"Catholic" (or in-Church, but not of-Church) Antibiblicism

• Everyone knows about Teilhard de Chardin who made a theological verging on theosophical system out of Evolution.
• I've advanced more than once that in 1920, in Paris (same archdiocese and Jesuit Institute as Teilhard) a certain Mangenot was no longer content with even Day-Age or Gap Theories, which had been previous attempts to comment on Genesis one while accepting Deep Time. He had good reasons to reject these, but a very inadequate reason to reject YEC.
• Now, he seems to have had an older precursor in Jerusalem. Dominican Father Marie-Joseph Lagrange. With École Biblique. With Revue biblique.

Damien Mackey, while he then goes off a tangent (or two or three) and while he's not himself a YEC, at least makes a decent intro (partly based on Dr. Dominique Tassot) to this Dominican Lagrange. Not to be confused with the Dominican Garrigou-Lagrange.

Père M-J. Lagrange’s exegetical blancmange
Damien Mackey, 18.I.2025
https://www.academia.edu/127096580/P%C3%A8re_M_J_Lagrange_s_exegetical_blancmange

I'd actually, come to think of it, refer back to Dr. Tassot's paper on the Kolbe Center:

The Influence of Geology on Catholic Exegesis
October 9, 2009, by Dr. Dominique Tassot
https://kolbecenter.org/the-influence-of-geology-on-catholic-exegesis/

A little reminder of who Lagrange is, he coined the term Concordist, but in another (much more restricted) usage than I have spoken of previously.* Lagrange specifically had in mind the Day-Age view.

On June 30, 1909, the Pontifical Biblical Commission granted liberty to Catholic exegetes to consider the word “yom” either in its proper meaning or in a broader meaning (sensu improprio) of indeterminate duration (DS 2128). In 1896, Fr Lagrange (who had founded Jerusalem’s Biblical College in 1893) rejected “concordism,” considering that the hexameron days and geological periods did not correspond.

The shaping of the Earth went on a long time after the appearance of life; plants and animals developed in parallel. But remains established the fact that the Earth took a considerable time to form. We renounced forever the historic precise duration of six 24 hours days.7

Now, that Concordism I also reject. There is no one to one between Geologic Periods and Creation Days. There is however a one to one between Bone Beds classed as in those Periods and the the Faunas of the Pre-Flood world. The Periods are then a phantom mirage from misinterpreting the Bone Beds from a Modern and Pagan Mythology called Succession of Faunas.**

For any creationist saying "no, you presuppose the animals were buried in situ, but we know boulders were carried as far away as 500 km ..." ... well, a boulder may still be a recognisable boulder after getting transported that far by the Flood, but a skeleton isn't a recognisable skeleton that far from the origin. I said bone beds, not indistinct bone shards.

As Dr. Tassot mentions, Garrigou devised three methods to avoid taking the Bible at face value:

• legendary primitive history
• "historic appearances" (in analogy with Providentissimus Deus, supposedly about the Galileo affair, the Bible speaking "according to the appearances")
• genres (some genres don't give categorical affirmations).

Dr. Tassot sums it up in an excellent way:

It is obvious that an intelligent use of these three methods is sufficient to get rid of any difficult passage of the Bible. But the authority of the Sacred Writings disappears at the same time, divine inspiration and inerrancy being inseparable!

However, he did fail insofar as he was asserting that Providentissimus Deus was adressing the Galileo affair.

Another such concept is that of “historical appearances.” Here Lagrange tried to transpose to history what Leo XIIIth said in Providentissimus Deus about astronomy (the Galileo affair!), that the Bible speaks “according to appearances.”

From a Thomistic perspective, our senses give a true path to knowledge. But in the Kantian perspective of that time, “appearance” meant the opposite of reality. In 1919, Lagrange abandoned his theory of “historical appearances,” but the idea remained that the Bible had to be confined to the sphere of religion, and this was indeed the most secure way to prevent any conflict with science.

Two observations:

• The Kantian idea of appearances being on the opposite end of actual reality as such, comes partly from Geocentrism being the appearance, while Kant presumed Heliocentrism to be the reality.
• Pope Leo XIII does not mention Galileo, does not mention astronomy, does not mention Sun, Moon, stars, planets, or Earth in that Encyclical. It's a "secret de polichinelle" — an "open secret" that this is what he had in mind. And obviously that Heliocentrism is how he saw the reality of astronomy. But he never actually said it. Far from magisterially settling whether Heliocentrism is acceptable in exegesis, he made a general framwork for discussing what is acceptable as exegesis. Invoking Providentissimus Deus for saying the Church "decided in favour of Heliocentrism" is like invoking Humani Generis for saying the Church "decided in favour of Evolution" ... or 1909 for saying the Church "decided against six literal days being true." In each of the cases, the Church actually decided on top level in favour of a structured discussion between experts, and in each of the cases, on ground level, cowards who were better as canon lawyers and as pastors than at discussing, both decided on their own against the discussion and for the misquoting in support of the new idea. They, not Pope Leo, was behind this "open secret" ...

Otherwise, I'm very happy with how Dr. Tassot sums it up. His observation on how Father Emery of the Sulpicians asked the Calvinist Deluc for permission to translate his “Letters to Blumenbach” into French, and the motivation is worth gold:

for such an apologetic, the difference of creeds between Catholics and a Calvinist could be set aside.

Exactly the example I follow when quoting probable Baptists, Calvinists, Anglicans at work on the Creation Ministries International. Thankful to Dr. Dominique Tassot for setting the record straight!

Hans Georg Lundahl
Pompidolian Library, Paris
Chair of St. Peter in Rome
18.I.2025

* Creation vs. Evolution: "Concordism" - a Pointless Concept in France and Madagascar
LD 10 September 2023 | published by Hans Georg Lundahl at 09:28
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2023/09/concordism-pointless-concept-in-france.html

** I gave an index to the whole series, dedicated to my work on this, when confronted with a bad comparison by Eberhard Zangger, otherwise quite decent as archaeologist:

Creation vs. Evolution: Archaeology vs Vertabrate Palaeontology in Geology
Saturday 4 June 2016 | published by Hans Georg Lundahl at 02:39
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2016/06/archaeology-vs-vertabrate-palaeontology.html