In our first seminar of the new academic year, Professor Jacob Phillips will explore how Scotistic Mariology made an unexpected appearance in discussions about how Catholic theology should respond to Darwinian evolutionary theory during the mid-twentieth century.
The controversy was caught between two extremes. On the one hand, there was an apparent reduction of cosmic history to an evolutionary framework, commonly associated with Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955).
On the other, a refusal to countenance any merit to evolutionary theory which would today be called 'creationism', and which was then as now more prominent on the American scene than the European.
The writings of the Franciscan Fr Peter Damian Fehlner (1931-2018) grapple with the merits and demerits of both approaches, but, surprisingly, find a way through evolution's Scylla and Charybdis by highlighting the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in binding creaturely history to God's ultimate ends for the cosmos.
This presentation will discuss Fehlner's interventions, and the roots of those interventions in a distinctively Franciscan approach to creation, particularly in Bl. John Duns Scotus.
Our guest speaker
Jacob Phillips is Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary's University. His most recent book is John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility: Distant Scene (Bloomsbury, 2023), and he is currently working on a monograph on Joseph Ratzinger and the History of Ideas which is scheduled for release in 2026. His most recent articles and chapters include contributions to the Oxford Handbook to Joseph Ratzinger, and the journals Nova et Vetera, Religions, and Theology.
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