Whig vs. Augustinian Thomists

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

Among 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.

Unlike the obsequious Kennedys, not to mention the legions of pants-suited nuns, guitar-strumming priests, and effete liturgical “experts” that arrived on the scene at about the same time, the Whig Thomists have not often professed a taste for theological innovation. They are able to insist on their orthodoxy by referring to the openness to the modern world allegedly recommended by the conciliar document Gaudium et spes (“The Church in the Modern World”), in which the Catholic Church finally officially engaged the question of modern culture (as opposed to modernism, which the Church had treated often in previous decades, but had approached as a specific set of ideas and not as a cultural complex). Unfortunately, what Gaudium et spes had to say about culture in general and modern culture in particular was ambiguous and unsatisfying, in part because it virtually ignored the preconciliar theological work of scholars like Balthasar, de Lubac, and Przywara. Furthermore, in affirming the “legitimate autonomy of culture,” in urging aggiornamento, and in Pope John XXIII’s optimistic appraisal that “Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations,” the Church seemed to affirm modernity as presenting new possibilities for the flowering of a revitalized Christian culture superior to all that had preceded it. Whatever challenges modernity also presented to the Christian life were outweighed by these exciting possibilities. But few of the Council fathers had drawn on, or themselves undertaken, anything like an adequate cultural analysis. If they had, they might have realized that the culture of modernity–and therefore Whig Thomism–was deeply problematic.

This evaluation of Gaudium et spes and its impact on the development of a Catholic theology of culture is provided in Tracey Rowland’s complex and wholly satisfying work of intellectual synthesis, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II. The principal concern of Rowland, who serves as dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne, Australia, is twofold: (1) to give an account of the “theological significance of culture,” particularly its role in moral formation; and (2) to ask how, in light of this analysis, the Catholic intellectual tradition–especially its dominant theological expression, Thomism–ought to regard the culture of modernity. Rowland argues that the account of modern culture given in Gaudium et spes is hopelessly insufficient. She claims that “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.” Gaudium et spes seemed not only to ignore the work of the Catholic critics of modernity, it also proceeded without seeming to understand the depth of the issue at hand. In part, this approach revealed the limitations of contemporary Thomism, which had not come to grips with the importance of culture as an analytic category. Rowland observes that St. Thomas Aquinas himself paid fairly little attention to the theme of culture, no doubt because the culture in which he and his audience were embedded was overwhelmingly and thoroughly Christian. Only in a post-Christian age could the problematic of the role of culture–and therefore history and tradition–in moral formation command the sustained attention of theologians and philosophers. Rowland argues that Gaudium et spes was a “compromise document.” The result was that it used terminology that was often vague or inappropriate: as early as 1969, Josef Ratzinger was criticizing certain sections of the document for their implicit Pelagianism.

Gaudium et spes, then, needs to be supplemented by a fuller examination of the unique characteristics of the culture of modernity. Rowland identifies two fundamental stances toward that culture which have emerged in Thomistic thought (a term she interprets broadly) in the years since Vatican II: (1) the culture of modernity is at worst neutral with respect to the flourishing of Christian practices and at best a positive development with respect to the Christian life–indeed, it may well be a “new praeparitio evangelii,” to quote Pope John XXIII, analogous in this respect to the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome; and (2) the culture of modernity is hostile to Christian flourishing and is aptly described as a “culture of death,” the term popularized by John Paul II.

Rowland calls the exponents of the first view the Whig Thomists–a much preferable term to the usual one of “neoconservatives,” since it brings the focus away from its adherents’ politics and puts it instead on their theology of culture. Whig Thomists like the familiar trio of Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus aim to synthesize the liberal and Thomist traditions. To take just two examples, Father Neuhaus claims that John Paul II has affirmed, especially in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, that Catholic teaching is “commensurate with the American liberal tradition,” at least when understood properly or in its best sense. For the irrepressible Michael Novak, American-style “democratic capitalism” (again, at its best) positively embodies authentic Catholic teaching. What others see as an amoral, materialistic, cutthroat world of global capitalism Novak interprets as a social-economic system that rewards individual creativity, alleviates poverty, and creates international solidarity. “Solidarity,” writes Novak, “is another way of saying globalization.” In fact, technology is even eliminating materialism:

In the new economy of today … it is very difficult to be a materialist, strictly understood. Consider your last purchase of a new disk or program for your computer. How much material do you actually have in your hand? About eighty cents worth of plastic. What you actually paid for is almost entirely composed of mind, the fruit of the human spirit, information in a design created by human intelligence. All around us, matter matters less and less, and intelligence (or spirit) matters more.¹

Few passages better capture the breathless, childlike awe in the face of undeniable progress that characterizes Novak’s Whig sentimentality. But the Whig Thomist label also includes the more sober–and more formidable–theorists of the New Natural Law, including most prominently John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Robert P. George. These scholars, if they do not exactly attempt a synthesis of liberalism and Thomism, use, in Rowland’s words, “the conceptual apparatus of the Liberal tradition,” particularly the Kantian tradition, in an attempt to recast Thomist ideas.

The exponents of the second view–that the culture of modernity is at odds with Christianity–include John Paul II (although only inconsistently, as Rowland realizes and explains); Catherine Pickstock, John Milbank, and some of the others associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement (Rowland’s book is part of Routledge’s Radical Orthodoxy series, edited by Milbank, Pickstock, and Graham Ward); theologians David Schindler, Kenneth Schmitz, and their Communio colleagues, including Cardinal Ratzinger; and Alasdair MacIntyre. Together this group constitutes the “postmodern Augustinian Thomists.” Not a catchy term, but it has the advantage of being pretty accurate. The postmodern Augustinian Thomists, explains Rowland, are postmodern in that they do not hesitate to adapt elements of the Marxist and Nietzschean critiques of the liberal tradition and its epistemological assumptions, choosing to emphasize the way in which the “soul [is] caught within the contradictions of the culture of modernity” and how that culture contributes to the soul’s formation; they are Augustinian in their concern about the relationship between the cities of God and man and in their emphasis on memory and narrative; and they are Thomist insofar as they seek to defend the viability of universal, objective natural law in the face of postmodern challenges by retrieving Patristic wisdom in order to develop “a postmodern metaphysics of the person.”

There is a lot to unpack here. But Rowland is up to the task, advancing her thesis carefully and with helpful side glances to theorists like Karl Rahner, Charles Taylor, R. G. Collingwood, and a host of others. Although unintentionally, Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday implicitly linked the birth of mass culture, consumerism, urbanization, and the bureaucratic, managerial, and intellectual classes with the decline in the authority of Christian teaching. One might say that Rowland demonstrates that much of the work of the postmodern Augustinian Thomists has served to make the reasons for this historical linkage explicit.

The effect of Rowland’s exposition is to oppose the Whig Thomists to the postmodern Augustinian Thomists in a lively debate about the theological meaning and import of culture, and modern liberal culture in particular. Breaking down the concept of culture into three parts–(1) culture-as-Geist, or as the characteristic institutions of a civilization, (2) culture-as-Bildung, or as that which facilitates self-formation, and (3) culture-as-Kultur, or as a specific civilizational logic or overarching form–Rowland asserts that the postmodern Augustinian Thomists amply demonstrate that modernity is at odds with Christian culture in each of these three senses. She concludes that the Liberal tradition as embodied in the practices of the culture of modernity actually operates so as to impede the exercise of prudential judgment in favour of decision-making by reference to bureaucratic norms, subjectives the transcendentals of the true and the good and in its bourgeois form marginalizes the transcendental of beauty, fosters an anti-historical “culture of forgetting” rather than a “culture of celebrated recurrence” and resists the horizontal incarnation of grace by its vacuous mechanical form.

If it is to retain its authenticity and power, the Thomist tradition must seek to criticize and transcend the cultural formation of modernity. Specifically, says Rowland, it must seek to participate in and theologically ground MacIntyre’s project of uniting “the natural law and virtue-ethics projects so that the tradition has a more highly developed account of how human persons can be not merely rational animals, but ‘culture-transcending dependent rational animals.’” Fortunately, Rowland’s study shows that there are adequate pre- and postconciliar resources for pursuing this grand project of accounting for the role of culture in the moral formation of the human person. The burden is on the Whig Thomists to show that the liberal institutions and practices they defend further rather than hinder this effort.

Rowland’s accomplishment is significant: she has canvassed the massive literature that lies along the hazy borderlands where Christian theology, social theory, political economy, and cultural criticism meet; she has identified, from a broadly Thomist perspective, the most insightful thinkers working in this area; and she has created a map showing the outlines of two opposing camps. She has also provided an account of these groups’ intellectual histories, delineated their most basic claims, and evaluated their contributions to Christian cultural reflection–all without rancor, ad hominem attacks, or resort to ideological canards.

Rowland has provided a reliable guide to the ideas that have today created a ferment of theologically informed cultural criticism, and in so doing she has herself become an indispensable voice of postmodern Augustinian Thomism. That school provides our best hope for escaping the morass of modern culture.

Note:

¹ This Novak quotation, the preceding one, and the quote from Fr. Neuhaus are all taken from Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), Doug Bandow and David L. Schindler, eds, pp. 55, 53, and 306 respectively.