The Forgotten Jesuit of Catholic Modernism: George Tyrrell's Prophetic Theology

By Anthony M. Maher

Reception of the theological voice in the Catholic Church is far from laudable. This book highlights the prophetic voice of one priest-theologian, amongst many others, who courageously challenged the hegemonic abuse of power within the church. The former Jesuit George Tyrrell has rightly been described as "a religious genius," "a revolutionary," and yet also a "mystic-prophet" and "a man of prayer and self-sacrifice." In proposing a Catholicism relevant for the time, and in opposition to clericalism, Tyrrell courageously engaged in a battle with the Roman, Jesuit, and English hierarchical establishment.

This book illustrates how Tyrrell‘s theological challenge to those who would take the church out of history was never effectively refuted, either at the time or since, and that the issues Tyrrell raised are still relevant and alive in the church today. In highlighting Tyrrell‘s liberation of theology from dogmatism, the current work describes why he was vilified by the Roman hierarchy, expelled from the Jesuits, and eventually excommunicated. Tyrrell‘s Ignatian-inspired, hope-filled theology should not be forgotten, not least because it sheds further light on another courageous and prophetic Jesuit, Pope Francis. In revisiting Tyrrell‘s Ignatian theology, this book celebrates the promise that Vatican II presented to the future church, namely, a universal call to holiness that is currently embraced by Pope Francis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781506438511

Book preview

Maher.

Preface

The ‘deposit of faith,’ is latent in the collective mind of the audience, but not in each singly, let them meet and talk it over, and all know at the end what none knew wholly at the beginning.[1]

I found myself on a cold December morning in the shadows of the legendary white chalked hills of West Sussex, the South Downs. The vista before me a wondrous sight, the yawning sun struggling to rise above the frost-scattered shimmerings of an older England. Clothed nearly new in Oxfam warming attire, I had set out early in search of the Parish Church of St Mary’s, an ancient place of worship, time-honoured, long before it was ever recorded in the Doomsday Book of 1086.

I had nervously embarked on, or so I told myself, a sort of pilgrimage to this ancient burial site. I was in search of the final resting place of a via media, the forgotten Jesuit, one deemed to have fallen from grace, and subsequently, died too young, over a hundred years earlier. As I came upon the sacred ground, I realised I was walking slowly, exhaling more deeply the breath that added to the clouded mist of surrounded unknowing. Unconsciously, I was trying not to make a sound that might disturb the silent solemnity of this wintery dormant tree-secluded dell. The entirety of the outside world seemed closed out behind the resolute flint stone sanctuary walls; only the incense-like smell of the morning coke fires from the village drifted into the medieval churchyard.

With mind-map, I moved between the gravestones, slipping in the wet mud-clod of the branding pathway. For a fleeting moment, time returned to 21 July 1909. I imagined the decorous Abbé Henri Bremond, clad in his priestly black cassock and biretta, bespectacled, reading intently from his prayer book. He led the diminutive group of chief mourners, an act of solidarity from a prayerful man, for which, in his turn, innocence lost, he was made to pay. There too, tailor and tailed, the respected Baron Friedrich von Hügel, closely followed by the resolute Maude D. Petre.

I watched in a saddened stillness, an imaginary moving photo once framed. The cortège at a church arrived and made a dignified approach to the yonder. Slowly and in quite silence, yet for prayerful murmurings, the assembly descended down the same mud-clod prayer well to the final resting place of a Catholic priest in an Anglican churchyard. Tyrrell’s Sanhedrin determined that they would inflict a Tertullian eschatological curse, of which Joyce so invectively portrayed; thus Pharisees and Scribes sought to pursue their man beyond the grave. In seeking revenge, they denied the Catholic priest a Catholic burial. After all, perchance, pace Belloc, one of the greatest joys of heaven, so surely, is to throw rocks at the damned in hell.

There, in Storrington, sheltered by a natural wreath of the holly bush, the bush that the sun never forgets. Before my eyes, splendidly festooned dark eternal emerald leaf, contrast red berry, drops of Christ’s blood, recalcitrant crown of thorns, symbols of His death. Among such, I discovered the emblematic gravestone of Father George Tyrrell. And bless my soul that day, did I not further see besides his grave, three more calvary moss-moulded crosses of the outcasts: Maude Petre, Robert Dell, and Alfred Fawkes—an eternal testimony to their faith.

With urgent bare hands, I cleared the moss that obscured the engraved chalice and host, the symbol of his priesthood, which Tyrrell had requested to supplement the simple mark of his name on a stone in the ground. I quickly brushed away the shaded soil splattered by the rain of a century of past days. Working with a stick, I scraped the mud from the plinth; looking down, I was comforted by the sign of my earthed hands; unlike Pilate’s men and the eternal quest for truth, I had no desire to wash memory away.

And so, I spoke freely out loud to Tyrrell that day, it seemed the thing to do. . . . The sound of my voice echoed familiarity in that cold, lonely, beautiful place. I told him of past times and of calls for ecclesial reform, explained as best I could his name and the reasons for this book. And as I walked from his graveside, respects acknowledged, I became ever more determined to pedestal the life of this forgotten Jesuit and to write of an injustice to restore his legacy.

As I turned at the last, I noticed through the holly bush, beyond the cemetery wall, a place Tyrrell knew well—it was the Catholic Priory of Storrington. Perched high on the church building stood a monument overlooking Tyrrell’s grave, there shrouded in wintery solstice light, an Epstein-like sculpture. It was none other looking down than the Mother of England, the Mother of God. How I knew then the futility of man-made borders. Here, situated between the church of his birth and the Church of Rome, at peace with God, Tyrrell had found a place of rest in ancient holy ground.

Anthony Maher, Parish Church of St Mary,

Storrington, West Sussex, England

November 2016

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Tyrrell, ‘The Mind of the Church,’ FM II (1904), 174. ↵

Introduction

To hold a theology or orthodoxy merely by tradition or imitation or inference, and not as a provisional and faulty expression of a real experience, is religious intellectualism, not faith. It is ‘idealism’ not ‘realism,’ that is to say, one’s life is, in such case, controlled, not by reality, but by a symbol or formula of reality; or if by experience at all, by the experience of others accepted on testimony.[1]

The intriguing history, including the trials, tribulations, expulsions and suppressions of the Society of Jesus have been well documented in hundreds of books and peer-reviewed articles. Down through the centuries the Society of Jesus has attracted to its ranks a significant number of remarkable men, saints, prophets, poets, academics, martyrs, soothsayers and political activists.[2] One remarkable but largely forgotten former Jesuit is the subject of this work. His name is Fr George Tyrrell (1861–1909); he was a poet, essayist, apologist, mystic, spiritual director, prophet and martyr. He laboured for a cause, which today we might understand to be the liberation of theology from what Tyrrell called Theologism. Only a liberated theology, or so Tyrrell believed, could bridge the divide between faith, theology and life. A division later emphasized by the ressourcement theologian Yves Congar as being responsible for the prevailing widespread loss of faith experienced in Western culture. Three decades after Tyrrell’s death, and in adopting a similar critique to him, Congar described the theological balance sheet for 1934 as being "in deficit . . . disincarnate ..... devoid of human life."[3]

Tyrrell and more contemporary scholars such as Congar devoted their life to a pastoral  imperative that the bishops of Vatican II appositely described as the necessity of reading the signs of the times.[4] A clarion call from the conciliar bishops that Pope Francis has rallied to in his attempt to bridge the void between faith, theology and life. In drawing attention to the ‘silenced’ and forgotten Jesuit, the current work highlights a prophetic Catholic thinker. An ecclesial prophet, who as a consequence of his pastoral theology and critique of the abuse of power within the church was labeled a ‘Modernist.’ He was subsequently publicly condemned by a group of powerful ecclesial hierarchs, those principally motivated by careerist ambition and the political assignations between Roman integralism and the English Church. Furthermore, Tyrrell had the significant misfortune of developing his ‘faith seeking understanding’ at the wrong place and in the wrong time; such is the importance of context. Following the First Vatican Council, Tyrrell sought to articulate a Catholic faith that would resonate with the modern mind, a prolegomena vastly more suited to the more aggiornamento and dialogically orientated period immediately following Vatican II.

Tyrrell’s life and theological endeavors belong within the so-called Catholic ‘Modernist’ narrative, although this work will oppose such deleterious and polarising caricatures such as conservative, progressive or modernist. Such man-made borders or labels seem singly manufactured to confuse or denigrate. Pioneering scholars who today are widely described as the leading figures of twentieth-century Catholic theology, those who shaped the revival agenda at Vatican II, were also forced to endure labels such as ‘Liberal’ or ‘Neo-Modernists.’ Including: Teilhard de Chardin, Congar, Maritain, Rahner, de Lubac, and St John XXIII. In their preparatory submissions prior to Vatican II, despite the devastation caused by the Oath Against Modernism (1910), many bishops continued to warn of the dangers of what they believed to be ‘Modernism.’

Such preparatory documents as Chapter XIX, De erroribus damnandis, speaks of the rise of neo-modernismus and urges that it be counted by the right affirmation of the Church teaching. Minority bishops suggested that Neo-Modernism in the 1960s manifests itself in ‘nova exegesi, symbolica et spiritual . . . false notione libertatis, in evolution dogmatum, in syncretismo religioso.’[5] Tyrrell and Roncalli (St John XXIII) shared similar experiences of being labeled Modernists. While both had the responsibility of teaching seminarians in a climate of suspicion, they were equally inspired by a pastoral raison d’être and understood their vocation to the priesthood as a pastoral calling to serve the people of God; subsequently both men were removed from their teaching posts (Stonyhurst College and the Lateran College). Both men had files held at the Holy Office marked: Suspected of Modernism.[6] It was not until he became Pope that St John XXIII discovered that his secret file in the Vatican recorded that he was suspected of being a Modernist.

In different circumstances, Tyrrell’s pastorally inspired theology may well have encouraged leaders within the Church to engage at a deeper level with the world, and to have embarked upon a path of dialogue with all that is best in human exploration and discovery. In re-visiting Tyrrell’s thought this work resists the temptation to produce a Tyrrell-inspired systematic theology, although it remains reliant upon sound scientific research and seeks to allow the facts to speak for themselves. One of our primary concerns, as reflected upon in the Preface, is to draw attention to an injustice and to seek the rightful recognition for a Jesuit pastoral theologian who attempted to journey with the ‘People of God’, as he found them. Simply, this work seeks to bring the voice of a forgotten and silenced religious genius into conversation with the contemporary epoch. Our goal is to support those who labour daily in word and deed, to bridge the divide between faith, theology, and life—those unsung heroes who through Christian witness in ordinary life—reincarnate the narratives of Christ.

Essentially, through the tripartite medium of Tyrrell’s ‘Life,’ ‘Theology,’ and ‘Legacy,’ this work moves back and forward through biography, history, theology, and advocacy. We will argue that the term ‘Modernism’ may have currency as an aging historical signpost, or perhaps more insidiously, as a barbed arrow to fire at our theological nemesis, but in truth, the term holds little theological substance or historical and linguistic accuracy, particularly when used superficially to describe a distinct theological movement, crisis, or school of thought. In truth, Tyrrell’s pastoral theology represents a dedicated attempt to articulate a sense of faith seeking understanding, an understanding that by definition should resonate with the concrete reality of the ordinary lived life of faith. Without reasoned and affective understanding that resists drifting off into mysticality, theology fails to respond to the most pressing questions of our time, when, pace Congar, theology and indeed faith would forever be disincarnate.

Part One: Tyrrell’s Life

In essence George Tyrrell took up arms in opposition to three publications by his ecclesial overlords. The documents include: the English Joint Pastoral Letter, composed secretly in Rome and surreptitiously signed as the work of the fifteen English bishops (1900); the Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, condemning Modernism (1907); and the Lenten Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Mercier, Primate of Belgium (1908). All three documents were inspired or directed by Cardinal Merry de Val, who became the Secretary of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Tyrrell, duly enraged, wrote and published three polemical responses: A Letter to a University Professor (1906); an article commissioned by and published in the Times of London and the Giornale ď Italia, ‘The Pope and Modernism’ (1907); and a further monograph, Medievalism (1908). Part One of this work chronicles the ‘fall-out’ from these six publications that coincide with and form the backdrop to the last ten years of Tyrrell’s traumatic life.

Part Two: Tyrrell’s Theology

Part Two turns a spotlight on Tyrrell’s theology: including an analysis of his Christology that arguably became a foundation for his evolving ecclesiology. Tyrrell’s exploratory theological endeavours cannot be easily categorized, much less appropriated by any specific school. He is not an academic theologian in the contemporary departmentalised sense, but a man inspired by an encounter with Christ mediated through the prism of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Tyrrell’s subsequent pastoral theology focused upon the concrete lived reality of faith. He began with the material reality (inductive method), which for him had primacy over a pre-given, perfect ideal or immaterial exemplar (deductive method) that is only partly reflected in the material world around us.[7] Through critical examination of issues such as ‘the rights and limits of theology,’ the ‘development of doctrine,’ ‘authority,’ and the ‘sensus fidelium,’ Tyrrell hoped to make the Church relevant to the ordinary lived life of faith. He believed the Church of his day had reached a crossroads. He laboured to produce a clearer map to a future church, one guided by an inclusive theology that was capable of bridging the divide between faith, theology and life. Guiding the Church in process, through the many real issues of the day, Tyrrell laboured theologically to encourage the church to embrace the brave new world of the twentieth century.

Tyrrell’s theology and ecclesiology go back to the roots of Christianity; he pioneered what today we might call a ressourcement to the original spirit of Aquinas and Ignatius.[8] He understood this method to be a viable gateway to the Gospel and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Tyrrell’s pastoral rasion d’être thus necessitated a theology of mercy. In his apologetic essay, ‘A Perverted Devotion to Hell’ (1899), Tyrrell questioned our understanding of God in relation to Divine mercy and the apparent contradiction of a Christian ‘devotion’ to eternal suffering.[9] Tyrrell concluded that such ‘devotion’ appears counter-intuitive to the Gospels, for it would cause the mouth of the river to appear to rise above the head; to the extent that humanity has the potential to forgive, humanity would seem more merciful than God. Tyrrell’s pastorally inspired theology does not appear as a sop to contemporary religious apathy; rather it is best understood as a call to mercy for those in pastoral difficulty. When correctly understood, mercy is not a yielding to pastoral weakness . . . it is revealed truth. It does not abolish justice, but outdoes it.[10]

Part Three: Tyrrell’s Legacy

Part Three of this work will pedestal Tyrrell’s legacy. His theology was addressed to countless individuals both within and outside the Church. While his influence in contrast to Newman’s legacy remains slight and restricted to a small group of friends and academics. By way of distinction, two Anglican scholars, Alec Vidler and Nicholas Sagovsky, have produced exemplary work on Tyrrell, along with meticulous historical scholarship by the American Jesuit, David Schultenover. In his native country of Ireland, Jesuit historian Oliver Rafferty most recently published a fine collection of essays on Tyrrell’s legacy. The papers commemorating the life and thought of Tyrrell were originally intended for a conference to be hosted by Heythrop College which unfortunately did not eventuate.[11] Despite the above meritorious endeavours and Tyrrell being rightly described as a religious genius, no English Catholic theologian has produced a monograph on Tyrrell’s life, theology, and legacy. The current work aims to rectify this particular over-sight.

Tyrrell’s legacy records that he pioneered a pastoral style of theology based upon a whole and realistic theological anthropology. He used the image of the Church as the ‘People of God’, he further understood the Church to be a sacrament, and he was averse to clericalism, centralism, and triumphalism. He clearly articulated a fundamental role of the laity within the structures of the Church and the necessity for a thoroughly instituted understanding of the sensus fidelium. In summary, as this work will evidence, Tyrrell foreshadowed many of the great reforms of the Second Vatican Council, along with important theological developments since the Council. Thomas Michael Loome compiled a luminous and precise bibliography of Tyrrell’s complete works, with additional supplements published in the Heythrop Journal. The research by Loome is a fitting tribute to Tyrrell’s legacy and may support efforts to ensure Tyrrell’s work is not forgotten. The bibliography has become the foundation stone for all subsequent research into Tyrrell’s life and theology. Here with reference to Tyrrell’s penultimate book, Medievalism, Loome explains something of the attraction to the life and theology of Tyrrell, the reason for this current book, and why Tyrrell’s contribution to Christianity should not be forgotten:

Tyrrell’s Medievalism was his first book to fall into my hands. It seemed to me then, it seems to be even now, the most uncompromising and compelling indictment of ecclesial stupidity and corruption written in the twentieth century. There have been other similar books written since: pleas for honesty, for reform, for renewal within the church. They are pale shadows of Tyrrell’s Medievalism, all the more so for having been written by men who have not had to pay a fraction of the price that Tyrrell paid: in suffering, public disgrace, and, finally, ostracism by the community he wished to serve. Only a man as outraged and as religious as Tyrrell could have written such a work. It is not easily forgotten.[12]

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George Tyrrell, ‘The Doctrinal Authority of Conscience,’ EFI, 6, and Kerr (1997), Theology After Wittgenstein, ‘Suspicions of Idealism,’ ‘Assurances of Realism,’ 101–44. ↵

Notable luminaries include, but is certainly not limited to: Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1884–1889), Fr. Rupert Mayer (1876–1945), Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), Fr. Augustin Bea (1881–1968), Fr. Walter Ciszek (1904–1984), Fr. Ignacio Ellacuria (1930–1989), Fr. Pedro Arrupe (1907–1991), Fr. Karl Rahner, Fr. Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), Fr. Bernard Lonergan, Fr. Anthony de Mello (1931–1998) and Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis—1936–present). ↵

Yves Congar, "Déficit de la théologie", Sept [a Catholic French newspaper], January 1935. The first section of the article (a foundation for a pastoral departure in theological method) has not yet been translated into English, although Jürgen Mettepenningen offers an excellent translation of the second section. In it Congar argues persuasively for a theology of life. Jürgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (London: T & T Clark International, 2010), 43–45; and (2) Yves Congar, Une conclusion théologique à l’enquête sur les raisons actuelles de l’incroyance [The Conclusion to a Theological Investigation into the Reasons for Unbelief in Our Time], Vie Intellectuelle, 25 July 1935, 214–49. Notwithstanding the inherent inexactitude of the term nouvelle théologie, particularly with regard to ressourcement theologians such as Congar and de Lubac, Mettepenningen reminds us that, in the English-speaking world, Congar’s two early essays have been largly overlooked, and that the articles contain numerous pastoral insights to guide the contemporary church. ↵

‘The Primacy of the Pastoral’, Bridging the Divide Between Faith, Theology and Life in the Ecclesiology of Yves Congar’, Anthony Maher (Ed.), Bridging the Divide Between Faith Theology and Life (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2015), 27–48.  ↵

See further, Typis Polyglottis, Vaticans, 1961, and Loome, T.M. (1979), Liberal catholicism, reform catholicism, modernism: a contribution to a new orientation in modernist research. Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, Mainz, 11. ↵

See Paul Johnson, Pope John XXIII, University of Michigan Press, 1975, 37.  ↵

For analysis of these two very different ways of thinking and the subsequent implications for Christology and Ecclesiology see Thomas M. Kelly (2013), When the Gospel Grows Feet, 23ff.; and Gerald A. Arbuckle, who reminds us that the inductive method so favoured by Newman finds solid support in the ecclesiology of Vatican II . . . [and] the inductive pedagogical method adopted by Jesus Christ . . . this is called a ‘narrative ecclesiology’ or an ‘ecclesiology from below.’ Catholic Identity or Identities? (2013), xvi ff. ↵

Spirituality and Virtue in Christian Formation: A Conversation between Thomistic and Ignatian Traditions, Nicholas Austin SJ, New Blackfriars 97 (March 2016): 202–17. ↵

See chapter seven below regarding Tyrrell’s call for mercy and his critique of the ‘devotion’ to hell. ↵

The Theological Background of the Ecclesiological and Ecumenical Vision of Pope Francis, National Catholic Reporter (Nov. 7th 2014), Cardinal Walter Kasper, President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. ↵

Oliver P. Rafferty (2010), George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism.↵

Loome, T.M. (1979), Liberal catholicism, reform catholicism, modernism: a contribution to a new orientation in modernist research. Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, Mainz, 14. See Tyrrell’s Medievalism, originally published in 1908 and republished with foreword by Gabriel Daly in 1994. ↵

I

The Life of George Tyrrell

1

An Ecclesial Prophet or Agent Provocateur?

When we are dealing with the spiritual world, we are under a further disadvantage; for we can speak of it only in analogous terms borrowed from the world of sensuous experience, and with no more exactitude than we would express music in terms of colour, or colour in terms of music. . . . The use of philosophy lies in its insisting on the inadequacy of the vulgar statement, its abuse, in forgetting the inadequacy of its own, and thereby falling into a far more grievous error than that which it would correct.[1]

I

An ecclesial prophet or agent provocateur? Most likely, our answer will depend upon our own psychology and subsequent theological compass. In the context of the so-called Catholic ‘Modernist Crisis’, most surely an enduring ecclesial civil war, there are no winners. In an effort to comprehend one tragic human story of this particular ongoing conflict, the contemporary reader effortlessly becomes drawn into the intriguing life and times of an avant-garde, but largely forgotten, ‘English’ Jesuit. His religious persecution, expulsion from the Jesuits, eventual excommunication, and subsequent early death represent one of the most significant examples of suppression in the modern era of the Church. In 1909, such was the scandal around his death and denial of a Catholic burial that a letter to the Editor of the Times of London recorded,

There is going on a war between two forces in the Church, and he has come to be looked upon, especially by English Roman Catholics, as the champion of one side, that which pleaded for light and freedom and growth, that which would be true to its faith and yet would welcome and fearlessly apply the methods of science, and which refused to be silenced, far less satisfied, by the traditional arguments for immobility.[2]

In a broader context, historical exploration of the ecclesial topography of the early twentieth century allows George Tyrrell’s life and pastorally inspired theology to inform the current ecclesial discussion inspired by another Jesuit, Pope Francis. While exercising demons is cathartic, and there are a few demons in this narrative, precise analysis reveals that Tyrrell became trapped in a rip tide of Roman, ecclesial-political machinations, a powerful current that he could not comprehend or escape. Primarily, emanating from a clash of cultures—English and Mediterranean—in a concrete sense, Tyrrell became what today we might call collateral damage, a casualty of Roman integralism ironically in pursuit of a geopolitical horizon.[3]

George Tyrrell has been rightly described as a revolutionary, a religious genius, Ajax-like, defying the lightning strike, and yet, also a mystic, a devoted friend, a man of prayer and self-sacrifice. Gabriel Daly reasons that Tyrrell’s theological challenge, to those who would expurgate him from the church (including vitriolic ripostes from eminent ecclesial personages, such as Wilfred Ward and Cardinal Mercier), ‘was never effectively refuted either at the time or since, and that the issues Tyrrell explored are still large and live in the Church today’.[4] Upon expulsion from the Jesuits, Tyrrell became exposed to Roman Ultramontane forces. Ronald Chapman rightly observed that ‘Tyrrell belonged to no party’, and this could ‘hardly be forgiven at a time when party and denomination was almost religion itself’. There is, he wrote: ‘an elusive Cain-like quality about Tyrrell’.[5] In fanning the Ultramontane flames, Tyrrell compared ‘the theological terrorism’ espoused from the Holy Office of the Inquisition with the Christ of the Gospels, and concluded that the papacy of his day had more in common with the ‘Sanhedrim which put Christ to death on the score of theological heresy’.[6]

Not without good reason did the Anglican historian Alec Vidler describe the Modernist leader as ‘a writer whose pen wields flame’.[7] The Catholic lay theologian and author of the acclaimed Mystical Elements of Religion, Baron von Hügel, considered Tyrrell a theologian and philosopher with the ‘heart of an Irishman and the mind of a German’,[8] while Gabriel Daly argues that Tyrrell’s theology is laced with ‘lucid prose, colourful metaphors, witty instance and ironic intent’,—in fact, ‘a tour de force of English prose’.[9] The French exegete Alfred Loisy, who travelled a similar path to Tyrrell, described his comrade’s opus as a ‘revolution’, but also as ‘a work of eloquence, sincerity and faith’.[10] Tyrrell’s close friend Canon Lilley declared: ‘Tyrrell was a born writer, one of those really great masters of language, for whom thought seems to arise out of the underground depths of musing, like Aphrodite from the waves, in perfect and accomplished beauty of form’.[11]

Indeed, Tyrrell was a gifted essayist who anticipated many of the church reforms of the Second Vatican Council. He was the master of witty retort and comic intent. Once drawn into Tyrrell’s personal life and ecclesial conflicts, it is virtually impossible to remain neutral. Even his critics admit Tyrrell could captivate a reader. Tyrrell’s powerful adversaries, such as the Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val, Cardinal Mercier, Primate of Belgium, and the so-called Black Pope, the Spaniard and Superior General of the Jesuits, Luis Martíns, all attempted to trade polemical or personal blows with Tyrrell, but they soon recognised their error and quickly withdrew from the open field.

Tyrrell’s fiery prose and antinomian spirit have deep roots within the Irish literary institution of Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, Behan, Beckett, O’Casey, Shaw, and Kavanagh. Here is Tyrrell’s tradition, located within the Irish-English theological-ecclesial caldron of his day. It certainly has significant English Jesuit association, but the organic roots also run deep into largely ignored Irish soil. Tyrrell was as English as C.S. Lewis! Following their relocation across the Irish Sea and subsequent conversion experiences, both Lewis and Tyrrell became, in their own way, apologists for Christianity, recognising that the use of allegory is a matter of necessity, reflecting the nature and limits of human philosophy and language. Lewis and Tyrrell were drawn to Christianity despite its philosophical overreach, because it offered a map of reality that corresponds well to what is actually observed and experienced in the world. They wrote to share their belief that Christianity has the capacity to widen our vision of reality beyond that set forth by doctrine or Neo-Scholastic philosophy.[12]

Tyrrell’s personal history, when combined with what Maude Petre, Tyrrell’s biographer, described as a complete lack of self-interest, conspired to make Tyrrell a formidable political adversary—a danger to himself no less than to others.[13] Confiding to a close friend, Robert Dell, Tyrrell illustrated prophetically the precarious potential of his combative nature,

. . . my own impulse [Tyrrell insists] is always to cut off my own head and fling it at my enemy’s head.[14]

George Tyrrell also belongs within the broad tradition of Catholic enlightenment, emanating from the Council of Trent and particularly within a milieu inspired by the thought of John Henry Newman. Tyrrell’s work represents an authentic voice of what today we refer to as aggiornamento, the desire to bring the church into dialogue with modernity.[15] Tyrrell’s legacy to Catholicism builds upon the influence of Newman and von Hügel. He also appears as one of the most original, significant, and largely forgotten ‘British’ thinkers of his generation. A number of contemporary scholars, such as Aidan Nichols and Michael Kirwin, believe that the questions Tyrrell raised were those of a theological genius. Furthermore, ‘English Catholicism has not produced so many that it can afford to forget this stormy petrel of the Edwardian age’.[16]

Other contemporary scholars such as Fergus Kerr emphasise that the thought of Tyrrell was not forgotten at Vatican II. Kerr notes that Ernesto Ruffini, Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo, a major figure at the Council, made a significant claim when he objected, ‘that the idea of the Church as sacrament came from Tyrrell’. Joseph C. Fenton, another significant member of the Ultramontane minority at Vatican II, complained, ‘that the whole of the first chapter of Lumen Gentium, the document on the nature of the Church, was composed in the language of Tyrrell’.[17] Significantly, and in assisting efforts to articulate Tyrrell’s legacy, Nicholas Lash argues that the modernist ‘event’ ‘was the painful and often tragic beginning of a significant success’.[18] In sum, Aidan Nichols, the first Catholic to be invited for a lectureship at Oxford since the Reformation, sheds further light on why Tyrrell should not remain the forgotten Jesuit, when he candidly declares that Tyrrell was a ‘religious genius’, an extremely rare phenomenon in the English Church.[19]

II

The Demands of Revisiting the

‘Modernist Martyr’

Above all, he was the stuff of which martyrs are made.[20]

Revisiting controversial events such as the ‘Modernist Crisis’ is fraught with difficulties. It is not unreasonable, following the lead of eminent scholars such as Gabriel Daly, to assert that it is practically impossible to approach George Tyrrell specifically—and Modernism more generally—without personal bias, and even ideological presupposition.[21] Ironically, and highlighting the dangers of such an undertaking, the historian Hilaire Belloc cautions that history should be written not from the Bar, but from the Bench. Moreover, it must show a willingness to submit to what Matthew Arnold called ‘the despotism of fact’.[22]

In addition, contemporary historians and theologians such as Ormond Rush accentuate the importance of historical consciousness and hermeneutical considerations of authors, texts, and receivers.[23] Theologians with a penchant for method, such as the Australian Neil Ormerod, remind us of further important procedural considerations for those who seek to dialogue with controversial buccaneers from our ecclesial history. Ormerod provides an important compass bearing for our journey, when he advocates that ‘historical ecclesiology is not just historical narrative. It should be empirical/historical, critical, normative, dialectic and practical’.[24] The complexity of the task serves as a partial reason to explain why the life and thought of the ‘forgotten Jesuit’ remains a largely unacknowledged constituent of the ongoing process of Catholic reform, as enunciated at Trent, courageously pioneered during the Modernist period, articulated and structured by the theologians of the Ressourcement and collegially proclaimed as Aggiornamento by the bishops at the Second Vatican Council. Today, this aspiration, to communicate the joy of the Gospel to the particular epoch, appears grounded most convincingly in the pontificate of Pope Francis.[25]

From Tyrrell’s perspective, the radically conservative Ultramontane school he opposed represents unqualified absolutism. ‘L’Église c’est moi’, literally seemed to refer to the Ultramontane position,[26] one that Tyrrell characterised as ‘Reaction on the Rampage’.[27] Holding a position that resonates with the reality of the sexual abuse crisis today, Tyrrell confided to his close friend Baron von Hügel,

. . . that the short-sighted fear of scandal has been, and is, the curse of the Church . . . because it is an easily and much used cover for cowardice, it exploits the future in the interests of the present, preferring scandal of millions to come to that of hundreds now.[28]

The Jesuit philosopher Gerard Hughes writes persuasively that the church is in danger of repeating the mistakes made in response to the first Modernist Crisis, and that

. . . the first casualty of a policy of top-down authoritarianism is truth. We must at all costs learn from the disastrous mistakes made, in all good faith, in suppressing the Modernists, and make sure we do not repeat them again, a hundred years later.[29]

Arguably, Catholic theologians continue to work within an ecclesial context that is characterised by isolation, anti-intellectualism, patrimony and oscillation—evidenced on one side of the pendulum by ecclesial documents such as Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), Lamentabili Sane (1907) and the ‘Oath Against Modernism’ (1910) and on the other by Lumen Gentium (1964), Dei Verbum (1965), Gaudium et Spes (1965), and Apostolicam Actuositatem (1965). Bishops also work within the constraints of this pendulum swing, although most privately would acknowledge the necessity of a critical (pastoral) safety valve, to enhance the capacity of the ecclesial vessel as it continues upon its journey toward the eschaton.

At the turn of the twentieth century, George Tyrrell articulated a challenge to those who would take the church out of history and place it in some ideal medieval realm.[30] Drawing upon the thought of Bernard Lonergan, it is reasonable to argue that the church had locked itself into a classicist understanding of culture as a normative ideal that it possessed and others must obtain.[31] George Tyrrell, during a period of ecclesial turmoil characterised by witch-hunts, vigilance committees and ecclesial spies ensconced, daringly undertook, as Roman missiles were fired at him, a groundbreaking role in instigating the shift from classicism to historical consciousness—not in theory, but in practice. In the heat of battle with Rome, Tyrrell candidly confessed to a friend,

. . . as you can imagine, the air is full of missiles directed at my head, and I am busy dodging them . . . it is not pleasant, yet to my Irish blood, not wholly unpleasant.[32]

Thus, we see that Tyrrell resolutely challenged what Ormerod describes as ‘the classic conservative antitype’, which represents a distortion in the development of the church, where ‘the past is normative, not as a prototype for future development, but as an archetype to be endlessly repeated’.[33] Undaunted, Tyrrell realised that an organisation that manifests the above antitype does not have the ability to adapt to changing social and cultural circumstances.[34] As we shall explore later, Tyrrell was inspired by the liberation motif he discovered in the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. Tyrrell almost single-handedly, most commentators would argue foolhardily, set about the not insignificant task of renewing the late-nineteenth-century manifestation of the Society of Jesus and the Roman Church.

III

Censorship and Pseudonym

Censorship and pseudonym characterised Tyrrell’s academic life. He achieved an extraordinary output in his too short, complicated life. Of his nineteen books, only ten were published in a normal manner. Of the others, two were published under pseudonyms, two under the names of friends, two others anonymously, one under Tyrrell’s own name but in a very limited quantity, and still another two, although later published commercially, made their first appearance as anonymous works, intended for private circulation only. He also produced a vast opus of essays, reviews, and other short writings, which may be counted in their hundreds.

Tyrrell was indebted to the extraordinary age of intellectual exploration and innovation in which he lived. His philosophy, no less than his theology and polemics, grew out of this historical context. In particular, he was profoundly influenced by the theology of Newman, Alfred Loisy’s biblical scholarship, and the philosophy of Maurice Blondel. However, claiming Ignatian inspiration, Tyrrell pioneered a theology that was accessible to the educated Christian, those he described as the faithful millions.[35] This objective led directly to his downfall, for he formulated an ecclesiology that challenged the teaching authority of the church as espoused by the Ultramontane interpretations of Vatican I.

Tyrrell was not a typical academic. He became a professor of theology at the relatively young age of thirty-three, convinced ‘that no truth can remain unaltered in a living mind’.[36] Ever forthright, he claimed his own aim was to ‘follow the truth to hell if necessary’.[37] By the age of thirty-five, he was removed from his Chair of Philosophy at Stonyhurst. Despite his struggles with the Society of Jesus, Tyrrell did personify many of the characteristics of a ‘typical’ Jesuit. In essence, Tyrrell was human, almost too human. He fought consistently to defeat the conflict raging within, between the intellect and the sentiment, the heart and the mind; it was a discord that eventually overwhelmed him.

Tyrrell adopted Samuel Coleridge’s lament, lambasting clergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church. They are, Tyrrell and Coleridge exclaimed, ‘orthodox liars of God’.[38] In his reply to Cardinal Mercier, Tyrrell wrote, ‘Guard your words how you will, your thought leaks out between them at every turn’.[39] In so writing, Tyrrell dared put his head above the medieval parapet in order to challenge what he considered to be an antiquated ecclesial culture.[40] He challenged those in the hierarchy, who he thought personified the medieval restorationist movement, such as Cardinal Mercier, who he lambasted:

The world which is your mission to evangelise has already slipped from your grasp. You have nothing to hold it by. Neither its intellectual nor its ethical, nor its social, nor its political ideas are yours. If it is interested in you at all, it is only as a medieval ruin which no sane man would seek shelter from in a storm. It has passed you by long since, and now if it throws a momentary backwards glance at you, it is because of the clamorous pretensions of Modernism to march with the age, and your clamorous outcry against these pretensions. ‘What is this brawl’, it asks, ‘in the household of death’?[41]

In powerful, polemical writing, Tyrrell maintained that the task of theology was to engage with the age in which it lived, for only in so doing can it hope to bring the Gospel of Christ into the world. In rejecting Scholasticism while drawing upon new biblical and philosophical sources, in an environment of political emancipation, Tyrrell presented the experience of the community as a genuine source of theological authority. He was subsequently banned from teaching, preaching, publishing, and giving retreats—silenced. Roman authority ‘persuaded’ publishers not to print Tyrrell’s books, and his work was removed from bookshops and library shelves. As a consequence, he remains, to this day, a forgotten literary figure, a muzzled theological genius who advocated religious experience as a source for theology, together with dialogue, collegiality, and ecclesial development.

Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan offers a convincing argument that ‘it is the occurrence of later events that places early events in a new perspective’.[42] In this light, the current work will narrate the story of Tyrrell’s life within an enlarged historical context. In Tyrrell’s day (1861–1909), history began to be described as scientific, as advocates of this methodology—historians as well as theologians—claimed objectivity in evaluating evidence.[43] Furthermore, Tyrrell defended the role of the critical historian’s relative, functional autonomy and their constructive role within the theological process. Tyrrell’s life, as we shall see in the next chapter, gives evidence of the fact that creative tension is integral to development in all human endeavour. It is the role of the theologian, following the position of John Henry Newman, to continually grapple after the truth, challenging the Magisterium to provide an appropriate forum for self-critical dialogue.[44]

The corresponding retribution that followed Tyrrell’s theological polemic captures, in an intimate way, the historical reality that was the Modernist Crisis. The inner turmoil ruptured into Tyrrell’s external Jesuit life with tragic personal consequences. The continuous provocation of his Jesuit superiors initially led to his exile from London. He was later expelled from the Society of Jesus, tormented and falsely accused by ecclesial spies ensconced outside his home, judged in secret by Roman-sponsored ‘vigilance committees’, denounced by popes, cardinals, bishops, and confrères, pronounced guilty without a hearing, and hounded from the sacraments. The final onslaught brought an abrupt end to his life. He died prematurely at the age of forty-eight, on 15 July 1909. The Times recorded that even in death, Tyrrell could not avoid controversy. Despite an emotional public outcry, those in authority ignored his ‘Last Will and Testament’, refusing the priest of eighteen years a Catholic burial. Anticipating his final fate, Tyrrell requested,

If a stone is put over me, let it state that I was a Catholic priest, and bear the usual emblematic Chalice and Host.[45]

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Tyrrell, RTD, 89, 93. ↵

The Editor, The Times, undated, Southwark Archives, Tyrrell File. Tyrrell’s letters from this period show a great deal of suffering on the part of Tyrrell. He wrote to Henri Bremond that he would do everything he could in order to retain as much as possible from his priesthood. Thus, he clung on to the reciting of his breviary because of ‘its quasi sacramental value’ and an exterior sign of communion with Rome. Tyrrell, G. Bremond, H. Louis-David, A., Lettres de George Tyrrell á Henri Bremond (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1971), 216–18. ↵

Integralism regards everything in the world as evil or worthless unless and until it is somehow ‘integrated’ with Roman Christianity. See McBrien, R.P., Catholicism, 692, 1242. ↵

See Daly, G. Medievalism, 16. Jodock, D. (Ed.), Catholicism contending with modernity: Roman Catholic modernism and anti-modernism in historical context, 16. Loome, T.M., Liberal catholicism, reform catholicism, modernism: a contribution to a new orientation in modernist research (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1979), 11. ↵

Chapman, R. The Pope and Modernists, The Times, 2 November 1910. ↵

Tyrrell, CF, 47. ↵

Vidler, A. Foreword, CC, 7. ↵

Von Hügel, Hibbert Journal (Jan. 1910), 16. ↵

Daly, G., Medievalism, 7–19. ↵

See Alec Vidler, Foreword, CC, 9. ↵

L. Lilley’s Preface, Petre, M.D., Von Hügel and Tyrrell—the Story of a Friendship (1937), v–xii. ↵

See Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, 185ff. See for example, Tyrrell’s allegorical works, The Civilising of the Matafanus and The Soul’s Orbit or Man’s Journey to God. ↵

For example, see Petre, A&L, Vol. II, A Long Friendship, 85. ↵

George Tyrrell to Robert Dell, A&L, Vol. II (1906), 306. ↵

Aggiornamento was, in fact, the task formally proposed to Vatican II by John XXIII. It literally means ‘a bringing up to date’. The church was to be brought up to date. Pope Paul VI believed aggiornamento constitutes the entire programme of Vatican II; for further discussion, see John Courtney-Murray’s exploration of aggiornamento in the thought of Pope John XXIII, "Things Old and New in Pacem in Terris,"America 107 (27 April 1963): 612–14; Thomas T. McAvoy, "American Catholicism and the Aggiornamento," The Review of Politics, vol. 30, no. 3 (Jul. 1968): 275–91; Bishop Christopher Butler, "The Aggiornamento of Vatican II," Searchings, ‘let us not fear the truth may endanger the truth.’ What united this disparate group into a movement was the pastoral concern that theology could speak to the church’s concrete situation and that theology’s relevance to the present lay in the creative recovery of its past. In other words, the Council acknowledged that ‘the first step to what later came to be known as aggiornamento had to be ressourcement, a rediscovery of the riches of the church’s two-thousand-year treasury, a return to the very headwaters of the Christian tradition’. ↵

135. See also Michael Kirwin, George Tyrrell and the Responsibilities of Theology, The Month (Nov. 1999): 426–30. ↵

Kerr, F., Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 7. ↵

Lash, N., "Modernism, aggiornamento and the night battle," Bishops and Writers (Ed.), Adrian Hastings (1977), 51–80. ↵

Nichols, A., From Newman to Congar, 135. Aidan Nichols was the John-Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Greyfriars, Oxford, 2006–2008. ↵

Maude Petre, My Way of Faith, 271. ↵

See the work of Gabriel Daly: Transcendence and Immanence; Gabriel Daly, Medievalism: George Tyrrell; Gabriel Daly, Theological and Philosophical Modernism, in Darrell Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, 88-112. ↵

See Arnold, M., On the Study of Celtic Literature, 66. See also Hilaire Belloc’s riposte to Coulton (literary contemporaries of Tyrrell), The Case of Dr. Coulton, The Month (Nov. 1938) and Wilson, A.N., Hilaire Belloc. During the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries, Belloc became a prolific author of British history, virtually all of it from the ‘bar’. In relation to Tyrrell, this work will highlight a similar challenge for scholars who publish on Modernism. ↵

Ormond Rush, Still Interpreting Vatican II.↵

Neil Ormerod, The Times They Are A-Changin, A Response to O’Malley and Schlosser, O’Malley J.W., Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?, 172. ↵

Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. See also interview with Pope Francis, New York Times (Sept. 19, 2013). Also A Big Heart Open to God: An Exclusive Interview with Pope Francis, Antonio Spadaro, America (September 30, 2013). ↵

Tyrrell to Rooke Ley, April 27, 1901, in Petre, Autobiography and Life, 2:160. ↵

Tyrrell to Rooke Ley, January 5, 1901, in Petre, Autobiography and Life, 2:153. ↵

Tyrrell to Baron von Hügel, June 27, 1903, and November 19, 1905, in Petre, Autobiography and Life, 2:292. ↵

Gerard J. Hughes, On Modernising the Church, The Furrow (March 2013): 142–52, at 150. ↵

See especially Tyrrell’s Medievalism, 1908, reprinted in 1994 with an insightful Foreword by Gabriel Daly. See also Neil Ormerod: ‘Anxiety about change finds theological expression in a type of idealistic ecclesiology that takes the Church out of history and places it in some ideal realm . . . characterised by lack of interest in historical details and events. They present a timeless unchanging Church’. The Times They Are A ‘Changing’: A Response to O’Malley and Schloesser, Theological Studies 67 (Dec. 2006): 834–55. ↵

Ormerod, 843. ↵

George Tyrrell to W.S. Blunt, GTL, 16 October 1907. ↵

Ormerod, 844. ↵

See Ormerod, Dec. 2006. ‘A Church that approximates the classic conservative antitype represents a community that effectively fails to realise its mission’, 846. ↵

See Tyrrell, FM II. ↵

Tyrrell, The Mind of the Church, FM II, 134. ↵

Tyrrell, EFI, 143. ↵

Tyrrell’s Last Will and Testament, A&L, Vol. II, 433, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Ira D. Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion; Haught, J.A. (Ed.), 2000 Years of Disbelief. Also The Times, July 16, 1909. ↵

Tyrrell, The Supposed Constitution of the Church, Medievalism, 62. ↵

Tyrrell, The Abuse of the Promise of Indefectibility, ER, 130. ↵

See Tyrrell’s reply to Cardinal Mercier. Tyrrell, The Death-Agony of Medievalism, Medievalism, 156. ↵

Lonergan, B., Method in Theology, 192. ↵

See Tyrrell, Preface, in Luis 2. Charles Taylor allows a contextual insight into Tyrrell’s pastoral motivation, "Intellectuals tend