Numerous attempts at accommodation
Full-frontal, thoroughgoing confrontations are not representative of the full range of positions. There was no shortage of people seeking to conciliate Christian faith and modern science. But at this juncture the room for manoeuvre and freedom of speech was not the same depending on whether one was clergy or lay, Catholic or Protestant. Two pathways were explored: one attempting a synthesis between Evolutionism and Christianity through the reinterpretation of Christian dogma and the theological corpus within a liberal framework the other setting in stone the principle of total independence between the realms of science and belief. Both these separate positions were labelled “modernism[1]” and as such condemned by the Catholic Magisterium in 1907.
British Protestant Churches were, during the period under review, mostly in thrall to modernist views. Endeavours to adjust the religious message had emerged even before the publication of On the Origin of Species, for instance with Baden Powell[2]. This mathematician, member of the Anglican clergy and Oxford professor was one of the main exponents of Anglican liberal theology. He sought to promote a Christian vision of evolution in The Order of Nature: Considered in Reference to the Claims of Revelation (1859). Half a century later, this trend seeking the compatibility of the religious discourse with the findings of modern science was spearheaded by Ernest William Barnes[3], later bishop of Birmingham. In the twenties, then Master of the Temple, he delivered in Westminster Abbey the so called “Gorilla Sermons” bearing on the theory of evolution which he assimilated to a development following divinely set laws. He published in 1933 a work entitled Scientific theory and religion. The World Described by Science and Its Spiritual Interpretation. His views, notably his objection to the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist were contentious but his position within the Church of England was not called into question.
For Catholics the position of the Magisterium was more confrontational. It stood in line with the 1864 encyclical letter Quanta Cura wherein “false science” is opposed to “true science”, which is conform to what was understood as divine revelation, “the star” intended to guide the scientist and to keep him “preserved from snares and error” as Pope Pius IX had already contended in his correspondence. The Roman authorities thus allowed Catholic scientists but little leeway in the field of prehistory or the natural sciences; still, they no longer possessed the institutional monopoly they once may have enjoyed in some countries at the time of the Galileo episode. Scientific works such as Darwin's were not consigned to the Index[4] but churchmen writing on themes deemed dangerous at a doctrinal level were closely watched and, as the case may be, silenced or forced to retract. At the same time a collective effort was under way to denounce on the one hand the preconceptions of scientists purportedly neutral while critical of religions in general and Catholicism in particular and on the other to forge a “Catholic science” based on other epistemological preconceptions.
Gathered around Mgr d'Hulst in Paris, Mgr François Duilhe de Saint-Projet in Toulouse and the Free Catholic Universities of these two cities, cleric and lay academics undertook this work while keeping up connections with their religiously non-aligned scientific colleagues. Five International Scientific Congress of Catholics were held between 1888 and 1900. Their debates were published by religious press outfits viz. the Revue des questions scientifiques, founded in 1877. However these initiatives were met with Roman mistrust and came to an end even before Pius X's unmitigated condemnation of “modernism” in 1907. In the following decades churchmen involved in research in this field had to remain extremely reticent or expose themselves to sanctions. Prehistorian Henri Breuil[5] would not take a stand on the issue of evolution while relying on it for his research. The palaeontologist Jesuit Pierre Theillard de Chardin[6] was dispatched to China and forbidden to publish; his papers covertly made the rounds, they would only be published after his death. Less well known but as significant is the case of Henri de Dorlodot[7]. A geology professor at the University of Leuven, he took his cue from St George Jackson Mivart[8], an English Catholic anatomist who clashed with Darwin in the name of a theist conception of evolution. His defence of man's exceptionality, whose “soul” was the object of a special “creation” had not stopped several of his papers from being put on the Index, nor indeed his own excommunication in 1900. Twenty years later Dorlodot published Darwinism and Catholic thought. By dint of uniformly prudent formulation he obtained Rome's imprimatur (permission to print). The book was translated into English but the Catholic authority thought better of it. The Biblical Commission demanded a public retraction of his theses. Dorlodot mustered support from his networks and a status quo was found. He did not have to retract but had to commit not to publish the second tome of his book intended to focus specifically on the human figure.
