HUMANI GENERIS. - Encyclical of Pius XII, of Aug. 12, 1950, concerning false opinions that threaten to subvert the foundations of Catholic doctrine (AAS, 42 [1950], pp. 561-78).
This distinguished document spontaneously calls to mind modernism (v.), which sinks its roots into the divorce between reason and faith, born at the time of humanism and matured through the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedists and Kantian criticism, from which sprang liberalism, Marxism and rationalism. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the conflict grew sharper and the problem of a reconciliation was envisaged. The Vatican Council traced the path of a just solution: from the divine to the human through the Church. Modernism, on the other hand, wanted to go from the human to the divine without the Church. And it was ruin. The historic encyclical Pascendi (v.) crushed the crisis, freeing Christian thought from the grave danger. But in recent years there have been seen emerging here and there, in the vast field of sacred culture, motifs, attitudes and tendencies that have an evident affinity with the modernist crisis and constitute a new unease and a new danger.
Pius XII had a prompt and precise sense of the danger, and in the encyclical «H. g.» he diagnosed the disease in the process of developing and weighed the effective remedies, identifying first of all the lines of march of modern culture in universal evolutionism, in existentialism and in historicism, which lead to the denial or devaluation of the absolute in being and in thought, to the benefit of a contingentism, a positivism and a relativism that make a metaphysics and therefore a theology impossible.
Faced with these threatening currents the Pope does not decree the isolationism of Catholic culture; on the contrary he exhorts scholars to take account of the new doctrines, which pose new problems to be explored in depth and often contain seeds of truth; but he deplores the imprudence of certain Catholics who, eager to update themselves, abandon themselves to a false irenicism, compromising the integrity of the faith and of the whole traditional doctrine of the Church.
There follows a keen analysis of the morbid tendencies in theology, in philosophy and in the border zone with the positive sciences. Under the pretext of returning to the sources, systematic theology with its notions and its technical terminology is despised and the simpler and more flexible language of the Fathers is preferred; the solid doctrinal complex defined by the Church over the centuries is neglected and appeal is made to Sacred Scripture, interpreting it by way of arbitrary symbolism, as if Jesus Christ had not constituted the Church the sole depositary and interpreter of the word of God. In this way the dogmatic formulas are devalued, reducing their content to a minimum that can be adapted to any philosophical or religious system. Dogmatic relativism, which has already begun to bear its first poisonous fruits.
Even more audacious is the attack on Scholastic philosophy, which, according to the innovators, no longer responds to the demands of modern thought, impatient of rigid metaphysics and fixed schemes, enemy of immutable truth and wholly bent on the flux of life in becoming. Devaluation of reason and of the supreme principles, of theodicy and of ethics, fideistic option of truth by way of will and sentiment, union of the most opposed systems in the effort to express an ungraspable truth. Such is the vital philosophy that they would like to substitute for Scholastic philosophy.
Finally the encyclical deplores the incautious tendency to accept scientific hypotheses and opinions of historical criticism as demonstrated conclusions, even if they are in antithesis with dogma and with the data of Revelation, as, for example, polygenism (v. MONOGENISM) suggested by evolutionary theory, and irreconcilable with the dogma of original sin, and the allegorical and mythological interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis.
Against these and other errors, more or less veiled, of the new philosophy and theology, the Pope pronounces his word of reprobation, which is however neither a brusque crushing nor a barring of every progress of Christian culture, nor a wholesale rejection of modern thought. On the contrary he exhorts to progress in studies in theology, in philosophy and in the sciences, provided that progress does not make the value of truth a chronological question and does not consider the normative function of the Church's magisterium as an impediment.
Updating in method and in form, endogenous development of Christian thought, integration also by way of a controlled assimilation of new elements and attitudes on philosophical and scientific ground, but all in harmony and in continuity with classical philosophy and theology, of which the Church points to the best synthesis in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, while also wishing for its growing deepening and a presentation ever more suited to the spirit of the times.
The historical and doctrinal value of this encyclical lies in checking the evolutionistic dynamism that threatens to sweep away reason and faith together, and in reaffirming certainty and trust in the value of being, of thought and of life, terms of the creative and motive action of God.
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