Wilfrid Ward and the Modernist Crisis in England
Rouen Cathedral, Claude Monet.
The Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis (c. 1893–1914) has been one of the most elusive episodes of modern Catholic history. The term “modernism” did not exist in any real form prior to its condemnation by Pascendi Dominici Gregis, the 1907 encyclical of Pope Pius X. Unlike other heretical movements, such as Arianism or Donatism, the “heresy” (or set of heresies) of modernism was not identified with a single prominent figure. Rather, as Charles Talar has noted, modernism was said to be “heresy by committee” or even “by conspiracy.”
At the heart of the modernist controversies was the question of how human subjects are able to experience the transcendent God. Pius X’s concern, as outlined in Pascendi, was that the “purely subjective truth,” which he found in modernist thought, is “of no use to the man who wants to know above all things whether outside himself there is a God into whose hands he is to one day fall.” While this subjective turn appeared differently in the writings of different thinkers, modernism was generally identified with an emphasis on the immanence of the divine, the evolution of dogma, and the application of critical historical scholarship and scientific methodologies to the Christian scriptures.
Upon the promulgation of Pascendi, certain Catholic thinkers were left scrambling to figure out exactly who was condemned. English layman Wilfrid Ward, for example, was under the initial impression that Pascendi had formally condemned now-saint John Henry Newman as a modernist. This interpretation was refuted by many ecclesiastics, including Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val. Pascendi and Lamentabili Sane (also published in 1907) outline the general tenants of modernism, but decline to name modernist individuals or geographies. Certain individuals, such as George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy, were soon formally excommunicated. Yet the ambiguity of the condemnation has left historians still pondering the “where” and the “who” of the crisis.
There are a few different ways to conceptualize the Modernist Crisis. In one respect the crisis can be understood as a focused reaction to a few, mostly French theologians (with the exception of George Tyrrell) who were condemned or censored for their historical and biblical scholarship. Alfred Loisy and Louis Duchesne were two prominent French examples. Loisy was excommunicated for his 1908 publication, Les Évangiles Synoptiques; Louis Duchesne’s Histoire ancienne de l'Église was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books (though he was never formally excommunicated).
While this Francocentric way of understanding the historical moment of the Modernist Crisis helps to capture the main particularities and personalities of the controversies, it tends to avoid understanding the moment within the greater historical milieu. An alternative, more expansive view sees Pascendi not simply as the apex of an ecclesiological crisis on the Continent, but as one of many defining moments within a broader religious and literary movement that sought to reconcile a modern secular world with transcendent reality.
In order to understand what is at stake in this latter model, one of the more helpful periods to study is the Catholic Church in England in the earliest decade of the twentieth century, a geography usually sidelined in favor of more prominent episodes in France, Germany, and Italy. English Catholicism at the time, as exemplified by Wilfrid Ward, but also Friedrich von Hügel and others, shares a philosophical tenor with both the Romanticism that preceded it and the literary modernism that emerged alongside it, providing an array of “modernist” and “anti-modernist” tensions across a range of secular and religious spheres.
Through the lens of Wilfrid Ward, we can begin to understand the unique character of how the modernist controversies were experienced across the English Channel. Ward, a layman, was one of the most prominently published English Catholic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century and was deeply attuned to how fellow Englishman John Henry Newman was represented by those suspected of modernism. When Pascendi was published in 1907, Ward was frightened that Newman had been condemned for modernism. The reason for his fear was because his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine had been incorporated into the theological and philosophical schemas of many of those censored for modernism, including George Tyrrell, Maurice Blondel, and Alfred Loisy. It took a great deal of reassurance from Merry del Val to assuage Ward’s anxiety.
Ward is best known for his two-volume biography of Newman, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman based on His Private Journals and Correspondence, published in 1912. He was the son of the Oxford convert and notorious ultramontane, William George Ward. While William George Ward and Newman often clashed over ecclesiological doctrines, particularly papal infallibility, Wilfrid Ward would become one of Newman’s greatest proponents in the next generation of theologians.
Throughout his adult life, Ward corresponded with Friedrich von Hügel and George Tyrrell, and (to a lesser extent) with Henri Bremond, all of whom were associated with modernism. Ward also corresponded frequently with many English bishops and archbishops and members of the English gentry who are often placed on the other side of the controversy. This is all to say that today’s historians of modernism have often struggled in their efforts to adequately narrate and categorize Ward’s place within the era.
As a lay Catholic, Ward was not under as much official scrutiny as figures Tyrrell (a Jesuit), even though his publications addressed similar concerns as the condemned modernists (if often in a more moderate tone). For example, most of Ward’s writings deal with the question of divine revelation and a concern for the immanent nature of God. His mediating stance can best be seen in his quest to find a via media, or a middle way, between the extremities of the scientific inquiry and the extremity of the propositionalism of the prevailing neo-scholastic orthodoxy.
One manifestation of this via media can be seen in his discussion of George Mivart’s scientific theories of evolution that involved questions of the evolution of dogma. Mivart was eventually censured and ultimately excommunicated for his writings. In his debate with Mivart, Ward argued that changes within history are reconcilable with the unchanging nature of Catholic doctrine. He explained that the divine revelation was unchanging (semper eadem) and that it is only at the human level that doctrines change. In other words, as he argues in his “Unchanging Dogma and Changeful Man,” the truth of Catholic dogma never changes, but human perception does.
John Henry Newman is the subtext for many of these debates. In their correspondence about Mivart’s theories of evolution, both Ward and Tyrrell would employ Newman’s theory of doctrinal development to explain how and why the past looks different from the present. In these discussions they also incorporated Newman’s theory into their discussions about how we can understand the relationship between God’s immanence and transcendence with our fleeting human history. As these debates progressed, letters from Cardinal Merry del Val demonstrated that Ward was suspected of modernism, but that his writings were never condemned because he generally attempted to find a middle way between the “excesses” of theologians such as George Tyrrell and George Mivart and the prevailing Neo-Scholasticism of the age.
Many questions remain for historians of the Modernist Crisis. For example, how does the case of Wilfrid Ward help to color in the paining of the Church’s relationship with the modern world? At the heart of this question is the nature of Catholic modernism itself. Is it confined to those (mostly French) theologians who were officially condemned as modernists? Or is Catholic modernism an episode within the larger, more widespread milieu of the growing pains of modernity in the early twentieth century? As historians begin to answer these questions more fully, we are able to begin to see how the episodes of history fit within the greater narrative of modernity.
Elizabeth A. Huddleston is Head of Research and Publications at the National Institute for Newman Studies and teaches in the Department of Catholic Studies at Duquesne University.