MATTHIAS SCHEEBEN ON FAITH
The Doctoral Dissertation of John Courtney Murray
Edited by
D. Thomas Hughson, S.J.
Toronto Studies in Theology
Volume 29
The Edwin Mellen Press
Lewiston/Queenston
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is a pleasure to thank the following individuals and
institutions for their generous cooperation. Most Rev. Donald E. Pelotte,
S.S.S., willingly discussed themes in Murray’s theory and helped me to
become familiar with the contents of the Murray Archives. These conversations
with the author of John Courtney Murray:, Theologian in Conflict both
encouraged me and directed my attention to the unpublished material in the
Murray Archives. Brian A. McGrath, S.J., Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., and Joseph
M. Moffitt, S.J., were kind and resourceful in recalling salient details and
some principal aspects of Murray’s theology. David Hollenbach, S.J., added
several reflections on Murray’s social ethic. John C. Haughey, S.J., and
Patrick Carey each suggested that Murray’s dissertation deserved careful
study.
Rev. Henry J. Bertels, S.J., alerted me to the copy of the dissertation
in material awaiting inclusion into the Murray Archives at the Woodstock
Theological Center Library. The staff of the Special Collections Room in the
Joseph Mark Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, could not have been more
helpful in making the Murray Archives available. Rev. John R. Crocker, S.J.,
Secretary of the Gregorian University, secured the photocopy of Murray’s
original text. The Woodstock Theological Center Library and the New York
Province of the Society of Jesus agreed to its publication.
The Georgetown University Jesuit Community hospitably received me for
two summers of work in the Murray Archives. The Marquette University Jesuit
Community made possible the preparation of the text by the typist, Mrs.
Lorraine Brimat (Jerusalem).Bonnie L. Jones, Production Manager of the Edwin
Mellen Press, provided editorial advice. Finally, the Department of Theology at
Marquette University allowed me the time needed to work on this project.
My gratitude to these persons and to these institutions acknowledges
their contribution to this volume and indicates the solidarity involved in
this, or any, research. The sole responsibility for the Introduction, however,
is mine.
Thomas Hughson, S.J.
Pontifical Biblical Institute
Jerusalem, 1987
(Department of Theology
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction to Text
Introduction
Chapter I : Faith and the Beatific Vision
Chapter II : Natural and Supernatural Faith
Chapter III :The Root of Faith
Chapter IV : The Assent of Faith
Chapter V : The Two Lights
Conclusion
Bibliographical
Notes
Index of Subjects
Index of Names
[p. 1]
This volume in the Toronto Studies in Theology reproduces the doctoral
dissertation John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967) completed in the spring of
1937 at the Gregorian University in Rome. From then until now, the Gregorian
University archives contained the original typescript of “Matthias Joseph
Scheeben’s Doctrine on Supernatural, Divine Faith: A Critical
Exposition”. A carbon-copy was incorporated into the Murray Archives
housed by the Woodstock Theological Library in the Special Collections Room of
the Joseph Mark Lauinger Library at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
John Courtney Murray eventually published the third chapter, modified and
disengaged from its original context (1). The complete, original text is
published here for the first time.
Preparing it for publication consisted in photocopying, and then retyping,
the original typescript according to a new format suitable for this series.
Minor alterations accompanied the retyping. Footnotes were shifted from page-bottoms
to the end of major divisions. The internal punctuation of Footnotes and Bibliography,
and some capitalization, was standardized in those cases where this was appropriate.
In the body of the text, retyping produced new pagination. The few corrections
in spelling and word-order inked into the original were accepted as Murray’s.
Several pencilled marginalia were not, because they did not belong to the text.
Also, Murray often inserted lengthy quotations into sentences. Here, these when
lengthy and used as evidence, appear indented and without quotation marks. Occasional
[p. 2]
typographical slips have been amended. But not all anomalies have disappeared.
Murray did not prepare the manuscript for publication or for circulation beyond
the official readers of his dissertation.
Murray’s own theology after the dissertation has become the context which
determines the perspective within which this early text will be read. His unparalleled
accomplishment in the area of Catholic Church-state relations in the United
States is the basis for considering any one of his writings worthy of attention
if only for the sake of discovering how it might enlighten reading of those
texts. Although the dissertation read and approved by Frs. E. Hocedez, S.J.
and H. Lennerz, S.J.(2) seemed to presage further work in the field of fundamental
theology(3), it turned out that Murray’s achievement would be in social
ethics. It would not be a book on faith, The Problem of God(4), much
less courses in the systematic theology of grace, Trinity, Church, or the virtues(5)
that would establish him as one whose “contributions to Christian life
and thought qualify him to be called the most outstanding theologian in the
history of American Catholicism”(6). When the editor of America
magazine decided to commemorate him(7), it was not his theology of faith but
his “reasoned civil discourse on the most complex problems of Church and
state in America”(8) that constituted his legacy. Likewise Cardinal Joseph
Bernardin’s forthright declaration that “no single figure in American
history has had a greater impact on how Catholics conceive of the relation between
religion and politics,”(9) stemmed from consideration of We Hold These
Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition(10), which a political
scientist describes
[p. 3]
as “on its way toward the status of a classic” (11 ) . Murray’s
public prominence in the United States came as the result of his work on the
themes of Church-state relations and of religious liberty(12). His social-ethical
writing has become a prepossessing foreground, to which his writing on other
subjects is background.
For this reason, and apart from the intrinsic worth it has as a piece in fundamental
theology, “Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s Doctrine on Supernatural, Divine
Faith: A Critical Exposition” gains an obvious value from its link with
Murray’s social ethics. Before explaining this link, the matter of how
Murray’s study of Scheeben originated deserves a brief commentary. The
choice of topic did not arise directly from the courses in which he had enrolled.
None specialized in Scheeben, though three touched upon faith: 1) ascetical-mystical
theology; 2) the theology of Aquinas in light of his commentators; 3) fundamental
theology(13). Scheeben’s doctrine on faith could be considered a topic
in fundamental theology, or apologetics, and certainly Murray approached it
with recourse to Aquinas and his commentators. In his Introduction he attributed
his selection of subject-matter to a new appreciation for Matthias Joseph Scheeben
gained during a sojourn in Germany. The Introduction also alerted its reader
to the future he at that time imagined would be his. He described his choice
of the topic of faith and the author, Scheeben, as something he foresaw would
yield “useful points of doctrine”(14). When he returned to the United
States in 1937 he assumed the post of teaching Dogmatic Theology at Woodstock
College in Maryland, and this may have been that for which Scheeben’s doctrine
would prove “useful”(15).
[p. 4]
But his Footnotes and Bibliography provide evidence for another view of why
he chose the topic he did. The reading documented in the Footnotes and Bibliography,
and frequently appearing within the text, placed him in the midst of a new movement
in theology. Catholic theologians like A. Gardeil, P. Rousselot, M. D. Chenu,
M. de la Taille, and H. de Lubac were bringing about what T.M. Schoof calls
the “re-orientation within Neo-Scholasticism”(16). They were dissatisfied
with the post-Reformation polemics which were often under the influence of a
Cartesian mentality. They sought an analysis fidei freed from rationalist
distortion. They studied the texts of Aquinas directly rather than as sources
contained within post-Tridentine discussions of faith. Their impulse led Murray
through Suarez, Banez, Molina, et al., to Aquinas’ In 3 Sententiae,
De Veritate, In Boet. de Trinitate, Summa Contra Gentiles, and Summa
Theologiae, which he referred to throughout his dissertation. Reading this
school of thought directed Murray to one of its central themes in recovering
a pre-rationalist theology of faith. The role of the will in the act of faith
had been neglected by post-Tridentine theology, and was not prominent either
in the teaching on faith given by Vatican Council I. Vatican I addressed the
problem that had preoccupied the theology of faith since the Council of Trent,
the relation of reason to faith in the act of faith. Vatican I upheld the truth
that faith was a divine gift and a theological virtue. It emphasized the contents
of faith. But, that faith also had the character of a personal encounter between
God and the believer was not the thrust of “De fide catholica”(17).
The result was a somewhat one-sided doctrine on faith that conceived only its
intellectual aspects.
[p. 5]
Correcting this imbalance by opening up the role of the will was a leading
tendency in the new movement into which Murray educated himself.
Whether his reading preceded or coincided with his study of Scheeben, he
framed the whole dissertation in reference to a problem central to the new
theology of faith: the link between will and intellect in faith. He identified
Scheeben’s originality as his attention to the irremovable role of the
will within the act of faith. His principal theme when commenting on
Scheeben’s doctrine on faith was the idea that faith was an
“affective cognition”,(18) not an act of intellect dissociated from
will. His evaluation turned on the extent to which Scheeben had succeeded in
expounding the voluntary dynamic in an act often treated as solely
intellectual. These major lines in his study of Scheeben show that he reflected
along a path identical to that proposed by the new movement in theology.
Furthermore, at the close of the dissertation he remarked that part of
Scheeben’s value lay in the way “Scheeben’s ideas on faith were
‘definitely of the twentieth century”(19). Murray read, studied and
wrote in connection with a theological development that took place after
Scheeben and to which Scheeben could be seen to contribute. He was recovering,
that is to say, Scheeben’s doctrine on faith from within a new theology of
faith leading toward Vatican II’s teaching in “The Dogmatic
Constitution on Divine Revelation”(20).
Undoubtedly, the outstanding value Murray’s early ideas on faith have
for contemporary theology lies in their potential for illuminating the reading
and application of his social ethics. Yet there are three other but still not
negligible reasons for studying the 1937 text fifty years after it fulfilled
the purpose
[p. 6]
for which Murray wrote it. First, it adds to our knowledge of Scheeben’s
theology of faith. Murray’s concentration on the central role of the will
in Scheeben’s analysis fidei, coupled with the act of historical
interpretation by which he distinguished Scheeben’s inner theological tendency
from his reaction to Liberalism, can help supplement, for example, R. Latourelle’s
summary of Scheeben in The Theology of Revelation(21). His Thomistic
critique of Scheeben’s over-reaction to Liberalism as well as his distance
from Kleutgen can enrich G. McCool’s treatment of J. Kleutgen in Catholic
Theology in the Nineteenth Century(22). Murray’s own embryonic theology
of faith can be discerned in his comments on Scheeben. Its post-Vatican I character
locates it on the broad path from “De fide catholica” to the “Dogmatic
Constitution on Divine Revelation” at Vatican II. This means that it could
be read as material pertinent to A. Dulles’ Models of Revelation(23)
or even H. Stirnimann’s “Erwägungen für Fundamental Theologie.
Problematik, Grundfragen, Konzept”.(24)
Second, his treatment of Scheeben has ecumenical value. It can be placed alongside
Paul Tillich’s The Dynamics of Faith(25) to exemplify the struggle
in Catholic theology to achieve a concept of faith that did justice to the uniqueness
of faith as an act of the total person. Then too, he expounded the act of faith
as the initium salutis. Using Aquinas’ analysis of faith as finality
toward a new end, he explicated the Tridentine motif in a way that resulted
in an uncalculated openness to the Lutheran sola fida tenet. The affinity
consisted in Murray’s insistence that faith is a divinely initiated , voluntary,
immanent principle with decisive salutary effect. Nonetheless,
[p. 7]
he proceeded on the basis of a characteristically positive Thomist anthropology
in identifying faith as a principle of activity. It is also true that he dropped
Scheeben’s simplistic synthesis of Protestantism’s approach to revelation
when he published Chapter III as an essay in 1948(26).
Another aspect of his text that has significance for ecumenism consists
in, first, Scheeben’s immersion in the Greek Fathers and their notion of
salvation as divinization, and second, Murray’s partial assimilation of
this insofar as he accepted a Trinitarian dynamic in salvation(27). This could
be read as the presence of the East within the thought of a theologian whose
concern for the issue of constitutional religious liberty otherwise seems
typically Western.
Third, this early text demonstrates that Murray commenced his
theological career by taking his orientation to faith from both the universal
teaching of Catholicism at Vatican I and from the ensuing theological
discussions of that teaching in Europe. Such details could enrich the
background given by Donald E. Pelotte in John Courtney Murray: Theologian in
Conflict, Chapter I, “The Early Years: 1940-1949”. Specialists in
American Church history and in American theology will note that he started from
a study of Scheeben and to some extent remained indebted to Scheeben throughout
his career(28). Murray’s commitment to the values of American Catholic
experience was not due, that is, to a lack of awareness of the patrimony of the
Church international and universal.
The primary theological justification for looking into the 1937 text, however,
is the potential it holds for deepening the understanding of his social
[p. 8]
ethics(29). The essential relationship between Murray’s dissertation,
and, for the sake of limiting the inquiry, the founding of his social ethics
in 1948, is one of unexpected continuity. In 1948 the foundation of his Church-state
ethic, and its teaching on religious liberty, took place in three articles,
referred to by Thomas T. Love as Murray’s “First Major Constructive
Proposal”(30). They were: 1) “St. Robert Bellarmine on the Indirect
Power”; 2) “Contemporary Orientations of Catholic Thought on Church
and State in the Light of History; 3) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”.
They generated what Donald E. Pelotte describes as “The Church-state Debate”(31)
that began in the late 1940s. Despite the shift in subject-matter from an analysis
fidei to Church-state relations, a format changed from a dissertation done
under the auspices of the venerable traditions of the Gregorian University to
essays locked in controversy over American problems, and a purpose altered from
that of presenting a comparison between Scheeben and Aquinas on the question
of how the will acted within faith to that of challenging the dominant opinion
in Church-state theory, there was unity between the text of 1937 and those three
articles.
The unity was not continuity in social-ethical subject-matter. There was no
Church-state theory in his study of Scheeben. Nor was the dissertation the genesis
of his Church-state thought. One of Murray’s original angles of approach
to Church-state relations lay through historically nuanced political philosophy.
In this, unlike his opponents(32), he worked simultaneously from a starting-point
in theological tradition and in the actual conditions of modern states. But
this methodological principle was not in evidence
[p. 9]
in 1937(33). Nor did he then formally address the question of religious liberty
despite his concern for the freedom of faith. The freedom of faith at issue
in his treatment of Scheeben was threatened by an authoritarian concept of revelation
and faith, not directly by social or political forces. Freedom before God revealing
was his focus in 1937. As Augustine, Aquinas, and Scheeben all taught, and as
Murray too, propounded, that freedom was received as a gift, first of all in
the will’s being moved by a new attraction to God. In 1937 he concentrated
on the freedom in which faith was moved by the graced will. This might be read
as preface to his later discussion of atheism in The Problem of God but
not as preparing for the essays of 1948.
The unity was that theological principles in 1937 became presuppositions entering
into and informing the social ethic of 1948, and after. This is why Murray’s
discussion of supernatural, divine faith cannot be separated from his later
Church-state theory. This link was not a personal predilection, or idiosyncratic
associating of disparate subject-matters, the theology of faith and Church-state
relations. Instead, there is an intrinsic unity between a theology of faith
such as his 1937 dissertation was, and a theory of Church-state relations. For,
as G. McCool states in in reference to the nineteenth century “the relations
between faith and reason and the relations between Church and state after all
were aspects of the one basic problem concerning the relation between grace
and nature”(34). If this condition extended also into the first half of
the twentieth century, then Murray’s dissertation in 1937 and his Church-state
theory in 1948 have the unity of treating the relation between grace and nature
through
[p. 10]
two successive approaches, the second relying on the first. How accurate and
significant McCool’s judgment can be in the case of Murray will be seen
from the five elements in the text of 1937 and in the articles of 1948 that
specify and manifest the theological con-tinuity between 1937 and 1948. They
are: 1) the classical status of Aquinas; 2) the concept of human finality toward
God; 3) opposition to Liberalism; 4) a normative implication in the concept
of faith; 5) a strong natural/supernatural distinction. Each of these will be
explained. The result will be that five elements in his social ethic can be
seen not as confined to his ethic but as already expressed in the dissertation.
In the social ethic begun in 1948, he presupposed the theology of faith containing
precisely these principles.
First, Murray gave Aquinas the status of a theological classic(35) in his dissertation
and subsequently accepted his teaching on the natural-law idea of the state
as classic for his social ethic in 1948. In 1937, the more than twenty individual
citations of texts from Aquinas did no more than indicate the position he gave
Aquinas’ theology. Throughout, he presented Aquinas’s theology of
faith as a most profound and balanced theology, and one open to further development.
He drew Chapter I to a close by comparing Scheeben with Aquinas. Chapter II
introduced the intricacies of post-medieval epistemology of faith, seen as sustaining
certain themes in Aquinas. In Chapter III he moved through the question of how
well Scheeben had actually explained the cooperation between will and intellect
within the one act of faith. Aquinas was regarded as the key to the understanding
of that cooperation. Chapter V and the Conclusion
[p. 11]
contained advances on his earlier comparison between Scheeben and Aquinas.
At all points in the study he guaged Scheeben’s theological success according
to the extent to which he had developed one theme in Aquinas: faith is an act
of intellect moved by the will. The normative role assigned to the theology
of Aquinas will continually confront readers of the 1937 text. It should be
noted, however, that the nature of this normative role was defined by what Murray
took to be the content of Aquinas’ theology not the authority latterly
conferred on Aquinas in the Thomistic revival.
The bench-mark of Murray’s new approach to Church-state relations, proposed
in 1948, was the increased extent to which Aquinas guided Murray’s theoretical
reflection. He moved from the mitigated Thomism with which Robert Bellarmine(36)
had sought to resolve Church-state conflicts to the consistently Thomist theory
of John of Paris(37). He professed admiration for Bellarmine’s recovery
of the Thomist natural-law idea of the state. But his final judgment was that
Bellarmine had misapplied it because he did not take sufficiently into account
the new condition of post-medieval nation-states succeeding to the former-and
to Bellarmine’s mind still extant-respublica christiana(38). His
misapplication was most strikingly evident to Murray in Bellarmine’s theory
of the Pope’s indirect power. Here he did not remain consistent with the
natural-law concept of the state drawn from Aquinas. The purpose toward which
the Pope exercised his spiritual power was salvific and spiritual. But what
means were suited to this end and which were deviations from it? Bellarmine
in general held the Pope to the exercise of spiritual power through means of
a spiritual nature. For example, the Pope could
[p. 12]
serve the good of souls by deposing a bishop if this was needed. This was an
act of jurisdiction over the office of bishop in the Church. But could the Pope
similarly depose a prince or king who was leading his subjects into heresy or
sin? Bellarmine thought that in individual and exceptional cases where the salvation
of souls was in the balance the Pope could act through such a means. He saw
this as an exercise of papal power directly for a spiritual end and only indirectly
passing through the temporal means to which it was extended in the exceptional
case.
The problem with this view was that, as Murray pointed out, “in the
course of the extension, the power itself has ceased to be purely spiritual and
has become formally political, specified as such by an act that is formally
political”(39). Bellarmine had not paid enough attention to the importance
of the means, which in the case of the Pope deposing a temporal ruler, would be
a temporal, political act. He failed to recognize the implications of
Aquinas’ natural-law idea of the state. According to this, certain actions
expressed and carried out the purpose of the state, and these were not
identical to those carrying out the purpose of the Church. In not noticing that
the one society with its two powers, spiritual and temporal, had ceased to
exist and that nation-states had supplanted it, Bellarmine did not give the
state its due. Because of this he was unable to develop and apply the
“virtualities for Catholic doctrine that are inherent in the natural-law
concept of the temporal power”(40). Therefore, Bellarmine was not a
reliable guide for modern thought on Church-state relations.
In passing from Bellarmine to John of Paris, Murray exhibited more than the
historical consciousness that
[p. 13]
was his ability to see the contingency and mutability of the concrete ways
people at different times had organized themselves politically. Important and
indispensable as this was, it does not explain completely his new approach to
Church-state relations. For that, there must be some account of his deepening
appreciation of Aquinas’ political philosophy. His progress in theory was
also a step toward Aquinas. His new proposal for Catholic Church-state relations
was able to justify Catholic support for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
on the basis of a consistent application of Aquinas’ natural-law concept
of the state to American Church-state relations(41). This was more than, though
indivisible from, his realization that the post-Reformation confessional states
were not permanent models for Church-state relations precisely because they
were not permanent and immutable ways of organizing a political order(42). The
pivotal element in his new social ethic was his turn to the consistent Thomism
of John of Paris(43).
In the theory of John of Paris, Murray found principles exceptionally valuable
for the recurrent task of applying the few essential and permanent norms for
Church-state relations to the modern condition in which the Church related to
a democratic state(44). John had distinguished four exercises of priestly power:
1) consecrating bread and wine; 2) absolving from sin; 3) preaching and teaching;
4) making judgments in the external forum. The first three involved changes
in earthly realities but did not directly produce a temporal, political effect.
Indirectly, the effects of the sacramental and evangelical ministry of the Church
affected the temporal order through their after-effects. Preaching
[p. 14]
evoked repentance, for example, that led to penance in a sacramental form;
this required of a repentant thief, for example, that stolen property be restored
to its rightful owner. But this type of indirect effect in the temporal order
was so obviously connected to the spiritual effect of forgiveness and repentance
that no Church-state problem arose from it. The exercise of the Church’s
spiritual power became problematic only, John of Paris realized, in making judgments
in the external forum(45).
He acknowledged the Pope’s power to make doctrinal and moral judgments
on matters pertaining to faith or Church law, even when they touched matters
outside the structures of the Church, and belonged to the temporal sphere of
life(46). He accepted the exercise of papal power in cases of ecclesiastical
crimes with penalties attached to them. There, papal jurisdiction extended to
coercive sanctions. Yet he made a slight but crucial distinction in the manner
of exercise of this jurisdiction. The Pope exercised his spiritual power spiritually,
for example, when he separated a Church member from the sacraments. The act
of ex-communication was a spiritual act and not a temporal means for the spiritual
end of the Church. The nature of the act differed, that is, from imposing a
monetary or corporeal punishment on the person. Levying a fine and physical
punishment were acts that had their own, temporal nature. Hence they did not
fall within the competence of the papal power. In distinguishing two ways in
which the Pope could act, and showing that only one was in accord with the nature
and end of the spiritual power, John of Paris laid down the principle that would
become essential to determining how the Church should act toward the temporal
order. The
[p. 15]
principle was that in exercising its power for spiritual ends, the Church should
act according to, or through, only those means that were of a spiritual nature(47).
This principle resulted from John’s consistency with Aquinas’
natural-law idea of the state(48). Some acts had the nature of temporal,
political acts. Where this was true, these were not suited to the Church’s
exercise of spiritual power. Acts directly ordered to the temporal goods of
peace, justice, prosperity and freedom belonged to that order of institution
whose nature was precisely to secure those goods, that is, the state. John of
Paris took the natural-law idea of the state not just as a way of comprehending
the nature of political reality but as a guide to determining the kinds of acts
that were expressive of that political nature, and which were, on that account,
acts the Church should not perform. In approving and incorporating John of
Paris’ principle into his new proposal, Murray was carrying out a recovery
of Aquinas’ natural-law idea of the state in its normative significance.
This is perhaps the most important single way in which Murray gave Aquinas
classical status in 1948. The change of one judgment on the exercise of the
Church’s power when it has indirect effects in the temporal order, a
change from the mitigated Thomism of Bellarmine to the consistent Thomism. of
John of Paris, was fundamental to his Church-state theory. It was, again, an
increased reliance on Aquinas as a classic for thought on the state, for the
sake of developing a Church-state theory pertinent to modern democracies.
The second element of continuity between the 1937 and 1948 writings was Murray’s
concept of human
[p. 16]
finality toward God as supernatural Last End. In 1937 this was his leading
idea of faith(49). In 1948 this became essential to the primacy of the Church
in Church-state relations(50). In both he reflected under the auspices of Vatican
I’s doctrine on faith. This means only that he was a Catholic of his generation.
Adding that his grasp of that doctrine included exact historical and theological
knowledge of the doctrine and “De fide catholica”(51) is to point
out that he was also an educated priest of the first part of the twentieth century.
But to go on to identify in the dissertation an original reading of Vatican
I on faith and to observe its influence in the 1948 social ethic is to have
located another unity between the early text and the foundation for his social
ethics.
Murray made a perceptible beginning toward a definite, Thomist, but originally
nuanced theology of faith. He did this by modifying Scheeben’s interpretation
of Vatican I. The essence of this was to reconceive the meaning of the obediential
aspect of faith which Vatican I taught and which Scheeben made primary.
Scheeben wished his theology of faith to be received as “a faithful interpretation
of the Vatican Council”(52), said Murray in 1937. One statement in the
doctrine put forward at the Council, in particular, had arrested the theological
attention of Scheeben:
Cum homo a Deo tamquam et Domino suo totus dependet, et ratio creata
veritati increatae penitus subjecta sit, plenum revelanti Deo intellectus et
voluntatis obsequium fide praestare tenemur.
(Since man is wholly dependent upon God, as upon his Creator and Lord, and
since created reason is
[p. 17]
absolutely subject to uncreated truth, we are bound to yield to God, by faith
in his revelation, the full obedience of our intellect and will (DZ 3008)](53).
In this statement, the final clause was especially important to Scheeben’s
theology of faith. Human beings were bound, said Vatican I, to yield “by
faith in his revelation the full obedience of our intellect and will.”
This “obedience” became the watchword in Scheeben’s defense of
Vatican I against Liberalism and in the theology of faith as sacrificium
intellectus with which he campaigned against it. The role of the will became
one of obediently submitting to an external divine command(54). Murray did not
accept Scheeben’s position on this without qualification. Murray argued,
in fact, that Scheeben exaggerated the aspect of submission in faith in order
to combat Liberalism(55).
Murray conceived the role of the will in faith as the dynamic with which the
believer made an act of self-surrender, in the form of a consecration to God
as Last End newly revealed(56). His idea of authority differed from Scheeben’s
too. Murray did not elaborate an analogy for the authority/obedience relationship
in faith. But he did not find Scheeben’s parent/child analogy helpful.
Scheeben regularly employed the vocabulary and concept of a likeness between
faith in revelation and a child’s reverent, trusting accession to the parental
word(57). By contrast Murray interpreted the term “obedience” from
Vatican I in an active way: he did not imagine that the “full obedience
of our will” meant above all submission to a superior will. Instead he
thought of it as “voluntary acceptance of that Last End, newly revealed”(58).
The will’s act in faith was something
[p. 18]
more than the cessation of defiance against the Creator and Lord. Faith was
the “inchoative ordination of oneself to one’s Last End”(59)
by an act of will. The intellectual assent to God as Prima Veritas revelans(60)
carried this movement to fulfilled expression.
Faith, for Murray, was obedience to a new finality and not solely to an
external divine command. Faith was a finality, and so a principle of activity,
in which the will had an essential role. It was not, that is, a factual
condition somehow prior to the end, which was beatific vision. Rather, he
picked up from Aquinas what he called a “dynamic”(61) theology of
faith. He understood Aquinas, perhaps to some extent in a characteristically
American way, to teach that faith was “the fundamental principle of
purposeful striving toward that final self-perfection”(62) that was the
beatific vision. Faith was a source of activity, and not primarily, as Scheeben
continued to hold, the anticipation of beatific vision. Faith, in a word, was
power to act in a way proportioned to the achievement of the Last End. in
faith, the believer received from divine grace a “new finality, directing
it [the will] now to Himself as supernatural Last End”(63). This was at
the same time the free acceptance of the divinely moved, new attraction to God.
In general, then, Murray’s idea of faith as obedience diverged from
Scheeben’s in the direction of Aquinas’ idea of faith as a new
finality.
In Murray’s idea of obedience there was room for the immanent as well
as the transcendent. The act of will interior to faith “can be considered
an obedience, if you will, but an obedience to a new finality imprinted by God
Himself on human nature”(64). Backing
[p. 19]
away from Scheeben, Murray said that obediential faith “was not merely
the acceptance of a divine command from the Creator and Lord of all but essentially
and above all an acceptance of a new destiny from the Father of mercies”(63).
This was to read Vatican I in a way that allowed room for the immanence of divine
action in the will as well as for the transcendence of divine revelation to
reason. And that reading was in light of Aquinas’ idea that faith was a
finality toward God as supernatural Last End.
The Church-state ethic of 1948 presupposed this concept of faith, without reiterating
it. Essential norms in the ethic come into their full meaning only when understood
in light of it. For example, his renovation of the norm that the Church had
primacy in relations with a state hinged on his concept of a finality toward
God that was immanent in all believing citizens. He organized, it can be said,
his new approach to Church and state with special attention to the unique, ultimate
finality toward God expressed and actualized in the act of faith. This orientation
to God transcended all other orders of human reality, including the realization
of social goods through the structured operation of the state. Finality toward
God and eternal life was, or could be, immanent to human beings in this life.
It was faith. Finality toward social ends reached through political structures
was also immanent in human beings in this life. It was the political dimension
of human nature. The goals of the state, - justice, peace, prosperity, freedom
- were human goods of a very high order, but they were not the Last End of humanity(66).
God and eternal life was the Last End. The new finality in faith was the reason
for the primacy of the spiritual to the temporal power, of
[p. 20]
the Church to the state. Whereas this primacy belonged to the traditional,
essential norms for Church-state relations, Murray conceived it especially as
a primacy in finality. For him the primacy or superiority of the Church in relation
to the state was the primacy of the finality expressed in faith to the terrestrial
finality toward excellent human goals realized through the action of the state.
The Church was the institutional witness and presence of that
transcendent finality(67). The end of the Church was the Last End of humanity,
God and eternal life. For that reason, the Church could be subject to no other
agency, society, power or state. For the Church to accept the superiority of
the state would be for the Church to profess in performance what would be
untrue, namely that there was an End, and a finality toward it, above God and
faith. The Church’s claim to immunity from interference with the free
operation of her mission (libertas ecclesiastica) was essentially the
declaration that God and eternal life was the Last End of humanity, and that
faith was a principle of activity ordering, not ordered by, other principles of
activity.
Murray reconceived Church-state relations by focusing on the contrast between
the finality toward God, borne by the Church, and the finality toward terrestrial
values, operative in the state. Clarity in applying this distinction produced
clarity in Church-state norms. These norms were traditionally four: 1) the distinction
between Church and political organization; 2) the primacy of the Church; 3)
the legitimate autonomy of the political order; 4) the harmonious cooperation
between Church and state. In working out the application of these in and to
the new
[p. 21]
condition of modern democracies, Murray drew out normative meaning from finality.
Finality was the ordering any reality had toward its end. Finality became normative
for Murray’s proposal in the field of Church-state relations insofar as
the end of the Church and of the state became normative for their operations
in relation to one another. Not only was its end that toward which either Church
or state tended through its acts. That end settled in advance the kinds of means
which actually bring the realization of the end. Clarity on the correlation
between ends and the kinds of means that actually moved Church or state toward
its purpose characterized his whole enterprise, and did much to make his contribution
one with lasting value.
For example, in “Governmental Repression of Heresy” the concrete
question whether or not the Church could and should enlist the action of the
state in repressing heresy was settled by the principle of finality(68). The
end of the Church, humanity’s Last End, was distinct from the end of the
state, humanity’s necessary but penultimate ends of justice, peace, prosperity,
freedom. The end of the state was not religious in that it did not lead to eternal
life, but to the humane earthly life. The distinction was normative. There was
an obligation to act in accord with the distinction so that the Church acted,
and acted only for its end, and the state only toward its end. The state acted
in this way when it protected public order but not when it entered into the
field of religious truth and unity. Deciding on matters of religious truth and
unity was not acting toward the end of the state but toward the end of the Church.
Therefore, only the Church had competence to decide and judge on truth and ecclesial
unity. The Church was
[p. 22]
violating its relation to the state by inviting political action in support
of its religious end. And if the state failed to act according to its end, it
failed to carry out the role in human existence it had from the Creator of human
nature(69). The government had no basis for acting in regard to heresy. Heresy
was a religious reality, a matter of religious truth and error. For the Church
to seek state action to repress heresy was for the Church to invite the state
to violate its integrity and specificity. It was not to respect the differing
ends, which were normative for the selection of means.
Murray’s Church-state ethic can be described as a fully consistent
Thomism which took the incommensurate but ordered ends of Church and state as
normative for thinking, judging, deciding, and acting in relations between
Church and state. This focus on finality placed his 1948 ethic in continuity
with his 1937 theology of faith. In 1937, faith was conceived as the new,
supernatural finality toward God as Last End. In 1948 his Church-state ethic
incorporated this finality, now as the finality of the whole Church, and then
began to interpret the finality in a way that led to practical norms. It is
also true, however, that in 1948 he subsumed the early concept of faith into a
movement beyond individual soteriology to the ultimate common good of humanity.
But in both 1937 and in 1948, the relation of humanity to God was understood in
terms of supernatural finality.
Murray’s opposition to Liberalism was the third element linking the study
of Scheeben to the foundation of his social ethic. In 1937 he shared Scheeben’s
negative evaluation of the mentality which enthroned reason in sovereign autonomy
over all truth and value.
[p. 23]
He allied himself with Scheeben’s opposition to Liberalism’s refusal
“to acknowledge the doctrinal rights and powers of any cathedra
that dared to set itself up against the university chair”(70). Murray,
however, did not undertake an independent critique of “this resistance
to social, ecclesial, and divine authority. Rather, he registered concern with
the way its tenet of absolute freedom of the individual resulted in a harmful
attitude toward the Catholic faith. This had been Scheeben’s point of contestation
with Liberalism. It regarded faith as an “act of free trust and sovereign
approbation wherewith one accepts and makes his own a truth that is seen to
be sufficiently attested”(71). Valid as this was for estimating the reliability
of human expertise as a basis for human trust and faith, it lacked an inner
dimension of awareness of God’s divine otherness when used as an approach
to faith in the Word of God. Murray agreed with Scheeben that it was an error.
He did consider that misunderstanding “by the Catholic Liberals-Döllinger,
for instance”(72) was partly responsible for suspicion about the value
of the Church’s teaching authority. This was to concede a need for checking
Liberalism by positive teaching on the nature of the magisterium, something
more than Scheeben’s polemic sought to accomplish.
He also departed from Scheeben’s reaction to Liberalism. Scheeben countered
the Liberal idea of rational faith based on sufficiently attested truth with
the concept of faith as sacrificium intellectus. Murray did not dismiss
this. He found the portrayal of faith as the attitude of submissive trust listening
obediently to the Father to be “most beautiful and most true”(73).
He protested, nonetheless, the absence of
[p. 24]
other details that would introduce a new tone into that picture. In addition
to the “great Jehovah thundering forth his right to His creature’s
obedience” there was a need to hearken to “the gentler accents of
the Father, Who ‘in these latter days has spoken to us (Heb.1:2)”(74).
The implication, of course, was that Scheeben temporarily overlooked the Son,
Christ,as the way the Father has revealed His truth. Murray implied that Christ
was the touchstone for appreciating the authoritative aspect of revelation and
the submissive aspect of faith. Scheeben, according to Murray’s judgment,
had over-reacted to Liberalism. He did accept Scheeben’s judgment on its
erroneous content but moderated the theological reaction to it.
Murray’s opposition to Liberalism took a new form in 1948. Not only did
his antipathy toward it survive the transatlantic voyage from Europe to America,
it became if anything more pronounced and more incisive. He began to develop
the social and political meaning of his earlier judgment against it. This was
needed because Liberalism itself was more than an anthropology or an epistemology.
Social and political consequences followed from the rationalism of its anthropology.
The autonomy and sovereignty of reason was the premise upon which a claim for
state control of all aspects of social existence could be built. The refusal
to acknowledge any truth higher than that arrived at by reason and the resistance
to any value or norm for conduct not similarly authenticated had a vicious political
outcome in a view that tolerated no society or value higher than the state.
There was no norm, value, or truth left by which the state fell under judgment
from a higher perspective or from an ultimate point of reference.
[p. 25]
The result was the claim by the state to juridical omnipotence. This directly
clashed with the political principles fundamental to Murray’s, and America’s),
philosophy: that the state was strictly limited in its end and operations; that
it was distinct from and ordered to the good of society; and that it was not
ultimate(75).
His entire Church-state ethic negated the rationalist premise and the Liberal
politic. In one direct retort he demonstrated the distance which lay between
it and his own espousal of pluralism, democracy, and religious liberty. He anticipated
Catholic objections to his “proposition that a governmental right to repress
heterodox religious opinions and worship enjoys no permanently valid status
within the Catholic doctrine on the orderly relation of church and state”(76).
One question that could surface was, “Is this Liberalism? At least, is
it Catholic Liberalism?”. His reply pointed out that “no part of my
argument rests on any part of the rationalist premise of Liberalism”(77).
The premise was simply and directly stated as “the absolute autonomy of
reason" (78). He had rejected this in 1937 when he proved Scheeben’s
defense of divine, supernatural faith against Liberalism’s reduction of
it to rational, human faith. In 1948 he turned aside also from its "false
metaphysic of freedom”(79). He had already begun to form his negative judgment
on this when, in 1937, he adverted to Scheeben’s dislike of the fundamental
tenet of Liberalism, which he at that time identified as “the absolute
freedom of the individual”. Most dangerous, however, was the social-ethical
corollary, which was an “individualistic, eighteenth-century concept of
rights”. This supported an atomistic concept of society”, and what
was worse,
[p. 26]
grounded the concept of the “juridical omnipotence of the state”(81).
All of Liberalism was repugnant to Murray in 1948, especially its socio-political
doctrine. He would devote many pages to his attack against the claim to juridical
omnipotence by any state, and he saw that claim as the essential over-extension
that produced a totalitarian state. Opposition to Liberalism was an element
uniting his theology of faith in 1937 to his social ethic in 1948. This could
be understood in light of McCool’s judgment as two phases in one affirmation
that grace exceeded nature.
The fourth commonality between the dissertation and the 1948 social ethic was
the moral concept of faith. The concept of faith presented by Scheeben, and
to the extent that Murray offered one, in his commentary on Scheeben, was pre-eminently
a moral concept of faith. Scheeben, and Murray after him, discussed faith as
a moral act insofar as the will was active within it. It was not purely and
totally an intellectual assent: it was also an act by the will and in that respect,
faith was a moral act. For Scheeben, it was also the way to discharge the duty
to obey the Creator that was part of human dependency on the Creator and Lord
of all. Murray demurred from this precisely because it made faith into a species
of moral virtue and robbed faith of the uniqueness of-being a new orientation
to God as Last End. Just because of his departure from Scheeben Murray proposed
a theology of faith that had normative implications in a way that Scheeben’s
theology of faith did not. Whereas Scheeben saw faith as the fulfillment of
a previously known moral duty, Murray conceived faith in a way that made it
a new norm for all other, future choices.
[p. 27]
The normative content in Murray’s concept of faith was not in the
fact of freedom, as if to emphasize that was a responsible act putting the
believer in the new position of having responsibility for further free and
morally significant acts. Nor was it in the judgment of credibility which
grounded the judgment of credendity placing faith before the person’s
conscience as an obligation toward the truth. Rather, faith was itself the
supreme moral act because in it the will aligned itself with the supreme good
for which the will had a new aptitude: God and beatific vision. In faith, as he
said, the believer accepted a new orientation to God as Last End. He explained
the act of accepting God as Last End as the voluntary movement toward God fully
realized in assent to revelation. It was a decision for God. It was the
decision in a person’s life because in it alone did the person enter the
new finality given by God. In it alone did the will order the intellect to
assent to truths known to be divinely revealed. That choice or decision brought
to completion the prior notion by which God stirred the will, drawing it to
Himself. That choice or decision was inseparable from ‘the assent to
revealed truth which formally characterized the act of faith. And that was the
choice for the most comprehensive of goods, God and eternal life. As such it
became not only a principle for further growth in faith but a new norm for
further choices of other goods. It was the norm never subject to a higher norm.
He did not employ the Biblical vocabulary of metanoia in discussing
faith. And yet he signalized his his divergence from Scheeben by his emphasis
on faith as initium salutis(82). Instead of understanding faith as the
anticipation of beatific vision, Murray
[p. 28]
preferred to stress that faith was the beginning of a salvation that was still
incomplete and still was to be realized through an earthly set of decisions.
For Scheeben, faith had been a moral act because in it the will acted according
to the established norm of obedience in its highest mode, to God as Creator.
And it was a moral act simply because in it the will acted freely. But for Murray,
faith was the moral act and not because any moral virtue was fully achieved
in it, and not because established norms of morality were met. It was the act,
rather, in which all choices found their center and goal because it was the
choice of and acceptance of God as Last End(83). Murray’s way of bringing
out the ultimacy of the finality toward God was also the basis for an important
norm. There could be no good, no value, no goal, no reality which the person
could choose that was not affected by the choice of God as Last End. No other
reality could be the Last End.
This remained implicit in the theology of faith in 1937. Faith conceived as
the supreme moral act, and implicitly the highest norm for conscience, did not
become explicit in 1948 in the form of a theory of ethics. Nor did the implication
produce Murray’s Church-state norms, as if he deduced them from a theological
premise. It is the fact of his shift into ethics that made the normative aspect
of faith as he wrote about in in 1937 explicit in 1948. His Church-state ethic
did not have to abandon his analysis fidei, could presuppose it, and
found there a concept of faith apt for ethical reasoning, be it in the field
of Church-state relations or in some other area. Nonetheless, his ethic of Church-state
relations specified that ethical aptitude in that he conceived
[p. 29]
the Church as the highest moral community. It embodied and promoted the supreme
moral act of choosing God as Last End(84). The Church was the social reality
whose institutional existence was the way the act of faith existed in visible,
corporate agency. The moral reality of the Church was not, for Murray, its ethical
message or its exemplary fulfillment of moral virtues. it was, rather, that
the Church was the community in which the Last End of a renewed human nature
was accepted and chosen and institutionally expressed. This was an aspect of
the Church’s priority over the state. The Church had primacy in Church-state
relations because the human act of choice - graced - in which God and eternal
life were embraced as Last End had precedence over all other choices of lesser
goods. And this was where the normative implication of the 1937 theology of
faith came to its most definite expression in the 1948 ethic.
A fifth element linking the 1937 with the 1948 work lay in the strong natural/supernatural
distinction characterizing both. So much a part of Western Catholic theology
had this distinction become that Murray would have needed extreme ingenuity
to extricate from either his theology in 1937 or his social ethic 1948. Variations
in its use were the way differing theologies affirmed the non-identity of creation
and redemption. Murray discovered in Scheeben’s theology of faith an underlying
ontology of redemption-as-divinization. Decidedly Greek in origin and inspiration,
this theology conceived the mystery of salvation, the economy of salvation,
as the created image of the inner-trinitarian mystery(85). The Father generating
the Son in the Trinity was, for Scheeben, the cause and exemplar of the regeneration
of the
[p. 30]
believer by divine grace. The believer received not simply a new attitude but
a new nature which was an image of the divine nature. And, “for Scheeben
man’s new nature meant new powers and their acts”(86).
Faith, for example, was the power and act by which the saved
person’s mind participated in the Son’s knowledge of the Father. In
Scheeben’s theology supernatural acts expressing and arising from the new
nature given in grace were acts whose contents differed from acts arising from
human nature itself. He took pains, for instance, to show that supernatural
faith differed from a possible natural faith which resulted from human
reasoning upon the reality of a created world and the fact of a revelation by
the Creator(87). This putative act of natural faith lacked the mode of
voluntary movement Scheeben called the “pius credulitatis
affectus”(88) and which was a surge of trusting, reverent willingness to
heed the revealed word because it brought communion with the revealing Father.
Natural faith was an ascent from rational knowledge of God’s existence and
the existence of a revelation to a rational judgment in favor of accepting the
truth of that revelation. Scheeben despised it because it seemed to mimic
supernatural faith. Supernatural faith, on the other hand, was an assent moved
by the will’s reverent trust in God and the obedient hearing of a word
revealed by the Creator and Lord of all. This brought not just assent but a
consent which was personal, sharing in the inner-trinitarian knowledge of the
Father by the Son. In Scheeben’s theology only supernatural faith was
saving faith(89). Murray covered Scheeben’s soteriology without becoming a
participant in his vigilance against the dangers of an act of natural faith
able to
[p. 31]
substitute itself for supernatural faith. This led him move in the
direction of diminishing Scheeben’s tendency to make a polarity out of the
distinction between the natural and the supernatural. This was not explicit
theme for Murray but when Chapter V in his thesis is allowed to become a
retrospective view of the preceding four chapters, that direction becomes
clear.
Murray set Chapter V, “The Two Lights” under the
soteriological principle that grace perfects nature. The distinction between
reason and faith, the two lights by which the mind can know, had been stressed
in Chapter II, “Natural and Supernatural Faith”. There, he
recapitulated Scheeben’s struggle to vindicate the act of faith as a gift:
it came from God and was not a conclusion from rational premises. There, the
incommensurability between the preparation for faith and the act of faith was
to the fore. But Chapter V began with Murray’s explicit reference to the
principle he designated the general law of the supernatural order”(90).
This was the truth that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. He did
not present this as something taken from Scheeben’s theology but from
Catholic tradition. He applied this principle to question of how the light of
reason and the light of faith were compatible in the act of faith. He noted,
and this could be read as correcting Scheeben, that “this means that the
grace of faith, traditionally called the ‘light’ of faith does not
destroy, nor dispense with, but perfects the operation of natural
intelligence-known universally to philosophers as the “light’ of
reason”(91). Scheeben did not develop the harmony between nature and
grace, reason and faith. Hs theology of faith focussed, to the contrary, on the
gulf between natural reason and supernatural faith,
[p. 32]
because of his effort to
lift up the supernaturality of faith for careful and reverent recognition. In
Chapter V, Murray took a different perspective, the perfection of nature by
grace, of reason by faith, and within this traditional concept explained
Scheeben’s theology of reason and faith.
This enabled him to pin-point in Scheeben’s Dogmatik
something native to Scheeben that also affirmed the harmony possible between
reason and faith. Scheeben stressed, as Murray observed, that the lumen
fidei was union with Eternal Truth and was more than an elevating
transformation of reason(92). Faith was a gift that brought a new power and act
to the person. Still, he was aware enough of Catholic theological tradition and
of the actual way a person came to make an act of faith to realize that the
novelty of faith did not dispense with prior conditions suitable to it(93). The
preparation for faith was not the same as faith, and was not supernatural, but
it was preparatory. The supernatural light of faith dawned upon something
already there, namely a rational judgment that revelation had occurred, was
believable, and should be believed. In accepting the role of the judgment of
credibility as essential to the disposition for faith Scheeben accepted the
role of reason in the preparation for faith. Here it was evident that the
gratuitous, heart-felt spontaneity in faith did not negate the light of reason.
Scheeben was not, therefore, a fideist.
Murray took account of the respect given to reason in the advent of
faith. This principle in Scheeben, however muted by the fierce polemic against
theological adversaries with rationalist tendencies, was something noteworthy
for Murray. It was congruent with Murray’s
[p. 33]
own conviction, expressed at the
beginning of his fifth chapter, that grace perfected reason rather than
destroyed it. And, in general that fifth chapter counter-balanced
Scheeben’s firm grasp of another truth: that grace transcends nature.
Murray suppressed neither truth yet sought their harmony in a way that Scheeben
did not. Murray made the strong natural/supernatural distinction with Scheeben.
But for Murray in 1937 this clarity on the transcendence of faith was able to
harmonize with a positive affirmation of the created order represented by the
light of reason.
He sustained the strong supernatural/natural distinction in his social
ethic of 1948, but allowed a new aspect of it to emerge. In 1937 the
distinction served to let faith emerge as a divine gift. In 1948 the same
distinction served to let the natural order—the created reality of the
state emerge as something not negated, not eliminated, not suppressed, by the
Church. This distinction was crucial in Murray’s emancipating of Catholic
Church-state theory from bondage to integrism(94). The non-identity of grace
nature was the non-identity of the natural order of the state with the
supernatural order of the church. This was significant for the reality of the
state. The state, a work of natural reason in the practical order, had,
moreover, a role in divine providence. It was not to be the instrument of the
Church in the way integrism imagined. This thesis/hypothesis school of thought
argued that Catholic doctrine had an exigence toward the establishment of
Catholicism as the official religion wherever possible. In this view the state
promoted the work of the Church by granting a special legal privilege to it and
by repressing some aspects of
[p. 34]
non-Catholic religions. Murray argued that the
confessional state was a fairly recent phenomenon that could not arrogate to
itself the importance of being a plenary manifestation of the unchanging norms
of Church-state relations. It was also a confusion between Church and state,
between the natural and the supernatural(95). It negated certain aspects of the
natural reality that the state was. It did not accept the legitimate
independence of the state from ecclesial linkage and tutelage as an inherent
part of what the state was. Integrism and the thesis/hypothesis position was,
therefore, a theological and philosophical disaster, and not only a rigid
classicism lacking sensitivity to empirical data on modern political practice.
His analysis of the indirect power that the Church’s spiritual
power has to affect the temporal order relied on the supernatural/natural
distinction. The distinction became the ethical principle that the Church was
not the state and should not try to be; nor was the state the Church or
structurally instrumental to ecclesial ends(96). Because those he confronted
were Catholic integrists not Catholic Liberals, he did not at every point also,
in 1948, spell out the norm that the Church was not to allow itself to become
instrumental to the valuable, but temporal, purposes of the state. The end of
the state was, of course, ordered to the ultimate end which the Church acted
toward, eternal life with God. But the ordering should occur with full respect
for the natural/supernatural distinction. This meant that the state was
effective for higher purposes not by directly seeking them but by being what
the state was and in that way fostering conditions of justice, peace,
prosperity and freedom
[p. 35]
which were good for people and therefore good for the
Church(97).
Murray’s concept of the “natural” in 1948 was theological
and dynamic. It was theological because it always meant and referred to
something created by God(98). The state was a creature arising immediately from
human nature and ultimately from the Creator of human nature. He conceived this
natural, created reality, too, as part of the way divine providence worked for
humanity. And his idea of providence had an empirical content. He often
referred to Pope Pius XII’s phrase on the “providential path of
history and circumstances”(99) which asked from the Church obedience to
her own inner “law of continual adaptation”(100) in order to foster
all that is rational and human in the aspirations and institutions of any age.
The salient example of the way God’s providence encouraged the maturation
of “the virtualities of human nature as grace calls them forth”(101)
was the gradual emergence of a political order not representing itself
as ultimate, and yet independent from control by the Church. It was factual and
providential that Church and state had come to mutual independence from one
another. And the Church’s respouse was attentive learning as well as
courageous witness to her own mission. The providential path of history-evident
in the gradual rise of the inherently rational aspiration for political freedom
through democratic government - was paralleled by the Church’s own
developing doctrine on Church-state relations. He remarked that “the
whole development of the doctrine of Church-state relationships has been
conditioned by the sharpening of the distinction between the two orders of
human life as the temporal order has progressively
[p. 36]
grown into its natural
autonomy”(102). For Murray, then, the idea of the “natural” was
theological in respect to the Creator of nature and in respect to the
providence with which the Creator continually worked the development of the
capacities of that nature through his grace. Grace not only perfected an
already completely finished nature; it assisted the realization of its
capacities. The concept of the “natural” was also dynamic in that
human nature was understood to be a reservoir of undeveloped potentials coming
into actualization over the long course of history.
In 1948 the natural/supernatural distinction enabled Murray to conceive
the Church-state distinction in a way that encouraged a new appreciation of an
autonomous political order. In this it might seem that he retained
Scheeben’s tendency toward a natural/supernatural polarity by giving the
distinction institutional magnitude in the state/Church difference. And it is
true that Murray argued for the distinction as the first and most important
principle in Church-state relations. But the principle was most important for
the sake of that for which it existed, the freedom which was the condition for
harmony between Church and state in the order of activity. Such harmony was not
itself institutional in structure. The harmony was personal, and in the ordered
activities of conscience(103). In the conscience of the person the perfection
of the social and political aspects of human nature which came to expression in
the state occurred, indeed, through grace. But it did not occur through
Throne-Altar alliance. The order of grace present through the Church perfected
the order of nature expressed by the state. But the manner or mode in which
this concretely took place was the coordination
[p. 37]
of obligations to Church and
state within the conscience of the one person who was believer and citizen.
Murray taught that the dual rights and responsibilities involved in a
person being at once believer and citizen were meant to be in harmony. This
personal harmony was the new mode in which the spiritual order had primacy over
the temporal order. And it was the modern form of the Church-state cooperation
affirmed by Catholic tradition. In modern democratic states, the bearers of
temporal power were not first of all the elected officers but the citizens of
the state. This changed the old order of things in which the Church-state
relation was between the highest authorities of state and of the Church. Since
the authorities of the democratic state were its citizens, the spiritual
society encountered the state precisely in the citizens who were simultaneously
members of the church and citizens of the state. The Church-state-relation was
a relation within the mind, heart and conscience of the person who was the
believer/citizen. And harmonious Church-state relations meant harmony between
the person’s two sets of obligations. This harmony was how ecclesial grace
perfected political nature. The perfection was dynamic and in the coordination
of acts rather than quasi-substantial in an integrated structural union between
church and hate. Thus, just as he taught in 1937 that grace perfects nature, he
taught in 1948 that the believing citizen realized a harmony between ecclesial
and civic responsibilities. In both cases the strong natural/supernatural
distinctions is liberating: in 1937 from naturalist reduction of faith to
reason; in 1948 from integrism.
[p. 38]
Five principles, then, linked the dissertation to the founding of the
social ethic: 1) the classical status of Aquinas; 2) the concept of human
finality toward God; 3) opposition to Liberalism; 4) a normative implication in
the concept of faith; 5) a strong natural/supernatural distinction. They prove
the claim that the dissertation was not isolated from the 1948 articles on
Church-state and religious liberty issues. In 1948, in fact, Murray
incorporated into his social ethic five principles already evident in the study
of Scheeben. When he began to address the American problems in the area of
Church-state relations and the First Amendment he was relying to some extent on
the theology adumbrated in the manuscript presented in this volume. This is not
to make the additional claim that the dissertation was the single source for
the founding of the social ethic. But it is to propose that that ethic cannot
be fully understood apart from the dissertation.
There is more than biographical significance in that connection, more
than a demonstrable continuity in motif between two stages in a
theologian’s writings. What has been established bears also on the
subject-matter. The realities of Church-state relations and faith are not so
disparate. For, as G. McCool remarked in regard to 19th century
Catholicism, the problem of Church-state relations was inseparable from the
faith/reason issue. He identified both as arising from a more basic and more
comprehensive reality, the entry of grace into the world of humanity. This
judgment applies to Murray, as the preceding inquiry made evident. It discloses
something about the subject-matter Murray treated and in this way becomes a
perception of the subject-matter and not simply a
[p. 39]
comment upon the temporal
coinciding of two themes in the life of nineteenth century Catholicism, and
then within the career of one twentieth century theologian.
Murray’s new focus in 1948 emerged from the subject-matter in 1937 and not only as
a response to papal teaching on the need for social reconstruction in the
aftermath of World War II or to Murray’s own insight into the need for
religious liberty as a condition for collaboration in post-war America. The
problem of how faith and reason harmonized within the act of belief in God and
revelation became the problem of how Church and state harmonized the conscience
of the believer/citizen. Now, faith and reason are problematic in relation to
each other the same way Church and state are: from within the light of faith
and the Gospel. Murray founded his social ethic within the same light of faith
he expounded in 1937 and adumbrated in his directly theological writings. The
Church/state relationship became the object for his reflection from within
membership in the Church. And because it pre-supposed the analysis fidei
from 1937 it was a theologically-qualified social ethic. It is true that he
refused to argue from theological premises but he did not by that fact place
his thinking outside the light of faith or apart from participation in the life
of the Church. His social ethic is a theological ethic at least in the sense
that it was worked out within the horizon of faith, constantly pre-supposed and
without which it cannot be fully understood.
Assimilating Murray’s legacy will remain incomplete to the extent
that its faith-horizon is
[p. 40]
neglected, and his explicitly theological texts
isolated from his social-ethical texts. The full meaning of We Hold These
Truths, for example, depends to some extent on understanding it in
conjunction with The Problem of God. This would be to fulfill the
hermeneutical counsel advising the value of reading an author’s works in
ensemble and to enter upon the task of interpreting Murray’s legacy in
light of its subject-matter. The subject-matter itself urges that the
faith-and-Church part of the problematic be fully in view in such interpreting.
[p. 41]
NOTES
Introduction to the Text
(1) The Root of Faith: The Doctrine of M.J. Scheeben, Theological
Studies 9 (1948), pp. 20-46.
(2) E. Hocedez, S.J. was Murray’s dissertation advisor. He and H.
Lennerz, S.J. approved the published excerpt from the dissertation.Its
cover bears the information: “Dissertatio ad Lauream, In Facultate
Theologica,Murray, Joannes, S.J., Tradita die 6a mensis Aprilis 1937, Moderante
R. P. Hocedez, S.J.”
(3) The identity of fundamental theology as a distinct discipline is
treated by Jean-Pierre Torrell in “New Trends in Fundamental Theology in
the Postconciliar Period”, pp. 11-22 in Problems and Perspectives of
Fundamental Theology, edited by Rene Latourelle and Gerald O’Collins,
translated by Matthew O’Connell (NewYork: Paulist Press, 1982); by Rene
Latourelle in “A New Image of Fundamental Theology”, pp. 37-58; by
David Tracy in “The Necessity and Insufficiency of Fundamental
Theology”, pp. 23-36 also in the same volume. Avery Dulles S.J. has
presented his approach to fundamental theology in “Fundamental Theology
and the Dynamics of Conversion”, The Thomist (S’81), pp.
175-193. Heinrich Stirnimann took up the theme in the important article,
“Erwagungen fur Fundamentaltheologie.Problematik, Grundfragen,
Konzept”, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie and
Theologie, 24 (1977) pp. 291-365. For Scheeben and Murray, fundamental
theology was apologetics.
(4) John Courtney Murray S.J., The Problem of God, Yesterday and
Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), but originally “On the
Structure of the Problem of God”, Theological Studies 33 (March,
1962), pp. 1-26.
(5) According to a list of courses taught at Woodstock College from
1937-1967, he offered “De Gratia Actuali et Habituali” and “De
Virtutibus” in 1938-39; 1940-41; 1946-47; 1958-59; 1960; “de
[p. 42]
inhabitatione ac statu gratiae” as part of “De Personis as (sic)
missionibus divinis” in 1960-61; 1961-62; 1964-65. He taught the doctrine
on God, “De Uno et Trino” in 1937-38; 1939-40; “De Unitate
Essentiae divinae; de providentia et predestinatione” in 1959-60; 1964. He
taught “De Ecclesia et Statu” in 1948-49; 1952-53; “Problema de
Ecclesia et Statu in Saeculo 19o” in 1955-58; 1959; 1960; 1961; 1962;
1963; 1964. Unnumbered file in the Murray Archives: “Courses of Fr. John
Courtney Murray listed in WC Kalendarii.”
(6) David Hollenbach, S.J. “The Growing End of an Argument”,
America (November 30, 1985), pp. 363-66; 363.
(7) America, dedicated issue, “The Legacy of John Courtney
Murray”, (November 30, 1985).
(8) George W.Hunt,“Of Many Things”, America (November
30, 1985), p. 356.
(9) Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, “Religion and Politics: The Future
Agenda”, Origins NC documentary service, vol. 14, no. 21 (November
8, 1984) pp. 321-328.
(10) John Courtney Murray, S.J., We Hold These Truths: Catholic
Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960)
(11) John A. Rohr, “John Courtney Murray and the Pastoral
Letters”, America (November 30, 1985), pp. 373-79; 373.
(12) On December 12, 1960, Time Magazine had Murray on its cover,
just after John F. Kennedy’s election and while the relation between
Catholicism and the First Amendment was a subject for public discussion.
(13) The Gregorian University records show that Murray completed:
“Ascet. myst.” (Ascetical-mystical Theology] June 8, 1936;
“Exercitatione de Aldama, Th. dogmatica” [Seminar in Dogmatic
Theology, on Aquinas in light of his commentators] guided by J. de Aldama in
June, 1936, and “Th. Fundamentalis” [Fundamental Theology] on June 5,
1936. Over the course of academic year 1935-36,
[p. 43]
he also did courses in:
“Hist, Bolsh” (History of Bolshevism]; “Eccl S. Cypriani”
[Ecclesiology of St. Cyprian]’ “Th. saec, XIX” (Theology of the
Ninetheenth Century].
(14) Introduction, p.1 in this volume.
(15) Cf. Donald E. Pelotte, S.S.S., John Courtney Murray: Theologian
in Conflict (New York: Paulist, 1975), Ch.I “The Early Years:
1940-49”.
(16) T.M. Schoof, A Survey of Catholic Theology 1800-1970,
translated by N.D. Smith (New York: Paulist Press, 1970), pp. 88-194.
(17) Cf. Josef Trütsch and Josef Pfammatter, “Die analysis
fidei der nachtridentinischen Theologie”, Mysterium Salutis:
Grundriss heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik; hrsg. v. Johannes Feiner u. Magnus
Lohrer (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1965), Kapitel 5, 3. Abschnitt
“Dogmenund Theologiegeschichtliche Skizze”, pp. 817-26.
For the teaching of Vatican I, cf. Dogmatic Constitution on the
Catholic Faith, Chapters II-IV (Dz.. 3004-3020) and “Canons on
Religious Knowledge”, (Dz.. 3026-3043), in The Teaching of the Catholic
Church, ed. J. Neuner, H. Ross, K. Rahner; translated by G. Stevens (Staten
Island, N.Y. Alba House, 1967; with the Mercier Press Ltd.) pp. 31-40.
(18) This volume, pp. 80-84; 116; Ch.III inter alia. Page
references to “Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s Doctrine on
Supernatural,Divine Faith:A Critical Exposition” will be to page numbers
in this volume. Hereafter, these references will be preceded by MJS.
(19) MJS, p. 252.
(20) Cf. the “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” in
The Documents of Vatican II ed. by W. M. Abbott and J. Gallagher (New
York: Guild Press, 1966), pp. 111-128, sections 5 - 6.
(21) Rene Latourelle, The Theology of Revelation Staten Island,
N.Y.: Alba House, 1966), pp. 200-203. Murray here gave an early instance of his
[p. 44]
sensitivity to the explanatory value of the historical situation within which
theology occurs. In reading Scheeben in reference to Vatican I, J. Kleutgen,
and Liberalism, he interpreted Scheeben’s texts with some of that skill
later so manifest in his interpretation of Pope Leo XIII’s indictments of
democracy, religious liberty, and Church-state separation. He will come to
distinguish Leo’s pastoral-theological content from its polemic against,
amongst others, Liberalism. Cf. Murray’s articles, “Leo XIII on
Church and State: The General Structure of the Controversy” Theological
Studies 14 (March, 1953), pp. 1-30; “Leo XIII: Separation of Church
and State”, Theological Studies 14 (June, 1953) pp. 145-214;
“Leo XIII: Two Concepts of Government”, Theological Studies 14
(December, 1953), pp. 551-567.
(22) Gerald A. Mc.Cool S.J., Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth
Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York: Seabury Press,
1’977), pp. 167-215.
(23) Avery Dulles, S.J., Models of Revelation (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday Co., 1983).
(24) Cf. FN. 3.
(25) Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper &
Row, 1957).
(26) In 1948, he no longer proposed pp. 149-152 to his readers in
“The Root of Faith: The Doctrine of M.J. Scheeben” (cf. FN. 1). All
of Chapter III might be read in reference to Schleiermacher’s On
Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. by John Oman,
introduced by R. Otto (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), insofar as Scheeben
affirmed the creaturely sense of absolute dependence as essential to faith,
while battling against Liberal theology, (perhaps like Karl Barth). Cf. MJS, p.
169-172. Murray defended ecumenical and inter-faith cooperation in the early
1940’s. Cf. Pelotte, pp. 14-17. Later he became a founding member of the
U.S. Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue and wrote “The Status of the Nicene Creed
as Dogma” for an ecumenical purpose,
[p. 45]
Chicago Studies: An Archdiocesan
Review, 5(Spring, 1966), pp. 65-80. Richard John Neuhaus The Naked Public
Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William
B.Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1984). Neuhaus sees Murray as a valuable and
ecumenically accessible resource for the task of reconceiving the religious
dimension of public discourse in America.
(27) John Courtney Murray, S.J., “The Most Blessed Trinity,”
in St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica, First Complete American Edition,
in Three Volumes; Volume Three, Containing Supplement, Q.Q.1-99,Appendices,
Articles on Various,Aspects of the Summa, Scriptural,
Patristic,Professional Indices.With Complete Series of Synoptical Charts (New
York: Benziger, 1948) pp. 3153-3163. This essay, which began from the Greek
Patristic starting-point in the Father, introduced the Trinitarian theology of
Aquinas, which accepted the Augustinian starting-point in the unity of the
divine essence. Bibliographies of Murray’s works have not included this
essay.
(28) For example, in The Problem of God Yesterday and Today,
Chapter 3, “The Contemporary Problem: The Death of God”, he speaks
about faith in a way that sustains the emphasis on the role of the will in
faith. Biblical “knowledge of God,” for example, is not “an
affair of affirmation alone; it is free engagement in a whole style of
life,” p. 77; the will is the “root” of either belief or
unbelief; the “root of religious faith” is “the will to faith
[which] issues forth from the deepest regions of the self where freedom is more
than choice,” p. 85; the “Bible clearly locates the ultimate root of
atheism not in an erroneous judgment of the mind but in an act of choice “
p. 84. Later, in “Religious Freedom and the Atheist,” an undated
post-Vatican II text explicating the intent and logic of the “Declaration
on Religious, Liberty”, Murray also described atheism as “never the
conclusion of an argument ...Atheism, like faith, is a decision, a
fundamental option, an act of freedom, that deserved civil and legal
immunity from constraint or restraint on the grounds of religious liberty; p.
13. This 18-page text from the Murray
[p. 46]
Archives, File 325, came to the
author’s attention through the kindness of D. Pelotte, author of John
Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict.
(29) Recent work on his social ethics includes:
Richard J. Regan, S.J., Conflict and Consensus: Religious Freedom and
the Second Vatican Council (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
Faith E. Burgess, Ecclesia et Status, The Relationship Between Church
and State According to John Courtney Murray, S.J., (Dusseldorff: Rudolf Stehle,
1971).
Edward A. Goerner, Peter and Caesar: Political Authority and The
Catholic Church (New York: Herder and Herder, 1975), chapter 6, “John
Courtney Murray, Historicism as an Antidote”.
Reinhold Sebott, Religionsfreiheit and Verhaltnis von Kirche and Staat:
Der Beitrag John Courtney Murrays zu einer modernen Frage (Rome: Universita
Gregoriana Editrice, 1977).
John A. Coleman, S.J., “Vision and Praxis in American Theology:
Orestes Brownson, John A. Ryan, and John Courtney Murray,” Theological
Studies 37 (1976), pp. 3-40.
David Hollenbach, S.J., “Public Theology in America: Some Questions
for Catholicism after John Courtney Murray,” Theological Studies 37
(1976) pp. 290-303.
John A. Rohr, “John Courtney Murray’s Theology of Our Founding
Fathers’ “Faith”: Freedom” in Christian Spirituality in
the United States: Independence, and Interdependence, edited by Francis A.
Eigo, O.S.A. and Silvio E. Fittipaldi, O.S.A. (Villanova, Pennsylvania:
Villanova University Press, 1978), pp. 1-30.
“Current Theology. Theology and Philosophy in Public: A Symposium
on John Courtney Murray’s Unfinished Agenda,” edited by David
Hollenbach, S.J., Theological Studies 40 (1979) pp. 700-715.
[p. 47]
Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., “A Mind, A Manner, A Man: Elegy for John
Courtney Murray”, in Tell The Next Generation: Homilies and Near
Homilies (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 211-215.
Charles E. Curran, American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth Century
Approaches (Notre Dame, )Indiana: Notre Dame, 1982), Chapter 5, “John
Courtney Murray,” pp. 72-232.
J. Leon Hooper, S.J., “John Courtney Murray’s “Ethics of
Public Discourse: The Public Search for Understanding, Moral Judgment, and
Commitment” (unpublished dissertation for the Joint Graduate Program,
Andover Newton Theological School/Boston College: 1982).
America, Vol. 153, No. 16 (November 30, 1985) “The Legacy of
John Courtney Murray”.
Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., “Who Chilled the Beaujolais?”, pp.
360-363.
David Hollenbach, S.J. “The Growing End of An Argument”, pp.
363-366
William E. McManus, “Memories of Murray”, pp. 366-368.
Charles M. Whelan, S.J., “The Enduring Problem of Religious
Liberty”, pp. 368-372.
John A. Rohr, “John Courtney Murray and the Pastoral Letters”,
pp. 373-379.
George C. Higgins, “Some Personal Recollections”, pp. 380-386.
J. Bryan Hehir, “The Unfinished Agenda”, pp.386-387; 392.
(30) Thomas T. Love in John Courtney Murray: Contemporary
Church-State Theory (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday & Co., 1965), chapter
III, “First Major Constructive Proposal,” referred to the following
three articles as the essential statement of Murray’s advance beyond his
own earlier position: “St. Robert Bellarmine on the Indirect Power,”
Theological Studies 9 (1948), pp. 491-
[p. 48]
535; “Contemporary
Orientations of Catholic Thought on Church and state in the Light of
History,” Theological Studies 10 (1949), pp. 177-234;
“Governmental Repression of Heresy,” Proceedings of the Third
Annual Meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America (Chicago:
1948), pp. 26-98. These will be referred to in ensemble as the work of 1948,
instead of 1948-49.
(31) Pelotte, pp. 13-14.
(32) The position from which Francis Connell, Joseph Fenton, and Alfredo
Cardinal Ottoviani criticized Murray has been described as “the
conservative Catholic” position (Love), the “textbook theory”
(Burgess), and the “traditional” view (Pelotte). Referring to
Murray’s opponents as “integrists” situates their Church-state
theory within the context of that understanding of the Church-world
relationship described as “integrism” by Karl Rahner in “Church
and World,” Sacramentum Mundi, Volume 1 (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1968) pp-346-357; especially pp. 349-350. For a general account of the
opposition to Murray, cf. Pelotte, Chapter 2, “Opposition and Rebuke”
1950-1959”, pp.7-73, and Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J., The Vatican and the
American Hierarchy, 1870 - 1965, Band 21, Papste and Papstum (Stuttgart:
Anton Hirsemann, 1982), Chapters XIV, “The Re-emergence of Religious
Liberty” and XV, “Americanismus Redivivus.”
(33) In fact, in 1945 Murray’s position in “Freedom of
Religion: I. The Ethical Problem,” Theological Studies 6 (1945),
pp. 229-286, did not differ from what Burgess described as the
“Conventional (customary) Textbook Statement” exemplified by Alredo
Cardinal Ottaviani’s Institutiones Juris Publici Ecclesiastici,
Volume II; Ecclesia et Status (Rome: 1960), at least on the principle
that “The State has the obligation to acknowledge God as its author, to
worship Him as He wills to be worshipped, and to subject its official life and
action to His law”, Theological Studies 6, pp. 266-267; cf.
Burgess, pp. 82-83 and Love, pp. 23-30. The shift from this principle to
Murray’s 1948 position marked his recognition that the State was not a
corporate personality. If it were, as he thought in 1945, then it had the
[p. 49]
responsibility also to “promote public religion and morality as essential
elements of the common good” through, among other measures, exercise of
the right to restrict by juridical processes the spread of opinions, and to
prohibit external actions, that tend to destroy in the community belief in God
and fidelity to moral standards, ”Theological Studies 6, pp.
266-267.Love, in chapter II, “Dissatisfaction and Confusion”, told
how Murray moved from this view to the one propounded in his first, major,
constructive proposal in 1948. Also, as will be explained, through study of
Aquinas and John of Paris, political philosophy and history, and an affirmation
of the First Amendment, he introduced the material content of
“nature” into the formal natural/supernatural distinction. The
thesis/ hypothesis approach, on the contrary, was an integrist
conclusions-theology because it lacked this philosophical analysis of
“nature” and not only because it was a-historical.
(34) G. McCool, p. 27.
(35) In the hermeneutical theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a classical work
“says something to the present as if it were said specially to it”
and has power to speak directly to the present. Of course, as Gadamer also
explains, the act of understanding a classical work or corpus depends upon and
belongs to participation in a tradition. Truth and Method (New York:
Crossroad Publishing Company, 1982), pp. 253, ff.
(36) “St. Robert Bellarmine on the Indirect Power”; cf. FN.30.
(37) “Contemporary Orientations of Catholic Thought on Church and
state in the Light of History”; cf. FN.30.
(38) “St. Robert Bellarmine”, pp. 506-13; 532-35.
(39) “St. Robert Bellarmine”, p. 500
(40) “St. Robert Bellarmine”, p. 504.
(41) “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 186-199; 216-227.
[p. 50]
(42) “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 227-334.
(43) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 52-62; pp.
67-70; cf. FN.30
(44) “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 194-227;
“Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 62-70.
(45) “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 202-204.
(46) “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 204-209;
“Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 58-62.
(47) Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 69-70;
“Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 213-214; p. 223.
(48) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 54 ff.
(49) For example, MJS, pp. 80-86; 172-177; 223-224.
(50) Cf. “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 44; 55-57;
61-63; 69-71; 75-76; “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 202-209;
210-211; 216-217; 220-224; 234. “St. Robert Bellarmine”, p. 504. The
consideration of the ends of Church and of state was part of traditional
teaching. Murray, however, noted its importance in John of Paris and Leo XIII
and developed it.
(51) Cf., for example, MJS, pp. 141-148; 167; 169-170; 177-180.
(52) MJS, p. 149.
(53) MJS, p. 177; English translation, The Teaching of the Catholic
Church, edited by Karl Rahner, (Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 1966),
p.32.
(54) MJS, pp. 253-255.
(55) MJS, pp.158-167; 171-172; 179-180.
(56) MJS, pp. 80 ff.; 171-180; 223-224.
(57) MJS, pp. 69-70; 148; 162-163; 244-246. (58) MJS, p. 173.
(59) MJS, p. 173.
[p. 51]
(60) MJS, Chapter IV, “The Assent of Faith: Its Genesis and
Analysis”, details the intricate intellectual assent.
(61) MJS, p. 81.
(62) MJS, p. 81.
(63) MJS, p. 174.
(64) MJS, p. 175.
(65) MJS, p. 179.
(66) MJS, p. 176; “Contemporary Orientations”; pp. 202 ff.;
“Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 69-85.
(67) E.g. “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 76 ff.
(68) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 70 ff. 69)
(69) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 62-70;
“Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 212-224. His historical
consciousness was not, that is, an historicism methodologically excluding a
divine dimension to human history. For a convincing example of his early
familiarity with one element of historical research, cf. his investigation of
Scheeben’s correspondence with Herder, in Chapter III, FN. 36; MJS, pp.
183-184. For a defence of Murray against the change that his historical
interpretations of church-state relations ended up in ethical relativism, cf.
John A. Rohr, “Murray and His Critics”, Continuum 4 (1966),
pp. 147-150.
(70) MJS, p. 144; cf. pp. 141-153.
(71) MJS, p. 146.
(72) MJS, p. 152.
(73) MJS, pp. 169-170; 253.
(74) MJS, p. 253.
[p. 52]
(75) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”. pp. 27-31; 79;
“Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 198-201; pp. 221-214; “St.
Robert Bellarmine on the Indirect Power”, pp. 532-535.
(76) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, p. 95.
(77) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 95-96.
(78) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, p. 96.
(79) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, p. 96.
(80) MJS, p. 145.
(81) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, p. 96.
(82) MJS, pp. 172 ff.
(83) MJS, p. 176.
(84) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 76-78;
“Contemporary Orientations”, 209-11; 216.
(85) Cf. MJS, pp. 99-103; p. 126.
(86) MJS, p. 99.
(87) MJS, pp. 106 ff.
(88) MJS, p. 113 ff., and Chapter III.
(89) MJS, pp. 108-120.
(90) MJS, p. 231.
(91) MJS, pp. 238-239.
(92) MJS, pp. 238-239.
(93) MJS, pp. 232-237.
(94) But, for the existence of a problem in regard to this distinction,
cf. Charles Curran, American’ Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth
Century_ Approaches (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame, 1982) chapter 5,
“John Courtney Murray”:
“A major point in Murray’s approach is the distinction between
the spiritual and temporal
[p. 53]
orders and the sacred and secular orders of human
existence. This serves as the basis for the Gelasian dyarchy - the dualism and
the distinction between Church and state. The distinction in Murray’s
writing corresponds to the traditional Catholic distinction between the
supernatural and the natural order. In Murray’s day such a distinction
served as a basis for much Catholic theologizing. Murray himself recognizes
that there must be an integration between the two orders and no clear
dichotomy. The individual person who is both Christian and citizen is the
integrating fact in the Church-state relationship...
However, many contemporary theologians call for a more integral
approach. The distinction between the natural and the supernatural does not
exist as an historical reality. At best the concept of the natural as
distinguished from the supernatural is only an abstraction and a remainder
concept,” p. 224.
It could be noted that lack of a natural/supernatural distinction in
faith-understanding needs to protect itself against the charge that it has
re-invented integrism. There could be an integrism of the left as well as an
integrism of the right.
Curran’s tendency toward a negative evaluation of the contemporary
applicability of Murray’s social ethic differs from the generally positive
approach proposed by David Hollenbach and J. Leon Hooper. They recognize that
Murray’s natural-law arguments for his social ethics pose difficulties for
many ethicians. Yet, they see the value in interpreting Murray’s social
ethics in light of what may be called his total theological presupposition.
Accordingly, for example, Hollenbach realizes that the “ontological
foundation of Murray’s social ethic is the human person graced by God,
redeemed by Christ, and summoned to the Kingdom of God” (“Public
Theology in America: Some Questions for Catholicism After John Courtney
Murray,” Theological Studies 37 (1976), pp. 290-203; 295).
Likewise, Hooper sees Murray as “...not simply a natural law theorist... .
He was also a man of faith for whom
[p. 54]
the actual world of human interaction was
touched by divine power and will,” (“John Courtney Murray’s
Ethics of Discourse: The Public Search for Understanding, Moral Judgment, and
Commitment,” dissertation for the Joint Graduate Program, Andover Newton
Theological School/Boston College (1982); 7-8).
(95) “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 227-234.
(96) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 85-95. (97)
“Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 70-76.
(98) “Governmental Repression of Heresy”, pp. 30; 54-58;
“Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 198 ff.
(99) “Contemporary Orientations”, p. 225.
(100) “Contemporary Orientations”, p. 213.
(101) “Contemporary Orientations”, p. 213.
(102) “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 191 ff.
(103) “Contemporary Orientations”, pp. 220-224.
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