One is One and All Alone and Evermore Shall Be So

Extract

For English speaking readers of my generation Simone Weil was one of a galaxy of French writers who came to the fore just after the last war. I am thinking particularly of Congar, de Lubac, Daniélou, arid Marcel. Time has dealt with their reputations very differently. Who remembers Marcel now? If Cardinal Daniélou is known to more people than Father Daniélou ever was, it is for rather special reasons. But in total these writers were a major cause of that aggiormamento in the Church we are still learning to cope with. They put out ways of thinking about theology both radically new and very traditional and in the process they devalued utterly the bankrupt pseudo-scholasticism that then ruled the roost. The most important of these writers were unquestionably de Lubac and Congar: but Daniélou too, is not to be forgotten with his work on typology. These theologians were among the first to have what is now commonplace—genuine argument and discussion with non-papist theologians of similar status. Some of them took part in an ecumenical seminar in Paris out of which came Oscar Cullmann’s magisterial book on Peter. Less well-known than these is the Anglican Father Hebert, whose books on The Authority of the Old Testament and the Throne of David had considerable influence on Daniélou (to put it mildly). It is symptomatic of the time that I myself first heard of Hebert’s books through Daniélou’s review in Dieu Vivant. This periodical was the New Blackfriars of the day; although it was no more all-embracing of the Catholic intellectual milieu than is New Blackfriars, it was equally representative of an important current of opinion.