In his book God, His Existence and His Nature, Réginald GarrigouLagrange gives a helpful explanation of this dense passage on pantheism in the constitution of Vatican I. What is condemned in the fourth canon, he says, are the three principal forms of pantheism: "(1) Emanatistic Pantheism; (2) the essential Pantheism of Schelling; (3) the essential Pantheism of the universal being."24 In this last form of pantheism, the canon presumably refers, Garrigou-Lagrange says, to the theories of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797-1855), condemned by decree of the Holy Office on December 14, 1887, and especially with regard to his teachings of ontologism, condemned on September 18, 1861. Two of the propositions condemned in 1861 read: "(1) What we understand by the term being as applied to all things and without which they mean nothing to us, is the divine Being. (2) Universals, objectively considered, are not really distinct from God."25

A doctrinal constitution such as Dei Filius usually shows restraint in identifying the concrete source of the ideas which are condemned as being incongruent with the truth of faith. It is possible that the fathers of the Council, when formulating the canon against pantheism, had in mind specifically the thought of Rosmini-Serbati, or more likely the influence of certain heterodox interpretations of his thought.26 It is clear that after his death in 1855 the Church felt increasingly the need to distance itself from Rosmini-Serbati's system of thought and to warn against possible erroneous interpretations in favor of idealism, and in particular of ontologism. The doctrine of "ontologism" is associated with the name of Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and consists in the affirmation that the human

24 Garrigou-Lagrange, God, 1:2.25 Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, 43rd ed., Latin-German, ed. by Helmut Hoping and Peter Hünermann [DH], Latin-English ed. and trans. Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), nos. 2842-43 (cited in Garrigou-Lagrange, God, 1:2, according to original Denzinger nos. 1660-61).26 Also associated with pantheistic ontologism, rejected by the constitution Dei Filius, were other Catholic thinkers in the nineteenth century such as Vincenzo Gioberti in Italy and Gérard Ubaghs in Belgium. It is possible that the third proposition of the canon primary envisages the pantheistic consequences of Gioberti's ontologism, more than Rosmini-Serbati's, especially considering the fact that the latter himself has emphasized the distinction between the universal being and God. The idea of being is not God himself, but something which has divine-like characteristics such as infinity, universality, and necessity. An enlightening discussion of his attempt to construct a Christian metaphysical philosophy in response to Kantianism and of his Thomistic critics (Kleutgen among others) can be found in Alasdair Macintyre's book Three Rival Version of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 70-71.

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Dei Filius I: On God, Creation, and Providence

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