George Tyrrell advocated a reorganisation of Catholicism. He wanted it to get away from rigid dogmas and to return to its essential message of religion as life-affirming, spiritual and mystical. Tradition was greatly valuable but the truths embedded within tradition had to be sifted from accidental accretions. As Ellen Leonard comments:

“Tyrrell had a deep appreciation for the rich Catholic tradition, although he seems to have preferred to refer to it as ‘life’ rather than as ‘tradition’. He was convinced that the new had to be made out of the old, and yet the past should not be imposed as a dead burden on the present. It must constantly be criticized in order to retain what is essential and to discard what is accidental. Tyrrell opposed any theory which would accept tradition en bloc. Tradition contains truth of all sorts, as gold in the ore. It must be continually sifted and corrected. He insisted that “… the attitude of the Modernists, however critical, is one of attachment to, not detachment from, the Church’s tradition’ “.

[George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition, pp.77-78]

A number of important twentieth century commentators expressed similar views. I deal with them in my forthcoming book Intellectuals and the Decline of Religion.

George Tyrrell believed that the Church was based upon the principles of faith and diversity of form, suitable for all peoples and cultures:

“To speak to each person, each class, each people, each age, in its own language,  on its own presuppositions – scientific, historical, philosophical, nay, even religious – so far from being contrary to, is altogether consonant with, the democratic spirit of the Gospel. The truth spoken is the same, and the whole endeavour of accommodation is inspired by the wish to speak it as fully as the hearer can hear it” [Oil and Wine, 1902}.

Tyrrell was a leading English Catholic Modernist who was ultimately banished by his church for heretical reforming ideas:

“The latter part of Tyrrell’s life (1861-1909) was dominated by a struggle against negative aspects of Catholicism which Tyrrell considered to be abuses of true Catholicism. He had been attracted to Catholicism as a dogmatic religion, a religion of authority, but he soon experienced the misuse of the principle of authority. He observed how Catholicism as a way of life easily deteriorated into ritualism, sacerdotalism or legalism. The Catholic stress on tradition and continuity, instead of acting as a principle of life, could lead to decay and death… The real error of the day for Tyrrell was not ‘modernism’ but ‘medievalism’, the refusal to face contemporary problems, and the binding of Catholicism to sixteenth-century thought-forms. Through his writings he tried to expose these abuses of true Catholicism in order to awaken the Church to the need for renewal” [Ellen Leonard,George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition, 1982, p.32].

Many of Tyrrell’s ideas were to be incorporated into Vatican II in 1965.

George Tyrrell, an important writer on the spiritual life, prophesied this five years before the First World War:

“At present the world that is heard and seen in public, elated with the success of science and the triumphs of invention, confident that what has done so much will do everything, is blind to the appalling residue of human misery and to the insoluble problems that are coming up slowly like storm-clouds on the horizon”

Christianity at the Crossroads (1909).

maude-petre  Click here

Maude Petre was from an aristocratic Catholic English family, who studied in Rome and became head of an order in England. But she was forced out because of her involvement with the Catholic Modernist reform movement. Her close friend and soulmate was the controversial Jesuit George Tyrrell. For an account of their attempts to modernise the church, and resulting “martyrdom”, see Paul’s brief essay on his website dpcrook. wordpress.com.

I’m hoping to have my new book out soon this year with Boolarong Press. It is entitled Intellectuals and the Decline of Religion, and is a series of essays on British writers and thinkers, mainly in the period from the First World War to about the 1970s. They include people like G. K. Chesterton, J. B. Priestley, Arnold Toynbee, R. H. Tawney, Malcolm Muggeridge, Alec Vidler, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot and Joseph Needham.

Latest news – the manuscript has just been sent to Boolarong.

T. S. Eliot was not only a famous poet, but he wrote widely on society, morality and culture. See Paul’s take on Eliot’s After Strange Gods  (1934) by clicking on his essay in his website dpcrook.wordsmith.com (blog). Here Eliot discusses the moral decline of society, modernism, criticism, and writers such as Lawrence, Pound and Yeats.

Click here: ts-eliot

“The number of people in possession of any criteria for discriminating between good and evil is very small; the number of the half-alive hungry for any form of spiritual experience, or what offers itself as spiritual experience, high or low, good or bad, is considerable. My own generation has not served them very well. Never has the printing-press been so busy, and never have such varieties of buncombe and false doctrine come from it”

[T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 1934,p.61].

Is this still true?

In a recent article Andrew Seddons examines works that have “debunked” Richard Dawkins’s arguments in books such as The God Delusion. To give a few examples, Thomas Crean finds Dawkins’s ideas of the origin of religion to be “lame”; Dawkins misrepresents the Bible, ethics and Catholic doctrine; Jesus did not preach only for an “in-group”, nor does Dawkins understand original sin, the Atonement, or the relation between faith and reason [see Crean’s God Is No Delusion].

The Oxford professor of historical theology Alister McGrath contends that The God Delusion “is often little more than an aggregation of convenient factoids suitably overstated to achieve maximum impact and loosely arranged to suggest that they constitute an argument”. The Protestant writer Vox Day counters common atheist criticisms of Christian historical abuses, which of course occurred but have been put out of perspective: “Do you want to know how many people died in the Spanish Inquisition…? Fewer than the state of Texas executes every year. How many people died under atheist regimes (a topic that atheists try to sweep under the rug)? About 150 million. How many wars in history were religious wars (since the atheists claim that religion is a major cause of war)? About 7 percent of history’s approximately 1800 significant conflicts. And so on from Socrates to the European Union”.

Just google Seddons’s “Dawkins’ Debunkers” (in Catholic Answers Magazine).

The American Orthodox philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart certainly thinks so: “It probably says more than it is comfortable to know about the relative vapidity of our culture that we have lost the capacity to produce profound unbelief. The best that we can now hope for are arguments pursued at only the most vulgar of intellectual levels, couched in an infantile and carpingly pompous tone, and lacking all but the meagerest traces of historical erudition or syllogistic rigor”. He attacks people such as Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens; and says of Richard Dawkins that he triumphantly adduces “philosophical” arguments “that a college freshman midway through his first logic course could dismantle in a trice”.

Sensationalism, of course sells better than sense: “One still has to wonder…at their thoughtless complacency: the doctrinaire materialism – which is, after all, a metaphysical theory of reality that is almost certainly logically impossible – and the equally doctrinaire secularism – which is, as even the least attentive among us might have noticed, a classical tradition so steeped in human blood that it can hardly be said to have proved its ethical superiority”[Atheist Delusions, pp.220-221].

See also his The Experience of God [20130.