by Clare McGrath-Merkle, OCDS, DPhil

Editorial Note: Clare McGrath-Merkle, OCDS is a graduate of Notre Dame of Maryland University (B.A.), St. John’s College, Annapolis (M.A.), Washington Theological Union (M.T.S., with a certificate in Carmelite Studies), The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies (A.B.D., spirituality studies), and the University of Augsburg, Germany (D.Phil.) Dr. McGrath-Merkle is a scholar working at the intersection of metaphysics, identity studies, the theology of the priesthood, and the clerical abuse crisis. Dr. Charles Camosi recently interviewed her about her work at Crux: https://cruxnow.com/interviews/2020/03/post-reformation-theology-of-the-priesthood-influenced-abuse-crisis-author-says/. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Religion and Health, The New Oxford Review, and SimplyCatholic.com. She resides in Maryland. This article serves as a brief summary of her findings as detailed in her 2018 monograph published by Aschendorff-Verlag, Bérulle’s Spiritual Theology of Priesthood: A Study in Speculative Mysticism and Applied Metaphysics. Full citations are to be found in the book. The Regensburg Forum seeks to be an actual forum for conversation about challenging historical and theological topics. We invite thoughtful contributions that address shifts in the history of ecclesiology, theology of ministry, and other related topics.

A revolutionary theology of the priesthood, forged in the crucible of the Christological battles of the 16^th and early 17^th centuries, has contributed in no small measure to our crisis of clerical abuse and cover-up, and, now, Church unity. It is the long-delayed consequence of a lacuna in our awareness and understanding of the complexities of these debates, which contributed to the perishing of an estimated 2 to 4 million souls in the Wars of Religion. We are now experiencing their effects on the Church’s official theology of the priesthood due to the breakdown of multiple intellectual failsafes that allowed the proliferation of theological and philosophical errors.

These errors included those resulting from loosened safeguards worked out by St. Thomas Aquinas against errors in the distant past related to the priesthood and a host of related themes in Christology, the Trinity, pneumatology, and the Eucharist.

Our current catastrophic clerical identity failure is a case study in how a disaster—that we could never have imagined happening—did happen, because of other failures that allowed a syncretistic theology of the priesthood, constructed with an elaborate system of applied metaphysics and speculative mysticism, to gain ascendancy.

Once and Future Priest: The Past as Prologue

Realizing the causes of the crisis have been multi-valent and multi-causal over not just decades but possibly centuries, I turned in 2007 to search for any possible historical roots in clerical formation spirituality that could be at issue.

Clerical authority and abuse of power were actually central preoccupations, however couched, in both positive Reformation and Counter-Reformation theologies. What I thought would be a fairly simple research project grew into years spent attempting to trace and understand the Christological debates, spiritualities, and, surprisingly, systems of metaphysics b­­ehind these theologies.

I found that the sea change that occurred in the Church’s official theology of priesthood happened not through the direct but, rather, indirect influence of theologians, filtered through the spiritual talks and writings of a French cardinal and statesman, Pierre de Bérulle (d. 1629), founder of the French School of Spirituality and of the Congregation of the Oratory. A rival to Richelieu and a spiritual director to Parisian notables, Bérulle attempted to purify the priesthood and change society through the work of his congregation, paving the way for the Sulpician seminary movement that has educated countless priests and bishops and influenced many religious orders and their lay followers over almost four centuries.

While Gregory the Great’s sublime treatise, The Book of Pastoral Rule, had held sway in the training of bishops and priests for a thousand years, it was supplanted by the Traité des saints ordres, the heavily edited and augmented pastoral manual of Bérulle’s key successor and founder of the Society of Saint Sulpice, the saintly Jean-Jacques Olier, whose own ideals were obscured in the text. It became the Church’s key clerical formation manual until Vatican II, and a major influence, however indirect, on 20th-century official Church documents, popular formation movements, and texts on priestly identity and spirituality. Taken together, they now influence clerical formation worldwide.

The depth of this spiritual influence on the life and doctrines of the Church has been largely a hidden one due to yet another failure—contemporary theologians’ general dismissal of formation spirituality in particular and spiritual theology in general. I would argue that it was precisely inside the formation spirituality of priests that key theological and philosophical notions, vitiated by central errors, laid the groundwork for today’s collapse.

In talks to his Oratorians and in his later defense against multiple criticisms, Bérulle redefined and recombined ideas taken from numerous sources: the Church Fathers, Middle Platonism, Meister Eckhart, John Duns Scotus, the Florentine Academy, the “ancient theology” of pre-Christian texts and priesthoods, as well as more recent Catholic and Protestant theologians, philosophers, and leaders of clerical reform movements. Bérulle patched these  together into a kind of clerical identity creed, creating what became a hardy chimera that has perdured for centuries—the modern priest.

That is why it is not an exaggeration to say that Bérulle’s theology of priesthood, the only systematic theology ever attempted, has survived in aspects of current theological discourse on the priesthood. Its chief tenet: that the priest is one in identity with Christ, in a special relation to Him, “essentially” different than the laity.

Perhaps the single most deleterious effect of Bérulle’s mirroring of Reformation ideals was the shift from an emphasis on office to that on person, resulting in what I would argue is the enshrining of a “cult of person and persona” (163-64, 180), a term Gustave Martelet used regarding the Berullian priesthood—one that arguably haunts us today on both sides of our current ecclesial divide.

Ignored Warnings from Experts

While now decades-long acrimonious debates on the priesthood have focused on the ontological vs. the functional, high Christology vs. low Christology, and servant vs. cultic leader models, I stumbled upon the fact that beneath these supposed opposites lie ideas that reach far deeper and wider—and that they have as their basis extraordinarily technical metaphysical arguments.

Why have we never heard of them?

One failed protection mechanism has been the neglect of the Church to take note of scholarly warnings and protests about the Berullian priesthood.

French School experts and others’ specialized treatments detailing key deficits have remained unheeded over decades, including those by such notable scholars as Gérard Yelle and Michel Dupuy (faithful inheritors of the rich and varied French School tradition), as well as luminaries such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jacques Maritain, and Gustave Martelet.

Many decades after Trent, Bérulle expanded priestly identity from a ministerial participation in the priesthood of Christ to a participation in the being and holiness of Christ. Bérulle’s notion of a particular version of this heterodox interpretation of sacerdotal mediation, wherein the priest must be holy to best mediate, was an attempt to address the critiques aimed at a still-extant clerical corruption in France.

Bérulle built his super-system in support of this error with concepts such as person, being, mediation, subsistence, state, hypostatic union, assimilation, image, instrumentality, and more, bringing them to bear on many of the controversies between Catholics and Protestants.

Yelle penned an important monograph on the history of the theological debates surrounding the core error underlying Bérulle’s spiritual theology of priesthood: the notion of the holiness of Christ, in which Christ’s human nature is considered to have been made holy by the grace of union with the Word—a mistaken understanding of the communication of idioms. In line with Chalcedon, the properties of Christ’s human nature remained unimpaired, since the hypostatic union changed nothing. If His human nature had been made holy by the grace of union, it would have necessarily changed. Christ, rather, needed habitual grace for His human nature to be raised to the supernatural order.

This error in the understanding of the humanity of Christ (a central meditation for Bérulle’s Oratorians) served as the basis for the holiness and sacerdotal power of Bérulle’s priest. Just as the grace of union made Christ holy and a mediator of religion for Bérulle, so, too, the priest, through the grace of union with Christ, was made mediator of redemption and capable of sacrifice. In this schema, the priest became a mediator in the order of being, a distinction reserved to Christ alone.

Decades after Yelle’s critique, Jacques Maritain best explicated this error and the ongoing influence of some of Bérulle’s key philosophical ideals in his article on the French School, only translated into English in 1997, in a collection of his works. In it, Maritain questioned how it was possible that a great number of churchmen still remained under the French School’s influence despite holding different doctrinal positions. Maritain wrote that the spirituality of French School priests “must consist above all in losing their own subsistence in order to live solely in the Person of Christ, who never ceases to draw them into the unity of the divine Person” (427).

Maritain insisted that Bérulle was seriously mistaken in taking the step from affirming the perfection to which a priest is called, to affirming a perfection of his state of life, making the priest the source of all sanctity in the Church. He quoted Dupuy’s important work on Bérulle and the priesthood, “He [the priest] cannot be defined as a superchristian. For he is not just that. But it is urgent that he be at least that” (190). Dupuy continued, “The priest is united to Christ more than as an instrument, he is conjoined to Him, he is not only in His hand, he is in a sense His hand itself; he is a member of Christ” (195). The basis of the superiority of Bérulle’s sacerdotal state was, as Maritain noted, “the sacerdotal anointing emanates from that of Jesus, who (and this is the thesis dearest to Bérulle) is a priest because of and as a direct consequence of the hypostatic union…” (Maritain, 428).

Maritain believed churchmen were more or less formed by this school in seminary, and were unable to perceive the effects of a vague theology that had escaped rigorous intellectual systemization and therefore any kind of critical review. The result, he noted, was the production of an ideology rather than a theology that continued in his day to have an immense influence.

Vestiges of this vague theology continue today. Impossible to treat fully in this article-length discussion, we can at least explore a few of its major errors.

Defending against the Protestant reformers’ rejection of apostolic succession and hierarchical authority, Bérulle countered with the idea of sacerdotal mission based on the Trinitarian processions. He cited St. Augustine, erroneously, as holding procession and mission as synonymous (673). He used this conflation to extend the notion of Trinitarian relations to the relation between Christ and priests. The priest became, in a way, a member of the society of the Trinity.

In this effort, Bérulle embraced a centuries-long strain of emanationism, notably answering and echoing Calvinist critiques, particularly, regarding the important debate surrounding eternal generation. Calvin rejected an eternally generative God (143). Rather, he held to an autotheotic Christ (that is, divine in and of Himself).

Bérulle would double down in support of a Trinitarian emanationism, but one willed by Christ and only made possible through the efforts of his Oratorians to maintain union with Christ through prayer. While Bérulle was familiar with the pagan priest Iamblichus, Dupuy, unconvincingly, denied any anagogical aspect to Bérulle’s proposed elevations to maintain union (225-226). According to Vacherot, however, Neoplatonism had degenerated into theurgic practice with Iamblichus and others, who served as the inspiration for “idealist” doctrines of the mystics of the 16^th century, (v-vii) and, I would argue, for Bérulle’s as well.

Sacerdotal Power and Emanationism

While the sacramental character of the priesthood was rejected by Protestant reformers, Bérulle affirmed it. He thought of it as a relation, following Duns Scotus, rather than under the category of instrumental potency, as Aquinas held.

André Hayen signaled already in 1953 the difficulty with this notion of relation, when he asked a fateful question regarding the possible influence of the differences between the ideas of Duns Scotus and Aquinas on the formation of priests (289). Hayen presented the theoretical question of whether a prince had the right to baptize a Jewish child against the wishes of the parents. Aquinas had answered in the negative, while Duns Scotus had answered in the affirmative, based on a univocal order of power and authority (269). Bérulle himself held to the anointing of the humanity of Christ by the divinity as a temporal extension of the eternal generation of the Word, a “royal” anointing. In this, we hear echoes of the same eternal generation controversy, in which Reformers asserted the saving power of Christ over the authority of a “necessary” institutional hierarchy.

Importantly, Luther had rejected hierarchical power and authority based on indelible character, focusing instead on the priesthood of all believers, as well as on a personal relationship with Christ. In this, he rejected the notions of habitual grace, and the conveyance of potencies. Bérulle’s rhetoric, in response, depicted Christ as divine substance, insisting on a willed essentialist mystical union of the priest with Christ, again, made possible through frequent meditation as a requisite for the highest use of sacerdotal powers.

Bérulle also tried to counter Calvin’s objections to transubstantiation in this effort. Calvin had focused, instead, on the idea of raising our hearts and minds to Christ on high in glory. Calvin’s insistence on the priesthood of Christ as begun in glory, along with an emphasis on adoration, became, in Bérulle’s project, a focus on a theopathic state for priests, which they could maintain through constant adoration and preoccupation with the mysteries of Christ in glory, attempting to effectuate similitude (359).

Putting on the person of Christ, entering into the person of Christ, being assumed by the person of Christ—Bérulle utilized this rhetoric to emphasize a mutually willed, essentialist relationship between the priest and Christ. Whereas in the doctrine of immensity, God is present everywhere and the immanent cause and sustainer of all creatures, Bérulle wrote of a kind of Christic “spiritual” immensity for both laity and priests. In the case of priests, this meant the continual presence and action of Christ who was meant to replace the priest’s person with His own Person. This idea of union is far different than the affective union great saints have described—with one or all of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity.           

The Image of Christ

As some Protestants had replaced icons of saints on Church walls with the portraits of pious pastors, Bérulle followed suit by choosing to focus on pastoral piety instead of office. Importantly, he met the Reformation objection to the ideal of the priest as the image of Christ with a unicity, engrafting, and transparency echoing Luther’s ideals of the believer’s union with Christ. Following the Pauline phrase that Luther had taken up, “yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20), Bérulle made the priest, rather than merely an image, a transparent image.

To defend against the Protestant reformers’ rejection of the Mass as the repeated sacrifice of Christ, and in seeming imitation of a Lutheran turn to a focus on the Presence at Eucharist, Bérulle focused on Christ’s interior state of immolation at the sacrifice of the Mass. Upholding the priest’s necessary place as mediator and sacrificer, Bérulle called the priest an “immolated victim,” who must sacrifice himself as he sacrifices Christ. In this, he also departed from a Thomistic emphasis of Christ’s spiritual sacrifice as that of obedience and charity. Aquinas had asserted, against old errors, an important distinction that the priest is a non-conjoint instrument, a ministerial mediator rather than a mediator by being.

Much has been penned regarding the neantist piety of the French School. Bérulle’s neantism reflected a rigorist ethicism, a self-naughting demanded of both priests and laity, and following a then-popular negative strain of Augustinian piety. Bérulle’s was more than a moral annihilationism, however, but attempted to reach to the ontological in that it required that the priest become a néant (a nothing), ceding his own person to that of Christ, as Maritain so well described.

While self-naughting may have been a way of perhaps ameliorating the grandiosity of Bérulle’s priest, and while it is still practiced today to anchor priestly piety in humility, it lends to a tendency, I would argue, to substitute Christ’s person for that of the priest. In other terms, this is akin to attempting to substitute Christ for the priest’s ego, at the expense of both the humanity of Christ and the humanity of the priest.

Balthasar made a major contribution in our understanding of this aspect of the Berullian priesthood when he wrote that Bérulle’s was a “pious theologization of metaphysics” … “forgetful of every worldly encounter of actual Being…” He continued,    

Thus this philosophy of spirit also lacks the decisive experience of reality: the shock of a head-on encounter with another ego, a dialogue between an I and a Thou which is radically open to its own vulnerable depths of being. This shock was missing in Bérulle, Condren and Fénelon, which is why their elevated spirituality retains something spectrally unreal, journeying in a world of ideas without a basis in Nature, crudely stated: something elitist for spiritual aristocrats for which, not without reason, the merciless guillotine of the real ‘comrades’ stands waiting. (481)

Public Personhood, Mediation, and Transparent Image

At the core of this identity dilemma is how Bérulle defined ministerial mediation. Mediation was, in fact, another main area of contention with Protestant reformers who held Christ as sole mediator of grace. Luther wished to emphasize Christ’s role as a public person and held that only civil authorities were public persons, doing away with the idea of sacred office. Luther also criticized the practice of private Masses and what he called “sacrifice-priests” who offered paid Masses devoid of preaching.

Bérulle rebutted that not just the bishop, as Aquinas noted, but also the priest is a public person, and not simply that, but a public agent of the Redemption at all times, sharing in Christ’s headship of the Mystical Body, possessing the Holy Spirit in a different way than that of the laity. In this, Bérulle conflated Redemption, once and for all given by Christ, with the ongoing work of salvation, in which all can participate as mediators in differing ways: the laity as dispositive mediators, priests as ministerial mediators, and Christ alone as mediator by being.

Bérulle departed from Augustine, who had refuted the Donatist heresy that priests must be holy in order to mediate. He also departed from Aquinas who had rejected the notion that character belonged to the category of habitus, one requiring grace for perfection. Aquinas’ stance was based on the fact that if it were a habitus, then a priest saying Mass in mortal sin would invalidate the sacrament.

The combination of the aporias of transparent image and public person is one of the most difficult aspects of Berullian priesthood. The modern priest became not only a public person and visible image of Christ the head, but also an agent of the Redemption and a holy mediator of holiness.           

Sacramental Causality and the Priesthood

Sacramental causality was another complex area of serious contention. In countering the Reformers’ critiques, Bérulle held to a misconstrued exemplar causality in which the priest participates in the idea of the Word or Son as resemblance. In this schema, Christ acts as proximate cause at all times, thus compromising the operations of nature by serving as a generative rather than a creative principle. This causality extended, for Bérulle, to all facets of his Oratorians’ ministry, requiring assent and obedience to be in “union with their cause,” in any ministerial function, including in the confessional (BLS, 427, OR 84).   

Doolan’s analysis of Aquinas’ thoughts on exemplar causality is helpful in understanding key distinctions. According to Aquinas, the divine ideas are not generative principles, but rather creative ones. Even though the divine exemplars are the cause of form in physical substances, their causality does not compromise the operations of nature, since the proximate causes of generation are natural agents, not the divine ideas (170, 248, citing Aquinas, De veritate, 3.1, ad 5).

Failsafes

Returning to the theme of failsafes, we can find error after error that prevented the Church’s awareness of and response to Bérulle’s influence. Some that I have stumbled upon include the following short list.

• The sequestering of documents and discouragement of theologizing following Trent left an opening for a powerful cardinal with incomplete training in theology and philosophy to construct his own heterodox response, resulting in an aporia and an over-commitment, as Rescher might describe, to inconsistencies that should be abandoned (ix).
• The rise in the 1500s of the study of rhetoric (including at Clermont, where Bérulle learned its use in metaphysical disputations), combined with the separation in 1600 of the study of mystical theology from systematic theology at the University of Paris, contributed over time to a strengthening of positive affective theologizing that, I would suggest, continues today.  
• The lack of exposure to the subtleties and varieties of scholastic metaphysics and how they undergird major aspects of the Church’s current teachings in a range of areas has also truncated contemporary conversations on the nature of priesthood. The continued uncritical populist blending of Scotist and Thomistic ideals has also had a heavy hand in supporting confused ideals.
• Lastly, the august nature of the priesthood itself, scholarly overspecialization, and the lack of coordination of research have also kept this important subject in the shadows.

Whither Priesthood?         

In his treatment of the influence of the French School, Maritain wrote almost 50 years ago:

Blest be that great theologian who, to extricate the clergy from the crisis in which it is struggling so painfully, will one day develop a just theology of the priesthood, made new with the help of the old masters! He will have answered to one of the most pressing needs of our time. (437)

A key first step, as I have learned, would be a review of Aquinas’ key correctives of ancient errors, including his more humble intuitions on sacramental character, the Humanity of Christ, His Headship of the Mystical Body, how the priest serves the priesthood of Christ, and his role in the Mass.

The historical varieties of priestly spirituality, identity, and theology are also rich in ideals to be recovered, including the more humble models proposed by Gregory the Great, Juan of Avila (made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI), and Vincent de Paul, among many other outstanding thinkers on the topic of pastoral identity and the spiritual theology of the priesthood.

We will need the entire brain trust of the Church working together, dispassionately, to make a way forward, beyond arguments of mandated celibacy, ever-changing popular sacerdotal piety, repeated calls to fidelity, and attempted reforms of seminaries and regional episcopate-driven changes. Academic preparation for the next council should be our goal.