The Culture We Evangelize:
A Review of Tracey Rowland's Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After
Vatican II
(New York: Routledge, 2003)
by Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P.
As Catholic
Christians reflect on the effects of the mass media, the culture of death,
consumerism, capitalist globalism, the public education system, and the
relationship between the Church and the state, it is becoming ever more
apparent that the culture of modernity is not a neutral entity that
enables the personal search for truth, goodness, and beauty, including the
perfection and completion of that search in the life of grace. Rather, our
modern culture (and any culture), because it plays a significant role in
shaping human thinking and human behavior, either promotes or hinders the
transmission, reception, and living-out of the Gospel. But what about our
modern culture? Is it naturally open to the Gospel?
In a book that promises to be hotly debated, the Catholic lay theologian
Tracey Rowland responds to the last question with a resounding "no!" She
maintains that the culture of modernity is an obstacle to the preaching
and living out of the Gospel, and thus must be thoroughly critiqued and
replaced by a Christian culture. Rowland deliberately rejects the
mainstream interpretation of Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes and calls
for a "postmodern Thomism," one with a refined theology of culture
equipped for this critique, a Thomism that should also lay the
intellectual groundwork to replace the culture of modernity with a
Catholic Christian culture. I will offer a summary of the book and
conclude with some reflections.
An Overview of the Book
Rowland begins by pointing out a serious lacuna in Catholic theology:
there is no developed theology of culture equipped to critique the culture
of modernity. Her own book seeks to begin this constructive project. She
starts with a perceived gap in the work of Vatican II. Its last and
perhaps most monumental work was the Constitution on the Church in the
Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. It enshrined one of the basic
tenets of the whole Council, the need to engage the world, especially the
non-Christian world, and to do so with respect, acknowledging the goodness
and truth already present among those persons and societies that have not
yet heard of the Gospel.
Rowland's first critique is that the Council never developed an
understanding of the nature of culture. Second, she points to the
dialectical character of Gaudium et Spes, resulting from different
theological camps within the Council. Parts of the document emphasize the
common ground that Catholics already share with non-Christians and
non-Catholics, while other sections emphasize the inadequacy of non-Christocentric
perspectives. She laments that no interpretive key was given by the
Fathers, so that Gaudium et Spes became the subject of radically
different and harmful interpretations. The dominant interpretation right
after the Council centered on the "opening of the windows" metaphor of Bl.
Pope John XXIII. Coupled with the document's vague language of culture's
"legitimate autonomy" from the Church (GS 59), as well as passages that
praise the ability of the human person to come to an understanding of
truth and goodness through the work of philosophy, science, and the arts
(GS 57), Rowland argues that the Council inadequately integrated the
theology of grace, and that it failed to show the influence of sin and
grace in human experience. Rowland goes on to cite an influential cardinal
(Lercaro) and a key theological advisor (or peritus) of the Council
(Bernard Lambert), according to whom the Church needs to give up her role
as a patron of culture, to recognize culture as an entity separate (and
not just distinct) from herself. All of this means that the Council did
not recognize the extent to which sin and grace shape culture, the way in
which culture supports life according to sin or grace, and thus the degree
to which the Church herself must seek to influence and shape culture in a
very direct and deliberate fashion.
Having lamented the interpretation that Gaudium et Spes received
right after the Council, one far too optimistic about modern culture,
Rowland argues (in chapter 2) that the pontificate of John Paul II has
gone in a different direction, especially with its preaching against the
culture of death. Rowland praises the work of theologians like David
Schindler, Kenneth Schmitz, and Cardinal Ratzinger for continuing this
critical turn. She includes these and many other thinkers (like Hans Urs
von Balthasar) under the category of "postmodern Thomism," thus giving the
term "Thomism" a very broad, untraditional meaning. Rowland calls for an
in-depth look at the cultural embodiment of ideas, to see different ways
of living transmit concepts. In opposition to multicultural theologies,
she retrieves the notion that the classical Greek and Roman cultures
remain normative due to their openness to the transcendent.
Turning to the areas of work and economics, Rowland suggests (in chapter
3) that virtue has been replaced by bureaucracy. The business manager no
longer considers the morality of the final product, but rather focuses
solely on achieving the most efficient means to the end. An aura of
professionalism has even invaded the realms of parish life and pastoral
care in other settings such as hospitals. Capitalism has separated the two
dimensions of work, the objective (the product or service produced) and
the subjective (the internal change brought about in the worker through
the work). Laborers have become mere producers of commodities. Unlimited
wealth is accumulated by some without any growth in virtue. A Catholic
approach to work would emphasize the opportunity it brings to participate
in the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty, and to share those
fruits. As a result, every kind of labor has its own religious or
anti-religious logic.
Gaudium et Spes also affirmed the human person's right to culture,
but failed to define this right (GS 60). In chapter 4, Rowland calls for
an approach for human self-development that is "aristocratic," meaning it
insists that there are standards of personal development, some of which
are better than others. Rowland believes that much of modernity (and
postmodernity) has rejected this approach. She calls for an anthropology
centered on Gaudium et Spes 22, especially the following passage:
"only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take
light." Rowland calls this the neglected hermeneutical key for the whole
document. The theological consequence is that the human person only
possesses self-knowledge to the extent that he or she possesses knowledge
of Christ. The preparation for an encounter with the Gospel must entail
above all an experience of the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and
beauty. To the degree that persons have no experience of the
transcendentals, their right to culture will be self-destructive. Yet,
argues Rowland, Catholic theology still lacks an adequate understanding of
the relationship between the soul, the theological virtues, the
transcendentals (among which she counts beauty), and the relations of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Much work needs to be done in
relating the transcendentals to personal human development, but without
separating them from faith, hope, love, and the Trinity. She especially
laments the loss of beauty in the culture of modernity, and argues that it
has been replaced by technology, efficiency, and functionality.
Chapter 5 defends a key position of the entire book: no culture is
theologically neutral, a conclusion implied by Gaudium et Spes 22.
Every entity in the universe, including every cultural entity, is related
to Christ. Every culture, and in fact (Rowland seems to say) every
concept, implies a grace-nature relationship, an understanding of nature
as fallen or unfallen, and an openness to grace or a lack thereof. If this
is not recognized, then the supernatural will be privatized and the faith
will be excluded from public life. Another consequence will be the
equation of the perfection of the natural order with the Christian
project, an assumption that Rowland detects in Gaudium et Spes. In
contrast to this neat separation of grace and nature, Rowland adopts an
idea of David Schindler, that no entity can be said to have an identity
without its relation to other beings, including its "substantial"
relationship to the Creator. Things have no identity in themselves,
without the transcendent and all beings around them. The way forward is
for the Church to provide society with a large part of its values and
self-understanding, to make the substantial relationship of all things to
the Creator (and to Christ) explicit.
Chapter 6 proposes narrative traditions as the key element for the
reconstruction of a Catholic culture. Rowland's work is heavily dependent
on Alasdair MacIntyre at this point. Concepts are always received in and
shaped by a tradition, a narrative. Thought does not begin with an
individual pondering himself or herself but with the reception of a
cultural heritage. Concepts are embodied in cultures, and this embodiment
changes the concepts themselves. Concepts cannot be neatly placed under
intellectual microscopes and dissected. They are inseparable from their
historical and cultural vehicles of transmission. All of this takes us
back to an ancient and medieval view of education: one begins by
submitting to a teacher. Rowland cites Plato's Academy, the medieval
university, and medieval religious orders as institutions which embodied
concepts that transmitted truth. Rowland concludes chapter 6 with an
interpretation of the place of faith in tradition according to thinkers
like MacIntyre, Schindler, and the Anglican theologian John Milbank: no
rationality or tradition can adequately account for its claims without
faith. There is no complete philosophy without faith. This is the anguish
of philosophy, the gap that only Christ and his grace can fill.
Chapter 7 considers the place of natural law and the rhetoric of rights in
a postmodern Catholic culture. As with other forms of education, moral
formation can only take place with a person's commitment to a particular
narrative tradition. But concepts are so influenced by the traditions that
transmit them that the rhetoric of human rights must be rejected, since it
originated in the secular tradition of Liberalism (in the classic sense,
not in the contemporary sense). Liberalism suffers from radical
individualism. It separates the secular from the sacred, excludes
providence and grace from nature, and subordinates revelation to
rationalism. This means that the Church's teaching on the natural law can
only be understood in the context of the Church's narrative tradition, and
that it cannot be translated into secular language, or at least not into
the language of Liberalism. The Liberal notion of rights is
ultra-individualistic, and some methodological presuppositions of
Liberalism are not open to theism. Rowland concludes her book with a call
for the Church to recover her role as patroness of culture, as the primary
source and guardian thereof.
Reflection & Critique
Rowland's work is stimulating and challenging. She reminds us that
Christian approaches to the culture of modernity have often been naïve.
She is correct in insisting that a Christian approach to culture must
always remember the fallen nature of the human person and the elevating
power of grace. Her thesis that each culture necessarily bears a relation
or has within itself a certain stance towards God, grace, and
Christianity, that no culture is theologically neutral, seems to be borne
out more and more in the experience of Christians engaging their modern
and postmodern cultures. Rowland points out problems with the growing
influence of bureaucracy in life, as well as the effects of capitalism on
the nature of work that deserve further study (chapter 3). Her notion of
an experience of the transcendentals as the necessary preparation for the
Gospel also merits close attention (chapter 4).
However, Rowland's critique of Gaudium et Spes seems inadequate and
partly inaccurate. She fails to consider the long and complex debates and
redactions behind the final draft of that document. Instead, she focuses
on the absence of clear definitions, the absence of a hermeneutical key
that overcomes the tensions of the text, and the views of two Conciliar
figures according to whom the Church has no place in the shaping of
culture. Given the absence of clear definitions of terms like "culture"
and "modernity," Rowland could have turned to a painstaking yet most
likely rewarding analysis of the different approaches to the contemporary
society that emerge in the language of committee statements, interventions
of Council Fathers, and theological advisors. Her conclusion is hard to
accept, considering how nuanced and diverse the approaches to the notion
of the "signs of the times" were at the Council, an idea that is
intimately connected to that of culture. Rowland's wish for a
hermeneutical key that overcomes the tensions of the text and thus could
have avoided harmful and radical interpretations after the Council seems
to be asking the impossible: the Fathers could not provide such a unified
interpretive key precisely because they disagreed in their approach to
modernity, to modern culture, to modern developments. Instead, the way to
read the text is with all of its tensions, and not by ignoring one type of
statement in order to focus exclusively on others. It is precisely this
hermeneutic of Vatican II, one which ignores some texts while
overemphasizing others, that has lead to sinful divisions in the Church.
Rowland's decision to focus on the commentary of two Conciliar figures,
who hardly seem representative of the 2000+ bishops and many theologians
at the Council, seems to obscure the meaning of Gaudium et Spes.
Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the important place of narrative traditions in
the formation and transmission of concepts, as well as the need to submit
to a teacher. One wonders whether the indispensability of these traditions
for this handing on of ideas and truths could deny the creative power of
the human spirit, a power that is a faint reflection of the Triune Creator
God. Is each human being so immersed in their culture and the traditions
that this culture transmits that the only way out is submission to a
teacher?
A similar problem emerges in chapter 7, where Rowland rejects the language
of natural rights, since it has come from the Liberal tradition. How did
the Liberal tradition attain this notion? Was it with or without a
previous tradition? Moreover, must all concepts of a secular culture that
includes anti-Christian and anti-theistic elements be excluded? It seems
that the great Christian thinkers of history did the opposite. However
open the Greco-Roman world may have been to the transcendent, it included
elements that were utterly un-Christian. The resurrection of the body made
no sense to Greek philosophers, yet all Church Fathers and scholastics
used their ideas, including their ideas about the afterlife. St. Thomas
Aquinas did not let the apparent denial of individual identity and
immortality in the Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes prevent him
from using many of their ideas in his metaphysics.
Rowland has correctly pointed out obstacles to the Gospel in today's
Western culture. She has identified a pressing need in the Church, the
creation of a theology of culture. The growing anti-Christian influences
of our culture validate her call to transform that culture in specifically
Christian ways. She has begun this work with her emphasis on the
experience of the transcendentals (the One, the Good, the True) as an
important step to an encounter with the Triune God. But her evaluation of
Gaudium et Spes is inadequate and could be misleading. Her emphasis
on the role of tradition and cultural influences in the transmission of
concepts points to an area that has been neglected by Christian thinkers,
yet she seems to go too far, making concepts and the recognition thereof
too dependent on tradition.
Still, her work should stimulate much fruitful reflection on the Christian
evangelist's approach to culture. In general, the best path seems to be
the complex one taught by Gaudium et Spes: to affirm what is good
and true in the culture (whether that culture is Christian or not), to
perfect what is imperfect, and to reject what is sinful. That would not
involve the replacement of the secular culture with a "pure" Christian
culture, but an uplifting of the former through the human message about
and divine activity of grace. Gratia perficit naturam, non destruit.
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