The current century has seen a timely and welcome English-language ressourcement of ressourcement theology/nouvelle théologie. To biographies, studies and rereadings of individual theologians – Gabriel Flynn, Elizabeth Groppe on Congar; Christophe Potworowski on Chenu; Eileen Scully on Bouillard; David Grummet on de Lubac; Olivia Blanchette on Blondel, to mention but a few – we can add a number of high-standard works which take a broader view of the whole ‘movement’. These include Hans Boersma's Nouvelle théologie and Sacramental Ontology and Heavenly Participation; Gabriel Flynn's and Paul D. Murray's edited volume Ressourcement; and Jürgen Mettepenningen's Nouvelle théologie – New Theology. Each of these, in its own way, solidly locates the nouvelle théologie, or ressourcement, undertaken by a group of French religious during the inter-war period, within a socio-cultural, intellectual and theological context; they are also properly attentive to theological, political and social hinterlands.
Jon Kirwan's interesting new monograph, An Avant-Garde Theological Generation aims, according to the cover blurb, ‘to remedy certain historical deficiencies by constructing a history that is sensitive to the wider intellectual, political, economic, and cultural milieu of the French interwar crisis’. Kirwan seeks to cover all the thinkers associated with the nouvelle théologie and takes his survey up to Vatican II and beyond. While this certainly gives breadth, limiting the scope to the readings, interpretations and use that de Lubac and other Fourvière Jesuits made of Rousselot and Blondel, for instance, would have resulted in a more focused work. Kirwan has employed a generational theory methodology, locating the protagonists within a wider cultural history. This is a new and interesting approach, although it is not always convincing, as Kirwan is at the mercy of the plethora of competing terminologies used by generational cultural historians.
More judicious editing would have aided the reader: chapter titles and subheadings often imply and claim material which is absent or presented so briefly it is easy to miss. An example would be the reference in a subheading (p. 73) to Sertillanges and Mandonnet, who are then ignored in the text (although Sertillanges receives a mention later in the work, Mandonnet never makes another appearance); d'Alès suffered the same fate in the previous section (p. 72). More attentive copy-editing and proof-reading would have put paid to typographical errors (missing accents, mis-spelled names, inconsistent italics for French institutions).
Despite the cultural history approach, there is often a lack of political and historiographical context. The Front Populaire is insufficiently embedded in its fuller political context; Left Catholicism and Social Catholicism (entirely different) are confused, while the historiography around Catholic Action is misunderstood; and the turn of Catholic theology across Europe and North America to the Mystical Body in the inter-war period is described as a phenomenon of French nouvelle théologie. Similarly, while Kirwan is correctly very attentive to the impact of the First World War on the protagonists’ generation, this is at the expense of the legacy of their enforced exile from France during the early years of their religious novitiates.
Kirwan deserves high praise for his careful use of well-chosen archival material. His delving in the Jesuit archives has revealed much fascinating documentation to demonstrate the discovery of, early dependence on and ongoing development of Blondel and Rousselot by de Lubac, Fessard, de Montcheuil and Bouillard, shedding some new light on these protagonists. The work on de Montcheuil, so neglected in English-language scholarship, is especially valuable, and will serve well those students of ressourcement who are unable to access the original texts. The use of archival material to prove intellectual ‘descent’ is generally masterly. The ‘close reading’ Kirwan engages of certain ‘key’ texts by a number of theologians – including Chenu and Congar – is likewise worthy of praise, although in most cases a synthesis of several texts by different authors would have made the argument more strongly than point-by-point review of a single text. Overall the addition of Chenu and Congar adds little that is new to our understanding of these theologians, and this applies to the treatment of Le Saulchoir in general. Nonetheless, this work may be added to library shelves to complement collections on ressourcement or nouvelle théologie; it will add an interesting breadth to our readings of this incredible flourishing of theology. I congratulate Kirwan on his achievement.
