Pierre Rousselot

Pierre Rousselot (29 December 1878 Nantes - 1915), was a Jesuit author of the controversial Les yeux de la foi, and he was a great influence upon Henri de Lubac.

Born at Nantes, France, Rousselot entered the Society of Jesus in October 1895. He was ordained priest on 24 August 1908 at Hastings. The same year he had obtained a doctorate for two theses presented to the Sorbonne: L'intellectualisme de saint Thomas and Pour l'histoire du probleme de l'amour au Moyen Age. In November 1909 he entered the Institut Catholique at Paris; he was given the chair of dogmatic theology in the following year, which he occupied till he was called to military service in 1914, apart from a year (1912–13) spent in England. He was killed in battle at Éparges, on 25 April 1915, aged 37.

Rousselot's L’intellectualisme de saint Thomas drew attention to the continuing vitality in Thomas’ synthesis of Christian Platonism.

Rousselot suggested a new concept of revelation: that revelation be conceived not as a sum total of distinct truths, propositions, judgements, but as a kind of knowledge that is indefinitely cashable (monnayable) in distinct ideas and propositions which explicitate it without being able to exhaust it, and without claiming to supplement it. Revelation, he proposed, was the living and loving knowledge that the apostles had of Jesus. The mode in which the many dogmas are precontained in the single changeless knowledge which is the apostolic deposit is not logical, but Christological. De Lubac's contribution to the question of doctrinal development is largely a restatement of that of Rousselot, whose papers he studied and published.