George Tyrrell/Letters from a "Modernist"/George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition:
Misner, Paul
Books: PAST AS MIRROR TO PRESENT GEORGE TYRRELL IN SEARCH OF CATHOLICISM David G. Schultenover, S.J. Patmos Press, $32.50, 504 pp. LETTERS FROM A "MODERNIST" THE LETTERS OF GEORGE TYRRELL TO...
...He commenced and aborted his brief teaching career in a Jesuit scholasticate teaching Thomistic philosophy, which was just then being revived as the Catholic answer to the ills of modern thought...
...This revival turned out, in fact, to be the unlikely path by which Catholic theology transcended its past in a way perhaps worthy of Aquinas himself...
...The catalyst for Tyrell was his reading of works in biblical studies thrust upon him by his eager guide, Baron von Hugel...
...He did not just invent metaphors for an interior Rule of God, but he expected this Rule to come "in power" in the foreseeable future...
...Tyrrell's own struggle with this perspective, which he quaintly but not invalidly referred to as "the assured results of criticism," is what lent serious significance to his last writings...
...Schultenover has constructed a monument to his fellow Jesuit, as if in reparation for the hurts of the tension-ridden relationship between Tyrrell and the Society, which only ended on his expulsion or release in 1906...
...Still later he became the leading spokesman in England for the theological views characterized as "modernist...
...David Schultenover's book is to have a sequel...
...In this he was quite right, but he did not have the training or temperament to deal very coolly with this disturbing insight...
...GEORGE TYRRELL AND TRE CATHOLIC TRADITION Ellen Leonard, C.S.J...
...By 1902 he was reading German Protestant works, with that of Johannes Weiss, Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, making the deepest impression...
...In a way, then, his mediating period anticipated the phase of Catholic theology that culminated in the sixties...
...two years later he died of Bright's disease, leaving behind the manuscript for a book that is still gripping to read, Christianity at the Cross-Rvads...
...It also made him the weathervane of storms to come in the Catholic church, of which we have not seen the last...
...Ellen Leonard's is the most comprehensive and accessible...
...This Jesus did not so much accommodate his heavenly teaching to the capacity of those he was addressing as struggle to express the new reality he was prophetically experiencing in the only ways available to him, those of his own setting and culture...
...it displays a fine touch for ordering Tyrrell's concerns around his central theme, the genius of Catholicism as reinterpreted for a modern sensibility...
...Tyrrell was a Dubliner by birth who converted to Catholicism and joined the Jesuits when he was not yet quite twenty years old (1880...
...and his modernist period, summed up in Christianity at the Cross-Roads, foreshadowed the post-conciliar developments in ecclesiology and Christology (as witness the well-known works of Kung and Schil-lebeeckx...
...One "liberal Catholic" most affected by this and subsequent declarations of church authorities was George Tyrrell, convert, Jesuit, and gifted writer of the period, to whose reflections on Catholicism the three books under review are dedicated...
...What riveted Tyrrell and did violence to his "mediating liberal" stance of previous years was the rediscovery of a historically plausible Jesus, whose message fed into a historically plausible, apocalyptically oriented early Christianity...
...He consumed the works of the French Catholic modernist scholar, Alfred Loisy, as they appeared...
...LETTERS FROM A "MODERNIST" THE LETTERS OF GEORGE TYRRELL TO WILFRID WARD 1893-1908 Edited by Mary Jo Weaver Patmos Press, $35,192 pp...
...judging by this first volume, the work will constitute the definitive record of the life and thought of George Tyrrell for a long time to come, based as it is on careful archival research...
...Tyrrell then turned to non-scholastic thinkers, particularly to Newman as un-dergirded and updated by Blondel...
...This "mediating liberalism" filled a period of roughly the last five years of the nineteenth century...
...This past is past - and yet so characteristic of Catholicism's recent development as to hold a revealing mirror up to the present...
...Mary Jo Weaver presents Tyrrell's half of his correspondence with Wilfrid Ward (the biographer of Newman and the father of Maisie Ward) in such a way as to afford the reader immediate contact with an intriguing case study: at issue was the Newmanian intellectual heritage which the bishops evidently held to be of no consequence...
...Later on he wrote for the Jesuit publication, The Month...
...Each of the three rises above the level normally expected of such scholarly publications in terms of interest, readability, and significance...
...Paulist, $8.95, 197 pp...
...As he pressed forward, reinterpreting Catholic Christianity in the light of the early Christian expectation of the Kingdom of God, he was entering territory which theologians have only begun to explore with any consistency since the Second Vatican Council...
...The wave of Tyrrell and other Modernist studies, which we are now witnessing, would of course be unthinkable without the resurgence in the Catholic world of many of the causes for which Tyrrell fought (and against which the Joint Pastoral of 1900 was directed): freedom of critical scholarship, openness to lay initiatives, and dialogue with non-Catholic thinkers, for example...
...But Tyrrell was to take no further part in the neo-scholastic movement: that would be the work of his contemporary Joseph Mercier and his school at Louvain and elsewhere...
...Paul Misner ON ENTERING the twentieth century, the Roman Catholic bishops of England issued an extraordinarily solemn Joint Pastoral Letter, "The Church and Liberal Catholicism...
...Following close on the heels of Pope Leo XIII's condemnation of "Americanism," which it quoted, it read any hankering for an accommodation to "the national atmosphere of free thought and public criticism" right out of the church...
...A direct path into some key tensions of modern Catholic theology awaits those who look into these investigations...
...In 1907 he was excommunicated by virtue of his defiance of Pius X's condemnations...
...The rude shock of the Joint Pastoral made the enterprise look unlikely to succeed, on the one hand, while on the other hand a growing acquaintance with biblical criticism was persuading Tyrrell that Newman and Blondel themselves had not faced the most pressing problems arising out of historical criticism for traditional doctrine...
...Tyrrell is a particularly apt figure for reflection inasmuch as he recapitulated in advance two or three phases that were to play themselves out in Catholic thought at large over the three quarters of a century since he died...
...Such studies, when as well done as the present ones, should meet with great interest even outside specialist circles...
...Ward took an increasingly conservative, Tyrrell an increasingly liberal view of Newman's contributions...
Vol. 110 • December 1983 • No. 22
