Fr. Aidan Nichols is prior of Blackfriars’, Cambridge.
He is a convert to Catholicism and he is regarded by many as England’s
finest contemporary theologian. “Christendom
Awake”** is one of his latest works.
He begins by asking the question of whether it is desirable to re-create
Christendom, understanding this as a society where the historic Christian faith
provides the cultural framework for social living, as well as the officially
religious form of the State? Nichols observes that how one answers the question
will not only depend on whether or not one is a Christian, but moreover, the
significant question is: “to what degree are we legitimately satisfied with
the current basic condition of our culture?”
In other words, do we really want a society which is “progressive,
secular and pluralistic?” Nichols
then suggests that “those Catholics who assume as a matter of course that
derision is the only possible response to the famous anathematisation of
“liberalism, progress and modern civilization” in Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus
Errorum, “may not be aware of the case constructed in recent years on
different presuppositions form those of the Pope”. Here Nichols alludes to the vast body of contemporary
scholarship which fits into the category of “critiques of the culture of
modernity”.
To be “for modernity” is no longer avant
garde. Intellectual debates are
now three cornered contests - the battles lines are much more complex than the
simple progressive/reactionary, left/right dichotomies which dominated so much
of nineteenth and twentieth century thought.
The dominant camps are now those of the pre-moderns, the moderns and the
post-moderns, though the picture is complicated by the presence of those who are
trying to effect a synthesis of elements found in two or more of these basic
divisions. The fundamental question now is: “Which aspects, if any, of the
culture of modernity do you want to defend? Nichols observes that the answers given to this question will
divide within confessional boundaries as much as across them.
From my own observations I would suggest that within contemporary Catholic
intellectual circles there are at least 6 positions on this question. Three out
of the six positions are held by those who are loyal to John Paul II. This is
not merely of scholastic interest, but is important for an understanding of what
is likely to happen under the next Papacy.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the groups within the Church who
have supported the John Paul II papacy are not a monolithic bloc, but actually
more of a loose coalition, united around the belief in the authority of the
Papacy when it comes to issues of faith and morals, and united in their filial
love and respect for a man who is one of the greatest popes in history.
However, the members of this coalition are far from united on the
question of “How did the Church get into its current mess?” and “How are
we to get out of it?” The
“culture of Modernity” thus becomes the critical question because how people
understand Modernity is what determines which camp within the coalition they
find themselves most at home. The
following is a brief and extremely general introduction to the six different
positions.
Uncritical
Accommmodationists or “Modernists”
The first is the “uncritical accommodation” position or the idea that Modernity is good and that the Church should accommodate her practices and beliefs to it. The aging generation of ‘68 Liberals tend to fit within this category. Although this position is still common among members of the hierarchy, it is not common among younger Catholic intellectuals. The “Magisterial authority” for this position is found in the treatment of culture in Part II of Gaudium et spes. One of the most opaque statements in the whole corpus of Conciliar decrees is to be found in Gaudium et spes, paragraph (59) that the Church recognises the “legitimate autonomy of the cultural realm”. This statement has been used to defend a variety of projects which lead directly to the secularisation of the Church itself.
Speaking of the impact of the uncritical accommodation position on
religious orders, Nichols concludes:
By “adapting” to modernity, instead of critically examining it in
the light of its own classical Christian tradition, those responsible for the
“modernisation” of the Religious life in the Western Church after the Second
Vatican Council have risked, rather, eviscerating it of all real substance.
“Whig Thomists”
Secondly, there are the self-described “Whig Thomists” who wish to defend the political and economic elements of the culture of Modernity, while rejecting the cruder aspects of a doctrinaire individualism such as abortion of demand. This group wish to effect a synthesis of elements of Liberal economic and political philosophy with Classical Thomism. Michael Novak and George Weigel are examples of this type. They both seek to defend the “culture of America” and oppose the arguments of other Catholic intellectuals who assert that the “culture of America” is synonymous with the culture of death. Although the “Whig Thomists” are supporters of the Papacy of John Paul II, their reading of his social justice encyclicals has been widely criticised as highly selective and blind to the defects inherent within corporate capitalism. The enthusiasm within this camp for elements of Enlightenment thought and culture is evident in the following statement of Michael Novak:
The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment achieved a revolution in the human ethos, a revolution whose spiritual possibilities have yet to be realized. It is my hope that moral and cultural leaders, philosophers and poets, theologians and prelates, will grasp these possibilities, and fashion from them the maxims of practical moral guidance for which so many economic activists are manifestly thirsty.
Charles
Taylor’s “Catholic Modernity”
Although he does not call himself a “Whig Thomist”, the Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor is also in favour of the adoption of elements of the
Liberal tradition and its associate culture of Modernity, although he may not be
as enthusiastic about corporate capitalism as Novak and Weigel.
His most recent series of lectures entitled, “A Catholic Modernity?”
fostered the idea of a new synthesis based on Classical Christian, Enlightenment
and Romantic elements. As a work of intellectual history Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity is one of the
very best works ever written on the subject of “What is the culture of
Modernity?”, however his proposals for a “Catholic Modernity” have been
criticised on the grounds that they are completely ambivalent about issues of
ecclesiology and, moreover, they tend in a Protestant direction. I know of no
article where Taylor has either praised or criticised John Paul II, though he
has been invited to the Pope’s Summer residence at Castelgandolfo to lecture
on the subject of Modernity in the presence of the Pope.
Pro-Christendom
Position
The fourth group into which Nichols fits, is the pro-Christendom group.
These types like to take their Thomism neat, undiluted by dashes of Kant,
Smith, Locke, Mill, or Abraham Lincoln. They
are not united in a common “school” as the “Whig Thomists” are, but
their individual intellectual projects are all converging on the same points. In
particular they believe that anything which is worthwhile in the Liberal
tradition and its culture of Modernity is but a remnant of values or practices
to be found within classical Thomism. The
pro-Christendom position is more common among Europeans and “Brompton
Oratory” types since they don’t have an emotional investment in the American
dream. There are however Americans in this group, foremost of whom
is David Schindler, although Schindler tends not to use the expression
“Christendom”.
Schindler, like Nichols, has built upon the theological traditions of
Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and tends to use their terminology,
whereas Nichols writes in his own hybrid Anglo-Continental style.
Schindler has also not bought into the issue of the value of a Christian
constitutional monarch, whereas Nichols is overtly pro-monarchy.
This group may well end up having sub-divisions over the precise elements
of a new Christendom, but they are fundamentally united on the principle that
Liberalism as an intellectual tradition has nothing to offer which can in any
sense perfect or improve upon the tradition of Thomism, broadly construed, to
include the tradition’s Patristic elements and antecedents. This is in part because they believe that Liberalism was
created as a tradition in direct
opposition to the Classical-Christian synthesis.
In this sense it is unlike other traditions, such as Aristotelianism,
which was capable of assimilation to the corpus of Catholic thought since it was
not established in open to theism.
Outside the ranks of Catholic scholars there is much support for this
interpretation among High Anglicans, including Professor Oliver O’Donovan of
Oxford, Catherine Pickstock of Cambridge, and the entire Cambridge-based
“Radical Orthodoxy” circle which includes both Anglican and Catholic
scholars.
Within the Australian context, it is also the position within which the Santamaria tradition was framed. After his death one journalist wrote that Bob Santamaria had opposed every revolution in human history since, and including, the Reformation. In particular his reading of the Church’s social justice tradition, including the three encyclicals of John Paul II, was that the current international economic order of corporate capitalism was fundamentally at odds with the Church’s teaching.
“New Natural
Law” School
The fifth group are those who wish to take the concepts of the Liberal
tradition and refill them with a Thomist substance. The work of the “New Natural Law” school, associated most
closely with Professor John Finnis, is perhaps the best example of this
approach, although it is unclear whether this school should be treated as a
separate category on its own, or as a sub-category of “Whig Thomism”.
There is a general ambivalence in the work of members of the “New
Natural Law” school regarding the Liberal tradition.
The question here is, do they want to adopt merely the language of the
Liberal tradition, or part of its substance as well? What seems to be clear is
that this group do not want to take Modernity on “head-on” as it were, but
propose to quietly go about redefining it.
Even if the enterprise is merely one of injecting Liberal concepts with a
Thomist substance, the critical question becomes one of whether, from the
perspective of linguistic philosophy, this is possible.
Those who subscribe to an expressivist theory of language argue that such
linguistic transpositions are fraught with difficulties.
Post-Moderns
The final group, at present the least significant, are the “post-Modern Catholics” who eschew the culture of Modernity and its Liberal tradition, but not in the name of a more pristine pre-Modern Thomism. Rather, their attitude is one of treating the Thomist tradition as a warehouse of ideas from which to pick and choose interesting elements while completely disregarding the rest. A common example here are those young Catholics who realise that the Church has a rich tradition of social thought and critiques of Liberalism which they find attractive, while, at the same time, they completely reject elements of the Church’s ecclesiology and her sacramental theology.
Rethinking Faith and
Culture
For those interested in understanding these debates, this work of Nichols is seminal. Each chapter of Christendom Awake deals with one particular area of Catholic thought and practice. Chapter titles include: Re-enchanting the Liturgy, Reimagining the Christendom State, Rerelating Faith and Culture, Resacralising Material Culture, and Rethinking Feminism. The common theme in each could be categorised as: “re-habilitating tradition”.
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"Church leaders have been pursing contradictory policy of attempting to hand down authentic Tradition while manifesting insouciance towards the forms in which the Tradition is embodied, that is, towards the immemorial rites and customs that compose Catholic Christianity’s received culture. " |
Nichols makes it clear that the Catholic faith is not merely a series of
intellectual propositions but a tradition, understood in the sense developed by
John Henry Newman and Maurice Blondel. Such
traditions are living and organic, they are the medium through which the faith
is expressed. To jettison elements
of the tradition as part of a strategy to accommodate Catholicism to the culture
of modernity is not only to risk failing to transmit the faith to successive
generations, but it is ironically, in our post-modern world, to risk looking
old-fashioned. The Thomist
philosopher Augustine Di Noia draws attention to this in the following
statement:
The post-Conciliar interpretation of John XXIII’s vision of aggiornamento
as updating theology is, from the perspective of postmodern eyes, a project
which has never really caught up; while conceived more grandly as modernization,
it is already far behind.
Nichols does not assert that the Church’s leaders over the post-Conciliar
period have been deliberately promoting anti-Catholic ideas.
Rather, he argues that they have been pursuing a ory policy of
attempting to hand down authentic Tradition while manifesting insouciance
towards the forms in which the Tradition is embodied, that is, towards the
immemorial rites and customs that compose Catholic Christianity’s received
culture. There has been, in other
words, a complete failure to appreciate the significance of the relationship
between form and substance.
One prelate who has some appreciation of this issue is Cardinal Francis
George. In his doctoral
dissertation he wrote:
Cultural forms and linguistic expresssions are, in fact, not
distinguished from the thoughts and message they carry as accidents are
distinguished from substance in classical philosophy. A change of form inevitably entails also some change in
content. A change in words changes
in some fashion the way we think.
Similarly, Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic from Toronto has recently drawn
attention to the reactive character of Catholic thought and practice.
In an address to the Pontifical Council for Culture he observed that
Catholics have been fighting a rear-guard campaign for three centuries now and
questioned the prudence of the project of trying to defend Catholicism at the
bar of the Enlightenment.
The Nichols work is the blue-print for an alternative vision from that of such rearguard strategies. He wants to recreate a Catholic culture, a new Christendom, which he defines, following Christina Scott, as “a society which has been informed by the Church”. In the words of Cardinal Christoph von Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna: “Rerelating faith and culture, reenchanting the liturgy, recentering on the end - it must, it can be done”.
*Tracey Rowland is a Commonwealth Scholar at Gonville & Caius College,
Cambridge.
**Aidan Nicholls OP, Christendom Awake, Edinburgh, T&T Clarke, 1999
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