Modernists and mystics

168 Pages·2009·0.556 MB·English

by  Talar, C. J. T

Modernists & Mystics

Edited by C. J. T. Talar
Modernists
& Mystics
The Catholic University
of America Press
Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2009
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standards for Information
Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984.
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Modernists and mystics / edited by C. J. T. Talar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8132-1709-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Modernism (Christian theology)—Catholic Church.
2. Mysticism—Catholic Church. I. Talar, C. J. T., 1947–
II. Title.
BX1396.M63 2009
248.2ʹ20940903—dc22 2009010755
For Michael Kerlin (1936–2007), valued colleague, longtime
contributor to the Roman Catholic Modernism Working Group/
Seminar, and patient expositor of Blondel, who lightened our
sessions with a touch of humor

Contents
Preface / William L. Portier ix
1 The Mystical Element of the Modernist Crisis
William L. Portier & C. J. T. Talar 1
2 Mysticism and Modernism in Baron Friedrich von Hügel’s
Life and Thought / Lawrence F. Barmann 23
3 Prayer at Twilight: Henri Bremond’s Apologie pour Fénelon
C. J. T. Talar 39
4 Maurice Blondel: Philosophy, Prayer, and the Mystical
Michael J. Kerlin 62
5 The Modernist and the Mystic: Albert Houtin’s
Une grande mystique / C. J. T. Talar 82
6 Henri Bergson and Alfred Loisy: On Mysticism
and the Religious Life / Harvey Hill 104
Bibliography 137
Contributors 147
Index 149

Preface
William L. Portier
At the 1976 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion
(AAR), the late Ronald R. Burke of the University of Nebraska at Oma-
ha convened the first session of a new consultation devoted to the study
of what its members called Roman Catholic Modernism. The consulta-
tion soon graduated to become a permanent group. But after a review in
1994, the AAR program committee suppressed the group by refusing to
renew its place on the program. It was given a five-year sunset reprieve
until 1999. For twenty-three years, from 1976 up through 1999, the Ro-
man Catholic Modernism Group (RCMG) continued to meet annually
at the AAR.
Georgetown’s Elizabeth McKeown has already made the RCMG
the stuff of history. At a session of the Nineteenth-Century Theology
Group at the 2001 annual meeting of the AAR in Denver, she thor-
oughly chronicled the Roman Catholic Modernism Group’s twenty-
three-year run. McKeown took the group’s work as a case study in “how
scholarship gets made—specifically in the fields of historical theology
and the history of religion, and more generally in the major profession-
al organization devoted to the study of religion in the United States.”1
In the twenty-three preprinted copies of the group’s working pa-
pers, one can track the state of the question on scholarship relating to
1. Elizabeth McKeown, “After the Fall: Roman Catholic Modernism at the American
Academy of Religion,” U.S. Catholic Historian 20/3 (Summer 2002): 111–31, at 113.
ix