TYRRELL, GEORGE. - Modernist theologian of English nationality, b. in Dublin on 6 Feb. 1861, d. at Storrington (Sussex) on 15 July 1909.
Reared in Calvinism, he early inclined toward High Church Anglicanism, and then entered the Catholic Church (1879) and, the following year, the Society of Jesus. Ordained priest on 20 Sept. 1891, after teaching philosophy for two years (1894-96) at Stonyhurst College, he became a contributor to *The Month*, the English Jesuit review, making his mark both through apologetic essays and his early books of religious meditation, in which Newman’s influence was evident. Following a profound crisis, hastened by his reading of Blondel, Laberthonnière, and Loisy—an interest sparked by his friend Fr. von Hügel—Tyrrell embraced modernism. He nevertheless intended to remain within the Society and the Church in order to reform it from within, engaging in clandestine writing until the Society expelled him (1 Feb. 1906), prompted by the discovery of *A Letter to a Friend* and his refusal to retract his errors. The expulsion entailed suspension *a divinis*, as he was dismissed “sine episcopo receptore”; to this was added, from Rome, the sentence of 22 Oct. 1907, which deprived him of the sacraments for his leadership in the reaction against the encyclical *Pascendi*. He died without having reconciled himself with the Church.
Works from the pre-modernist period include: *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 principal essays from *The Month*. During his clandestine modernist period he wrote: *Religion as a Factor of Life* (Exeter 1902: pseud. Dr. Ernest Engels); *The Church and the Future* (n.p. 1903, pseud. 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).
Tyrrell’s religious philosophy, though not presented as a coherent organic system, nonetheless outlines the broad lines of a vast new theological synthesis that, rejecting Thomism in favor of a pragmatic-immanentist scholasticism, sought to reconcile the demands of modern thought with Catholic faith under the banner of anti-intellectualism and relativism. Denying reason any capacity for scientific or metaphysical knowledge, the transcendent, in Tyrrell’s view, is given through a vital experience—true revelation that normally unfolds in the consciousness of each person and, in extraordinary measure, in that of the prophet, interpreter of the collective soul. This revelation or experience of the divine, consisting essentially in affective and dynamic elements, tends to be inscribed in images and concepts, giving rise through their continual evolution to ever-new dogmas which, by their origin and nature as unrevealed mental constructs, cannot claim—no more than any other human knowledge—to possess speculative value; they retain only a directive practical value, in the sense that their truth consists solely in their utility for religious life, which is the normative *Lex Orandi* of the *Lex Credendi* (dogmatic symbolism). The error of the Church, which Tyrrell termed “theologism,” lies in attributing to dogmas and to theology deduced rationally a value of speculative and revealed truth; in so doing, it betrays the mission entrusted by Christ, positioning itself as a school of doctrine rather than of life, thereby provoking an unnecessary conflict with science and the absolutism of an infallible papacy, invoked to safeguard the alleged uniformity of dogma, which has replaced the *consensus fidelium*, the sole organ of truth of the Spirit, revealed in collective religious experience. The reduction of the supernatural to nature, and the practical equivalence of dogmas and, consequently, of religions, led Tyrrell to a religious naturalism according to which Catholicism would be merely a transient historical form of the universal religion.