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Life
1861-1909; Catholic confessional writer; b. Dorset St., Dublin; first cousin ofRobert Yelverton; converted to Catholicism, 1879; probationary year atJesuit College, Malta; entered Manresa House, Roehampton, 1880; took vows,1882; became a Thomist scholar at Stonyhurst, and returned to Malta as schoolteacher;ordained after 4 years at St Beuno’s College, Wales, 1891; Stonyhurst,1896; joined literary staff at Farm St., London; forced to retire to JesuitMission House by authorities, 1899; Confidential Letter to a [...]Professor of Anthropology (1906) admits untenability of ConservativeCatholic position; published as A Much Abused Letter (1906); with Alfred Loisy and others, sought to reconcile Catholic scholarship with Biblical studies [i.e., Modernism]; expelled1907; suffered minor excommunication for letters to The Times opposingdecrees against Modernism; attacked by Bishop Mercier as embodiment ofModernism; replied in Medievalism (1908); d. 15 July, Storrington, Surrey.ODNB PI KUN FDA.
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Works
Nova et Vetera (London: Longmans 1897); Hard Sayings (London:Longmans 1898); External Religion (London: Sands & Co. 1899);The Faith of the Millions, 1st & 2nd ser. (London: Longmans1901-02); Oil and Wine (London: Longmans 1902); Lex Orandi(London: Longmans 1903); Lex Credendi (London: Longmans 1906);A Confidential Letter to a friend who is a Professor of Anthropology,later A Much Abused Letter (London: Longmans 1906); ThroughScylla and Charybdis (London: Longmans 1907); Medievalism (London:Longmans 1908); Essays on Faith and Immortality (Arnold 1914).
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Criticism
M. D. Petre, ed., [Tyrrell,] Autobiography and Life (Arnold 1912);A. Loisy, Memoires pour servir a l’histoire religieuse de notretemps, 3 vols. (Paris 1930-31); J. L. May, Father Tyrrell and theModernist Movement (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode 1932); M. D. Petre, Von Hugel and Tyrrell: The Story of a Friendship (London: J. M.Dent 1937); M. Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and Transition (London:Sheed & Ward 1937); C. Dawson, Prophets of Past Time (Johns Hopkins UP 1988), pp.25-69.
Gareth Downes: ‘The Modernist movement was a loose network of scholars and theologians, both lay and clerical, who attempted to reconcile Catholic apologetic with contemporary critical thought, and responded to the application of modern historiographical methods to Biblical criticism by liberal Protestant and anticlericalist scholars. Although the Holy Office was inclined to view the Modernists as a close-knit group of scholars and theologians ( “the partisans of error ”), 33 and in Pascendi dominici gregis sought to identify apologetic immanentism and agnosticism as the philosophical and ideological basis of Modernism, it was neither an homogeneous movement nor an homogeneous discipline. The unsystematic arrangement of Modernist scholarship and philosophy was actually condemned as “one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists ”, designed to mask the “fixed and steadfast ” nature of their sacrilegious campaign against Mother Church.34 While Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell sought to reconcile Catholic scholarship with the historicism of Biblical studies, Maurice Blondel, Edouard LeRoy, and Lucien Laberthonnière, attempted to realise a new Catholic apologetic that did not rely solely on the extrinsicism (transcendentalism) of scholasticism. The “New Apologetic ” of Modernism was not an immanentist philosophy. However, in its frustration with the ineptitude of “Thomistic stasis ”, 35 its attack on the arid rationalism and extrinsicism of traditional scholastic apologetic, and its development of a “method of immanence ” to reconcile the problematic relationship between a transcendent being and the historically situated individual, Roman Catholic Modernism was condemned by the Holy Office as “the synthesis of all heresies ”.’ (Downes, pp.276-77; quoting Lester R. Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism, California UP 1986, p.76.)
Further (quoting Tyrrell): ‘In Through Scylla and Charybdis: Or, The Old Theology and the New [1907], George Tyrrell asserts his belief in such an apologetic immanentism: “[…] since that light, at once transcendent and immanent, at once above and within Nature, guides all men to one and the same supernatural end, it is plain that the process is at once, and without contradiction, natural and supernatural.”’ (Tyrell, op. cit., p.20; Downes, op. cit., p.281.)
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References
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges Figgis1912), Version and Perversions from Heine (London 1909); b. Dublin, 15 July; noted Jesuit; expelled from order for Modernist doctrines; vide Supplement ODNB.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, chps., V and XIII, ending, ‘perhaps had I lived at home ... I might have worn down [and] ... broken those hearts whose love was everything to me ... that is my faint hope, and the salve of my conscience, when I think, with bitterness, how I abandoned the life of affection for the service of so barren a mistress as truth, and let the substance of life escape me in the pursuit of shadows ...’[407-11]; his conversion; repugnance of his old co-religionists, and his own disappointment with the Catholic church, 407; the theological abstractions Tyrrell had fed to him when he converted to Catholicism and found that he still could not appease the Protestant longing for a religion of evangelical fervour and warmth [Deane, ed.], 382; BIOG, WORKS & CRIT 557 [as supra].
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