PART I
Culture as a theological problem 9
1 The treatment of culture in Gaudium et spes 11
Modernism and modernity 11
Modernity as a specific cultural formation 12
The Conciliar openness to modernity 14
'Culture' in Gaudium et spes 17
The need for a theological hermeneutic of culture 20
The neglect of important pre-Conciliar scholarship 21
Specific examples of the problematic 22
The 'autonomy of culture' 27
Bernard Lambert's affirmation of'secularism' 29
The affirmation of the secular in Rahner and Maritain 30
Conclusion 32
2 'Culture' within post-Conciliar magisterial thought 35
Introduction 35
The split between the gospel and culture 35
The Christocentrism ofJohn Paul II 37
The culture of death and the liberal tradition 39
The Greco-Latin heritage 45
Conclusion 49
PART II
Modernity and the Thomist tradition 51
3 The epistemic authority of 'experts' and the ethos of
modern institutions 53
The bureaucratised self 54
The eclipse of prudential judgement 57
Plain persons and professional administrators 60
The 'onto-logic' of economic practices 63
The junction of 'Aristotelian Marxism' with Thomism 65
Conclusion 69
4 'Mass culture' and the 'right to culture' 72
The Aristocratic and Bourgeois Liberal models 73
The Nietzschean model 76
The 'prototypical' classical Christian model 77
Memory and 'sapiential experience' 79
The problem of 'mass culture' 83
The possibility of a 'modern Catholic self' 84
Conclusion 89
5 The logos of the Kultur of modernity 92
Invalidations of the secular 93
The logic of identities in relation 95
The mechanical form of the 'secular logic' 97
The 'culture of America' 100
The priority of doxology 105
The form of love 107
Conclusion 110
PART III
A postmodern development of the tradition 113
6 Culture and the rationality of the tradition 115
The influence of R. G. Collingwood 116
The concept of a narrative tradition 118
'Smudging the boundaries' between philosophy and theology 125
Fides et ratio 127
Harmonising Aristotelian and Patristic elements 130
Certainty as 'rational coherence' 132
Conclusion 134
7 Natural law and the culture of the tradition 136
MacIntyre's project and the New Natural Law theory 136
The absence of a narrative tradition 141
Religion as an 'infrastructural' and 'primary' good 144
The rhetoric of rights 148
Conclusion 157
8 Conclusion 159
Three requirements of any satisfactory response 162
The ongoing challenge of postmodern Augustinian Thomism 165