Congar’s Imperfect Critique of “Hierarchiology”

Abstract

Congar’s Imperfect Critique of “Hierarchiology” Ephrem Reese O.P. The Secretary-General of the Synod of Bishops opened a recent address by stating his hope for the Church: Yves Congar believed that Catholic ecclesiology over the last two millennia can be divided quite simply into two distinct periods. The first millennium, he said, operated out of what he called a communio-ecclesiology; the church of the second millennium, shifted to operating out of a top-down ecclesiology, which Congar summarized as “hierarchology.” Today I want to share my hope that, in the wake of Vatican II and its reception by Pope Francis, historians will look back on the church of the third millennium as one characterized by an ecclesiology of “synodality.”1 What is this top-down ecclesial modus operandi of the second millennium that must sink at last, as the star of synodality rises? The Dominican theologian Yves Marie-Joseph Congar (1904–1995) is commonly recognized as the most important ecclesiologist in the twentieth century, one whose ideas about the Church repeatedly found expression in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Congar made “hierarchy,” a [End Page 545] term apparently coined by Pseudo-Dionysius in the fifth or sixth century,2 one of the special objects of his theological focus. In treating it, he ridicules “hierarchiology” (which he means to be a post-thirteenth-century Western reduction of writing on the Church to the clergy), and castigates “Dionysian ideology,” which he discerns in Boniface VIII’s bull of 1302, Unam Sanctam.3 For all of Congar’s staggering erudition, fervent faith, and ecumenical spirit, he rarely credits Dionysius as a pillar in the ecclesiologies of both East and West. Instead, when Dionysius is treated, he appears in Congar’s writing as the downfall of medieval ecclesiology. Recent appreciation for Dionysius shows him to be a Pauline thinker who deftly translates biblical and liturgical realities into neo-Platonic vocabulary.4 Dionysius gives us a rather full and impressive treatise on [End Page 546] the Church many centuries before the ecclesiological debates sparked by Boniface VIII’s pontificate. Rather shortly before the seismic conflict over ecclesiastical and civil power between Pope Boniface and Philip the Fair toward the beginning of the fourteenth century, Thomas Aquinas embraced and adapted Dionysian thinking on hierarchy to defend religious priests in the mendicant controversies of the thirteenth century, and to reveal the sacramental principles of the Church. Close reading of Dionysius and Aquinas reveals a harmony between the two that differs from what Congar describes. It can be shown that Dionysius himself differs from his reception by certain Dionysian thinkers, and develops a faithfully Christian account of the divinization of all through orthodox worship and theology.5 It can also be shown that Thomas read Dionysius carefully and followed him more closely than his anti-mendicant adversaries in his understanding of hierarchy, while developing a unique theology of religious perfection through charity and sacramental grace.6 Since demonstrating those theses [End Page 547] would entail two larger projects, I will not attempt to do so here. Rather, I will summarize Congar’s influential account of hierarchy as “hierarchiology” and propose a revision to his Thomistic ecclesiology. I will isolate my study of Congar to six texts which span several decades.7 [End Page 548] The earliest and latest of them are dedicated to expressing Thomas Aquinas’s theology of the Church, and serve as bookends to this discussion. The earlier is important for having been published numerous times, and giving a broad programmatic statement of Congar’s Thomistic idea of the Church.8 This 1939 essay, “L’idée de l’Église chez saint Thomas d’Aquin” (text 1), may be paired with Congar’s 1978 essay “Vision de l’Église chez Thomas d’Aquin” (text 6).9 Congar’s long 1961 essay “Aspects ecclésiologiques de la querelle entre mendiants et séculiers dans la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle et le début du XIVe” (text 2)10 is the most decisive for the question of Dionysian hierarchy, and its influence is felt in any subsequent writing on Thomas and the mendicant controversies. However, other works anticipate...