Anyone who has been involved in or witnessed online Catholic conversations has likely, at some point, come across the word “modernism” or its adjectival form “modernist.” In particular, radical traditionalists can be quick to accuse those they do not like of being modernists. To be sure, modernism was—and arguably still is—a significant problem in and for the Church. However, it is sometimes used imprecisely as an overarching pejorative that is meant to shut down conversation rather than advance it. Accordingly, in this article, I would like to give an explanation of what modernism actually is to help the reader better discern when the term is being used appropriately or fallaciously. Our focus will be the heresy of modernism condemned by the Church, rather than the broader cultural significations of the word.
Modernism as a technical, theological term is a bit complex. As Arthur Vermeersch explains in his 1911 entry in The Catholic Encyclopedia: “A full definition of modernism would be rather difficult. First it stands for certain tendencies, and secondly for a body of doctrine which, if it has not given birth to these tendencies (practice often precedes theory), serves at any rate as their explanation and support. Such tendencies manifest themselves in different domains. They are not united in each individual, nor are they always and everywhere found together.”1 That is to say, modernism is not a single viewpoint that is univocally held by each and every thinker to which it applies; it admits of variety. In fact, Darrell Jodock observes that “the Modernists often were openly critical of each other.”2 Hence, Thomas Loome describes modernism as “a single intellectual crisis manifest in a wide variety of individual controversies.”3
Despite the difficulty in providing a precise, brief definition, Karim Schelkens writes: “Very basically, the modernist crisis would be understood as a clash between secular scientific progress and the church’s own neo-scholastic scientific model.”4 Along these lines, modernism can perhaps be most clearly seen in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts to employ secular historical and literary critical methodologies to the study of the Bible apart from patristic and medieval exegesis and without due consideration of the analogy of faith (the way various doctrines and Scripture passages shed light on one another). In some cases, this led to putting well-settled dogmas into doubt. In this vein, The Catholic Encyclopedia explains: “[Modernism] is nothing less than the perversion of dogma. . . . no real modernist keeps the Catholic notions of dogma intact. . . . In this way we may define modernism as ‘the critique of our supernatural knowledge according to the false postulates of contemporary philosophy.’”5
It is sometimes used imprecisely as an overarching pejorative that is meant to shut down conversation rather than advance it.
An oft-cited example of a modernist is George Tyrrell (1861–1909). In A Much Abused Letter, he writes: “It seems to me that a man might have great faith in the Church . . . in the unformulated ideas, sentiments and tendencies at work in the great body of the faithful . . . and yet regard the Church’s consciously formulated ideas and intentions about herself as more or less untrue.”6 Similarly, Alfred Loisy—another infamous modernist—advocated a “principle of the complete relativity of ecclesiastical doctrine to the time and conditions of its origin,” according to Richard Boynton.”7
Other examples could be given, but what is most relevant is Pope St. Pius X’s condemnation of modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies”8 in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Therein, Pope St. Pius X described two related elements of modernism: agnosticism and immanentism. Regarding agnosticism, he writes:
According to this teaching human reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that are perceptible to the senses, and in the manner in which they are perceptible; it has no right and no power to transgress these limits. Hence it is incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognising His existence, even by means of visible things. From this it is inferred that God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject.9
Such agnosticism rejects both natural knowledge of God as well as divine revelation, which is obviously contrary to Catholic dogma.
Agnosticism leads to immanentism. As Jodock posits: “Agnosticism is . . . a negative position; immanentism is its positive correlate. Because the Modernists cannot appeal to external revelation to explain religion, they seek its sources instead ‘in man,’ in a ‘movement of the heart’ which is called ‘sentiment.’”10 According to Pope St. Pius X, modernists equate faith with—and reduce faith to—such sentiment.11 In this sense, faith would be nothing more than a subjective, interior feeling or inclination that one attempts to express in words, rather than a rational and grace-filled belief in an objective, divinely revealed truth.
Modernism thus also tends towards historicism. In a manner akin to Hegelian philosophy, religious doctrines are considered to be so historically conditioned that they have no real absolute or perennially binding truth value. While history and historical contexts can be valuable for understanding the meaning of doctrine, historicism emphasizes historical conditions so much as to completely relativize all dogmatic expressions.
In reaction to modernism, there can be the temptation to label anything that discusses the subjective or historical aspects of faith as heretical. While understandable, that would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Catholic faith certainly involves the receiving subject, the person of faith, and it has been explicated in history, often in reaction to specific historical contexts. Nevertheless, if one pushes subjectivity and historicity to the point of denouncing absolute truth and the objectivity of—and the obligation to assent to—divine revelation, then one has fallen into the modernist heresy.
The tendency to judge magisterial texts negatively when they conflict with “modern sensibilities” is certainly a sign of modernism. All of us are influenced by our cultural surroundings, and it can sometimes be difficult to understand things from a more objective standpoint. That is precisely why we need to have proper deference to the Magisterium so that we do not inadvertently fall into error on matters of faith and morals. The rebellious impulse to accept only that which we deem fitting according to our personal tastes or opinions can be an obstacle to the humble receptivity required for authentic faith. We must be open to being taught by God and his Church, which presupposes that objectively true doctrines exist and are knowable through the means given to us by our Lord. It is precisely the refusal to admit as much that lies at the heart of modernism.
1 Arthur Vermeersch, “Modernism,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (NY: Robert Appleton Company, 1911).
2 Darrell Jodock, ed., Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8.
3 Thomas Michael Loome, Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism, Modernism: A Contribution to a New Orientation in Modernist Research [Tübinger Theologische Studien 14] (Grunewald and Mainz, 1979), 195.
4 Karim Schelkens et al., Aggiornamento?: Catholicism from Gregory XVI to Benedict XVI (Boston: Brill, 2013), 77.
5 Vermeersch, “Modernism.”
6 George Tyrrell, A Much Abused Letter (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 56.
7 Richard Wilson Boynton, “The Catholic Career of Alfred Loisy,” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 11, no. 1 (Jan., 1918): 45.
8 Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, encyclical letter, September 8, 1907, §39, vatican.va.
9 Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, §6.
10 Jodock, Catholicism Contending, 4.
11 See Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, §7.