Möhler on the Holy Spirit and the Unity of the Church – Peter Dobbing – 11.10.03

CTC401: Catholic Identity and Its Main Themes

Assessment Task 1 (Portfolio)

Möhler on the Holy Spirit and the Unity of the Church

Ideas find expression in particular historical and cultural contexts. They are

developed in order to encapsulate, synthesise, critique, relativise and break

new ground, with reference to a particular intellectual focus or concern. An

idea, together with the network of concepts to which it is related, is a dialogue

with a different network with which it will overlap to some extent. Ultimately, if

it is to be fruitful, it will suggest a richer context that will provide greater

explanatory power coupled with a broader vision.

As with ideas, so with ecclesiology. The thinking of the 19th century Catholic

theologian Johann Adam Möhler (1796 – 1838) was a considered reaction to

a deeply rooted scholastic idea of the church that was formulated essentially

as a juridical societas standing over against a societas civilis. That the

dominant tone of ecclesiology for several centuries was apologetic and

defensive is not surprising, given the history of secular and civil

encroachments on the Church since the 13th century – not to mention the anti-

institutional and ‘spiritual’ yearnings of figures such as Occam, Wyclif and

Huss. Added to this, the intellectual climate of the 18th century (the time of

‘mankind’s coming of age’ according to the philosopher Immanuel Kant), with

its distrust of external authority considered as a source of knowledge and

enlightenment, helped only to consolidate a (reactionary) definition of the

Church that emphasised its sovereign and self-sufficient character. Möhler’s

response was shaped and tempered by the milieu of Romanticism, itself a

reaction against the arid intellectualism of the Enlightenment.

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Möhler on the Holy Spirit and the Unity of the Church – Peter Dobbing – 11.10.03

While studying under the learned and theologically pioneering professors

Drey and Hirscher at Tübingen in 1823, Möhler underwent an experience that

was to exercise a profound influence on his thinking during the next few

years. It seems that the group of thinkers with whom Möhler was associated

became captivated by the notion of Geist, that is, of ‘organism’ that is both

living and continuous. The group’s cerebral engagement with Geist became

transmuted for Möhler into an encounter with Holy Spirit experienced as the

dynamic and abiding life force of love who constitutes and guides the Church.

In his book, Unity in the Church (1825), Möhler effectively stands the order of

salvation – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – on its head. It is the Holy Spirit who

is associated with the first stirrings of new life in the human heart. Once

moved in this way, the believer is soon brought to a realisation that she or he

belongs in an intimate way to a community of love that is the embodiment on

earth of the Spirit of Jesus. The Spirit, then, and not any juridical conventions

linked to particular epochs or circumstances, is the first and most profound

source of life of the ecclesial community. Established in this way, this

communal life goes on to express its identity in liturgy (especially Eucharistic

communion), in the shared memory of tradition, in scripture, doctrine and

Episcopal leadership.

The Church exists through a life directly and continually moved by the divine Spirit, and is maintained and continued by the loving mutual exchange of believers. (93)

There are a number of interesting implications associated with the Spirit-

centred emphasis found in Möhler’s Unity. First, revelation is conceived as

‘the living speech’ and ‘the living gospel’ as opposed to any notion of it being

located in scriptura sola, or even jointly in scriptures and tradition. The letter is

preceded by the Spirit – Möhler reiterates the observation in Unity that the

gospel and preaching were in place before the adoption on any canon of

scripture. Second, Christian belief, far from being a set of static concepts, is a

God-given and living experience that is capable of maturation and

development. Third, Möhler sees in the consensus of faith found among the

members of the Christian community a criterion for judging the authenticity or

otherwise of any developments of doctrine. Heresy is thus deemed to spring

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Möhler on the Holy Spirit and the Unity of the Church – Peter Dobbing – 11.10.03

from an alien spirit that is either egotistical or sectarian in character. Finally,

Möhler’s approach favours a communion ecclesiology in which the Spirit can

be seen to be at work between all the individual parts of the organic body of

Christ. The hierarchy, as well as every member of the laity, exists to serve the

Spirit at work in the entire community.

By way of a brief critique of Möhler’s position as set out in Unity I would like to

make the following observations:

I have already pointed out that Möhler’s approach yields a

developmental understanding of doctrine. However, there seems at the

very least to be some tension between his point that ‘We do not know

of an unmediated activity of divine spirit’ (200 and his earlier remark

that ‘The divine power, active and forming itself in the church from the

church’s beginning, is the same throughout all time …’ (109 - my

emphasis). Möhler needs to be more explicit about how identity is

maintained in the midst of change. If Spirit is always mediated, can we

speak of an (unmediated) deposit that allows us to regard various

manifestations of the Spirit as the same?

There is a danger that Möhler, in his wish to make Spirit the main basis

of ecclesiogenesis, is displacing other elements in the makeup of the

Church (both human and divine) to such an extent that he succumbs to

a form of deism in which the Spirit operates on the Church from without

in a controlling and mechanical way. Geiselmann in his La Definition de

l’eglise chez J A Möhler observed that ‘It would seem that the Holy

Spirit runs the Church in the same way that a charioteer leads his

horses.’ (p. 153).

Closely related to the last point, Möhler, by emphasising the primordial

nature of the interior, spiritual element of the visible Church, is tilting

towards a kind of ecclesiological monophysitism (a charge that has

also been directed towards his more mature position as set out in his

book Symbolism).

The Church’s hierarchical structure, and thus the authority associated

with the episcopacy and even the Petrine office, could, instead of being

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Möhler on the Holy Spirit and the Unity of the Church – Peter Dobbing – 11.10.03

seen as an element that was intrinsic to the Christian community, be

regarded as an accidental feature that happened to be engendered by

the body of the faithful in the course of the Church’s historical

development.

After the publication of Unity, Möhler embarked on a series of studies that

enabled him to formulate an ecclesiology that achieved a more balanced

view of the exact nature of the Spirit in the total structure of the Church.

According to his Symbolik (Symbolism 1832), the Church, once

characterised by him as the family of believers who have the fullness of

the Spirit, is now described as the visible community of believers that is

the extension in space and time of the body of Jesus. To put it in a

different way, the Church is the continuation of the Incarnation of the Word

of God. There appear to be two principle motives behind Möhler’s adoption

of this new position. The first was possibly generated following his study of

the Chalcedonian formula (451AD) that attempted to delineate the

relationship between the divinity and humanity of Christ. Möhler saw a

parallel between the ‘two natures without confusion, without change … the

differences of the natures being by no means removed because of the

union’ (referring to Christ’s nature) and the union of the visible and the

invisible elements of the Church. In addition to this he wished to distance

himself from a position – associated with the dogmatics of Schleiermacher

– in which there was a danger of losing the transcendence of the Holy

Spirit by speaking of ‘the Spirit of the community’. The second motive is

connected with Möhler’s desire to engage critically with the Lutheran

notion of scriptura sola. He believed that this view rested on a solus

Spiritus Sanctus doctrine and that Luther simply failed to recognise the

role of human cooperation with the Spirit and incarnational character of the

Catholic church.

I will conclude with further observations this time relating to Möhler’s more

mature position as set out in Symbolism.

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Möhler on the Holy Spirit and the Unity of the Church – Peter Dobbing – 11.10.03

Ironically both Möhler’s evolving (Unity) and later (Symbolism)

theology has attracted the same charge of ecclesiological

monophysitism. In the case of Symbolism it is his emphatic and

unequivocal identification of the hierarchically constituted Church

with the body of Christ that has created disquiet among some

commentators who share Möhler’s apparent concern for productive

ecumenical relations.

The question of the balance between (non-visible) Spirit and

(visible) continuation of the Incarnation does not seem to have been

settled. In its place there is an implied bifurcation of Word and Spirit

in which the Spirit enables the believer to receive the message

engendered by a hierarchy whose position is a necessary corollary

of the Incarnation.

(1488 words)

References and bibliography

J.A. Möhler, Unity in the Church or the Principle of Catholicism

(Catholic University of America Press, 1996)

D.J. Didn and M.J.Hines (eds) The Legacy of the Tübingen School

(Crossroad, 1997, pp 75-94)

J.A. Möhler, Symbolism (Symbolik) (1832)

Kallistos Ware, Tradition and Traditions (from Dictionary of the

Ecumenical Movement, ed. Lossky, Bonino, Stransky, Wainright and

Webb (Geneva, 2003)

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