Replies

Thanks for posting this thread - it answers some of the questions I had following the earlier articles from the series.

Sounds like pinning down Blondel's philosophy is rather like eating jellied eels with a fork, however!

"The root of this schismatic act can be discerned in an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition. Incomplete, because it does not take sufficiently into account the living character of Tradition, which, as the Second Vatican Council clearly taught..."

Allow me to paraphrase the above quote and apply it to "La Nouvelle theologie":

"The root of the new theology can be discerned in an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition. Incomplete, because it does not take sufficiently into account the unchangeable character of Tradition, which, as the First Vatican Council clearly taught:

"is put forward
not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence,
but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated.
Hence, too,that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding."

and

"If anyone says that
it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands:
let him be anathema.""

It also seems to me that Vatican I could have been speaking to Blondel et al when the Fathers stated this:

"With this impiety spreading in every direction, it has come about, alas, that many even among the children of the catholic church have strayed from the path of genuine piety, and as the truth was gradually diluted in them, their catholic sensibility was weakened. Led away by diverse and strange teachings [4] and confusing

nature and grace,

human knowledge and divine faith,

they are found to distort the genuine sense of the dogmas which holy mother church holds and teaches, and to endanger the integrity and genuineness of the faith."