By Fr. Bud Grant
SAU Theological Perspective
A few weeks ago, I participated in the Oxford Patristics Conference at Oxford University. My great friend and colleague, Dr. Ethan Gannaway, and a group of nine other Ambrose scholars from around the world joined me. St. Ambrose was the topic of about 15 of 1,000 or so papers given that week. Our group gave talks on St. Ambrose’s Hexameron, a collection of nine homilies that he gave on the Six Days of Creation. My topic was Natural Law in Ambrose. To get there I employed a theological strategy called ressourcement, which has an interesting backstory.
In the 17th century, Catholic theology was reduced to “manualism.” The term refers to the manuals that teachers used, derived from St. Thomas Aquinas, which provided black and white answers to all the big questions of faith. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII went so far as to require Catholic colleges to teach only St. Thomas. In 1950, Pope Pius XII condemned as “modernist” any other approach to theology.
The problem was that, since St. Thomas died in 1274, his answers were a bit, ah, outdated. More importantly, St. Thomas himself would have objected to using his works as if they were the source of all truth. His genius was in joining God-given reason in creative tension with God-given faith. He only insisted on one universal principle of natural law, which is that “good is to be done and to be pursued and evil to be avoided.” His specific applications of that truth to his world and time were never intended to be universally authoritative.
By 1920, Catholic theology was mired in this neo-scholastic manualist quagmire, unable to respond to contemporary needs, drifting into irrelevance and resisting all attempts to change. Then a group of French Jesuit theologians decided to rebel. They called their idea ressourcement, deliberately choosing a French word rather than Latin.
Ressourcement was a call to re-source biblical and patristic sources to address contemporary issues, in other words, to do what St. Thomas did, but for our world and time. In 1962, guided by Pope John XXIII, ressourcement theology helped shape the teachings of Vatican II and re-introduced Catholicism to a now secular world.
Ressourcement claims that universal truths are found within the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition. Secondly, it applies this great deposit of wisdom pastorally to address the great questions of contemporary society. Today, these include environmental crises; economic injustice; the marginalization of women, racial minorities and our LGBTQ sisters and brothers; and the hemorrhaging of young people from the Church. This last crisis, not coincidentally, is largely due to youths’ perception that the Church is either blind to or on the wrong side of these other issues.
My Oxford talk re-sourced St. Ambrose of Milan’s natural law theology with specific reference to the environment. He believed that truth is universal and discoverable by all reasonable people. He insisted that reason and faith lead to the same understanding of natural law, which has three parts:
First, God created the cosmos: it is good; therefore, it should be saved from destruction, all the more so since we are causing that destruction. Secondly, God created humanity: we are good; therefore, the meaning of life, which St. Ambrose calls the vita beata, the happy life, is found in our duty to one another, especially in justly providing the earth’s resources to those on the margins. Third, Christ’s presence is incarnate already, always, and everywhere in Creation, within humanity and in each soul; therefore, seeking out Christ both within and beyond Creation is the purpose of life, which St. Ambrose calls vita aeterna, life eternal.
St. Ambrose marvels at this grand divine law of nature. Perhaps, in these divisive times, he has something to teach us about our own innermost nature: “Who does not marvel at the fact that the world formed of dissimilar elements should rise to the level of unity in one body, that this body should combine by indissoluble laws of concord and love to link together and form a union of such discordant elements? Who does not marvel that these elements so naturally separate should be tied together in the bonds of unity and peace as if by an indivisible pact.” (Hexameron II.3.1.1.)
(Father Bud Grant is a professor of theology at St. Ambrose University in Davenport.)
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