The figures associated with nouvelle théologie were shaped by, and in turn gave shape to, their own chapter of the modernist crisis, which Étienne Fouilloux defines as “the rereading of the foundational message [of the gospel] in the light of [nineteenth-century] scientific advancements.”1 Insofar as this crisis of dogmatic authority and religious experience called into question the relationship of human action to spiritual versus temporal spheres, the “politics” of the nouvelle théologie has often been construed along the lines of Blondelian genealogical critique.2 As one prominent text puts it, their advocacy for a “return to mystery” includes the diagnosing of the modern division of sacred and secular, as well as the posing of philosophical and theological resources with which to overcome such a division.3 Their various attempts at conciliating the Catholic theological heritage with the epistemological and existential concerns of their day, however, earned them the unhappy label “new” from their contemporaries—it should also be borne in mind that they used the label against their adversaries as well—producing several overlapping layers of controversy amidst ecclesiastical circles in France-Belgium and Rome. Thus, many approaches view the “new theologians” as a singular reactionary movement which, though silenced in their day, were vindicated at Vatican II. Sarah Shortall's remarkable new study of these figures, Soldiers of God in a Secular World,4 ought to disrupt this limited narrative and make waves across several disciplines: on the one hand, historiography, philosophy, and theology relating to the twentieth century; on the other, the burgeoning domain of political theology, which reflects ongoing negotiations of the contingent relationship between the two terms. And, in a word, that “contingency” is precisely Shortall's major achievement. She examines the mobilization of theological discourse to advance idealized visions of the political precisely by disavowing the political and claiming adherence to a body of thought that witnesses to values which transcend temporal political structures. The shining moments of the monograph are where she shows that characters within polarizing political debates often started from shared theological premises, thereby demonstrating the profound ambiguity of theology and its potential to generate imaginations of the social, the common, the authoritative, and the legitimate. In doing so, she transcends the material to which she confines her investigation and penetrates to the rhetorical nucleus of a wide range of Christian thought, ancient and modern. Shortall accepts the established confines of the discipline, viewing the sources as they collaborated in networks of their respective religious orders, Jesuit (Bouillard, de Lubac, de Montcheuil, Fessard, Daniélou) and Dominican (Chenu, Montuclard, Congar). Keenly aware of how the separation of church and state, or sacred and secular, had very real political consequences, she innovatively shows how legitimate methodological differences between the religious orders tended to support different accents of modus vivendi witness amidst their contemporaneous debates about the organization of both French and international society. Skillfully situating these thinkers in relation to specific political debates amongst theologians, which may be called the ‘contingent’ approach,5 makes Shortall's monograph unique among recent attempts to identify the societal and political horizon against which to portray authors associated with nouvelle théologie. While not a work of “political theology” in the Schmittian sense of a genealogical investigation of how concepts of order are transferred from one sphere to the other,6 Soldiers of God is distinguished for its examination of how the discipline of political theology, emerging in the twentieth century, flourished as a tool for theologians to adapt in various contexts as they sought to provide guidance to a French Church whose witness was being increasingly occluded by the hegemony of political debate. Her achievement can be elucidated by comparison with other prominent works that pose as entry points to understanding the politics of nouvelle théologie, namely those of Jon Kirwan and Étienne Fouilloux. They offer what may be called “generational” and “terminological” approaches, respectively. The former tends to view the nouvelle théologie figures as filiations from a single source, namely the philosophical struggle of reconciling the modern concerns of immanence and existential action with the ancient traditions of the Church.7 For its selection of essays regarding the diagnosing of modernity and its philosophical characteristics, Patricia Kelly's Ressourcement Theology: A Sourcebook may be ranged alongside Kirwan's here,8 and to their number may be added Jürgen Mettepenningen's useful delineation of the four historical phases of the nouvelle théologie, spanning from the Saulchoir affair in 1935 to the close of Vatican II in 1965.9 Distinct from these and Shortall's approach is Étienne Fouilloux's book Christianisme et eschatologie.10 Consciously mirroring the earlier Incarnation et eschatologie by Bernard Besret,11 this “terminological” approach relates how the relevant sources viewed the political and social implications of their work through the definition of evocative Christian dogmatic concepts. While neither Kirwan nor Fouilloux set out to write an orientation directed to political questions per se, as announced in the title of Shortall's work, the politics of the nouvelle théologie is the point around which their interests and subject matters converge most poignantly, thus raising the need to distinguish their approaches. Within this convergence, three basic aspects impacting the production of twentieth-century theology may serve as comparison points: the legacy of Maurice Blondel, the handling of the Vichy crisis, and the nexus between journal production and political thought. Shortall and Kirwan agree that Blondel is the single most important figure for understanding the inspiration of nouvelle théologie.12 But where Kirwan's “generational” approach views the link between theology and politics through the lens of Blondel's critique of modernism and the insistence on the interpenetration of the natural and supernatural orders,13 Shortall places Blondel's significance as spearheading a non-external vision of collective life, driven by the common evolution towards collective consciousness in Christ.14 Indeed, their assessments of Blondel's impact on the more general project of twentieth-century Ressourcement is telling. For Kirwan, Ressourcement is the use of historical study to identify the spirit of a given age and uncover the authentic tradition to meet modern needs.15 For Shortall, however, this can be read in a political register. The very method of Ressourcement is a political critique of the tendency to conflate the communal impulse of Catholicism with collectivist political projects.16 How they arrive at such different emphases can be viewed from the treatment of the work of Valensin, mentor to Henri de Lubac and Gaston Fessard among others. With his brother, Auguste Valensin wrote the famous 1912 article “On the Doctrine of Immanence” for the Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique. Swiftly condemned by the ecclesial censors for its justification of eighteenth-century “new methods,”17 the article is a synthesis of Valensin's tutelage under Blondel during his licentiate in philosophy at Aix-en-Provence (1897-1899). Kirwan states that this line of influence, summarized as the “inherent insufficiency of the acting subject within the natural world,”18 had as its corollary certain envisaged projects of “social engagement.”19 But Kirwan does not treat the details of this engagement, apart from referencing Blondel's seminal involvement in the Semaines sociales of 1904 and general personalist ideas—equality among persons, support for labor unions; in short, criticism of Action française.20 Particularly the last point is significant for Kirwan: Blondel's critique of Action française is seminal for Maritain's Humanisme Intégral (1936) and Henri de Lubac's general rejection of integralism.21 But apart from these points of general influence, Kirwan's “generational” approach does not specify how, exactly, Blondel's “subjective method” results in concrete political options in relation to developing conceptions of ecclesiology. Shortall, however, identifies the inflection point of Blondel's influence on the politics of nouvelle théologie as Valensin's collaboration with Yves de Montcheuil. There is the Blondelian reader, so to say, that the two published in 1934,22 which stemmed from a conference given in 1931, but the key point for Shortall is that Blondel disputed with Pedro Descoqs, one of Henri de Lubac's teachers, for his support of Action française in 1909-10.23 A Jewish convert, throughout the 1920s and in direct dialogue with Blondel,24 Valensin was deeply concerned with combating Catholic integralists that had aligned themselves with Action française.25 Kirwan misses this crucial connection at the heart of the figures who mentored the authors who would be associated with nouvelle théologie. While Kirwan rightly suggests that the condemnation of Action française in 1926 set the stage for nouvelle théologie, evidenced in Blondel's influence on de Lubac's Surnaturel thesis via Valensin,27 Shortall's work shows how Blondel's logic forged in the controversy with Descoqs is redeployed at succeeding points in the political thinking of the careers of authors associated with nouvelle théologie—especially in the years prior to the standard 1942 landmark. Key among these redeployments is the clandestine journal Témoignage chrétien, conceived during the Vichy regime by de Montcheuil, de Lubac, and Chaillet. Cautioning collaboration with an un-Christian regime just because it had a penchant for order and hierarchy was utter pastoral and theological failure, they maintained; purely political collaboration to achieve vaguely similar ideals blunts the Church's eschatological witness.28 Fouilloux, however, approaches the engagement of modernism in a different way. Without denying his importance, it is in fact not Blondel that Fouilloux signals as significant for the authors associated with nouvelle théologie, but his contemporary, Léon Bloy. Bloy was a key resource in the fashioning of “eschatological pessimism,” a privileged terminological prism through which to approach many aspects of the politics of nouvelle théologie, particularly the Jesuit and ecumenical strands. In a famous passage from the first issue of the ecumenical journal Dieu vivant, a major organ of nouvelle théologie thought from 1945-1955, Bloy and Claudel are placed next to Origen and Augustine. Together they pose as readers of the Bible not in a dogmatic or moral register, but as an invitation to the living reflection of a higher world.29 However, the corollary to this invitation was a pessimistic view of the contemporary world. As a novelist, Bloy had a sense of what Marcel Moré identified as the “living flesh of the absolute.”30 Drawing on the theme of the positive value of suffering, commonplace among nineteenth-century Catholic literature and rich biblical imagery,31 Bloy's 1887 and 1897 novels, Le Désespéré and La Femme pauvre depicted in concrete terms the humiliation of contemporary poverty and hopelessness, thus serving as a mirror by which to view Christ's incarnation and an ideal for locating Christian witness. Such an attitude fit the growing interest in Kierkegaard among French theologians of the 1930s and 40s and was ostensibly a point of dialogue with the “philosophies du désespoir” of Sartre, Bataille, and Camus.32 Moré and his burgeoning Dieu vivant circle could juxtapose “poverty” and related concepts with various forms of political organization, above all capitalism and communism, but more concretely, various forms of French Catholic political “engagement.”33 Indeed, via Bloy's depictions, poverty took on an eschatological function because it corresponded to the condition of the world as such under the dominion of sin. As Moré states in the “Liminaire” of a 1950 issue of Dieu vivant, “the eternal Mendant, the Poor One” irrupts into the world of destitution.34 Jesuits Jean Daniélou and Louis Bouyer would develop this notion in the pages of the journal.35 Impressed by the perception of an imminent end to history following the devastating financial crisis and succession of World Wars,36 this pessimism was, according to Fouilloux's account, fundamental for the politics of nouvelle théologie. For the Christian, the luminaire of Dieu vivant 20 reads, “All the rest—his political and social life just as much as his intellectual and mystical life—is nothing more than an ‘addition’ [surcroît], a series of ‘points of view’ which stem from his secret, eschatological life.”37 Such a starting point was understood as distinguishing itself, Fouilloux shows, from Marxist philosophies of history which were based in rational optimism in material progress.38 This terminological approach clarifies how major concepts in Christian thought could be used in political debates. One such concept was Constantinianism, which the Dieu vivant authors define as “the hope in salvation by social institutions … to identify the victory of the Lamb with the concept of ‘Christian civilization’, to suppose and to act as if the laws of society could protect us from ‘the Robber’.”39 Shortall's typologies clarify how this is a clear shot across the bow at leftist Catholic political engagements in the post-Vichy era. And as both Fouilloux and Besret pointed show, it was not without recrimination.40 Not only from the Dominican Georges Didier who took aim at Louis Bouyer in particular,41 but Chenu developed a theology of materiality and work, with Action Catholique viewed as nothing less than the continuation of the Incarnation amidst modern capitalism.42 To authors dissenting from the eschatological pessimism represented by Dieu vivant should be added the Louvain-based Gustave Thils, whose vastly underappreciated Transcendance ou incarnation? bemoaned the opposition of eschatology and optimism. Thils warned that such “transcendence … accommodates itself to a regrettable naturalism.”43 Thus, pessimism and its Christological form, “Le pauvre au Christ humilié,” took on a new valuation in light of the sedimentation of polarized political options in France and abroad. Nothing, perhaps, was so polarizing in twentieth-century France politics than the years of the Vichy regime, which collapsed the Third Republic and governed France in collaboration with the Nazi occupation from May 1940 to August 1944. Pitched as a unifying political movement of national revolution, the governing French regime stationed in Vichy is viewed by Shortall as a bio-political effort based on the perception of what is “natural,” thus seeking to impose social hierarchy at every level of society, from motherhood to immigration.44 There are two notable discourse ambiguities that guide her handling of these pivotal years in French politics and the entanglements of Catholic theology therewith: the interplay of the natural and the political, and the seemingly inexorable distinction between the natural and the supernatural. It was as if the quarrel over Action française had been carried over into the context of the war. Christian thinkers were intrigued by the alleged shared commitments of hierarchical religious life and Vichy propaganda. Making clever use of Thomas Aquinas and Charles Péguy to support its contempt for disorder, the allure of the regime came down to a common vocabulary: family, effort, sacrifice, work, nation.45 Kirwan notes the enticement of Pétain's rhetoric.46 Viewing the Vichy years in brief as an extension of the general sense of economic collapse experienced in the 1930s, Kirwan presents resistance and collaboration with modernism as two options defining the Catholic approach to political thought at the time.47 Henri de Lubac's great Corpus mysticum (1944), a work of political theology and scathingly coded political critique written throughout the rule of the regime,48 is interpreted in terms relating to the Modernist crisis. Corpus mysticum was a call for men to unite in a spiritual whole and rediscover the spiritual sources of our civilization.49 Kirwan thereby uses “generational” categories primarily fitted to the contours of the modernist crisis to view the crucible of the Vichy years. Important as this perspective is, works like Corpus mysticum were more than historical-theological investigations in a Blondelian key. Shortall leans heavily on the ambiguity of public terminology shared by Vichy and Catholicism. Textuality and historical literary resources like Aquinas and the Church Fathers played a role for both dissenting and assenting Catholics. She thereby interprets works like Corpus mysticum in their contingent political circumstances. Claiming, as de Lubac did in that work, that modern Catholicism was stifled by a false transposition of the eucharistic miracle from the community of the Church to the physical elements of bread and wine during the high Middle Ages, had a singular political upshot: true authority and community cannot be founded on external institutions. Yet, the shared value commitments of Vichy and hierarchical Catholicism led the French episcopacy to lend full support to the regime in 1941. With a Pauline echo, Catholics were exhorted to obey this newly established authority—how times had changed since Leo XIII's bitter call for obedience under the secular Third Republic of France amidst the increasing tide of anti-clericalism!50 As de Lubac presaged in his Corpus mysticum, the political-theological discourse could cut both ways. To resist, Jesuit theologians launched the clandestine journal Témoignage chrétien, where they developed arguments for the illegitimacy of this regime and the correlative legitimacy of resisting it. There, in the opening pages of the second issue of the journal, a translation of a letter to the Church of France from none other than Karl Barth read: “In the Church of France, the war must continue at the spiritual level. Under no pretext can the Church make peace or armistice with Hitler.”51 Shortall contends that Pierre Chaillet, Yves de Montcheuil, Gaston Fessard, and Henri de Lubac waged this war with the weapon of eschatology. Their strategy was to blunt the claim to what is “natural” by redefining it as provisional.52 In view of the hierarchizing equation of the “natural” and the “political,” these Jesuits framed authoritative concepts like fatherhood and the state in terms of their character as contingent responses to sin within the divine pedagogy of the human race.53 This deeply patristic54 theme thereby enabled these priests to resort to their pastoral office vis-à-vis the people of France, exuding the universal message of Christian mercy, open communication across European churches, and, significantly, the disclosing of information such as the crimes of central-European concentration camps as they were being discovered and reported in real time.55 One of their javelins was lanced as a critique of the way Nazism resembled a neo-pagan religion, with its prizing of blood and race as markers of divine election. The Nazi regime and its Vichy cooperators could thereby be framed as more subtly dangerous than communism which outright denied transcendental realities.56 Implicit in this claim, then, was the suggestion that communism, liberalism, and fascism derived from the same conceptual root, namely the violation of the primacy of the supernatural.57 As pastors, they could thereby draw upon authority sourced in transcendence to compel their audience to form collaborative pockets of resistance which took on remarkable forms.58 Thus, Shortall manages to treat the Vichy regime as a prism that refracts both the Action française debates prior to the armistice and, out onto the other side, the complex swamp of the tripartite governance of France in the years immediately following liberation. Indeed, Shortall points out that in the context of Dieu vivant, whose early planning took place during occupation and began print in 1945, the same logic of resistance used by de Lubac, Fessard, and Montcheuil against Vichy is redeployed against communism.59 Eschatology rears its head again: “homogenous empty time,” which is the vision of revolution accomplished by progressive means, poses as no resource to liberate men and overcome social divisions. For—and it is the voice of Fessard that Shortall rehabilitates most effectively here, given his absence from the work of Boersma and the Ressourcement volume edited by Flynn and Murray60—divisions are overcome only eschatologically, which should give forms of government based on reciprocity, not force.61 This is why, to return to the theme highlighted by Fouilloux above, Danielou and de Lubac saw in the ancient Church the model for their own contemporary French Catholic Church.62 Beleaguered by paganism and the forces of secularization, the themes of the martyr, the angelic, and the monastic—and not the state—served as focal points of renewed reflection on archetypical pathways for carrying out the externality of Christian witness. Crucially, these forms did not correspond neatly to the polarized options of contemporary political debate, and it is precisely that dissonance which especially the Jesuits of Témoignage chrétien prized. Again, this frames the wider project of Ressourcement as a rediscovery of a spirituality that was nourished by the opposition of secular state and militant Christian Church, not one that was simply nostalgic for a return to medieval configurations and a vague sense of recovering belief in metaphysical realities. Fouilloux offers an important perspective in this regard that complements Shortall's approach to the contingencies of Vichy. While Témoignage chrétien posed itself as a resistance movement located in the south, Dieu vivant drew upon the remainders of ecumenical intellectual life in occupied Paris in order to denounce a “degraded Christianity which, in being no more than a social structure, has lost its character of living faith.”63 Even more starkly, the “Liminaire” of the second volume poses Satan as presenting Jesus with a “plan de christianisme incarné,” but Christ, in his resistances to the desert temptations, prefers “christianisme crucifié.”64 To address the degradation of the incarnationalist collaborators with Vichy, they redefined the term “Christianity” itself. If incarnationalist models emptied Christianity of transcendence, then the Dieu vivant circle would search for models across the resources of Christianity that could preserve transcendence and so resist the hope of capturing the presence of the totalizing Church in purely political terms. Their models became, to name a few, Gregory of Palamas, Gregory of Nyssa, Jewish exegesis of the Psalter, and a personalist interpretation of Islamic mysticism.65 It is important to note with Fouilloux and Shortall that the fault-line does not fall strictly between Jesuit and Dominican camps. An Yves Congar could bemoan the prevalence of support for the national revolution even amidst his contacts on the board of Esprit, the organ of personalist philosophy edited by Emmanuel Mounier, much of whose content relied on the clear distinction between supernatural and natural spheres.66 Once more the model of the early Church presented itself to Congar as a political body independent of the state and yet not retreated into the private sphere, so unavailable to become enlisted in the externalism of totalitarian causes. With this caveat in mind, however, viewing the distinct ways Jesuits and Dominicans produced theology around the nouvelle théologie provides a fruitful tension for approaching political questions. And this religious divide is seen nowhere clearer than from the vantage point of journal production. Clandestine manuscript circulation, intimate letters, public recrimination and libel, journal entries, lecture notes, inquisitions and sometimes outright intervention by the Vatican, fresh journals and book series, linguistic modulation to pass—or in some cases, like in Vichy, openly oppose—censorship: this is how theology was written from the demonization of Blondelian modernism in Pascendi (1907), through the condemnation of Action française and Henri de Lubac's inaugural lecture at the Theology faculty of the Catholic University of Lyon in 1929, up to the 1944 liberation. Preponderant among these forms is the production of freshly conceived journal periodicals. To paraphrase Shortall's apt evaluation, there were few other means of political critique during a time of censorship and paper rationing. Indeed, particularly for approaching the politics of nouvelle théologie, journals played an immense role in fashioning the identity of the group. It was in the pages of Revue thomiste in 1946 that the Fourvière Jesuits were condemned, one of the hallmark dates of the nouvelle théologie controversy. And it was in Dieu vivant that, in 1953, Hans Urs von Balthasar published the translated article Raser les bastions (a condensed version of his Schleiftung der Bastionen, published a year later), effectively signaling the end of the nouvelle théologie controversy. Manifestly rupturing with what was viewed as the insular posture of the medieval Church, Balthasar announced the radically “open-door and open-window” posture of the modern Church.67 Notable monographs from the period were often published either as facsimile editions of a particular journal, or within supplemental series directly attached thereto. As flagship enterprises of a particular intellectual community, the initiative to establish a journal was often conceived as the response to a particular political crisis. Four journals play key roles in Shortall's narrative and thus emerge as important figures in the approach to the politics of nouvelle théologie: the Dominican Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1907-present), the Jesuit Témoignage Chrétien (1941-1944), the Dominican La Quinzaine (1950-1953), and the ecumenical—though piloted by Daniélou, a Jesuit—Dieu vivant (1945-1955). The terminal dates in most of the preceding parentheticals indicate that these journals were conceived as controversial, sustained, pointed critiques addressing concrete political realities; long life typically does not become those literary enterprises which, to take the case of La Quinzaine, viewed the United States of America as the single greatest threat to global peace amidst the burgeoning Cold War.68 Letters between the cofounders of the Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques indicate that it grew out of the 1903 expulsion of religious orders from France; the initial periodicals of this Revue could be read as exile literature.69 But its significance is more than a response to the travails of the religious orders at the hands of modernity and its secularizing institutions. While not conceived with overt polemical aims, this Dominican Revue consciously set itself on different terrain than the reigning Thomist journal at the time, Revue thomiste. Viewing the latter as atrophying, some wished for a tighter grasp on the present state of Thomist studies and the possibility of dialogue among different scientific disciplines.70 In Shortall's hands, this tension takes on its full political significance. The 1907 founding of Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques represents a diversifying movement within Thomism itself. Even at this early stage, the division presages Chenu's more radical departure from the Rome-based “baroque Thomism,”71 an approach developed in articles throughout the 1930s and 40s and published in his magisterial works Une école de théologie (1937) and La théologie au XIIe siècle (1951).72 Deeply inspired by the rediscovery of Johann Adam Mӧhler's (1796-1838) concept of the Church as an extension of the incarnation of Christ, and so “Revelation” as a progressive inscription in history,73 Chenu championed Aquinas as a cultural, linguistic, and philosophical integrator to be emulated by dialogue with modern science.74 For Chenu, there was one science that made an impression of priority for such a dialogue. His La théologie au XIIIe siècle pointed to the double-helix revolution of theology and its surprising partner: economics. It is no accident, he supposed, that Aquinas's work flourished during the so-called Feudal Revolution; so too in our day, he concluded, theology ought to flourish in relation to social and materialistic analyses in order to improve economic conditions for human life. Marxism, it goes without saying, was chief among such analyses, though Chenu found its general coopting for ideologies of liberalism and human rights to result in a severely insufficient view of the human person and human community.75 After all, he pointed out, it is capitalism and not communism that manipulates labor into a force for alienation.76 Throughout the 1940s and early 50s, in journals like Sept, Esprit, La Vie intellectuelle, and La Quinzaine, Chenu developed a veritable theology of matter and labor. As Magali Della Sudda notes, during this time journals like Études and L'Action Catholique movements like Appel de la jeuenesse étudiante chetienne incorporated collaboratrices—female editors—in contrast to elite religious journals like La vie intellectuelle with largely male readership, a fact that gestures to the gradual impact of personalist philosophy on the meeting point between theory and practice in French Catholic culture.77 Shortall brilliantly distills three distinctions among Chenu's works from this period, reflecting his model