George Tyrrell (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 and philosophical doctrines systematized in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas.
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 (1907), Tyrrell wrote two letters to the London Times rejecting its reasoning and conclusions. This led to his excommunication by the Bishop of Southwark, Peter Amigo. Tyrrell never recanted his modernist opinions, but he did not abandon the Catholic Church and 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, had 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, in the University of Dublin.
The family had to move repeatedly due to the financial straits in which it fell after the father's death. George's elder brother "Willie", although crippled in infancy by a fracture of the spine and afflicted by persistent ill health, was a brilliant student at Rathmines School and went on to an outstanding career as a classicist at Trinity College, before his early death in 1876. George himself became deaf in the right ear following a childhood accident.
The headmaster of Rathmines, Dr Benson, agreed to remit George's fees in light of the success of his brother Willie, and George entered the school in 1869. His performance was poor, however, and his mother sent him as a boarder to Midleton College, where he was subjected to a tougher discipline. Due to her difficulties affording the fees, George soon returned to Rathmines, where in 1876 he completed the sixth form at the bottom of his class. He then studied privately in the hopes of earning a scholarship to study Hebrew at Trinity College, but he failed the required examination twice. He gained admission to Trinity in 1878 but, without a scholarship, his mother could not afford to send him there.
More interested in religion than in academic work, the young Tyrrell began worshipping at All Saints Church, Grangegorman, where he was exposed to a moderate high church Anglicanism. Around 1877 he met Robert Dolling, an Anglo-Catholic priest and a Christian socialist who would go one to exert a strong influence on Tyrell. With Dolling's encouragement, Tyrrell began to go to confession at the Catholic St Mary's Church and to attend mass at the Gardiner Street Church, run by the Jesuits, while continuing to take Anglican communion at Grangegorman.
In August 1878, Tyrrell took a teaching post at Wexford High School, but he was unhappy with the school's uncompromising Protestantism and did not return after the Christmas break. The rector of Grangegorman, Dr Maturin, confronted Tyrrell about his attendance at Catholic masses, and Tyrrell then decided to accept an invitation from Dolling to join him in London, where Dolling was active in Saint Martin's League, an Anglican devotional society that worked with local postmen.
In London, Tyrrell planned to earn his living by collaborating with the work of the St Martin's League, under the supervision of Dolling and of Father Alexander Mackonochie, the vicar of St Alban's Church, Holborn. Tyrrell, however, was unimpressed by what he saw as the insincere ritualism practiced at St Alban's. On Palm Sunday, he wandered into St Etheldreda's, a Catholic church on Ely Place, and was powerfully struck by the Catholic Mass. Of this experience he later wrote 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."
Jesuit Tyrrell soon converted and was received into the Catholic Church in 1879. Feeling called to the priesthood and inspired by a recent historical novel by popular French writer Paul Féval that presented the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in a heroic light, Tyrrell applied to join the Society, but the provincial superior advised him to wait a year. He spent the interim teaching at Jesuit schools in Cyprus and Malta.Rafferty, Oliver, S.J. "George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism", Thinking Faith 6 July 2009 He joined the Jesuits in 1880 and was sent to the novitiate at Manresa House, in Roehampton. As early as 1882, his novice master suggested that Tyrrell withdraw from the Jesuits due to "mental indocility" and 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. He then returned to the Jesuit school in Malta, where he spent three years teaching, before being sent 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 conflicts with his superiors over the traditional Jesuit approach to teaching philosophy.
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 philosophy 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.Hurley, Michael, S.J. "George Tyrrell and John Sullivan: Sinner and Saint?", Thinking Faith, 14 July 2009 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 views of a moderate Catholic 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.
In 1899, Ward invited Tyrrell to join the "Synthetic Society", which counted among its members several of the leading religious and philosophical thinkers in Britain, including Friedrich von Hügel, Arthur Balfour, Charles Gore, Edward Talbot, Richard Haldane, and Henry Sidgwick. The Society met every month at the Carlton Club. His participation in it reinforced Tyrrell's confidence that Catholics should participate in the debates of the broader intellectual community.
Modernist controversy Between 1891 and 1906, Tyrrell published more than twenty articles in Catholic periodicals, many of them in the United States.Portier, William L. "George Tyrrell in America." U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 20, no. 3, 2002, pp. 69–95. JSTOR 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. He insisted that philosophy and theology may clarify the misunderstandings that arise from a naïve devotion, but that
In External Religion: Its Use and Abuse (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. According to the text, Catholics should remember "that the Christ and the religion outside of them is but a means to wake up the Christ and the religion that is latent in them." 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."George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads (1913 ed.), pg. 44 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." 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". According to Tyrrell, the dogmas of the church were unchangeable because they were imposed authoritatively as the Word of God, not as a conclusion of theological reflection. In other words, the theological form of dogma was as expression of the dogma, not the dogma itself. 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.