Jean Daniélou

French Jesuit theologian and cardinal (1905–1974)

Jean Guenolé Marie Daniélou (danjelu; 14 May 1905 – 20 May 1974) was a French Jesuit and cardinal, an internationally well known patrologist, theologian and historian and a member of the Académie française.

Jean Guenolé Marie Daniélou was born on 14 May 1905 in Neuilly sur Seine. He was the son of Charles Daniélou and Madeleine Clamorgan. His father was an anticlerical politician who several times as a minister served in the French government, while his mother was a Catholic educator and the founder of institutions for women's education. His brother Alain (1907–1994) was a noted Indologist and historian. Daniélou studied at the Sorbonne and passed his agrégation in grammar in 1927. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1929 and during his regency taught at a boys' school in Poitiers, from 1934 to 1936. He then studied theology at Fourvière in Lyon under Henri de Lubac, who introduced him to the specialized study of the Fathers of the Church. He was ordained a priest on 19 August 1938.

During World War II, Daniélou served with the Air Force in 1939–1940. With the fall of France to Nazi Germany he was returned to civilian life and began doctoral studies, completing in 1942 his thesis on the spiritual doctrine of Gregory of Nyssa. He was then appointed chaplain to the female section of the École Normale Supérieure, at Sèvres. He spent most of his time on research in patristics, and he became, together with Henri de Lubac, one of the founders of the Sources Chrétiennes book series. In 1944 he was named Professor of Early Christian History at the Institut Catholique de Paris, later becoming dean there. Beginning in the 1950s he produced several historical studies which included The Bible and the Liturgy, The Lord of History, and From Shadows to Reality that furnished background for the development of Covenantal Theology. Thoroughly grounded in the Fathers of the Church, who worked from Scripture, Daniélou generally avoided the neo Thomistic terminology and approach and used a more relational vocabulary, emphasizing our self gift in response to God's gift in Jesus Christ, with the gradual unveiling of the Trinitarian life in history. Pope John XXIII appointed Daniélou a peritus of the Second Vatican Council. In 1969 Pope Paul VI made him a cardinal. As a result, he was ordained to the episcopal titular see of Taormina, and assigned the title of Cardinal Deacon of San Saba, a Jesuit run parish in Rome. Rather like his theology professor Henri de Lubac, Daniélou twice refused the cardinalate but eventually accepted at the insistence of Paul VI.