Modernism

The word and the thing

The word Modernism is not a banner its supporters ever raised: it is a name given by the judge, like Gnosticism or Jansenism before it^[6]. Before 1907, those concerned called themselves reforming Catholics, scientific exegetes or philosophers of action; after Pascendi, the word denotes the system the encyclical attributes to them: a way of thinking about religion that makes inner experience the source of faith, dogma a mere changing symbol, and the Church an institution born from the needs of believers rather than founded by Christ^[7].

"Now, embracing the whole system in a single glance, who will wonder that We define it as the synthesis of all heresies? If anyone had undertaken the task of collecting all the errors ever professed against the faith and concentrating their substance and, as it were, their sap in a single doctrine, he truly could not have succeeded better." Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici gregis, 8 September 1907 (doctrinal conclusion)^[8]

To grasp what is at stake, a simple image: the Modernist wants to save faith by emptying it. Pressed by the science of his time, biblical criticism, the history of dogmas, the natural sciences, he believes it impossible to defend the traditional claims (Moses as author of the Pentateuch, miracles, the divinity of Christ as historically known); rather than defending them, he moves religion elsewhere: into feeling, experience, life. Faith is safe, he says, since it no longer claims to affirm anything about facts. But a faith that no longer affirms anything has nothing left to hand on: that is exactly what Pius X reproaches him with^[9].

What Modernism is not

Three common confusions, to be set aside from the outset^[10]:

• Loving one's age is not Modernism. A Catholic may admire the science, democracy or art of his time without being a Modernist. Condemned Modernism is not a taste, it is a precise doctrinal system: agnosticism, vital immanence, evolution of dogmas^[11].
• Criticizing real abuses is not Modernism. Several future Modernists denounced genuine evils, scholasticism learned by rote, blind censorship, political clericalism. The Church acknowledged this afterwards: Pius XII and then Vatican II would take up certain reforms of method (exegesis, liturgy, relations with the modern world) without taking up Modernist doctrine^[12]. See the article Neo-Modernism.
• Liberal Catholicism is not Modernism. Lamennais, Montalembert and their heirs wanted to reconcile the Church and modern freedoms on political ground; the Modernists attack dogmatic ground itself, Revelation, Christ, the sacraments. The kinship is real, but the object is different^[13]. See the article Condemned Liberal Catholicism.

The shock of the new sciences

Modernism was not born in 1902: it is the endpoint of a century during which Catholic theology endured, without always answering, three converging assaults^[14]:

Rome had nevertheless provided the doctrinal framework: the First Vatican Council (Dei Filius, 24 April 1870) defines that God can be known with certainty by reason, that faith rests on external motives of credibility, and that the meaning of dogmas, once defined, never changes^[15]. But between the definition and the seminaries, transmission faltered: many young clerics of 1900 knew Renan and Harnack better than Saint Thomas, which is the bitter observation Pascendi would make^[16].

The loyal demand and its drift

It must be said honestly: the first Modernists were not all impostors. Alfred Loisy is a priest who believes he serves the Church by bringing her scholarship; George Tyrrell wants to save the faith of educated young people whom catechism learned by rote drives away; Baron von Hügel funds and advises all of them out of love for the Church^[17]. Their starting question is an honest one: how can an educated man of 1900 still believe?

The drift begins when the answer stops being defend the truth better and becomes change the truth to make it defensible. Instead of showing that criticism is mistaken, its conclusions are conceded (Moses wrote nothing, miracles are symbols, the Resurrection is not a historical fact) and a religion is rebuilt that no longer needs facts: experience, life, feeling^[18]. It is this shift, from apologetics to surrender, that the condemnations of 1907 target with precision.

A learned priest against Harnack

Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), priest of the diocese of Châlons and professor of exegesis at the Institut catholique de Paris, was regarded as the finest Catholic Hebraist in France^[19]. In 1900, the liberal Protestant Adolf von Harnack published The Essence of Christianity (Wesen des Christentums, Leipzig, 1900): Christ, he claimed, had preached only the Kingdom and the fatherhood of God, while everything else, dogmas, sacraments, the hierarchical Church, was a Greek and Catholic distortion^[20]. Loisy set out to answer as a Catholic: his L'Évangile et l'Église (Paris, Picard, 1902) argued that the Church, with its dogmas and sacraments, is the legitimate development of the Gospel, even if Jesus did not institute every detail himself^[21].

The most famous line of the book, Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom, "and it was the Church that came", was meant to defend continuity. Roman theologians read it as the opposite admission: if the Church came in place of the expected Kingdom, then Christ was mistaken, and the institution was an invention of the disciples^[22]. Loisy published his defense, Autour d'un petit livre (1903): the Holy Office placed five of his works on the Index in December 1903. Loisy submitted in words, continued his teaching at the cost of growing ambiguity, published Les Évangiles synoptiques (1908), and was excommunicated vitandus on 7 March 1908^[23]. The following year, the Third Republic, then in open conflict with the Church, gave him the chair in the history of religions at the Collège de France (1909): the symbol was perfect, and disastrous^[24].

Why Loisy matters more than his book

Loisy was not the most profound theorist of the movement, Tyrrell and Le Roy surpassed him, but he was its detonator, for three reasons^[25]:

• He was a Catholic priest and professor: his theses carried the authority of the Institut catholique, not that of a declared opponent.
• He wrote in French, for the educated general public: his books sold, were discussed in salons, and alarmed seminaries.
• His case forced Rome to rule publicly: after the 1903 Index, each new writing reignited the crisis, up to the decrees of 1907, which largely targeted his propositions.

Pascendi insists: there was no Modernist society with membership cards, but a common spirit shared by men who often barely knew one another^[26]. Three geographical centers, three temperaments:

Tyrrell: the Irishman who wanted a Church without theologians

George Tyrrell, an Irish convert who became a Jesuit, was the most brilliant polemicist of the group^[27]. His thesis: scholastic theology, with its arid definitions, kills the mystical life. True religion is experience, prayer, action, and all the rest is only a perishable shell. He wrote with a brilliance that made each of his articles an event, and he alienated everyone: his superiors forbade him to write, he disobeyed, and he was expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1906^[28].

After Lamentabili and Pascendi, Tyrrell struck the hardest blow: two letters to The Times (30 September and 1 October 1907) in which he treated the encyclical as a declared opponent^[29]. The Bishop of Southwark answered with minor excommunication, October 1907, deprivation of the sacraments. Tyrrell died in 1909 without retracting: Catholic burial was refused to him. His friend Henri Bremond, present at the private funeral, traced a sign of the cross over the grave, and was suspended a divinis for that gesture^[30]. The scene sums up the harshness of the time: a cross over a grave had become a punishable act.

Italy: democratic priests and militant journals

In Italy, Modernism took a more political face. Romolo Murri, a priest from the Marches, led Christian democracy and demanded autonomy for Catholics from the hierarchy in social action: suspension a divinis in 1907, excommunicated in 1909^[31]. Ernesto Buonaiuti, priest and historian of Christianity, applied the historical-critical method to Christian origins with a radicalism that earned him three excommunications (1921, 1924, 1926) and left him ending as a lay professor at the University of Rome, calling himself to the end a "faithful son" of a Church that no longer wanted him^[32]. Journals followed one another and died under censures: Minocchi's Studi religiosi, Murri's Rivista di cultura, Il Rinnovamento founded in 1907, to which the novelist Antonio Fogazzaro contributed, whose Il Santo (1905) had been placed on the Index the previous year^[33].

The borderline: Blondel, Laberthonnière, Le Roy, von Hügel

Not every suspect was condemned, and honesty requires that nuance^[34]. Maurice Blondel, with L'Action (1893), sought to show that human action calls for the supernatural: his philosophy of immanence worried Rome, but he was never condemned and remained all his life a submissive Catholic^[35]. Baron von Hügel, an Austrian aristocrat settled in England, was the soul of the network, with immense correspondence, subsidies, introductions: never condemned, he embodied the grey zone between intellectual sympathy and assent to error^[36].

By contrast, the Oratorian Lucien Laberthonnière paid for his "moral dogmatism" (Essais de philosophie religieuse, 1903): two works on the Index in 1906, then a ban on publishing in 1913^[37]. The mathematician and philosopher Édouard Le Roy, with his article "Qu'est-ce qu'un dogme?" (1905), supplied the system with its centerpiece, the theory of the evolution of dogmas, directly targeted by the condemnations of 1907^[38].

The Method of the Encyclical

Pius X does not condemn proper names, Pascendi cites no modernist by name, but a system: "not scattered and disconnected theories, but a perfectly organized body, whose parts are so bound together that one cannot be admitted without admitting them all"^[39]. And to expound this body, the encyclical uses a striking device: the modernist "combines in himself several roles", the philosopher, the believer, the theologian, the historian, the critic, the apologist, the reformer, "roles which must be clearly distinguished if one wishes to know their system thoroughly"^[40]. Let us follow this thread.

The Philosopher: Agnosticism and Vital Immanence

Everything starts with philosophy. The modernists lay down as the basis "the doctrine commonly called agnosticism": human reason, confined to phenomena, "is incapable of raising itself up to God, not even so as to know His existence by means of visible things"^[41].

"And to begin with the philosopher, the modernists lay down as the basis of their religious philosophy the doctrine commonly called agnosticism. Human reason, confined strictly within the circle of phenomena, that is to say, of things that appear, and such precisely as they appear, has neither the faculty nor the right to pass beyond these limits; it is therefore incapable of raising itself up to God, not even so as to know His existence by means of visible things.", Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907^[42]

The Catholic reader recognizes here the exact denial of Vatican I (Dei Filius: God knowable "by the natural light of human reason by means of created things"), and the kinship with Fideism, condemned forty years earlier: the same distrust of reason, but inverted, where the fideist said "reason can do nothing, believe blindly," the modernist says "reason can do nothing, feel blindly"^[43].

The positive side of the system is then "what is called vital immanence": once natural theology is repudiated and "all external revelation entirely set aside," the explanation of religion "is to be sought for in man alone," it lies within man himself, in a religious need pressing from within^[44]. God is no longer the One who speaks from without; He is the name conscience gives to its own impulse.

The Believer: The Experience That Creates Its Object

Then comes the second role: the believer. How does one pass from need to dogma? By a mechanism Pascendi describes with clinical precision: the religious sentiment, once it has become imperious, drives man to express what he feels, and this expression produces formulas, the dogmas^[45]. Dogma is therefore not a received truth, it is a symbol of experience, useful for communicating it, revisable whenever experience changes.

Hence two consequences the encyclical names with a terrible word: confronted with the fact (for example the resurrection), faith first performs a transfiguration, it raises the phenomenon "above itself and above its true reality", then a disfiguration: "faith, having withdrawn it from the conditions of space and time, comes to attribute to it things which in reality do not belong to it"^[46]. In other words: what the believer adores is no longer the event, it is his emotion before the event, decked out under the name of the event.

Dogmas, Sacraments, the Church: Everything Evolves

Once the principle is laid down, everything follows, and this is what makes modernism, according to Pius X, a total system^[47]:

• Dogmas evolve: born of yesterday's experience, they must be reformulated by today's experience. The formula of Nicaea suited Greeks of the 4th century; it cannot bind modern men^[48].
• The sacraments are signs empty of received efficacy: instituted not by Christ in person but by the community interpreting "some idea of Christ," they serve to sustain the religious sentiment^[49].
• The Church is born of a double need: believers need to communicate their faith (hence society), and to spread it (hence authority). No immediate divine foundation, no primacy by divine right: a human organization, respectable but reformable at will^[50].

The Double-Speaking Apologist and the Reformer

The picture closes with the two most formidable roles. The modernist apologist plays on two registers: "One page of their work might be signed by a Catholic; turn the page, and you think you are reading a rationalist. When they write history, no mention of the divinity of Jesus Christ; when they ascend the pulpit, they proclaim it loudly"^[51]. Two exegeses, two discourses, one for scholars, the other for the faithful, which the Church would judge a lie, and which the modernists called adaptation.

"When they write history, no mention of the divinity of Jesus Christ; when they ascend the pulpit, they proclaim it loudly. As historians, they disdain the Fathers and the Councils; as catechists, they quote them with honor.", Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907^[52]

And the reformer wants to change everything: relegate scholasticism "among outmoded systems," teach only modern philosophy, rewrite history according to the new methods, democratize the government of the Church, reconcile dogma with science by subordinating it to science^[53]. "Nothing, absolutely nothing, in Catholicism to which it does not attack," says the encyclical of this "mania for reform."

The "Syllabus" of Pius X

Two months before Pascendi, the Holy Office strikes: the decree Lamentabili sane exitu (3 July 1907), approved by Pius X, condemns 65 propositions "as reprobated and proscribed," under the pen of the notary of the Holy Office: the procedure follows that of the Syllabus of Pius IX, hence its nickname as the "Syllabus of Pius X"^[54]. The propositions are taken from works then in circulation, Loisy foremost among them, without naming anyone: it is the doctrine that is judged, not men^[55].

They can be grouped by subject matter, following the division used by historians^[56]:

Four Condemnations to Know by Heart

A few propositions deserve quotation, so well do they sum up the spirit of the system. In the body, the Ignispedia translation; in the note, the original English of the decree^[57]:

• On dogmas (no. 22): "The dogmas which the Church presents as revealed are not truths fallen from heaven. They are an interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has acquired by laborious effort."^[58]
• On the historical Christ (no. 29): "It is permissible to grant that the Christ of history is far inferior to the Christ who is the object of faith."^[59]
• On truth (no. 58): "Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolves with him, in him, and through him."^[60]

"Scientific progress demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the person of the Incarnate Word, and redemption be reinterpreted." Proposition no. 64 condemned by Lamentabili (Ignispedia translation)^[61]

• On the logical outcome (no. 65): "Modern Catholicism can be reconciled with true science only if it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity, that is, into a broad and liberal Protestantism."^[62]

The last proposition is a confession wrung from the system: the endpoint of the system is departure from Catholicism. Pius X merely records the fact.

Two Causes: Curiosity and Pride

Pascendi does not stop at description: it seeks the causes. The remote ones first, ignorance of true philosophy, which makes men take Kant for an unavoidable master, then the proximate ones, reduced to two with wholly fatherly severity: "curiosity and pride. Curiosity alone, if not wisely regulated, suffices to explain all errors"^[63]. Pride does the rest: "they do everything so that what is the work solely of obstinacy and pride may be attributed to a pure zeal for truth"^[64]. The diagnosis is spiritual before it is intellectual: one becomes a Modernist not only by reading bad books, but by preferring one's own thought to the faith received.

Saint Thomas, Censors, Vigilance

The remedies follow, concrete and disciplinary: the part of the encyclical that liberal historians will reproach most, and in which Catholics will see the act of a shepherd^[65]:

• The philosophy of Saint Thomas as the basis of studies: "let the professors bear well in mind that to depart from Saint Thomas, especially on metaphysical questions, is never without grave harm"^[66]. On this foundation, the theological edifice is to be solidly raised.
• The sorting of professors and seminarians: removing from chairs and even from the priesthood those won over to the new spirit, a painful measure, accepted as surgery^[67].
• Prior censorship: in each diocese, official censors charged with examining works to be published, an institution "highly praised" and made mandatory^[68].
• The Council of Vigilance: "We therefore decree that in each diocese a council of this kind, which it pleases Us to name the Council of Vigilance, be instituted without delay": trustworthy priests, meeting every two months under the presidency of the bishop, charged with "watching most attentively and most closely for every sign, every trace of Modernism"^[69].

Pius X completes the apparatus with scholarly institutions: the Pontifical Biblical Commission, created by Leo XIII on 30 October 1902 (Vigilantiae studiique), sees its decisions made binding in conscience by Praestantia Scripturae (18 November 1907)^[70]; and the Pontifical Biblical Institute, founded on 7 May 1909 (Vinea electa) and entrusted to the Jesuits, gives Catholic exegetes the scholarly level they lacked: the answer from above, not by censorship alone^[71].

An Oath for Fifty-Seven Years

On 1 September 1910, by the motu proprio Sacrorum antistitum, Pius X imposes on all clergy raised to dignities, on confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and seminary professors an anti-Modernist oath: to embrace all that has been defined against Modernism, to reject the evolution of dogmas and agnosticism, to hold that faith is not a blind sentiment^[72]. Every ordained priest, every appointed professor, every installed parish priest pronounces it, hand on the Gospels, from 1910 to 1967^[73].

The policing apparatus follows: Msgr. Umberto Benigni organizes the Sodalitium Pianum, known as "La Sapinière": a network of correspondents charged with reporting suspect clerics to Rome, their reading, their friendships^[74]. The methods, anonymous denunciations, files, surveillance, soon exceed all measure: Benedict XV, successor of Pius X, must dissolve the organization, without retracting anything of the doctrinal condemnations^[75]. The episode recalls a rule of conduct: defending the truth never authorizes crooked means, a point the Ignispedia line takes as settled^[76].

1967: The End of the Oath

The oath remains in force for fifty-seven years. On 17 July 1967, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the approval of Paul VI, replaces it, along with the Tridentine profession of faith, with a new profession of faith^[77]. The previous year, the Index of Forbidden Books had been abolished (1966): the Church of the Council chooses other weapons. Judgment here does not belong to this article: we record the fact, and refer to contemporary debates in the article Neo-modernism^[78].

Three positions face to face

To grasp the gravity, compare three attitudes before Revelation^[79]:

Modernism combines the two symmetrical excesses: with rationalism, it subjects faith to the science of the day; with fideism, it declares reason powerless. What remains is feeling, and feeling transmits nothing to later generations^[80].

What the Catholic faith holds

Facing the system, Catholic doctrine holds three points, all earlier than the crisis and confirmed by it^[81]:

• God speaks from outside. Revelation is not man's becoming aware of God, but the Word God addresses to man, in history, through the prophets, and definitively in Jesus Christ. This is the exact opposite of proposition no. 20 of Lamentabili^[82].
• Dogma does not change meaning. Vatican I defined it: once revealed truth is defined, its meaning "must be maintained in perpetuity", it may be deepened, never contradicted. The Modernist evolution of dogmas is thus excluded in advance^[83].
• Facts are facts. The resurrection, the miracles, the institution of the sacraments belong to history, not to the emotion of the witnesses. A faith that no longer dares affirm facts is no longer the faith of the apostles: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain" (1 Cor 15:14)^[84].

The war of 1914 scatters the networks: journals die, leaders grow old or submit partially, Benedict XV calms things without retracting anything^[85]. But the system does not disappear: it goes dormant. Buonaiuti, repeatedly excommunicated, keeps writing until 1946; Tyrrell dead, his books circulate; and from the 1930s and 1940s onward, theologians take up again, in other words and often with sincere loyalty, kindred theses on the evolution of dogma and the historicity of the biblical narratives^[86].

Pius XII, with Humani generis (1950), will warn against these resurgences, which is the subject of the article Neo-Modernism, to which we refer for everything after 1950^[87]. Let us retain here the lesson in method the crisis taught the Church: science is answered neither by fleeing it nor by copying it, but by surpassing it, the Biblical Institute was its instrument, Vatican II its heir on this point, without ever taking up the condemned system^[88].

Readers who wish to go deeper should begin with the texts themselves: the decree Lamentabili sane exitu (3 July 1907, 65 propositions) and the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (8 September 1907), both available on vatican.va, then the notice "Modernism" by the Jesuit Arthur Vermeersch in the Catholic Encyclopedia (vol. 10, 1911)^[89]. For neighboring errors, nineteenth-century Catholic liberalism, Americanism, the Sillon, see the articles Condemned Liberal Catholicism, Americanism and Sillonism; for the afterlife of the system after 1950, the article Neo-Modernism^[90].