The Evangelization
of Western Culture: A Starting Point
The concern of Pope Paul VI that cultures
be evangelized "in depth and right to their very roots"
has been taken up, deepened and amplified by Pope John Paul II
in his writings concerning the "culture of life" and
the "new evangelization". What exactly it might mean
for a given national culture to be evangelized in this way will
obviously depend largely on its own unique character. Britain
has, for example, unique characteristics due to the nature of
its Reformation, its position on the edge of Europe, its tradition
of empiricism, the myths of heroism (King Arthur and so on) that
lie deep within the consc
The new evangelization, correctly understood, subsumes and goes
beyond the numerous previous attempts at a "theology of
liberation" by the way it touches the very roots of modernity,
and the way it suggests principles that would give form to a
new Christian culture, a "culture of life" (See in
particular two issues of Communio : Winter 1994 (XXI:4) and Summer
1995 (XXII:2). In the first of these issues, Lorenzo Albacete
compares the new evangelization to liberation theology in "The
Praxis of Resistance"). The new culture must be capable
of integrating all the legitimate concerns of our era, including
respect for individual conscience, for cultural diversity, for
scientific progress, for the dignity of women and the poor, for
the integrity and sustainability of the natural environment,
and so on. Consequently, a "return to Christendom"
is neither feasible nor desirable.
The split between faith and culture developed, according to Balthasar,
with the separation of theology from the spiritual life. The
creation of supposedly autonomous academic disciplines such as
"theology" and "philosophy" brought in its
train the separation of the "transcendental properties of
being" - that is, of Beauty from her "sisters"
Truth and Goodness, no longer perceived as mutually dependent.
While religion increasingly became a matter of moralism or fideism
(of truth grasped by the will), science after Bacon and Descartes
became increasingly shallow, constructivist and utilitarian.
Our age has witnessed the victory of expertise over wisdom, quantity
over quality, action over contemplation ... and Deism over Trinitarian
Christianity. An abstract and empty freedom has triumphed over
the concrete love incarnate in Jesus Christ.
Beauty lies in the unity of Truth and Goodness, and is in a certain
sense what holds them together. Once this connection has been
lost, religion becomes less a response to God's revealed glory
than a semi-Pelagian attempt to grasp (and ultimately manipulate)
doctrine and ethics. But religion, as Christopher Dawson showed
in detail, is the source of the dynamic spirit that permeates
every culture. The great obstacle or challenge to the new evangelization
is therefore a sense of the self as primarily active, rather
than receptive, in relation to God and to being, a "technological
attitude" the all-pervasiveness of which renders it virtually
invisible, and any opposition to it extremely difficult. Even
our reactions to the overt symptoms of degeneracy in our culture
(ultraviolent videos, the breakdown of families, the rise of
drugs) tend to be coloured by it and therefore to feed the flames.
What gives Balthasar's analysis its teeth is the realization
that the "autonomy" of the secular has for a long time
been wrongly understood. The institutions of our society, both
economic and political; the methods of science; the principles
governing town planning and architecture; the activities of artists
and patrons of the arts: all of these are generally assumed,
even by many Catholics, to be morally or theologically neutral,
and therefore to be accepted as givens before evangelization
begins. Not so, says Prof. Schindler. The institutions and structures
that constitute our present world culture embody a "logic
or abstraction from God that secularizes the culture and disposes
it towards a technocratic-consumerist nihilism." To evangelize,
to liberate, to transform, we must recognize this as a structural
sin. "We cannot hope to resolve the problems besetting modern
Western society if we begin by bracketing the question of relation
to God [embodied in its structures], because bracketing that
question itself constitutes the source and deepest context of
all those problems."
The fear that such a response naturally provokes in our contemporaries
is the fear of a new integralism, a kind of totalitarian Catholicism.
It might seem that Balthasar's radical critique of modernity
and call to conversion carries with it the implication that all
Catholics should work towards a theocratic Catholic state, in
which important modern freedoms will be curtailed in the name
of Trinitarian love and the spirit of "obedience to the
truth". This fear is the result of a complete failure to
understand the principles and spirit of the critique. Trinitarian
love is, in fact, the only basis for a true liberation of the
human person, and thereby of an authentic social, cultural and
even religious pluralism. A love that traces its origin to the
Holy Trinity is a love that respects the other as other, and
not merely as an instrument of the self. Furthermore, a Church
that represents this "fairest love" cannot possibly
impose a religious faith or determine the policies of a government.
All she can do is promote, by any means consistent with her mission,
the dignity of each human being as such.
If the application of that principle reduces the range of human
expression in one respect, by militating against many forms of
institutional and personal injustice, so much the better. The
creative diversity of cultures that do respect human dignity
will be greater, because Trinitarian love is intrinsically fertile
and regenerative. Merely to ban abortion and euthanasia, to censor
violence on television and outlaw guns and drugs on the streets
- in other words, to counterreact to the culture of death - is
not enough. Love casts out fear, and it casts out the shadows
by shining. A culture of life would find creative solutions for
women who may be pressured into having an abortion by economic
or social circumstance. In the hard cases that no change in public
policy can prevent, the refusal to have an abortion would be
recognized and valued for what it is: an act of heroism, calling
for the utmost respect and support.
However, this is not the place to discuss details of public policy.
Nor does Prof. Schindler's book do so: he is necessarily concerned
simply to establish the principles that would define a new moral
architecture for society, principles based on a transformed understanding
of the Church's relation to the world. Schindler himself is Editor
of the English-language edition of the international Catholic
review Communio, where many of the chapters first appeared in
earlier drafts. The review was founded over twenty years ago
by Balthasar, along with his teacher Henri de Lubac, and his
friends and colleagues Josef Ratzinger, Jean Daniélou
and Louis Bouyer. It has since blossomed into thirteen different
language editions, including an Arabic edition edited in Beirut.
Seeing Schindler's essays gathered together with so much new
material, one begins to get a sense of the inexhaustible vision
that lay behind the founding of the review in the wake of the
Second Vatican Council, a vision of the renewal of all things
in Christ, of a Christian anthropology and even a Christian cosmology
that has increasingly come to shape the direction of the Church's
development under Pope John Paul II.
The book focuses on Catholic liberalism, beginning with the work
of John Courtney Murray, the American Jesuit who helped to prepare
the gound for Dignitatis Humanae, the Council's great Declaration
on Religious Liberty. That Declaration represented the most radical
apparent break with tradition of all the Conciliar documents
- at least according to Archbishop Lefebvre and its other conservative
critics. It is vitally important, therefore, for Catholics to
understand the Declaration correctly, as an authentic development
of doctrine - or at least a development in the application of
doctrine to a modern situation. Schindler's contention is that
despite Murray's enormous contributions to Catholic thought,
his work disposes Catholics to liberalism in a way that the Council
itself does not. It "Americanizes" the interpretation
of the Council. There is a "logical ambivalence" in
Murray's position that (contrary to Murray's own intention) actually
undermines religious freedom by causing it to "collapse"
into a kind of liberal dogmatism. Schindler then moves on to
his critique of the most influential contemporary Catholic liberals,
the so-called "neoconservatives", led by Michael Novak,
Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel. Here again, his argument
is subtle, distinguishing between the undeniably Catholic intentions
of these authors and the "unintended logic" of their
stated positions.
According to Schindler, the neoconservatives baptise too quickly
the American style of economic liberalism, and fail to recognize
consumerism as a structure of sin - as Pope John Paul II clearly
does. Drawing on the work of Jewish sociologist Will Herberg
and Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, Schindler exposes
the anthropology of the Scottish Enlightenment lurking beneath
the false neutrality of the "articles of peace" and
the "empty freedom" granted to religion by our main
social and economic institutions. The neoconservative solution
poses itself as the only credible alternative to a Catholic integralism
of the Right or the Left, but Schindler insists that there is
a "third way" based on the "communio ecclesiology"
implicit in the Council itself. The Church must not be absorbed
into the world, as the liberationists have tended to do, but
it cannot maintain its independence by remaining merely "juxtaposed"
alongside the world, attempting to influence it for the better.
There is a deeper and more intimate relation between the two,
and here the best analogy is found in an ideal marriage, where
each is fulfilled through a union with the other without losing
his or her own integrity - indeed, in such a union the integrity
of each is deepened and confirmed.
In a powerful, compact passage from Love Alone frequently quoted
by Prof. Schindler, Balthasar writes that "whenever the
relationship between nature and grace is severed... then the
whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of 'knowledge',
and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are
overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and
cybernetics. The result is a world without women, without children,
without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation - a world
in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria, where
the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised,
persecuted and in the end exterminated...." It is the severing
of the relationship between nature and grace that lies behind
the crisis of the modern world. Perhaps this is a formulation
that will only make sense to a theologian, but if so we may substitute
for the word "grace" the word "love". Prof.
Schindler finds the love revealed in Jesus Christ as "constitutive
of all of creation, as affecting intrinsically every fiber of
every being in the cosmos". He sees contemplative and Marian
receptivity at the very foundation of Christian existence. He
sees the Christian's activity as taking its primary form "from
within the spousal union given in the eucharist and the fiat
", adding that these "are not merely 'private' sources
of moral inspiration for worldly activity", but the inner
form of the world as world. This is the starting point for any
effective evangelization of culture, any renewal of the springs
of our civilization into the new millennium.
* Address: T&T Clark Publishers, 59 George St, Edinburgh,
EH2 2LQ, UK
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