Abstract
Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (eds),
Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology
, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012; 592 pp.: 9780199552870, £65.00 (hbk)
This impressive collection of thirty-three essays reminds us that ressourcement, which means ‘return to the sources’, is the twentieth-century French theological equivalent of the Renaissance humanist return ad fontes – a post-Enlightenment return intended to refresh the life of the contemporary Church. The ‘springs’ in view were the wellsprings of pre-medieval Christian tradition, including the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, the early liturgy and, to some extent, Scripture (a tricky area after the condemnation of Modernism in 1907). Central to this exercise were the flagship series of ecclesiological monographs, Unam Sanctam, launched in 1936 by the Dominicans Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar, and of patristic texts, Sources Chrétiennes, launched, astonishingly, in 1943 by the Jesuits Jean Daniélou and Henri de Lubac. Roman authorities, anxious to defend the received (‘manualist’) neo-Thomist doctrinal synthesis, were largely hostile to what they saw as the Nouvelle Théologie. A determined attempt to stamp it out was made in the Encyclical Humani Generis (1950). Three of the four editors of the key series were disciplined, but the momentum for renewal was unstoppable. Ressourcement was fundamental to the aggorniamento of Vatican II. Chenu, Congar, Daniélou and de Lubac all attended the Council as periti (expert advisors) and the last three, before they died, became Cardinals.
The scope of the book is encyclopedic. It will be for readers of English a standard resource on a theological era much indebted to the Augustinian philosophical anthropology of Maurice Blondel, when ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’ was developed in encounter with Orthodox theologians newly arrived in France after the Russian Revolution, when a number of scholars rediscovered the thought of Aquinas as a growing, changing response to the intellectual and spiritual challenges of his times, when ecumenism began to be seen as intrinsic to the identity of the Roman Catholic Church, and when theologians such as Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger began to emerge within the orbit of the Nouvelle Théologie. On all of these subjects, together with the contribution of key theological pioneers (Gilson, Chenu, Congar, de Lubac, Daniélou, Bouyer), there are stimulating and informative essays. Surprise essays on Jansenism (Simmonds), Teilhard de Chardin (A. N. Williams) and ressourcement among the Orthodox (Louth) add to a rich mix created by front-rank scholars such as Komonchak, Pecklers, McPartlan and O’Collins.
The key to the book lies in the title of Paul Murray’s essay, ‘Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity in the Work of Yves Congar: Ressourcement, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Reform’. The whole collection, taken together, undergirds the contemporary project of Receptive Ecumenism by showing the receptivity, both diachronic and synchronic, of Ressourcement. There is a fantastic bibliography. If I have one quibble, it is that ‘light-touch’ editing allows for a fair degree of repetition – but, then, this is a book to consult and explore, and, though there is something to be learnt from every page, not to read doggedly from cover to cover.