Tyrrell, George

TYRRELL, GEORGE. - English Modernist theologian, b. in Dublin on 6 February 1861, d. at Storrington (Sussex) on 15 July 1909.

Raised in Calvinism, while still young he turned toward the High Church, and then entered Catholicism (1879), and, the following year, the Society of Jesus. Ordained a priest on 20 September 1891, after having taught philosophy for two years (1894-96) at Stonyhurst College, he became a contributor to the Month, the magazine of the English Jesuits, making a name for himself with the public both through his apologetic essays and through his first books of religious meditation, in which the Newmanian influence was visible. Following a profound crisis which the reading of Blondel, Laberthonnière and Loisy, into which he had been initiated by his friend Fr. von Hügel, only accelerated, T. moved over to Modernism; he intended, however, to remain within the Society and the Church in order to carry out reform from within, engaging in clandestine activity as a writer, until the Society decided on his expulsion (1 February 1906), brought about by the discovery of A letter to a friend and by T.'s refusal to retract his errors. The expulsion entailed suspension a divinis, since he was dismissed "sine episcopo receptore"; there was added, from Rome, because of the reaction he led against the encyclical Pascendi, the sentence of 22 October 1907, which deprived him of the Sacraments. He died without having been reconciled with the Church.

The works of the pre-Modernist period are: Nova et Vetera (London 1897); Hard sayings (ibid. 1898); On external religion (ibid. 1899); Oil and wine (1900, privately circulated); The faith of the millions (London 1901): a collection of the principal essays that appeared in the Month. In the clandestine Modernist period he wrote: Religion as a factor of life (Exeter 1902, under the pseudonym Dr. Ernest Engels); The Church and the future (s.l. 1903, under the pseudonym Hilaire Bourdon); Lex orandi (London 1903); Lex credendi (ibid. 1906). From the openly Modernist period are: A much abused letter (ibid. 1906); Through Scylla and Charybdis (ibid. 1907); Mediaevalism (ibid. 1908); Christianity at the cross-roads (ibid. 1909, posthumous); Essays on faith and immortality (ibid. 1914, posthumous).

T.'s religious philosophy, although it does not present itself as a coherent organic system, nevertheless traces the broad outlines of a new vast theological synthesis which, setting aside Thomism in favor of a pragmatic-immanentist scholasticism, would serve to reconcile the demands of modern thought with the Catholic faith, under the sign of anti-intellectualism and relativism. With all capacity for scientific and metaphysical knowledge denied to reason, the transcendent, according to T., is given through a vital experience, a true revelation that is accomplished normally in the consciousness of each person and, in an extraordinary degree, in that of the prophet, interpreter of the collective soul. Such revelation and experience of the divine, consisting essentially in affective and dynamic elements, tends to be inscribed in images and concepts, giving rise, through the continuous evolution of these, to ever new dogmas which, because of their origin and nature as an unrevealed mental element, cannot claim, any more than any other human knowledge, a speculative value, and retain only a practical, divisional value, in the sense that their truth consists only in their usefulness for the religious life, which is the Lex orandi normative of the Lex credendi (dogmatic symbolism). The error of the Church, which T. calls theologism, lies in attributing a value of speculative and revealed truth to the dogmas and to the theology rationally deduced from them, whereby it betrays the mission entrusted to it by Christ, setting itself up as a school of doctrine instead of a school of life, thus bringing about a useless conflict with science and the absolutism of an infallible pontificate, required to safeguard the supposed dogmatic uniformity, which has replaced the consensus fidelium, the sole organ of truth of the Spirit, which reveals itself in collective religious experience. The reduction of the supernatural to nature, the practical equivalence of dogmas and, therefore, of religions, led T. to a religious naturalism, according to which Catholicism would be nothing but a transient historical form of universal religion.

Giuseppe Cantoni