England, Brownson, and Dulles: Religious Biography and the Catholic Tradition

Abstract

England, Brownson, and Dulles:Religious Biography and the Catholic Tradition Patrick W. Carey Ever since the Acts of the Apostles, which focused primarily on the words and deeds of Peter and Paul, Christian historians have valued biographies. St. Jerome illustrated this Christian appreciation in his own writings on the deeds of the illustrious men of the past. 1 The Christian hagiographical tradition emphasized the victory of redemptive grace in the lives of the martyrs and saints. That tradition, secularized to a considerable extent, continued in the early nineteenth century when Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, following the romantic stress on the dignity of the individual, emphasized what Pierre Leroux and Orestes Brownson called the role of "providential men" in the world's historical and cultural progress. 2 In the modern Catholic tradition the emphasis on the dignity of the human person continued in Church documents and declarations, and in the twentieth-century American Catholic portion of that tradition, historians Peter Guilday, John Tracy Ellis, Marvin O'Connell, David O'Brien, and others illustrated that emphasis on human dignity when they told the story of American Catholicism through the biographies they wrote. Good biographies are important genres for telling the story of the past and present because they do not reduce history to social trends, mass movements, or the crowd of sociological statistics. This comment is not intended to be a critique of social history but a reminder that social history and mass movements not only influence individual persons but are also shaped by some individuals. That interaction between the individual and the social trends of selected historical moments is complicated, and well-done [End Page 1] biographies help the readers of history to perceive how significant individuals helped to shape the generation they lived in and the future they hoped to see emerge. Focusing history on the lives of individuals helps readers to see that history is the arena of freedom, and because of this freedom, human beings generally cannot be reduced to some comprehensive identifying labels (e.g., liberal or conservative) that are sometimes used to characterize them in the past and in the present. Biographies have a way of representing, without fully being able to do so, the complexities of the human condition in any age. My own interest in history, theology, and biography (and their interconnections) stems from my years as an undergraduate at St. John's University (Minnesota) where I had the good fortune of being taught by Colman Barry, O.S.B., Godfrey Diekmann, O.S.B., and other stimulating teachers and publishing scholars. Father Colman sparked my interest particularly in American church history, and it was from him that I first became fascinated with Bishop John England's views of the relationship between Catholicism and American culture. When I went to graduate school some years after my graduation from St. John's, I already knew that I wanted to do a dissertation on England, which I did and which became the basis of the intellectual biography I later published. 3 My interest in the interdependence of history, theology, and biography was reinforced when in 1978 I started teaching at Marquette, where I offered a course on American Catholic life and thought with a heavy emphasis on the theology of representative American Catholics. In teaching that course, I discovered for myself (others had done so before me) that Brownson was almost the polar opposite, intellectually and culturally, of England, and it was out of this personal discovery that I began to see a dialectical development of the American Catholic intellectual and theological tradition. It was not a monolithic theological tradition as Thomas McAvoy, C.S.C., and others had presented it. And, in fact, there was much more to American Catholic intellectual life than John Tracy Ellis had perceived. My initial insight into Brownson's dynamic disagreement with England led me to a multi-year study of Brownson's works and eventually to the biography that Mark Noll asked me to write for Eerdmans' "Library of Religious Biography" series. 4 In my original course on American Catholic life and thought, I had a section on post Vatican II developments and selected for study three...