It is sometimes said that Vatican II committed itself to the Modernist view that revelation is an inner experience. For example, one commentator has claimed:
The modernist doctrine of revelation by means of a personalistic intimate experience is… gnostic. And this concept of revelation… was admitted in the Vatican II. (“Jean Guitton and the Modernism of the II Vatican Council”)
Is that an accurate view?
1. The Modernist Theory of Revelation
An example of Modernist ideas about revelation can be found in Chapter 11 of George Tyrrell’s 1907 book Through Scylla and Charybdis (TSAC). We know that Tyrrell was a Modernist because he was explicitly cited as a Modernist on the floor of the Vatican II debates. (See “The Ghost of Modernism.”)
Tyrrell’s ideas of revelation can be seen in the following comments:
Revelation is not statement, but experience. (TSAC p. 285)
[It is a] … psychological experience. (TSAC p. 303)
Conscience … is revelational. (TSAC p. 277)
Revelation [involves a] … sentiment of Conscience. (TSAC p. 283)
Those comments show that Tyrrell viewed revelation as a subjective (psychological) experience which occurs within people’s inner conscience. He thought that people accessed revelation by engaging their feelings (sentiments) about religion, not by engaging their minds to consider statements (i.e., doctrines).
Another reason for thinking that Tyrrell’s comments are Modernist, is that they are similar to what Pope Pius X described as Modernism in his 1907 document Pascendi Dominici Gregis. He said:
They make consciousness and revelation synonymous. (Pascendi 8)
[They say that]… in the religious sentiment… [there is] a kind of intuition of the heart which puts man in immediate contact with the very reality of God… It is this experience which… makes… [a person] properly and truly a believer. (Pascendi 14)
Those descriptions of a Modernist theory of revelation are important because they have a very significant impact on how we think about Christianity and its purpose. They result in views such as these:
The end of… [revelation]… must be… to evoke the same spiritual phenomenon in others, to bring them to a like relation to the Eternal. (TSAC p. 303)
Revelation cannot be put into us from outside; it can be occasioned, but it cannot be caused, by instruction. (TSAC p. 306)
By the Modernists, tradition is understood as a communication to others,… of an original experience… which acts… to stimulate the religious sentiment… and to produce the experience. (Pascendi 15)
To sum up: the Modernists thought that revelation consisted of feelings (or experiences) about God. So the purpose of Christianity is to try and kindle inside modern Christians, experiences which are as similar as possible to the original experiences which Jesus’ disciples had.
2. The Traditional View of Revelation
Prior to Modernism the Church’s traditional theory of revelation viewed it as God’s verbal communication to humanity. God’s word(s) could be found in Scripture, in interpretations of Scripture (dogmas) and in natural theology. (See Pascendi 6.) The information contained in God’s word constituted revelation and it was often referred to as a “deposit of faith.” The purpose of the Church was to preach God’s word (i.e., to communicate the deposit of faith) so that people could believe and act appropriately in order to achieve salvation.
The implications of the traditional view are made clear in the 1910 Anti-Modernist Oath, as that oath was designed intentionally to reject the Modernist view. It states:
I… accept each and every definition that has been… declared by the… teaching authority of the Church, especially th[e]… principal truths… (Oath Against Modernism)
I also condemn every error according to which, in place of the divine deposit… there is put a… product of a human conscience… (Oath Against Modernism)
What emerges from the Oath is a clear distinction between traditional Christianity as a religion which contains a deposit of beliefs and truths, contrasted with Modernism as a religion of feelings and conscious experiences. It was that Modernist idea which Pope John XXIII described in 1961, when he said:
The most fundamental modern error is that of imagining that man’s natural sense of religion is nothing more than the outcome of feeling or fantasy. (Mater et Magistra 214)
Although there is indeed a clear difference between Modernism (section 1) and the Church’s traditional faith (above), if we try to express the difference by focusing on the idea of “experience,” then a number of problems begin to arise…
3. Spiritual Experiences
The first problem involves spiritual experience.
Modernists appealed to a revelation of inner experiences, which they sometimes described as God communicating in their hearts.
But traditional spirituality also recognized that God could communicate in people’s hearts. For example, St. Benedict of Nursia (d. 547) opened his monastic rule by stating:
Listen…, and incline the ear of your heart. (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue)
What is the “ear of the heart?” It has been explained in different ways over the centuries, and one of those ways is that it might include an aspect of inner experiential illumination, or intuitive grasp of God and God’s word. (See “Benedictine Spirituality III: The Ear of Your Heart.”) Far from it being an odd or peculiar idea, illumination is a relatively common theme in spirituality and mysticism.
This means that it is not surprising to find mystics claiming that they have had encounters with God that produced intense subjective inner spiritual experiences which they struggle to convey in objective external verbal statements. For example, in her autobiography St. Teresa of Avila (d. 1582) says:
It is now some five or six years, I believe, since our Lord raised me to this state of prayer… and I never understood it, and never could explain it. (The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, Chap 16.2)
The Church’s saints and mystics were not Modernist heretics when they talked of experiencing God with inexpressible inner feelings. So, it is important not to simplistically equate the spirituality of religious experiencing with a Modernist view of revelation as experience, otherwise it can inadvertently confuse Modernism with mysticism.
4. Philosophical Experience
Another problem with describing Modernism in terms of subjective experiences can arise because philosophers often describe perception and sensing as involving experience. For example, if a person sees a dog, then that person experiences the dog.
We can see that kind of thinking in St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), who said:
We have experience [experientia] when we know… objects through the senses. (Summa Theologiae I, Q.54, A.5)
Experience is a relatively small feature in the philosophy of Aquinas’ era. Philosophical interest in the role of experience grew from the Enlightenment era when philosophers began to argue about whether people objectively experience the external world (Direct Realism) or whether people subjectively experience internal images of the external world (Representationalism).
Those issues fed into the Philosophical Phenomenology which featured in the Transcendental Thomism of the first half of the twentieth century. Thinkers as diverse as Karol Wojtyla (the future Pope John Paul II) and Karl Rahner found themselves asking questions about the relationship of human subjective experience to divine revelation.
The implications are that there is an appropriate set of philosophical questions about human experiences. And those questions have unavoidable implications for theological ideas of revelation, as people acquire revelation through perceptual experiences (such as hearing preaching).
So, if there is a simplistic equating of Modernism with experiencing revelation, then that has the potential to undermine the philosophical basis of the Church’s theology of how revelation is transmitted.
5. Vatican II on ‘Experience’
One of the important issues discussed at Vatican II (1962–65) was how to understand the right concept of “experience” (sections 3 and 4) without accidentally veering into the Modernist idea of it (section 1).
Across the documents of Vatican II, the verb and noun forms of the word “experience” were used 49 times. (See “Magisterial Teaching on Experience in the Twentieth Century.”) The texts show that the Council situated the concept of experience in the midst of the Church’s wider teaching on faith and reason, and that it gave examples of the spiritual and philosophical ideas of “experience.”
A) Faith and Reason
Vatican I (1870) said that faith and reason should be in harmony. Vatican II echoes that teaching by insisting that experience (of reasoning) has to be in harmony with the revelation (of faith). The Council said:
What divine revelation makes known to us agrees with experience. (Gaudium et Spes 13)
The Church… cannot cease repudiating… those poisonous doctrines and actions which contradict reason and the common experience of humanity. (Gaudium et Spes 21)
B) Philosophical Experience
The Council said:
The Church guards the heritage of God’s word and draws from it moral and religious principles… as… she desires to add the light of revealed truth to mankind’s store of experience. (Gaudium et Spes 33)
In this text Vatican II is using the word “experience” in the most general philosophical sense, to refer to any kind of learning that takes place.
We can see that broad sense again when the Council identifies the two ways of human sensory perception in which the disciples learned from hearing and seeing Jesus’ words and actions:
He so manifested Himself through words and deeds… that Israel came to know by experience the ways of God with men. (Dei Verbum 14)
C) Spiritual Experience
Sometimes Vatican II seemed to refer to spiritual experiences, as in the following text where it is describing the Church’s (mystical) experiencing of heavenly realities:
The Church… seeks and experiences those things which are above, where Christ is seated at the right-hand of God. (Lumen Gentium 6)
In another text the Council referred to what the disciples learned from spiritual prompting:
The Apostles… handed on what they had received from the lips of Christ, from living with Him, and from… what they had learned through the prompting of the Holy Spirit. (Dei Verbum 7)
6. Vatican II on Revelation
One of the most significant comments which Vatican II made about revelation and experience occurs in Dei Verbum. The text in full, reads as follows:
For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke, 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience. (Dei Verbum 8)
Those who would accuse Vatican II of the Modernist heresy, typically interpret that text as if it inserted the extra words below (in bold capitals) at the end of the text.
For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke, 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience IN FURTHER REVELATION FROM GOD. (Dei Verbum 8, with additions in bold)
The Modernists said that revelation occurs in experience (see section 1). So, for Vatican II to be promoting the Modernist idea, it would have to be saying that the growth in understanding which occurs in experience is part of God’s revelation. That Modernist idea is rendered in the interpretation immediately above, in the words in bold which link experience with revelation.
But the authentic Vatican II text (above) does not contain anything equivalent to the words in bold capitals above.
Vatican II said that there is a growth in understanding of what has been handed down. It is revelation which has been handed down. The growth in understanding occurs after revelation has been handed down, and it is that later growth in understanding which is where there is an experience occurring. Whether the later experience involves some spiritual experience such as divine illumination (section 3), or philosophical experience such as reasoning to acquire further learning about revelation (section 4) is not specified.
The Vatican II text is not Modernist because the human experiences which are a growth in understanding occur AFTER revelation, and those experiences help people to interpret revelation. That is not the Modernist theory which equated human experiences as occurring SIMULTANEOUSLY with revelation itself.
7. Conclusion
We began with the suggestion that Vatican II’s views of experience have adopted the Modernist view of revelation occurring in subjective experience. It should be clear by now that that is an inaccurate reading of Vatican II.
To read Vatican II as adopting the Modernist view effectively involves inserting words into the text of what Vatican II actually said in Dei Verbum. (See section 6.)
If we read the text of Vatican II as it is, then it is simply a reiteration of the traditional Church teaching (section 2), albeit a reiteration which refers to experience in order to recognize the relevance of the concept of experience, as it has arisen in spirituality (section 3) and philosophy (section 4).
