The “spirit of renewal” after Vatican II
proposed that, wherever possible,
Catholicism should accommodate itself to modernity.

The Culture of Modernity
and Catholicism

By James V. Schall

“All who seek God without Jesus Christ, and who rest in nature, either find no light to satisfy them, or come to form for themselves a means of knowing God and serving Him without a mediator. Thereby they fall either into atheism, or into deism, two things which the Christian religion abhors almost equally.”

– Pascal, Pensées, #555.

“According to the modern project, philosophy or science was no longer to be understood as essentially contemplative and proud but as active and charitable; it was to be in the service of the relief of man’s estate; it was to be cultivated for the same of human power; it was to enable man to become master and owner of nature through the intellectual conquest of nature.”

– Leo Strauss, The City and Man, 1964. [1]

“The question of the logos of the culture of modernity was never addressed (in Gaudium et spes), because ... the Conciliar fathers generally lacked a notion of modernity as a specific cultural formation.”

– Tracey Rowland, Culture and Modern Thomism, 2003. [2]

For a number of years, I have argued, in its most succinct statement, pace all other philosophic positions, that the intellectual position of Catholicism in the modern world has never been stronger, but its cultural position has never been weaker. [3] The condition of Catholicism, which I want to look at here, has implications for everyone in the civilization itself. The living culture, in fact, has come, in many ways, to embody operative principles and habits that are, in effect, the exact opposite of basic Catholic standards, of what Catholicism has proclaimed itself to stand for. [4] Just below the surface lies a bitter anti-Catholicism that has its form in modernity’s perception that Catholicism is indeed its main enemy, a form of intransigent “fanaticism.” [5] How often is it said or implied that “if only the be-knighted Catholic Church would give up its odd positions on, say, abortion, divorce, married clergy, contraception, and euthanasia, it could finally be ‘welcomed’ into modern culture.” Almost every interview with a Catholic prelate or spokesman on TV or in the press gets around, sooner or later, to some version of this question, with its not too subtle implication that it is the culture that judges Catholicism, not the opposite, as the faith has always taught about itself.

This “welcome” of a culturally conformed Catholicism may or may not be forthcoming, of course, but what is obvious is that this accommodating itself to the culture would have the disadvantage of eliminating the core of what Catholicism has stood for or said it stood for. Its “alternative” to the existing culture, perhaps the last one still around, would disappear. Whatever might be left after such conformity, it would not be what the faith claimed itself to be in its public stance taken on these very issues.

In terms of intellectual clarity about what is at stake, however, this striking opposition of modernity and Catholicism is not totally without advantage. We need to see the stark dimensions of the problem in order to come to terms with them. [6] This argument about the intellectual strength of Catholicism, as I earlier understood it, was made principally against the growing incoherence of the actual alternatives to Catholicism on the intellectual scene. This issue was something already remotely anticipated by Pascal in the 17th Century, by Chesterton’s Orthodoxy in 1908, and by Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World in 1956.

Nietzsche’s legacy at the end of the 19th Century, however, had already set the stage, at least beneath the surface, for the 20th and 21st centuries’ problematic. A radical emptiness or ungroundedness could be found in those alternatives to classical thought and Catholicism that were so confidently proposed in the Reformation, Enlightenment, or German idealism. Such early modern alternatives, however, could not be justified as consistent alternatives to Nietzsche’s own rejection of Platonism and Christianity, which latter two he considered, in Beyond Good and Evil, as pretty much the same thing. [7] Nietzsche provided the basis of a new or “post-modern” world. He continues to function as the real and most logical alternative to a failed liberalism that refuses to return to metaphysics and revelation for foundations in the real. He is also the alternative to Christianity in the culture, though outside it, there is Islam.

No alternate and consistent grounding on which to organize one’s life and society, Nietzsche thought, could be found in any system, particularly not in liberalism in its various and changing forms. Nor could it be found in Christianity, which latter he rejected not so much because he did not think it true, but because he did not think Christians, in practice, thought it was true – hence “the last Christian died on the Cross.” The only possible foundation of noble human living, as Nietzsche saw it, was in raw, arbitrary will, enthusiastically embraced wherever it led. The shock that Nietzsche sent and still sends through the intellectual world is his contention that what replaced Plato and Christianity was not an inner-development B la Hegel of either, but their radical rejection and replacement. Nor could Nietzsche sustain his own principles on any alternate claim to truth except the paradoxical “truth” that there is no truth.. Modernity’s heart is, when finally exposed, skeptical and nihilist. Its foundations are set firmly in quick-sand. At this point, Nietzsche demanded the honesty to admit this loss of contact with any order. He insisted on taking the logical consequences in a system bereft of radical justification but one still in need of action.

Not only God is dead, but reason also, because the latter depended ultimately on the former as a source of any stable intelligible order. This consequence was already anticipated in the late medieval controversy between the Thomists and the Occamists over the primacy of will or intellect in the Divinity. This view of the primacy of will is something that arrived in the Reformation through Luther and his abhorrence of Aristotle. For if God is pure will, that is, if the voluntarist view that nothing can limit God, even His own nature, a position also found in Islam, is true, then no stable finite order is possible.

As Hume would later put it, the contrary of every matter of fact is then possible. To be and not to be simultaneously are both equal in pure will theory. As a result, only willed human order is found in the universe and it has no basis outside itself. An arbitrary willed order has no foundation except blind repetition of the dialectic claiming that no order is possible. Since no order is possible, therefore, it is claimed, all is free. Freedom is not “following nature,” but choosing and putting into existence whatever one wills. Freedom is autonomy, self-creation.

Gilson’s Unity of Philosophic Experience had later sketched just why, once deviant first principles are accepted and embodied into a tradition, they lead both thought and society to the logical conclusions contained within their initial errors. [8] They led, as Nietzsche saw, to a world evaporated of any order but that imposed by the “will to power,” the power of whoever has the courage so to seize it, once willed. This insight still makes Nietzsche the most powerful voice in contemporary Western intellectual, including theological, circles and, increasingly, forms the essence of its culture, its habits of being. Behind the culture there is no logos, no sign, of ordered intelligence beyond what is arbitrarily imposed by he human practical or political mind. Politics, contrary to Aristotle, becomes a metaphysics or better, a “substitute” metaphysics that depends on itself, not being, for the explication of the order of what is. [9]

Added to this intellectual problematic, and in part caused by it, is the moral decline within the civilization, the relation of how we think to how we live. This decline is measured against standard judgments of the human good and virtue, against the Decalogue in the revelational tradition. Now undermined, both in theory and in practice, at almost every level of society, is the intellectual capacity to understand any reasonable alternative to a modern or post-modern understanding of man’s purpose in being, in what is, as it is presented within the central doctrines of Catholicism. By rejecting the epistemological tools by which we understand things, as any serious study of Kant shows, we have no access to any being but that of our minds presupposed to nothing but themselves.

To many, the fall of communism meant, or should have meant, a rejection of that popular, though odious, form of modernity that had, through Marx’s Hegelian materialism, proved to be the most lethal and unliveable presence in modern times. “Evil empire” is a rather charitable interpretation of its political embodiment. Thus, a return to transcendence through the lived experiences of people like Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag offered a real contact with transcendence. This contact was no longer based merely on ideas or even on abstract faith, which a return to the classics alone would imply. It was grounded in experienced living with the worst alternatives in their most heinous places. [10] It was this lived experience of human degradation that forced, or should have forced, the modern mind to face the implications of abstract ideologies that had presumed enthusiastically to explain and improve the human lot in the name of alleviating the poor and downtrodden. In being put into effect, however, somehow the ideologies in power attacked the core of any decent human living wherever lived.

To many, like Strauss, even a half century ago, before these ideological consequences became so visible both in theory and in practice, the time was ripe to recover our foundations in reality, in metaphysics. A return to the classical standards of virtue and reason, against which modernity departed to claim its own autonomy, seemed most sensible. [11] In 1974, Henry Veatch, in his book, Aristotle: A Contemporary Interpretation, likewise argued the same view with much persuasiveness [12] If modernity was a rebellion against Aristotle, the subsequent intellectual incoherence of the alternatives to his rejection should suggest a return to him, to his enormous common sense.

What in fact happened was rather a rejection both of the classics and of the Christian standards with no “return” to either. The voluntarist works that charged through modernity from Machiavelli to Hobbes and Rousseau carried to their logical conclusions in the culture the principles of dissolution perceived in the inconsistent ideas of modernity. Early modern culture still may have held Christianity in customary, though not philosophic, honor. But the extremes implicitly found in modernity were not fully visible till our own era when the habitual or customary Christian practices themselves, often paradoxically under the guise of Christian renewal, gradually vanished as operative cultural guides.

The study of Tracey Rowland on the relation of culture to Thomism and more particularly to the adequacy of the treatment of culture in Gaudium et spes of Vatican II, however, causes me to reaffirm this position about incompatibility of modern culture and Catholicism but to look at its problematic in quite a new way. I understand that the “spirit of renewal” has, in effect, insisted that the project be one, wherever possible, of accommodating Catholicism to modernity. It has not been seen, as perhaps it should have been, as a profound critique of modernity itself by Catholicism. Rowland shows quite clearly that serious deficiencies in intellectual acumen were present within Catholicism and in the minds of many fathers in Vatican II. Gaudium et spes’ understanding of how its basic teachings related to a cultural milieu, infused, as it was, with unattended to and alien philosophic premises, was at least innocent, when not positively faulty and erroneous.

The culture was not “neutral,” as Rowland often repeats from de Lubac. On many points it is positively inimical to Catholicism as a matter of principle. To pretend otherwise is not a virtue. “To what is it to which Catholics are bringing themselves ‘up-to-date?’” Karl Barth wanted to know of Vatican II, in a query again often cited by Rowland. Within it, the culture did not have the basic operative principles capable of accepting the intellectual coherence that is the faith if properly spelled out. As John Paul II was to point out in Fides et ratio, the faith cannot be supported by just any philosophy, but only by a true philosophy.

The claim to such truth is not “arrogant,” though any claim to truth has necessarily come to be called that by virtue of the workings of modernity’s own metaphysical principles that have openness only to tolerance, not to truth. Still there cannot be many “true” philosophies, but only one philosophy seeking what is, what is true, by examining fairly all the philosophical arguments, from whatever source. There is no privileged philosophical position other than that of the truth founded in the principle of contradiction clearly enunciated, the principle itself evocative of the being on which it stands over against nothingness.

What is argued by Rowland is not that Catholic theological and philosophical principles are not in fact directly pertinent to the crisis of both liberalism and post-modernity, but that these principles have not been argued well within the Magisterium or by many of the theologians and philosophers who claim to be following its terms. Not realizing the depths to which a living culture can be penetrated by religious or philosophic principles or ways of acting that prevent any understanding of transcendent principles, an intelligent understanding of Catholicism, using such cultural principles, would be impossible.

The subsequent enthusiasm to “conform to” or “open” oneself to modern culture, so much associated with Gaudium et spes, was not, therefore, a project without serious danger to any future of a Catholic culture, let alone to the proper understanding of Catholicism embedded within any culture, even those outside the modern Western orbit. These latter cultures are now themselves increasingly related to modern ideas and practices often summed up, rather naively, under the vague and over-used term “globalization.”. Hence, this analysis of culture has become not merely a problem of the Western tradition, but also it has become a missionary problem in which, as in the case, say, of liberation theology, its very terminology was rooted in this same philosophical problem of culture as articulated in specifically modern philosophy.

The central thesis of this most erudite and well-argued book is, contrary to many assumptions of the Fathers at Vatican II, that modern culture is not neutral but replete with customs, laws, ideas, and assumptions that either are difficult or impossible to reconcile with classical Catholic orthodoxy. This conclusion means that the famous project of “opening” the Church to specifically “modern culture” did not and could not result in any new evangelization or success in making Catholicism more acceptable to the modern mind. In fact, this opening to modern culture undermined many of the basic assumptions by which understanding and living the faith was possible. The conversion did not go from modernity to Catholicism, but from Catholicism in modernity, even though many of the words used were traditional ones with a specific theological meanings if understood in their proper contexts.

For many years, it has been sociologically obvious that the Catholic church, in spite of certain optimistic statistics, is in radical decline in Europe and North America. [13] While others like Philip Jenkins maintain that much grounds for optimism exist about the Church in Asia and Africa, this expansion must itself counter the much more rapid and hostile rise of Islam, even in the West itself, no less than in Africa and Asia. In a striking sense, little real sense is evident within Catholicism that Islam is itself a very pressing problem. But Islam a religion fully capable of attracting to itself large scores of alienated Christians. Relativism and even ecumenicism have obscured many real problems.

The fact remains that within the West, the cradle of Christianity itself, the results of the reforms of Vatican II have been anything but what might be expected Spectacular, they have not been. [14] The culture has been largely impervious to any large-scale opening to the essential revelational positions, something that puzzles the proponents of a “new evangelization,” largely because of an underestimation of the issues of the culture of modernity. Many significant individual conversions continue to take place, but the culture is stubbornly unmoved.

What are the reasons for this imperviousness? Catholicism, as I like to say, it itself an intellectual religion. Even its faith, “seeks intelligence,” to recall a famous phrase from Augustine. I would say that it especially seeks intelligence, though intelligence is not some Platonic form hovering outside of living beings, divine or human. Rowland’s book is, in this sense, an intellectual history, written from within Catholicism, within the Catholic mind, about its misunderstanding of the world in which it too must exist, even if, ultimately, it understands that the human beings within it are not intended solely for this world.

The heros of this intellectual history are those thinkers – notably, de Lubac, von Balthasar, MacIntyre, Schindler, Schmitz, Nichols, Pickstock, Przywara, Ratzinger, Kraynak – who have engaged modern thought at its roots but from within the long Augustinian and Thomist traditions. Rowland now joins together Augustine and Aquinas almost as a kind of defiant rejection of the long scholastic custom of putting these two traditions in opposition to each other, often in the curious belief that somehow St. Thomas was more “modern” than Augustine. The fact of our time, however, is not any doubt about the pertinence of the intellectual acumen of Aquinas, but the remarkable realization of the pertinence of Augustine. [15] “Whenever we suffer some affliction, we should regard it both as a punishment and as a correction,” Augustine said, mindful of Paul, in a sermon whose spirit we hear expressed all too seldom. “Our holy Scriptures themselves do not promise us peace, security and rest.” Modernity does promise these things.

The problematic begins from within the West itself, with its first encounters with what came to be called the difference between “ancients and moderns,” with the added problem for Catholics, of what to do with the medievals, the great effort to reconcile reason and revelation in a coherent whole. [16] Were the medievals themselves in part of the causes of modernity, or our protection from it? The first question is what is liberalism, or the Enlighenment and is it compatible in all its principles and approaches with Catholicism? A good part of modern Catholic thought, as Rowland shows, has been concerned with the proposition that the two can and ought to be reconciled. In short, is it possible to reconcile Catholicism and modernity in some happy way, as the enthusiasm of post-Vatican Catholic thought seemed to suggest?

What happened seems rather to have been a conversion of much Catholic thought to what is in effect a liberalism that is, at bottom, irreconcilable with Catholicism. Part of Rowland’s further argument is that the breakdown of liberalism itself has already taken place even without the energies of a Catholic critique. Nietzsche had shown that at bottom, liberalism is indefensible. The only avenue is Nietzsche or Aristotle. The massive effort to reconcile Catholicism with liberalism is already out-of-date, not necessarily because Catholicism is irrelevant, but because liberalism is.

As Alasdair MacIntyre, Rowland’s principal guide in these reflections, put it in After Virtue: “My own conclusion is very clear. It is that on the one hand we still, in spite of the efforts of three centuries of moral philosophy and one of sociology, lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualism point of view; and that, on the other hand, the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments.” [17] What Rowland adds to this philosophical reordering of our understanding of reality is openness to revelation that both is philosophically grounded and infused with an actual content that explains or describes the coherence of man’s final purpose.

Perhaps the clearest way to come to terms with what is at issue in Rowland’s presentation about culture and Catholic ability to deal with it is to turn to the question of how “human rights” have been used in modern Catholic documents. Since the common language of liberal democracy is expressed in terms of “rights,” both human and positive, the Catholic documents seek to present their own understanding of man, cosmos, government, and God in these same terms as if both traditions were talking about the same things. The problem is that “rights” are an invention of modern philosophy. They unavoidably bear its theoretical imprint. The natural law is not the same thing as natural rights. Catholic usage assumed that this language of “rights” can easily be employed because a language of “rights” can evidently be read into classic Catholic thought about natural law. It is possible, it was assumed, to adapt this modern usage to make what Catholicism holds intelligible to the modern mind which lives according to his own peculiar understanding of “rights.” But are the usages and meanings interchangeable?

To make my initial point of why there is a problem, let me recall a cartoon of S. Gross that I came across in the New Yorker. The cartoon, that might have originally appeared in the Leviathan, shows a very large cat, on two legs, confidently walking away from the viewer. On a long string, he is pulling a toy car, in which is seated a little mouse at the steering wheel. The mouse is evidently enjoying the outing. Behind the big cat and the little car stands a second mouse, however, frantically yelling at the his companion in the toy car, “For God’s sake, think! Why is he being so nice to you?” The little mouse, about to become the victim of the big cat’s kindness, is admonished to “think, for God’s sake.” The humor of the cartoon consists in seeing the contradiction implicit in the mouse’s not thinking normal mouse thoughts about what is going on in front of him with the big cat.

What is the “logic” of the thought in this cartoon? 1) Cat eats mouse. 2) Mouse usually flees cat. 3) Cat is acting according its nature, only more cunningly. He is being nice. He does not have to chase the silly mouse, who is coming to dinner voluntarily. 4) Neither the nature of the mouse nor of the cat changes, even when the mouse does not recognize his “right to life,” while the cat does recognize his right to the mouse’s life. 5) The state of nature remains, war of all against all. 6) Cat gets mouse unless mouse recalls “reason,” recalls what he is and what a cat is. Put in terms of rights, the cat has the natural “right” to eat the mouse. The mouse has the duty to escape him. This mouse does not understand his own nature. He has no self-interest. The mouse’s right does not trump the cat’s. The cat is “being nice” to the mouse in order to devour him, which is the natural right of the cat to do.

In modern thought, man has a “natural right” to his own preservation and can use any means necessary to achieve it. The purpose of reason is instrumental, not to know what is, but to achieve man’s natural right to whatever he wills. Whatever he wills is his by “right.” Wrong means not getting what we have a right to will. Reason does not refer to what man is but to what he wills and how to get it. Freedom means the ability to acquire one’s rights. The purpose of government is to protect our rights to what we will. Man has no nature other than what he wills. He is completely malleable. To be an individual means to be able to will and to obtain what one wants. Autonomy means that nothing else determines our wills but our wills to what we want. The perfect man is the man with all his “rights” fulfilled. “Rights” are what are “owed” to him.

The more rights we have, the more we are self-sufficient. If something is lacking to us, our rights are being violated. We are being treated unjustly. Nothing can be “given” to us because what we do not have is “owed” to us by “right.” There is no room for gratitude or thanks which imply a world beyond “rights.” Thus, we stand in our “natural rights” in perfect isolation and perfect autonomy, being owed everything, having a right to everything, being obliged to nothing because we have a “right” to everything we will. The “rights” of others are subsequent to our rights to what we will. No relationship exists but that of my right to what I will. Happiness is having my rights, however I define them. I am owed everything, I owe nothing. My happiness triumphs your happiness. As the Supreme Court intimated, I define my own happiness to which I have a “right.” This is the logic of modern “rights.”

These “rights” are the core of modern liberalism from Hobbes. They seem to be the natural, legal, and political language of modernity. They are defined and determined by individual or legislative will presupposed to nothing but that will. The question is, are these “rights” actually the same things that were found in Aquinas’ natural law and hence find a place within the ordered law of all things to the divinity, or are they at root voluntaristic and individualistic such that they can provide no basis of a Christian view of man, particularly one that includes charity, which is essentially other oriented?

This is a delicate question. Many great modern Catholic philosophers, such as Jacques Maritain, have worked assiduously to make this reconciliation of rights and Catholic thought possible and intelligible. [18] John Paul II almost never speaks in any other language but those of “human rights.” These “rights,” moreover, are words associated with French and American political foundations, upon which all just government is said to rest. Obviously, if there is something incoherent in modern liberal thought upon which “rights talk,” as Mary Ann Glendon has called it, is based, then the whole topic leads to the core of the confusion that Rowland’s book addresses. [19]

In his Introduction to this book, Fergus Kerr, takes issue with Rowland on this very point. “Here the present writer,” Kerr affirms, “for whom such ‘right’ are simply the dependent reflection, in human subjects, of the objective order of the world, cannot follow her, and yet he is brought back gratefully to her thought at last. In his view, what is objectionable about the ‘rights industry’ is the tone in which, in advanced Liberal societies like the United States, such rights can be asserted.” [20] But this approach would indicate that there is no metaphysical problem involved with “rights,” that the problem pertains to some foible in the American mind. That “rights” are “the dependent reflection, in human subjects, of the objective order of the world,” something that is standard in the treatments of rights in Finnis, Rommen, Maritain, and other natural law/natural rights thinkers who try to reconcile the traditions, needs to be counterbalanced against the notion that the Latin word usually used for “right” – jus – does not refer to something in a subject. This latter notion that “right” is a description of something within the subject came into modern thought probably with Suarez, where in a “right” is a “faculty” of the subject. Jus, however, refers to the relation itself that exists between two or more beings. It is “common good” oriented in its very reference to the one who is said to have rights.

The irony of the problem can perhaps be better seen with the question of abortion, where the famous “right to life” is most forcefully proposed in Catholic circles as the reason why this practice is abhorrent and wrong. The “right to life” would mean that what the being is, in this case an actual human life, is immune from outside attack and, more importantly, open to its full normal development into being what it is. Rowland mentions that, at times, John Paul II seems to understand the problem with his own language. He is said to want to keep the language of “rights” but to replace the content with his own meaning.

The problem with this approach is that if “rights” are essentially dependent on will, it makes no sense to say that they provide any immunity if the content of the “right” is itself subject to will. Thus we have legislative or natural “rights” to abortion, “willed rights.” Anyone who speaks of “rights” as the last intellectual protection of the dignity of the human person in its most vulnerable condition comes up against the very opposite position that enables someone to have a “right” to kill another on the basis of one’s own defined “rights” to security or happiness or autonomy. Obviously, the two languages as the two ideas are not compatible. Immediately, it involves the Catholic party in the quagmire of explaining how he is for “rights,” and at the same time, why he is against “rights.” The spectacle in the public order then pits Catholics who are for liberal “rights” against those for natural “rights.” The confusion is almost complete precisely because the culture has embodied within its general customs an understanding of “rights” that cannot bear the Catholic meaning.

But what is perhaps Rowland’s most significant contribution is her effort to restore Trinitarian theology, itself related to a proper understanding of the metaphysics of substance and relation, to public discourse. This approach is not a private piety about what we, in our inner autonomy, think God is like. Rather it provides the only basis on which we can hope to understand the whole truth about man since that truth includes the inner life of the Deity and the Incarnation of one of its persons. Modern philosophy and ideology, at bottom, are efforts to arrive at alternate explanations of reality, indeed at alternate constructions of reality since biology itself is now a science, at times, claiming to reconfigure man in his very body. This is why these alternate explanation are, following the Thomist example of knowing and stating exactly what an errant position held, themselves essential elements in understanding the validity of the Christian alternative.

Again we find here Schmitz, Ratzinger, MacIntyre, Schindler, von Balthasar, and, in particular, Norris Clarke. In addition, there is Catherine Pickstock and the return to philosophy through liturgy which she represents as precisely the proper response to post-modernism, to the Nietzschean mind, which, at bottom, is the real enemy as the logical conclusion of modernity. [21] It is this attention to beauty and glory that distinguishes these efforts to present the complete understanding of human purpose and destiny. In this sense, the liturgical approach to philosophy “parallels,” as it were, the Solzhenitsyn experience of also discovering transcendence through the pits of human degradation and evil. Through both we can reach a sense of the abiding transcendence of God in all created being. Indeed, one suspects, that for Rowland more danger to the Catholic understanding of the world can be found in the “mass culturalization” of the liturgy than in the Gulags. The former so obscures the normal human’s soul’s avenue to the transcendence that is provided in revelation that is cannot find an escape out of the culture.

Rowland also demonstrates, as in Chesterton’s “common man,” that there is an abiding interest in the “ordinary person,” an interest in particular found MacIntyre’s philosophy. [22] The effort is consciously made to combine the aristocratic and classical notion of virtue and honor with the Christian idea of the uniqueness of each created person and his specific divine creation. No longer do philosopher and common man have different ultimate destinies, however much their approach to it may vary. Moreover, this transcendent purpose is precisely what, through liturgy, enables each person to recognize in his own life this transcendent final meaning.

“What Chesterton understood was that it was precisely one of the great graces of the Catholic Church,” Rowland observed,

that she makes it possible for people, poor as well as rich, to transcend their cultural limitations, to rise above their cultural poverty and be citizens, or rather subjects, of an eternal city. The effect of the Church on the culture of the world, and in particular on the life of ‘common man,’ ought to be ennobling, ought to be affirming of an aristocratic status as a child of God, as a member of a royal priesthood, a people set apart This does not happen when mass culture is ‘baptised’ by its use in the liturgy or when its idioms are taken to wrap the Church’s doctrines. Contrary to the rationale behind such pastoral projects, their ultimate effect is not to make the Church relevant to the modern world, but to make it indistinguishable from the modern world, and this in turn makes it completely irrelevant. [23]

The liturgy has always been a way to elevate even the lowliest of believers, sometimes the only way available to them, so that a de-emphasis of beauty in music, buildings, and language, in the name of ease to understand or comprehend faith, has the unfortunate result of eliminating the main channel by which people can escape from a deadening common culture whose principles are the opposite of this elevation to beauty. [24]

In order to establish her point about the need we have of a philosophic basis for any possibility of the understanding of Trinitarian revelation and what it means, Rowland recounts the subtle modern controversies about nature and grace. She understands that if grace is, as it were, something added onto nature, or “extrinsic” to it, then it is quite possible to conclude that man’s own inner-worldly purpose is sufficient and the real reason for his existence, exactly what modernity does think. Following de Lubac, however, she argues that there cannot be found in existence any human nature that is not oriented towards the inner life of God even its very being. This position requires a new look at the transcendentals and substance in order to come to terms with the modern individualist premise of metaphysics, itself the heritage of nominalism.

It is on this basis also that Rowland takes issue with the “new Natural Law theorists” within Catholicism – Finnis, Grisez, and Boyle, in particular – arguing that there is even within the practical order a natural hierarchy of goods, particularly the good of religion, according to which man must primarily situate himself before reality. “Unless religion is given the highest ranking within the hierarchy of goods,” Rowland writes, “the priority of contemplation over work and of being over doing and having can be displaced with the practical consequence that persons adopt strategies ... of bifurcating life into religious and secular compartments. When this split occurs, the good of religion is often perceived as a very inferior compartment confined to ceremonial and liturgical practices and a few moral principles.” (147) The good of culture must be itself grounded in a metaphysics of what is that finds the distinction in things to be more than a projection of the human mind outside of itself.

Culture and the Thomist Tradition, in conclusion, brings into focus, with a clarity seldom seen in recent literature, the relation of modern culture and Catholicism as itself a philosophical problem. It is not simply an issue for Catholicism, of course. Muslim immans are frequently pictured as worried about the same “culture of modernity” that would erode its claim to validity. Indeed, western liberalism often pictures itself as providing precisely this dissolution-factor against these difficult to comprehend religious enthusiasms. Hence, the sympathy of Islam and Catholicism is sometimes pictured, as in the Cairo and Bejing UN conferences, as anti-liberal conspiracies, which they are, in many ways.

But the real focus of the Roland presentation is not the crisis of liberalism or post-modernity, but the intellectual understanding of Catholicism of itself and the philosophical tools that would make this understanding possible within a clear understanding of what does actually motivate the “culture of modernity.” Whatever might be said of Vatican II’s effort to bring Catholicism “up-to-date,” the fact is that it did not understand clearly what it was that was in fact motivating the culture. It was not merely a question of debate and ideas, but of habits, institutions, laws, and philosophies that implicitly guided people in explaining how they lived according to modernity. When these principles of modernity are carefully spelled out, as Rowland has done, it becomes evident that the project of culture is a much broader and more difficult undertaking than anyone had realized. The first step is the philosophical recovery of language and ideas, including the revelational ones. Rowland finally argues that we can explain the whole truth of man, a truth that even in any culture, only if we include an accurate description of his transcendent destiny and the revelational means whereby it is given us to be achieved.

NOTES

1 Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 3-4.

2 Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (London: Routledge, 2003), 21.

3 See James V. Schall, S. J, Human Dignity and Human Numbers (Staten Island: Alba House, 1981); The Distinctiveness of Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982); Does Catholicism Still Exist? (Staten Island, N. Y.: Alba House, 1994).

4 See The End of Democracy?, edited by Richard John Neuhaus (Dallas: Spence, 1997).

5 See Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Oxford, 2003).

6 See James V. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), Chapter III, “Modernity,” 49-70.

7 Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1885] 1975), 14.

8 Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophic Experience: The Medieval Experiment, The Cartesian Experiment, The Modern Experiment (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, [1937] 1999).

9 See Charles N. R. McCoy, The Structure of Political Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963).

10 See David Walsh, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (San Francisco: Harper, 1990); Daniel Mahoney, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Ascent from Ideology (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

11 See both Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950) and Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

12 Henry B. Veatch, Aristotle: A Contemporary Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974).

13 See David Carlin, The Decline & Fall of the Catholic Church in America (Manchester, N. H.: Sophia Institute Press, 2003).

14 Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford, 2002).

15 See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); William R. Stevenson, Christian Love and Just War: Moral Paradox and Political Life in St. Augustine and His Modern Interpreters (Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press, 1987); Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); Augustine Today edited by Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids,: Eerdmans, 1993); Ernest Fortin, The Birth of Philosophic Christianity, edited by J. Brian Benestad (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); James V. Schall, “The Place of Augustine in Political Philosophy,” Political Science Reviewer, XXIII (1994), 128-63.

16 See Etienne Gilson, “Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner’s, 1938); Josef Pieper, Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems in Medieval Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960).

17 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 241.

18 See James V. Schall, Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in the City (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), Chapter V, “Natural Law/Natural Rights Dilemma,” 79-98.

19 Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991); Russell Hittinger, The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural in a Post-Christian World (Wilmington, DE.: ISI Books, 2003).

20 Fergus Kerr, O. P., “Introduction,” Rowland, ibid., xiv.

21 See Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Radical Orthodoxy, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999). See James V. Schall, “Worship and Political Philosophy,” Roman Catholic Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2004), 135-150.

22 G. K. Chesterton, The Common Man (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950).

23 Tracey Rowland, “G. K. Chesterton and the ‘Weeds’ of Aggiornamento,” A Paper delivered to the Australian Chesterton Society, in Chesterton Essays for Today, edited by Tony Evans (Melbourne, Freedom Publishers, 2004).

24 This same point was made by Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, in The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000); see Dennis Quinn, Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 2002).

Reverend James V. Schall, S.J., is now teaching at Georgetown University after having taught at the University of San Francisco and the Gregorian University in Rome for twelve years. A prolific writer, he is the author of many books and hundreds of articles. A frequent contributor to HPR, Fr. Schall is also a regular columnist in Crisis magazine.