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.

Gilson thought that the problems the modernists tackled were real ones, that there was something wrong with the orthodox portrayal of dogma and doctrine. So, of course, did they. A further aspect of modernism is what it meant to those who taught some variant of it. They wanted to change the theological outlook of their times, to do theology in a different way. Why? What did they see as being at fault in the late-nineteenth-century exposition of Christian doctrine? Loisy, Lucien Laberthonnière, and Baron von Hügel were each regarded in the Roman Curia as a subjectivist, but each of these men had touched upon subjectivity in answer to different questions. In order to understand what modernism was, one has to ask what questions were in the minds of each protagonist, what problem they were trying to solve, and how.

 Loisy recalled the four years given to the study of Christian doc­trine in his diocesan seminary at Châlons-sur-Marne as an era of "mental and moral torture." His first, amiably spiritual professor of philosophy was dismissed on a suspicion of liberalizing his seminarians. The "new professor, a devotee of scholasticism, introduced a textbook exempt from all compro­mise with modern philosophy." Loisy made a fist at studying the Summa Theologiae, but the outcome was unfortunate. Without having learned from the "devotee of scholasticism" that Aquinas's study of the Trinity is the contemplation of a mystery, Loisy found here only "exercises in logical sub­tlety" that "had upon me the effect of a huge logomachy."¹²

At the bidding of Abbé Escaré, the seven-year-old Étienne Gilson was en­rolled by his pious mother in the Petit Séminaire Notre Dame Des Champs, a primary school run by the Christian Brothers. Abbe Victor Thorelle took Étienne under his wing, compelled him to join the choir, and impressed upon him a devotion to Wagner and Claude Debussy.¹³

The writings of Aquinas did not percolate so far as the Petit Séminaire. Gilson left there "after seven years of studies, without having heard even once . . . the name of Saint Thomas Aquinas." Most of the clergy who had any intellectual principles shared them with their secular counterparts. The young philosopher attended Notre Dame des Champs from 1895 until 1902. He said that "I do not know today in any detail what philosophy I would have been taught if I had stayed at Notre Dame des Champs. I know enough to say with certainty that it would not have been that of Thomas Aquinas. . . . The professor of philosophy at the Petit Séminaire was called l'abbé Ehlinger, that at the Lycée was called M. Dereux, but the main difference was that one taught in a soutane and the other in a frock-coat; otherwise they said more or less the same thing. A change of professors does not change the history of French philosophy, because both taught with clarity a sort of spiritualism of which Victor Cousin would not disapprove."

In 1902, having observed that teachers have long holidays, realizing that he had no vocation to the priesthood, and surmising that he must teach in a secular Lycée, Gilson took himself off for a year-long apprenticeship in the Lycée Henri IV.¹⁴ He had freely selected secular education at just the mo­ment when most of his young compatriots were to be compelled to undergo it. He had received an education that made the neo-Thomist orthodoxy of the time alien to him.

In his seminary at Châlons-sur-Marne, Loisy had taken refuge from Saint Thomas in the study of Hebrew. Once ordained, he went to teach Old Tes­tament literature at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Loisy's doctoral thesis, The History of the Old Testament Canon (1889), earned him the odium of the crusading, anti-liberal Univers. In "The Biblical Question and the Inspira­tion of the Scriptures" Loisy denied the Mosaic authorship and the inerrant historicity of the Pentateuch. The investigation of biblical literature and ar­chaeology had taught him two things. The first was that the Bible contains historical inaccuracies. Second, by studying each biblical book in relation to its historical context, Loisy saw that there is an internal growth of the reli­gious ideas within the biblical literature.

Contemporary Scholasticism seemed to Loisy to turn a blind eye to the historical study of scripture. How could one reconcile this historical data with the theological doctrine that the scriptures contain the extra-temporal pronouncements of God? Loisy tried to do so by claiming that "the absolute notion of Biblical inspiration"¹⁵ is a Protestant, not a Catholic, tenet. A church can evolve in a way that a revealed proposition cannot. Loisy imag­ined that the idea that revelation is given in slow stages to a historical com­munity chosen by God was one to which Catholics might instinctually turn. Far from it: Loisy's writings aroused the concern of the cardinal archbishop of Paris. He departed in disgrace from the Institut Catholique just before Leo XIII issued Providentissimus (l893), which reaffirmed the divine word­ing of the scriptures.

While Adolf Harnack made use of his Chair of Theology in Berlin to define religion as a moral inspiration for individuals, a convent chaplain was composing a treatise to demonstrate that his own social and evolutionary conception of inspiration makes better sense. Loisy thought that the current state of biblical studies compelled believers to a choice between Harnack's liberal Protestantism and a Catholicism cognizant of its own historical roots. As he saw it, the choice was between reducing Christianity to a moralism that ejected Hebraic history from Christian theology, as Harnack did, or accepting a gradualist notion of inspiration and thereby retaining the Old Testament. A gradual inspiration struck him as the kosher Catholic option. This was not what most Catholic professors of theology thought. Loisy believed that they avoided the decision by extracting an ahistorical revela­tion from the scriptures, ignoring the historical conditioning of the human authors of scripture.

The Thomist seminary professors considered that their conception of rev­elation was rational. They conceived it as God-imparted propositions so as to defend the objectivity and thus the truth of divine revelation. But Loisy be­lieved that their devotion to rationality merely paralleled the rationalism of their secular contemporaries. One of Loisy's unpublished chapters claims that

the Scholastic theology derives directly from Greek rationalism; only it has introduced a modification, in supposing that it was in virtue of the Christian revelation that truth in its completeness entered the mind of man, and fur­ther that the philosophical version of revelation, that is to say, theology itself, was a precise rendering of the divine and ultimate truth. On the other hand, human reason, repulsed by theology and divorced from faith, has never left off believing in its power to solve all problems; it also . . . assumes the right to judge dogmatically concerning matters beyond its province. Nothing copies more slavishly the spirit of certain Scholastic theologians today than the spirit of the popular rationalism.¹⁶

Loisy's reason had thriven on positive facts in which his faith put down no roots. His seminaries had trained him as an empirical historian but had not shown him how to connect Loisy the empiricist with Loisy the believer. He saw the problem and was looking for a solution to it. The higher rationalism of the Scholastic professors had given the first generation of Catholic biblical critics scant means by which to relate contingent facts of history to the "logomachy" of revealed doctrine.

Following Saint Thomas to the letter, the seminary professors taught that scripture is propositionally revealed to its authors, by God. This enabled them to pinpoint the objectivity of faith: the objective data of faith reside in the revealed propositions of scripture. Once one starts conceiving the bibli­cal texts as works of their own time and their contents as developing in his­tory, where does one place the objectivity of faith? For the Scholastic ratio­nalists, Christian dogma does not need a tradition in which to grow, because it is already packed inside the box of the Bible. All that remains to be done is to lift the eternal propositions out of the box and deduce their a priori implications.

Loisy picked up Newman's Essay on Development in 1895. He read it with "enthusiasm," because it enabled him to argue that faith remains absolute, while history evolves on the level of phenomenal facts that a pos­itive scientist-historian can study. The objective datum of faith, outside and above the "empirical" texts of the Bible, remains the same, even as the bibli­cal writers develop their ideas. Newman's metaphors of "vital," biological growth gave Loisy a way out of the conceptions of tradition of the Protes­tant and Scholastic rationalists. He would contrast the "living develop­ment" of doctrine with its "purely logical elaboration."¹⁷

Harnack's The Essence of Christianity (1900) finds the timeless Gospel in an ethical teaching of love of God as Father, and of neighbor, to be practiced by individuals. It disentangles Jesus’ ethical message from its Jewish setting. Since Catholics would naturally regard this as an aberrant conception of Christianity, Loisy imagined he could use it to demonstrate that they needed an evolutionary notion of inspiration. He promptly published a section of his manuscript as L'évangile et l'église (1903). His book put itself forward as a defense of Catholicism against liberal Protestantism. Loisy could see that it would do no good to denigrate the Catholic-Thomist conception of a "timeless," prepositional Gospel. He would proceed against that target in­directly, by criticizing a liberal Protestant idea of the timeless essence of Christianity.

L'évangile et l'église attacks Harnack's "arbitrary" attempts to separate " 'what is traditional from what is personal, the kernel from the bark, in the preaching of Jesus about the kingdom of God.'" Harnack avowed that "the spirit and his God are the whole content of the Gospel." But, says Loisy, the Gospel "does not have that individual . . . coloration." Rather, the Gospel of the Kingdom was informed by the dynamism that would evolve into the Catholic Church: "if there was one thing that was completely alien" to Jesus's "authentic teaching," he writes, "it is the idea of an invisi­ble society, formed . . . by those who have faith in their heart in the good­ness of God . . . . Jesus' Gospel already had the rudiments of social organiza­tion, and that kingdom had already assumed the form of a society. Jesus announced the kingdom, and it was the Church which came."¹⁸

Harnack was looking behind the Gospels for Jesus who makes sense to intelligent moderns; but by the turn of the century, such Protestant ration­alism was coming under fire. In The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1900), Albert Schweitzer argued that Jesus taught no moral message that would seem rational to a twentieth-century Protestant theology professor. Jesus was, he said, an apocalyptic visionary who died disappointed of his Father and of the Kingdom he preached. Schweitzer's historical idea of Jesus as an apocalyptic visionary was intended to make it impossible to envisage Jesus as Harnack's rational moralist. Where Harnack offered a rational message that is loosely connected to the historical Jesus, Schweitzer provided a his­torically grounded picture of Jesus, in which it is irrational for a modern person to believe.

Loisy saw that Harnack's theology could be set up as a stalking horse for any ahistorical system, like the Scholastic version of revelation. Loisy thought that one could use Schweitzer's conclusions against Harnack. He tried to use Schweitzer to prove that ahistorical rationalism does not fit Catholic faith. Loisy was deploying the fact that Schweitzer found the historical Jesus irrational to show that Harnack's rationalist moralism is insufficient to grasp­ing the meaning of Jesus. Schweitzer himself believed, however, that Jesus's apocalypticism makes him "a stranger and an enigma to our times" and that Jesus died disappointed of his kingdom. Loisy's contention is that it takes faith, not reason, to believe in Christ's Church. For faith, Loisy said, "if the idea of the heavenly kingdom is real, the Gospel is divine and God reveals himself in Christ." Conversely, for "the logic of reason, if the idea of the kingdom is inconsistent, the Gospel fails as a divine revelation, Jesus is only a pious man who . . . died the victim of an error."¹⁹

The abbe-historian was playing a dangerous game. His Catholic critics suspected him of fideism, that is, of making reason and faith mutually exclu­sive. Loisy seemed to his critics to be denying that there is objective, exter­nal, historical evidence for Christian belief. They thought he was disjoining what empirical research knows about biblical history from what faith believes about it. They read Loisy as claiming that what faith believes about Jesus is not to be derived from the empirical facts of Jesus's life.

The Holy Office of the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books swiftly went to work. Pius X called the odious object "religious neo-reformism," that is, neo-Protestantism; it was first termed modernism in an admonitory pastoral letter issued by the bishops of North Italy.²⁰ By December 1903, five of Loisy's books, including L'évangile et l'église, had been placed on the Index.

Loisy himself "did not suspect" any problem in treating history on the analogy of physical science.²¹ For him, a historical fact was just the "quan­titative" datum. Abbe Lucien Laberthonnière tried to ease the dilemma by examining the difference between a "quantitative," or positive, fact and one that is qualitatively significant for faith. The book in which Laberthon­niere reapportions the balance between faith and facticity in the Bible, Le réalisme chrétien et l'idéalisme grec (1904), was set on the Index in 1906. Laberthonniere's endeavor to distinguish between the quantitative histori­cal fact and the fact that has the quality of faith was seen to subjectivize faith, that is, to displace faith from external facts and relocate it in believers. In the battlefield of the modernist crisis, any attempt to discuss the rela­tionship of faith and history brought one under fire. The relationship be­tween faith and facticity was at issue, and it had become impossible to dis­cuss it.

Those who condemned Laberthonniere believed that historical facts be­long among the (nontheological) proofs of faith, like proofs of the existence of God. On no account, then, may one describe the facts to which the Bible refers as data of faith, because one thereby eliminates their externality. Here externality means having the quality of "rational—proof to anyone, believer or not." This is why Laberthonniere's Le réalisme chrétien et l'idéalisme grec fell foul of the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books. Laberthonniere was believed to be subjectivizing the historical proofs, by making them data of faith rather than of reason.

Gilson was well acquainted with Abbe Laberthonniere and with his book. So was Loisy, who regarded it as an exercise in "Protestant illuminism." If something was remiss in Loisy's theological education, it was not the imme­diate consequence of the anti-modernist campaign to set it right. "The priests whom we knew personally because they mixed in the world of phi­losophers and whose religious zeal we admired," said Gilson, "found them­selves sooner or later disavowed by the Church, while those who triumphed over them in the name of orthodoxy, proclaimed a philosophy whose lan­guage was no longer of our time."²²

The mentality of the first decade of the twentieth century was positivist. When Thomists defined revelation, they sounded rather positivistic: they made eternity sound static, the impartation of revelation look like the me­chanical impartation of propositions, and the eliciting of dogma from scrip­ture like the progression of a syllogism. In order to experience sympathy for Loisy, one would have had to possess a more empirical spirit than did the contemporary Scholastics. When biblical scholars studied the biblical history, they used empiricist criteria. When Loisy tried to show that Catholic faith grows, he used an empirical metaphor, the growth of a physical organ­ism. Laberthonniere saw that Loisy's own idea of temporal growth was quantitative, not qualitative. So Loisy himself ended up extricating faith from history. In France, the modernist crisis was thus a violent dialogue of the deaf, among people who shared the same cultural mentality. Was there any other way to picture temporality and eternity, any way of altering the positivist paradigm?

That is how one young French Catholic philosopher experienced the problem of modernism. Gilson sensed that Loisy's question was genuine and had gone unanswered by authority. Ecclesial authority had said "no" rightly enough, but its "yes" was somewhat less well prepared. Moreover, was the real problem of the time a cognitive one, a need to find a new theory of knowledge, or was it a metaphysical one, a need to find another way of conceiving what is actually there?

Until the church had driven Loisy from her fold, he was too Catholic to stand outside it and ask himself if the story it told was for real. He worked under two disadvantages: he was no philosopher, and he suffered the limi­tations of a narrowly cultural Catholic perspective. Henri Bergson had nei­ther of these drawbacks. He was a genuine philosopher and a secularized Jew. It was he, and not Loisy himself, who taught Gilson how to begin to think through the problems that Loisy had raised. When Gilson formally matriculated at the Sorbonne in 1904, he had already been auditing the classes of brilliant lecturers such as Bergson and Lucien Levy-Bruhl for sev­eral years past.

Henri Bergson: Epistemologist Intuition or Musical Metaphysics?

In 1902 two young romantics who had vowed to commit suicide if materialism proved to be true were rescued from this fate by Charles Peguy's insistence that they go to hear Henri Bergson lecture at the College de France. A generation of Catholics, lay people and seminarians, who had been enjoined to avoid fideism, and a multitude of the churchless, who had been repelled by the church's rationalism, packed the lecture theater to the doors to hear Bergson discourse. Raïssa Oumancoff and Jacques Maritain heard Bergson say that intuition makes metaphysics possible.

In his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Bergson argued that positivism looks good so long as we visualize reality. When we portray the real as a series of points in space we can construct a geometry of reality, in which every cosmic point is predetermined. Conversely, when we sound out our experience, we discover an area of pure duration, a condensed time within time, which is free. Bergson often described this creative freedom by analogy to the spontaneity of music. "Pure duration," he said, "is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live . . . [our ego now ] forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting . . . into one another . . . . [E]ven if these notes succeed one another, yet we per­ceive them in one another . . . . We can thus conceive of succession... as a mutual penetration, an interconnection and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought."²³

Bergson considered that "the essence of the message which it was his mis­sion to deliver"²⁴ was an epistemic contrast between a geometric intellect, unable "to comprehend life,"²⁵ and an intuition which hears the organic movement of life. This is how Jacques Maritain understood him.

For those who had crossed the threshold into the seminary, Bergson of­fered a novel style by which to convey the truths of faith, softening the lines effected by the Scholastic educational bureaucracy. One such was the young Sulpician Lucien Paulet, a close friend of Gilson, who was teaching in the Grand Seminary at Issy. Étienne and Père Lucien went to Bergson's lectures together and spent hours in debate upon the professor's meaning.

Gilson was not primarily attentive to what Bergson was saying about epistemology. He went to the College de France readied for a philosophical tone poem: "To understand by what experience many people acceded to meta­physics, between 1900 and 1914," he writes, one must think of "Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner. Disciples of Bergson, . . . their lives were passed under a musical enchantment in which they were the . . . passionately complicit victims. Some of them still remember, as unforgettable events, two revelations . . . in 1900, La damoiselle élue, conducted by Taffanel, and the prelude of Tristan [and Isolde] directed by Gustave Mahler. Like the first reading of the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, these dazzling discoveries inflected the curve of a life-time. We came to meta­physics already heavy with all the music of the world, and drunk with that of our time."²⁶ A new metaphysical paradigm could be drawn out of this experience of reality as music.

In the overture to Creative Evolution, Bergson asks, "What is the precise meaning of the word 'exist'?" Existence is found to be the structuring im­petus of time. At the bottom of reality, and propelling it forward, is "pure duration," a continuous and unitary flow of motion. Bergson likens the evolution of the different species to "a musical theme" that had "been transposed . . . into a certain number of tones and on which, still the whole theme, different variations had been played." The underlying order of reality, he claims, is not geometric, spatial, and predetermined, but temporal, as "in a symphony of Beethoven, which is genius, originality, and therefore unforeseeability itself." Bergsonian time is not clocked but experienced. He argued that our consciousness knows it by "twisting on itself."²⁷

But for Gilson, since the "universe" that Bergson "proposed for our reflection was fluid, moving and continuous, like that of music," those of "us, who knew from our daily experience how a theme contains its develop­ment, no twisting in on ourselves was necessary to attain a mobile continu­ity too pure for spatial partition. Through music, we were already in it, like fish in the sea."²⁸ Gilson understood Bergson to be talking, not about how we know what is there, but about the musically ordered structure of reality.