Patricia Kelly's volume of translations from the nouvelle théologie affair includes a variety of texts (eight articles and five book chapters or excerpts) and is divided into three sections. Part one includes book chapters from 1) Chenu's Une école de théologie, 2) de Lubac's Surnaturel, and 3) Bouillard's Conversion et grâce chez S. Thomas d'Aquin (the famous conclusion). Articles include 4) Jean-Marie Le Blond's ‘The Analogy of Truth’, defending the ressourcement notion of truth, 5) Daniélou's famous ‘Current Trends in Religious Thought’ (already translated in the Josephinum journal), and 6) de Lubac's anonymous response to the Toulouse Dominicans.

Part two is entitled ‘Attacks on the “new theology”’ and includes four articles: 1) Pietro Parente's, ‘New Tendencies in Theology’, 2) Garrigou's famous ‘Where is the New Theology Leading Us?’ (also already translated in Josephinum), and 3) Michel Labourdette's article, to which de Lubac anonymously responded, ‘Theology and its Sources’. Regrettably, the extensive (and vital) endnotes and replies to de Lubac's anonymous response, which appeared the following year in Dialogue théologique, are omitted. The final piece 4) is a response by Labourdette to Le Blond's above mentioned article.

Part three contains three short texts, 1) Jules Lebreton's history of Sources chrétiennes, 2) de Lubac's wartime recollections of Fourvière, and 3) an appendix from Congar's True and False Reform in the Church.

Sadly, this promising work contains many excellent selections but is marred by serious translation errors and undocumented excisions (mostly footnotes, though sometimes lengthy ones). I should note that I have by no means closely checked the entire volume, and have only spot checked certain sections where inaccuracies were readily apparent. Let me say first that as someone with a volume of nouvelle théologie-affair translations in editing for publication, I know what difficult work translating is and have no desire to nitpick or quibble over arguable interpretations. The translator needs a wide and generous berth for complex technical renderings often made more difficult by inscrutable French grammatical constructions. Moreover, the translation of difficult philosophical and theological ideas only makes the task more challenging.

With that sympathetic note sounded, let me say that Kelly at times translates with a literalism that renders subtle philosophical technicalities nonsensical, and her handling of long (admittedly tortuous) French sentences can be clumsy. More seriously, however, her translation missteps in the properly philosophical articles can lead one to doubt whether she has a proper grasp of either the Neo-Thomism she clearly disdains or the transcendental Thomism (implicit in Le Blond) she cheers for in her introduction. For example, she translates ‘traité d’église’ [treatise on the Church, from the Latin-scholastic term of trade Tractatus de Ecclesia] as ‘treaty of the Church’ (p. 26), and the technical scholastic notion of truth is rendered as ‘matching our mind with the thing’ (p. 119). In the French, ‘adéquation’ follows the Latin ‘adaequatio’ and is usually translated as adequation, conformity, or correspondence, but never matching, which is far too vague and confusing. In another place (p. 91), ‘adaequatio’ is inexplicably translated as ‘sufficiency’ (because adequate and sufficient can be synonyms in English?). Likewise, she renders ‘physico-mathematical’ as ‘pseudo-mathematical’ (p. 135).

There are many examples I could cite, but an analysis of two short pages (pp. 42–44) will illustrate these concerns. First, she translates the standard metaphysical ‘act’ and ‘potency’ as ‘action and its reception in power’, and then renders literally ‘la position de l'absolu’ (a tricky phrase meaning something like ‘the question of the absolute’) as ‘the position of the absolute’, a phrase which makes no sense in the context of the discussion.

A little further, a crucial term, ‘asymptotique’, is given as asymptomatic, rendering Le Blond's important point unintelligible, and in the same sentence she mistranslates an important clause, misconstruing a central contention of transcendental Thomism. What should read as something like ‘[the absolute] which we hope to possess in the next life’, instead is translated as ‘…the absolute, by which we hope to be possessed in the next life.’ This is not a minor point, as the drive for possession of the absolute is the central principle for transcendental Thomists. And in the following sentence she translates ‘positivité’ literally, writing of ‘sin and its “positivity” to the error’. This makes Le Blond's reference to Aquinas on actual sin confusing if not incoherent (ST I-II, 85.5.ad3). Le Blond means in English something like ‘actuality’.

The following paragraph is marred by what seems to be a failure to understand the basic tenets of transcendental Thomism. The aim, drive, or dynamism of the mind to the absolute is central here, but this is not evident given that she repeatedly translates ‘visée’ as ‘design’ (e.g., she problematically renders ‘the drive [or, more literally, aim] toward the absolute’ [visée vers l'absolu] as ‘the design of the absolute’). Then, ‘affirmation’ is translated as ‘statement’. This technical term in the affirmation-formulation debate was central to controversies around Modernism and the nouvelle théologie and simply cannot be rendered this way without imprecision and confusion resulting, given that affirmation and statement are not synonymous. Moreover, she misses key prepositions, makes an important singular noun (l'origine) plural, and finishes with a problematic clause, which she mistranslates and renders as ‘which we meet on our path’. This also should refer to the visée-dynamism's interaction with finite, conceptual representations, but she tacks it on the end, clearly missing the philosophical point. Finally, in the next paragraph, ‘finite being’ (l’être fini) is rendered as ‘the finished being’.

Also, at times she utilizes a dynamic equivalency decidedly skewed against the Thomists, making them more critical than they were. She has Garrigou rudely dismissing Bouillard's central notion as ‘just a lot of hot air’, even though the French phrase is not rude at all (like saying ‘he is paying lip service’ or ‘he is satisfied with mere words’), and in fact conveys a specific theological criticism. A footnote is omitted (one among many) in which Labourdette wishes that studies like de Lubac's Surnaturel ‘will multiply… on account of their great usefulness…’, and further, a difficult conditional construction is missed (admittedly quite convoluted in the French), and the translation has Labourdette declare that he's willing to put ressourcement on trial for mere theological tendencies without actual texts to prove the case (!), when in fact precisely the opposite is declared: ‘we would believe ourselves to be placing tendencies on trial were we to attribute this…’ (pp. 103–104).

Lastly, I would just remark that Kelly displays little academic reserve in cheerleading for the ressourcement theologians. Her commentary propagates the dark legend of an innocuous and irenic nouvelle théologie repressed by an anti-historical ‘baroque Thomism’, which disdains subjectivity and seeks only to crush dialogue and rule by Roman fiat. Yes, the Thomists largely had control of the Roman curia, but as their personal correspondence indicates, the influence of the nouvelle théologie was dominant in the French church of the 40s, and it was a debate that none of the major Thomists in France wanted to have.

Kelly speaks of a ‘Thomist attack’, ignoring the near constant Toulouse obeisance to nouvelle théologie work, even dubiously declaring that ‘accusations of “Modernism” were frequently hurled at them’ (a reference here would be helpful). Garrigou stated simply, as a theological rather than polemical point, that he believed their conception of truth would lead back to Modernism, as the dogmatic affirmation was severed from formulation, resulting in too much slippage. Indeed, he always held that Blondel was acting in good faith and was not a Modernist.

Thus, she fans the flames of controversy in her commentary, and we read of Chenu's ‘blistering attack’, and Bouillard's ‘painstaking historical analysis [which]… blew this unchanging monolith [of Neothomism] out of the water’. The ressourcement notion of truth was ‘like a red rag to a bull’, and the Neo-Thomists, for their part, ‘lambasted’ their opponents, whose works were ‘triggers for the virulent attack by Garrigou-Lagrange’. However, when one reads the multiple articles making up Garrigou's interventions (soon to be published in English), he was indeed among the most measured and charitable of any of the authors in the exchange, avoiding recourse to sarcasm, personal attack, or cheap straw-man arguments.

If the ‘circular firing squad’ (rightly criticized by Matthew Levering) that marks debates around the nouvelle théologie is to be avoided, scholars must work diligently to understand the complex arguments of their opponents, frame them in the strongest and most charitable way, and provide reliable translations which can further academic study.