The Bible and the Crisis of Modernism: Catholic Criticism in the Twentieth Century

By Tomáš Petráček and David Livingstone

A detailed study of the Catholic Church’s acceptance of the historical-critical method and modernization through the pivotal work of European theologians and biblical scholars.

One of the few topics in Catholic studies that demonstrates a marked about-face in theological attitudes within the Catholic Church is the reception of the historical-critical method in biblical exegesis and its dramatic rise from outright condemnation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its official acceptance by the 1990s. The Bible and the Crisis of Modernism tells the dramatic story of the ultimate acceptance of this modern method by the Catholic Church as it worked out the relationship between faith and reason in view of advances in the social and natural sciences. Particular attention to the contributions of Czech theologians to the field of biblical exegesis foregrounds the tensions at play in the church’s gradual recognition of the value of the historical-critical method to a better understanding of the Christian scriptures.

In this extensive study of the church’s response to the historical-critical method, Petráček broaches wider topics, such as the relationship between the Catholic Church and society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the modernization of the church in the face of a changing world, the balance between institutional authority and individual freedom of conscience, and the balance between scholarly independence and ecclesial convictions. The attitude of the Catholic Church to modern scholarly research in many ways reflects its complicated relationship to the modern world in general, as The Bible and the Crisis of Modernism shows. Scholars in biblical studies, Catholic studies, and the history of the church in the Czech Republic will find Petráček’s work an enlightening addition to their collections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780268202880

Tomáš Petráček

Tomáš Petráček is a professor of modern social and church history at the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic. He is the author of Church, Society and Change: Christianity Impaired by Conflicting Elites.

Book preview

THE BIBLE AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNISM

The Bible and the Crisis

of Modernism

Catholic Criticism in the Twentieth Century

Tomáš Petráček

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Initial translation work by David Livingstone,

final translation by Addison Hart.

Copyright © 2022 by Tomáš Petráček

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935748

ISBN: 978-0-268-20289-7 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20291-0 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20288-0 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was translated by David Livingstone. The translation was revised by Addison Hart. The translation was made with the financial support of the University of Hradec Králové, and the revision was supported by the Centre for Philosophy, Ethics and Religion, Faculty of Arts, Charles University.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

There is a strange paradox in the history of Catholic biblical exegesis. Early in the twentieth century, Luis Martín, superior general of the Jesuit Order, instructed his subordinates to beware the mortal dangers inherent in the historical method of biblical study and interpretation.¹ Progressive Jesuit scholars were ordered to abandon their studies; further penalties were meted out according to their degree of guilt. In some cases, these punishments amounted to a total restriction of their duties to the pastoral sphere. The gentlest and most common sentence was a ban on further scholarly work in the discipline. Similar measures were soon adopted throughout the whole church under the supervision of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC), setting a heavy burden on the backs of Catholic scholars for decades to come. The principal aim of this book will be to examine this conservative response and the reasons it arose, and the transformation in thought that succeeded it almost exactly ninety years later. For in 1993, the Pontifical Biblical Commission—the very same body that had condemned the historical-critical method—issued the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, a binding document that identified it as the basis for all future Catholic scholarly exegesis.²

A secondary aim of this study is to address the criticism, found in more than one book on Czech Catholic modernism, that the Czech territories produced no original theologian or philosopher of note in this period, and certainly none to rival the most celebrated thinkers in Europe. It is hard to dispute this claim on the one hand, but some exceptions do exist, especially in the area of biblical exegesis. We will therefore attempt to show how the conflict over modern exegesis played out in the environment of the Czech church, resulting in the emergence of several scholars whose talents rivaled those of most of their Western counterparts.³ The stories of these individuals, and their varied responses to the limitations placed on biblical scholarship within the church, will provide telling illustrations of the tensions that existed between independent researchers and the institutional authorities. In these various cases, we will find examples of courage, resignation, and conformism. Ultimately, we will see that it is always futile to sweep legitimate problems under the carpet.

The almost sixty-year struggle to incorporate the historical-critical method into the framework of biblical exegesis testifies to the power of faith in scientific inquiry, and indeed to the power of words. The drama and intensity of the conflict resulted from the period conviction that objective knowledge could be acquired, that truth could be attained and expressed, and that it was possible to build upon the truth. Thus, paradoxically, the historical-critical method could be viewed within the church as both a gift (a magnificent instrument for comprehending not only the biblical text but the whole of tradition) and a threat (an enemy weapon capable of annihilating the very basis of ecclesiastical tradition by questioning its origins and authenticity). And even if the fears of its detractors were not realized, a problem remained. How was it possible to provide a legitimate interpretation of scripture using the very tools applied to any other ancient text?

The problem of applying modern research tools to biblical scholarship is still a thorny one in certain quarters.⁴ The Protestant and Catholic churches remain divided on the subject, not so much between themselves as internally, or between particular denominations and sometimes also generations.⁵ The scientific nature of these investigations is still a source of embarrassment for some Christians, who worry about where they might lead. It is not hard to detect a rift of sorts between the ecclesiastical elites of traditional churches, who typically accept the benefit and necessity of scientifically rigorous criticism, and certain laity for whom such studies are blasphemous and corrosive. There has been, moreover, a resurgence of fundamentalism within Christianity, radically rejecting any form of critical study in favor of a completely literal reading of the Bible. One need only consider the growing influence of extreme evangelicalism around the world, or even the waves of fashionable conservatism lapping at the margins of the Catholic Church. Even now, it would be premature to speak of this chapter in Christian history as definitively closed.

This book will examine an important aspect of Catholic exegetical history: the emergence of modern biblical scholarship in light of the church’s reaction to the dynamic development of the social and natural sciences during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The freedom to pursue new techniques in the study of scripture (including historical-criticism) was only obtained with difficulty. The renaissance in Catholic exegesis came about after a long series of tribulations, victimizations, and tragic errors that slowed its progress for decades. This oppressive atmosphere was gradually dispelled after the adoption of the dogmatic constitution Dei verbum in 1965. Pope John Paul II was to compare this situation to the maltreatment of Galileo: Some, in their effort to defend the faith, considered it necessary to reject historical conclusions built on solid foundations. This was a hasty and unhappy decision. The work of pioneers like Father Lagrange has made it possible to make distinctions on the basis of dependable criteria.⁶

Our book focuses on the history of Catholic biblical scholarship, Catholic theology more broadly considered, and contributions made to exegetical developments by Czech scholars, but we could well expand the horizon of our attentions to include a host of interrelated issues in historiography: the relationship of church and society at the turn of the twentieth century; the question of modernism in Catholicism; the process of modernizing church teachings and institutions in an era of turbulent social change; the relationship between authorities and the individual; the freedom of individual conscience when compromised by the institution’s demands for loyalty and conformity; the autonomy of theological scholars when their findings appear to question formerly undoubted and undeniable points of ecclesiastical and theological tradition, to name only a few. It can be asserted with justice that the church’s attitudes to modern scholarship epitomize the complicated relationship between the church and modernity in general. The church’s decisions in this problem and others inevitably determined the course of many thousands of lives for decades afterward. Bearing this fact in mind, we should clarify a few basic concepts before examining the particularities of our subject.

BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

It would not be useful here to provide a comprehensive list of the many characteristics of Catholicism, but it would be a mistake not to emphasize some of the qualities that distinguish it from other Christian confessions, particularly in such instances as those qualities play important roles in the present study.⁷

From a very early period, the Catholic Church has been defined by its strict hierarchical structure. Though it has undergone many natural developments over the course of time, with liberal or virtually autonomous power vested in its prelates at certain periods, the basic features of its architecture—the bishops holding the weight of an edifice culminating in the papal crown—have remained firm and steady.⁸ What has changed, however, is the church’s degree of political influence and power. The decisive moment in its temporal decline was the traumatic extinction in the nineteenth century of the Papal States that once dominated central Italy and constituted for centuries a core element of the papacy’s sense of self. Throughout the Middle Ages, and again during the sixteenth-century confrontations with Protestantism, the church conceived of itself as an ideal society, an indispensable partner of the state, with which it closely cooperated in the interest of safeguarding the temporal and eternal welfare of its inhabitants. This philosophy found its main expression in the system of canon law, which was more or less respected by the state authorities of Catholic Europe for many centuries.

The traditional bond uniting state, society, and church was permanently dissolved by the upheavals of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In reaction, Catholic leaders took steps to consolidate and centralize their entire system of organization, emphasizing the role of the papacy in order to compensate for the loss of much of the church’s worldly power.⁹ National seminaries were instituted in Rome for the purpose of strengthening the specifically Roman character of priestly formation, thereby creating a pool from which the members of a future clerical elite could be drawn. It was already difficult to reach out to the newly privileged class of educated lawyers, civil servants, teachers, and physicians, for whom the spiritual and intellectual offerings of the church had grown stale; this was increasingly true for the working class also. The result was a precipitous decline in Catholic believers over the course of the nineteenth century. However, the church remained active and effective in the areas of charity and social work, and retained much of its influence in small towns and rural areas, where Catholicism often had some of the qualities of a folk tradition (albeit one inflected with such contemporary cultural phenomena as widespread religious indifference, pragmatic infidelity, and spiritualism).

Within the church there exists a particular authoritative office with a clearly defined set of duties concerning the teaching and promotion of doctrinal accuracy.¹⁰ It is known as the magisterium. All Catholics are subject to its authority, priests, theologians, and clerical educators most of all. Originally, the individual bishops were responsible for this office, and were expected to exercise their powers to moderate preaching and theological instruction in conformity with established doctrine. Special bodies were later created to assist with these duties—certain medieval universities, for instance—but the role was ultimately centralized under Roman authority after the Reformation. This led to the institution of agencies such as the Congregation of the Holy Office and the Congregation of the Index.¹¹ Any publication concerning faith and morals was subject to review by those two authorities. The first issued approval for publication to the relevant local church authority; the second decided whether (or when) to list unapproved works in the Index of Prohibited Books.

This practice will naturally strike many of us as unsustainable and distasteful, but it is not unique to the Catholic Church. Modern liberal society has not abandoned censorship and the manipulation of public discourse, nor does it grant the completely free presentation and dissemination of certain ideas and images. For the premodern believer, heresy was thought of as a deadly infection threatening one’s faith, and therefore one’s greatest hope of salvation; the intervention of church and state was consequently deemed an appropriate cure. Here the Catholic Church and the Protestant confessions agreed, even if they differed in their theories as to the source of the infection. When, in the nineteenth century, the state rejected its role in the suppression of heresy, it fell to the church alone to preserve these mechanisms of control, retaining them long into the twentieth century in the form of the two congregations and several other censorial entities, as we shall discover later.¹²

The magisterium is still considered one of the essential elements that defines Catholicism in the sense that it guarantees the continuity of Catholic teachings. Another of these essential elements is the concept of the church’s infallibility in the principal matters of belief. Faith in this idea may be detected very early in church history, deriving ultimately from the promises made to Peter by Jesus in the New Testament. The most specific and provocative expression of this concept is found in the dogma of papal infallibility (1870), which arose in reaction to the rationalism and skepticism of the nineteenth century. Frequently misinterpreted, misunderstood, and exaggerated, it would serve in many countries as an excuse for attacks upon the church. Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903) partly qualified the dogma, and the traditional issuance of censures and anathemas gradually gave way to a series of more positively formulated teachings, such as encyclicals, apostolic letters, and regular public sermons.

Catholic leaders still reserve the right to supervise the publication of theological and philosophical materials, and also all literature on matters of faith and morals produced by priests and monastics. We will therefore conclude our summary by considering ecclesiastical obedience as a further essential characteristic of Catholicism. A priest in conflict with his superiors runs the risk of suffering any number of canonical punishments—admonitions, publishing bans, outright dismissal from a teaching post (revocation of the canonical mission), transfer to a different position, suspension from the priestly order (making it impossible to perform his clerical functions), and the harshest punishment of all: excommunication, expelling him from the society of the church. Once again, it may be difficult for postmodern individuals to understand the psychological trauma these punishments inflicted, and continue to inflict, on priests who have suffered them. For church leaders who hoped to control individuals considered dangerous or nonconformist, such penalties were formidable tools of manipulation and coercion.

THE BIBLE AND ITS INTERPRETATION IN THE CHURCH

The Bible, as the Catholic Church currently defines it, consists of forty-five Old Testament and twenty-seven New Testament books, varying widely in length, historical origin, language, and literary genre. It is best understood as a diverse library of texts rather than a single book. Christians often refer to it with the phrase Holy Scripture, denoting the two qualities Christian churches chiefly attribute to it: its inspirational and canonical characters.¹³ In other words, the Bible, as a revealed text, is believed to contain all the truths essential to human salvation as God himself communicated them to the world—the word of God as transmitted from his redeeming will—and it is the means by which God reaches out to humanity from now to the end of time. The celebration of the liturgy is the most venerable method of disseminating its contents among Christian believers.

The biblical canon (meaning the specific selection of biblical books) was the outcome of a relatively long period of evolution. The Old Testament canon has its origins in the Jewish diaspora, having been adapted from the wider Alexandrian canon that included the deuterocanonical books.¹⁴ The New Testament canon appears to have acquired its essential form among the Christian churches of the Mediterranean during the course of the second century. Its books were selected with reference to two basic criteria: authentic apostolic origin and freedom from doctrinal error. A book meeting such requirements could be read in the liturgy and accepted as inspired literature. The contents of this canon remained stable from quite early on in Christian history, but a final binding decision was only reached at the Council of Trent (1545–63), when it was ruled that the Protestants had erred in their rejection of the deuterocanonical literature. With this stroke, the canon was at last defined by a decision of the church, on the basis of whether the inspiration of the Holy Spirit was detected in every given book.

Many places in the Bible itself refer to the creation of sacred texts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit upon human authors, and for this reason the Holy Spirit is considered their primary author. For the same reason, Christians as a rule affirm the complete truthfulness and infallibility of the Bible. Containing as it does the divine revelations necessary for salvation, it cannot be regarded as inaccurate or in error.¹⁵ Both the Catholic and Protestant traditions uphold this view; the Bible is in both cases considered the basic source and measure of church teaching and practice. All later theological formulations of truth (known in Catholicism as dogmas) stand on the authority of God’s word, representing the essential points of scriptural revelation as expressed in the philosophical and theological terminologies of subsequent tradition.¹⁶ Given that each dogma, confession of faith, and general tenet of Christianity rests in essence on biblical testimony, we can easily understand why biblical interpretation is so crucially important to every church.

This interpretative practice is known by the Greek word exegesis, meaning the effort of locating and comprehending the correct sense of a text. The church entrusts such work only to highly skilled teachers. Given the composition of the Bible, which is after all an ancient compilation of disparate religious books produced and collected over many centuries, prudence and humility have always been considered necessary requirements for its study. The discipline is practically as old as the canon itself. The most ancient theological texts already contain many biblical citations in sermons and longer catechisms, and the genre of biblical commentaries (monographs systematically interpreting individual books) is of comparable antiquity. A remarkable degree of sophistication was achieved in the dialogues of early and ancient church fathers, who regularly referred to biblical testimony when deciding arguments over the formulation of doctrine. The first great showcase for this art is to be found in responses to the problems of systematic theology during the Trinitarian and Christological disputes.

The work of these ancient biblical scholars also included the translation of scripture into other languages, such as Latin, Syrian, Gothic, and Armenian. In contrast to their later Islamic counterparts, the early Christians regarded making the Bible accessible in the languages of missionized lands to be a necessary part of their task. Such efforts—particularly in places where vibrant literary cultures already existed—required the development of a mature exegetical apparatus. This was achieved partly through the efforts of St. Jerome, who was later recognized as a father of the church and the model and patron for all future biblical scholars. In the late fourth century, he left his Dalmatian homeland to live in Bethlehem, where he acquainted himself with the geography of Palestine and obtained a perfect command of Hebrew. He was soon regarded as the greatest church authority on all matters of biblical interpretation, both for his general expertise on questions concerning particular passages in scripture and for his theories of translation.

All later scriptural interpretation was bound and directed by a vast treasury of patristic exegesis, particularly from the fourth and fifth centuries. This mass of literature included biblical commentaries, antiheretical polemics, disquisitions on specific theological themes, and (most numerous of all) sermons by St. Jerome and other great church fathers, Saints Ambrose, Augustine, and John Chrysostom among them. The spiritual and intellectual brilliance of these saints and teachers, combined with their high status in the church, made their works the principal source of scriptural interpretation for many centuries afterward. They retain their value and significance even now, as we will see in future chapters. Every one of the exegetes discussed in this book was intimately acquainted with the patristic corpus.

Nor was biblical scholarship neglected in the Middle Ages, but exegesis from this period is generally considered inferior to what had preceded it on account of the near-universal ignorance of the original biblical languages among Western scholars at that time. What flourished instead was a kind of allegorical and spiritual exegesis resting on the concept of the four senses of scripture.¹⁷ Few professorial titles were as prestigious as that of sacrae paginae; even St. Thomas Aquinas, despite the tremendous importance of his synthesis of faith and reason, was primarily known in his own time as a biblical commentator. The period was also distinguished by the appearance of many biblical translations in vernacular languages. These were often enormous literary contributions to the individual cultures that received them.

As it is my intention in our next chapter to describe the evolution of biblical scholarship, and the church’s attitudes concerning it, it remains only for me to remark upon the variety of exegetical methods in use today, given their prodigious multiplication in the twentieth century as the discipline branched out to incorporate different perspectives. Not only have analytical methods evolved, but scriptural interpretation has sometimes been adapted for social discourse, such as feminist criticism or liberation theology. It is unnecessary, of course, for nonspecialists to become familiar with all these methods, techniques, and approaches, which are far too numerous even for biblical interpreters to understand and practice them all, but to provide a solid and reliable guide to the differences among them, and to clarify the church’s position on each, the document Interpretation of the Bible in the Church was issued in 1993.¹⁸

Although it is possible for Catholic biblical scholars to work independently of the church, most of their research is conducted within theological faculties, ecclesiastical seminaries, and regular theological colleges by professors of exegesis. Such specialists generally focus either on the Old or New Testament. In modern times, the intellectual formation of the clergy has tended to revolve around other theological branches, but biblical education is nonetheless important and usually occupies the first several years of instruction. (This might explain why it is often neglected later on, as other focuses emerge.) But, as a rule, the Catholic Church places an emphasis on tradition, as opposed to, and partly in reaction against, the one-sided (and sometimes absolute) emphasis most Protestant denominations place on the Bible. Yet if we are to claim that the Bible is the soul of sacred theology and that the whole of church preaching and piety finds support and guidance there, we must concede that there has been a considerable amount of neglectfulness in the Catholic environment for centuries.¹⁹

Biblical scholars were obliged in the past to satisfy themselves with the Latin Bible and a wealth of patristic commentary, but the situation grew markedly more dynamic and complex after the eighteenth century. The demands and developments of that time made biblical study and specialization extremely challenging. In all likelihood, it has become the single most demanding theological discipline, requiring mastery of the principal living languages of Europe and at least four dead ones from the ancient world. Its literature is so vast and obscure that no scholar can hope to digest it completely. It is moreover dependent on such a wide range of other disciplines that no real accomplishment can be made in it without a working knowledge of archaeology, topography, paleography, epigraphy, textual criticism, and ancient history, to name only the most obvious fields.

The exegetical mission is important, valuable, and irreplaceable to the Catholic Church. There is, however, a paradoxical aspect to it that we must consider if we are to proceed with our study. Biblical interpretation has been a highly specialized discipline since the nineteenth century, requiring the cultivation of linguistic talents, among many others, over long years of hard work. But from that time also, it has been used as a weapon against the authority of revelation and church teaching, the foundations of which were thought vulnerable to subversion by rationalist criticism. The reaction of church authorities was therefore to supervise the progress of exegesis in order to adequately respond to skeptics, but as none of the decision-makers of the Roman Curia and virtually nobody else in the chain of church hierarchy had acquired anything like an exhaustive or formative education in biblical scholarship, the tightening of reins made inevitable a future conflict of interest.

THE HISTORICAL-CRITICAL METHOD IN BIBLICAL EXEGESIS

We will now briefly describe the historical-critical method, the integration of which into Catholic exegesis forms the subject of our study. It is not a completely modern innovation. Many of its approaches are detectable or were intuited in the works of Origen, St. Jerome, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others.²⁰ However, its true foundations were laid in the textual criticism of the Renaissance, a period that saw a great many technical innovations in literary scholarship. For a basic definition of the method, it will suffice to paraphrase the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.

The historical-critical method is called historical because it is applied to the study of ancient literature and attempts above all to elucidate the historical processes by which the biblical texts were produced, processes of a complex and diachronic nature, made more complex still because they were transmitted to many different types of audiences over a wide variety of times and places. It is a critical method because it clarifies the original meaning of biblical texts for modern readers by means of scientific criteria. As an analytical method, it involves reading the Bible as one would any other ancient literary survival. Thanks to this method, and above all to its critical emphasis on textual editing, exegetes are better equipped for understanding the content of divine revelation.²¹ As to the problem of aligning these approaches with doctrine, it should be remembered that there are only a small number of biblical pericopes (extracts) that are directly linked by precise interpretations to a concrete dogmatic definition (de textu citato). In the New Testament there are only about a dozen such sections.²²

The key to biblical interpretation, as the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church makes clear, is the recognition and serious consideration of the historical dimensions of revelation:

A second conclusion is that the very nature of biblical texts means that interpreting them will require continued use of the historical-critical method, at least in its principal procedures. The Bible, in effect, does not present itself as a direct revelation of timeless truths but as the written testimony to a series of interventions in which God reveals himself in human history. In a way that differs from tenets of other religions, the message of the Bible is solidly grounded in history. It follows that the biblical writings cannot be correctly understood without an examination of the historical circumstances that shaped them. Diachronic research will always be indispensable for exegesis.²³

The historical formation and development of these texts is a complex subject, and the historical-critical method greatly contributes to our understanding of that process. One of the principal techniques of the method is studying the oldest and best-preserved manuscripts in order the reconstruct the texts in their original forms as accurately as possible. The texts are subjected to linguistic and semantic analyses in conformity with the findings of historical philology. Several distinct forms of textual criticism are applied. Literary criticism defines internal units of text and describes how they cohere, demonstrating the composite nature of a book consisting of various subunits. Genre criticism aims at categorizing the text in terms of its literary genre, the environment that produced it, and its patterns and development. The criticism of tradition locates the text within a particular traditional stream and attempts to interpret its meaning on the basis of that classification. Editorial criticism traces modifications in the text before it reached its final preserved form.²⁴ The ultimate purpose of all these techniques is to provide understanding of the text’s origins, the environment in which it originated, and the intentions of its author.

Historical-criticism does not need to be dogmatized; it has limitations; it is not the only or the ultimate method. It restricts itself to looking for the meaning of the Biblical text within the historical circumstances that gave rise to it and is not concerned with the other possibilities of meaning which have been revealed at later stages of the Biblical revelation and history of the Church.²⁵ Only by supplementing this method with others can we arrive at a complete understanding of the inspired text. Nonetheless, historical-criticism cannot be replaced with any synchronic method. There are other ways of studying the meaning of ancient texts, including the Bible, but the magisterium not only admits the use of this method, but actually requires it.²⁶

Self-evident though this view may appear, it was only arrived at after a long period of struggle. In this book we will focus on several of the figures in Catholic progressive exegesis who were most responsible for paving the way to the adoption of historical-criticism. Their fates offer sobering testaments to the trials of their period. At times, the method was rejected for its supposed links to philosophical currents deemed incompatible with Christianity: evolution and rationalism, for example. However, the church document refutes these concerns by demonstrating that the method makes no a priori assumptions in itself and may therefore be used objectively.²⁷ Because it is not inherently bound to any one philosophical system, it is both acceptable to the Catholic Church and open to additional refinements and corrections, as has already been illustrated by the long history of its development, which had not yet reached its present stage at the start of the twentieth century.

THIS BOOK: ITS STRUCTURE AND SOURCES IN BRIEF

The present study is divided into several main chapters, in which we will gradually examine the development of progressive Catholic exegesis following its emergence in the late nineteenth century. We will deal first of all in chapter 2 with the work of three European exegetes—Franz von Hummelauer, Marie-Joseph Lagrange, and Alfred Loisy—and four Czech ones—Vincent Zapletal, Alois Musil, Jan Nepomuk Hejčl, and Vojtěch (Adalbert) Šanda.²⁸ We will follow the efforts and fates of these men into the first decade of the twentieth century, when (as we shall find) conditions for progressive Catholic exegesis deteriorated sharply.

Chapter 3 will examine the evolving attitude of the magisterium, which changed from cautious consent and support of biblical scholarship in the pontificate of Leo XIII to abrupt and drastic reaction after the ascension of Pius X. We will examine the 1893 appearance of the first biblical encyclical, Providentissimus Deus, and other documents of that period, including the key antimodernist texts of the magisterium, the encyclical Pascendi, and the Lamentabili syllabus of 1907. We will focus our attentions on the formation of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1902 and the fourteen important decisions issued by it from 1905 to 1915.

Chapter 4 deals with the enemies of modern Catholic exegesis and the application of the historical-critical method in the church environment. We will examine the arguments of two important opponents of the method, Jesuits Leopold Fonck and Alphonse Delattre. Attention will be paid to the Pontifical Biblical Institute, founded in 1909, which—along with the PBC—was the main source of conservative institutional resistance. Finally, we will comment on secret integralist organizations, which were linked to the most powerful figures in the Roman Curia and targeted progressive Catholic scholars.

Chapter 5 attempts to explain the radical Catholic reaction against the historical-critical method and its findings in the early twentieth century. This question is intimately connected to the problem of the church’s historicity and the struggle to gain acceptance for its historical claims at that time. The main cause of contention lay in the understanding of inspiration and therefore in the infallibility of scripture, which was thought to be undermined by historical-criticism. Only a new conception of inspiration, stripped of naïve and vulgar trappings, would clear the way for a true understanding of the meaning of biblical truthfulness and infallibility.

Chapter 6 will focus on the arrested development of Catholic exegesis in the succeeding decades and its consequences. We will continue the stories of our seven protagonists and tell those of several others in order to gain a fuller and clearer picture of the situation of Catholic scholarship in a period of repressive measures, suspicion, and censorship. The ways in which these men responded to such treatment differed greatly according to their personalities and situations, the support of their peers and superiors, and their own private beliefs.²⁹ Despite these difficult and restrictive conditions, they created several interesting works and laid the foundations for a paradigm shift, if one that few of our protagonists lived to see.

Chapter 7, will address the course of the church and Catholic exegesis up to the year 1943, when the key encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu was issued, reopening doors for scholarly development previously closed. Definitive confirmation of the new direction came only in 1965, when the dogmatic constitution Dei verbum was passed at the Second Vatican Council. Interesting perspectives on these changes in the Czech scholarly world will be provided from the great Czech biblical scholar Jan Merell and the lesser-known but fascinating author Jaromír Tobola.³⁰ We will also examine Josef Krejčí’s response to Dei verbum.

In chapter 8, which reflects upon the historical struggle over various concepts of scriptural truth and infallibility and the acceptance of historical-criticism in biblical interpretation, we will attempt to formulate some more general conclusions about the conflicts between institutions and the freedom of inquiry, religious and scholarly thinking, tradition—which provides society with stability and security, but also provokes anxiety over change—and the constant need for innovation and adaptation. The struggle in the Catholic Church from 1893 to 1993 provides fundamental illustrations of these and related questions.

This book is the outcome of more than ten years of study. Contemplation of these questions has provided the author with material for two monographs and a number of shorter studies to which we will refer in relevant sections.³¹ Gradually and patiently the author acquired, in the libraries and archives of Prague, Rome, Fribourg, Jerusalem, Frankfurt am Main, Paris, and Vyškov (among other places), the accumulated research he now presents in synthesis with his previous work.

This synthesis was made possible more generally by the wealth of previous inquiries into modernism as it flourished in the Czech world³² and abroad,³³ and into the history of Catholic exegesis and the modern church.³⁴ We have seen a significant shift in the illumination of Catholic exegetical development. The present author is therefore indebted to all previous authors who have shed light on the topic and will cite their works in relevant places. May this modest book rest as a little stone in the mosaic of our knowledge, adding to the history of Catholicism, Catholic exegesis, and European society in the first half of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 2

Catholic Biblical Scholarship and the Beginnings of the Historical-Critical Method

THE SITUATION OF CATHOLIC BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

There were controversies over the texts of scripture even in the earliest periods of church history, starting with arguments between church fathers and various gnostic groups over the legitimate and authentic exegesis of certain passages. The later Trinitarian and Christological disputes highlighted a need for stricter exegetical precision, and the primacy of St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation was gradually established in the West. Translations in the vernacular slowly began to appear in the Middle Ages, but a real breakthrough was achieved in the Renaissance and Reformation periods with the expansion of the printed word, which allowed for the mass production of relatively more economically accessible publications. Some of the earliest and most popular printed books were vernacular New Testaments. The Bible was no longer the exclusive preserve of the clergy, but was increasingly available to a vastly expanded readership.

At the same time, the humanist fascination with the surviving literature of antiquity led to the invention and perfection of new methods in textual criticism, such as the practice of comparing early manuscripts. These techniques were soon applied to biblical scholarship, sometimes provoking controversy. Erasmus of Rotterdam published his Greek New Testament with a new parallel Latin translation in 1516, revealing many departures and inaccuracies in the traditionally approved and culturally ubiquitous Vulgate. In his later dispute with Luther over the limitations of biblical scholarship, he articulated what was ostensibly the Catholic perspective, opposing Luther’s belief that the testimony of scripture was perfectly clear and that the Bible should therefore be rendered into vernacular translations that anyone could read.¹ Luther, as a result of this position, was suspicious of any critical study of scripture, but at the same time his call for such enormous translation projects underscored the necessity of technical aids, dictionaries, and concordances, the production of which amounted to a further advance in biblical scholarship. The reaction of the Catholic authorities was to affirm, at the Council of Trent, the authenticity and binding character of the Vulgate for all liturgical and dogmatic purposes. Thus, at a stroke, the question was resolved in the church for several centuries. Scriptural criticism, once again the exclusive province of the clergy, was soon eclipsed by dogmatic and spiritual theology.²

In the seventeenth century, certain countries provided safe havens for the critical examination of Christian and Jewish scriptures, which were increasingly read with the same detachment from doctrinal consideration as any other ancient text.³ Even in such refuges, however, it was necessary for scholars to operate circumspectly, sometimes to the point of hiding their identities behind pseudonyms. The effect of their scholarship was to reveal various textual and editorial layers in the biblical books, along with apparent contradictions, mistakes and inconsistencies in chronology and genealogy, and even the marked literary inferiority of the texts when compared to many of the classic works of Greek and Roman antiquity. Catholic scholars were increasingly obliged to acquaint themselves with modern methods in order to defend the Bible against increasing scrutiny.

Richard Simon (1638–1712) is now regarded as one of the founders of modern biblical criticism.⁴ An Oratorian priest, he applied his wide knowledge of ancient languages and rabbinical literature to his studies of the Bible, publishing his Histoire critique de Vieux Testament in 1678.⁵ His book represented the first attempt by any Christian author to critically examine the literary composition of the Pentateuch. Simon argued that the question of inspiration was not necessarily bound to that of authorship; Moses was probably not its only inspired author, inspiration instead appearing to have fallen upon a whole group of authors. He makes the bold suggestion that the text might have been compiled from a variety of sources, later enhanced with supplements and glosses. In the case of Genesis, for example, he believes there is little doubt as to the presence of multiple authors. His comment on the book of Job is indicative of his attitude as a whole: After all, whether it is a historical narrative or only a parable, it is no less divine or true.⁶

The aim of criticism like Simon’s is to produce an original analysis of the text from a careful study of the earliest and most reliable manuscripts; yet, even though the prescription was not meant to be exhaustive, the Council of Trent directed biblical interpreters to rely mainly on the authority of the church fathers. It is therefore unsurprising that Simon fell into conflict with the famous Bossuet, court preacher to Louis XIV, who enforced a royal ban on the distribution of Simon’s book, destroying nearly every copy of the first edition despite the imprimatur Simon had obtained for it. A few copies avoided the bonfire, and a pirated edition appeared two years later in 1680.⁷ Simon himself, less lucky than his book, was expelled from the Oratory and forced to live out his remaining twenty-four years in seclusion, unable to advance his ideas. Müller, among others, believes Simon’s theses would have done much to counter the spread of theistic and atheistic rationalism in eighteenth-century France, where such philosophies grew prevalent even among the clergy.⁸

Catholics were provided with biblical story rather than biblical text, as a rule. The exegesis accompanying it was demanding and obscure, rooted as it was in the valuable if increasingly inadequate patristic tradition. Seminaries required no familiarity with the original biblical languages. The gradual improvements made in the eighteenth century were reversed in the nineteenth as an increasing democratization of the clergy necessitated a reduction of formational demands. It was sufficient merely to comprehend the Vulgate. Vernacular translations of the Bible continued to appear in the Catholic world, but the predominating conviction continued to be that its reading should be restricted to clergy alone. If anything, this belief was reinforced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the rise of several distinctly heretical sects fueled by unauthorized interpretations of scripture.⁹

In the Protestant countries, reading the Bible lay at the forefront of Christian life, but this comparative liberty was not enough in itself to ensure the dynamic or steady progress of scholarship. During the eighteenth century, Protestant exegetes broke into opposing camps. Under the influence of deism and rationalism, several renowned theologians and philosophers—Lessing, Herder, Kant, and Schleiermacher among them—rejected the supernatural character of the Bible and its claims to inspired origin. To them, it was a book like any other, without obvious literary distinction.¹⁰ In reaction to this movement, a totally fundamentalist reading of the Bible arose in many places. Every individual word was regarded as the product of nothing less than direct verbal inspiration; there was no room for any doubt concerning the truthfulness and infallibility of scripture.

Additionally, and crucially, so-called independent criticism—no longer bound to the Protestant churches and practiced typically in university settings—emerged in the German-speaking countries. Granting the limitations and excesses of the period, it must be admitted that this new exegesis represented a remarkable shift in scholarly interpretation, contributing also to the development of other disciplines, such as archaeology, Egyptology, Assyriology, ethnology, cultural and general anthropology, religious studies, prehistorical studies, and history as a branch of learning in its own right. New institutes, fields, and libraries grew up at an astonishing rate. In both Germany and France, significant progress was made in the study of Middle Eastern languages.¹¹ Egyptian hieroglyphics were deciphered in 1822 and Persian cuneiform in 1847, unlocking a wealth of hitherto untranslatable material. The Bible was no longer the only literary survivor of Middle Eastern and Semitic antiquity.

With such discoveries, archaeology emerged from antiquarianism to assume the full proportions of a legitimate science. The site of Nineveh was identified in 1847, that of Babylon in 1851; from the ruins were extracted additional materials for the scientific public in the form of inscriptions, reliefs, weapons, architectural fragments, coins, and even whole libraries. Research in the Holy Land itself, then a backward and neglected province of the Ottoman Empire, only started in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As late as the early 1900s, a few conservative apologists still clung to the belief that the Bible was the oldest human document, but most critical scholars now accepted the existence of numerous books of greater antiquity.¹²

The significance of this admission became clear when texts discovered in Mesopotamia were found to contain numerous parallels to biblical laws and stories, evidently predating the Bible itself. The recovery, in particular, of ancient law codes ran counter to the traditional idea that Israel’s law had descended from heaven. It was no longer obvious to anthropologists and scholars of religion that Moses had established each and every cultic regulation down to its last recorded detail. The biblical accounts of creation, the original sin of Adam and Eve, and the worldwide flood increasingly looked to independent exegesis as rather banal reimaginings of Babylonian myth. Suddenly it became all too easy to conclude that science and faith were irreconcilably opposed. Rationalist and subjectivist exegesis slowly came to dominate German universities, spreading into the rest of Europe over the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The middle part of the century saw an even greater revolution that altered not only the history of humanity but the understanding of the world itself. Darwin’s celebrated treatise On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, followed swiftly by advances in geology and archaeology that threatened to overturn all received wisdom concerning the age of humanity and the Earth. The traditional chronology of the universe had been calculated on no firmer a basis than the list of biblical patriarchs, which set the period of creation at only a few thousand years before the birth of Christ. Once the immense antiquity of the Earth became apparent, questions concerning the infallibility and authority of scripture as an inspired source of revelation became inevitable and unavoidable.¹³

The result of these developments was that the rationalists felt more and more justified in ruling out a supernatural factor in the formation of the scriptures, even to the point of disregarding the principle of divine intervention in Jewish history altogether. The Bible was increasingly treated as a hodgepodge of doubtful legends and appropriated myths, rewritten to serve the interests of Israel’s priestly caste. Liberal Protestant exegetes discarded everything but the Gospels, which they retained only after relieving them of their transcendental and miraculous trappings. Once the fullness of biblical faith was rejected, only humanistic altruism and ethical instruction remained. The use of modern research methods, firmly based in the mastery of the original languages, lent such conclusions the flavor of unassailable truth in an environment giddy with faith in science, progress, and technological advance.

The most important voices in this movement were Strauss and Renan— German and French historians, respectively—both of whom enjoyed pan-European renown. David Friedrich Strauss, a lecturer at the Lutheran seminary in Tübingen, published his hypercritical two-volume life of Jesus in 1835.¹⁴ His best-selling study attempted to provide an account of the legendary (that is, unrealistic) character of the gospel stories; in the opinion of the Catholic Church, it was heresy.

Ernest Renan’s 1863 Life of Jesus was an even bigger scandal and best seller.¹⁵ The literary talent of the author, his indisputable erudition as a university professor, and his skill at crafting a sympathetic portrait of Jesus as a great humanist (and nothing more) combined to win the book widespread fame and popularity. Rationalists soon gained control of every French university, achieving their ultimate triumph in the dissolution of the last theological faculty at the Sorbonne. Similar victories were won at state universities not only in Germany but throughout Italy, Belgium, and many other parts of Europe.

The reaction of church authorities and most Catholics was to radically reject the idea that anything in scripture did not correspond with reality, even at the level of the natural sciences, a development that necessarily prompted a lapse into fideism, casting the Christian faith into fundamental opposition to reason and scientific evidence. It is necessary to remember that the relativization of revelation was only one of many deep shocks that rattled European society in the nineteenth century. Never before had the world seen such rapid and dramatic transformations, with the economic, cultural, social, and political conditions of life shifting decisively almost everywhere. The old unchanging stage of the world vanished irretrievably under a curtain of anxiety. It seemed inevitable that an entire generation of educated Europeans would come to reject church teachings. This