Tag: Tracey Rowland

One Man’s Modernism is Another Woman’s Sacramentality

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Apparently Tracey Rowland doesn’t read Geerhardus Vos or Eric Voegelin and so isn’t worried about “immanentizing the eschaton.” On her recent visit to Scotland she found that Rome’s sacraments are exactly what ails the land of Presbyterianism:

On a recent trip to Scotland Bishop Gilbert of Aberdeen asked me whether I was familiar with the Scottish writer George Mackay Brown. I had to confess that I had never heard of him. A few days later I was rummaging through second-hand book stores searching for everything and anything by Mackay Brown.

Bishop Gilbert had got me hooked by suggesting I read Mackay Brown’s essay “The Treading of Grapes,” which takes the form of three homilies on the Wedding Feast of Cana. One is delivered in 1788 by a classically Calvinist Presbyterian minister, down on every kind of human enjoyment from wine to party dresses. He uses the story of Cana to berate his flock about spending too much money on their wives’ wardrobes, and drinking too much at weddings. He compared their enjoyment of ale to piglets sucking on the teats of a sow.

The second homily is delivered in the 20th century by a modern liberal Protestant minister, who uses the homily to explain that Jesus didn’t really turn water into wine. There was no miracle. Jesus was simply a good organizer who saw to it behind the scenes that supplies were sufficient.

Finally, one is treated to a homily by a Catholic priest delivered in 1548. Rather than berating people as piglets, or denying the reality of miracles, the priest tells his congregation that at the wedding feast of the Lamb they will all be princes. Therefore, he says, I will call you Olaf the Fisherman and Jock the Crofter no longer, but I will call you by the name the Creator will call you on the last day—princes! Prince Olaf! Prince Jock!, et cetera.

The priest left out that his auditors may not be at the wedding feast but still waiting in purgatory.

Still, Rowland thinks the sacraments break down dualism and allow Christianity to flourish:

It can’t be all that difficult to compete with liberal Calvinism and garden-variety New Age paganism when one has the full treasury of a sacramental Catholicism—a faith for which there is “no separation,” no iron curtain standing between the sacred and the profane, no unbridgeable gulf between heaven and the Highlands and the valley of the River Clyde.

Apparently, Professor Rowland is unfamiliar with modernism and its dangers (even though Pius X should have registered a few dents in the Communio mind). According to William R. Hutchison who wrote THE book on Protestant modernism, modern Christians are all in favor of doing away with dualism of all kinds:

[Modernism] generally meant three things: first and most visibly, it mean the conscious, intended adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture. . . . for the Protestant theologians, preachers, and teachers who either championed or opposed the idea of cultural adaptation, two further and deeper notions were important. One was the idea that God is immanent in human cultural development and revealed through it. The other was a belief that human society is moving toward the realization (even though it may never attain the reality) of the Kingdom of God. (Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, 2)

I don’t know about Professor Rowland, but maintaining some distinction between the sacred and secular, between the Mass and the Happy Meal, is fairly basic for preventing Christians from reverting to the pagan world where gods and spirits infested so many aspects of nature that chopping down a tree was no different from destroying the statue of a saint.

At Least They Can't Blame the United States

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

Tracey Rowland, one of the Augustinian Thomists, who is no fan of Whig Thomists, the ones who like the United States and argue for Roman Catholicism’s compatibility with it, wonders what’s going on in Belgium, the Roman Catholic country that just passed a child euthanasia bill:

I first visited Belgium in 2004 to attend a theology conference in Leuven. The conference Mass was the most bizarre liturgical experience of my life. It did not take place in any of the many churches in Leuven but in the conference room itself. Part of the ritual took the form of watching a video of the September 11 attack on the twin towers while listening to mood music. One of the participants from Holland was dressed in a folk costume and looked like a member of the band The Village People. There was also a Nigerian priest who was treated like an idiot because he expressed respect for Cardinal Arinze. I took some flak for being critical of the culture of modernity and one polite person apologized to me by saying, “you see, around here people think of you as an ally of Joseph Ratzinger”!

My overall impression was that Leuven was like a town that had been hit by a neutron bomb—the kind of bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact. All the Gothic buildings remained—the outward symbols of a once vibrant Catholic culture were still on view as tourist attractions—but the people who worked within the buildings seemed not to be the original inhabitants, but another people who had moved in after some terrible cataclysm and were ill at ease with what had gone before. Our Lady, the Seat of Wisdom, and Patroness of Leuven, appeared marginalized.

A few years later I attended another theology conference, this time in Krakow. A Belgian professor delivered the keynote address in the hall of the Polish Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He veered off topic and gave a rousing oration in favor of the projects of the culture of death (eugenics, euthanasia, a tax on babies etc). He even argued that anyone who opposed contraception should be convicted of a criminal offense. Not all the conference participants were supporters of Humanae Vitae, but they were completely shocked that such an anti-life and totalitarian speech could be given in the hall of the Polish Academy just a couple of hours drive from Auschwitz. What stunned the participants was the closeness of the ideology of the speaker to that of the Nazi ideologues whose specters (metaphorically speaking) still haunt the streets of Krakow. A quick Google search revealed that the illustrious academic had been Jesuit educated in Antwerp and was a product of the University of Leuven. A more recent Google search revealed that last year he ended his life by being given a lethal injection in the presence of his children. He at least had the virtue of practicing what he preached, but I wondered how someone who was Jesuit educated in the 1930s could end up in such a spiritual state. In an interview given not long before his death he said that religion is nonsense, a childish explanation for things that science has yet to fathom. At some moment in his life he had bought the Feuerbachian critique.

Audacious, indeed.

Americanism: Protestant and Roman Catholic

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Scott Clark reposted a piece recently on the ways Protestant conjure with dominant forms of American religiosity. His conclusion ran as follows:

There are conservatives, who embrace the past but must negotiate a modus vivendi with American Religion, and there are liberals who are quite ready to discard the past and go where ever the culture demands so as to try to remain “relevant” and influential. There is a third way to relate to American religion, however, and that is confessionalism, which is neither liberal nor conservative, but it is what the Reformed Churches have always confessed to be the theology, piety, and practice revealed in the Word of God.

The relationship between confessionalism and Americanism also has ramifications for 2k and its reception. Critics of 2k usually equate its proponents with selling out to American notions of the separation of church and state, or worse. These critics would have us return (even though the churches have also come round to church-state separation) to Geneva of 1560, Edinburgh of 1590, or Boston of 1640. But any political theology that embraces the U.S.’s novos ordo seclorum is a capitulation of Christianity to liberal politics.

Curious to observe is a similar dynamic among Roman Catholics. It is sometimes named a debate between Whig and Augustinian Thomists (though the Augustine invoked here ironically sounds more like the Anglican John Milbank than the Bishop of Hippo). The so-called Augustinians are critical of folks like George Weigel, Michael Novak, and the late Richard John Neuhaus for conforming Roman Catholicism to American political and economic conventions. Tracey Rowland outlines the differences in an interview here (almost a decade old):

What I argued in my book “Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II” is that there is a division between those who think that the Thomist tradition should accommodate itself to the culture of modernity, particularly the economic dimensions of this culture — the self-described “Whig Thomists” — and those who believe that modernity and its liberal tradition are really toxic to the flourishing of the faith.

Those who take the latter position do not want to supplement the Thomist tradition with doses of Enlightenment values. They are very broadly described as Augustinian Thomists for the want of a better label because, in a manner consistent with St. Augustine’s idea of the two cities, they reject the claim of the liberal tradition to be neutral toward competing perspectives of the good and competing theological claims.

While the Whigs argue that liberalism is the logical outgrowth of the classical-theistic synthesis, the Augustinian Thomists argue that the liberal tradition represents its mutation and heretical reconstruction, and they tend to agree with Samuel Johnson that the devil — not Thomas Aquinas — was the first Whig.

There are thus two different readings of modernity and with that, two different readings of how the Church should engage the contemporary world. While the Whigs want the Church to accommodate the culture of modernity, the Augustinians favor a much more critical stance.

She goes on to draw the contrast this way:

The Whigs want to baptize the current international economic order, while the Augustinians take a more critical approach, arguing that there are economic practices characteristic of this order that cannot be squared with the social teaching of the Church.

Moreover, the Augustinians are more likely to point out that most people do not sit down and develop a worldview for themselves from hours of philosophical and theological reflection. They tacitly pick up values and ideas from the institutions in which they work.

The Augustinians argue that there are aspects of the culture of modernity that act as barriers to the flourishing of Christian practice and belief, and unless the culture is changed, no amount of intellectual gymnastics on the part of the Church’s scholars will be of help to those 1 billion Catholics who have to make a living within the world.

In other words, if one has to be a saint not to be morally compromised by the culture in which one works, then there is something wrong with that culture.

So, the Augustinians are critical of liberalism in the fashion of American political and economic arrangements, and believe that Whigs don’t understand the incompatibility between Roman Catholicism and the kind of modernity that the United States has embodied. The Augustinian complaint is another lament about what America does to religion. (About this debate among Thomists the Callers are generally ignorant.)

But what the Augustinians want to see replace the liberal order is a dicey proposition. The Augustinians, whether they know it or not, are echoing Leo XIII’s condemnation of Americanism as a heresy. Leo’s verdict was far from clear, nor was it free from ultramontanist fear mongers. But the thrust of Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899) was that efforts to accommodate Roman Catholicism to the American way of life were erroneous. This included the efforts of bishops who argued for the legitimacy of the separation of church and state as a viable way for the church to conduct its affairs. Leo still had the Syllabus of Errors (1864) echoing throughout the halls of the Vatican and he was not going to be the pope to give up resisting modern civilization.

An important difference between the Reformed Protestant and Roman Catholic developments is that 2kers do not praise or even baptize the American system the way that Whig Thomists do sometimes. 2k advocates appropriately give 2 cheers for the American political order (and are fairly silent about economics — though Jason Stellman used to sound Occupy-Wall-Streetish). Weigel and company usually give 3 cheers for the U.S. and regard the nation in Lincolnian terms — the “last best hope of earth.” 2kers know that the church through its ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ is humanity’s last best hope. Which leads me to think that the Augustinians have a point about their Whiggish brethren if the latter confuse the blessings of liberty with the redemption purchased by Christ.