What Happened Before the Council?
What Happened Before the Council?
Re-Framing the Debate on the Hermeneutics of Vatican II
In a Christmas address to the Roman Curia in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI famously attributed the strife in the Catholic Church to two competing understandings of the Second Vatican Council. First, he describes a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” according to which the council represented a substantive break from the past. Benedict claims this interpretation is not so much based in the texts of the council, but rather in the supposed “spirit of the council,” the sense that Tradition is no longer binding. Ironically, however, this same hermeneutic was adopted by opponents of the council, like Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers, who saw an inrreconcilable rupture between the council’s teachings and what had come before, leading them to reject the council’s teachings, for example on the liturgy and on religious freedom.
Benedict opposes the hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture to a “hermeneutic of reform,” which he describes as a “combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels.” At one level, the council’s teachings are in discontinuity with earlier doctrine, but seen in historical perspective, there is a continuity in underlying principles.
In ways I don’t think he anticipated, some have interpreted Benedict as advocating a “hermeneutic of continuity” ( a term he does not in fact use in the Christmas address, although he does use it in his apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, in regards to liturgical reform) according to which nothing significant changed at the council. Advocates of this interpretation, contra Benedict, downplay the real discontinuities in the council’s teaching, ignoring or distorting the text of the council documents in the process.
The same strife has been evident in the wake of Pope Francis’s Traditionis Custodes, which severely restricted the celebration of the “Traditional Latin Mass.” Shaun Blanchard rightly points out that Traditionis Custodes is not just about the liturgy, but about the legacy of Vatican II. Although the broadened use of the Roman Missal of 1962 permitted by Pope Benedict in Summorum Pontificum was intended to reconcile the discord in the council’s aftermath, according to Francis in a letter accompanying Traditionis Custodes, that has not happened:
I am … saddened that the instrumental use of Missale Romanum of 1962 is often characterized by a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the “true Church”.
In other words, independently of the old liturgy’s inherent validity, the continued celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass has facilitated pockets of resistance to the teaching of the council, a situation that cannot be permitted to persist.
Nearly twenty years after Pope Benedict offered his diagnosis of the problem, and sixty years after the council itself, this difference in interpretations of the council appears intractable. Experts in problem-solving, however, suggest that when you reach what appears to be a dead end, it helps to re-frame the problem. Are we even asking the right questions?
So far, the questions have been some variation of that posed by the great historian of the Church’s modern councils, John W. O’Malley: “What happened at Vatican II?” But what if, instead, we asked, “What happened before the council?” After all, the council had to have been a rupture with, or in continuity with, something that came before. Every conciliar hermeneutic, however, simply takes for granted what that something is. But what if more clearly understanding that something could help us better understand the council and what it calls us to today? Indeed, I would propose that, with a better understanding of the complexity and diversity of Catholicism from roughly the Renaissance era onward, we can get a clearer sense of how Vatican II represented authentic developments in the Church’s teaching and practice even while seeming like a rupture to those who experienced it.
In particular, I want to focus on the history of theology from roughly the late medieval period to the nineteenth century. There has, in recent decades, been a boom in scholarship on Catholic life in general in the late medieval and early modern periods, but our understanding of the history of Catholic theology during this period has lagged far behind. The work of theologians from this period remains mostly untranslated and unknown except to a small number of specialists (with some exceptions, like the debates over the just-war tradition and the rights of indigenous Americans among 16th-century Spanish theologians). How can we really understand the continuities and discontinuities of Vatican II’s teachings compared to theological developments that came before when there is such a Black Hole in our knowledge?
What I want to propose in the rest of this newsletter is that twentieth-century Catholic theology developed two main historical narratives regarding the theology between the late medieval era and the nineteenth century: the narrative of restoration, and the narrative of ressourcement. These two narratives represent different tendencies within the Church and are closely linked with the competing hermeneutics of the council described by Pope Benedict. Both, however, are united in misconstruing the period under consideration and providing rationales for not studying it. In contrast, I would propose that gaining a better understanding of the richness and diversity of theological reflection from the late medieval period onward will lead to re-writing the historical narratives that have dominated recent Catholic theology and give us a better understanding of the place of the Second Vatican Council in the Church’s theological and doctrinal development.
I know this is a big claim, probably better suited to a book than an email newsletter. I like to think of this more as an opening manifesto than a fully-developed argument. In the rest of this post, I will outline the first historical narrative, that of restoration. In a later post, I will describe the narrative of ressourcement and then discuss how I see re-discovering this theological history as one of the goals for this newsletter.
In his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII proposed that a special place be given to Thomas Aquinas in the study of philosophy and theology. In doing so, Leo crafted a powerful myth regarding Aquinas’s wisdom and influence.
According to Pope Leo, Aquinas summed up and perfected the teachings of the medieval scholastics (no. 17). His teaching was universally taught at the universities of Europe:
And, here, how pleasantly one's thoughts fly back to those celebrated schools and universities which flourished of old in Europe - to Paris, Salamanca, Alcalá, to Douay, Toulouse, and Louvain, to Padua and Bologna, to Naples and Coimbra, and to many another! … And we know how in those great homes of human wisdom, as in his own kingdom, Thomas reigned supreme; and that the minds of all, of teachers as well as of taught, rested in wonderful harmony under the shield and authority of the Angelic Doctor. (no. 20)
Likewise, Aquinas’s teaching guided each of the ecumenical councils since his death:
The ecumenical councils, also, where blossoms the flower of all earthly wisdom, have always been careful to hold Thomas Aquinas in singular honor. In the Councils of Lyons, Vienna, Florence, and the Vatican one might almost say that Thomas took part and presided over the deliberations and decrees of the Fathers, contending against the errors of the Greeks, of heretics and rationalists, with invincible force and with the happiest results. But the chief and special glory of Thomas, one which he has shared with none of the Catholic Doctors, is that the Fathers of Trent made it part of the order of conclave to lay upon the altar, together with sacred Scripture and the decrees of the supreme Pontiffs, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, whence to seek counsel, reason, and inspiration. (no. 22)
Leo, then, very closely links the Catholic tradition with Aquinas, presenting Aquinas’s theology as a timeless, unifying intellectual framework.
Without meaning any disrespect to Aquinas, Pope Leo’s historical narrative is erroneous in significant ways. For one, although respecting Aquinas as an authority, the majority of theologians in the generations after his death found many of his arguments unconvincing and rejected his conclusions (the condemnations of 1277 played a complicated role in this process), and the teachings of John Duns Scotus and the via moderna (“nominalism”) had greater influence on university theology well into the fifteenth century.
Likewise, Leo’s description of Aquinas’s authoritative status at the ecumenical councils is misleading. The participants at these councils deliberately avoided the questions dividing the different schools of theology, and so it does not really make sense to claim the councils favored the theology of one or another master. Although Aquinas’s theology had an important influence at the Council of Trent, the majority of theologians at the council were Franciscans influenced by Bonaventure, Scotus, and even the via moderna, and the influence of this group is also reflected in the teachings of the council. At Trent, Aquinas was cited as an authority alongside Augustine, Scotus, and more recent theologians (I am not sure if Leo’s reference to the Summa being placed on the altar at the council is historically accurate or a later embellishment; I will try to find answers!).
Although there was a surge in Aquinas’s influence around the time Pope Pius V declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1567, there remained several non-Thomist schools of Catholic theology—Scotist, Augustinian, and eclectic—solidly represented at Catholic universities for centuries afterward. Trent Pomplun notes the superb irony that Leo elevated Aquinas in this way a mere twenty-five years after the triumph of the Scotist school over the Thomists with the definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in 1854.1
Despite its questionable accuracy, Pope Leo’s narrative served to provide the Catholic Church with a unified intellectual framework to combat modern philosophies that were thought to be harmful to the faith. The emergence of modern neo-Thomism was part of a broader effort to unify the Church and present it as a bulwark of timeless truth against a hostile modern world.
Leo’s narrative presented the thought of Aquinas as the culmination of Catholic theological reflection; although there was room for further development, it would take place within the Thomistic framework. As modern neo-Thomism developed, a more nuanced version of the narrative of restoration emerged that recognized that, historically, Aquinas’s teaching had not been universally accepted as supreme by subsequent Catholic theologians. Rather, the thought of later theologians like Scotus and Ockham was marred by deviations from the synthesis established by Aquinas, deviations that opened the way for modern philosophy. The neo-Thomist revival, then, was a timely restoration of Thomas to his rightful place.
By design, the narrative of restoration papers over the diversity within Catholic theology after Aquinas. When new schools of theology emerged in the twentieth century in reaction against this Neo-Thomism, they could only be seen as ruptures from the Tradition embodied in the Thomist synthesis. Ironically, however, for those not well-versed in theological history but drawn to these new theologies, the latter also appeared as a rupture with Tradition, since the Neo-Thomists had so successfully established intellectual hegemony in the pre-conciliar Church. It did not seem worthwhile to anyone to explore whether these new currents in theology had any organic relationship to post-Tridentine theology.
I will pick up here in a later post. But let me know what you think in the comments. Am I on to something? Am I off the rails? Am I missing something that might help my case?
Trent Pomplun, “Duns Scotus and the Making of Modern Catholic Theology,” in Innovation in Early Modern Catholicism, ed. Ulrich L. Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2021), 171.