Sound thinking
Recognizing a frayed tapestry
by Ken Myers
On Volume 155, David Bentley Hart presented a stinging critique of “two-tier Thomism,” the theological claim that effectively severs nature from the supernatural. His comments summarized the argument he made in You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022). Hart’s polemic echoed the work of twentieth-century theologians who promoted what has been labeled (as Hart recapped) “la nouvelle théologie or ressourcement or the patristic restoration or even ‘the Eastward turn’.”
Protestant theologian and patristic scholar Hans Boersma wrote two books summarizing that restoration movement. The first was a scholarly tome called “Nouvelle Théologie” and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford University Press, 2009). The second book — aimed at a non-academic audience was Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Eerdmans, 2011), a book he discussed on Volume 108 of the Journal.
The first chapter of the earlier book is called “Introduction: The Rupture between Theology and Life.” Boersma begins by describing a 1946 essay by Jean Daniélou, who judged that (in Boersma’s summary): “While modernism had rightly been rejected, the central theological problem continued to plague the Catholic world. There still existed, in Daniélou’s day, a ‘rupture between theology and life’. The Modernists had rightly sensed that this rupture, reinforced by the dominance of neo-Thomism since the late nineteenth-century, needed to be bridged. Daniélou was convinced that contemporary thought would no longer be satisfied with the unresolved dualism: ‘The theological speculations, separated from action while not engaging life, have had their day.’”
Later, Boersma summarizes the set of theological concerns shared by the twentieth-century Catholic thinkers surveyed in his book.
“The conflicts surrounding nouvelle théologie centered on its attempts to come to a renewed integration of nature and the supernatural. Each of the issues involved in the controversies of the 1940s and 50s involve the key issue: to what extent are nature and the supernatural distinct from one another? Several other problems, immediately connected, also came to the fore: the relationships between reason and faith, philosophy and theology, history and eternity, experience and revelation, human ability and divine grace, historical and spiritual interpretation were the most evident concerns. Whereas the Leonine Thomist revival of the late nineteenth century had in each case reinforced a more or less strict separation between nature and the supernatural, the nouvelle theologians regarded such a separation as the most serious pitfall of the Baroque scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with disastrous consequences both in terms of a radicalized autonomy of the realm of nature and in terms of divine grace being isolated from everyday existence. They were concerned with the rationalism and secularism implied in the imminent is a of a purely natural order and with the fideism, spiritualism, and authoritarianism of a strictly otherworldly supernatural order.
“When the nouvelle theologians tried to reintegrate nature and the supernatural, they took up concerns that had long lain at the heart of the Reformation. The nouvelle theologians were like the Reformers in a number of ways. They wanted to go back beyond scholastic theology to the Church Fathers and place the Scriptures at the center of the theological enterprise (de Lubac, Daniélou). They were apprehensive of an authoritarian hierarchy and wanted to reintegrate doctrinal authority with the Eucharistic life of the church and with the active communal participation of the laity (Congar). They insisted that Christ was not just of significance for matters of faith, but that the Incarnation was foundational to every human endeavor (Balthasar). They were interested in recapturing the significance of the ordinary lives of working-class people as genuine vocations, worthy of reflection in the theology of work (Chenu). They had questions about the clearly defined sacramental system of Catholicism. Moreover, the focal point of nouvelle théologie’s criticism was usually either the scholasticism of the post-Reformation period or the more recent neo-scholasticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both scholastic periods had reacted against a perceived foreswearing of human reason, whether that of the Reformation, with its emphasis on sola fide and its protest against Aristotelianism, or that of the nineteenth-century Catholic fideism and traditionalism of Félicité de Lamennais, Louis Bautain, as well as Johann Adam Möhler and others of the Tübingen school. In other words, the approach of nouvelle théologie might well be viewed as an olive branch extended to the Reformation, with with which it shared an apprehension of rational philosophy setting the theological agenda. Understandably, then, the direction of nouvelle théologie, along with its endorsement at the Second Vatican Council, made for a significant ecumenical opportunity.”
