ABSTRACT
In the fi rst half of the twentieth century, Thomist scholars sought to defend St Thomas from the charge of having neglected the theme of culture. Augustinus Fischer-Colbrie and Robert Brennan both argued that, although Aquinas wrote no treatise on the subject of culture, ‘he knew all the principles that form the groundwork of a philosophy of culture’, and, further, that the belief in the ‘modern’ discovery of culture merely illustrates the ignorance of Rousseau and other Romantic and post-Enlightenment philosophers of the richness of the Thomistic framework.1 The underdeveloped account of culture from the perspective of the Thomist tradition has, however, continued to be the subject of criticism. For example, Fergus Kerr has observed that ‘traditional theology overlooks the way that human beings are rational creatures immersed in history’, whereas Nikolaus Lobkowicz has stated that ‘Aquinas did not develop anything like a theory of history and therefore was not very interested in culture either’.2 One way of reconciling the two perspectives is to conclude that, while St Thomas did foreshadow aspects of contemporary accounts of the philosophical and theological signifi cance of culture, his intellectual projects were not focused on the rôle that culture plays in the formation of the soul because he wrote during a period in history when Christendom was at its zenith. Although, he noted that Gothic tribesmen did not regard stealing as morally wrong until after they had been Christianised, he did not develop this observation into a full theory of how persons are infl uenced in their moral development by the culture of the community into which they have been born. If thirteenth-century Paris had been occupied by Islamic and Gothic tribesmen as well as by Dominican and Franciscan friars and lay Christians, and if the city were surrounded by pagan temples and mosques as well as by Benedictine abbeys, then the effect of such a social framework upon moral formation may have required analysis. However, Aquinas wrote at a time when all the arts, the working week, the holidays, the kings and the laws were overtly Christian.3 For Aquinas, Christendom was the presumed context for his audiences.4 The Church was the teacher of the truth, the dispenser of the mysteries, the barque of fellow travellers. In effect, Aquinas shifted to the Church much of the rôle of the
polity in Aristotle. In this classical Thomistic model, Christians immerse themselves in the culture of the Church, and the Church, through her sacraments, liturgies, scholarship, religious and laity, Christens the world.
