ABSTRACT
Whereas Chapter 3 dealt with the issue of the ethos or Geist of institutional practices and the epistemic authority of experts, bureaucratic managers and ostensibly neutral public institutions, and Chapter 4 with the effect of modernity’s mass culture upon the opportunities for a classical Christian Bildung, this fi fth chapter will focus on critiques of the form or ‘logic’ of the culture (Kultur) of modernity.1 These critiques all converge on the argument that the construction of a theory of culture consistent with the Christocentrism of paragraph 22 of Gaudium et spes requires the rejection of the idea that cultures are ‘theologically neutral’. From a Christocentric perspective, ‘every created entity of the cosmos, every aspect of every entity, is, from the beginning of its existence, related to God in Christ’.2 In other words, ‘Christ affects the cosmos not only effi ciently and fi nally but also formally’.3 As a matter of logic it follows from this that cultures cannot be ‘autonomous’ in the popular sense of the word. Rather, as von Balthasar acknowledged, ‘the interpretation of the grace-nature distinction affects one’s understanding of the structure of metaphysics, ethics, apologetics, politics, and the entire praxis of human life’, which of course includes the realms of institutional practices, conceptions of self-formation, and the logic of cultural forms.4 This incarnational theology is explained in short-hand form by David Schindler as the idea that every ethos always needs a logos that precedes it and gives it meaning.5
