George Tyrrell

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

SJ
Orders
Ordination1891
Personal details
Born(1861-02-06)6 February 1861
Died15 July 1909(1909-07-15) (aged 48)
Storrington, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
DenominationRoman Catholic, Latin Church
Occupation
  • Priest
  • theologian
  • scholar

George Tyrrell

Jesuit order in 1880. His attempts to adapt Catholic theology to modern culture and science made him a key figure in the debate over modernism in the Catholic Church beginning in the late 19th-century. During the anti-modernist crusade led by Pope Pius X, Tyrrell was expelled from the Jesuit Order in 1906 and excommunicated
in 1908.

Early life

Tyrrell was born on 6 February 1861 in Dublin, Ireland. His father, a journalist, died shortly before Tyrrell was born. George was first cousin to Irish classical scholar Robert Yelverton Tyrrell. A childhood accident resulted in George eventually becoming deaf in the right ear.[1] The family had to move repeatedly due to financial straits.

Tyrrell was brought up as an

Trinity College, Dublin, but he failed the required examination twice. Around 1877 he met Robert Dolling, an Anglo-Catholic priest who had a strong influence on him. In August 1878, Tyrrell took a teaching post at Wexford High School, but in October he matriculated at Trinity College, on the advice of Dolling, hoping to train for the Anglican ministry.[1]

Jesuit

In the spring of 1879, at Dolling's invitation, Tyrrell went to London to work for the

Society of Jesus, but the provincial superior advised him to wait a year. He spent the interim teaching at Jesuit schools in Cyprus and Malta.[2] He joined the Jesuits in 1880 and was sent to the novitiate at Manresa House
.

As early as 1882, his novice master suggested that Tyrrell withdraw from the Jesuits due to a "mental indocility" and a 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

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 serious conflicts with his superiors over the traditional Jesuit approach to teaching philosophy.[2]

Pope Leo XIII's 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris had promoted the teaching of a Scholastic philosophy, based on the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Catholic schools and seminaries. Tyrrell admired Aquinas, but he rejected the Scholastic approach as inadequate. He became convinced that the Jesuits were not teaching the work of Aquinas himself, but rather the narrow interpretation of it introduced by Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez.

In 1896, Tyrrell was transferred to the Jesuit House on Farm Street in London.[3] 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 view of moderate liberalism.

Modernist controversy

Between 1891 and 1906, Tyrrell published more than twenty articles in Catholic periodicals, many of them in the United States.[4] In 1899 Tyrrell published A Perverted Devotion. The article concerned the concept of hell. Given "the essential incapacity of finite mind to seize the absolute end which governs and moves everything towards itself",[5] Tyrrell recognized that some subjects were matters of "faith and mystery". He "preferred to admit that the Christian doctrine of hell as simply a very great mystery, one difficult to reconcile with any just appreciation of the concept of an all-loving God".[6] He argued that the rationalist approach of the Scholastics was not applicable to matters of faith. Although reviewed by a number of English Jesuits, including Herbert Thurston, who found no fault with it, the Father General determined that it was "offensive to pious ears". Tyrrell was assigned to a small mission in Richmond, where he deeply appreciated the peace and quiet. In January 1901, he declined a re-assignment back to St. Helen's.

Tyrrell was critical both of the Catholic neo-Scholasticism and of the

Holy Spirit in the Church".[8]

Expulsion and excommunication

The stone erected at the grave of George Tyrrell

Asked in 1906 to repudiate his theories, Tyrrell declined and was dismissed from the Jesuits by

Franz X. Wernz. He was the only Jesuit to be expelled from the society in the twentieth century until a subsequent Father General, Pedro Arrupe, expelled the Dutch priest Huub Oosterhuis
in 1969. Modernism played a major role in both cases.

With the condemnation of modernism, first in the 65 propositions of the decree

Pascendi dominici gregis in September 1907, Tyrrell's fate was sealed. Tyrrell contributed two letters to The Times in which he strongly criticized that encyclical.[3] For his public rejection of Pascendi, Tyrrell was also deprived of the sacraments, in what Peter Amigo, the Bishop of Southwark, characterized as "a minor excommunication".[9]

In his rebuttal of Pius X's encyclical, Tyrrell alleged that the Church's thinking was based on a

Scholastic theology and of having a completely naïve view of doctrinal development. He furthermore asserted that the encyclical tried to show the "modernist" that he was not a Catholic, but succeeded only in showing that he was not a Scholastic.[2]

Unlike

Holy Office. His fate rested in the hands of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Rafael Merry del Val, who collaborated closely with Bishop Amigo.[10]

Death

Tyrrell's last two years were spent mainly in

extreme unction on his deathbed in 1909, but as he refused to abjure his modernist views was denied burial in a Catholic cemetery.[11] 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. Bremond a divinis.[12]

A near contemporary account on The New York Times places most of the blame for the disagreement between the modern Catholic philosophers and the Vatican on Cardinal Merry del Val's "irreconcilable and reactionary attitude".[13]

Selected writings

Articles

References

Further reading

External links