the New Pantagruel

Whig vs. Augustinian Thomists

Tracey Rowland's Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II, reviewedby Jeremy Beer

mong the ways in which the monumental changes wrought by the Great War might be characterized, one of the most compelling, if oft-repeated, is that it definitively effected the death of western Christendom. For the disillusioned generation that came of age in the Twenties, writes Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday (1931), “disbelief was no longer considered sensational.” The postwar generation was the first for which the old Christian verities of their parents and grandparents seemed quite literally incredible. “It is doubtful,” wrote Allen, “if any college graduate of the ‘nineties or of any other previous period in the United States could have said ‘No intelligent person believes in God any more’ as blandly as undergraduates said it during the discussions of compulsory college chapel which raged during the ‘twenties. Never before had so many books addressed to the thinking public assumed at the outset that their readers had rejected the old theology.”

Culture and the Thomist Tradition:
After Vatican II
by Tracey Rowland.
Routledge, 2003. 240 pages.
ISBN: 0415305276

This rejection not only of Christian orthodoxy but of religious reflection generally was naturally accompanied by a rebellion against the culture that had been formed by Christian ideas and institutions. The postwar generation thrilled in the promises of unlimited sexual freedom; scoffed at moralistic attempts to enforce social conformity on matters of morals and manners (Prohibition, in Allen’s account, was more a pre- than a postwar phenomenon, despite the fact that the Eighteenth Amendment was passed in 1919); indulged in the fleeting pleasures of “debunking” (itself a new word) traditional and revered narratives; embraced progressive education; and targeted the businessman and the Fundamentalist as its chief social enemies. In other words, in the doctrines and practices they rejected and in those they chose as replacements, the new class of intellectuals that emerged during the Twenties is recognizably part of a new age, our age. The secular culture of whose triumph they were the prophets and agents is what we have come to call the culture of modernity.

In the first decades of the modern age, a number of Catholic thinkers from a variety of disciplines focused their attention on how Catholics ought to engage this new, rapidly secularizing world. They were forced to think through a problem that was presenting itself in the West for the first time since the reign of Constantine, namely, how and whether Christian moral formation could be undertaken in a culture drastically at odds with Christian teaching and practice. We might view Christopher Dawson, Romano Guardini, Erich Przywara, Dorothy Day, Josef Pieper, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac as some of the more important writers involved in this effort.

Whether radical or reactionary in their practical politics, these men and women agreed that the modern world posed unique and unprecedented problems for Christian living. They may have disagreed on which aspects of modernity were most objectionable, but they typically portrayed modern culture as fundamentally destructive. True, in its demolition it might, happily, raze a few dilapidated buildings and leave behind soil on which wildflowers bloomed, but one needed only to notice the accompanying weeds to avoid mistaking such plots for flourishing gardens.

Since Vatican II, critiques like those of Day, Dawson, and Balthasar have continued to emerge, but their popular appeal has waned. The decline was hastened by the ascendance of the doctrines of a group Tracey Rowland calls the “Whig Thomists.” This group traces its lineage not to those twentieth-century thinkers just mentioned, but rather to liberal Catholics like Lord Acton and the comte de Montalembert, neo-Thomists such as Jacques Maritain, and the American theologian John Courtney Murray. And unlike the most prominent Catholic critics of the first half of the twentieth century, the Whig Thomists are optimistic about the compatibility of modern practices and institutions with Catholic orthodoxy; indeed, they see the two as in many ways mutually complementary.

Considered sociologically, the rise of the Whig Thomists coincides with the increasing tolerance expressed towards Catholics by Protestant America after Vatican II, a tolerance symbolized by the election of John F. Kennedy to the White House in 1960. Political and social power, influence, and prestige suddenly fell within the not-long-ago ghettoized Catholics’ reach. To be sure, the Whig Thomists’ line is not John Kennedy’s–my faith shall not affect my politics in any way–but it speaks to the same objection (Catholicism is un-American!) with an equally effective reply–I shall not separate my politics and my faith, but not to worry: my faith is perfectly compatible with your politics. One could argue that JFK, schooled in the preconciliar milieu, had a more realistic grasp of how hard were Christian teachings, despite his craven submission to the demands of electoral politics.

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