Prelude

A historiographical paper on Jesuit modern philosophy must address some methodological issues before developing its arguments. First of all, what is the field of research meant by the concept of philosophy? Indeed, a shift occurred between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the distribution of the philosophical areas and the corresponding teaching of the subject in higher education institutions such as colleges and universities. Moreover, the rise of new fields of research, such as human and social sciences, epistemology, and the development of new technologies that raise special ethical issues have made the boundaries of what is meant by the early modern period of philosophy even more nuanced.

This means that while the branches of philosophy in the nineteenth century were mostly those which were taught at universities and which followed a modernized version of Aristotle’s division, the fields of philosophical inquiries in the twentieth century expanded widely to embrace economic, anthropological, psychoanalytical, sociological, and post-metaphysical dimensions. As Jesuit scholars have always been men of their time, their interests have often crossed the boundaries of what their ancestors in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries understood to be proper philosophy.

Two of the most evident examples of such cross-discipline problems are the cases of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) and Karl Rahner (1904–84). Tracing these back to philosophical categories could be (and, as I will show later, have been) a complex historiographical problem. Nonetheless, a philosophical historiography of either their methods or the consequences of their thought will reveal the broad and deep impact they have had in the twentieth century. The same goes for Jesuit scholars such as Marcel Jousse (1886–1961), Walter Ong (1912–2003), Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), Jean Daniélou (1905–74), Michel de Certeau (1925–86), and Jean-Yves Calvez (1927–2010).

The second major issue is the process, which is still underway, of the immersion of the Jesuit-ness of late modern Jesuit philosophers into the historiography of philosophy. Studies addressing this issue are still lacking. This is a deficiency which is less noticeable in theological studies, where neo-Scholasticism has triggered different traditions, particularly between the Jesuits and Dominicans as religious orders seeking the best way to revive Thomism in modern times.

The last major issue pertains to chronology. Distinguishing between current philosophical debate and historiography often is simply a subjective choice. Articles on a Jesuit philosopher’s ideas have often been outlined in order to challenge that philosopher’s thought. Jesuit scholarly journals have often devoted obituaries to those Jesuit scholars who have passed away, tracking those scholars’ intellectual paths and thought. Sometimes, Jesuit philosophers devoted chapters or paragraphs of their articles to other Jesuit philosophers, with the theoretical aim of endorsing their own theory. This overlapping time between history and chronicle makes the challenge of tracking the historiographical literature on Jesuit modern philosophy very complex, and, again, somehow a subjective choice.

In this article, I will consider Jesuit philosophers and Jesuit philosophical institutions in a broader sense—not limiting my tracking of historiography to the thought of academic professors of philosophy—and try to group thinkers into broader traditions within the multifaceted prism of ever flexible Jesuit thought.

Jesuit Thomisms

The very first, and also the most recognizable, tradition, in Jesuit late modern philosophy is that of the so-called renaissance of Thomism, which was triggered by Pope Leo XIII (r.1878–1903) in the nineteenth century. The Jesuits stood at both the vanguard and the frontier of that renaissance, developing divergent and centrifugal systems, which brought them often into conflict with other neo-Thomists, such as the Dominican philosophers, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) and Étienne Gilson (1884–1978).

Gerald McCool’s The Neo-Thomists appears to be the latest, most readable history of this Catholic modern philosophical movement. McCool’s distinction of three kinds of Jesuit Scholasticisms is helpful for tracking those Jesuit philosophers who tried to bring Thomas Aquinas’s thought into dialogue with modernity.

The first kind concerns those Jesuits and institutions that, according to McCool, played a significant role in fostering Leo XIII’s preference for Aquinas’s thought. Domenico Sordi (1790–1880) and his brother Serafino (1793–1865) were the two leading precursors of Jesuit neo-Scholasticism. As a novice at the Lazarist Alberoni College in Piacenza, Serafino shared his passion for Aquinas with his fellow Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862), who would later be appointed rector at the restored Gregorian University. As a teacher at the philosophate in Naples, Domenico crucially influenced Carlo Maria Curci (1809–91) and Matteo Liberatore (1810–92), who would found La Civiltà cattolica in 1850. Under these figures, both the Gregorian University and La Civiltà cattolica spread Aquinas’s ideas; this was before Gioacchino Pecci (1810–1903), a former student at the Gregorian University, was elected pope and prompted neo-Thomism with the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). The debate that immediately arose between Dominicans and Jesuits and, later, the dramatic impact scholars such as Maritain and Gilson had on neo-Thomism make distinguishing the historiography from philosophical polemic quite difficult. Conflicts of interpretation exist between and within the orders themselves.

The first Jesuit neo-Thomism followed the Suárezian tradition. Liberatore and Joseph Kleutgen (1811–83), whom Leo XIII appointed as prefects of studies at the Gregorian University, were Suárezian. While La Civiltà cattolica endorsed this kind of neo-Scholasticism, the philosophers of Louvain and the journal Revue néoscolastique often polemicized with them. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that one of the first historiographical assessments of Liberatore’s philosophy was provided by Amato Masnovo (1880–1955) in the Revue néoscolastique in 1908. Masnovo’s attempt was to denounce the precocious Thomism of Liberatore, pointing out that between 1840 and 1850 Taparelli did not recognize Liberatore’s Thomism, claiming that the very first neo-Thomist in Italy was the layman and baron Vincenzo de Grazia (1785–1856). Nonetheless, Masnovo was the first to trace the revival of Thomistic studies back to the Alberoni College of Piacenza and mentions the Sordi brothers.¹ Shortly after Masnovo’s papers, Auguste Pelzer (1876–1958) wrote a survey on the early history of neo-Thomism, based on accurate references to Curci and Liberatore’s writings and articles published in La Civiltà cattolica.²

Following the historiographical path of Suárezianism in Jesuit philosophy, one arrives at the historiography of early modern Jesuit philosophy rather than the modern one. But it should be remembered that the manner in which this kind of neo-Scholasticism developed depended mostly on current philosophical debate, in which the neo-Scholastics felt engaged in so far as they considered Aquinas’s thought as a philosophia perennis (perennial philosophy). Agostino Garagnani (1881–1944) made this clear in a paper published in the very first issue of Gregorianum, the journal published by the theologians and philosophers who taught at the Gregorian University.³

Kleutgen’s thought attracted the interest of German scholars from the outset. The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie devoted an entry to him in 1906 and an intellectual biography appeared in 1910.⁴ A very detailed bibliography of Kleutgen appeared as an attachment to an article by Lakner in 1933, who focused on Kleutgen’s theology as does most of the literature about this Jesuit author.⁵ With regard to Kleutgen’s philosophical thought, Peter Walter’s contribution is historiographically essential.⁶

The middle of the twentieth century seemed to be propitious for studies on the origins of Italian neo-Thomism. Several monographs were devoted to Curci and Taparelli’s philosophical thought; these commentaries emerged amidst biographical accounts of their paths in the most important Jesuit cultural institutions.⁷ In 1954, Giuseppe Filograssi (1875–1962) wrote an important article, still referenced today, on the history of modern philosophy at the Gregorian University.⁸

Finally, interest in Liberatore’s philosophy and the first Italian neo-Scholastics has followed the development of the more general historiography of neo-Thomism, which declined after Vatican II, but was revived in the last quarter of the twentieth century.⁹ The publication of Liberatore–Cornoldi correspondence in 1993 has finally revived studies on this leading figure of Jesuit modern philosophy, so much so as to deserve a monographic issue of Gregorianum, with articles by Henrici, Sans, Dante, and Alonso-Lasheras.¹⁰

The connections between Italian and German neo-Scholasticism in the Jesuit modern tradition has been the topic of some studies, but of course Italy and Germany do not cover the entire field of Jesuit Suárezianism.¹¹ Nor was Suárezianism the only version of Jesuit neo-Thomism in those contexts. In France, for example, the cultural environment at the philosophate of Jersey, where the provinces of Paris and Lyon sent Jesuit scholastics, was “fiercely Suárezian.”¹² In addition, Pedro Descoqs (1877–1946) had organized a library there so that it seemed to be a philosophical program rather than a bibliographical source for students. Gabriel Picard traced this philosophical background in Descoqs’s activity in the obituary he wrote for this restless librarian.¹³

But Jersey, to the history of which I will refer later, was not the only site of the Jesuit Thomistic tradition in France, and probably not the most relevant. The encounter (and, possibly, the hybridization) between Aquinas’s philosophy and the most prominent modern philosophical systems would find a seedbed at the philosophate of Vals-près-le-Puy, and—after World War II—in Chantilly.

One of the most influential Jesuit Thomisms of the modern era is the one that goes under the name of “transcendental Thomism.” Its starting point was a meeting of Aquinas’s metaphysics and Immanuel Kant’s criticism. The founder and leading figure of the transcendental Thomism was Joseph Maréchal (1878–1944), who taught at the Collège Philosophique et Théologique Saint Albert de Louvain until his death in 1944 and published one major and a most renowned work entitled Le point de départe de la métaphysique in five volumes (1927–44).

Maréchal’s philosophy entered the Thomistic debate with a fairly different approach; the problem was not to reconstruct the truly historical philosophy of Aquinas, but to inquire into Aquinas’s philosophy from a modern viewpoint. This new approach, indebted—as claimed by Maréchal—to the teaching of Pierre Rousselot (1878–1915), provoked polemics and debates within the neo-Thomistic field, but it was finally very influential for André Marc (1892–1961), Gaston Isaye (1903–84), Joseph de Finance (1904–2000), Rahner, Bernard Lonergan (1904–84), and Johannes Baptist Lotz (1903–92).

Pierre Rousselot, a Jesuit who taught dogmatic theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris until his premature death, received great attention from historians of theology; some contributions which dealt with his philosophical thought have appeared throughout the twentieth century. A biography with a detailed bibliography of Rousselot was published in the second edition of one of his most renowned writings, L’intellectualisme de saint Thomas.¹⁴ In order to track historiography about Rousselot’s philosophical thought, one should not fail to study the contributions made by John McDermott, who kept publishing on Rousselot into the last quarter of the last century.¹⁵

Rousselot’s influence on some aspects of Maréchal’s philosophy was tracked by Albert Milet (1915–2006) in a historiographical article he published in the Louvain journal Revue néoscolastique de philosophie. ¹⁶ In this paper, Milet traced Maréchal’s and Rousselot’s philosophies back to the core teachings of Maurice Blondel (1861–1949); that is, the issue of seeking justification of the absolute character of knowledge in the structure of human consciousness.¹⁷ Milet’s interpretation was probably as premature as it was simplistic. Maréchal’s debt to Blondel is not very clear and, most of all, the intellectual relationship between Blondel and Maréchal went on to diverge in the thirties.¹⁸ In 1968, Dirven stressed the differences between Blondel’s and Maréchal’s thoughts, reassessing their philosophies within two different historical contexts.¹⁹

Archives de philosophie was of course the journal most sensitive to Maréchal’s transcendental Thomism. In the bibliographical second issue of 1924, Blaise Romeyer (1882–1954) outlined one of the earliest reviews of the first three volumes of Le point de départ de la métaphysique. ²⁰ Despite his appreciation of these volumes, it is highly remarkable that Romeyer reacts negatively to Maréchal’s presumed refutation of any immediate intuition in the process of human knowing. In short, Maréchal appeared too Kantian as an interpreter of Thomas Aquinas.

Historiography on Maréchal before 1950 relied on two crucial volumes entitled Mélanges Joseph Maréchal, which collected early works of the Jesuit philosopher, biographical notes, and contributions on his thought by several authors such as Milet himself; it was published in Brussels and Paris in 1950.²¹ After 1950, the literature on Maréchal grew extensively. Monographs which received attention from scholars included those by Casula (1955), Aleu (1970), Savignano (1978), and—most importantly—the monographic article on Maréchal by Johannes Baptist Lotz, published in 1988.²² Articles on Maréchal’s thought have basically followed two different paths. The first and larger group includes those papers which focused on the relationship between metaphysical justification and the dynamism of the mind according to Maréchal. This group includes works by Pires (1957), Siewerth (1959), Javier (1964/65), Lebacqz (1965), Burns (1968), Bradley (1975), and Savignano (1981).²³

The second group includes the articles of those scholars, all of whom were Jesuits, who debated on the philosophical legacy of Maréchal. “Did Maréchal found a school, or a movement, or something else?” This was the issue which some of the most renowned Jesuit philosophers discussed for more than a decade. Emerich Coreth (1919–2006) was among the first to pose this question in 1961.²⁴ Among its merits, this work includes a fact that triggered a response by Lonergan, who wrote his criticisms of Coreth in one of his most celebrated articles, Metaphysics as Horizon. ²⁵The only thesis of Coreth that Lonergan was willing to accept was the fact that Maréchal had not produced a “school,” but a “movement.”²⁶ Yet, the debate was far from being resolved. In 1974, Johannes Baptist Lotz intervened on the Thomism of what he called the “Maréchal school”²⁷ and in 1988 this expression was used by both Jacobs and Muck.²⁸

In 2000, the Belgian francophone Jesuits published a collective volume, which stands today as the main reference work on Maréchal studies. It was edited by Paul Gilbert, who also gave notice of it in La Civiltà cattolica with an extensive commentary one year later.²⁹ In this volume, the expression “Maréchal school” was used by some contributors, but Gilbert did not consider it to be universally accepted.³⁰

What is now commonly accepted is Maréchal’s influence on the Jesuit neo-Thomisms that developed in the second half of the twentieth century. To Jesuit philosophers, Maréchal had paved the way for dealing with modern philosophies in a theoretical way that did not imply the deprecation of Aquinas’s doctrine.

In France, philosophers such as André Marc, Joseph de Finance, and Yves de Montcheuil (1900–44) echoed Maréchal’s philosophical style, while Gaston Fessard (1897–78)—influenced by post-Kantian idealism—triggered a slightly different philosophical tradition. This tradition shared with Maréchal the choice to keep Aquinas’s thought in dialogue with modern German philosophers. Historiographical papers have addressed all of these Jesuit philosophers; André Marc’s philosophy has received attention from scholarship since the early 1960s.³¹ The most relevant work on Yves de Montcheuil, from a philosophical point of view, is the recent monograph Fouilloux devoted to him.³² In Germany, Maréchal’s influence is usually recognized in August Brunner’s (1894–1985), Lotz’s, and Coreth’s philosophies, and in some aspects of Rahner’s theological method.³³ Gustav Siewerth (1903–63), whose thought was so important for Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88), was also inspired by Maréchal.³⁴ A larger perspective on these Jesuit variations of Thomism was provided by several studies by Helen James John and the aforementioned Gerald A. McCool, who has been working on neo-Thomists since the early 1960s.³⁵

A third kind of Jesuit Thomism was represented by Erich Przywara (1889–1972), whose philosophical reputation has been linked to his renowned Analogia entis (1932). In this book, Przywara followed Aquinas’s distinction between essence and existence, interpreting it in the light of Dionysius the Areopagite and, through Augustine, of Platonic tradition. As a member of the editorial team of the Jesuit Stimmen der Zeit, Przywara was monitored by the Gestapo until the Nazis shut down the journal; the editor-in-chief, Alfred Delp (1907–45), was executed in 1945 for his presumed involvement in Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg’s (1907–44) plot.

Since Przywara was highly esteemed by Barth and his teaching had an influence on von Balthasar, the large majority of historiographers have focused on the theological implications of Przywara’s concept of analogy. Yet, philosophical insights on Przywara’s thought have been offered by Julio César Terán Dutari (1973), Martha Zechmeister (2001), and, more recently, by Thomas O’Meara (2006).³⁶

Gaston Fessard and Jesuit Hegelian Philosophy School in Chantilly?

The name Gaston Fessard is usually linked to the larger history of France, thanks to the first issue of the Cahiers de témoignage chrétien (1941). Entitled “Beware of losing your soul, France” it has been interpreted both as a strong political call to resist the Nazi occupation of France and as the theoretical precursor of post-war Gaullism. But the crucial impact of Fessard’s thought on the French philosophical scenario in the middle of the twentieth century has been fairly highlighted only lately, thanks to an intellectual biography by Michel Sales, S.J., and several socio-political studies by Michèle Aumont.³⁷

Like many other Jesuit philosophers who tried to open up dialogue with modern thought, Fessard endeavored to foster an appropriate understanding of Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit was translated into French by Jean Hyppolite (1907–68) in 1939–40. Fessard had encountered Hegel by the twenties and his La dialectique des Exercices spirituels de saint Ignace de Loyola—a renowned book inspired by Hegelian dialectics, which would be published only in 1956—was already circulating in its manuscript form among Jesuit circles by 1931. As Michel Fourcade recently pointed out, Fessard’s starting point was a dissatisfaction with the lack of a philosophy of history, religion, and politics in neo-Thomistic theological studies.³⁸ According to Fessard, Hegel’s historical dialectics had positive and powerful repercussions on a “new theology,” which he felt necessary.³⁹ Fessard’s philosophical interest in the concept of history led him to enter the French debate on Hegel’s Phenomenology primarily as a historiographer: he published a paper in Études (1947) comparing Alexandre Kojève (1902–68)’s reading of Hegel with that of the Jesuit Lyons professor Henri Niel (1910–67), of whose work Fessard was the first historiographer.

If Niel and Fessard paved the way for a Jesuit reading of Hegel, the Jesuit philosopher who set up the scholarly seedbed for this has been largely recognized to be Marcel Régnier (1900–98). A fellow of Fessard at Canterbury in 1919, and again in Chantilly by 1962, Régnier expressed his sense of gratitude to Fessard by delivering the homily at his funeral. This homily was eventually published and still stands as a sharp insight into the philosophical paths of Fessard.

Régnier had been teaching at the philosophate of Vals from 1931 to 1962, contributing to creating a bridge between French and German philosophies. He was appointed editor of the second series of the prestigious journal Archives des philosophie, founded in 1926 by the Jesuits Joseph Souilhé (1885–1941) and Robert de Sinety (1872–1931), directing the publication toward a French encounter with German modern philosophers.⁴⁰ Régnier’s historiographical approach to Hegel appeared to be far different from the more theoretical one of Fessard; it was described as “philosophically thrifty.” This philosophical style, along with his main commitment to teaching and his role as editor of the Archives probably fostered a literary biographical rather than properly philosophical style. Yet, Régnier’s leadership in the French-German philosophical scene was eloquently shown by both Xavier Tilliette’s (b.1921) Festschrift and the monographic issue of Archives, published on occasion of the tenth anniversary of Régnier’s death (1988).⁴¹

Recalling his visit to Vals where Régnier was giving classes in 1943, de Lubac reported that he was impressed by the “Hegelian work” that such a small group of Jesuits was conducting.⁴² This group included Tilliette, Gustave Martelet (1916–2013), Jean-Marie Tézé (1919–2012), and Joseph Gauvin (1918–96). George Morel (1920–89), Roger Munier (1923–2010)—whom Fessard and Abel Jeannière (1920–95) helped translate Martin Heidegger’s (1889–76) renowned Letter on Humanism—and Calvez joined Vals shortly after the end of the war. It is significant to note that, aside from Régnier’s German interests, Joseph de Finance (1904–2000) kept teaching metaphysics at Vals from 1938 to 1951, the year in which he joined the Gregorian University.⁴³

Gauvin and Morel soon left Vals for Chantilly, where the ancient philosophate of Jersey had finally been moved and where the Jesuit youth, attracted by the new theology, appeared dissatisfied even with Maréchal’s thought, the most Kantian version of Thomism. In Rome, there were concerns about this particular sensitivity to German thought at Chantilly by the time of Jean Marie Le Blond (1899–1973)’s rectorate. But, as Tilliette recalled later, the arrival of Régnier’s disciples Morel and Gauvin, and the contact with the group Études, where Le Blond himself had been sent after his rectorate, made Chantilly even more closely attentive to Hegel and even opened the young theologians to the triad of the so-called “masters of suspicion,” Marx-Nietzsche-Freud.

Several Jesuit philosophers were at Chantilly by then and some of them attracted the interest of historiographers. But the crucial point for the historiography of Jesuit late modern philosophy is that Chantilly’s tradition induced scholars to see it as a hallmark of “Jesuit philosophy schools.” This idea was put forward by Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarrière in their De Kojève à Hegel: 150 ans de pensée hégélienne en France (1996).⁴⁴ Labarrière, who had been a student of Gauvin in 1953–54 with de Certeau, alluded to it once again in his obituary of Gauvin.⁴⁵ And finally, Fourcade made a contribution about the philosophical history of Vals and Chantilly that stands as a reference work for those who want to inquire into Jesuit modern philosophy in France.⁴⁶

Bernard Lonergan

The literature on Bernard Lonergan’s thought is immense. His most acclaimed masterpieces, Insight and Method in Theology, have been largely influential within and beyond Jesuit philosophers and theologians. Moreover, distinguishing what pertains to philosophy and to theology in Lonergan’s thought has been controversial because of the unique synthesis which Lonergan offers in his works. Lonergan’s development of a distinctive approach has challenged the traditional boundaries between philosophy and theology, and has raised more questions than, for example, Rahner’s use of philosophy to develop a theological method.

Finally, historiography and research on Lonergan’s thought started while Lonergan was at the apex of his intellectual parabola. Conferences, workshops, university institutes, and research centers have been opened and operating since the seventies, so that Lonergan’s reputation as an intellectual would spread all around the world.

Crucial to studies about Lonergan was the first International Lonergan Congress held in St. Leo, Florida, in 1970. The congress was organized by Joseph Collins, David Tracy, and Bernard Tyrrell, and it was just the first of a long list; however, this gathering included many of the most important scholars who would later produce initiatives on Lonergan’s thought. Several papers addressed Lonergan’s philosophy. Among them was one by Frederick Lawrence, who discussed Lonergan’s historiographical concept of self-knowledge in comparison with that of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1900–2002); David Rasmussen compared Lonergan’s and Paul Ricoeur’s (1913–2005) hermeneutics; and Giovanni Sala (1930–2011), a student of Lonergan who translated his works into Italian and German and continued research on them, dealt with the Kantian roots of Lonergan’s theory of knowledge. Marcel Régnier, then editor of Archives de philosophie, sent a paper on Lonergan and Hegel, but could not attend the meeting.

Frederick Crowe (1915–2012) was among the very first and most important scholars of Lonergan’s thought. His involvement with Lonergan’s studies can be traced back to 1953, when, as a student of theology at the University of Toronto, he accepted the task of preparing the index for the first manuscript of Insight, which Lonergan would only publish in 1957. Crowe started working on Lonergan, pursuing the idea of setting up a Lonergan archive, which was the basic research source in the Lonergan Center that Crowe established at Regis College in 1970. In 1964, Crowe edited one of the first volumes of articles devoted to Lonergan’s thought, Spirit as inquiry: Studies in honor of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. He contributed to this collection a paper on Lonergan’s intellectualism.⁴⁷

Lonergan moved back from the Gregorian University (where he taught from 1954 to 1964) to Regis College (1965–74) and later to Boston College (1975–83). During these years, studies on his thought grew at an exponential rate. While Crowe was working to collect Lonergan’s works and papers in Toronto, Lawrence ran the annual Lonergan Workshop at Boston College and edited the journal Lonergan Workshop which has to date offered outstanding papers on Lonergan’s philosophy. Particularly, Lawrence has worked on Lonergan’s hermeneutics, providing insights into Lonergan’s reception of Heidegger and Gadamer’s paradigmatic revolution.⁴⁸ Meanwhile, Sala published five articles on Lonergan’s metaphysics in Archives de philosophie between 1970 and 1973.⁴⁹ In 1972, he published an important paper in Gregorianum devoted to Lonergan’s and Coreth’s epistemologies.⁵⁰

A historiographical instrument that has consistently kept a record of publications of and about Lonergan to date is the Lonergan Studies Newsletter, which Terry Tekippe and Michael O’Callaghan founded in 1980, the same year when Crowe’s introductory work The Lonergan’s Enterprise appeared.⁵¹ Crowe would also offer one of the most renowned introductions to Lonergan twelve years later.⁵² In the 1980s, Toronto’s Lonergan Center became the Lonergan Research Center (1985), and Boston College founded the Lonergan Institute. In 1985, Compass, a Jesuit magazine published in Canada, devoted a monographic issue to Lonergan, for which  Hugo Meynell wrote a short article about Lonergan and the future of philosophy.⁵³ In 1981, Matthew Lamb edited a collective volume with some specific insights into Lonergan’s phenomenology and ethics.⁵⁴

Since then, the historiography on Lonergan’s philosophy has focused mostly on issues of epistemology and theory of knowledge. Meynell provided an interesting introduction to Lonergan’s philosophy in 1991, and Sala focused on Lonergan’s concept of intentionality in a collective volume edited by Virgilio Melchiorre in 1993.⁵⁵ Terry Tekippe dealt with Lonergan’s philosophical method in Gregorianum (1990), the same journal that would devote a monographic issue to Lonergan on the occasion of the centenary of his birth in 2004, with contributions about Lonergan’s philosophy by Rosanna Finamore, who had been studying Lonergan’s work for years, and by Lawrence.⁵⁶

In 2006, Valter Danna edited the proceedings of a conference held in Turin (Italy) one year earlier, whose contributions included insights on Lonergan’s theological method, science, and philosophy.⁵⁷ In 2007, João J. Vila-Chã edited a monographic issue of the Revista portuguesa de filosofia devoted to Lonergan’s philosophy, with contributions by some of the most renowned Lonergan scholars.⁵⁸ The volume, entitled The Realms of Insight: Bernard Lonergan and Philosophy aimed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Insight; however, its scope covers many aspects of Lonergan’s philosophy and offers several comparisons with those philosophers and movements which influenced Lonergan’s thought (Aquinas, Kant, Maréchal, Newman, Courtney Murray).

Robert Doran, a fine Lonergan scholar, founded a project on Lonergan primary and secondary sources at Marquette University, where he also organized a meeting focused on Lonergan’s philosophy in 2012. Mark Morelli discussed Hegel’s legacy in Lonergan’s work, Michael Sharkey dealt with the notion of being in the work of Lonergan and Heidegger, and William Reigh compared the ethical theories of Lonergan and Habermas.⁵⁹

Finally, although literature on specific topics about Lonergan’s philosophy have been extending and becoming even more specialized, broader surveys on Lonergan’s thought have appeared even more recently. Among the volumes which try to track the development of Lonergan’s philosophical and theological thought with his biography, the most recent of Lonergan’s intellectual biographies are those by William A. Mathews and by Pierrot Lambert and Philip McShane, which stand today as the most complete and obligatory introductions to this Jesuit philosopher, whom Time once emphatically named “the finest philosophical thinker of the twentieth century.”⁶⁰

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Since the day of his death (April 10, 1955), an extensive scholarship on Teilhard de Chardin has dealt with the cornucopia of interests of this curious and trans-disciplinary Jesuit. Discerning what in Teilhard’s thought was specifically philosophical rather than biological, paleontological, cosmological, spiritual, and, finally, theological is not an easy task. Teilhard’s thought and life are indeed intermingled, as Claude Cuénot, the most important of Teilhard’s first biographers, pointed out. Although Cuénot’s Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Les grandes étapes de son évolution (Paris, 1958) does not strictly focus on Teilhard’s thought, it provides a “philosophical” angle in presenting Teilhard’s evolution of life as divided into three stages of theoretical discoveries (matter, spirit, person). Cuénot was also the first to outline a tentative bibliography of Teilhard’s writings (507 titles).⁶¹

Early intellectual biographies of Teilhard were published by the Jesuit Émile Rideau (1899–1981) and Bruno de Solages (1895–1983).⁶² The extensive and systematic survey of Rideau, though, could not rely on the primary sources, which stood at the core of de Solages’s work; that is, the journal which Teilhard kept during the period 1915–25, a period crucial to the formation of his thought. Some scholars have devoted the first significant inquiries of Teilhard’s philosophy to these years. The common trait of such inquiries is the endeavor to track Teilhard’s philosophical influences or to compare his philosophy with the most updated philosophical movements of his time (or that of the historiography, as well). Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule (1911–2001) followed both paths, by tracking Teilhard’s roots in the philosophical evolutionism of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and hazarding a comparison between Teilhard’s philosophy and neo-Marxism and existentialism, the two most controversial movements in France at her time.⁶³ Barthélemy-Madaule pointed out that Teilhard’s evolutionism differed from that of Bergson in the direction that the two philosophers understood the evolutionary process: while Bergson understood it as centrifugal, for Teilhard evolution could be symbolized by a cone, whose generator lines converge toward a vertex. Therefore, as Christ is the vertex of the cosmos, so Christology is the core of Teilhard’s philosophical view of the world.

This strictly ontological connection between the evolution of the cosmos and that of Christ (“Christ toujours plus grand”) was the aspect of Teilhard’s thought that fascinated Blondel the most. As one of the most influential Christian philosophers of the beginning of the twentieth century, Blondel drew attention from a number of Jesuit scholars, Teilhard included. De Lubac was the first to publish and comment on the correspondence that Blondel and Teilhard kept in 1919.⁶⁴ As far as Teilhard’s thought is concerned, the importance of this publication cannot be overestimated. De Lubac had worked on this topic earlier, thus preparing himself for an extensive introduction to the edition of the letters, and two other essays, which were included at the end of the book.⁶⁵ De Lubac traced the origin of this correspondence back to the Jesuit Auguste Valensin (1879–1953), a common friend of both. De Lubac’s comments mainly address theological issues, but it was clear to him that Blondel’s method of immanence had both philosophical roots and implications.

Similarly, Christian d’Armagnac (1915–2000) was among the first to study how Blondel and Teilhard influenced each other in terms of theology, but many aspects of his argumentation involved a philosophical understanding of Blondel’s method of immanence.⁶⁶ According to d’Armagnac, Teilhard and Blondel shared the same starting point—that is, human action—but they differed in the way they understood the presence of transcendence within human action. In his arguments about this comparison, d’Armagnac outlined the philosophies of religion of both Blondel and Teilhard

While d’Armagnac was devoting papers and studies to the religious aspects of Teilhard’s philosophy of religion, a comparative approach toward Teilhard’s philosophy was offered by Roger Garaudy (1913–2012), a French Marxist whose thought was constantly in dialogue with Christian religion until his later conversion to Islam.⁶⁷ In the years when French Marxism was involved in a fierce dispute about the so-called humanism of Marx, Garaudy, a leading figure of the “humanistic” party, pointed out that Teilhard and Marx agreed exactly on their optimistic humanism and their proposed unification of history of nature and history of mankind in the broader and more general history of evolution. According to Garaudy, though, Teilhard’s mistake was his biologistic method for understanding social phenomena and, therefore, his neglect of the historical role of class conflicts.

It should not come as a surprise that Garaudy’s concordist statement generated replies from the Catholic Teilhardists of his time. A subtle paper by Morel, which appeared in Études in 1960, recognized that Garaudy’s argumentation was not as simple-minded as those of some scholars who had reduced Teilhard’s evolutionism to “the exclusively Marxist perspective of human hope.”⁶⁸ Nonetheless, Morel stated that the best and only merit of Garaudy was trying to understand Teilhard, but there was no chance for any assimilation of Teilhard to a Marxist point of view. Cuénot followed Morel’s path and intervened in the debate with a pointed article in 1965.⁶⁹

Ten years after Teilhard’s death, a number of cultural initiatives were put in place to foster Teilhard studies. By 1964, several foundations were established in Europe and the United States. The Fondation Teilhard de Chardin was the main one and had headquarters at the Musée de l’homme in Paris. The foundation also served as a center for a growing number of affiliated institutions and study initiatives all around the world, such as the Teilhard de Chardin Gesellschaft in Munich and The Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Association of Great Britain and Ireland in London. Also, though unaffiliated with Paris, there was the Centre Belge Teilhard de Chardin in Brussels. A particularly significant initiative was undertaken in the United States in 1967: The American Teilhard Association was founded, and has since been organizing conferences and publishing the quarterly Teilhard Perspectives and the book series Teilhard Studies.

Besides these institutions, two bibliographical initiatives were crucial for studies on Teilhard’s thought in the 1960s. First, the Jesuit László Polgár published the Internationale Teilhard-Bibliographie 1955–1965, and, second, Eusebi Colomer (1924–97) outlined a selection of and commentary on Polgar’s work that appeared two years later in an issue of Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu.⁷⁰ Colomer’s work is particularly important because it offers a guide to Teilhard studies which takes into account the impact of the monographs he mentioned in his list. Moreover, Colomer updated it in 1980, providing a commentary and a selection of the most significant studies on Teilhard that appeared after 1965.⁷¹

As Colomer himself stated, this new collection came at a time when the fierce controversies about the figure of Teilhard were over, and a fair assessment of this Jesuit scholar could be outlined on the basis of more objective historiographical studies. To realize how extensive the literature about Teilhard was, it is significant to note that 2,228 titles were listed by Joan Jarque in a bibliography that covered Teilhard studies just up to 1969. From a philosophical point of view, an instrument which is still used as a reference work is Adolf Haas’s Teilhard de Chardin-Lexikon, which endeavored to provide the philosophical background to the terms that Teilhard used in his writings.⁷² Cuénot himself produced a Teilhard lexicon and kept publishing works with the aim of reassessing Teilhard’s real thought against misinterpretations, which, of course, were many in such a monumental literature.⁷³ Particularly, he tried to interpret Teilhard’s intellectual life as polarized between the philosophical and the mystic fields, an interpretation that could be argued for a typically interdisciplinary scholar such as Teilhard.

In 1980, Colomer stated that the problem of Teilhard’s method was still unresolved and under debate. “Was Teilhard a scientist, a philosopher, or a theologian? Are there any ‘illicit’ crossings of (disciplinary) boarders?”⁷⁴ This question was pretty common in Teilhard studies, and it reflects the importance to which the epistemological debate had been raised in the philosophical scene of the second half of the twentieth century. According to Norbert Luyten, Teilhard’s method was a paradigm as revolutionary for modernity as pre-Socratic philosophers’ search for a synthesis of reality.⁷⁵ Teilhard himself claimed to be like an ancient Greek physicist. But what Luyten’s study seemed to miss was the centrality of man in Teilhard’s epistemology.

A renowned scholar who devoted several studies to this aspect of Teilhard’s thought was Karl Schmitz-Moormann, who published his first acclaimed volume in 1966.⁷⁶ Among others, Robert O’Connell devoted a study to Teilhard’s method by focusing on the evolutive relationship between man, nature, and time.⁷⁷ To correct Luyten’s neglecting of the centrality of man in Teilhard’s thought, several studies were devoted to Teilhard’s philosophical anthropology. Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule’s interpretation of Teilhard’s thought was mainly philosophical. Her La personne et le drame humain chez Teilhard de Chardin offered a dialectical perspective on the development of Teilhard’s thought, based on three stages (the Person, the Universal, the Personal Universal).⁷⁸

The relationship between man and society has been the topic of several Teilhard studies, which focus on it from the points of view of several disciplines, such as theology, social sciences, and political thought. It should not come as a surprise that this topic came under fire in theological disputations for its implications on Teilhard’s own Christology. Maritain condemned and endeavored to confute Teilhard’s thought in his renowned Le paysan de la Garonne, while more sophisticated speculations on Teilhard’s ideas can be found in Rahner’s Science, evolution, et pensée chrétienne, which was prefaced by the aforementioned Christian d’Armagnac. As topics such as paradigm shifts in epistemology and the postmodern human condition attracted the interest of philosophical communities, especially in the last quarter of the twentieth century, so studies on Teilhard’s thought were necessarily revived.⁷⁹ The role of Teilhard as a thinker in an age of crisis raised a particular interest among German scholars such as Thomas Broch and Ludwig Ebersberger.⁸⁰ The beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Teilhard’s death (2005), and scholars did not miss the opportunity to publish new and detailed intellectual biographies of the Jesuit scholar. Danzin and Masurel’s edited volume and Patrice Boudignon’s comprehensive biography are among the most quoted in this general literature.⁸¹

Jesuit Scholars on the Edge of Philosophy

There are several Jesuit scholars whose relationship with philosophy has raised controversy. Indeed, a distinctive trait of the Jesuit thinkers was that of being particularly sensitive to current epistemological debates and scientific discoveries. Therefore, it will not be surprising that some Jesuit scholars drew philosophical implications from whatever natural sciences, theology, human sciences, and even political thought were focusing on in a given period.

Stephen Schloesser coined the concept of “Jesuit hybrids,” meaning leading scholars who followed a similar path amidst the disciplines of the twentieth century. Although some of them are not listed under the category of “philosophers,” they have triggered a philosophical debate and historiography on some aspects of their thought. Philosophical studies on de Lubac’s anti-Scholastic ressourcement, Daniélou’s liturgical history, and Rahner’s theological method have been published throughout the second half of the twentieth century. However controversial this philosophical appropriation might be considered, the presence of such studies should not be ignored.

Rahner is a prime example of this. The historiography of Rahner’s thought has been mainly theological, which is how Rahner himself understood his work. Nonetheless, two other ways of dealing with Rahner’s thought have allowed scholars to produce philosophical historiographies of it. Tracing back and comparing Rahner’s method with the ontology of philosophers such as Maréchal or Heidegger constitute the first way. This approach inspired discussion about the philosophical language and style that Rahner adopted in writing about theology.⁸² These kinds of discussions are basically the same as those that have involved historiographers of Jesuit theologians such as de Lubac, Daniélou, and von Balthasar, and, one could say, they pertain to the long-lasting Scholastic tradition of discussing the boundaries between theology, the queen of the disciplines, and philosophy, its presumed handmaiden.⁸³

The second way of looking philosophically into Rahner has mostly to do with the core of his thought. He was mostly known for his systematic, foundationalist approach. But is there any reason to read Rahner in a non-foundationalist way? This was the question that prompted Karen Kilby’s monograph Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy, one of the aims of which was to show that decoupling Rahner’s theology from his philosophy was possible and useful in order to liberate the entire potential of Rahner’s theological theory. Yet, in this way, what Kilby did only showed the relevance of philosophy in the development of Rahner’s thought. A controversy has developed around this topic and several scholars, including Thomas Sheehan and Richard Lennan, have made critical interventions.⁸⁴

The boundaries between theology and philosophy have been crossed by historiography for several other Jesuit (or former Jesuit) theologians, such as de George Tyrrell (1861–1909), Henri Bremond (1865–1933), and de Lubac. Although literature about Jesuits such as Tyrrell and Bremond has focused on the theological and historical controversies of their own biographies, contributions on the philosophical roots of such biographies have been produced throughout the twentieth century.⁸⁵ De Lubac’s bibliography—which is more extensive than that of Tyrrell—includes studies on his hermeneutics of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill (1806–73) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) and broader surveys of his relationship to philosophy as a discipline.⁸⁶ Moreover, the philosophy of de Lubac was sometimes included in pioneering surveys about Jesuit thinkers whose work stood at the crossroads of disciplines.⁸⁷ Philosophical issues have been drawn from Jesuit scholars whose thought stood at the crossroads of human sciences. Ong,⁸⁸ de Certeau,⁸⁹ and Calvez⁹⁰ were among such Jesuit hybrids who worked on accommodating the modern into the fields of both cultural and social studies.

Jesuit Philosophical Institutions

Aside from individual philosophers who deserve the attention of modern scholarship, the Jesuits have restlessly endeavored to carry out philosophical work in groups and cultural institutions. These groups and institutions include philosophical centers such as the Centre Sèvres in Paris, and the philosophical institute Aloisianum in Gallarate (Milan), and several philosophical journals that have had really important cultural influence. Consulting publications published by these centers and journals offers an interesting insight into their own historiographical interests, as many of them dealt with Jesuit modern philosophers and philosophical systems from a historiographical point of view. Moreover, these centers and journals have become themselves the subject of interest for historiography, as they were active subjects with their own distinctive philosophical vision and mission.

The Philosophical Institute of Gallarate has attracted the attention of scholarship since the very first annual conference of the Center for Philosophical Studies, which it hosted in 1945. The Center for Philosophical Studies was founded by some of the most prominent Catholic philosophers in Italy, including Carlo Giacon (1900–84) who kept the role of secretary at the center until his death. Chronicles and reports about the contents of these conferences have appeared in the major philosophical journals every year.⁹¹ In some cases, the center at Gallarate has been even called a “movement,” thus confirming that Jesuit institutions such as philosophate could foster and act with a distinctive philosophical personality.

Giacon himself regularly published reports on the annual meetings of the center in several international philosophical journals. His major endeavor as a philosophical chronicler and medievalist did not prevent historiographers from focusing on and publishing papers about Giacon’s own philosophical ideas. In 1972, a Festschrift was compiled in honor of Giacon, where several articles dealt with his distinctive interpretation of Thomism as an actual philosophy.⁹² Later, Antonio Tognolo signed the entry about Giacon in the Enciclopedia filosofica of Gallarate, and, finally, Peter Henrici, a Jesuit philosopher who succeeded Giacon as secretary of the Center of Philosophical Studies, wrote a tribute to Giacon in the proceedings of the annual conference held by the center which was devoted to Christian philosophy in dialogue with modern thought.⁹³ Aside from organizing meetings, the Center for Philosophical Studies also distinguished itself with such important historiographical projects as the Bibliografia filosofica italiana dal 1900 al 1950, 4 vols. (Rome, 1950–56); Bibliografia filosofica italiana, published annually starting in 1951 (Milan, 1951–53; Brescia, 1954–68; Padua, 1971–78; Florence, 1980); and finally, the Enciclopedia filosofica (Sansoni: Florence, 1957).⁹⁴

The Center Sèvres was founded in 1974 by the amalgamation of the philosophate of Chantilly and the theologate of Lyons. Its historiographical commitment to philosophy, and particularly to Jesuit philosophy, has been basically laid out in the publication of Archives de philosophie and Cahiers de médiasèvres, two periodicals which are still highly prominent on the philosophical scene.

Among the leading Jesuit philosophers in the history of the Centre Sèvres, one needs to mention Tilliette, though his life is linked to many institutions, including the Gregorian University. Tilliette has been both a philosopher and a historiographer of Jesuit philosophy. A specialist on Jaspers (1883–1969) and Blondel, he has been developing his own thought around the concept of “philosophical Christology,” which recent historiography has mostly focused on.⁹⁵

Mentioning the periodicals published by Centre Sèvres leads us to state that a significant part of Jesuit modern philosophy was played by journals that either Jesuit research centers or universities have published since the Society’s restoration. The long life and high reputation of several of these journals has caused them to become the subject of philosophical historiography, as is also the case with the above-mentioned institutions. Some of these journals had a historiographical mission; some others a more theoretical one. La Civiltà cattolica, for example, published a number of philosophical articles in the wake of the neo-Scholastic movement: these articles had the aim of both outlining a clearer understanding of medieval philosophy and contrasting medieval philosophy with modern philosophy. Historiography was their way of debating modernity.

Important journals such as Études, Gregorianum, Stimmen der Zeit, Revista portuguesa de filosofia, Brotéria, Pensamiento, Orientierung, and the International Philosophical Quarterly offered a dramatically large literature in philosophy. Many of these articles dealt with historiography, but many others dealt with the most updated philosophical movements such as existentialism, Marxism, and phenomenology. In many cases, these journals have been involved in the most up-to-date philosophical debate. Études, for example, kept offering insights on the development of Catholic thought and the church, thus providing materials for the debate about philosophy of religion and about the concept of “humanism” in anthropological disputation with Marxism, Existentialism, and Personalism. So also did Stimmen der Zeit, which did not have an exclusively philosophical goal. Journals such as Orientierung engaged in a close debate with Marxism in the second half of the twentieth century, and was really receptive to current phenomenological and epistemological debate.

It is interesting to note that Pensamiento, a journal published by the philosophical department of the University of Comillas (Spain), shows a continuous interest in Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy. Beginning with the early monographic issue on Teilhard’s thought in 1970, Pensamiento repeatedly hosted papers on this Jesuit philosopher, and finally focused on Eusebi Colomer, also a Jesuit philosopher who devoted much of his work to Teilhard.⁹⁶ Pensamiento was also very sensitive to the philosophical questions raised by Ignacio Ellacuría (1930–89) and the theological movements of Latin America.⁹⁷ Issues of the Revista portuguesa de filosofia and Brotéria reveal the same great interest in Teilhard de Chardin. Monographic issues on Teilhard’s philosophy were published by the Revista in 1972, 1981, and 2005. But these two journals are also important because they have devoted historiographical efforts to help Portuguese Jesuit philosophy finally emerge. Cassiano Abranches (1896–1983), Júlio Fragata (1920–85), Diamantino Martíns (1910–79), Lúcio Craveiro da Silva (1914–2007), and other major pillars of the modern history of Portuguese philosophy have been addressed by articles or monographic issues of this journal.

To conclude these limited remarks on Jesuit philosophical journals, it is worth mentioning that the Woodstock Letters, an American Jesuit journal whose core was cultural rather than philosophical, launched the only project I was able to track concerning a general history of Jesuit philosophy. Hunter Guthrie (1901–74) authored two articles entitled “400 Years of Jesuit Philosophers” in 1940 and 1941, covering the period 1540–1660, but his work was interrupted and, later, he was called to be the president of Georgetown University, a charge which he held for three years (1949–52).

Conclusion

It is curious that such a vast field as Jesuit modern philosophy still needs to find an editorial enterprise in order to help it finally emerge. Historiography has dealt with individuals, authors, specific aspects of a philosophical system, or with the intellectual history of a philosophical journal. These efforts have failed to adequately assess the impact and influence Jesuit modern philosophy, as a whole, has had on more general philosophical debate. This imbalance was partially avoided in the field of Jesuit early modern philosophy, because the label of “late Scholasticism” has helped historiographers think in terms of Jesuit distinctiveness within the philosophical early modern panorama. By contrast, accepting uncritically this label has also prevented many historiographers from discovering what distinguished Jesuit philosophers as individuals, and from allowing the texture of their own thought to be presented in all its complexity.

With regard to Jesuit modern philosophy, one might wonder if such a Jesuit distinctiveness can be found. Indeed, the tree of modern philosophy has so many branches and has been developing in so many different directions that looking for a shared core between Jesuit thinkers might be considered a desperate, if not useless, challenge. Nonetheless, the history of philosophical historiography as it emerges in these pages indicates what Schloesser once called “hybridization” as the common core dimension of Jesuit modern philosophers. This includes hybridization of philosophical traditions, of disciplines, of methods: the most influential Jesuit modern thinkers have always stood at the frontier of intellectual movements and debates. Such a modern feature is also the one that connects them as a group to the origins of Jesuit mentality and remains as a promise of the opening up of new horizons by those Jesuit philosophers who are dealing with our postmodern condition.