Yves Moreau de Montcheuil (; 30 January 19008 August 1944) was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian. He was a close friend of Henri de Lubac.Kirwan 2018, p. 7 De Montcheuil joined the French Resistance during World War II and was executed by the Gestapo.
Biography
De Montcheuil was born 30 January 1900, in Paimpol, Brittany. He entered the Jesuits in 1917 after abandoning plans to enter the École Navale following his brother's disappearance during the Battle of Verdun.Kirwan 2018, p. 9 He studied at the novitiate in Jersey under Pedro Descoqs, whose support of Action Française and opposition to the emergent nouvelle theólogie and thought of Maurice Blondel led to discord.Shortall 2021, p. 50 He went on to study at the Jesuit house in Fourvière from 1929 to 1932, was ordained a priest in 1932, completed doctoral studies in 1935 with a dissertation on Nicolas Malebranche, and was a professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris from 1935 until his death in 1944.Kirwan 2018, p. 9 He professed his final vows as a Jesuit in 1935. As a member of the French Resistance, he served as a chaplain at the Battle of Vercors and was executed by the Gestapo.Shortall 2021, p. 87
Thought
As a student, De Montcheuil felt stifled by the Neo-Scholastic intellectual climate of the Jesuit college in Jersey.Shortall 2021, p. 35
De Montcheuil was deeply influenced by Maurice Blondel and maintained a correspondence with him.Shortall 2021, p. 40-41 He believed that imitation of Thomas Aquinas's intellectual spirit was more important than strict fidelity to Aquinas's works.Kirwan 2018, p. 176 De Montcheuil's 1935 dissertation L’Intervention de Malebranche dans la querelle du pur amour, in a manner evocative of his Jesuit predecessor Pierre Rousselot, focused on Malebranche's debate with Bernard Lamy over quietism. De Montcheuil reads Malebranche's contribution to the debate along the lines of Blondel and Rousselot, arguing implicitly that Malebranche anticipates their thought by seeking a harmony between nature and the supernatural and between philosophy and theology.Kirwan 2018, p. 190 Maurice Blondel's views and nouvelle théologie were initially deeply controversial and some of De Montcheuil's works were briefly censored after his death and the publication of the encyclical Humani generis.Shortall 2021, p. 228
De Montcheuil also wrote on ecclesiology, emphasizing the mystical union of the church in a manner similar to that of the Catholic Tübingen school.Kirwan 2018, p. 230 De Montcheuil felt this view of ecclesiology provided theological opposition to totalitarianism.Shortall 2021, p. 80
Political activity
De Montcheuil served as a chaplain to the Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne.Shortall 2021, p. 63 Along with his classmates Henri de Lubac, Gaston Fessard, and Pierre Chaillet, De Montcheuil would launch the anti-Nazi journal Témoignage chrétien.Shortall 2021, p. 143
Legacy
De Montcheuil is considered a forerunner of liberation theology, as Gustavo Gutierrez studied his work and argued that De Montcheuil's rejection of the nature-grace dualism of Neo-Scholasticism provided the basis for a political theology superior to that of Jacques Maritain, whose alternative to the Neo-Scholastic paradigm in politics Gutierrez still found insufficient.Shortall 2021, p. 250
Notes
References
Kirwan, Jon. An Avant-garde Theological Generation: The Nouvelle Theologie and the French Crisis of Modernity (2018) Oxford University Press Shortall, Sarah. Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (2021) Harvard University Press