Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After

Thomist's influence upon the development of Catholicism is difficult to overestimate - but how secure is its grip on the challenges that face contemporary society?Culture and the Thomist Traditionrexamines the crisis of Thomism today as thrown into relief by Vatican II, the 21st ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. Following the Church's declarations on culture in the document Gaudium et spes - the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World - it was widely presumed that a mandate had been given for transposing ecclesiastical culture into the idioms of modernity. But, says Tracey Rowland, such an understanding is not only based on a facile reading of the Conciliar documents, but is flawed by Thomism's own failure to demonstrate a workable theology of culture that might guide the Church through such transpositions.

Acknowledgements

ix

Foreword

xi

Introduction

1

(8)

PART I Culture as a theological problem

9

(42)

The treatment of culture in Gaudium et spes

11

(24)

Modernism and modernity

11

(1)

Modernity as a specific cultural formation

12

(2)

The Conciliar openness to modernity

14

(3)

`Culture' in Gaudium et spes

17

(3)

The need for a theological hermeneutic of culture

20

(1)

The neglect of important pre-Conciliar scholarship

21

(1)

Specific examples of the problematic

22

(5)

The `autonomy of culture'

27

(2)

Bernard Lambert's affirmation of `secularism'

29

(1)

The affirmation of the secular in Rahner and Maritain

30

(2)

Conclusion

32

(3)

`Culture' within post-Conciliar magisterial thought

35

(16)

Introduction

35

(1)

The split between the gospel and culture

35

(2)

The Christocentrism of JOhn Paul II

37

(2)

The culture of death and the liberal tradition

39

(6)

The Greco-Latin heritage

45

(4)

Conclusion

49

(2)

PART II Modernity and the Thomist tradition

51

(62)

The epistemic authority of `experts' and the ethos of modern institutions

53

(19)

The bureaucratised self

54

(3)

The eclipse of prudential judgment

57

(3)

Plain persons and professional administrators

60

(3)

The `onto-logic' of economic practices

63

(2)

The junction of `Aristotelian Marxism' with Thomism

65

(4)

Conclusion

69

(3)

`Mass culture' and the `right to culture'

72

(20)

The Aristocratic and Bourgeois Liberal models

73

(3)

The Nietzschean model

76

(1)

The `prototypical' classical Christian model

77

(2)

Memory and `sapiential experience'

79

(4)

The problem of `mass culture'

83

(1)

The possibility of a `modern Catholic self'

84

(5)

Conclusion

89

(3)

The logos of the Kultur of modernity

92

(21)

Invalidations of the secular

93

(2)

The logic of identities in relation

95

(2)

The mechanical form of the `secular logic'

97

(3)

The `culture of America'

100

(5)

The priority of doxology

105

(2)

The form of love

107

(3)

Conclusion

110

(3)

PART III A postmodern development of the tradition

113

(56)

Culture and the rationality of the tradition

115

(21)

The influence of R. G. Collingwood

116

(2)

The concept of a narrative tradition

118

(7)

`Smudging the boundaries' between philosophy and theology

125

(2)

Fides et ratio

127

(3)

Harmonising Aristotelian and Patristic elements

130

(2)

Certainty as `rational coherence'

132

(2)

Conclusion

134

(2)

Natural law and the culture of the tradition

136

(23)

MacIntyre's project and the New Natural Law theory

136

(5)

The absence of a narrative tradition

141

(3)

Religion as an `infrastructural' and `primary' good

144

(4)

The rhetoric of rights

148

(9)

Conclusion

157

(2)

Conclusion

159

(10)

Three requirements of any satisfactory response

162

(3)

The ongoing challenge of postmodern Augustinian Thomism

165

(4)

Notes

169

(30)

Abbreviations

199

(3)

Bibliography

202

(14)

Index

216

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Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II

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