MARCH 2007

ISSUE 9 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

The New Catholic Modernists

Matthew Del Nevo

Abstract

Labels such as “liberal” and “conservative” often confound rather than clarify. This is nowhere more the case than in the Catholic Church—evidenced, for example, in a recent book entitled Lost! Australian Catholics Today. Using the tools of philosophy, the author provides light on our contemporary pluralist culture particularly in regard to the similarities and differences between “modernity” and “postmodernity”. While challenging some of the assumptions of both worldviews, he maintains that the new Catholic “modernists”—by definition upholders of “ideology”—will hold sway until the “postmodernists” get beyond “liberalism” and its agendas and see the weakening of ideology as a good thing since our age is one of interpretation rather than ideology. [Editor]

This article is about definitions that govern Catholic self-understanding in Australia today. My point will be that adhering to certain popular labels, that is, definitions and self-definitions, of who we are as Catholics, and what we see as properly Catholic, can be seriously misleading, for ourselves and others.

I will start with a basic clarification of the distinction between modern and postmodern. These terms are not technical and therefore do not have a set definition. What we mean by them in the realm of usage, by and large, is to differentiate between an age of ideology and an age of interpretation. Both ages value the new and the reformed.  In that sense, “post-modernism” is merely modernism’s new take on itself – modernism with a “make-over”.  However, the deeper lying difference, the difference which we discover if we study the writings of modern philosophy, is that between an age which values and valorises ideology and an age in which all ideology is only regarded as an interpretation or a perspective. 

The twentieth century was the age of ideologies par excellence. If you read Simone de Beauvoir’s multi-volume biography, which spans mid-twentieth century European intellectual life, you enter a world of ideology. To be an “intellectual” (as the French say) meant to subscribe to an ideology. Non-intellectuals who had no understanding of ideology, or no interest, were considered victims of ideology. Or they supported the “ruling” ideology by default.  Every position and stance and thing could be reduced to its ideas and every idea was ideological, that is, political.  This situation had roots in the French Revolution, which was ideologically driven, and by the various disastrous political Republics that followed, up to the present. In the English-speaking world, the situation was less gallic, more calm and just, but nonetheless, also ideological. In plainest terms there was a difference between Capitalism, industrialisation and consumerism, or statism, socialism and at the extremes Marxist Communism. You were either on one side or the other.  Every ideology claimed, almost by definition to have the right idea, as opposed to the wrong idea. The age of ideology was inherently conflictual.

Gradually we have moved from an age of rampant ideology to an age, which we call post-modern. The faith in progress, which fuelled the modernist craze for the new, and created the avant garde self-consciousness, has gone into demise in post-modernism. In this sense, post-modernism is a modernism that is jaded. Post-modernism regards ideology not as an answer to the world’s problems, but as an interpretation of things, and probably, a misinterpretation. Postmodernism is not a world of juxtaposed competing ideologies, but a plural world of alternative possibilities. In modernism, tolerance was an ideology, and as such often went neglected. In postmodernism, in a situation of cultural and religious pluralism, tolerance is practical and sensible, and advocated for that reason.  While modernism regarded man highly and spoke of man’s rights and dignity and humanism lauded man as the measure of all things, postmodernism is more hesitant. Postmodernism knows that the Holocaust took place in the midst of high culture, that Nazis were baptised – and generally speaking – Church-going Christians. Catholics and Protestants under an ideological banner united to organise an international industry which produced death, mainly of that old enemy of the Church (it was supposed) the Jew.  Postmodernism has imbibed this experience and is more conscious of the evil and the unnecessary evil in the world. Postmodernism is practical about tolerance because it makes for peace.  Postmodernism is less ideological about “man” and has been burned by the evils man has wrought on the face of the earth.

While modernism linked truth and knowledge with an objective sphere of reality, then, after Kant, with the subjective sphere of “man”, postmodernism, after Freud and Heidegger, does not strongly believe in objectivity in either sphere. Our subjective reality in postmodernism does not constitute – as in neo-Kantian modernism – an objective basis or “consciousness”. For the eponymous “consciousness” at the basis of reality, according to the neo-Kantians is really only – as Hegel pointed out – the history of consciousness. Our subjectivity is an interpretation. Our interpretation of the objective sphere equally depends upon the pre-understanding or prejudgement we bring to it. Truth and knowledge are hermeneutical in postmodernism. Objective scientific truth, following Popper and Kuhn and others is intrinsically falsifiable, that is what makes it scientific. Nothing for scientific enquiry is objectively true as such in some sort of timeless way; it is true within the paradigm science is working with, which in time will undergo revolution, as with Copernicus, Kant, or Einstein.  Increasingly, since Hegel, we realize that the old “laws of thought”, as they were called, that buttressed metaphysical truth, are not basic truths, but lifeless tautologies. Truth comes to us, as Jesus came to us, in historical dress. Metaphysics is historically constituted. 

And so, while there are continuities between modernism and postmodernism, there is a big difference.

Now from this distinction, if we turn to the Catholic scene in Australia today, we hear that it is polarised – divided in places – between conservatives and liberals.  This of course translates into the political sphere, where we think in terms that go back to Hegel, of “the right” and “the left”, or in nineteenth century England, Tory and Whig, which became conservative and socialist in the twentieth century.

My point is that the so-called conservative Catholics are modernists.  They are modernists because they do not conserve the past, but have made an ideology of tradition, which they serve. There is a distinction between serving an extrinsic ideology and conserving a continuity, as say in Orthodox churches, which are conservative in a real traditional sense, rather than the sense of conservative Catholics, for whom tradition and conservativism are ideological.  

As modernists, conservative Catholics think of their opponents in modernist terms, as “progressive” or “liberal”. But Catholics who are not of the modernist brigade are not “progressive” or “liberal”, which are modernist labels belonging to ideological terms of reference, in this case the ideology of Catholic tradition. Catholics who are not modernist - the so-called liberals - are actually post-modern. There is a widespread confusion about this in the Australian Catholic Church today. 

As far as post-moderns are concerned, the so-called conservative Catholic has a perspective on Catholicism that they are of course entitled to hold, so long as it is not injurious or violent. It is an option in the post-modern reality of the Church; one legitimate option among others.  The post-modernist does not hold that their own view is a “progression” or is “liberal”, but that it is simply different. The modernist of course believes, by definition of being modernist, that his ideology is more than a perspectival interpretation, but that it is somehow an objective truth, over above history, or consummating history, a truth which would desire to totalise all meaning for itself. Like all ideology which is modernist, it is driven by what Nietzsche called, extolling it in fact, “will to power”. This we know from a post-modern perspective is inherently violent. 

While post-modernists do not mind difference, in fact they thrive on it, modernists bitterly resent it because they interpret it as an affront to the existence of the ideology they live by, and therefore they try to get rid of it (violence again). Postmodernism is all about difference and respecting difference and moving people by persuasion and attraction. Modernism tries to obliterate or cancel difference. This is the reason we find among the modernist Catholics (so-called conservatives) the attempt to crush opposition.  They are ideologically driven. Postmodern Catholics on the other hand, who are comfortable with difference, can”t really understand what they have done to drive the resentment against them. They haven”t done anything of course. Ideology is driven by resentment, the resentment which is at the heart of all  ideology,  and as Max Scheler showed in his famous work Ressentiment - reinterpreting Nietzsche - of modernism itself.

Taking up a recent example of what I am talking about, to illustrate it. The “lost” of Michael Gilchrist’s new book Lost! Australian Catholics Today, are mistakenly thought to be lost because they don”t subscribe to the modernist ideology of tradition that “conservative” Catholics serve.  AD2000 for instance, for whom Mr Gilchrist writes, is a good example of a modernist Catholic magazine and it propagates the modernist vision of Catholicism that I have described. The “lost” Catholics of Mr Gilchrist’s title, are of course not really lost, they are Catholics who have, by and large, moved on from a modernist  age of ideology, and are post-modern, in the sense described above. 

In saying this, my sense is that in Europe there is a genuine pre-modernist tradition, which is carried on, which is not ideological, but genuinely traditional. But this is not the same tradition as that of modernist ideological ‘tradition’, which is discontinuous with any past, and we should be careful of the distinction.  This is precisely the distinction that Gilchrist, as an ideologue, fails to make, or even to see – of course he is not alone, modernist ideology is cliquish and comes out of a self-serving milieu. Modernist ideology is all about collusion and getting people to collude.   

Catholic modernism, such as I have described, is most rife in new countries like Australia and the United States, or in countries with broken continuity like France. But in Italy or in Great Britain, where there has been more continuity, although Catholic modernism is to be found, as part of the general diversity of secularism, as a choice some might want to make, it has hardly any root at all. In both Italy and Great Britain one is actually able to find genuine tradition, that is, tradition which is not an ideology. This tradition is characterised by peaceableness and just carries on with it, because it knows nothing else, and could hardly conceive of itself in terms of noisy collusive agendas and aggrandisement. 

The Orthodox churches tend to be traditional in the genuine sense and in an exemplary manner virtually unequalled in the West. But where they have a serious rupture with the past, where the transmission of tradition has been lost, as in Russia, or by virtue of generational migration in the United States, some Orthodox have also become modernists, like some Catholics, when it comes to tradition. The Orthodox speak of the ideologically Orthodox in their ranks as “fundamentalists”. 

Coming back to Australian Catholicism, which is confused between the old modernist distinction between conservatives and liberals, and the more persuasive distinction I am making, between modernist and postmodernist Catholics, let me draw one last example.

Frank Mobbs, for whom I have great respect, wrote a very humourous and damning review of Gideon Goosen’s book Australian Theologies in 2001, published in AD2000. Now my point is that the difference between Dr Mobbs and Dr Goosen is the difference between the modernist and the postmodernist.  Remember, this is a difference between two Catholics. Dr Mobbs is the modernist who sees himself as traditional rather than, as is in fact the case, ideological about tradition or ideologising tradition. In modernist fashion, he assumes that “Australian Theologies” is first and foremost an idea or concept. He therefore asks “What, according to Goosen, are Australian theologies?”  And from Goosen’s book he deduces some criteria that purportedly make a theology “Australian” according to Goosen.  Mobbs” criticism is that “theology” has to be singular, not plural “which is as odd as talking about “biologies”” Mobbs does not think that theology can be Australian - or are we to conceive there is a “Pilbura or Pitt St “theology”?” 

Mobbs, in classic modernist fashion, takes it that knowledge about God can be objective and ahistorical. He sees himself as before God doing theology just like Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, before the invention of depth and perspective in painting and before the birth of the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy (which shouldn”t be confused) – to name two important discontinuities.  Goosen by contrast is a postmodernist.  He may not disagree with Mobbs that theology is one field, like biology (if this is in fact the case). But what Goosen assumes, is that in every theology, in every “claim to know something of theos” (Mobbs) you bring something to it which mediates it. 

Revelation is not simple and immediate, as Mobbs claims in his review. The ideology of Mobbs gets in the way of common sense here and the result is misinterpretation. Revelation is not simple and immediate, it is always mediated, as is every communication. I’m speaking now as a postmodernist, deconstructing ideology.  In every Revelation you bring your cultural baggage (as Aquinas did) and your language, and with them, your pre-understanding and prejudgement, and these mediate Revelation. For Mobbs it is conceptually wrong for there to be theologies (plural), because conceptual totality and totalising ideology is part of the modernist pre-understanding. For Goosen, the assumption is that we always bring a pre-understanding to theology and in his view, obviously a contemporary Australian pre-understanding may differ from that of another clime and place and period. Indeed Goosen has found this to be the case, and this is what his book is about. 

There is no talk about God without also, inferred in the very language and idiom, a talk and reflection, about man. Even Mobbs’ talk about theology as ‘science’ - the major keynote of modernist theology – is culturally and historically constituted, not some “pure” idea qua God.  In short, the difference between Mobbs and Goosen is not that between a conservative who preserves the old and true Catholic ways of Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor of the Church, and a liberal academic whose “silly book” (Mobbs) will undermine these verities should it be believed. It is simply the difference between the modernist for whom tradition and even “Thomas” are ideological, and a postmodernist, who has moved on from the age of ideology and writes within the postmodern world of interpretations and perspectives and desires to enlighten us about the strengths and weaknesses some of these. 

An age of perspectives and interpretations is not the same as “plural relativism”, as Catholic modernists always believe. From the modernist perspective of total ideology, this is how a postmodern age of interpretation must look. But postmodernism realises, that every interpretation is carried out in conversation with the past.  This is basic hermeneutics. Every perspective and interpretation is caught up in tradition, including those (like modernist atheism) that are a revolt against tradition. Whereas modernism turns the past into an ideology to adhere to and to get others to think likewise about, in postmodernism, one simply returns, as a child of modernism, to the past that modernism mistakenly left behind, and picks up the conversation that was left off. Postmodernism does not eschew the past on one hand or get fundamentalist about it on the other, but while being authentic about itself, and its postmodern predicament, it attempts to learn from the past, rather than, live in it, which is merely a mockery of it.

Until postmodern Catholics get beyond “liberalism” and its so-called progressive agendas and understand our age as one of interpretation, rather than ideology, and until postmodernists look on the weakening of ideology as a good thing, they will be in thrall to the new Catholic modernists  - the “retro-traditionalists”.

Dr Matthew  Del Nevo, Senior Lecturer in Theology and Christian Spirituality is the Dean of Research and Development at the Broken Bay Instititute.

"Matthew Del Nevo" <mdelnevo@brokenbay.catholic.org.au>

 

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