Are the 12 Condemned Propositions of 1924 Still Relevant? – Part 1

On December 1, 1924 the Vatican condemned twelve propositions relating to the “Philosophy of Action.” Looking at the propositions 100 years later, a question arises: do they have any continuing relevance?

These twelve propositions are relatively unknown today. I owe an awareness of their existence to a mention of them in Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s 1946 article: “Where is the New Theology Leading Us?”

The original text of the 1924 document of condemnation has been reproduced in Latin and English on this webpage. The English translation of the condemned propositions in this piece is provided by myself, and so it is accompanied with the original Latin.

The following sections will go through each proposition and look at some of the theological issues which caused the propositions to be condemned. To assess whether the propositions have any ongoing relevance, we will look to see if the issues raised in 1924 were still featuring in Vatican documents at the end of the twentieth century.

Introduction

The 1924 condemnation targeted the “Philosophy of Action.” It does not condemn any individuals by name. But the most well-known proponent of a Philosophy of Action, in the early twentieth century, was Maurice Blondel (d. 1949). It was no coincidence that Blondel’s 1893 book was called Action.

The 1924 condemnation of a Philosophy of Action raises questions about whether, and to what extent, Blondel himself was being targeted. It is difficult to answer that question without first going through the condemned propositions and clarifying what ideas were specifically being condemned. It is then a further question as to whether Blondel himself subscribed to what was being condemned.

The wider context of the 1924 condemnations was provided by the intellectual systems of the nineteenth century, especially those of Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) and Georg Hegel (d. 1831). They dominated (secular) European philosophy, and they spurred an enormous amount of academic study. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they were also raising the question in some minds, about whether there was more to life than just the intellectualizing logic of Kantian and Hegelian argument.

That was one of the questions which the Philosophy of Action tried to address. It called upon people to look within themselves and to find a more spiritual meaning of life from their personal actions and from their subjective commitments. Understood in this way, the Philosophy of Action was a forerunner of what would later be known as Existentialism.

One of the distinguishing features of the Philosophy of Action is that it claimed that human life and thought did not make sense, unless it pointed beyond itself to the infinite. That meant that the Philosophy of Action seemed to imply (or presuppose) the existence of God. This made it extremely controversial within French secular philosophy. As a result, Blondel was refused an academic post as a philosophy teacher for two years, for effectively daring to “contaminate” academic philosophy with religion.

Although Blondel was a Catholic, his philosophy was also controversial within the Catholic Church. In the early twentieth century Thomist Philosophy reigned supreme. The 1917 Code of Canon Law even required it as an official methodology. (See Canon 1366.) The Philosophy of Action takes a very different philosophical approach than Thomism, so it was frequently criticized by Thomists.

This means that it is not entirely surprising that the Philosophy of Action was eventually the subject of a condemnation. However, the fact that the Philosophy of Action was named in the 1924 condemnation does not mean that the condemned propositions accurately understood or represented what the Philosophy of Action was really trying to say. Whether what was condemned as the Philosophy of Action was actually what Blondel taught, as the Philosophy of Action, is an important question which we will return to in the conclusion.

Proposition 1: Concepts Cannot Reliably Represent Reality

This condemned proposition expressed a version of Nominalism. Influenced by the ideas of Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), it expressed a negative view about what human concepts and language could achieve. Kant had argued that humans can only know the (phenomenological) appearances of things. He insisted that they can never know the (noumenal) nature of reality itself. That meant that human concepts and language can only ever contain provisional and surface level information about reality.

Those kinds of views had disastrous implications for the Church’s creeds and dogmas. If concepts can only contain provisional information, then they will need to be constantly updated. That means that it is impossible for there to be unchangeable dogmas. And it is also impossible for anyone to ever have certainty regarding the content of dogmas. The Nicene Creed might be true this week, but who knows whether it will need reinterpreting or updating by next week.

When the Vatican condemned the proposition above, it was repeating an earlier 1907 condemnation that:

the concepts of Christian doctrine… [need to be] re-adjusted. (Lamentabili 64)

After the 1924 condemnation, similar issues about the limitations of concepts re-erupted in the 1940s, when the Nouvelle Théologie was seeking new ways of expressing traditional concepts. Pius XII re-condemned that mentality in 1950 when he stated:

They hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions… Wherefore they…consider it… necessary, that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones. (Humani Generis 15)

In 1965 Vatican II took the opportunity to re-reject the Kantian background to those kinds of ideas, by insisting that:

[Human] intelligence is not confined to observable data alone, but can with genuine certitude attain to reality itself as knowable. (Gaudium et Spes 15)

This issue was still topical enough in 1998 for Pope John Paul II to revisit it. Commenting on the role of concepts in theological reasoning, he insisted that:

certain basic concepts retain their universal epistemological value and thus retain the truth of the propositions in which they are expressed. (Fides et Ratio 96)

Proposition 2: Reasoning Is Not Reliable

The background to this condemned proposition is a negativity about the capability of human reasoning. Historically that negativity has taken both a philosophical form and a theological form.

Philosophical limitations typically arose within strong philosophies of voluntarism. We can see a version of this in René Descartes’ (d. 1650) insistence that God can will the logically impossible. If that were so, then it would mean that humans cannot use logic to reason to any reliable conclusions about God or reality.

Theological limitations to human reasoning typically arose when theologians stressed a total depravity of human nature. We can see ideas like that in Reformation thinkers, such as John Calvin (d. 1564), who argued for the superiority of Scripture by stressing that depraved human minds could not (on their own) reason reliably about God or reality.

Another version of negativity appeared in the nineteenth-century Catholic Traditionalism of Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821) and Félicité Robert de Lamennais (d. 1854). They essentially argued that reasoning was redundant in religious matters, as there is Revelation and the Church to tell people what they needed to know.

Negativities about human reasoning tend to drift into theologies of fideism, which turn religion into a matter of subjective feelings. The problem with a religion of feelings is that people’s feelings change. This week people might “feel” that Jesus is God, but perhaps next week they will feel differently? The result of fideistic negativity about reasoning is that it ends up undermining the possibility of there being immutable dogmas and unchangeable creeds.

In 1870 Vatican I rejected fideism (Dei Filius 4). That meant that Catholic thinkers ceased to explicitly propose or support fideism. What they did instead was to espouse a more nebulous negativity about human reasoning. It is that looser negativity which this condemned proposition is targeting and rejecting in 1924.

Issues with fideism and the disparagement of human reason have continued throughout the twentieth century. In 1950 Pope Pius XII said:

It is a matter of regret that not a few of these [theologians], the more firmly they accept the word of God, so much the more do they diminish the value of human reason. (Humani Generis 8)

Writing in 1998 Pope John Paul II also returned to this issue. He noted that there was a “resurgence” of negativity about reasoning and that it had led to a new type of fideism which was expressing itself as a

“biblicism” which tends to make the reading and exegesis of Sacred Scripture the sole criterion of truth. (Fides et Ratio 55)

If the reading of the Biblical text is the only criterion of truth, then theological reasoning and authoritative interpretation of Scripture are irrelevant. This has the consequence that people can end up believing that the Biblical text says whatever they (currently) happen to feel that it means.

Proposition 3: Propositions Cannot Be Immutably True

In the background of this condemned proposition is a view known as (philosophical or theological) evolutionism. Linked to ideas of Georg Hegel (d. 1831), evolutionism was a perspective that everything is in a state of constant flux and change. It viewed reality as evolving towards an eventual future state of perfection (which Teilhard de Chardin (d. 1955) called an Omega Point).

The theological problem with that view is that it meant that there could not be any immutable dogmas or unchangeable creeds. In evolutionism, immutable perfection is always a future hope, and never a present reality.

The wording of this condemned proposition queried the immutable truth of “abstract propositions.” This is probably because early-twentieth-century discussion of this issue often cited abstract theological claims, such as the Council of Chalcedon’s teaching, in 451, that Jesus has two natures. Theologians asked whether claims like that could have a genuine immutable truth, or should they be considered as culturally conditioned perspectives, which had to evolve and change in the more enlightened modern era?

The issues raised by this proposition were not new. In the 1907 Modernist crisis, the following claim had been condemned:

Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him. (Lamentabili 58)

The rejection of immutable truth has continued to be queried throughout the twentieth century. It was still an issue in 1998 when Pope John Paul II rejected what he called “Postmodernist” philosophy, which he described as claiming that:

The time of certainties is irrevocably past… [because] everything is provisional and ephemeral. (Fides et Ratio 91)

Proposition 4: Truth Can Only Be Grasped Fully Through Action

In the background of this condemned proposition was a Scholastic theory which held that the mind grasps an impression of reality via its apprehensive power. It also held that people achieved truth when they correctly judged that the impression within their minds corresponded to how reality actually is.

This condemned proposition was not rejecting that Scholastic view. It was asserting that there is another aspect of truth which needs to be considered. It insisted that people can only achieve and possess truth (in its full sense) when truth exists in their wider human actions, as well as in their intellectual acts.

That kind of view could be just the common sense observation that truth requires an alignment between thoughts, words and actions.

But it could also be a theological version of Pragmatism (or Instrumentalism or Operationalism) which tried to reduce religious truths to their practical implications. We can see those kinds of ideas in Édouard Le Roy’s What Is A Dogma? (1918). In that book he suggested that the meaning and truth of the claim that “God is a person” can be reduced to how that claim functions in the practical actions of a believer’s life.

The problem with those kinds of pragmatic approaches is that they inevitably collapse into versions of relativism. This is because people’s lives inevitably vary from culture to culture and from age to age. If the variability of lives impacts upon the truth of religious claims, then how can any dogmas be immutably true?

Concerns about the relativistic implications of dogmatic pragmatism led to its rejection in 1907, when Pope Pius X condemned the claim that:

The dogmas of the Faith are to be held only according to their practical sense; that is to say, as preceptive norms of conduct and not as norms of believing. (Lamentabili 26)

The attempt to link truth to practical actions continued after the 1924 condemnation. It reappeared in 1960s versions of Situation Ethics, when the practicalities of specific contexts contributed to determining the truth of the ethical principles which should be applied in those situations. The adequacy of that approach was rejected by Pope John Paul II in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (paragraph 59).

Writing in 1998 Pope John Paul II clearly felt that the wider issues of dogmatic pragmatism were still topical enough to warrant the following reminder of their inadequacy:

The dogmatic pragmatism of the early years of this century, which viewed the truths of faith as nothing more than rules of conduct, has already been refuted and rejected… [It] leads only to an approach which is inadequate, reductive and superficial. (Fides et Ratio 97)

To be continued in:

Are the 12 Condemned Propositions of 1924 Still Relevant? – Part Two