Culture and the Thomist Tradition

After Vatican II

Tracey Rowland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134405824
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Thomism's influence upon the development of Catholicism is difficult to overestimate - but how secure is its grip on the challenges that face contemporary society? Culture and the Thomist Tradition examines the crisis of Thomism today as thrown into relief by Vatican II, the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. Following the Church's declarations on culture in the document Gaudium et spes - the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World - it was widely presumed that a mandate had been given for transposing ecclesiastical culture into the idioms of modernity. But, says Tracey Rowland, such an understanding is not only based on a facile reading of the Conciliar documents, but was made possible by Thomism's own failure to demonstrate a workable theology of culture that might guide the Church through such transpositions.
A Thomism that fails to specify the precise rôle of culture in moral fomration is problematice in a multicultural age, where Christians are exposed to a complex matrix of institutions and traditions both theistic and secular. The ambivalence of the Thomist tradition to modernity, and modern conceptions of rationality, also impedes its ability to successfully engage with the arguments of rivial traditions. Must a genuinely progressive Thomism learn to accomodate modernity? In opposition to such a stance, and in support of those who have resisted the trend in post-Conciliarliturgy to mimic the modernistic forms of mass culture, Culture and the Thomist Tradition musters a synthesis of the theological critiques of modernity to be found in the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, scholars of the international 'Communio' project and the Radical Orthodoxy circle. This synthesis, intended as a post-modern Augustinian Thomism, provides an account of the rôle of culture, memory and narrative tradition in the formation of intellectual and moral character. Re-evaluating the outcome of Vatican II, and forming the basis of a much-needed Thomist theology of culture, the book argues that the anti-beauty orientation of mass culture acts as a barrier to the theological virtue of hope, and ultimately fosters despair and atheism.

Part I
CULTURE AS A THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM

1
THE TREATMENT OF CULTURE IN GAUDIUM ET SPES

The ‘crisis’ within the Thomist tradition regarding its stance towards the Liberal tradition and the culture of modernity was not solely created by the treatment of culture in the Conciliar document Gaudium et spes. However, this document represents a pivotal point in the magisterial engagement with the culture of modernity, and, like the Second Vatican Council itself, its treatment created an ‘explosive problematic’. This chapter seeks to provide an account of the elements of the problematic and the theological and philosophical ideas of those Conciliar periti who were influential in the drafting of the specific section of Gaudium et spes that deals with culture. In so doing, Gaudium et spes will be situated within the wider history of the magisterial effort to deal with the problem of modernity and the effort within the Thomist tradition to develop an understanding of the relationship between culture and theology, and, in particular, an account of the significance of culture in moral formation.

Modernism and modernity

The history of the stance of the Catholic magisterium in relation to the complex phenomenon of modernity may be traced through the Papal encyclicals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The popes of this era were concerned with modernism as a constellation of ideas about the relationship between philosophy and theology, especially about the possibilities of a natural (philosophical) theology, and the relationship of subjective experience to faith and the authority of tradition. They were also concerned about the implications for the Church, and its conception of the common good, of the principles of modern political philosophies, both Liberal and Socialist. This is especially clear in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII; but it is also manifest in various decrees throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which were prompted by the persecution of Catholics in France and other countries undergoing modern political revolutions.¹ The import of these documents could be summarised as an opposition to the philosophical presupposition of the Enlightenment that faith is merely a matter of subjective experience; the Rousseauian–Marxist idea that institutions, not original sin and the vices (such as greed and avarice) which flow from this, are the cause of social injustice; and the Liberal idea of the primacy of the individual will. These decrees, while demonstrating an awareness of the major principles operative within ‘modern theology’ and ‘modern political philosophy’, nonetheless fell short of a systematic critique of ‘modern culture’ as has appeared in the twentieth century in the works of scholars from such diverse intellectual traditions as Thomism and Anglicanism, Hegelianism and the Marxism of the Frankfurt school, and the Genealogical tradition from Nietzsche. At the close of the twentieth century the definitive demarcation lines within scholarly circles are between the pre-modern, the modern and the postmodern, while within specifically theological circles the issue is not so much whether one is a self-described Protestant or Catholic, but that of where one stands in relation to the cultural formation described as ‘modernity’. Alasdair MacIntyre hints at this as early as 1969 in his observation:

It has become increasingly plain that whether a man calls himself a Christian, a Marxist, or a Liberal, may be less important than what kind of Christian, Marxist, or Liberal he is.²

Similarly, Aidan Nichols has more recently observed that when it comes to the judgement of modern culture, ‘Catholics – as well as Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans and others – may find themselves divided across, rather than along, confessional lines’.³

Modernity as a specific cultural formation

The importance of focusing on modernity as a specific cultural formation has been repeatedly emphasised by Charles Taylor. Taylor (1995) defines a culture as a specific understanding of ‘personhood, social relations, states of mind, and virtues and vices’ or ‘a constellation of understandings of person, nature, society and the good’; and he further distinguishes the ‘acultural’ from the ‘cultural’ theory of modernity. Whereas the acultural theorists acknowledge that social transformations may be facilitated by our having certain values and understandings, just as they are hampered by the dominance of others, they argue that the transformations are not defined as the espousal of some such constellation. On the contrary, in his account of the transformation from the culture of Christendom to the culture of modernity, Taylor concludes:

It is not that we have sloughed off a whole lot of unjustified beliefs, leaving an implicit self-understanding that had always been there, to operate at last untrammelled. Rather one constellation of implicit understandings of our relation to God, the cosmos, other humans, and time, was replaced by another in a multifaceted mutation.⁴

Such a construction of the issue means that the concept of ‘modernity’ cannot simply be equated with ‘what is contemporary’. It is rather, as Taylor argues, a ‘constellation of implicit understandings’ about the relationship of the human person to ‘God, the cosmos and other humans’. As these understandings become embodied within social practices they form a culture.

The comparatively narrow focus on particular aspects of the culture of modernity within the papal encyclicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is not surprising since at the time of their formulation this culture was still undergoing construction. The processes that Charles Taylor calls ‘mutation’, Alasdair MacIntyre ‘severance’, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock a ‘heretical reconstruction’ and William T. Cavanaugh ‘secular parodies’ of the classical Christian synthesis were well under way but had not yet reached their apotheosis.⁵ However the absence of a theological examination of this cultural phenomenon called ‘modernity’ or the ‘modern world’ by the Conciliar fathers in the years 1962–5 is perhaps one of the most striking features of the documents of the Second Vatican Council. In this context, Kenneth Schmitz recently reflected:

Had we been more perceptive we might have guessed that the foundations of modernity were beginning to crack under an increasingly incisive attack. But we had no such cultural concept as ‘Modernity’; all we had instead was the historical category: modern philosophy.⁶

John O’Malley in Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II has also alluded to this lacuna:

At the time of the Council we did not think to ask from it any consistent theoretical foundation for aggiornamento, because most of us were not aware of the importance of having one.⁷

O’Malley concludes that ‘the Council’s fundamental injunction to remain faithful to the authentic past while adjusting to contemporary needs was transformed from a practical norm for reform into an explosive problematic’.⁸ There was no consideration, at least not at a philosophical and/or theological level, of the question of what is, in essence, the culture of modernity, and how such a culture affects the spiritual and intellectual formation of persons and their opportunities for evangelisation. The subsequent calls for a ‘relevant’ approach to pastoral issues thus offered a concept that was empty of content and which appears to have been influenced by Martin Heidegger’s call for an ‘authentic’ response to the situation of the ‘self ’ which finds itself ‘thrown’ (geworfen) within the culture of modernity.⁹ The difficulties associated with the opacity of Heidegger’s concept were subsequently multiplied when given a Christian gloss and popularised in Catholic communities throughout the world. Parishioners, clergy and the religious were called upon to be ‘relevant’ by adopting an ‘authentic’ response to the ‘modern world’, in circumstances where all three concepts – ‘relevance’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘the modern world’ or ‘modernity’ – were, of themselves, in O’Malley’s words ‘an explosive problematic’. ¹⁰

Thus, although much attention was paid by the Church’s magisterium to ‘Modernism’ throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, the notion of ‘modernity’ as a ‘cultural formation’ had not yet arrived within the theological frameworks of the Conciliar fathers in 1962. In this context, Hervé Carrier has observed that ‘prior to the Council, the capacity for cultural analysis was almost wholly ignored in the theological formation provided at the time’ – the word ‘culture’ did not even appear as an entry in the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique.¹¹

The Conciliar openness to modernity

In his opening address to the Council, John XXIII set the tone for what became the post-Conciliar enthusiasm for the culture of modernity:

In the present order of things, Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by men’s own efforts and even beyond their very expectations, are directed toward the fulfilment of God’s superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads to the good of the Church.¹²

This belief in the latently Christian orientation of the social trends of the 1950s may also be found in John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, wherein he described the ‘mutual acknowledgement of rights and duties in society’ as a ‘kind of preparatio evangelii’ since it brings human beings to an awareness of a world of values such as ‘truth, justice, charity and freedom’, and brings them to a ‘better knowledge of the true God, who is personal and transcendent’.¹³ There is, however, no analysis within Pacem in Terris, theological, sociological or otherwise, to support the judgement that the mutual acknowledgment of rights and duties leads to a greater appreciation of ‘truth, justice, charity and freedom’ and ultimately the personal, transcendent God. One can, for example, believe in the importance of a mutual acknowledgment of rights and duties on purely Hobbesian grounds without being remotely interested in truth, justice, charity and freedom as understood in a Christian sense, let alone in a personal transcendent God. Indeed, it may be argued that the very linking together of these values as if they have some natural relationship to one another carries within it intrinsically Christian theological presuppositions. A utilitarian, for example, may very well believe in rights and duties while regarding charity as completely irrelevant to questions of jurisprudence and political philosophy. In other words, what is missing from Pacem in Terris and John XXIII’s optimistic judgements about the directions of social values in the 1950s is precisely what Taylor calls a cultural analysis – an understanding that clusters of values fit together into constellations that become embodied in the practices and beliefs of individuals and the institutions in which they work, and, further, and most significantly, that one can have, for example, a culture which embodies a belief in rights and duties without having any interest at all in a notion of justice that is linked to a transcendent truth, including the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

Consistent with the theme of ‘openness’ to the world and a general optimism about the degree of common ground between Christians and non-Christians, G. Turbanti argues that the attitude of Paul VI was not so much one of caution, critique or condemnation, as one of welcome to what were construed to be ‘universal values in modern culture’.¹⁴ Again, as with John XXIII, it appears that Paul VI had little understanding of the fact that the concept of ‘universal values’ is itself highly problematic. It can be understood in at least two senses: first, that there are a range of goods or values that are universally required for human flourishing regardless of the peculiar social circumstances of individuals. However, ‘universal’ can also mean transcending all divisions among traditions or ‘common’ to all traditions. In the first sense, the expression is but a synonym for the idea of natural law; in particular, what are now commonly called ‘the goods of human flourishing’. However, in the second sense, it is a postulation of a belief that there are some values or goods which are common to all traditions, or that different traditions, regardless of their theological pedigree, will reach the same or similar conclusions about the goods of human flourishing. It is this second sense that is problematic in the context of the engagement of the Thomist tradition with the culture of modernity and its dominant Liberal tradition. If it is true that conceptions of justice, rationality and virtue are tradition dependent, as Alasdair MacIntyre and various proponents of the Genealogical tradition argue, then giving content to these supposed ‘universal values’ becomes a highly difficult intellectual exercise. Although those who belong to one of the ‘Abrahamic religions’ may find that they share interpretations of the goods of human flourishing in common, the notion of ‘universal values’ implies not merely inter-Abrahamic faith agreements about the most basic precepts of the ‘natural moral law’, but also the possibility that there exists an area of common ground between the theistic traditions and the Liberal tradition in relation to the goods of human flourishing. Moreover, for the optimism of the 1950s to be vindicated there would need to be a large area of common ground not only between the theistic traditions and the Liberal tradition(s), but also between the theistic traditions and the Genealogical.

The belief that it is possible to effect a synthesis of the Liberal and Thomist traditions is described by George Weigel, one of its contemporary proponents, as the project of ‘Whig Thomism’.¹⁵ It can be traced to the works of nineteenth-century ‘Liberal Catholics’ such as Lord Acton in England and the comte de Montalembert in France.¹⁶ It continues in Jacques Maritain’s efforts to reconcile Thomistic natural law with the Liberal natural right doctrine and his endorsement of the natural rights doctrine in the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. This strategy of reconciling natural law with natural right was prefigured in Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and has been followed in the encyclicals of John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. However, in the work of John Paul II it is clear that the Pope is taking only the rhetoric of the Liberal tradition, not its philosophical substance, while, in relation to Leo XIII’s adoption of the rights rhetoric, Ernest Fortin argues that this was not part of a project to synthesise the Thomist and Liberal traditions, but merely the expedient adoption of a weapon to use against socialism at a time when the Thomist tradition lacked the conceptual tools to deal with that particular ideology.¹⁷ Fortin further argues that Leo XIII failed to appreciate the ‘radical heterogeneity of the positions whose amalgamation was being sought’. Nonetheless, the ‘Whig Thomist’ project was further developed in John Courtney Murray’s defence of the American polity, of which Weigel’s contemporary defence of the ‘culture of America’ is a logical extension. To some degree, elements of ‘Whig Thomism’ are also to be found in the New Natural Law theory of John Finnis, Germain Grisez and Robert George.¹⁸

This adoption of pieces of the conceptual apparatus of the Liberal tradition, and, in some cases, its substantive content, occurred at a time during which the persuasive authority of the Liberal tradition had begun to wane. The watershed year of 1968 is now commonly held to mark the beginning of the period of postmodernity and a growing recognition of the internal contradictions within the Liberal tradition and the tradition’s tendency to compensate for its lack of any explicit connection to a theological framework by creating its own alternative soteriology. In terms of the intellectual avant-garde, 1968 represents the point at which the theorists of the Liberal ‘Enlightenments’ were replaced by Marx, Heidegger, Freud and Nietzsche, and 1989 represents the year when Marx dropped out of this quartet. Notwithstanding Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history in 1989, theological issues continue to dominate both domestic and international politics. Postmodern scholars argue that this is not surprising as all political and philosophical positions are dependent upon a framework of theological presuppositions. Works such as John Milbank’s Beyond Secular Reason and Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry challenge the claim of the Liberal tradition and its ‘value-free’ sociology to theological neutrality.

The idea that the Thomist tradition should eit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Culture as a Theological Problem
• Part II: Modernity and the Thomist Tradition
• Part III: A Postmodern Development of the Tradition
• Notes
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography