An Intellectualist Understanding of the Relationship Between Theology and the Spiritual Life

Mysticism and infused contemplation transcend theology and dogma, but they neither contradict nor nullify it. The mind & will must be nurtured on the milk of theo/dogma before passing to the solid food of contemplation. If not, one will read the mystics but not truly grow.

— Taylor Patrick O'Neill (@thomaesplendor) July 11, 2022

Reprints of Books by Joseph C. Fenton

Missed this in 2018.

First Things: Fenton Returns by Patrick Carey

Fenton told readers of his “The Ecumenical Council and Christian Union” (1959) that the council’s ecumenical work would amount to nothing more than the Church’s previous emphasis on a “return of dissident Christians to the one true fold of Jesus Christ.”

He probably included the Orthodox as dissident Christians.

Related:
Cardinal Ottaviani and the Council by Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton

1966 Letter Reveals Cardinal Ottaviani’s Post-Conciliar Concerns

Theology of Baptism

and theology of the authority of the Church...

Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Vatican II and Crisis in the Theology of Baptism" by Thomas Pink (via Peter Kwasniewski)

Re: the importance or necessity of exorcism -- is the accompanying theology of "sovereignty" of the devil over the unbaptized an established part of the Faith, or is it just a theological opinion? And how should it be understood?

Interview with Père Jean-Dominique Fabre, O.P.

who is writing a biography of Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P.



(via Pertinacious Papist)

John Senior on the Thomistic Revival

A good counterpoint to Dr. Dennis McInerny's essay. From The Restoration of Christian Culture:

A few uncommon and relatively unknown, and old, theologians still study and teach St. Thomas, but he is no longer received as the Common Doctor of the Church. The Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas himself says in the Prologue, is a book "for beginners"; but we have few real beginners anymore. Our schools and colleges turn out advanced technicians in what are called the arts and sciences, but none has the ordinary prerequisites to traditional philosophical and theological study, none with the famous mens sana in corpore sano of the ancients, that is, disciplined in the perception, memory and imagination of reality. To compensate for our failures, seminaries in the decades preceding Vatican II tabulated maxims based upon the Summa as texts for easily testable courses run on principles remotely traceable to Descartes, full of method, and having little to do with reality, less of memory and nothing of imagination or the spirit of St. Thomas. In the great Catholic universities at Rome and elsewhere, the grand old Dominican and Jesuit masters went on lecturing in Latin to students, many from America, who had to get laugh-signals from the graduate assistants when the master cracked a joke because none knew Latin well enough to tell a joke from a scholastic formula. It is hardly surprising that in such universities scholastic formulas became jokes. The only unusual skill you had to master at the Roman colleges, they say, was to read the easy Latin upside down because on oral examinations the professor would read aloud a question from the manual--holding it right there in front of him. If you had the trick of reading upside down you could give the answer word for word to pass with high distinction. Through a gross misunderstanding of docility, students sat on their disengaged intelligences through hours of what to them was gibberish, at the end of which they received gilded Italianate certificates in Canon Law and Theology certifying in reality an education in outlines, "ponies," and tests whose questions had been leaked in advance with answers right in front of them. And with these doctorates, as professors, rectors, and bishops, their graduates occupied positions of authority in Catholic universities and seminaries. Of course there were exceptions, but I think, brutal as it seems, this is a fair description of the general situation.

The results are still visible among the thinning ranks of priests formed before the Council. How else could the postconciliar failure have occurred? I heard a beloved example some weeks ago, whom I shouldn't disparage in any other way -- a good man of the type of whom in terms of piety it is said in the Common for Confessors, Euge serve bone, in modico fidelis! But, explaining the Eucharist to a parishioner who had been scandalized by uninstructed children secreting instead of consuming consecrated Hosts, he said, "Oh, St. Thomas teaches that only the accidents can be touched anyway, not the Body of Christ, which is the substance."

It is better, as Socrates repeatedly said, not to know and know you don't than not to know and think you do.... Theology and philosophy are difficult, exacting sciences; there are few vocations to such studies in any given generation; and even for those with special gifts of intelligence and will, there are still twelve years of prerequisites in elementary and high school.

John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture (Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2008) 73-5.

I think Dr. Senior is probably correct in his presentation of the historical and cultural factors that made Leo XIII's project mostly a non-starter. That period of the the history of the Latin churches deserves a more extensive, scholarly treatment.

Dennis McInerny on the Thomistic Renewal

THE RISE & FALL OF THE THOMISTIC RENEWAL — PART I: "The Revivification of Sound Christian Philosophy" (July 7, 2015)

THE RISE & FALL OF THE THOMISTIC RENEWAL — PART II: "A Revival Cut Short" (July 7, 2015)

(via Pertinacious Papist)

Edward Feser: Neo-Scholastic Essays

Jeff Mirus on Henri de Lubac's Vatican Council Notebooks, Vol. 1

Henri de Lubac's fascinating notes on Vatican II By Dr. Jeff Mirus

How good is this generalization?

A more immediate historical influence might be attributed to the two world wars of the twentieth century. Throughout the West, people came to have a profound respect for military precision and obedience, and all the habits of thought associated with soldiering. Those who can remember the 1950s will remember a society still interested in precise dress, short military hair cuts, and punctilious manners when it came to rank, not to mention the need to concern oneself primarily with one’s own duties, while accepting unquestionably the larger decisions of authority. This lent the entire culture a quality of systemic formalism.

(Ignatius Press)

John Milbank on the eastward movement of western theology

Pertinacious Papist: William L. Portier on the nouvelles and neo-scholasticism

Some ideas for conferences and such... not that I would have the resources or standing or credentials to put one on my own, but maybe it is possible to find some sponsors for something less than academic. (Or more than academic, depending on your perspective and the ultimate end of such gatherings.) While the 20th century disputants may have passed on, what about revisiting the debate between the neo-scholastics (neo-Thomists) and the new theologians? Are there any today who would acknowledge being the successors to neo-Thomism? Or would they, like many Dominicans, see themselves as restoring or reviving a Thomism? How is each school to be distinguished from the other?


For the needs of "modern man," how are we to explain God and His saving work? Render scripture more intelligible? Understand God better?

Related:
"Uniting Faith and Culture: Hans Urs von Balthasar" by J. Peter Pham (via Insight Scoop)

Revue Thomiste - books

Présentation de la Revue Thomiste (le fr Serge Thomas Bonino)


Aquinas on the Spirit's Gift of Understanding and Dionysius Mystical Theology by Bernard Blackenhorn

Gilles Emery: "The Thomistic Doctrine of God and Dominican Spiritual Life"

Christopher Smith on Traditionalism

His original essay, at Chant Cafe (posted at NLM): Sacra Liturgia 2013 and the Transformation of Traditionalism

And the follow-up (also posted at NLM): Has Traditionalism Really Been Transformed

But now there are many people, who are perhaps a bit more open to certain insights outside of the pre-conciliar manualist theological tradition, such as those of Ratzinger, who now find themselves engaging the same critiques of the traditionalists, but from within the desire of a hermeneutic of continuity. Such a school of tradition is no mere reincarnation of Ultramontanism in its neoconservative Amerophilic form. It is embued with the classical liturgical movement, with an eye to the Patristic age, the East, as well as certain insights of the nouvelle théologie. One thinks of a Ratzinger scholar like Tracey Rowland as perhaps more of an example of this type of thought.

They may be more willing to renew sacramental theology; for example, in light of current discussions and decisions on the Liturgy of Addai and Mari. But would they re-evaluate the magisterial standing of certain council documents and of the councils themselves?

Thomiastica.net: Thomistic Philosophical Terms (part 3)

Ite ad Thomam: Louis Bouyer: Enemy of Traditional Theology.
:
There is much that is debatable within the quoted passage, and a discussion of the questions of method that are raised seems proper to theology. A more sustained critique of Fr. Bouyer would require his own account of what theology is and its proper method?

That this is true of “John of St Thomist” theology, {note the audacious ad hominem, a mockery of traditional Thomistic theology} right from its very beginning, is revealed by that theologian’s understanding of what, following St Thomas, he calls a “theological conclusion.”  According to him it is possible, even while adhering to a strict application of syllogistic reasoning, to have two kinds of theological conclusions—one flowing from two revealed premises, the other from one revealed and one philosophical premise.  And this latter kind by its very nature will widen the field, if not precisely of revelation as such, at least of the knowledge we can draw from it.  This may appear at first sight to be a quite innocuous and legitimate development of St Thomas’ idea of a theological conclusion.  In fact, it transforms it to the point of being unrecognizable.  The whole meaning of theological endeavor is at a stroke radically altered, and at the same time even our very conception of revelation.

For St Thomas there are not and cannot be theological conclusions which are not already comprised within revelation.  A theological conclusion is and can only be a revealed doctrinal affirmation of which one has established the logical relationship it has with other doctrinal affirmations of the same species.  The whole of theology moves within faith and so within revelation.  To suppose that it can evade it in order to increase its scope (!) is no longer to understand anything about revelation itself, {thus, pretty much all of post-Tridentine theology, which is founded on this doctrine, is unable to understand revelation} as if theology could ever flatter itself of having gone so far beyond revelation as to be able to complete it.

Can one apply human reasoning to truths about the faith? And if not, would not the truths of revelation be cut off from the truths we come to know about reality?