George Tyrrell

For the Union Army Medal of Honor recipient, see George William Tyrrell. For the British geologist and glaciologist, see George Walter Tyrrell. For the British mathematician, physicist, radio engineer and parapsychologist, see George Nugent Merle Tyrrell.

George Tyrrell SJ (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 doctrines systematized in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas.

The Reverend George Tyrrell SJ
Orders
Ordination	1891
Personal details
Born	(1861-02-06)6 February 1861 Dublin, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Died	15 July 1909(1909-07-15) (aged 48) Storrington, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Denomination	Roman Catholic, Latin Church
Occupation	Priest theologian scholar

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 (1908), Tyrrell wrote two letters to the London Times rejecting its reasoning and conclusions. Their publication caused him to be excommunicated by the Bishop of Southwark, Peter Amigo. Tyrrell never recanted his modernist opinions, but he 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, 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, Dublin. A childhood accident resulted in George eventually becoming deaf in the right ear.^[1]: 33 The family had to move repeatedly due to the financial straits in which it fell after the death of George's father.

George was brought up as an Anglican and around 1869 he attended Rathmines School, near Dublin. He was educated from 1873 at Midleton College, an institution affiliated with the Church of Ireland, but his mother had difficulty affording the fees and he left early. In 1876–77, he studied privately in the hopes of earning a scholarship to study Hebrew at Trinity College, but he failed the required examination twice, much to the distress of his mother.

In Dublin, Tyrrell attended All Saints Church, Grangegorman, where he was exposed to a moderate Anglicanism.^[2] Around 1877 he met Robert Dolling, an Anglo-Catholic priest and a Christian socialist who had a strong influence on Tyrrell.^[2] 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]: 135

Jesuit

In the spring of 1879, at Dolling's invitation, Tyrrell went to London to work for the Saint Martin's League, a sort of mission that Dolling was organizing. On Palm Sunday, Tyrrell wandered into St Etheldreda's, a Catholic church on Ely Place. He was powerfully struck by the Catholic Mass, about which he would say in his autobiography: "Here was the old business, being carried on by the old firm, in the old ways; here was continuity, that took one back to the catacombs."^[1]: 153 He converted and was received into the Catholic Church in 1879. He immediately applied to join 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.^[3] 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 Stonyhurst College to study philosophy as the first stage in his Jesuit formation. Having completed his studies at Stonyhurst, he next returned to the Jesuit school in Malta, where he spent three years teaching. He then went 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 serious conflicts with his superiors over the traditional Jesuit approach to teaching philosophy.^[3]

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 centuries later by Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (see Neo-scholasticism).

In 1896, Tyrrell was transferred to the Jesuit House on Farm Street in London.^[4] 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. 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.^[2]

Modernist controversy

Between 1891 and 1906, Tyrrell published more than twenty articles in Catholic periodicals, many of them in the United States.^[5] 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.^[2] He insisted that philosophy and theology may clarify the misunderstandings that arise from a naïve devotion, but that

God has revealed himself [...] not to the theologian or the philosopher, but to babes, to fishermen, to peasants [...] and therefore He has spoken their language, leaving it to the others to translate it (at their own risk) into forms more aceptable to their taste.^[2]

In External Religion (1899), Tyrrell argued that all of the structures and sacraments of the Church exist only to help reproduce the life of Jesus in the lives of his followers.^[2] 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."^[6] 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."^[7]: 185 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".^[8] 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.^[2]

Tyrrell's open conflict with the Catholic authorities was triggered by his article "A Perverted Devotion", published in the Weekly Register in 1899, in which he criticized the literalistic preachings on hell by two Redemptorist authors.^[2] Given "the essential incapacity of finite mind to seize the absolute end which governs and moves everything towards itself",^[7]: 118 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".^[9] 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 mission in Richmond, where he deeply appreciated the peace and quiet. In January 1901, he declined a re-assignment back to St. Helen's.

Between 1900 and 1904, Tyrrell published several pseudonymous works that emphasized the primacy of the human will over the intellect and the capacity of the will to be united with God. In those works he also described the Catholic Church as fallible but also as a vehicle to the immanent Spirit.^[2]

Expulsion and excommunication

Tyrrel's Jesuit superiors ordered him in 1906 to repudiate his modernist theses. Tyrrell refused to do so and was consequently dismissed from the Jesuits by Father General Franz X. Wernz. He was the only Jesuit expelled from the society in the 20th century until a subsequent Father General, Pedro Arrupe, expelled the Dutch priest Huub Oosterhuis in 1969.

With the explicit condemnation of modernism by Pope Pius X, first in the decree Lamentabili sane exitu of July 1907 and then in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis of September 1907, Tyrrell's fate was sealed. Tyrrell wrote two letters to The Times in which he strongly criticized that encyclical.^[4] According to Tyrrell,

The whole of this vast controversial structure is poised by a most ingenious, logical tour de force on the apex of a science-theory and psychology that are as strange as astrology to the modern mind, and are practically unknown outside Seminary walls, save to the historian of philosophy. Touch this science-theory, and the whole argument is in ruins.^[10]

According to Tyrrell, Pascendi equated Catholic doctrine with Scholasticism, thus reflecting a wholly naïve view of the historical development of the Church. Thus, while Pascendi intended to show that the "modernist" is not a Catholic, it succeeded only in showing that he is not a Scholastic.^[3] For this public rejection of Pascendi, Tyrrell was deprived of the sacraments in what Peter Amigo, the Bishop of Southwark, characterized as "a minor excommunication".^[11] 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.^[12]

Death and legacy

The stone erected at the grave of George Tyrrell

Tyrrell's last two years were spent mainly in Storrington. He suffered from chronic nephritis (known by physicians at the time as "Bright's disease") and became increasingly ill. He was given extreme unction on his deathbed in 1909, but as he refused to abjure his modernist views he was denied burial in a Catholic cemetery.^[13] 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.^[14]

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.^[2] Tyrrell was convinced that Christianity had to face up to the challenges of biblical criticism and natural science, but he was personally ill-equipped to deal with them at a deep intellectual level. His biographer Nicholas Sagovsky considers that Tyrrell's talents lay primarily in the "literary communication of religious ideas".^[2] According to Sagovsky, many of the reforms that Tyrrell advocated were eventually adopted by the Catholic Church in the years following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), but "it is doubtful whether the institutional Roman Catholic church in any age could have contained a spiritual writer so gifted, so reckless, and so provocative".^[2]

Selected writings

• Nova et Vetera: Informal Meditations, 1897
• Hard Sayings: A Selection of Meditations and Studies, Longmans, Green & Co., 1898
• External Religion: Its Use and Abuse, B. Herder, 1899
• The Faith of the Millions 1901
• Lex Orandi: or, Prayer & Creed, Longmans, Green & Co., 1903
• Lex Credendi: A Sequel to Lex Orandi, Longmans, Green & Co., 1906
• Through Scylla and Charybdis: or, The Old Theology and the New, Longmans, Green & Co., 1907^[15]
• 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^[16]
• 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.