The Catholic Historical Review

This fascinating and well-crafted little book should be of interest not only to scholars specializing in Roman Catholic modernist thought but also to educated readers generally who have an interest in church history and human psychology. A helpful introduction locates the reader in the modernist milieux and explains in a general way the relationships between the seven French clerics discussed in the book and their various relationships to modernism. The seven are Joseph Turmel (1859–1943), Marcel Hébert (1851–1916), Pierre Battifol (1861–1929), Albert Houtin (1867–1926), Henri Bremond (1865–1933), Eudoxe Irénée Mignot (1842–1918), and Alfred Firmin Loisy (1857–1940).

Whether or not all of these men were modernists depends, of course, on one's definition of modernism. If a desire for and work toward a reform of the structural Church and an effort to bring the tradition into modern relevance are essential dimensions of a true modernist, then Turmel was not a modernist. Ordained a priest in his early twenties after seminary training in doctrinaire manual Scholasticism, he had lost his faith by the age of twenty-seven through reading critical commentaries on the Old Testament and other critical scholarship generally. He concluded that the whole Catholic ecclesial [End Page 850]structure was deliberately fraudulent, and, while remaining and functioning publicly as a Catholic priest for decades, he published pseudonymously a series of scholarly patristic studies aimed at undermining the Catholic Church. Turmel's biographer was Felix Sartiaux, a layman who had a wide circle of ecclesiastical acquaintances including several prominent modernists. Of Turmel Sartiaux remarked: "I have known many priests, several of whom certainly did not lack for knowledge, loftiness, or personality. Turmel is the most surprising, fascinating example of ecclesiastical psychology that I have run into" (pp. 24–25).

Hébert, Houtin, Bremond, Mignot, Battifol, and Loisy had keen, inquiring minds. All were trained in the manual theology of decadent Scholasticism, but they all went beyond this seminary mind-set with differing results. Hébert was primarily a philosopher who gradually absorbed Kantian thought and ultimately ending as a symbolist, denying the personality of God. Houtin's evolution began with his discovery that the traditional history of French Christianity's origins was mostly a myth and then proceeded into exposing the ecclesiastical misuse of Scripture to bolster church positions. He ended up the most negative of the group, denouncing publicly those modernists who did not leave the Church, threatening even Baron von Hügel. Bremond was the most quiet of the French modernists, and some of his close modernist friends questioned whether he was a modernist at all. Mignot never backed down in his support of Loisy and the positive modernist hopes, although Rome despised him and treated him with contempt. Bremond called Mignot "the Modernist par excellence and, by all his acts, the most decisive justification of Modernism" (p. 151). Battifol was a scholar who understood the issues with which the modernists were engaged and was privately not unsympathetic to them, but he was also ecclesially ambitious and so denounced Loisy and others publicly for his own gain. Finally, Loisy was without a doubt the sharpest mind and most dedicated scholar of the French modernists. Although Loisy was excommunicated in 1908 and renounced Catholicism, Bremond insisted that Loisy retained a mystical faith and remained a mystical priest. Bremond also argued that it was not the critic in Loisy that had killed the Catholic priest in him, as others had argued; rather, it "was Pius X" (p. 129). These studies of French modernists by other French modernists demonstrate not only the complexity of human psychology and the varieties of Catholic modernism but also demonstrate marvelously the simplicities and misrepresentations of Pope Pius X's Pascendi dominici gregis.

Whether one is orthodox or heterodox depends on who defines ortho-doxy. And of course the modern Vatican...