowledge of a religious sort. In holding that we cannot know things directly but only as they are presented to us by our minds, Descartes and Kant inserted radical subjectivism into the heart of the epistemological question, including the question of what can be known about God and spiritual realities. Shortly after Modernism's condemnation, Rev. Arthur Vermeersch, S.J., an important Roman theologian of the day, remarked that while in Kant "dogmas and the whole positive framework of religion are necessary only for the childhood of humanity," Modernists went further still and took faith to be "a matter of sentiment, a flinging of oneself towards the Unknowable."
