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I argue that it was the historical consciousness of Chenu’s approach that served as an initially threatening, but ultimately distinctive, contribution to Catholic theology, challenging the prevailing neo-scholastic paradigm of seminary education at the time. This historical method for theological reflection, particularly evident in Chenu’s contextual approach to Thomas Aquinas, laid the foundation for his socially engaged theology. His writings from 1920 to 1942 convey a strong conviction that theologizing in the present requires an understanding of how earlier thinkers engaged with their own world. The interrelated dimensions of history and social engagement, subversive when Chenu first articulated them but somewhat self-evident in contemporary discourse, would develop into cornerstones of his life and thought.
After situating Chenu in the social, intellectual, and ecclesial context of early twentieth century Catholic Europe, this chapter traces the influences on Chenu’s early thought that equipped him to reimagine the prevailing neo-scholastic paradigm of seminary education. It then turns to A School of Theology, Chenu’s watershed work, as an explicit statement of the innovative theological method and pedagogy he coordinated at the Saulchoir. Contemporary historians grant great significance to this short work as “the most unabashedly programmatic statement” of the ressourcement movement and “the programme itself” for nouvelle théologie, but the original French has been out of print for decades, and was only translated into English in 2023. A close reading of this text reveals the distinctive underpinnings of Chenu’s historically-oriented theology, which would rock the Catholic intellectual landscape first in its vociferous condemnation from Rome, and then more lastingly in the gradual paradigm shifts of the next few decades. Finally, the text’s fraught reception presents a central chapter in Chenu’s vexed relationship with ecclesiastical authority, a lifelong result of his engaged theological method.
Context: History, Authority, and “Modernism
Chenu’s historically conscious approach to theology, and to the work of Thomas Aquinas in particular, was largely a reaction against the officially sanctioned neo-scholasticism that dominated the ecclesial intellectual landscape of the early twentieth century. In the century prior to Chenu’s intellectual coming-of-age, the cultural, political, and moral trajectories of the modern world seemed to many to be irreconcilable with the institutional Catholic Church. As contemporary historians like Gerd-Rainer Horn, Jürgen Mettepenningen, Étienne Fouilloux, and Pierre Colin have shown, this era of tumult exacerbated the authoritarian impulses of the Roman hierarchy, creating an atmosphere of suspicion and stifling institutionalism.
Seeking to assert the church’s authority in the face of an increasing loss of political power, Pope Pius IX condemned any openness to the ideas of so-called modernity in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, concluding the document with the infamous last error, “That the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself and make peace with progress, with Liberalism, and with modern culture.” The First Vatican Council doubled down on ultramontane, centralized authority with the articulation of papal infallibility in Pastor Aeternus (1870). Offering an alternative positive vision to the many condemned modern philosophies, Leo XIII established Thomas Aquinas as the theologian of reference for “official” Roman Catholic teaching and theology with the promulgation of his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris. Neo-Scholastic Thomism became the norm for seminary education. While the encyclical emphasizes the need to return directly to Thomas’s writings, in practice, its implementation brought about a very specific type of renewed scholasticism, relying chiefly on commentaries rather than the original source material, which tended to reduce Thomas’s thought to a timeless, reified system of propositions. Under this influence, mainstream seminary education followed an almost exclusively deductive paradigm, prioritizing the memorization of dogmatic manuals, often to the exclusion of independent thought. As French historian Étienne Fouilloux describes it, because of “this omnipresence of commentary from authorities, past and present,” the theology condoned by Rome was “repetitive and reproducing,” and as a result, “the idea of research into the material of faith, and its corollary production of original works, were relatively foreign to Roman circles.” Instead, the respected Roman professors were publishing what Gerald McCool identifies as “basically school manuals whose purpose was the clear exposition of safe ‘received’ scholastic doctrine rather than the stimulation of original thought.” Theological research was largely “devoted to the defense of views sanctioned by church authorities.” This intellectual stagnation exacerbated the disconnect between Catholic theology and the realities of the modern world.
(excerpted from chapter 1)
