The Very Model Of Lucidity

There is nothing like Debrett's Peerage in these United States. If there were, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., who died on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Dec. 12, would surely have been in it.

His great-grandfather, John W. Foster, was President Benjamin Harrison's secretary of state—a service done for President Wilson by his great-uncle, Robert Lansing, and for President Eisenhower by his father, John Foster Dulles. His uncle, Allen Dulles, was America's European spymaster during World War II, and his aunt Eleanor (whom many thought the most formidable of the clan) was largely responsible for negotiating the Austrian State Treaty and getting the Red Army out of Vienna in 1955. John Foster Dulles was also the most prominent Protestant layman of the 1940s, serving as chairman of the Federal Council of Churches' Commission to Study the basisof a "just and durable" peace in the days when that predecessor to the National Council of Churches stood at the apex of the American establishment, alongside the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association.

Foster Dulles's robust Calvinism didn't take with young Avery, who would say in later years that he left Choate for Harvard a thoroughgoing skeptic and agnostic. But neither did his agnosticism last. As he recounted in his memoir, "A Testimonial to Grace," he was walking along the Charles River on a blustery, early spring day in 1938 when he noticed the veins in a leaf on a blossoming tree; such precision, beauty, and purpose could not, he thought, be an accident. The universe, he imagined, must be governed by "an all-good and omnipotent God." "That night," he wrote, "I prayed for the first time in years."

For the intellectually inquisitive Dulles, however, belief in God opened up another set of questions: such as, where might God's will and purposes be institutionally embodied? Dulles's undergraduate years coincided with a renaissance of Roman Catholic intellectual and apologetic life at Harvard; and so it was that, slowly but certainly, this product of the strongest Presbyterian stock in America came to appreciate the depth, subtlety and coherent structure of Catholicism—as well as its capacity to inspire civilizational nobility, which he found manifest in the Middle Ages, a period of which he was very fond. Thus, he entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1940—relishing, as he used to joke years later, the part of the ritual in which the candidate had to abjure and recant his former heresies. After decorated service in the Navy during World War II, Avery Dulles entered the Society of Jesus—then the intellectual elite corps of the Roman Catholic Church—and was ordained a priest in 1956.

His pre-ordination philosophy and theology courses and his graduate studies in Rome, where he received the doctorate in 1960, prepared him for a teaching career at Woodstock College, Catholic University and Fordham. That immersion in the Catholic tradition in full also gave him the conceptual anchor that kept him remarkably steadfast in the intellectual whitewater of the post-Vatican II years. His steadiness, which was complemented by an equally remarkable fairness to those with whom he disagreed, made him a unique figure on the U.S. Catholic theological scene—a reference point for just about every serious Catholic religious thinker, and more than a few Protestants and Jews as well. His lecture style was not particularly scintillating; but his written work—extending over more than two dozen books and 800 scholarly articles—was the very model of lucidity. Pope John Paul II, on the advice of Cardinal Joseph Ratinger, honored that accomplishment in 2001 with the cardinal's red hat.

Avery Dulles was a self-consciously ecclesial theologian, who made a deliberate decision to "think with the church." Some imagined this a form of conservatism; if it was (and such labels really don't work with theology), it was an evangelical conservatism, an intellectual approach inspired by Christ's instruction, after the multiplication of loaves ands fishes, to "pick up the fragments, that nothing may be lost." Dulles explicated ancient truths; he stretched our understanding of them a bit; he probed their implications. But he never sought cheap originality or sound-bite fame.