There is a view that Vatican II (1965) was a theological catastrophe. This view sees it as a capitulation to Modernism, sinking the Church into heretical error.
There is an opposite view which sees the conflict between Modernists and Anti-Modernists as the real catastrophe. Both were veering theology into heresies, but Vatican II intervened and saved the Church.
Which of these views is right?
To explore this question, we need to understand the context of Modernism.
1. Rationalism: Faith OR Reason
Vatican I (1870) declared that “there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason,” since God is responsible for both (Dei Filius, 4.5). So Catholics believe in a synthesis of Faith AND Reason which leads to a single combined truth.
During the nineteenth century, Rationalists were trying to separate these concepts.
The Rationalists insisted that faith was “irrational.” They argued that history disproved the Bible, and Christian claims about doctrine. They said that it was therefore irrational to believe in miracles like the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection.
Rationalists tried to force Christians to choose between Faith OR Reason. Christians could have an irrational superstitious faith OR they could have a rational demythologized set of beliefs. But they couldn’t have both.
2. Romanticism: Faith DESPITE Reason
A (Protestant) response to Rationalism was Romanticism. The Rationalists insisted that people could not (rationally) hold “Faith AND Reason” in their minds. So Romanticism moved faith out of the mind, into the emotions. Faith became a feeling.
This made Rationalism irrelevant. When a Rationalist said that the Resurrection was irrational, the Romanticist could reply, “Yes, it might be irrational, but I can still feel it is true. So it is true for me.”
This approach leads to a “double-truth” theory. Rationalism has one truth (e.g., the Resurrection is not true) but Faith has a second truth, which is a feeling in the heart (e.g., the Resurrection is true).
If the Resurrection is simultaneously true (in the heart) and not-true (in the mind), then Faith is contradictory. Romanticism solves the problem of Rationalism’s choice between Faith OR Reason, by creating an irrational Faith DESPITE Reason.
Faith DESPITE Reason is Fideism, which is irreconcilable with Vatican I’s vision of Faith AND Reason.
3. Modernism: A Defense of Catholicism
Modernism was a Catholic attempt to solve the problem of Rationalism by avoiding the mistake of Romanticism.
It is described in Pope St. Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), and its core tenets can be summed up with three claims:
- God’s Revelation occurs in people’s consciousness
- Consciousness is constantly developing, so nothing is absolute
- Each person’s consciousness therefore recognizes what is true (for them).
The first claim is influenced by Romanticism. It rejects the idea of a public Revelation in Scripture or Tradition, so religion becomes a private experience inside each person. This insulates Faith against Rationalism’s use of evidence to attack it.
The second claim is influenced by Rationalism’s discoveries in history, archaeology, and biblical studies. As new discoveries kept occurring, Modernists thought that even doctrines like the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth might be (rationally) disproved one day. So, there cannot be any dogmatic truths. This protects Faith against Romanticism’s Fideistic double truths.
The third claim is the consequence that each person must make up their own version of religion. They can still use the language of the creeds and dogmas, but it must all be reinterpreted into something that people find reasonable “to them.”
Modernism was a clever attempt to defend Catholicism against Rationalism and Romanticism. But it was like a theological nuclear weapon. It destroyed the enemies of Rationalism and Romanticism, but it also devastated the Catholicism which it was meant to defend.
The Vatican was horrified by Modernism. Pope Pius X called it the “synthesis of all heresies” (Pascendi, 39). This is because it made religion an entirely subjective matter, and heresies always end up with people deciding what is “true for them,” preferring a subjective personal opinion to the judgement of the Church.
4. Catholic Anti-Modernism
When the Vatican declared war on Modernism in 1907, it treated it as a type of Rationalism. The Vatican knew that the central issue was the unity of Faith AND Reason. It could not accept Rationalism’s Faith OR Reason, and it could not accept Romanticism’s Faith DESPITE Reason.
So the Church turned to St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), as his Thomism was one of the Church’s best theological ways of dealing with the problem of Faith AND Reason.
This was a good strategy for dealing with Romanticism. But it didn’t deal with Rationalism’s use of evidence. Evidence needs to be rebutted if Faith is to be rational.
The Modernists kept talking about evidence, because they understood the need to rebut it. But the more the Modernists mentioned “evidence,” the more the Vatican tried to steer Catholics away from it, into the safe theology of Thomism.
When Catholics did turn to historical studies, such as the Nouvelle Théologie movement of the 1940s, the Anti-Modernists accused them of being Modernists.
This was a disastrous situation for Catholic theology. By ignoring evidential issues, the Anti-Modernists were at risk of turning Catholic theology into a kind of Fideism. They just insisted that when Reason (evidence) disagrees with Faith, then it MUST be wrong, even if they didn’t have the evidence to justify that conclusion.
This sounds perilously like “Faith DESPITE Reason,” which is the Fideism that is incompatible with Vatican I’s vision for Catholic Theology.
We can see the problem more clearly by looking at the example of the Problem of the Pastoral Epistles.
5. The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles
There are 13 Pauline Epistles in the New Testament. These letters say that St. Paul is the author. So there is a sense in which the Bible teaches that St. Paul wrote 13 letters. The Church Fathers also say it, so St. Paul’s authorship can also be viewed as part of the Sacred Tradition of the Church.
But there is a problem. The science of textual analysis raises doubts that St. Paul wrote all 13 letters. The evidence of textual analysis suggests that the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus) may have been written by someone else.
When this was put to the Church in 1913 the Vatican (Biblical Commission) insisted that Catholics could not doubt that St. Paul wrote the Pastoral Epistles. It was a theological fact because it is stated by Scripture and Tradition.
Yet, textual analysis is a valid science. It has enabled scholars to clarify the authenticity of plays attributed to Shakespeare. It has been used in legal contexts to identify forgeries. It is even used by Church scholars to distinguish between authentic and doubtful works of Thomas Aquinas.
How can it be the case that textual analysis can be trusted to give information in every textual context, apart from on the question of whether St. Paul wrote the Pauline Epistles. This led Modernists to argue that it looks “irrational” to insist that the Pauline epistles are a unique exception to the science of textual analysis.
Yet the Anti-Modernists ignored the irrational appearance of outcomes like this. They just insisted that Scripture and Tradition state that St. Paul wrote all 13 letters, so it must be true DESPITE all evidence to the contrary.
If the Pauline authorship is a matter of Faith, DESPITE evidence, then the Anti-Modernists are at risk of becoming Fideists. It is not Faith AND Reason, so they are effectively driving the Church into a view condemned by Vatican I.
On the eve of Vatican II, the Church was in a potentially perilous theological situation. Modernists fought against the Fideism of the Anti-Modernists, and the Anti-Modernists fought against the Rationalism of the Modernists.
Both sides were making some valid points, but extremists on both sides were going too far and risking driving the Church into positions already rejected by Vatican I as heresy.
There was no obvious solution on the horizon. Then Vatican II happened.
6. Vatican II’s Solution
One of the little understood achievements of Vatican II is that it solved the problem caused by Modernists and Anti-Modernists. It got Catholic theology back onto its (Thomist) synthesis with a harmony of Faith AND Reason.
It achieved this outcome in a surprising way. It refused to talk about Modernism, so it avoided reigniting entrenched positions. Instead, it focused upon the factors which were the causes of Modernism and Anti-Modernism. It discussed Faith and Reason by examining the Church’s relation to the modern world.
In doing so, the Council clearly rejected Modernism. For example, Dei Verbum (1965) insists that there is an objective Revelation in Scripture, and its truth can only be authoritatively determined by the Church (Dei Verbum, 12).
The Council equally clearly rejected Anti-Modernism. For example, Gaudium et Spes (1965) cites Vatican I’s comments on Faith AND Reason and explicitly affirms that science has a legitimate autonomy which Faith should not try to control (Gaudium et Spes, 59).
7. Resolving the Pastoral Epistles
Using the principles clarified by Vatican II, it becomes possible to solve problems like the Pastoral Epistles, without falling into the mistakes of the Modernists or the Anti-Modernists.
The science of textual analysis is a real science, so the Church accepts its “legitimate autonomy.” This means that the Church accepts that. St Paul may not have written all 13 epistles. (See the Introduction to the Pastoral Epistles, on the website of the US Catholic Bishops Conference.)
Contrary to the claims of the Modernists, there is an objective truth of the matter. But the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles is not a truth of Revelation, so we just do not know what that truth is.
Contrary to the claims of the Anti-Modernists, admitting the possibility that St. Paul didn’t write the Pastoral Epistles does not undermine the Faith as expressed in Scripture and Tradition.
This is because Scripture and Tradition can contain human customs as well as divine Revelation (see “Must Christian Wives Be Subordinate to Their Husbands”). The labelling of the epistles with Paul’s name is a human convention, not a divine Revelation of Faith; so there is no conflict between Faith AND Reason when science disagrees with the Pauline authorship.
8. Did Vatican II Save the Church?
Neither Modernists nor Anti-modernists are happy with Vatican II.
The Modernists have evolved into Liberals and claim that the Council didn’t go far enough. The Anti-Modernists have evolved into Traditionalists and claim that the Council went too far.
Critics of Vatican II point to the “state” of the post-council Church. They rightly lament liturgical abuses and theologians who misrepresent the faith.
Those who defend Vatican II say that the Council opened the lid of a pressure cooker when it defused Modernism and Anti-Modernism. So, of course the Church experienced the consequences of the resulting theological explosion. It will take time to heal. In the meantime, people must not lose sight of the fact that Vatican II got Catholic Theology back onto Vatican I’s vision of Faith AND Reason.
Conclusion
Whether people will think that Vatican II saved the Church, depends upon the extent to which they appreciate the perilous implications of both Modernism and Anti-Modernism.
Vatican II modelled a practical solution, by dropping the word “Modernism.” The Council wanted to get out of the rut of the “either-or” arguments. Both Modernism and Anti-Modernism are theologically wrong, so there is no point continuing to argue about their wrongness. Catholics need to move on and focus on what’s theologically right.
The last time the Church called on people to move on, Jesuits and Dominicans were publicly calling each other heretics over the issue of Grace and Free Will. The Vatican responded in 1611 by telling everyone to just stop talking about it.
So, perhaps there is wisdom in Vatican II’s refusal to talk about Modernism. This is especially so when the very word is beginning to become a pejorative slogan.
Godwin’s law tells us that when people fall out online, they inevitably start calling each other Nazis. Catholics do it differently. They call each other Modernists.
17 thoughts on “Modernism: Did Vatican II Save the Church From Disaster?”
I appreciate the Catholic Church is not antagonistic to science and reason, but we are still a Church foundationally built on the truth that a sinless virgin girl received God incarnate who became a man foretold by generations of prophets and who was dead for three days before coming back to life. This central narrative of our faith clearly conflicts with the modern infatuation with reconciling all Church teaching to the scientific method (see: Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich). We walk by faith and not by sight.
Thank you Patrick, you make a good point. There are two subtly different understandings of Rationalism. Firstly, it is a matter of logical consistency (ie no contradictions). It is in that sense that Vatican I was positive about using reason with faith.
A second type of rationalism insists on only drawing conclusions from ‘physical’ evidence. That approach conflicts with the ‘oral Tradition’ and the witnessing which contributed to the Scriptures. However, it also conflicts with aspects of History and Sociology when they are dependent upon oral transmissions.
So, Christianity can be said to be both rationalist and non-rationalistic… depending upon how ‘rationalism’ is defined and understood.
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Slick article. . . but so terribly misleading. St. Pius X would have placed this piece on the Index.
FYI: textual analysis has not even come close to proving that St. Paul is not the author of even one of the Pastoral Epistles.
FYI: “Dei Verbum” altered the Catholic position of the primordial priority of Sacred Tradition vis-a-vis Sacred Scripture. That has huge consequences for Catholic Apologetical Science.
But I won’t bore you with facts. I’ll stop there.
Yes Sean, you make a good point urging caution about textual criticism. This is why the Church merely recognises the “possibility” of alternative authorship of some Pauline epistles.
And yes St Pius X might disagree with the article (if he were alive to read it). But he might also agree with it, because he too rejected the mistakes of Rationalism and Fideism.
Do please feel free to clarify why you believe that the article is “misleading.” Accurately Identifying issues can help other readers.
Except we don’t just “call each other Modernists.” Godwin’s Law also applies to those who have turned “Traditionalist” into a pejorative.
A good point. All pejoratives are unhelpful in discussion. Not only are they disrespectful, but they become fallacies, substituting comments about persons for comments about issues.
Good to see a defence of Vatican 11. Undoubtedly, the Catholic Church has been in dire straits since the Council and thus many Catholics, especially the traditionalists, blame Vat. 11 for all the Church’s problems over the past sixty years or so.
Too few Catholics have actually read the council documents and because of this, many false beliefs about their contents have been disseminated: what we now call the “Spirit of Vatican 11”. There is now a great need for Church leaders to support the real Council and oppose the false beliefs that have been attributed to it.
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Thank you, those are good questions. Ultimately both Rationalism and Fideism are problematic position and Christian Churches which prefer one to the other end up with difficult theological outcomes. Catholics try to hold the issues in balance, but doing so involves making some difficult judgement calls. You rightly ask about the criteria for those judgement calls. Its a complicated set of issues, so possibly a topic to return to at a later date.
A very well done synthesis of church history and outcomes. If we apply Fibonacci’s logarithmic spirals which form a dense center then swirl out exponentially, expanding to reveal the true scope of, in this case, correct theology. It follows that the Vat 1 war against modernism was to chase the curve in order to overtake the destination it feared coming. Vat 2 put the race for clarity abreast of the curve but the kinetic force that launched it is losing velocity, a Vat 3 is necessary if we are to stay well ahead. Genesis is the stumbling block. Like ‘Roger Rabbit ‘ it blends animation with film – it tries to synchronize allegory with recorded history and for the church it portends a paradigm shift; where religion turns from a solid into a gas: the result is spirituality. Not resolving this is absolutism. Because the end of that conch shell at its terminal point is integration of truths held by all faiths, only the CC is able, wise enough to accomplish the enormous task: making everyone one.
A Fibonacci analogy raises some good questions. We can also think of the issues as a simple attempt to avoid two extremes. At one extreme is Rationalism (Liberalism Modernism) and at the other extreme is Fideism. The Vatican Councils, each in their own way, were trying to hold the middle ground between the two extremes.
Even if Paul did not write some of his epistles himself, he may have dictated his thoughts to a scribe. This does not make them less authentic. Regardless of who wrote them, they were deemed to be orthodox Christian teaching in the fourth century by the Catholic Church.
It helps to have the mind of Christ, in addition to faith and reason, when dealing with theological questions (see 1Corinthians 2:9-16, Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium 12, 1John 2:20, 27, and 1Thessalonians 5:21). This may be a component that is missing in the discussion.
Yes the question of authorship is distinct from inspiration. Paul could have indeed given ideas to a secretary who wrote the Pastoral Epistles in a different style. But even if the Pastoral Epistles were written by someone with no direct communication from the Apostle Paul, that would not necessarily affect inspiration or canonical status.
This was a really interesting article. I definitely lean more toward the rationalist camp, but ultimately I agree that we need to have a strong mix of faith AND reason.
I think the church got itself into trouble when it started defining so many things infallibly without any evidence or historical basis. Looking back at history, Mary’s perpetual virginity wasn’t defined until almost a thousand years after Jesus while the church was trying to figure out how evil/defiling sex was – even within the bonds of marriage. The Assumption was only officially defined as dogma in the 1900s. These are items that are hard to accept as true while rationally looking at the environments in which they were defined. And ultimately, they aren’t important to the core of the faith. The church survived 1950 years without the Assumption. Why did they need to tell people it was required to believe in the Assumption at that point?
I think the church needs to reassess many of its teachings and remove them from the category of required belief (dogma). Like the apparitions of Fatima or other miracles, Catholics can decide for themselves whether to believe in these “non-essential” concepts that were created hundreds of years after Christ under sometimes dubious circumstances.
Ignoring the problem and not talking about it – evidently the Vatican II solution – isn’t a solution at all. There is a real disconnect between these camps and it must be dealt with. There are a number of current church teachings in conflict with reason, and if we’re going to move forward on a basis of faith AND reason, those conflicts must be dealt with rather than ignored. The Pauline epistles were a good example, but the list of contentious items is longer and includes much more important topics.
This article gave me a fresh perspective to the topic and I appreciate it!
Kyle, you are misinformed about a number of facts about history and dogma. The BVM’s perpetual virginity and Assumption were only able to be formally defined because extremely exhaustive studies proved that they were part of the tradition received from the Apostles and had always been taught by the Church. They weren’t “created” when they were formally defined. They are not, as you imply, unimportant or “non-essential” and most certainly not “in conflict with reason” which by definition is impossible. All the church’s dogmas are connected to each other. You can’t make one or two of them merely optional extras without unravelling the whole religion.
I do agree it’s a poor choice of words by the author to refer to “not talking about” conflicts and by implication ignoring them. A more careful reading of the article shows that he is in fact saying that the Church led the way to a via media between the two extremes and so resolving the conflict between them.