Abstract
On 8 September 1907, Pope Pius X issued the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, condemning Modernism as the synthesis of all heresies and estab lishing rigorous norms within the Roman Catholic Church for dealing with this perceived threat. Modernism itself was at the time a relative neologism in theo logical discourse, coined to cover and attack a diverse set of movements in philoso phy, theology, biblical studies, apologetics and politics. The term may have been a neologism and may have created a false unity, but the currents embraced under it were quite real. On its intellectual side, the side at issue in this essay, Roman Catholic Modernism revolved around three main questions or sets of questions: an apologetic question, a biblical question and a dogmatic question.1 The first set of questions engaged the impact of modern philosophy upon the traditional Catholic apologetics, particularly insofar as this philosophy from Rene Descartes through Immanuel Kant and beyond forced an inquiry into the subjectivity of human knowing. Thus a devout thinker like Maurice Blondel, working outside ecclesiastical institutions, tried in his now famed 1893 dissertation, L'Action, to enter sympathetically into this inquiry and to show how taking this route itself led to transcendence, a strategy quite foreign to the reigning classicism of Catholic philosophers and apologists.2 The second set of
Published Version
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