ABSTRACT
The Catholic theological scholarship of the twentieth century is best understood as a development of two different currents in nineteenth-century Catholic thought. On the one hand Catholics of the nineteenth century were contending with the impact of the so-called Age of Enlightenment. This included the promotion of varieties of rationalism which sought to purify intellectual judgements of all attachments to theological beliefs and all movements of the human heart. It also included the rise of liberalism as a political ideology. On the other hand the various Enlightenment projects had themselves been subjected to criticism by the nineteenth-century Romantics. While not denying the significance of the place of reason in human life, the Romantics opposed the tendencies in the Enlightenment legacy to treat the human person as a highly complex machine and to so exalt the universal over the particular that issues like the uniqueness of each human being, their specific personalities and configurations of talents, were of no significance. Above all the Romantics were highly sceptical of the Kantian notion of pure reason. As Hamann expressed the objection, ‘reason has a wax nose’. They were however interested in the relationship between reason and tradition, the intellect and the heart, intuition as well as logical deductions (Vernunft and Verstand), and the themes of individuality and self-development (Bildung). While the temper of the Age of Enlightenment was ahistorical, exalting the universal and timeless, the spirit of the Romantics was soaked in historical sensibilities. Since it was the German Romantics who were the most theologically engaged, one finds in German-speaking provinces of the late nineteenth century a network of Catholic theologians addressing Romantic-movement issues. Most prominent of these were those based at the University of Tübingen. The work of the Tübingen scholars also found resonances in the works of the Oxford Anglican-convert John Henry Newman. On the other hand, scholars based at the University of Louvain in Belgium and at the pontifical academies in Rome tended to be focused on what might be called the Enlightenment fronts. Whereas the relationship between history and theology was the central concern of the Romantics, the defence of the reasonableness or truth of Christianity was the central preoccupation of those based in Louvain and Rome. The most prominent schools of twentieth-century Catholic theology can usually be traced back to one of these two orientations.
