Overcoming Theological Amnesia

Ressourcement. It’s a French word that means “resourcing”—or, better, “re-sourcing.” As a term in theology, it calls for renewal based on a return to richer, more original sources, especially the Fathers of the early Church. Born in the Francophone world between the two world wars, ressourcement emerged as one of the great theological movements of twentieth-century Catholicism. It flourished despite suspicions and opposition, and it became an international movement. No history of modern Catholic theology can be told without giving prominent attention to figures who flew the flag of ressourcement.

Re-sourcing required making more texts of the early Church available to a wider audience. In 1942, Jean Daniélou, Claude Mondésert, and Henri de Lubac founded Sources Chrétiennes, a series of new editions of the Church Fathers with facing French translations, which now numbers in the hundreds of volumes. The methods and contents of these works needed to be elaborated upon and explained. To this end, Henri de Lubac wrote his eye-opening Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture (1959–64).

History was not being examined out of a mere antiquarian interest. The hope was that “re-sourcing” would aid a rejuvenation of Catholic theology, then dominated by the Thomistic revival and anxious in the shadows of the Modernist controversy. Study of the Fathers could loosen the grip of scholastic logic, encourage greater sensitivity to the importance of historical context in understanding theology, and provide the conceptual foundations for a critical but flexible engagement with modernity. In the minds of its foremost exponents, ressourcement went hand-in-glove with aggiornamento, a bringing-up-to-date of Catholic life and thought. This “step back in aid of a step forward” strategy was not unique to these Catholic thinkers. Similar movements arose during the same period in other Christian traditions—the patristic revival among the Orthodox, the Luther renaissance among Protestants.

The positive achievements of ressourcement are undeniable. Central texts of the Second Vatican Council, especially Dei Verbum and Lumen Gentium, would have been impossible without the contributions of ressourcement theology. In its first generation, the movement toward ressourcement produced such theologians as Yves Congar and de Lubac and cultivated the soil from which sprang Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and St. John Paul II.

A. N. Williams described ressourcement as “a serious examination of all historical theological resources that both recognized their diversity and partiality but also sought to find in them resources for the renewal of theology.” Who could find fault with that? But there was a critical, negative, and potentially destructive edge to the ressourcement program. The rejuvenation of Catholic theology required that the old be swept away. Yves Congar noted at one point in his post–World War II journal that he and Marie-Dominique Chenu agreed “on the necessity of ‘liquidating Baroque theology.’” Strictly speaking, “Baroque theology” refers to the scholastic theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Congar used it as a blanket term for scholasticism as he encountered it in his own time. The old scholasticism didn’t need to be supplemented; it needed to be sidelined, if not eliminated.

The extent of the positive achievements of ressourcement can be debated. None can dispute that their negative program succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The dominance of scholasticism was not broken immediately. Scholasticism was by no means dead at the Second Vatican Council. The texts of the Council, especially Dei Verbum and Lumen Gentium, are not merely careful (some would say incoherent) balances of new and old theological perspectives. They are integrations of the two. Providentially, I would say, the Council came at a moment when the two—ressourcement and early-twentieth-century scholasticism—could meet and each influence the outcome.

In the decades following the Council, however, things were different. Theologies of the ressourcement school thrived, as did the revisionist Thomisms of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, soon to be followed by various political and contextual theologies. By contrast, the scholasticism of figures such as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and of the theological handbooks that had transmitted this tradition to seminarians, simply disappeared. It suffered the fate of the deacon’s buggy in Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s poem “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.” In that poem, often read as a comment on the collapse of Calvinist orthodoxy in nineteenth-century New England, the deacon’s shay, a kind of small carriage, was built with such great logical skill—every part logically followed from another—that no part could wear out or break before another did. The shay lasted one hundred years and then one day collapsed in a heap, as every part gave way simultaneously: “It went to pieces all at once,— / All at once, and nothing first,— / Just as bubbles do when they burst.” The old scholasticism seemed to collapse with similar suddenness in the carnival years of Catholic theology following the Council. By 1975, who was reading the handbooks that had been standard fare on many Catholic seminary syllabi twenty-five and fifty years earlier, even though they could be bought for a dime or a quarter at used book sales?

The loss of the handbooks may have been inevitable. Although I find handbooks such as Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma or the much larger Spanish Sacrae Theologiae Summa useful as reference books, I wouldn’t use them as textbooks in a course. Far more significant is what went down the memory hole along with the handbooks. Any work done in a scholastic vein between 1850 and 1950 was consigned to oblivion, unassigned to and unread by students of theology.

Luckily, I was prodded by a friend to read some of this forgotten tradition. He directed me to the late-nineteenth-century German theologian Matthias Joseph Scheeben, whose combination of capacious learning and sharp analysis, intellectual creativity and faithfulness to Church teaching, is bracing and enlightening. Scheeben has made a comeback in the last ten years. An English translation of his monumental Handbook of Catholic Theology is now available. But how could such a brilliant achievement have been ignored for decades?

I was even more surprised when I read sections of Maurice de la Taille’s great work on the sacrifice of the Mass, Mysterium Fidei, originally published in Latin in 1921 and partially translated into English in 1940 and 1950. I found not only a strikingly high level of historical scholarship and theological acumen, but also a work that drew on and expanded a tradition of reflection on the Mass as sacrifice going back at least a millennium. Reading de la Taille was a revelation. I chalked up my ignorance of this great work of theology to my Protestant background and education. But when I shared de la Taille’s work on the Mass (a brief summary had been published in his collection The Mystery of Faith and Human Opinion) with a younger, cradle-Catholic colleague, educated in the 1990s and 2000s, he responded, as I had, with surprise and delight, edged in his case with a bit of anger—anger at his teachers, who had never mentioned work such as da la Taille’s. I ask again, how could such profound theology have been simply ignored?

Some respond by saying that Scheeben and de la Taille were not typical of their times. Their use of the Church Fathers shows that they were ressourcement theologians avant la lettre. They might merit revival, so the argument goes, but the current disinterest in the general run of their contemporaries remains justified.

I am unpersuaded. Let me give another example. Recently, while working on questions related to the concepts of grace and merit in Catholic theology, I ran across various articles published in the 1950s and 1960s by the Belgian-born Jesuit theologian Prudentius de Letter. He did a dissertation at the Pontifical Gregorian University in 1939 on the ontological foundations of the concept of merit in the work of Thomas Aquinas, then seems to have spent the rest of his life teaching at a Jesuit school in Kurseong, India, a mile high in the Himalayas, close to the border with Nepal. His work is not far-ranging, rarely straying beyond the topic of grace. His essays are not, strictly speaking, exegesis of Thomas, but rather are works of constructive theology in an eclectic Thomist vein. These essays provide sharp scholastic analyses that enriched my understanding of the concept of merit in Catholic theology. You will rarely, however, find any reference made to them in the last fifty years. De Letter’s work sank from sight, collateral damage in the effort to liquidate “baroque theology.”

Reading Scheeben and de la Taille indicates that the campaign against scholasticism runs much deeper than a forgetfulness of the Catholic theology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scheeben and de la Taille are themselves custodians of the remarkable breadth of the tradition. Scheeben, like the ressourcement theologians, breaks with a great deal of earlier Catholic theology in drawing inspiration from the Eastern fathers. But both Scheeben and da la Taille draw on Western theologians one has rarely seen mentioned in the last sixty years: medieval figures beyond Thomas and Bonaventure, plus a broad sweep of post-Tridentine theology, encompassing not just those figures who are often mentioned but rarely read (Bellarmine, Báñez, Suárez), but those who now are almost totally forgotten except to true specialists. (Who has even heard of Lessius or Petavius?) The references by Scheeben and de la Taille to post-Tridentine theologians are not just scholarly window-dressing, nor are they mentioned only to be dismissed. Scheeben draws inspiration for his own proposal about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit partly from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century work of Lessius, Petavius, and Thomassin.

The capacious scholarship of Scheeben and de la Taille stands in marked contrast to our present practice of theology. Catholic theology today almost invariably draws on a much narrower range of historical sources than it did one hundred years ago. To put it bluntly: Over the last three generations, theological students have been taught to ignore virtually all theology written between the death of Aquinas in 1274 and the stirrings of theological change in the 1920s and 1930s. (John Henry Newman stands as the exception.) As Christopher Ruddy has commented: “It would be a strange ressourcement, after all, that simply regarded centuries of thought as a new Dark Ages or that reduced complex eras and theologies to brief, sometimes dismissive summaries in textbooks.” Yet that is where we are. Such is the cunning of history. We have broken the shackles of an allegedly ahistorical scholasticism and found ourselves ignorant of a vast swath of the history of our own theological tradition. Most Catholic theologians—and I include myself—have at best a spotty knowledge of this or that theologian, this or that dispute, from the period between 1274 and 1918. We lack a good working knowledge of the whole, and certainly have gleaned little knowledge from a reading of the primary texts, even a selective reading. On its face, this fact is dispiriting. We impoverish Catholic theology when we systematically exclude more than half of the last millennium from our work.

R. R. Reno has described the “Great Forgetting” that has taken hold of our culture and universities (First Things, November 2023). A similar “great forgetting” dominates Catholic theology. Newman said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” Ironically, Protestant theology today often involves a greater historical reach, at least with respect to the last millennium. Though the typical Protestant theologian knows less about Aquinas than the Catholic does, he knows far more about the Reformation. He reads Luther, Calvin, and perhaps some later figures, such as John Owen. Moreover, since “modern theology” typically begins for the Protestant with Friedrich Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth century, unlike his Catholic counterpart, he reads theologians who wrote before the middle years of the twentieth century.

I have focused here on theology of an academic sort. However, the contraction of the living past in Catholic life over the last sixty years is widespread. The triumph of historical-critical methods in the study of the Bible in Catholic institutions of higher learning has meant that most Catholic biblical interpretation before 1950 is ignored by professional biblical scholars. Interest in older exegetical methods has begun to revive—but, as far as I can tell, more among theologians and historians than among faculty in biblical studies. The situation in ethics is complex. The revival of virtue ethics connects us with some aspects of our past while cutting us off from others. I must admit that I know little about the history of spiritual theology, but it appears that here, too, the losses have been great. The religious orders preserve, to varying degrees, traditional forms of spiritual formation. The post-Tridentine period, however, saw a particular growth in spiritualities oriented to the laity: the writings of Francis de Sales or Alfonsus Liguori or Jean-Pierre de Caussade. Like so much else, they were washed away in the post-conciliar flash flood.

We need to recover what has been lost. We need a wider ressourcement, not unlike the ressourcement of the mid-twentieth century, but one that casts a wider, more “catholic” net. The endeavor will not be easy. Late medieval and early modern theologians are hard nuts to crack. When a late medieval theologian says that a certain adjective is applied in the second mode of per se predication, one has to stop and figure out what that means. And the early modern theologians can be horribly long-winded. In many ways, twelfth- and thirteenth-century theologians are easier for us to understand than those of the fourteenth or seventeenth centuries. But the hard work will be worth it.

A wider ressourcement faces certain challenges and will provoke some objections. Let me note two challenges and three likely objections.

To the challenges: First, contemporary American Catholic and (to a degree) Protestant thinking often pictures late medieval and early modern theology in terms of widely shared, but increasingly lazy, narratives of decline. In these genealogies, theology at some point, usually the fourteenth century, started to go to hell in a handbasket. Some fundamental mistake was made, probably metaphysical. Although it may take centuries for the full implications of the mistake to be realized, the disastrous effect finally, inexorably, comes about. Scotus leads inevitably to Ockham, Ockham to Luther, Luther to Descartes, Descartes to Hegel, Hegel to Marx, Marx to Stalin on the one hand and gender ideology on the other. Scotus gets the analogy of being wrong, and the Soviet Gulag and drag queen story hour follow by the iron laws of history. Ideas have consequences! I exaggerate, but only slightly.

Earlier versions of this story of decline, such as that of the great medievalist Étienne Gilson, involved a close reading of the sources. Today, the genealogies have too often become lazy, a set of excuses for not reading the texts. Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation has a section that turns on a widely embraced version of the decline narrative. It begins with John Duns Scotus’s admittedly controversial and often misinterpreted argument for a univocal concept of being, applicable to both God and creatures, finite and infinite being. Thus does Scotus take the first step down the road to modernity. When a colleague of mine pressed Gregory on this interpretation, he admitted that his reading of Scotus was based entirely on secondary sources. The accepted narrative—univocity of being as the source of modernity’s woes—had come to bear the argumentative weight that only a close reading of the texts can support. But why spend time reading difficult authors when one knows in advance that they are wrong? I fear such an attitude is far too often communicated to our students, who learn a few shibboleths and are happy to go from Aquinas to the twentieth century in their comprehensive exams, with only a glance at the Council of Trent and Newman along the way.

A second obstacle to a wider ressourcement is the tendency in contemporary American Catholic theology to form self-enclosed schools. We array ourselves as Thomists or Balthasarians or whatevers, without much engagement across school lines. Distinctive schools of thought are not inherently bad. I have profited greatly from friendship with and instruction from what one might call Thomists of the strict observance. A close reading of Thomas and Thomists on grace was crucial to my becoming Catholic. The Summa Theologiae is the first place I look when I want to get a sense for what is involved in a question I have not thought about before.

But a school need not be closed in upon itself. I am impressed by the way Thomists in the past were flexible and engaged with, even adopted ideas from, other approaches and schools. In Analogy After Aquinas: Logical Problems, Thomistic Answers, Dominic D’Ettore shows the ways in which Thomists who came after Scotus took Scotus’s criticism of analogy seriously, sought to address his arguments, and to varying degrees used Scotus to make more precise (or simply to alter) Thomas’s relatively few comments on analogy. As D’Ettore makes clear, Thomas left important questions about analogy unanswered; Scotus’s criticism pushed Thomists to flesh out what Thomas had not developed.

Scheeben is another example of open engagement with the breadth of the tradition. He was in many ways a Thomist—his grave bears a statue of Thomas—but he didn’t let that stop him from advocating ideas that were foreign to Thomism. Schools of thought can be pedagogically helpful, at least when they rest on figures as rich as Aquinas or Bonaventure. But for theology to be catholic in an authentic sense, we need multiple schools, and they must be engaged in flexible and charitable argument with one another.

In addition to challenges, there are predictable objections to an effort to overcome today’s theological amnesia. Some are more practical in substance, some more ideological.

It’s easy to anticipate the objection that a wider ressourcement seeks to perform the impossible, or at least what is impossible for most of us. Mastery of an almost two-thousand-year history of theology is more than can be expected from the theologian. Many important pre-modern theological works, especially from the late medieval and early modern periods, are untranslated, and most of us do not have the Latin facility typical of our theological forebears. Nevertheless, things are improving. The Catholic University of America Press series of Early Modern Catholic Sources is making available in English translation significant works that have been long ignored. Google Books, the Hathi Trust, and the Internet Archive make older editions available as never before.

Serious theological work requires reading the primary texts. Secondary sources can offer indispensable assistance, but they cannot replace what someone actually wrote. We should be realistic, of course. Some historical periods will inevitably get short shrift. Many theologians, even some of importance, will necessarily be known to most of us from brief selections and through secondary literature, histories, and summaries. This is as it must be. Peter Lombard himself said that he put together the Sentences so that one who sought the “opinions of the Fathers . . . shall find it unnecessary to rifle through numerous books.”

In view of the fact that no one person can read everything, we need relatively comprehensive, reliable historical overviews without partisan axes to grind, the sort of survey of early Christian theology one finds in Robert Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. Books of this sort have been written about early and high medieval theology. Rik van Nieuwenhove’s An Introduction to Medieval Theology does the job well. But van Nieuwenhove’s history becomes very thin after 1308, the year of the death of Scotus. I don’t know of good surveys of Catholic theology covering significant portions of the tradition from 1300 to 1900. The production of this kind of scholarship would be a major service to the discipline of theology. But before reliable surveys can be written, we need the scholars who can write them. Do they now exist?

We need realism concerning shifts in the institutional structure of theological work. A century ago, theology was the domain of clergy. Their study of theology probably began early in college, if not before. They would have completed a full seminary program before beginning doctoral work. The theological culture of the time encouraged learning the tools of scholarship and the content of the tradition. Today, the majority of those teaching theology in colleges and universities and writing theological essays and books are, like me, lay people. Our catechesis as children and teenagers was probably weak; we may have taken some religion or theology courses in college but may not have mastered any foreign language. Our first encounter with rigorous theological study came only as we completed a two-year master’s degree before beginning a doctoral program. This now common educational path makes mastery of the field difficult.

The problem of insufficient breadth and inadequate competence is exacerbated by the shifts in theological culture. Describing the weaknesses of contemporary Catholic theology, Grant Kaplan notes: “Today, the crisis seems to pivot on whether one really needs to spend time with basic sources and questions. . . . Many [theology] students today . . . receive the impression, often conveyed intentionally, that one survey course on pre-modern theology suffices.” In a crowded curriculum, ignorance becomes self-reinforcing. Faculty, themselves often with a sketchy grasp of figures between Aquinas and the twentieth century, teach what they know.

Remembering what we have forgotten will require work and take time. The old institutional structure of theology—clerical and seminary-based—will not return any time soon. But we can examine curricula and insist that theology students get a firm foundation in the full breadth of the tradition. Those of us who teach and write theology need to broaden the historical reach of our own study.

Another and quite different objection is likely to be raised: Would not a wider ressourcement lead to an even greater and more debilitating fragmentation in contemporary Catholic theology than exists today?Instead of just having Thomist, Balthasarian, and various contextual theologies speaking past one another, would we add new, perhaps even more discordant voices to the cacophony: doctrinaire Scotists and insular Suarezians? Would we simply be carving out new niches, constructing new silos that stand in splendid isolation? How could a wider ressourcement avoid such a result?

Let me make two suggestions, both exemplified by the work of Joseph Ratzinger. First, a goal theologians should set for themselves is to speak and write in a common and generally understandable theological language, one that is precise, but at least within hailing distance of everyday English. Achieving that goal means speaking and writing less in the various dialects of our schools, not to mention the peculiar idiolects of particular authors. As teachers, we should be aware that advanced undergraduates and graduate students find the various sophisticated and esoteric linguistic systems seductively attractive. If one can master the vocabulary and grammar, the characteristic turns of phrase, of Thomist or Rahnerian or Lonerganian or critical-theory jargon or the dialectical rhythm of the Balthasarian-phenomenological discourse popular in some circles, one can rattle on with a sense that one is saying something intelligent, while saying very little and communicating even less, other than signaling that one has completed the initiation rites for this or that theological tribe. Joseph Ratzinger is a sterling example of a theologian who wrote sophisticated texts without resorting to a specialized language. The same was true of many of the first generation of ressourcement theologians. You don’t need an advanced degree in theology to read de Lubac’s 1947 classic, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man.

A second suggestion: We need to write less about theology, which is to say about theological method or the foundations of theology, and less about this or that theologian. We need to write more about the actual subject matter of theology—God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, grace, the sacraments—and do so with primary reference to the Scriptures and the teachings of the Church. Fragmentation into insular theological schools tends to be exacerbated when we stray from the traditional subject matters of theology and toward greater self-reference, theology about theology—or, worse, when we stray toward the topics of auxiliary disciplines, such as philosophy, hermeneutics, and critical theory. Greater reference to Scripture requires courage from those of us who are not scripture scholars in the academic sense; we will be seen to be venturing beyond our fields of expertise. Greater appeal to Scripture and the normative tradition of Church teaching, however, will help provide a common framework of discussion. Again, Joseph Ratzinger is an example to be followed. He wrote about basic theological questions with reference to Scripture and tradition, and he even dared to write a three-volume work on Jesus in the Gospels.

A wider ressourcement won’t cure fragmentation, but I see no reason why it should make fragmentation worse. It might even help break down divisions among different theological approaches or schools.

I can easily imagine a third and more ideological objection: Isn’t the call for a wider ressourcement a reactionary exercise in nostalgia, an expression of a desire to return theology to some pre–Vatican II purity, to the study of old books by dead white men?

No doubt, in the hands of some, a wider ressourcement might evince a kind of reactionary nostalgia. After all, the original ressourcement movement was not immune to visions of a patristic purity and simplicity that never existed. But no historian of theology would say that mid-twentieth-century ressourcement was reactionary or backward-looking in effect. It sought to bring old, too often forgotten resources into the present for the sake of contemporary theology and the contemporary Church. A wider ressourcement should have the same goal. I find Scotus or Suárez or Scheeben worth the real effort they require, because they help me think about how Christian language actually refers to God, or about the nature of freedom, or about what grace is and does. A wider ressourcement brings new resources into the present; it does not return to the past. Today, the “Baroque theology” that attracted the ire of Yves Congar is a “new resource.” We might even profit from a reexamination of the maligned theology manuals. We might learn a thing or two about how to write good (and no doubt quite different) textbooks for today’s seminarians and other beginning students in theology.

A second admission should also be made: Such a wider ressourcement, like the original ressourcement, has a critical edge to it. There is a target: the thoroughgoing presentism of our culture, which afflicts some, even much, of contemporary American theology, Catholic and Protestant. We are burdened with the sense that the theological past is at best irrelevant and at worst generally corrupt and compromised, that an authentic theology must primarily be about expressing our present experience of God or about producing specific changes in our contemporary culture, economy, and politics. The Great Forgetting in theology wasn’t an accident; it was motivated.

A wider ressourcement has a further motivation, rooted in a sense of what theology is and is about. Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiae in Part 1, question 1, article 1, with the question whether, besides philosophy, any further teaching—any further doctrina—is necessary. He begins his response with the statement: “It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a doctrina revealed by God.” In article 3 of this question, he says that the subject matter of theology is “of God primarily and of creatures only so far as they are referable to God” (ST I, q. 1, a. 3, ad 1). I would expand this account and say that the subject matter of theology is “the faith once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) as the Holy Spirit has led and is leading the Church into an understanding of that faith. If that is what theology is about, then a knowledge of the course theology has taken over the last two millennia, in its general outlines and most salient moments, is essential.

If one’s understanding of the foundation and nature of theology is radically different from this account—and my sense is that some theologians today indeed advance a radically different understanding—then the theological amnesia of the present will be understood to be more a blessing than a curse. Our ignorance liberates us to innovate in ways we imagine urgent and necessary to meet the needs of the present. At this point, we come to a difference of first principles, about which argument can only be indirect.

Let me end with one such argument. It cannot be denied that Catholic theology is pursued today with little or no firsthand knowledge of most of what has been written and thought over the last 700 years. My own experience has led me to judge this a loss that has handicapped us. My thinking over the last decade has been enriched and sharpened by my reading of theologians from those neglected centuries—Scotus, Diego Laínez, Báñez, Suárez, Möhler, Scheeben, de la Taille, De Letter, even Ockham (yes, Ockham—his arguments are sharp and illuminating, even if one thinks he is wrong in the end). Saint Paul exhorts us to put on the full armor of God (Eph. 6:11). As theologians, we need all the resources the Spirit provides, and among those are the riches that, all too foolishly, have been cast aside.

Michael Root is Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology at The Catholic University of America. This essay is based on his Presidential Address to the annual meeting of the Academy of Catholic Theology in May 2024.

Image by Andrea Landini, public domain. Image cropped.