TYRRELL, GEORGE. — English modernist theologian, born in Dublin on 6 February 1861, died 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 teaching philosophy for two years (1894–96) at Stonyhurst College, he became a contributor to the Month, the journal of the English Jesuits, gaining public recognition both for his apologetic essays and for his first books of religious meditation, in which the influence of Newman was apparent. Following a profound crisis, which his reading of Blondel, Laberthonnière, and Loisy, to whom he had been introduced by his friend Fr. von Hügel, merely hastened, T. turned to modernism; he nevertheless intended to remain within the Society and the Church in order to carry out reform from within, working clandestinely as a writer, until the Society decided to expel him (1 February 1906), prompted by the discovery of A letter to a friend and by T.’s refusal to retract his errors. Expulsion entailed suspension a divinis, since he was dismissed «sine episcopo receptore»; Rome additionally imposed upon him, because of the reaction he had led against the encyclical Pascendi, the sentence of 22 October 1907, depriving 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 published in the Month. During the period of clandestine modernism he wrote: Religion as a factor of life (Exeter 1902, pseud. Dr. Ernest Engels); The Church and the future (s.l. 1903, pseud. Hilaire Bourdon); Lex orandi (London 1903); Lex credendi (ibid. 1906). The works of 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 and extensive theological synthesis which, excluding Thomism in favor of a pragmatic-immanentist scholasticism, would reconcile the demands of modern thought with the Catholic faith under the sign of anti-intellectualism and relativism. Once every capacity for scientific and metaphysical knowledge has been denied to reason, the transcendent, according to T., is given through a vital experience, a true revelation which normally takes place in the consciousness of each person and, in an extraordinary degree, in that of the prophet, interpreter of the collective soul. This revelation and experience of the divine, consisting essentially of affective and dynamic elements, tends to be inscribed in images and concepts, giving rise, through their continuous evolution, to ever new dogmas which, because of their origin and their nature as an unrevealed mental element, cannot claim, no differently from any other human knowledge, speculative value, and retain only a practical divisional value, in the sense that their truth consists solely in their usefulness for the religious life, which is the Lex orandi normative of the Lex credendi (dogmatic symbolism). The Church’s error, which T. calls theologism, consists in attributing a speculative and revealed truth-value to dogmas and to the theology rationally deduced from them; thus it betrays the mission entrusted to it by Christ, presenting itself as a school of doctrine rather than of life, thereby creating a useless conflict with science, and the absolutism of an infallible pontificate, demanded to safeguard the supposed dogmatic uniformity, replacing the consensus fidelium, the sole organ of the truth of the Spirit, which reveals itself in collective religious experience. The reduction of the supernatural to nature, and the practical equivalence of dogmas and therefore of religions, led T. to a religious naturalism, according to which Catholicism would be nothing more than a transient historical form of universal religion.