Dominicans vs. Jesuits: A High-Stakes Debate

A review of: The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie: Concerning the Truth of Dogma and the Nature of Theology, edited by Jon Irwan, translated by Matthew Minerd (Catholic University of America Press, 2023)

Reviewed by Thomas Storck

As I was finishing this book and preparing to write this review, Pope Francis issued new statutes for the Pontifical Academy of Theology. In his letter accompanying these statutes, he stated that theology is called to “a turning point, to a paradigm shift, to a ‘courageous cultural revolution’ that commits it, first and foremost, to be a fundamentally contextual theology…having as its archetype the Incarnation of the eternal Logos…. From here, theology cannot but develop into a culture of dialogue and encounter between different traditions and different knowledge, between different Christian denominations and different religions.”

Whence came the ideas embodied in Francis’s conception of the role of theology? What might they imply? Without attempting to trace their ultimate origin, we can find their proximate source in certain theological controversies in France, controversies that accompanied the birth of what became known as the Nouvelle Théologie, or the “new theology.” This was chiefly a Jesuit initiative that arose after 1940, though its roots date to the late 19th century. This new orientation alarmed a number of mostly Dominican theologians, and this important volume contains over a dozen of their theological articles published at the time. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., is the best known, while Michel-Marie Labourdette, O.P., as shown in his six articles reprinted here, was also an important and informed theological voice of the period.

The controversy concerning the new theology, sometimes called ressourcement theology, is frequently presented as a controversy about the relationship between nature and grace, with a corresponding dispute about how to interpret certain passages from St. Thomas Aquinas and whether some of the later Thomistic commentators, such as Cajetan, had misunderstood or distorted Thomas’s thought. But this was not the chief concern of the Dominican first responders. Indeed, they began writing prior to the publication of Henri de Lubac’s 1946 book Surnaturel, often seen as the focal point of the entire controversy. In fact, the nature/grace question receives comparatively little attention here. It was on other matters that Labourdette and his colleagues concentrated, as they believed that the theological starting point of the French Jesuits was profoundly mistaken and would end up destroying the certitude of theological knowledge.

The controversy concerning the new theology, sometimes called ressourcement theology, is frequently presented as a controversy about the relationship between nature and grace, with a corresponding dispute about how to interpret certain passages from St. Thomas Aquinas and whether some of the later Thomistic commentators, such as Cajetan, had misunderstood or distorted Thomas’s thought. But this was not the chief concern of the Dominican first responders. Indeed, they began writing prior to the publication of Henri de Lubac’s 1946 book Surnaturel, often seen as the focal point of the entire controversy. In fact, the nature/grace question receives comparatively little attention here. It was on other matters that Labourdette and his colleagues concentrated, as they believed that the theological starting point of the French Jesuits was profoundly mistaken and would end up destroying the certitude of theological knowledge.

Though the Dominicans recognized that theological progress must take account of contemporary intellectual trends and developments, that “theology has the duty of observing and gathering the facts and data that can be of assistance in understanding its object, in whatever domain that such facts may present themselves,” they believed that the Jesuits, unwittingly, were making contemporary thought and individual experience their theological point of departure. Fr. Henri Bouillard, S.J., had written in 1941 that “a theology that would not be contemporary would be a false theology.” This assertion alarmed the Dominicans, who saw it as an endorsement of the notion that theology must not only take account of contemporary ideas but must take them as its starting point or confine itself to using whatever categories of thought are current. “Contemporary thought,” wrote Fr. Labourdette, “experiences the permanent temptation to judge all systems of intellectual expression first and, indeed, ultimately, in terms of the historical context and experiences of its author and the era in which he lived, not essentially in terms of their conformity with the reality of what is.”

It is easy to see that concern over the meaning of truth was central to the Dominicans’ writings. Is truth the agreement of the mind with reality, a definition that was formulated in antiquity and is not only a matter of common sense but is presupposed in the doctrinal definitions of the Church? Or does truth change and develop, because the human mind is unable to attain to reality, and therefore any attempt to embody truth in definite statements, even dogmatic statements, is always provisional and subject to revision? And are we thereby restricted to understanding, as best we can, the Church’s dogmas in terms of the categories of thought and the lived experience of contemporary man? But if the human mind cannot attain to the reality of things, ultimately it is thrown back upon itself, as has happened in much of modern philosophy. As Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange aptly remarks regarding Immanuel Kant, the mind can no longer make judgments about external reality but is “forever limited to rendering one kind of judgment, namely, one stating whether my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object. Therefore, man is enclosed within himself and cannot escape therefrom.”

Another important point at issue was that of St. Thomas’s theological system, which the Dominicans saw in its essential points as embodying the correct nature of theology and of theological truths. With Thomas, theology had attained a scientific status, that is, according to the classical understanding of a science as an exact system of knowledge. But some Jesuit writers saw Thomism as having frozen theology in an outmoded intellectual model. This struck at the very foundations of any scientific theology, the Dominicans believed, for if truth cannot be embodied in words of permanent value and meaning, all language and all thought become hopelessly relativistic. The Dominicans were not advocating, however, for a static Thomism that refused to recognize that there have been changes in the world since the 13th century. Fr. Labourdette writes, “What Christian thought needs today is an immense constructive effort undertaken in order to integrate so many new data into its essential perspectives without losing anything. And we are convinced that no more solid a foundation, nor any better instrument, can be found for this constructive effort than St. Thomas’s philosophy.”

If St. Thomas and those who developed his doctrine had truly grasped any lasting reality outside the mind, then that remains true for all times and places, and to assert as much is not to remain stuck in the Middle Ages, whereas to deny it is to slip inexorably into complete relativism.

At the time of this theological dispute, the two philosophies exercising the most influence over the French mind were existentialism and Marxism. Existentialists and Marxists were seen as engaged philosophers, whose thought was relevant to the concerns of their contemporaries, and the Jesuits likewise wanted une pensée engagée, as Fr. Jean Daniélou, S.J., put it. The Dominicans had no objection to that, so long as it did not imperil the theological system of St. Thomas. They pointed out that though apologetics requires speaking to one’s contemporaries in a language they can understand, the Church’s own theological work is something different. For the latter, a precise vocabulary, worked out carefully over centuries, is necessary even if that vocabulary is foreign to modern modes of thought. For if theology itself is reduced to apologetics or to employing solely contemporary categories of thought, then the clear and stable meaning of dogmas is in danger of being lost or obscured. In fact, a genuine apologetics presupposes scientific theology, for how can an apologist translate Catholic truth into a language accessible to his contemporaries if he is ignorant or unsure of what Catholic truth really is?

The first eight articles in this volume are by Dominicans working in France, published mostly in the journal Revue thomiste, while the second group are those written by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange and published in the Roman journal Angelicum. Although Fr. Labourdette and his collaborators avoided accusing the Jesuits of any tendency toward modernism, for fear of intensifying the already overcharged French intellectual atmosphere, Garrigou-Lagrange was not shy about pointing out the affinities between the tendencies he saw in the new theology and modernism, condemned some 40 years earlier by Pope St. Pius X. He also zeroed in on the question of the definition of truth and the Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel’s substitution of the traditional understanding with the novel formula, the agreement of thought with life. Again, we can see in this new definition the propensity to ground not merely theology but all of thought in the shifting opinions of different times and places. Blondel himself was a sincere Catholic whose orthodoxy was attested to by several popes, but however we are to understand his thought, Garrigou-Lagrange was correct to worry that its effect on Catholic theology would not be salutary.

In an activist culture, such as that of the United States, seemingly arcane disputes over philosophical or theological systems might seem unimportant. After all, do they not distract us from fighting abortion or preventing the corruption of children by wokeness? But disputes over the fine points of philosophy and theology are at the bottom of all the social and political issues that afflict humanity. All quarrels are theological quarrels, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out. Hence, the importance of this valuable sourcebook for understanding controversies that still trouble the Church.

For anyone interested in the trajectory of Catholic theology or modern secular thought and its presuppositions and implications, I recommend this important book. In addition to its generous selection of articles from the 1940s, the editors include a lengthy introduction of over 80 pages, summarizing the origins and course of the controversy. They had originally planned to include “texts from both sides of the debate,” but the publication in 2020 of Ressourcement Theology: A Sourcebook, edited by Patricia Kelly, which does include, albeit on a smaller scale, contributions by both the Jesuits and the Dominicans, made that superfluous. For a comprehensive study, therefore, both volumes are necessary, but the work under review here stands by itself, and the various writers themselves offer abundant quotes from their Jesuit interlocutors so the points at issue can be sufficiently understood.

This brings us back to our starting point. What is theology, and whence come the dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church? Are they subject to perpetual scrutiny and revision by an ongoing series of synods in which any Catholic potentially has a right to vote? Or are they something revealed once and for all to the Church, “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints,” as St. Jude puts it in his epistle? This is indeed a high-stakes debate, and The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie is an excellent way to approach it, to understand its background and the contours of issues that are still very much with us today.

Thomas Storck, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, has written widely on Catholic social teaching, Catholic culture, and related topics for many years. His latest book is The Prosperity Gospel: How Greed and Bad Philosophy Distorted Christ’s Teachings (TAN Books, 2023).

The foregoing review article, "Dominicans vs. Jesuits: A High-Stakes Debate," was originally published in the June, 2024 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.

©2024 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.s

A Gift of the Spirit, Rarely Given - a book review by Christopher Beiting

Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination. Volume 1: The Modern Redefinition of Tongues By Philip E. Blosser and Charles A. Sullivan

Publisher: Pickwick Publications
Pages: 236
Price: $35
Review Author: Christopher Beiting



[N.B. - See my editorial note at the bottom]

The New Testament twice mentions the practice of speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, as it has come to be called. First is St. Luke’s account of Pentecost (cf. Acts 2) in which glossolalia circumvents linguistic differences and provides a universal method of communication. Second is St. Paul’s description of glossolalia as a private method of communication in prayer: “One who speaks in a tongue does not speak to human beings but to God, for no one listens; he utters mysteries in spirit.” These mysteries can be understood only by someone who has the spiritual gift of interpreting it: “If anyone speaks in a tongue, let it be two or at most three, and each in turn, and one should interpret. But if there is no interpreter, the person should keep silent in the church and speak to himself and to God” (1 Cor. 12-14).

Which of these two instances provides the proper understanding of the practice? As a way of addressing the question — and examining the history of speaking in tongues — Philip E. Blosser and Charles A. Sullivan have proposed a comprehensive, three-volume study of the subject, of which The Modern Redefinition of Tongues is the first. If this volume is any example, the completed work is likely to be the definitive study of the subject — and to ruffle a few feathers.

Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination is an unusual work in a number of ways. The first is the nature of its approach. Most historical studies of this type would begin with the New Testament and then trace the subject through the Patristic era, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and so on, up to the present. Blosser and Sullivan, however, have undertaken what they term an “archaeological excavation” in which they begin with the present and dig backward through the past. Thus, Volume 1 deals with the contemporary era (from the present to the 19th century), Volume 2 will go from the Counter-Reformation to the late Patristic era, and Volume 3 will cover the early Patristic era to the New Testament era, as well as earlier Jewish practices. This approach is a bit counterintuitive, but since this is the age of Christopher Nolan, director of such nonlinear films as Memento (2000), Tenet (2020), and Oppenheimer (2023), it doubtless has its appeal.

The second way this project is unusual has to do with its authors and their backgrounds. Blosser and Sullivan are both credentialed scholars, and they have written their work with full academic rigor. But they are also men of strong religious faith. Sullivan, an independent scholar and linguist, is a Canadian who was raised Baptist, studied in Canada and Israel, was exposed to the Canadian Charismatic Renewal movement in the mid-1980s, and has been affiliated with it ever since. Blosser, born to Protestant missionaries in China, grew up in Japan and was exposed to charismatic-style worship from his youngest days. He converted to Catholicism in 1993 and has been part of the Catholic charismatic movement ever since. He is now on the faculty at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, an unusual institution in that a goodly portion of its faculty members are Catholic charismatics.

Thus, given their respective backgrounds, Blosser and Sullivan have produced a work that is truly ecumenical and treats fairly both Catholic and Protestant approaches to the subject. (Indeed, NOR readers — those who didn’t go to Franciscan University of Steubenville, anyway — might find Chapter 2 particularly interesting as it provides a good look at the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.) Moreover, as both men are, in their own ways, Pentecostals, any criticisms they make of Pentecostal practices are not those of hostile outsiders but of faithful insiders. Thus, the conclusions they draw are radical, but they are the product of critical study done by fair-minded men who do not have an axe to grind. What overall conclusion do they draw? Quite simply, this:

We can say with certainty that the understanding and practice of “speaking in tongues” found in the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition is based on a nineteenth-century theory of glossolalia and a twentieth-century redefinition of “tongues” that are complete historical novelties…. The contemporary practice and understanding of “tongues” as a gift of personal prayer and praise, regardless of how spiritually uplifting they may be, are a historical novelty without precedent before the nineteenth century in Church history.

In short, from the Patristic era to the 18th century, the consensus of Christianity was that speaking in tongues was to be understood according to St. Luke’s account rather than St. Paul’s description. Which is to say, speaking in tongues was considered a gift of the Holy Spirit that enabled someone to be understood by another individual who did not speak his language (and, as a spiritual gift, it was vanishingly rare in history, perhaps possessed by the likes of St. Francis Xavier, but very few others). Only in the 19th century did using unintelligible languages as a form of private prayer — as is commonly observed in Pentecostal churches these days — emerge. While we must wait for Volumes 2 and 3 to get the deep historical data behind this conclusion, Volume 1 provides a good study of the events that led to it.

And the reasons why the situation is what it is turn out to be somewhat comical.

Though Blosser and Sullivan’s backward-proceeding archaeological approach makes an exact origin date for the modern practice of speaking in tongues difficult to pinpoint, generally speaking, it appears to be an early-19th-century phenomenon. Its roots are arguably found in the ministry of the popular Scottish Presbyterian pastor, theologian, and revivalist Edward Irving (1792-1834), who became something of a celebrity in early Victorian Britain. Irving’s religious views were decidedly apocalyptic in nature, and central to his teaching was the idea that the gifts of the Holy Spirit would manifest increasingly in the end times (which were, in his opinion, clearly at hand). By 1830 Irving had encountered a number of worshipers in Scotland who were manifesting unusual spiritual gifts, particularly the practice of speaking in unintelligible languages during prayer. Irving considered this an important sign, which he made central to his ministry, so much so that people began to find it bizarre and off-putting (the famous Scottish author Thomas Carlyle was particularly bothered by it, took to referring to Irving pejoratively as “gift-of-tongues Irving,” and considered him mentally unstable). Irving died in 1834, but the practice of speaking in tongues survived him, although it was not enormously popular or widespread. Indeed, the word glossolalia, which sounds ancient, actually emerged in the 19th-century German Higher Criticism movement and first appeared in English in 1879 in the writings of Anglican divine Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903).

Matters seem to have come to a head in the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th in what Blosser and Sullivan refer to as “the Pentecostal Crisis of Missionary Tongues.” A number of Pentecostal groups, particularly those involved in revivalist circles in the United States, were keenly interested in doing mission work in Asian countries. During their prayer meetings, some of these charismatics began speaking in unintelligible tongues, which they were convinced were actually Indian or Chinese languages. They took this to be a sign of a new Pentecost and set off on mission trips to India and China, utterly convinced that the Holy Spirit would enable the missionaries to preach effectively to the unchurched heathens while sparing them the long and tedious process of actually learning the native languages. Naturally, these charismatics were completely mistaken and, naturally, their mission efforts failed completely and, naturally, they made fools of themselves in the process.

But the practice of speaking in tongues survived this catastrophic evangelical face-plant. When it turned out that the unintelligible noises they were making during prayer were not actual languages, these Pentecostals maintained the practice but shifted from perceiving it in a Lukan way to a Pauline way. And there matters have remained ever since.

To an outside observer, the usefulness and divine inspiration of speaking in tongues in a Lukan way is obvious. But the same is not true of the Pauline perspective. Adherents claim it provides a deep spiritual experience, but detractors regard it as useless and even silly, as Carlyle did. And, in any case, as Blosser and Sullivan make clear, the practice has never been a significant part of Christianity.

The conclusion Blosser and Sullivan draw will doubtless be as welcome in certain circles as a bombshell exploding on a playground (their image, actually). But it is interesting to contemplate what Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination is not, as much as what it is. In the hands of lesser or less charitable individuals (i.e., most academics these days), the work would have turned into a glorified exercise in “Lookit how stoopid these religious people are.” In the hands of more hostile or critical individuals, such as Presbyterian-pastor-turned-rad-trad-Catholic Gerry Matatics — who became vehemently opposed to speaking in tongues after testing his fellow Pentecostals in various ways, such as reciting a memorized string of nonsense words when asked to speak in tongues to see if they would be interpreted the same way each time (they weren’t) or by reciting Psalm 23 in Hebrew to see whether the interpretation would have anything to do with shepherds or valleys (it didn’t) — the work would be an unrelenting attack on the legitimacy of the practice. Blosser and Sullivan fall into neither of these camps.

For all their reservations about the historicity of speaking in tongues, our authors do appreciate the “spiritual significance” of the practice and the benefits it has had for many people. They maintain that it “is not necessarily discredited by these findings,” noting also that “the Holy Spirit works in the interiority of human hearts in ways that cannot always be easily discerned.” All in all, they issue their work with the wish that it “will encourage friendly debate.” How well their work will be received, and what the nature of the debate it engenders will be, is, at present, anyone’s guess.

[Christopher Beiting, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Archivist at Waldorf University and Editor-in-Chief of The Catholic Social Science Review.]

©2024 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.

The foregoing article, "A Gift of the Spirit, Rarely Given," was originally published in the April, 2024 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.

Editorial Note: I found this to be a very good and balanced review. However, there is one tiny error that needs to be corrected, as I have called to the attention of the reviewer previously: I have never been a Pentecostal or Charismatic, even though some of my students have called me a "charismatic professor." Some of the faculty members of my academic institution are members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and can say that we have an amicable working relationship.