Q: You have said that the major intellectual and theological battle within the Church is between the "Augustinian Thomists" and the "Whig Thomists." What does this mean?

Rowland: "First, let me define "Whig." The expression "Whig Thomist" was coined by Michael Novak to describe his intellectual project. Originally the word "Whig" came from the Scottish word "Whiggamor" for a cattle driver -- though some sources say cattle thief and others say horse thief. It was initially applied to Scottish Presbyterians, mostly from the west coast of Scotland, who opposed the Stuart cause in the wars of the 17th century. Their counterparts, the Tories -- a word derived from the Gaelic for "outlaw" -- consisted of some aristocrats, large landowners and agrarian peasants. They were mercantilist in economic policy, royalist in politics and tended to support the succession of James II [1633-1701]. Over time the term was used to refer to a faction in British politics. Although there was never anything like a strong doctrinal definition of the term, as a sociological generalization it can be said that the Whigs were the heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized economic and political liberty, or an emerging philosophy known as liberalism, which was often fused with a Puritan form of Protestantism. In the 19th century Lord Acton popularized the idea that Thomas Aquinas was the first Whig, that is, the first proponent of a modern, post-Enlightenment concept of politics. Thus "Whig Thomism" refers to an intellectual project that seeks to locate the genesis of the liberal tradition in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and to synthesize elements of the Liberal tradition, particularly those provided by the Scottish Enlightenment, to classical Thomism. The project of reading Aquinas as the first Whig or first Liberal has been criticized by a number of scholars. For example, Robert Kraynak, in his work "Christian Faith and Modern Democracy," has written that "though intriguing, Acton's interpretation is misleading because Thomas defends power sharing and political participation, not as a right of the people to parliamentary consent nor as a means for protecting personal rights and liberties, but as the prudent application of natural law whose ends are best realized in a stable constitutional order dedicated to peace, virtue and Christian piety. This is medieval corporatism applied within the [Augustinian] doctrine of the Two Cities, rather than the first stirring of modern liberty." Those who may loosely be classified as "Augustinian Thomists" follow such a Kraynak-style reading of Aquinas, rather than an Actonian. 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. Another point I made in my book is that those who think that the liberal tradition is avant-garde are about 40 years behind the times. Liberalism ceased being the hegemonic intellectual tradition in the Western world in 1968. At least since then the intellectual battlefront has been three-cornered. First of all there are theists -- Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Protestants, etc.; secondly, there are believers in Enlightenment-style rationality, that is, different varieties of liberals who sever reason from faith; and thirdly, there are the postmoderns who think that the Enlightenment was a very oppressive social experiment and that all versions of rationality are in some way related to theological or mythological presuppositions, although they do not accept that we can use our reason to judge between those competing theological presuppositions. On some fronts Catholic scholars may do better to work with the postmoderns than those who insist on a strict severance of faith and reason, or at least not nail their colors irrevocably to a liberal mast. The point at which the Whigs and Augustinians come into conflict is over the issue of the moral quality of what is called the "culture of America," which is not of course confined to the geographical boundaries of the United States. It is, as Alasdair MacIntyre says, a theoretical construct. 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. I don't think that this is the major intellectual battlefront within the Church, but it is an important one."

Okay, now a few thoughts. Modern evangelicalism is still grounded in the Scottish Enlightenment project of Scottish common sense and its political and capitalist economic program. What "conservative" (actually liberal!) Catholics and evangelicals share in common is not their commitment to the faith given to the saints, but this modernist project -- which can also be shared with some variations with liberal Protestants. The "Whig political/economic project" holds together the "religious economic conservatives" in the United States, but the faux Christian language gives it a transcendental value in the United States by grounding the project, anti-Christian in its origins, in God. The American project becomes God's project; Hal Lindsey and Michael Novak find their common faith in the American liberal free-market project with "freedom" for "personal relationships with God" that the government is to ensure.

Obviously I am committing my life, here and hereafter, to the "Augustinian" project of two cities. Part of adopting an ascetic monastic life-style at Mid-City is because it is so easy to pick up tacit values from the culture at large even as we try to discover/build new/old institutional/cultural matrices that the Spirit can use for our sanctification -- and thus the sanctification of the world.

Our biggest challenge comes in the tacit values that form us -- or at least me, so subtly. We do live in a culture where of the commodification of everything -- if not of material goods for ourselves, at least of "experiences" so that we can reach a certain type of emotional equilibrium for personal satisfaction with all the unpleasantness that we have to face in life. It seems to me that we might have to relativize these individualistic therapeutic forms of experiences (even in their communal forms) that our culture teaches us are essential in order to be formed into those who are shaped into the image of Christ by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love by grounding our life together in the objective love of God found in Jesus Christ, experienced inwardly by the Spirit in our common participation in the Triune God in the Eucharistic feast.