Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Her most recent book, God is not a Story (Oxford University Press, 2007) is available in book form or as an electronic download. This excerpt and excerpts that follow are taken from Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, (University of Missouri Press, 2004) which is published in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy. This appears with permission.

A crisis occurred in France in 1902 through 1914 — a crisis about mod­ernism. It affected Étienne Gilson at the time, and for always. To understand him, we have to look at what happened; but we need to do more, and, in a way, less, than that. The more objectively photorealistic a war movie is, the less true it is to the experience of war. Lacking the omniscience of the movie camera, combatants only see what is going on in their immediate vicinity. An aerial and yet telescopically naturalistic overview of the modernist crisis would likewise play false to how it was experienced by one nineteen-year-old French onlooker, Étienne Gilson. An exhaustively objective account of modernism would not necessarily help us to understand how Gilson felt about it. What we need is not just a detached comprehension of what mod­ernism actually was but also what Gilson believed was going on.

What influenced Gilson was what the modernist crisis looked like to him, and what it represented to him. He was nineteen when it began and thirty when it simmered out. He was to have a near lifelong sympathy for Alfred Loisy, one of the authors of French theological modernism. Gilson could write vitriolically about French paleo-conservatives seventy years after the events that we shall now describe. We will pinpoint several different viewing positions on modernism and observe where Gilson stood in relation to them. The first is the cultural and political environment of the French modernist crisis.

The Cultural and Political Environment of Modernism

A purely theological definition of modernism is not the best place to be­gin, because what people experienced at the time was a thicket of entangled theological and political issues. So the first angle on the modernist crisis relates to its cultural and political concomitants in France. To understand what was going on politically, we have to retrace our steps to 1792.

In the textbooks of the history of ideas, modernity begins in the cogito of Descartes. French Catholics of the early twentieth century dated the Fall from Grace at 1792, the year designated by their Patriot countrymen as Year 1 of the Revolutionary calendar. Catholics later associated the post-Revolutionary order with the political enfranchisement of Jews and Protes­tants. In 1801, the Emperor Napoleon and Pope Pius VII signed a concor­dat, which gave the French government the right to select the bishops of France. The papacy retained a veto over the nominees. It was seldom exer­cised. The concordat made the French state the paymaster of its Catholic clergy. Discomforted neither by their economic subjugation to the state nor by the loss of the autonomy of the episcopate, the Catholics of France were offended by the political freedoms granted to others. Of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité, it was Liberté that stuck in the gullets of the faithful. In the hearts of most French Catholics, and equally in the imaginations of most republicans, Catholicism and political liberalism were irreconcilable. The Catholics objected, not to the clergy's having become state employees, but to the fact that the state did not employ a king. A cleric who called himself a republican "was looked upon as a traitor to his priesthood."¹

The anticlericals and the churched each made an act of faith in a political order. The great French positivist sociologist Auguste Comte argued that positivism would not hold society together unless it acquired a religious aura;   society must now feel for its scientific directors the awe it had once invested  in its confessors. Radical republicanism was inspired by this Comtean vision. On the other hand, while offering notional assent to the creeds promulgated by the ecumenical councils, French Catholics gave real and imagina­tive assent to a creed that included an affirmation of the divine right of  kings. Just as the positivist and republican ideal of politics was theological, so the Catholic monarchists' ideal of religion was political.

The fact that the republicans and the Catholics of France were two war­ring sides of the same coin is symbolized by the Catholics' acquisition of Charles Maurras as an apologist. Maurras was an atheist whose intellectual master was Auguste Comte. He admired Catholicism for its political illiberalism. For a quarter of a century, from around 1900 until 1927, Maurrasianism and a very large section of French Catholic opinion found common po­litical ground.

The strongholds of the French church were in the rural south; the urban and industrialized north belonged to the denizens of reason and progress. Caroline Juliette Rainaud was a Burgundian, born in 1851 in "Cravant, a small medieval village in the department of l'Yonne about halfway between Auxerre and Avallon." That is, she came from the south, which in the 1790s had been the military stronghold of "White" resistance to the French Rev­olution, and retained that allegiance. Caroline Rainaud attended a primary school run by Ursuline nuns, owing her religious education to Mother Saint-Dieudonné, who called her "one of my first daughters and one of the most faithful." ²  She was good with her hands, a facility that came to the fore when she married Paul Gilson, a Parisian merchant. Caroline presided over the draper's shop; she was the controlling center of the union. The marriage of Catholic south and mercantile, intellectual north bore fruit in a family of five sons. The third son was born in their flat above the shop, in 1884. Abbé Escaré baptized him Étienne. From the time that he was mature enough to form an opinion, the boy carried both the flag of the republic and that of the church. With a mother who created clothes and hats, Gilson's first impression of his religious faith came from an artist.

Leo XIII (Pope from 1878 to 1903) was not disposed to subscribe to the Gallican creed. He wanted French Catholics to cease to identify them­selves as the victims of a revolution past and as the victors of a revolution to come. He wanted them to ally themselves with the state to which they be­longed. Many of the 162,000 clergy and nuns in France were teachers, both in religious and in state schools. ³ In 1879, France elected a republican government, whose minister of education, Jules Ferry, was a "free-thinker to his finger-tips." He asserted the control of the state over its schools. Leo XIII's initiative for republican-Catholic ralliement came about in the face of a government determined to exercise its right to regulate its clerical em­ployees and, upon their inability to comply with the altered laws, to expel them from France. Many Jesuits preferred expulsion to relinquishing their educational tasks. Instead of rebuking the government, Leo XIII urged French Catholics to reconcile themselves to the republic. "By the State," he said in Rerum Novarum (1891), "We here understand, not any particular form of government prevailing in this or that nation," as, for example, the ancien régime, "but the State as rightly apprehended; that is to say, any gov­ernment conformable in its institutions to right reason and natural law, and to th[e] dictates of the Divine wisdom." In 1892, in Aux milieu des solicitudes, Leo "tried to persuade the French church to be less uncompromising." This papal exhortation, known as the Encyclique du Ralliement, was diluted in its episcopal dissemination.⁴

Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a Jewish officer who was accused in 1893 of conspiring against the French government. The "Dreyfus Affair" dragged on until 1906, when, the evidence against him having been shown to be forged, he was pardoned. Conceiving Dreyfus's allies as liberals with no love for the armed forces, and being profoundly anti-Semitic, a majority of French Catholics were noisily convinced of Dreyfus's guilt. Even Catholic observers, such as Yves Simon, considered that "the persecution of the Catholics at the beginning of this century was determined in large measure by the attitude of the Catholics during the Dreyfus case." ⁵ That is, French Catholics brought the subsequent vengeance of the seculars down on their own collective collar.

Leo XIII had encouraged the faithful to engage in the print media. The contributors to the Univers, edited by Louis Veuillot, required little papal stimulation in their mission to extirpate liberalism within and without the church. Founded in 1840, the Augustinians of the Assumption took, in ad­dition to the customary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, "a vow to struggle mightily for the kingdom of God." In 1883, they established La Croix, a daily newspaper with a circulation of half a million. La Croix pur­veyed the "most extreme journalism" ever composed by a "religious order in the history of Christendom" and on behalf of French Christendom. ⁶

At the outset of the Dreyfus Affair, the editor of La Croix, Father Bailly, stated in an editorial: "Free thought, advocate of the Jews, the Protestants, and all the enemies of the Church, stands in the dock with Zola, and the Army is forced, in spite of itself, to open fire against it." In 1899, Leo "com­pared Dreyfus to Jesus on Calvary." He required some of the crucifiers to cease editing La Croix. The Augustinians' antics continued and played into the hands of the republican government, which took them to court in 1900 on a charge of "having subsidized Nationalist candidates in elections" and had them convicted, and dissolved. ⁷

In 1901 a bill on the "Contract of Association," ostensibly concerned with the freedom of association of clubs and syndicates, was used to limit that freedom: associations containing foreigners or governed by them must seek government approval. Those religious orders and congregations that failed to gain authorization would be dissolved. An additional clause for­bade a member of an unauthorized congregation to teach: by December 1902, twelve thousand schools had been closed. Most congregations were refused permission for free association; fifty-four male congregations and eight-one female ones were dissolved. The dispersal of the religious orders began. In 1904 a new law forbade teaching by any religious congregation, illegal or legitimate. Jesuits, Dominicans, and others had to relocate their own houses of study outside of French soil, the anti-republican flame burn­ing ever the brighter in their embittered breasts.

The education minister directing these reforms was Emile Combes. A former seminarian, he was Comte redivivus and in political power. He was "a fanatical anti-Catholic who . . . had a dream of a national Church where all the curés would be like Rousseau, where Rome would have no authority but the State would direct a religiously tinged moral code. This could not be achieved without exploding Catholicism; which he wished to do." ⁸  Leo XIII had meantime been succeeded by Pius X, renowned for his handling of the modernist crisis.

The Church's Conception of Modernism: Faith, Reason, and Politics

Another angle on modernism is how it looked to the church: that is, quite simply, as heresy. At the First Vatican Council (1869-1879), the constitution Dei Filius had affirmed that the existence of God can be rationally demon­strated. Dei Filius condemned fideism, the notion that the existence of God is sheerly a matter of faith. In Aeterni Patris (1879), Leo XIII upheld Saint Thomas Aquinas as the exemplar of the Catholic mind, which elaborates the truths of reason in the light of faith. Aeterni Patris calls for a reform of "phi­losophy, in order that sacred theology may receive and assume the nature, form, and genius of a true science." ⁹  The Pope's ideal of faithful reasoning was effected in the manner of officialdom. The management of seminaries changed hands. The new Scholastics produced a diet of textbooks that were handy for training curial bureaucrats. These manuals appear to have been wanting in the way of the intellectual and spiritual formation of priests.

Neo-Scholasticism was the means through which the church articulated its own theology and by which it discharged its objections to modernism. The Scholastics pictured the Bible as a series of propositions dictated by God to Moses, the prophets, and the apostles, each divine dictate contain­ing in full the dogmas that were later to be built upon them by the Catholic Church. And so, those with a Scholastic mindset enculpated certain histo­rians for distinguishing too clearly between the original meaning of biblical documents and the dogmas that the church had read out of the Bible. Be­cause they seemed to tie the truth content of the biblical documents to the era of their production, these men were also charged with historicism. A related charge was propounding an immanentist conception of God, that is, conceiving the divine as the force driving the historical process of revela­tion forward.

Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) records the occasion upon which, "in his most majestic manner," Cardinal Richard "lift[ed] his hand impressively and said: 'You are a subjectivist!'" ¹⁰  Subjectivizing religious faith was another charge. Fideism was also a cause for indictment as a modernist. Others were con­demned for arguing that Catholic political culture must take a modern and not a mediaeval form. Loisy would be excommunicated because he was believed to be a subjectivist, a fideist, a historicist who had separated the content of the Bible from that of Christian dogma, and an immanentist. These numerous crimes amounted, in the eyes of the church, to undermin­ing the objective and supernatural basis of Christianity.

The modernist crisis could be said to be about theological ideas, like those expressed in Loisy's L'évangile et l'église, published in 1903. But Loisy was not especially fortunate in his timing. The fact that L'évangile et l'église was published when the French church was under siege from a republican government meant that church authorities conflated theological and political error. The embattled church authorities perceived their different assailants as one single monster. Politics tinged the French church's "theological" conception of modernism. Secular movements seized the opportunity to settle their own political scores by denouncing other lay people, some non-Catholic, for modernism; they were heartily thanked by the church for so doing. French modernism had its own cultural "haeccitas": what the church in France saw itself as fighting was, simultaneously, theological heresy and political error.

Catholic anti-modernism was not the condemnation of a single book, but a basic option, the decision to set one's philosophical compass against fideism, subjectivism, historicism, and political liberalism. Pius X's encycli­cal Pascendi (1907) decreed that what "We are pleased to name 'the Coun­cil of Vigilance'... be instituted without delay" in every diocese. In order to quell the storm, seasick ecclesial bureaucrats set up a new "Inquisition" that "methodically burned that Catholic spirit which was attempting . . . to make contact with the new age." The ferocious measures taken against indi­viduals suspected of modernism aroused great sympathies in some French bystanders. Gilson himself later wrote that, if the "race of denouncers and heresy hunters is not dead... the Modernist crisis was their golden age." ¹¹