The Soul You Lose May Be Your Own: Historical Considerations on Theology and Culture by Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P., S.T.M. November 15, 2008

I. Introductory Remarks

About 20 years ago when I was living in Bologna, Italy, the then Cardinal Ratzinger came to speak at one of the Evenings of St. Dominic, as they were called. You will remember that at this time he had become famous for the series of interviews published as the Ratzinger Report, which amounted to a fairly critical evaluation of the trajectory of Catholic life in the post-Vatican-II period. The subject of his lecture, given the grandiose Renaissance salon called the "Sala del Cinquecento," was "The Office of the Theologian. In the talk, he described the theologian as mediating between the lived experience of Christians and the Church's on-going tradition.

It was very much a reprise of the visions of the theologians who influenced the documents and vision of the Council Fathers, De Lubac, Congar, Chenu, and others. There was little evidence that the Cardinal was influenced by Rahner or appropriations of modern philosophy in the mode of Schillebeekx or Bernard Longergen. There was certainly no hint of Liberation Theology or "Deconstruction" of a post-modern sort. It seemed to me a somewhat old-fashioned talk, and I don't mean that as negative, nor even faint praise.

I don't think it would be a caricature, to summarize the Cardinal's understand of the theologian's office this way: The theologians task is to interpret and articulate the Christian experience of God's action in the world in the light of the Scriptures and the Church's tradition, under the corrective guidance of the Magisterium. I would have supposed that the prominent role of Scripture and Tradition in this formula, as well as the explicit inclusion of Vatican oversight in it, should have played well in the Bologna environment: where the Ratzinger Report was the current refectory reading. But I was wrong.

The next morning, after Lauds, when I found my way into the little nook where the friars usually stood around breakfasting on stale bread in bowels of caffe latte, I found a sizable group of the Dominican faculty, perhaps the majority and including the academic dean, Padre Galli, denouncing the Cardinal's heresies of the night before. The consensus was that his understanding of the theological project simultaneously denuded it of objectivity by founding it on the shifting sands of personal experience while rendering it authoritarian and fideistic though the institutionalization of what amounted to an oracular Magisterium. I would not say that the Cardinal was the object of the proverbial "odium theologicum," but to say the friar professors were unhappy would be putting it mildly.

It seems had chanced on what was perhaps the last sizable group of Neo-Scholastics in charge of theological formation -at least it was the only one I can remember encountering. For Padre Galli and theologians like him, the objectivity of theologian was founded on the objectivity of its first principles. Again, I don't think that it would be a parody to describe their understanding of the Theologian's office this way: The theologian is responsible for defending and elaborating the "Deposit of the Faith," a series of propositions about God, Christ, and the Church, found in Scripture and tradition, and defined by the Councils and popes as normative. This elaboration takes place by a logical, method whereby through syllogistic arguments new propositions are propounded, and then offered to the Magisterium for canonization as articles of the Faith.

The Magisterium does not exist without the theologians. Indeed, in the words of one Bolognese friar, the Magisterium would have nothing to declare "de fide" if the theologians did not propound new propositions from old. Not only was this enterprise "objective," a non-believer could probably pursue it, fashioning new propositions, logically consistent with a set of first principles that he might very well reject. No shifting sand here. And frankly, whatever one might think of this kind of theology, the Cardinal's version did look very subjective, impressionistic, and authoritarian in comparison. I say this even if I found it more attractive. In any case, I doubt the Bolognese option exists any more, the Neo-Scholastics of this type have pretty much entered into the presence of the Formal Object of Theology, or have at least retired. Even Thomists don't generally think this way any more, or so I understand.

Even more than twenty years ago, a wise priest who was then my spiritual director, on hearing that I would be returning to graduate studies, asked with a hint of concern in his voice, "Are they sending you to do a degree in theology?" No, I said, I would be returning to Berkeley to study medieval history. With obvious relief, he replied, "Thank God; those who do theology can loose their souls!" I have often thought about that remark, and over the years it along with my "Bologna Experience" have provided food for thought. Frankly, and I have said this to a number of the distinguished members of the Dominican School faculty, I have not the vaguest idea how theology is supposed to work, and I am very glad that I do not have to do it.

The theologian's task must be something more than manipulation of propositions, especially if St. Thomas is correct that it has as its object God Himself and that true knowledge can only come by connaturality. But to characterize theology as reflection on something as God as revealed in human experience, even Christian experience, seems very risky. I would think that the only experience worthy of theological consideration would be the graced experience of the saint, living to the full the life of the Church and manifesting the deification with comes from participation in the life of the Trinity. And I would think that only the saint could do it. The problem, however, is, as John Calvin never ceased repeating, that fallen human creatures have a disturbing tendency to replace the living God with idols of their own creation. Indeed, when the "Christian" experience considered by the theologian is nothing of the sort, but just another idol of the age, the theologian is on the road to Hell. And I do not mean that metaphorically.

What can a historian provide for those engaged in this kind of risky business. Certainly not a method, since history itself deals with the most radically particular of objects, individual human actions and events -so much so that Aristotle declared that it was no science at all -but we can say something about the ways in which cultural realities conditioned and formed the theologians relation to what went on around them and provide, if not a method, a variety of real-world conditions in which the theologian had to perform his task.

I leave aside the peculiar situation that produced the theologizing that resulted in the composition of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Not merely because, unlike the sacred authors, later theologians did not enjoy divine inspiration (a fact that modern theologians seem occasionally to forget), but principally because their utterances, no matter how grave and weighty, are in no sense normative for the Church. The Scriptures are, since their canonization, normative, and so, however fashionable it has become to speak of the "theology of John" or the "theology of Paul," those theologies are in no way on par with the "theology of Rahner" or even that of the former Cardinal Ratzinger. Rahner and Ratzinger may fade away, the Word of God remains.

II. Historical Situations

I would like, then, not to begin with first century Christians, but with their grandchildren. One might call them the Post-Neronian Christians, because we find them mostly in the age of the Pagan Persecutions. They are that small group of Christian believers who first attracted the unappreciative attention the dominant culture of the Greco-Roman world. My colleague Robert Wilken once wrote a book on the this attention, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. In this work, he admitted that although there was not much consensus among Pagans as to what they thought Christians were, but there was a consensus that these deviants were very, very bad. Perhaps dangerous. And for good reason. Sub-apostolic Christianity was sociologically speaking a sect. And people generally do not like sects, unless they seem genuinely harmless and totally uninterested in the dominant culture--thus the exemption for the Amish, who much to their frustration have become a tourist attraction.

The Post-Neronians were a persecuted sect. Not that this persecution was constant, but the near possibility of becoming lunch for lions does have a tendency to focus the mind. With the community, we discover a world that, for whatever literary and cultural trapping they shared with the larger culture, essentially defined itself against it. Fustel de Colange, nearly two-hundred years ago, correctly identified the ancient city, ancient society generally, as a cultic entity. There was no "secular" realm, only, for Christians, an alternate sacrality, the sacrality of the Pagan cosmos and social order, in which to participate in public life, and much of private life, involved an overt act of worshipping the gods. As one of the last great pagans said in reply to the intolerance of St. Ambrose, "We too are religious people." One might choose one's favorite cult, but a preference for Asclepias did not invalidate another's preference for Diana of the Ephesians. Again, Praetextatus, sounding very American, said "There are many road to so great a mystery."

To be a Christian was to take reject the sacral public order completely. Christians were bad citizens. Not only did they view the Greco-Roman world as steeped in what amounted to demon-worship, and so to be shunned; they were intent on converting their neighbors and making them too into bad citizens. And within the Church, at least that version of the Church that had staying power, what this alternate culture entailed was fairly clear. We take for granted certain moral attitudes: exclusion of abortion and infanticide, a sexual code that viewed even marital sex with a bit of suspicion, and had a tendency to limit social contact, in particular marriage, to those within the group. If an modern American suddenly found himself to be a second-century theologian and were required to "reflect on Christian experience," he would have encountered two central realities profound alienation the rest of the world, and an apocalyptic anticipation of that divine intervention would end it.

What is odd is that the Ante-Nicene Fathers don't really have all that much to say about alienation or the eschaton. They have a theology of experience, I guess, but it is about the experience of the martyrs, a very radical experience indeed. Moderns who think about second and third century Christianity generally like to think of this as the age of the Apologists, that little band who present themselves as writing to explain to the outside world that Christianity was really a good thing, a sort of Platonism for the masses. Emperors should call off the lions because they were good citizens. They prayed for the army after all. The problem with this view is that the Apologists produced precious little in the way of apologies, with the exception of Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, a few letters supposedly to emperors, and a handful of risible treatises. And as one reads Justin and Clement one wonders if they expected any pagan really to read their work: this is not Christianity for export to the Pagans, it is more like an exercise in self-affirmation: to show to other Christians that "How the Romans Saw Them" was mistaken. I find it a in-house literature.

Apologetics was not the most common "theological" project of the age. The really big books, the ones that fill up the volumes of the Ante-Nicene Library are those "Against the Heresies," the real heavy lifting done by the likes of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian. And these heretics all start to look the remarkably similar after a while (modern historians generally call them "Gnostics"). They want to damp down apocalyptic anticipation and they build bridges with the Pagan religious thought of the age: speculation about cosmic powers (Iamblicus), a mystical monism (Plotinus), with a dash of theurgy (the Hermetic Corpus). This, to us, strange brew was the Christian alternative to the Orthodox writers' more shocking dissent from mediterranean religious orthodoxy. There is something marvelously ecumenical about the Gnostics, for all their odd ideas. In contrast, the idea that the human and the divine had met in a single person, whose accomplishment on the Cross rendered all other religious routes to the divine not merely wrong but evil was not only cosmologically shocking but socially repugnant. No wonder more domesticated versions of the Gospel circulated. Indeed, since Bauer, many have come to the Gnostics as the majority of Christians, the Mainline. The Catholics were a small sect in Asian Minor with some outposts in Rome and, eventually, North Africa. Could the Catholics survive? They really did not have a very good read of the "signs of the times" after all.

Those the Catholics called the "heretics" seem to have taken a live and let live attitude toward the larger culture--what difference does a little incense to the Emperor make: I'm spiritual, not religious. These were cultured urbane Christians, not sectarians. Praetextatus might have enjoyed dinner with them, although Plotinus seems to have thought their cheap access to the One rather distasteful. To us the literature "Against the Heresies" seems to us rather negative: but to its readers it was a literature of experience, the experience of martyrdom. Survival could brook no compromises. The theological project of the Post-Neronians, on the other hand, was a project in self-policing. And given the survival needs of the persecuted sect of Christians, not a bad choice. Contrary to popular literature, the Da Vinci Code, and the History Channel, the Gnostics did not disappear because the Catholics persecuted them (they were too busy policing internal orthodoxy and had no police force anyway).

The Gnostics mostly just evaporated into the culture because, I think, they refused the anti-assimilation vaccine developed by writers like Irenaeus. That Catholic theologians from Ignatius of Antioch to Lactantius did their job is proved by the fact that their Church is still around to read them. If modern Christianity in the industrialized West finds itself ever more a culture enclave in a largely indifferent society, the sectarian theologians may have something to teach us. The Gnostic approach to culture seems to offer very little but extinction.

Contrary to the Pre-Millennial expectations of some Ante-Nicenes, the Antichrist did not arrive to be defeated by Christ who would usher in a new age. What happened was perhaps more astounding, or at least more unexpected: an emperor converted and within a hundred years, the persecuting empire was itself at least nominally Christian. Setting aside the massive catechetical challenge of Christianizing the Ancient City, it should give us pause to observe that outside of their sermons, the major theological agenda of the great Fathers was not evangelization, but, like that of the Ante-Nicenes, policing orthodoxy within the Church. And the Christological controversies were the working out of issues from the earlier period: How should one to think about what God had accomplished in Christ? Patristic theology before and after Constantine is part of the same project.

What is oddly lacking, with one exception, is any attempt to reflect on what it means to be a Christian in a "Christianized" society. Indeed, the general approach seems rather Ante-Nicene: theologians continue write and preach as if their hearers were still somewhat pagan, albeit of more a more harmless type--no lions. The one exception is Augustine, whose most singular contribution to theology is not his speculation on predestination and grace, nor the exercise in self-analysis that is the Confessions, but the idea of the Two Cities. This is a theology founded on experience, Augustine's experience of Christianity in a post-persecution world, where the sectarian experience no longer insured a faithful sense of identity and behavior, because Christians were no longer, perhaps unfortunately, a sect.

From Adam to the End Times, Augustine tells us, there have always been and always will be Two Cities, and both are invisible. Membership in each is determined by the hidden movement of the heart. Members of one city have quiet hearts, which seek and find near to hand what they truly love: wealth, power, pleasure, but also family, community, and country. The other city is composed of those with restless hearts, who are satisfied with nothing here and love God alone as their only good. No one but God can know who is a member of which city because only God can read the heart--perhaps, even the individual cannot know his own heart. We are so given to self-deception.

This theology profoundly alienates the believer from all around him, perhaps even from himself. The pay-off of Augustine's revolution is a radical turn within. The sectarianism of the Post-Neronian Christians has returned with a vengeance. Opposition to the non-Christian world has now become an alienation from everything, save God. Whether the Christian Empire survives or collapses becomes a matter of consummate indifference. "Puppies fighting over a bone," Augustine calls it. And since the visible Church itself cannot be identified with the City of God (for it contains many wayward hearts), its worldly success and respectability is ultimately insignificant. A remarkable solution to the Christian predicament of later antiquity. One wonders how many could have lived by it. But Christians did not have to.

Within a hundred years, authentic Christian experience seemed possible only to a group even more exclusive than the small sect of the Post-Neronians. By the seventh century, at least in the West, Roman control collapsed and the Latin West had become a collection of at least nominally Christian warrior chiefdoms. While it is common to speak of early medieval theology as "Augustinian" its project was so different that this label is profoundly misleading. Without exception, after the death of Boethius in 525 until the age of Peter Abailard, who died in the mid-1100s, there is not a single significant Latin theologian who was not a monk. If there were ever a theology founded on experience, if not at the service of experience, it was that of the Monastic Theologians. In the view of some moderns, this age produced a theology that was derivative and repetitive, endless often plagiarized biblical commentaries and the occasional fabulous saint's life. To take this approach is profoundly to misunderstand the purpose of this literature.

The monastic and eremitical project of the early middle ages was, for those who undertook it to completely remake the individual, producing not merely saints, but holy communities where the doxological character of Christian living, its single-minded liturgical glorification of God, controlled and ordered every element of life. If Augustine wanted Christians to live in the world as if only God mattered, the monks wanted to create a space in the world where only God mattered. The Protestant reformers, who lumped the monks together with Anabaptists as "sectarians" were profoundly right. Monastic Christianity was as alienated from the dominant surrounding mostly pagan culture as the Ante-Nicenes were from the persecuting Roman Empire.

The monastic theology is, above all, a theology at the service of the liturgy. Its biblical commentaries made it possible for the monks to contemplatively enter into the texts they sang. The task of the monk as to mourn, we are told, but mostly their job was to sing. Their hagiography celebrated the saints who populated and shaped the monastic calendar, and the commentaries on Benedict's Rule formed as practice the measured asceticism of the Father of Monks. Admired as it was by the Germanic warriors who supported the monasteries, no life could have been more opposed to theirs. In place of heroic bravado, humble submission; in place of the heavily liquored conviviality, the endless sober chanting of psalms; in place of military exploits, the service of the guesthouse and the scullery.

Certainly, the ethos of the Benedictine centuries seems, for moderns to fall short of certain aspects of "authentic Christianity," what with its aristocratic elitism, its willingness to let professionals perform vicarious service to God, and its seeming indifference to the miserable poverty and social, violence, and oppression that surrounded it. Nevertheless, there is no question that the monastic project and its theology stands in absolute contradiction to the non-Christian world outside the monastery walls. In her book Rhinoceros Bound, Barbara Rosenwein describes the liturgical project of the Cluniacs as a active subversion and subjugation of the warrior ethos of its host society. And in the end, the monks prevailed. This was one of the two great missionary periods of the Christian Church (second only to the fifteenth and sixteenth-century), it was the age in which preaching hermits like Robert of Arbrissel and, the better known Norbert of Xanten began the conversion of the peasants of the countryside. The were the commandos of the monastic war, I mean prayer, machine.

If theology is ultimately sterile unless it bears fruit in sanctification and conversion of life, then the monks have much to teach us. And I, for one, cannot imagine a genuine theology that does not arise out of the act of praising God, that arises out of the Church's liturgical life and is its servant. When that life is compromised and its focus strays from God, the theological reflection it fosters is nothing but idolatry, worship of self or of the group. In my own theological training here at St. Albert's, I was encouraged to look to the accomplishment of the great Scholastics, in particular the Angelic Doctor. And indeed their accomplishment was great

Yet much as I admire Thomas and his school, I always had harbored a nagging anxiety about their intellectual forebears, those who replaced the monks as the intellectual trend-setters of Latin Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. I remember a conversation with an older student, now a theological school president, during which I remarked that my heart was with St. Bernard and not with the early Aristotelians at Paris and, in particular, not with Abailard. He looked at me and said, "Well, as for me, Abailard is the beginning of real theology." Or something to that effect. I later published an article that had as its sole purpose attacking the Abailard cult. Salve reverentia, pater.

One advantage enjoyed by the early Scholastics was that they could, thanks to the monks and hermit-missionaries, to a great extent talk the Christian identity of their society for granted. I do not mean that the people of their age were all saints, or even particularly good Christians, but their "public square" was informed by a dense network of Catholic symbols and practices that formed perceptions. Unlike the Ante-Nicenes and Monks, the early scholastics did not have to practice theology within a hostile pagan environment or a tribal world of Germanic warriors. They could read and appropriate Aristotle, employ the rigor of syllogistic logic, and enjoy an expansiveness of the vision impossible for sectarians. Nevertheless, the establishment of theology as a "science" among other sciences, even as the Queen of the Sciences, brought with it a potential objectification of knowledge that could imply a realm of autonomous reason that could be very seductive.

I do not mean that the Scholastics were more prone to heresy than their predecessors, they were probably far better at self-policing than the Fathers thanks to their more rigorous forms of argument, but it was now possible to do theology outside of a doxological context. It was possible to be a leading theologian even if no one could mistake you for a saint. It became possible for theology to become an academic job, however, an exercise scholarly competition, with no necessary connection to holiness of life, and no clear responsibility to the Faith. Could undermine its ecclesial nature. I don't think such a dreadful result describes Scholasticism as a whole, but I am not so sure about Peter Abailard.

St. Thomas, like all the Paris doctors, was a "Master of the Sacred Page." To that extent, they inherited the Scriptures as the normative Christian language and they were still absolutely bound by the Scriptural norms, stabilized by centuries of normative reading. But as Beryl Smalley long ago noticed they also participated in something a primitive historical-critical method. The determination of the meaning of the biblical text was no longer found in its liturgical use or its service as a foundation for contemplation, as with the Victorines, but in a philological and historical enterprise of determining the "literal sense." As post-moderns like my former colleague John Milbank, the founder of the movement called "Radical Orthodoxy," have been saying, a text only preserves a stable and normative meaning within the context of an on-going community of readers: this is what medieval's meant by Scripture only being able to speak within the context of tradition. Not as two sources of truth, but because Scripture only has a voice through tradition. Futhermore, and this is central, that meaning might be discovered by a pagan or atheist, so long has he had the proper philological and historical training. The Bible could, in a positivistic way, become a black box of propositions independent of its readership.

This trajectory eventually resulted in the proof-texting biblicism of the Protestant Reformers, to which Catholics replied with their own proof-texting. Both claiming to have found the "original intention" of the sacred authors. To say that the result was religiously unfortunate is to be generous. I do not intend to go there. Those who no longer sing the Bible together and experience as one the sanctification produced by Christian worship will not know Scripture's meaning. The doxological quality of the text will be replaced by moral didacticism, or even worse by autonomous academic controversy. A plague on the humanists who thought they could get truly authentic Christianity if only they had the best manuscripts, in the original language, of course. And their later successors who discovered by this method an alien two- to three-thousand year old document totally out of touch with "contemporary" realities and needs. That reading of Scripture making it a dead historical artifact is the Sin against the Holy Ghost.

I do not want to trace out the unfortunate legacy of bug-hunting literalism. It did have its positive side. At least the post-reformation apologists understood heresy when they saw it and, in their own way sought to tend and protect the faithful from movements that could compromise their experience of God in Christ through the sacraments, moral development, and prayer. Theology came more and more to focus on theological issues, joined by little more that the fact they had become the subject of academic dispute. For Protestants, the historically retrieved "original meaning" of the Bible was to serve as the determinant for these controversies. Catholics would reply in kind. Inter-denominational polemic, perhaps the predominant idiom of post-Reformation theology, did at least place the theological enterprise at the service of the Church. It served to protect and reinforce Catholic identity and so carve out an intellectual space for the tradition.

In the case of the Protestants, at least, a supposedly autonomous means for resolving doubts seemed ready to hand. In spite of Calvin's assertion that a reader can only know the meaning of the inspired text if the Spirit inspires him as it did the sacred author -in short the theologian must be to some extent a saint -there is nothing about Biblical foundationalism that would require holiness in the practitioner, much less membership in a worshiping community. Like the realm of autonomous reason discovered by the early modern philosophers, Melanchthon's gift to the Protestant tradition was a realm of autonomous theology. Not merely distinct from tradition, but also distinct form union with God. In 1521, Philip Melanchthon, the disciple of Martin Luther, produced one of the most important theological books of modern times, the Loci Communes Theologici. In it, he reorganized theology according to a series of theological topics that were generating controversy. This move was to have major consequences. In 1563, the Spanish Dominican theologian Melchior Cano, published a Catholic corrective to this misadventure, his De Locis Theologicis. In it, he systematized not topics of theological dispute, but the authorities through which the theologian reached conclusions. Needless to say, for Catholics this determination could not to be made by consulting scripture alone.

His loci were: Scripture, Conciliar decrees, and determinations of the Roman Pontiffs, in that order. These were normative. But such de fide propositions could only be understood within the context of the opinions of the Patristic doctors, the on-going reflections of the scholastic theologians (which includes canon law), natural reason, sound philosophy (which includes what we would call natural science), and the testimony of history (which included for him civil jurisprudence). In short, doctrinal theology can only function within what Alasdair MacIntyre as called a "tradition of discourse." Finally he proposed norms for interpreting, weighing, and reconciling these loci in theological argument. His accomplishment lies behind the labels "de fide," "sententia certa," "opinio communis," etc., of the old manuals. But that is not why his accomplishment is important, rather it is important in spite of that product. After all, traditions of discourse are just human creations: you pay your money and you take your choice.

What Cano accomplished as to reintegrate theology in to Catholic experience, which is not some merely subjective experience, into the theological enterprise. The experience that counts is that of the saints, the experience of the Church. That tradition is normative because we know by faith that it is guided by, and subordinate to, the Holy Spirit. The vapid if rigorous logical virtuosity of the late medieval nominalists, like the proof-texting biblicism of the Reformers, had both turned theology into a mind-game. Albeit a mind game with ecclesio-political pay-offs. Theology as rethought by Cano, at least in theory and for the time being, was subordinated to the living Church's experience as guide and sanctifier. And not merely the Church's contemporary experience. Cano's vision of theology was historical because authentic Christian life is transmitted to us through time, from the Incarnation of the Word and the inspiration of Scripture to the perceptions and acts of the saints through the ages. If Christ came in history and remains with us, all true theology is historical theology. As Chesterton said, Catholicism is the only true universal democracy because it is the only one that gives the franchise to the dead.
It must be obvious that I admire Friar Melchior's accomplishment. On the other hand, I am pained to notice that he made no place for the Church's liturgical expression of Truth. The doxological element is sadly missing. This is risky. One could reconfigure his hermeneutic to create yet another academic exercise: a more complex and sophisticated mind-game. This is an accusation sometimes leveled against Radical Orthodoxy, with which I think Cano has many points of contact. Something that was not the case in the great Scholastics like Thomas, who often clinches an argument by citing liturgical practice or the texts of prayers. Lex orandi est lex credendi, not the dangerous reverse when theological ideas that might have no foundation in prayer are allowed to deform prayer itself. And the resulting deformed worship is very close to idolatry. I don't think I have to trace how, in the face of Cartesian Rationalism, some Neo-Scholastics seem to reduce Cano's expansive project into an autonomous philosophical system.

III. The Contemporary Situation

I began this lecture with a story confronting an unfortunate propositionalism with the attempt to resituate experience into theology by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is now time to return to that contrast and say something on the current predicament of Catholic Theology as I, an outsider, see it. It was regrettable that the retrieval of a more organic vision of theology in the movement known as "Nouvelle Théologie," was almost immediately followed by the 1960s. This on two levels. First, the individualistic focus on the self during that period, tended to rule out of court any previous age's experience. "Christian Experience" came often to mean nothing more than my personal proclivities in the here and now, which is what it seems to mean when "theologians" argue that Church teachings need to be revised because some large percentage of the "Catholic" population either reject them or do not find them meaningful. Neither did the pagans. The Catholic enfranchising of the saints has been repealed. And in the hands of some practitioners, the historical-critical approach to the Scriptures has paid off by making them a two-millennia-old artifact representing an obsolete cosmological and social world view. What kind of norm could such a piece of dated debris provide? As a theological norm, Scripture follows tradition into the dust bin.

These unfortunate cultural developments would not matter much if we could be certain that the experience of contemporary Christians with the Church remained, on the whole, was one that flowed from true growth in grace. This of course, presupposes the cultivation of the spiritual faculties that has been of concern of theologians since the Ante-Nicenes. The hot-house community of the persecuted Church and all-encompassing doxological environment of Monastic theology could do without Cano's recourse to historical Catholic experience because the chances of compromise with the truly diabolical aspects of the host culture (pagan cult, violence, and bloodlust) were so foreign to the self-understanding of the community. The much maligned "Catholic Ghetto" of the manualist age at least provided some buffer against wholesale assimilation to the alien elements of modernity, even if the theology of the period was often a rarified academic exercise.

In contrast, individual perceptions and experiences in the post-industrial west, our spiritual sensitivity, is formed, or malformed, mostly, not by a lived Christian tradition but by an individualistic consummerist culture the defines the person by what he consume and preaches personal autonomy and base gratifications as worthy pursuits. It is no surprise that the usual long litany of complaint is against the Church usually boils down to complaint about how it thwarts gonadal expression and limits choices. Contemporary society is very effective at its catechesis, and its does this in the most effective way: by ritualizing materialistic consumption and increasing its glamor. As for the doxological quality of Christian worship: well, "it's all about me."

This is a bleak picture. But lest one think that I am pitching for a neo-sectarian Christianity, a kind of monasticized merger of the Catholic Worker and Home Schooling, I would like to emphasize in closing that as a historian I do not claim to have solutions, theological or cultural, for contemporary problems. All we can do is point out other ways that past Christians have understood the task of theology. What this all means for theology today is a question for the theologians and pastors of the Church. As a politician recently replied when asked his opinion on a crucial moral and political issue: an answer to that is above my pay grade.

Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P., S.T.M.
St. Albert the Great Priory, Oakland CA
Solemnity of St. Albert the Great, 2008

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