Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II

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Summary: Basis of the Church's pastoral problems since Vatican II
Review: This book has been reviewed by the emminent Fr Peter Joseph STD in AD2000 Vol 16 No 5 (June 2003), p. 17: "Dr Rowland argues that the anti-beauty orientation of mass culture acts as a barrier to the reception of the theological virtue of hope, and ultimately fosters despair and atheism."

I found the book's insights on when to adopt/reject the concepts of rival intellectul traditions especially helpful. There are pastoral as well as important philisophical lessons in here.

Read Fr Joseph's entire review ...

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Summary: A Crititcal Re-Aprraisal of Vatican II
Review: To live in the aftermath of an Ecumenical Council appears never to have been easy. In our own age, we who have grown up in the shadow of Vatican II need to remember this. We probably suffer from having been told "Vatican II changed all that" in respect of all aspects of Church life, and we may well have looked on whilst those who questioned such 'changes' were consigned to perdition.

Such is the deference with which we have been taught that we must speak about Vatican II and all its works that I was astonished to read in Aidan Nichols' The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger an account of Ratzinger's substantial criticisms of the Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes. Surely this was the document of the Council par excellence? How could it be subject to such informed criticism?

The answer is that most of the documents of Vatican II contain reformable prudential judgements made in contingent circumstances; they are not dogmatic definitions to which one owes the assent of faith, but rather, largely, they seek to chart pastoral policy for the Church (eg, one can be a Catholic in good faith and believe that the Council was silly to call for the introduction of bidding prayers into the Mass-the decision is simply a matter of judgement, not doctrine). Once this is understood, it is perfectly reasonable for a peritus of the Council, as Joseph Ratzinger was, to engage in a critical evaluation of these judgements and policies.

Today, it is, surely, no less appropriate that critical evaluation should continue, particularly in the light of the almost forty years' experience since, for, even if the policies of the Council were apposite, the pastoral policies appropriate to the Church today may well not be identical to those of forty years ago.

Enter the Australian Cambridge scholar Dr Tracey Rowland. She is a "child of Vatican II" in that she has known no other period of history, and has been inoculated with the assumptions that modernity is intrinsically good and that modern culture is the apex of philosophical and humanistic achievement, and that the Church has rightly shaped her pastoral policies in accordance with them. Fortunately, though, Rowland has-rather like a child forbidden to look in an attic-delved behind these assumptions.

She has delved deeply. Its central tenet is that, in its uncritical embrace of modernity in general and of modern culture in particular, Gaudium et spes was insufficiently critical of modernity and operated from flawed understanding of culture, with the result that 'modern' pastoral policies based on these errors have resulted in "a widespread loss of faith within Europe...within countries like Canada, the United States and Australia." Furthermore, Rowland argues:

Those sections of Gaudium et spes that appear to give the Church's approval to the culture of modernity were formulated without reference to a theological framework within which the concept of culture could be 'eschatologically situated.' In the absence of any such theological framework, an endorsement of the culture of modernity, or select aspects thereof, can only be, as Rahner conceded, an act of faith.

To this canonisation of modern culture, Rowland juxtaposes the response of scholars of the Thomist tradition, who vary as to whether such a concept is fundamentally alien to the faith, or is complementary. Her study finds for the former, concluding:

'Pastoral strategies' that further blur the distinctions between the culture of modernity and a culture rooted in a specifically Trinitarian Christocentrism do nothing to restore the visibility of the form and further compound the crisis. Either the Church as the Universal Sacrament of Salvation is the primary source, guardian and perfector of culture within persons, institutions and entire societies, or culture becomes and end in itself-an ersatz religion-as in the Aristocratic Liberal and Nietzschean traditions, which in turn implodes into that anti-culture known as 'mass culture.'

Dr Rowland draws upon an impressive and wide-ranging array of philosophical and theological sources including works by Alasdair MacIntyre, Von Balthasar, Aidan Nichols, David Shindler and John Paul II, and avoids the dry erudition of some scholarly works by regularly connecting her argument with facets of post-Conciliar life, most particularly the Liturgy. Her conclusions in here are highly significant, locating the question of the Liturgy at the very centre of the life of the Church:

It is precisely what [Cardinal] Lercaro called the 'cultural patrimony of the Church,' and what Paul VI identified as the Church's rich liturgical culture, which was historically the source of the plain person's exposure to 'high' or 'erotic' or 'aristocratic' culture and, in particular, to beauty. By depriving people of these riches through the policy of accommodating liturgical practices to the norms of 'mass culture'-a culture already identified by Guardini in the 1950s as an 'anti-culture'-the post-Conciliar Church has unwittingly undermined the ability of many of its own members to experience self-transcendence. This destruction in turn leads to a loss of 'sapiential experience'-...a necessary element of [truly] prudential judgement-and a preparation for the virtue of hope. As a consequence, plain persons fall into the pit of nihilistic despair and/or search for transcendence in the secular liturgies of the global economy, whereas the more highly educated pursue strategies of stoic withdrawal and individual self-cultivation which are destined to end in despair, and even madness, for which the secular critics of modernity-Freud and Heidegger, for example-have no viable solutions.

This is an extremely important book, and no serious student of theology or pastor can afford to ignore it; we do live and work in the shadow of an Ecumenical Council which has-intentionally or not-revolutionised the Church, and-unless all the statistics lie-not for the better. It is utterly necessary that more scholars continue the work of thorough, loyal, critical examination of its strengths and of its very real weaknesses and of their implications for the life of the Church that Dr Rowland has begun so well.

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Summary: Incisive critique, but where are the thomists?
Review: Tracey Rowland has written an excellent critique of the classical liberal assumptions that still dominate thought in much of the West. She is especially effective in dispelling the ideology of "human rights" by comparison to the classically conceived theory of right. However, there is much in this book that is baffling to me.

First, it is not clear to which "thomist tradition" she refers in the title. Certainly, the authors she criticizes, the "whig thomists" as she calls them, do not represent the main current of Thomism. And "analytical Thomism" is hardly what I think of when I hear "thomist tradition". On the other hand, the authorities she invokes, Pope John Paul II, Ratzinger, Schindler, De Lubac, Kaspar, Schmitz, and MacIntyre, are certainly not thomists in any traditional sense. They are original thinkers who vary greatly in their fidelity to Saint Thomas, freely contradicting him when it suits them. Alone of this group would I have recognized MacIntyre as a thomist, and he is no conventional one. It seems that among Catholic intellectuals "thomist" has become a designator of personal approval rather than objective doctrinal content. To be a "thomist" one does not have to agree with St. Thomas on fundamentals; it's enough to invoke his name. It is no wonder then that there are only a few references in this work to St. Thomas' own writings. None of St. Thomas' works even appear in the bibliography.

Second, there are some serious problems with her solution. She maintains that the "identities in relation" logic of the Trinity needs to be applied to the person as such, so that what constitutes us as persons is not only substantiality, but also relatedness. But St. Thomas makes it clear that only in God are persons subsistent relations. Moreover, the created relations we have to God as creatures are not reciprocal or in any way definitive of personhood. God does not have a real relation to creatures, and all creatures, whether persons or not, have this relation to God. Dr. Rowland has not grasped that while the Vatican gives lip occasional service to such theses as she presents, it effectively undermines all attempts to restore the Tradition that she wishes to vivify. Groups that wish to retain the traditional worship and theology are hammered down, exiled, or called schismatic by the very authorities to whom Dr. Rowland is appealing. As is typical of contemporary papal apologists, she does not wish to see the disturbing and scandalous elements of this papacy, and by a very selective reading of the Pope's writings would make us understand him to be a traditionalist in disguise. He is, in fact the most radically liberal Pope ever to sit in the chair of St. Peter.

Dr. Rowland's work ultimately takes us right back to where we are today. She comes down in favor of a "continental Thomism" that has less to do with St. Thomas than even the "analytical Thomism" she criticizes. (Her division of Thomism along the lines of the Continental / Anglo-American divide reveals her essentially post-modern framework.) American culture comes in for a drubbing (not unjustly) and it is suggested, although not too loudly, that today's European culture is more sympathetic to Christianity. Never mind that the Catholic Church in Europe is nearly extinct. We in America and the English-speaking countries are to take their lead. But didn't we do the same 40 years ago? It was the Rhine, not the Potomac, which flowed in to the Tiber. Let's go back to St. Thomas in the original, not to the perverted images of St. Thomas being sold to us, whether those of the "analytical thomists" or the "continental thomists". In view of her incisive critique of liberal society, it is a shame that Dr. Rowland has not recognized the source of the problems in the Church today, which remains a hierarchy and papacy resolutely attached to dubious novelties.