George Tyrrell

George Tyrrell (6 February 1861 – 15 July 1909) was an Anglo-Irish Catholic priest and a controversial theologian and scholar. A convert from Anglicanism, Tyrrell joined the Jesuit order in 1880 and was ordained as a priest in 1891. He was a prolific writer whose efforts to adapt and reinterpret Catholic teachings in light of modern science and culture made him a central figure in the controversy over modernism in the Catholic Church that flared up towards the end of the 19th century. Tyrrell rejected the neo-scholastic thinking then dominant among the Jesuits and in the Vatican, insisting that the Church's response to the problems faced by modern believers could not be merely to reiterate the theological and philosophical doctrines systematized in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas.

Tyrrell enjoyed a high reputation as a liberal Catholic author in the late 1890s, but he then came into conflict with his Jesuit superiors and with the Vatican authorities. The anti-modernist campaign launched by Pope Pius X led to Tyrrell's expulsion from the Jesuits in 1906. After Pius condemned modernism in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), Tyrrell wrote two letters to the London Times rejecting its reasoning and conclusions. This led to his excommunication by the Bishop of Southwark, Peter Amigo. Tyrrell never recanted his modernist opinions, but he did not abandon the Catholic Church and received the Catholic last rites just before his death in 1909.

Early life

George Tyrrell was born on 6 February 1861 in the city of Dublin. His father William Tyrrell, a journalist and sub-editor of the Dublin Evening Mail, had died shortly before George's birth. The Tyrrells belonged to the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and were intellectually distinguished. George was a first cousin of the classicist Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, who became Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, in the University of Dublin.

The family had to move repeatedly due to the financial straits in which it fell after the father's death. George's elder brother "Willie", although crippled in infancy by a fracture of the spine and afflicted by persistent ill health, was a brilliant student at Rathmines School and went on to an outstanding career as a classicist at Trinity College, before his early death in 1876.

The headmaster of Rathmines, Dr Benson, agreed to remit George's fees in light of the success of his brother Willie, and George entered the school in 1869. His performance was poor, however, and his mother sent him as a boarder to Midleton College, where he was subjected to a tougher discipline. Around 1877 he met Robert Dolling, an Anglo-Catholic priest and a Christian socialist who would go one to exert a strong influence on Tyrell. He joined the Jesuits in 1880 and was sent to the novitiate at Manresa House, in Roehampton. As early as 1882, his novice master suggested that Tyrrell withdraw from the Jesuits due to "mental indocility" and dissatisfaction with a number of Jesuit customs, approaches, and practices. Tyrrell was, however, allowed to remain. He later stated that he believed he was more inclined to the Benedictine spirituality.

After taking his first vows, Tyrrell was sent to Stonyhurst College to study philosophy as the first stage in his Jesuit formation. He then returned to the Jesuit school in Malta, where he spent three years teaching, before being sent to St Beuno's College, in Wales, to take up his theological studies. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1891. After a brief period of pastoral work in Lancashire, Tyrrell returned to Roehampton for his Tertianship. In 1893, he lived briefly at the Jesuit mission house in Oxford, before taking up pastoral work at St Helens, Merseyside, where he was reportedly happiest during his time as a Jesuit. A little over a year later, he was sent to teach philosophy at Stonyhurst. Tyrrell then began to have conflicts with his superiors over the traditional Jesuit approach to teaching philosophy. There Tyrrell discovered the work of Maurice Blondel. He was also influenced by Alfred Loisy's biblical scholarship. Tyrrell first met Friedrich von Hügel in October 1897 and they became close friends. Part of Tyrrell's work while at Farm Street was writing articles for the Jesuit periodical The Month. He had the occasion to review some works by Wilfrid Ward, and for a time, came to share Ward's views of a moderate Catholic liberalism. Tyrrell's gifts of literary expression were showcased in two collections of religious meditations, Nova et vetera (1897) and Hard Sayings (1898). That work earned him a wide readership and a reputation as a liberal Catholic thinker in the mould of John Henry Newman. In "The relation of theology to devotion", which appeared in The Month in 1899, Tyrrell argued for the primacy of devotion over the intellectual abstractions of philosophy and theology. Tyrrell was critical both of Catholic neo-Scholasticism and of the liberal Protestant scholarship of the day. In an often quoted attack on Adolf von Harnack's approach to Biblical criticism, Tyrrell wrote that "the Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of 'Catholic darkness', is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well." On the other hand, Tyrrell advocated "the right of each age to adjust the historico-philosophical expression of Christianity to contemporary certainties, and thus to put an end to this utterly needless conflict between faith and science which is a mere theological bogey." In Tyrrell's view, the pope should not act as an autocrat but a "spokesman for the mind of the Holy Spirit in the Church". According to Tyrrell, the dogmas of the church were unchangeable because they were imposed authoritatively as the Word of God, not as a conclusion of theological reflection. In other words, the theological form of dogma was as expression of the dovma, not the dogma itself. Tyrrell befriended other Catholic intellectuals who shared his concerns about reconciling Church doctrine with modern thought, including the English nun Maude Petre and the French Jesuit priest Henri Brémond. The English Jesuit Herbert Thurston had reviewed and authorized the article for publication, but it aroused controversy in Rome and was later found to be "offensive to pious ears" by Father General Luis Martín. Tyrrell was then assigned to a small Jesuit residence in Richmond, North Yorkshire, which he jokingly called domus impossibilium nostrorum ("the house of our impossibles"). There Tyrrell enjoyed the peace and quiet afforded by his lack of responsibilities, the distance from London, and the policy of the Jesuit in charge of the residence, Fr. Farmer, of not interfering with Tyrrell's personal activities.

Tyrrell argued that Pascendi illegitimately equated Catholic doctrine with a specific reading of Scholasticism, thus reflecting a wholly naïve view of the historical development of the Church. While Pascendi intended to show that the "modernist" is not a Catholic, Tyrrell argued that it succeeded only in showing that he is not a Scholastic. Unlike his contemporary the French modernist theologian Alfred Loisy, Tyrrell was never tried by the Congregation of Index or by the Holy Office. His case was always in the hands of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Rafael Merry del Val, who worked closely with Bishop Amigo. Loisy was declared by the Vatican in 1908 to be vitandus (i.e., to be shunned by Catholics), but this was never the case of Tyrrell.

In The Program of Modernism (1907), Tyrrell embraced the label of "modernist" and argued that, far from being a straightforward deduction from revelation and primitive Christianity, the scholasticism upheld by Pius X had been a synthesis of the Christian faith with the culture of the late Middle Ages, and therefore a sort of "modernism" of the 13th century. A priest, his friend Henri Brémond, was present at the burial and made a sign of the cross over Tyrrell's grave, which resulted in Bishop Amigo temporarily suspending Fr. Brémond a divinis.

In a letter to Arthur Boutwood, Tyrrell had said shortly before his death that "my own work —which I regard as done— has been to raise a question which I have failed to answer", namely the meaning of Christianity in the modern world.

A Much-Abused Letter, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907
Medievalism: A Reply to Cardinal Mercier, Longmans, Green, and Co. 1908
The Church and the Future, The Priory Press, 1910
Christianity at the Cross-Roads, Longmans, Green and Co., 1910
Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, Edward Arnold, 1912
Essays on Faith and Immortality, Edward Arnold, 1914

Articles

"The Clergy and the Social Problem," The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XXII, 1897.
"The Old Faith and the New Woman", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XXII, 1897.
"The Church and Scholasticism", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XXIII, 1898.

George Tyrrell

Early life

References

Further reading

External links