A brief history of the Catholic both/and

That we face today a great crisis of division—religiously, philosophically, politically, socially—is taken for granted. Yet most attempts to explain and deal with this crisis inevitably tend, in a vicious circularity, right back toward the very divisions in question. Is there any way out of our deepest dichotomies—an ex-hodos from our captivity to intellectual either/ors and cultural war?

In my first book The Way of Heaven and Earth: From Either/Or to the Catholic Both/And, I argue that Christ and the Church offers this way out—the Way—and present readers with a framework for thinking about and applying what has come to be called “the Catholic both/and.”

But where did this phrase—and the idea behind it—come from? And what are the various historical and theological contexts that defined its emergence? Here I would like to trace, albeit briefly, this pedigree through two thousand years of Catholic history, in the hope that others might be inspired to participate in building its future.

A (very) brief look at the first fifteen hundred years

While the term “Catholic both/and” does not appear until the twentieth century, its substance flows out from the revelation of Christ himself, who gathers up and reconciles “all things” of heaven and earth (Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:20). From the Incarnation through the Paschal Mystery to the promised new heavens and new earth, the great polarities of life captured in the phrase “heaven and earth” in all its senses—God and man, God’s place and man’s place, the spiritual and the physical, and the spirit in the flesh—come together as one in Jesus. The New Testament, which unveils the Old, bears abundant witness to this both/and quality of Christ and the Christian life.

However, the Christians of the first centuries found themselves in fierce disagreement about how exactly these polarities fit together. The early Church was especially torn over the very identity of “the Way” himself (John 14:6). The Scriptures speak of the Son of God—on that all Christians agreed—but was the Son consubstantial and coeternal with the Father? They also speak of the Word becoming flesh—no follower of Jesus could deny it—but was the “flesh” a full human nature? Various heresies, from the Greek hairesis (choice), chose one truth of the Way at the expense of another.

Thus, Sacred Tradition—“flowing from the same divine wellspring” as Sacred Scripture (Dei Verbum § 9)—began, through the organ of ecumenical councils, to clarify points of Catholic dogma and doctrine. And time and time again, they came down on the side of the “both/and.” The Council of Nicaea declared that the Son was both “consubstantial” with the Father (against the Arians) and a distinct person (against the Sabellians), and the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon declared that Christ was both truly God (against the Nestorians) and truly a union of two distinct natures, divine and human (against the Monophysites). Even the first “council” in Jerusalem featured two both/ands: the early Church would be both liberated from the Law of Moses and still bound to it—and this seemed good both to the Holy Spirit and to the Apostles (Acts 15:28–29).

Various saints and theologians built on this both/and quality of Catholicism down the centuries, which naturally developed in a thousand different directions: Saint Irenaeus (the unity of Old and New Testaments in Scripture), Saint Augustine (the harmony of faith and philosophy), Peter Abelard (the “yes and no”), Saint Thomas Aquinas (the medieval synthesis of Christianity and Aristotle), Nicholas of Cusa (the “coincidence of opposites”), and countless others. This isn’t to say, of course, that these thinkers of the first fifteen hundred years did not have sharp disagreements. But what they held in common was deeper than what divided them. The Catholic world shared a distinctive, rich terrain of synthesis and paradox—the incarnational, the sacramental, the analogical—all patterned after the communion of heaven and earth in Christ.

The 1500s

The Reformation was a watershed resurgence of the either/or in Christian theology, one that struck at the very heart of Christendom. The lynchpin of the Reformation, of course, was the five “solas”: salvation through faith alone (sola fide), by grace alone (sola gratia), in Christ alone (solus Christus), on the authority of Scripture alone (sola scriptura), for the glory of God alone (soli Deo gloria). Luther drew clear and distinct contrasts regarding the salvation of the soul, and Protestantism to this day feeds off a sense of radical choice between two elements set in dramatic opposition: Christ or Mary? The Word of God or human traditions? Service to God or to the Bishop of Rome? The central either/or was, of course, either faith or works when it came to our standing before God: “The first care of every Christian,” Luther declared, “ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and strengthen his faith alone more and more.”[1]

The Reformation was met with the Counter-Reformation, and the Council of Trent (1545–1563) met the Protestant either/or with a resounding both/and: “If anyone shall say that by faith alone the sinner is justified, so as to understand that nothing else is required to cooperate in the attainment of the grace of justification, and that it is in no way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the action of his own will: let him be anathema” (Canons on Justification, can. 9; emphasis added).

Five years before Trent, Saint Ignatius founded the Society of Jesus. These soldiers of both God and the pope were commissioned, among other things, to stop the spread of Protestantism. The Jesuits had an instinct for finding God in all things (“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins would later put it[2]) and for living in the paradoxical tension of divine and human wills: “Let your first rule of action,” an Ignatian maxim declared, “be to trust in God as if success depended entirely on yourself and not on him: but use all your efforts as if God alone did everything, and yourself nothing.”[3] And the Jesuits would go on to play a decisive role in articulating the both/and centuries later—as would, it turns out, the ongoing Protestant reaction to Catholic fullness.

The 1800s: Hegel and Kierkegaard

We fast forward three centuries later to a war of ideas between two rather unconventionally Lutheran philosophers: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Søren Kierekgaard (1813–1855). Hegel was the last great system-building rationalist in the tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant. He attempted to get his arms around the whole of human history by framing it as a gradual unfolding of the divine Absolute, Reason, or Spirit. Suffice it to say here that Hegel’s system was a kind of immanentized both/and—a purely rational and historical dialectic that accounted for the whole of human life as it unfolds on earth. Each thesis and antithesis “sublate” into a higher synthesis, as the tumult of world-historical statesmen unwittingly serve the march of God in time, and humanity collectively progresses into greater degrees of freedom.

Hegel had a massive influence across Europe, including in Denmark. There, the master ironist Kierkegaard rose up against the prevailing rationalism of Danish Hegelianism—“the erudite, the anxious, the timorous contradictory effort of approximation”[4]—with a call to a pure and passionate faith: an absolute relation to the absolute. Kierkegaard is widely thought to be the first one to coin the term “either/or” with his famous work of the same name, which presents the stark choice between the aesthetic and the ethical as a rebuff to tidy Hegelian synthesis.

But Kierkegaard also might have been the first one to coin the term “both/and.” In his Attack Upon Christendom, he writes,

I who am called “Either/Or” cannot be at the service of anybody with both-and. I have in my possession a book which doubtless is all but unknown in this land, the title of which I will therefore cite in full: The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Although I stand in a perfectly free relation to this book, and am not, for example, bound to it by an oath, yet nevertheless this book exercises a great power over me, inspires me with an indescribable horror of both-and.[5]

In the decades after Kierkegaard’s death, these two phrases—“either/or” and “both/and”—would continue to bubble up in popular discourse. And Catholic thinkers in post-Reformation England, where a Hegelian Idealism was taking hold—men like John Henry Newman (1801–1890), Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914), and G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)—would continue teasing out a thoroughly paradoxical view of reality. But it was in the early twentieth century that these two streams of thought would converge, and the “Catholic both/and” as we know it began to take shape.

The 1900s: The Catholic both/and arrives

One of the first to link Catholic thought with both/and principle is the Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Barth has been quoted as referring to the “damned Catholic ‘and’”; however, the source for this phrase seems to be Hans Küng, who references it in two of his works without citation, suggesting that it’s either a paraphrase of Barth or a direct quote from personal interactions between the two.[6] But what we do see in Barth, in his 1933 lecture “The First Commandment as an Axiom of Theology,” is a critique of the “theology of ‘and’”—a tendency to edge out the one God with other “gods,” and to supplement divine revelation with various human constructs of reason, experience, culture, history, etc. Barth principally had liberal Protestantism in view, but also declared its guilt by association with Catholicism, that original master of “and” theology: “The catholic church . . . is great in the art of dividing its heart between God and the gods. Alongside Christ it knows of a second thing needful for salvation. It knows of a ‘down here’ which in its existence and actuality is analogous to that ‘up there’ and is oriented toward it in its immanent structures.”[7]

The reference to “analogy” is telling: The year before Barth’s lecture, Erich Przywara, SJ, who was influenced by figures like Aquinas and Newman, published the Analogia Entis (1932). This text—which Przywara scholar John Betz says was, “in part, a response to Hegel”[8]—explored the “analogy of being” first articulated by Thomas Aquinas, a both/and that refused to succumb to either equivocity (sharply separating God and creation) or univocity (collapsing the distinction between the two).[9] Barth and Przywara engaged in friendly theological dialogue, but the former reacted strongly against the whole idea of analogy: “I regard the analogia entis as the invention of Antichrist, and I believe that because of it it is impossible ever to become a Roman Catholic.”[10]

Przywara was the first of several Jesuit priests who, over the course of subsequent decades, gradually embedded the Catholic both/and in theological discourse. Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Jesuit for twenty-one years and a student of Przywara, furthered the Catholic both/and in his own massive corpus, using the term directly at least once: “The ‘Catholic both . . . and’ has always appeared as a compromise in the eyes of the Augustinians, who think things out to the end, and who include Luther and Karl Barth.”[11] Another colleague of Balthasar’s, Henri de Lubac, SJ, also wrote powerfully around the same time of the paradoxical aspects of Catholicism. The ressourcement movement in theology in which both men took part shaped the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and in the decade after, Balthasar and de Lubac—together with Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI—founded the journal Communio. As early as 1962, the young Ratzinger was using “both/and” in connection with Catholic thought: “Gratia praesupponit naturam’ . . . The Catholicism that had brought forth this axiom appeared as the religion of Both-And: spirit and body, God and man, grace and nature—as the great universal harmony.”[12] Pope Saint John Paul II, a council father, was also a man of the both/and—his famous Fides et Ratio being a prime example—and was deeply influenced by all three of these Communio scholars.

If the both/and was a strong theme in both Benedict XVI and John Paul II, it was virtually omnipresent in the intellectual history of Jorge Bergoglio, SJ. In The Mind of Pope Francis, Massimo Borghesi details the influence of writers like Przywara, Balthasar, and de Lubac on the young Jesuit. But Bergoglio was influenced even more profoundly by the deeply Hegelian Gaston Fessard, SJ, and the Uruguayan lay writer Alberto Methol Ferré (who converted through the influence of G. K. Chesterton, and also studied Przywara). “A Catholic cannot think either-or (aut-aut) and reduce everything to polarization,” Pope Francis told America magazine in 2022. “The essence of what is Catholic is both-and (et-et).”[13]

Another Jesuit from this period worth mentioning is William F. Lynch, SJ, best known for Christ and Apollo (1960). In the preface of his 1962 book The Integrating Mind, Lynch writes, “This is a book written in defense of a way of thinking and a philosophy of life that may be called both-and versus either-or.”[14] Lynch had a profound influence on the young novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor, who reviewed three of Lynch’s books, including Integrating Mind, and in one letter called him “one of the most learned priests in this country.”[15]

But when did the phrase “Catholic both/and” first appear in full? The honor once again appears to belong to a Protestant. In March 1967, Jesuit Missions sponsored an ecumenical conference on mission theology—the first of its kind after Vatican II—at Woodstock College in Maryland titled “The Church, The Word and the Nations.” The proceedings were later published in The Word in the Third World. In that text, the theologian Paul D. Clasper comments on a presentation by Jean Daniélou, SJ (another ressourcement theologian), saying, “I think that one of the values of Catholic thought to Protestant people, at least speaking of myself, is this healthy sense of ‘both-and’ which is always a check on my Protestant ‘either-or.’”[16] A few pages later, Clasper remarks that “the Catholic ‘both-and’” comes through in Vatican II’s teaching on missions.[17]

The turn of phrase seems to have especially caught the attention of Avery Dulles, SJ, who then served on the faculty of Woodstock. Dulles remarks, “Those of you who belong to the Reformation tradition, as well as we non-Reformed Christians, have generally recognized the validity of what Dr. Clasper generously called ‘the Catholic both-and.’”[18] Almost twenty years later, Dulles deployed the phrase again in his Catholicity of the Church (1985), and in the introduction articulates “the Catholic principle” in both/and terms, nodding to the contributions of both Richard P. McBrien and Robert Imbelli to the theme.[19]

Throughout the 1970, 1980s, and 1990s, these major theological currents—the Protestant-Jesuit dialogue, the rise of the ressourcement movement, and the magisterial weight of the Second Vatican Council and the past three pontificates—led to a critical mass of the both/and in Catholic theological discourse.

2000–2025: The Catholic both/and explodes

That critical mass exploded in twenty-first century America, largely through the work of two academics turned popular writers: Peter Kreeft and Bishop Robert Barron. Both, too, were trained by Jesuits: Kreeft by W. Norris Clarke, SJ, author of Person and Being (1993) and The One and the Many (2001), and Bishop Barron by Michel Corbin, SJ, a specialist in Hegel and Aquinas and a student of de Lubac.[20] The term “both/and” appears in Kreeft’s writings as early as 1990 (Everything You Ever Want to Know About Heaven), and in Barron’s writings as early as 1998 (And Now I See). Yet both men continued to return to the theme again and again in their writings. The phrase “both/and” appears a dozen times in Kreeft’s Handbook of Catholic Apologetics, coauthored with Ronald Tacelli, SJ (1994), and in 2016, Bishop Barron published a book of essays framed by it: Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism.

Through their influence, and through the continued influence of the aforementioned movements and figures, the Catholic both/and from here proliferates through popular writing in the English-speaking Catholic world, becoming impossible to track in terms of influence. Post-2000, the phrase makes an appearance in books by Sherry Weddell, George Weigel, Dave Armstrong, Christopher West, Jimmy Akin, Abigail Favale, and Thomas Joseph White, just to name a few.

But there are three other specific developments in this span worth underscoring. First, in 2005, New Testament scholar Felix Just, SJ, published an extensive list of Catholic both/ands of theology and philosophy on his “Catholic Resources” website, opening the door for anyone to email along suggested additions to the impressive list.[21] Then, in 2013, the “both/and” perspective made its way, at least implicitly, into Church doctrine via Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which laid out four principles reflective of the coincidence of opposites: “time is greater than space,” “unity prevails over conflict,” “realities are more important than ideas,” and “the whole is greater than the part” (Evangelii Gaudium § 222–237). Finally, in 2020, Mauro Gagliardi published the Truth Is a Synthesis, an English translation of his comprehensive presentation of Catholic teaching through the lens of the “both/and,” stressing not only the holding of two elements together in tension but also giving proper primacy to one of the elements over the other—a vitally important insight for the principle’s future.

With the election of Robert Francis Prevost as Francis’s successor on May 8, 2025, the question naturally arises: Will Pope Leo XIV follow in the both/and footsteps of his three predecessors? There’s already strong evidence that he will: Unity-in-diversity—a theme reflected in his episcopal motto, In Illo uno unum (In the One, we are one)—has already been a key emphasis of his first weeks; a foreword from 2006 points to a deep sense of the union of the the heavenly and the earthly in eschatology, anthropology, and Christology; and his 1987 doctoral dissertation for the Angelicum seems to evince a keen appreciation for maintaining Catholic balance in the life of the Church. What that will look like exactly as Leo rises to meet the challenges of the day in both the Church and the world remains to be seen.

In conclusion

The “Catholic both/and” has often been defined in opposition to the “Protestant either/or.” But while the Reformation clearly marks a tipping point in the emergence of the Catholic both/and as we know it, and the reaction of Protestants and Catholics to each other’s theology was clearly a critical force in drawing the concept to the fore, the long and complex history of both/and thinking in the Church—both before and after the Reformation—points to a much bigger story. The Church does say yes to faith and works, Scripture and Tradition, etc. But it also shares deeper theological both/ands with most Protestants (God and man in Christ, the soul and body in man, etc.). It even reaches toward other both/ands beyond theology (the one and the many in metaphysics, order and openness in social and political thought, etc.). Catholicism’s both/and is both deeper and broader than its response to the Reformation, even as it includes that response; it’s not simply a way of viewing theology, or even Christianity itself, but—in and through Christ—all of reality. The acceleration of the phrase in popular Catholic discourse, together with the embedding of the principle in mainstream Catholic theology, has opened up this wider horizon.

At the same time, looking at this history of synthetic thought in the Church, we also have to admit that there is a definable horizon—a common thread of the Way running from the Incarnation to the present. The Catholic both/and is a powerful hermeneutical tool for understanding and defending the faith; on the other hand, without clear definition, it risks losing all meaning: the term can be applied to any pair of things in any way, pulling us into obscurity and even—under the guise of incarnational synthesis—heresy. What is the particular question a both/and is answering? Which element of a duality has the primacy over the other, and why? And when are we dealing with a true Christian both/and rather than some other convergence—a union of parallel things, a logical contradiction, even a marriage of heaven and hell? As that deeply catholic thinker C. S. Lewis remarked in his preface to The Great Divorce, it’s a mistake to think that reality does not also present us with “an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or.’”[22]

In light of this brief history, the Catholic both/and appears to be an especially potent and promising avenue for defining Catholic thought and identity in the third millennium. But both expanding the Catholic both/and beyond the debates of the Reformation and fortifying it within well-defined boundaries will ensure that it continues to flourish and bear good fruit.

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[1] Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty, in First Principles of the Reformation, trans. Henry Wace and C.A. Buchheim (John Murray, 1883), 107.

[2] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in 100 Great Catholic Poems, ed. Sally Read (Word on Fire, 2023), 267.

[3] Ignatius of Loyola, January 2 reflection, in Thoughts of St. Ignatius Loyola for Every Day of the Year, from the Scintillae Ignatianae, ed. Gabriel Hevenesi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 15.

[4] Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the “Philosophical Fragments,” in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Modern Library, 1946), 252 (emphasis added).

[5] Søren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon “Christendom” (Princeton University Press, 1946), 91 (emphasis added).

[6] See Hans Küng, Theology for the Third Millenium, trans. Peter Heinegg (Doubleday, 1988), 48; and Great Christian Thinkers (Continuum, 1994), 191.

[7] Karl Barth, “The First Commandment as an Axiom of Theology,” in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments, ed. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Pickwick Publications, 1986), 76.

[8] John Betz, “Erich Przywara: In Memoriam,” Church Life Journal, February 7, 2023, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/erich-przywara-in-memoriam/.

[9] See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1.13.5.

[10] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (T&T Clark; Continuum, 2004), I/1, p. xiii. 2

[11] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tragedy Under Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the Experience of the West, trans. Brian McNeil, CRV (Communio; Ignatius, 1988), 144–145.

[12] Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, trans. Michael Miller and Matthew O’Connell (Ignatius, 2011), 146 (first published in 1962).

[13] “Pope: Polarization is not Catholic, dialogue is the only way,” Vatican News, November 28, 2022, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2022-11/pope-polarization-is-not-catholic-dialogue-is-the-only-way.html.

[14] William F. Lynch, The Integrating Mind: An Exploration Into Western Thought (Sheed and Ward, 1962), v.

[15] Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 119.

[16] The Word in the Third World, ed. James P. Cotter (Corpus Books, 1968), 32.

[17] Third World, 35.

[18] Third World, 263.

[19] Avery Dulles, The Catholicity of the Church (Clarendon, 1985), 125, 3, 5.

[20] See Barron, Renewing our Hope, 66.

[21] Felix Just, “The Essential Key to Christian Theology: BOTH/AND, not either/or,” updated February 10, 2025, https://catholic-resources.org/Both-And.htm.

[22] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (HarperOne, 2002), 465.