The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a fair amount of debate in Catholic theology among scholars on how to interpret ressourcement theology, the “return to the sources” movement that played such an important role at the Second Vatican Council and in numerous theological fields before and since. Mary Kate Holman has entered this conversation with boldness and verve with Marie-Dominique Chenu: Catholic Theology for a Changing World.
The ressourcement debate in recent years has included a number of English-language books on the topic, including a magisterial edited volume by Gabriel Flynn as well as more theologically conservative (Hans Boersma’s Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery) and progressive (Jürgen Mettepenningen’s Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology) interpretations of the movement.
These works hint at how a proper historiography of ressourcement theology uncovers the same narrative tension—between continuity and rupture, reform and retrieval—that bedevils the interpretation of Vatican II itself. Here the familiar post-Vatican II polarities of concilium and communio, neo-Thomistic optimism and Augustinian pessimism, aggiornamento and ressourcement, come to the surface.
Until quite recently, it appeared that the Augustinian side had won the day. Note that favorites of that school remain visible: Dozens of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s books remain in print; Joseph Ratzinger’s work has appeared in new editions; and Henri de Lubac remains a reliable subject of dissertations, and a number of his works appear on graduate-course syllabi. Meanwhile, the aggiornamento school has fallen somewhat out of favor: Yves Congar’s most important work, Tradition and Traditions, is out of print, and many younger theologians would be hard-pressed to name a single book by Jean Daniélou. Further, Marie-Dominique Chenu’s key studies, most notably Toward Understanding Thomas Aquinas and his essays on 12th-century theology, are no longer in print.
But now Holman, an assistant professor of theology at Fairfield University, steps into the breach. Like Sarah Shortall in Soldiers of God in a Secular World (Harvard University Press, 2021), Holman (who previously co-translated Chenu’s magnificent A School of Theology: Le Saulchoir in 2023) relies extensively on archival material, thereby offering a major contribution to ressourcement scholarship.
Born in 1895, Chenu entered the Dominicans and completed a dissertation on Aquinas under the direction of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange in 1920. Already in these years, Chenu bristled at the constraints of neo-scholasticism and the particularly Dominican form of neo-Thomism exposited by Garrigou-Lagrange. Chenu essentially dropped one Lagrange for another, shifting to the founder of the École Biblique, Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938), known for applying critical and historical approaches to scriptural study.
In order to understand biblical texts, and particularly the life of Jesus, taught the latter Lagrange, one needed to understand the surrounding culture, including Second Temple Judaism. Chenu pondered what would happen if one took the same approach to Aquinas. Perhaps to understand this great church doctor, one needed to situate him amid the conversations brewing in Aquinas’s Paris and identify the sitz im leben of his non-systematic writings.
These scholarly commitments led Chenu to turn down an appointment at the Angelicum and to take up a post at the Dominican school, Le Saulchoir, which had been relocated to Belgium after the French laïcité laws of 1905. Four years after becoming regent of studies in 1932, Chenu gave a talk that became Une École du Theologie: Le Saulchoir (“A School of Theology: Le Saulchoir”). Chenu proposed that Saulchoir become a school modeled on Lagrange’s École Biblique and the “Catholic Tübingen School,” both of which took historical method seriously.
Chenu’s proposal represented a sharp departure from what had been normalized in Catholic seminary education since the First Vatican Council. Chenu did not hold back—first by arguing that Thomas and what was called Thomism were not always identical, and second by insisting on the incarnational, historical quality of Christian truth.
For some, this simply sounded too much like Modernism, and Chenu faced two Vatican inquiries: first in 1938, when he was compelled to sign onto a number of banal affirmations, and more consequentially in 1942, when his “little book” was placed on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books. Church officials also made an apostolic visit to Saulchoir, which resulted in Chenu being relocated to working-class Paris and Garrigou-Lagrange’s disciple, Marie-Dominique Philippe, taking over as regent of studies at Saulchoir.
While this story is well known in theological academia, Holman uses the recently opened archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) in Rome as well as Chenu’s files at Saulchoir to unearth details hitherto only suspected. Key among these is the role played by Garrigou-Lagrange, a scholar once described as the “sacred monster of Thomism.” Holman surfaces a jarring legacy of pettiness and poor character judgment by this influential Thomist and some of his disciples. (The aforementioned Philippe, for example, left the Dominicans to form the “Community of Saint John,” where he coerced several nuns into sexual acts.)
Chenu’s exile, meanwhile, led him into direct encounter with working-class communities and propelled him to provide the intellectual heft for the “worker-priest” movement, premised on the idea that the church in France assumed a too-easy alliance with bourgeois norms and perspectives. Chenu’s social engagement coincided with some of his most important publications on medieval theology.
As Vatican II convened, Chenu was called on to advise the bishop of Madagascar, a former student. While not an official peritus, Chenu worked his connections, chief among them a long friendship with Congar, to push a reform agenda at the council. Perhaps his most substantial contribution was to the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (“Gaudium et Spes”), which articulated the need to discern the “signs of the times.”
During these years, Chenu used his position on the fringes to his advantage. As the dust settled and the church attempted to adopt the council’s directives, Chenu aligned with the Concilium wing of theology and argued for “signs of the times” as the hermeneutical framework for interpreting the council itself. Chenu saw secularization as such a sign and took steps to be in regular dialogue with the laity while calling for priests to read Marx and rethinking (without ever officially articulating) the question of female leadership in the church. He looked with hope at the formation of liberation theology, whose leading expositor, Gustavo Gutiérrez, had studied under him.
As a scholar of Aquinas and of medieval theology, Chenu left no doubt about the consequences of bringing form criticism and historical context to these areas. The point was to breathe life into something that centuries of decadent scholasticism had rendered moribund. In one essay he concludes, “The theology that grew out of the twelfth-century schools was and remained abundantly rich in methodological variation until post-Tridentine scholasticism regrettably imposed a system of methodological conformity.”
This kind of insight did not simply tweak scholarly opinion; it disrupted foundations that many had assumed to be settled. Holman appreciates Chenu’s contributions to medieval theology but shifts attention, justifiably in my opinion, to Chenu’s inductive method. In essay after essay (his publications totaled over 1,300), Chenu laments deduction from first principles and instead recommends that theology begin with encounter and lived experience. Holman’s steady hand guides readers through a selection of the most important texts, from the 1930s through the 1980s, that display how one can do “Catholic Theology in a Changing World.”
Holman concludes by underscoring her intention “to treat Chenu as he treated Aquinas, situating him in the social and intellectual context of his own time.” Holman largely succeeds. One comes away with a sense of who Chenu was, especially through the countless letters cited throughout the book.
Still, Holman might have provided broader intellectual context to fulfill her promise. Scholars like Blondel and Lagrange largely drop out of the story after the first chapter, and one never quite knows who Chenu was reading all those decades. De Lubac and Chenu came to occupy very different camps after the council, and one wonders how Chenu would have explained his position to an intellectual peer who had also suffered censure but read the signs of the time much differently. Although it lies beyond the scope of her work, the resurgence of interest in and affection for Garrigou-Lagrange in recent years also signifies something worth noting—perhaps that we need to read more Chenu.
Quibbles aside, Holman’s book represents a real achievement. It engages a figure who embodies the best of 20th-century Catholic theology. Holman has made a notable mark on ressourcement theology and left serious theologians no excuse for forgetting the great Chenu.
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