This comprehensive volume offers thirty-three essays on the indispensable key for understanding Vatican II, namely, the twentieth-century theological movement(s) known as ressourcement (“return to the sources”). These renewal currents came to a head in the three decades before Pope John XXIII announced that he intended to convoke an ecumenical council for the sake of aggiornamento.

The volume's four sections treat the movement's history and context, seven of its central figures, its biblical, liturgical, and patristic strands, and its impact on church and culture, including Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity. Gabriel Flynn's substantial introduction and John McDade's provocative epilogue serve as bookends. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, because the essays complement each other, while also in places correcting each other. Some repetition occurs, along with problematic aspects discussed below, but I congratulate the editors for their ambitious project. It is not the last word on this complex movement, but this volume is an excellent place to start. The fifty-page bibliography is also a rich resource.

Ressourcement, a term attributed to poet and social critic Charles Péguy (4), was defined by Yves Congar as “a new examination of the permanent sources of theology: the Bible, liturgy, the Fathers (Latins and Greeks)” (224). Delineating the contours of the movement is more challenging. Nineteenth-century antecedents appear, such as Johann Adam Möhler and the Tübingen School, John Henry Newman, Matthias Scheeben, and the Roman theologians Clemens Schrader and Johann Baptist Franzelin. Some scholars who lived through the Modernist crisis and its aftermath kept alive questions concerning historical method and development and the significance of subjectivity and spiritual experience in doing theology, and thereby prepared the generation that directly influenced Vatican II. Ambroise Gardeil, Marie-Joseph Lagrange, A. G. Sertillanges, Pierre Rousselot, Léonce de Grandmaison, Jules Lebreton, and others appear in various essays, although several of these names are missing from the index. But the main spotlight falls on the generation that came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, especially the two outstanding catalysts of ressourcement, Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar, to whom the volume is dedicated. Beyond their own seminal publications, they launched the collaborative publishing projects Unam Sanctam, Sources chrétiennes, and Théologie between 1937 and 1943. Congar was formed at the Dominican center of Le Saulchoir, first in exile in Belgium and then in Paris, under the significant influence of Marie-Dominique Chenu's historical approach. De Lubac was influential at the Jesuit theologate at Lyon/Fourvière where his patristic and medieval studies influenced Jean Daniélou, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and others. Encouraged by Congar, the publication of de Lubac's Catholicisme (1937/1938) was programmatic. However, the movement is larger than this French berceau. The volume takes note of work in the German sphere, but there are lacunae, such as Josef Jungmann's The Mass of the Roman Rite and Max Meinertz's work, the “first theology of the New Testament worthy of the name to be published by a Catholic” (Roger Aubert). Xavier Léon-Dufour's Dictionary of Biblical Theology also deserves note.

Furthermore, the movement connected with other renewal currents, some of which (like Congar's pioneering ecumenical work) receive detailed attention, and others (e.g., developments in the social apostolate) make cameo appearances. Very significant is the French sociopolitical context, which Flynn treats in the introduction—that is, the opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism and Vichy by de Lubac, Congar, Gaston Fessard, and Yves de Montcheuil, who was executed by the Gestapo.Footnote ¹ Michael Conway's essay touches on Maurice Blondel's opposition to the proto-Fascist, neo-monarchist movement Action Française, although that is not what initially motivated his defense of the Semaines Sociales. The volume lacks a more detailed treatment of the consequences of Pope Pius XI's 1926 condemnation of Action Française for Congar's and de Lubac's generation.Footnote ² One has to go beyond Benedict Viviano's mystifying remark that “de Lubac and Daniélou had not yet clearly broken with the sterile politics of Bourbon restoration (Action française)” (315), for example, to treat the scandalous endorsement of Vichy by Maurrasian Thomists like Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, who fiercely opposed the nouvelle théologie in the 1940s. In the light of this tragic history, a more serious lacuna in the book is a treatment of the beginnings of the recovery of the Jewish matrix of Christianity, the importance of which is acknowledged in McDade's epilogue.Footnote ³ Pius XI famously said: “Spiritually we are Semites.”

Several essays treat the so-called nouvelle théologie, which overlaps but is not identical with the ressourcement movement. This label aimed to cast suspicion on Henri Bouillard, Marie-Dominique Chenu, de Lubac, and Daniélou by likening some of their ideas to the Modernism that the church had rejected thirty years before. The neo-Thomist opponents targeted Bouillard's claim that “a theology that would not be current (actuelle) would be a false theology” (145). Joseph Komonchak's essay narrates this controversy, which culminates in Pius XII's warning against “dogmatic relativism” in Humani Generis (1950). Unfortunately, an editing error on page 151 truncates an important section of the encyclical that states that “theology through the study of its sacred sources remains ever fresh; on the other hand, speculation which neglects a deeper research into the deposit of faith, proves sterile, as we know from experience” (#21). Ressourcement theologians would obviously agree, although the encyclical ties this study to the manualist method to be discussed below. In any event, de Lubac and Congar had to endure Vatican repression of their work until they were rehabilitated by John XXIII's surprising appointment of them as consultants to Vatican II's Preparatory Theological Commission and by John Paul II's later honoring them with the cardinalate.

We read frequently of these theologians' concern for pastoral renewal in the face of the de-Christianization of society and the spread of pernicious ideologies. Theology needed to resume contact with the daily life of the people of God. This relates to their second concern, a shared repugnance for the “arid,” “rationalist,” “narrow” neo-Scholastic theology, likened to a “wax mask” by Congar—namely, the “manualist theology” of the post-Tridentine era. They viewed this theology as unresponsive to contemporary needs, with its “polemical mixture of defensiveness, aggression, ahistoricism, a fixation on ecclesiastical authority (or the lack thereof), and a rather modern neo-scholasticism draping itself in the trappings of timeless tradition” (186) that employed a regressive, proof-texting method in support of the Magisterium's teaching. Essays by Christopher Ruddy and Gerald O'Collins describe this method, which owed more to Melchior Cano, the sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican, than to Thomas Aquinas.

Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) proved to be an encouragement to “ressourcement Thomism.” Étienne Gilson and Chenu promoted a historically oriented, open Thomism freed from the essentialism of Garrigou-Lagrange. Transcendental Thomists, notably Joseph Maréchal and Karl Rahner, who is the subject of Richard Lennan's essay, integrated elements of modern philosophy. Congar and de Lubac severely criticized “Baroque” Scholasticism—namely, Thomism as filtered through Cajetan, Suarez, and others; de Lubac contended this was a disastrous rupture in the tradition. These combined assaults on neo-Scholasticism led to what Walter Kasper has called “the outstanding event in the Catholic theology [of the twentieth century,] the surmounting of neo-scholasticism.”Footnote ⁴ However, fifty years after Vatican II, one may wonder if the baby was not thrown out with the bathwater. Have not enduring values in the Scholastic method been jettisoned, such as distinction of terms, systematic organization, philosophical ontology and epistemological realism, and the system of theological “notes”? Theology surely needed to be renewed by a return to its sources, but have the requirements for a viable speculative theology been unintendedly undermined?

This history is germane to the disputes over the natural-supernatural relationship, which “was arguably at the heart of the nouvelle théologie project” (44). Jürgen Mettepenningen's essay notes Fergus Kerr's contention that de Lubac's Surnaturel (1946), which sought to overcome an extrinsicist understanding of this relationship that de Lubac traced to the Baroque Scholastics, “brought about the greatest crisis that twentieth-century Thomism—and perhaps even Catholic theology of the [twentieth] century as a whole—had ever faced” (178). De Lubac attributed to Blondel, Garrigou-Lagrange's bête noire, the “main impulse” to overcoming the “dualist theory which was destroying Christian thought.”Footnote ⁵ Indeed, Blondel's philosophy of action is “foundational to the entire edifice of Ressourcement theology” (66), including the recovery of a far richer understanding of tradition and the integration of history and dogma that bedeviled the Modernist era. Many of the volume's essays touch on the nature-grace relationship, which, unfortunately, is not adequately referenced in the subject index. Stephen Fields states that it is the “key to dialogue between ressourcement and Thomism” in his treatment (356–58). However, de Lubac's interpretation incurred criticism, not only from neo-Scholastics like Garrigou-Lagrange, but also from admirers like Balthasar, treated by Edward Oakes (requiescat in pace). Even Blondel had difficulties with de Lubac's understanding.Footnote ⁶ De Lubac's reading of the tradition continues to be controversial, not least in its appropriation by the Radical Orthodoxy theologians.

The volume also touches on the debate over the relationship between nouvelle théologie and Modernism that was condemned as the “synthesis of all heresies” by Pope Pius X. Gerard Loughlin's essay argues for elements of continuity, while Hans Boersma highlights the nouvelle théologie's recovery of “sacramental ontology,” which was missing from Modernism, restoring a feeling for the Glory of God.

Several essays relate the volume's topic to Vatican II, at which several preparatory schemata were dramatically set aside or thoroughly reworked to integrate the fruits of ressourcement. In France as nuncio from 1945 to 1953, John XXIII had studied Congar's Vraie et fausse réforme dans l'Église.Footnote ⁷ In his opening address to the council participants, he effectively endorsed a surmounting of the official neo-Scholasticism: “The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.” Both Brian Daley and O'Collins show how ressourcement shaped Vatican II's Dei Verbum, the most important theological document of the council. The neo-Scholastic propositional understanding of revelation gave way to a unitary, sacramental understanding of God's saving words and deeds that culminate in Christ, whose saving death, resurrection, and sending of the Holy Spirit is God's definitive self-revelation. Biblical ressourcement appears in the affirmation that Sacred Scripture is “the soul of sacred theology” (Dei Verbum 24) and that “biblical themes be treated first” in dogmatic theology (Optatum Totius 16). Of course, this does not solve the problem of integrating the use of historical-critical methods with the spiritual senses of Scripture championed by de Lubac.

More is said about ressourcement and Vatican II—for example, its impact on Lumen Gentium and Ad Gentes, as presented by O'Collins. Paul McPartlan shows how Vatican II incorporated the fruits of the eucharistic ecclesiology especially championed by de Lubac. As a second-generation ressourcement theologian and a peritus at Vatican II, Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Emeritus Benedict is the subject of the only collaboratively authored essay.

Two distinctive terms are indelibly associated with the Second Vatican Council: ressourcement and aggiornamento. This volume is a major scholarly resource for understanding the fruitful interrelationship of these two terms that came to fruition in the documents of Vatican II and that continues to invigorate the contemporary church.