Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

A Critical Inquiry

Paul DeHart

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136520662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy investigates the encounter of the most vibrant and controversial trend in recent theology with the greatest Christian thinker of the Middle Ages. The book describes Radical Orthodoxy's orientation and highlights those anti-secular strategies and intellectual influences that have shaped its appeal to Aquinas. It surveys the emergence of the particular picture of Aquinas especially associated with the leaders of Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank and his student Catherine Pickstock, along with the scholarly disputes which prompted and followed that development. The book then undertakes a detailed investigation of the pivotal publications on Aquinas of those two authors, laying out their difficult theories in clear language, carefully examining the texts of Aquinas to which they appeal, and challenging their interpretations on a number of fundamental points. Topics covered include: analogical language and knowledge of God, the role of metaphysics within theology, the relation of cognition to the divine archetypes of things, the possibility of human apprehension of God's essence, the nature of substance, and speculation on the Trinity. The conclusion reflects on those elements suppressed by the Radical Orthodox reading of Aquinas, their constructive philosophical and theological possibilities, and the challenges they present to the Radical Orthodox project.

1 Radical Orthodoxy

A Genealogy of a Genealogy

I. FINDING A POINT OF ENTRY

In 2006 a noteworthy scholarly gathering took place in Granada, Spain. The broad yet intriguing theme, “Belief and Metaphysics,” called for and received a collection of papers both diverse and intellectually demanding. The roster of speakers was large and impressive, including a miscellaneous assortment of theologians and philosophers, Protestant and Catholic, European and American. But, beyond the usual details, the choice of the conference’s honorary host might have piqued the curiosity of some observers: the Catholic Archbishop of Granada, Javier Martinez. True, this particular cleric had long been active as a scholar, and was well-known for promoting theological research. Even so, it is not every day that an ecclesiastic of rank troubles himself to bestow what amounted to a personal benediction upon a flock of professors lining up to read abstruse papers in philosophical theology. Especially given the fact that this was not a sanctioned body of Roman Catholic academics, might such a blessing not have appeared just a bit incongruous, both from the side of the archbishop and from that of the intellectuals? What exotic breed of academic conference was this?

The answer opens a window on perhaps the most ambitious and energetic trend in contemporary Christian theology in the West. The meeting had been arranged by the Society of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham; hence the organizing force and presiding spirit behind the conference was the English theologian John Milbank. The curious details of the meeting become slightly less enigmatic when understood in light of this fact: the intellectual movement most closely associated with Milbank’s name, usually known as Radical Orthodoxy, was apparently entering a new phase of public prominence, especially in Europe. It was no longer content (if indeed it ever had been) to remain a set of talking points for faculty and graduate students. The Archbishop’s enthused foreword to the published proceedings of the conference made this crystal clear: Radical Orthodoxy’s unmasking of the hidden nihilism within secularism (the latter understood both as a worldview and as a way of organizing society) is, he declared, the most promising intellectual position from which to begin reorienting Western civilization away from secular pluralism and back toward religious faith as the only viable basis for humane values and social cohesion.¹

To ears attuned to the historical resonances vibrating from the name of his archdiocese, some of the good bishop’s other turns of phrase might have struck a faintly disquieting note. We will return to touch on this in the Conclusion. The point for now is the way in which this peculiar kind of conference symbolizes the long road that Radical Orthodoxy has traveled since its founding by a handful of Cambridge academics in the late 1990s. It now bids for the attention of publics both ecclesial (the Granada meeting was followed by one in Rome in 2007 featuring an audience with Benedict XVI, reportedly a fan of the liturgical writings of Catherine Pickstock, another founding figure) and civil (Milbank’s student Phillip Blond has taken its communitarian social critique out of the academic ghetto and into the political arena, becoming in 2010 part of the brain trust of Britain’s incoming conservative Prime Minister). This would be very heady stuff for any theological movement, especially these days. But it would have to be admitted that, brushes with popes and policy wonks notwithstanding, Radical Orthodoxy remains at heart an intellectual stance, philosophically ambitious and conceptually rarefied. It is probably the best known and most controversial theological movement going, its writings a source in turn of enthusiasm, hostility, and sheer incomprehension on the part of the academic theological community. In a relatively short time, it has become a familiar topic of discussion in these circles and among many educated clergy as well; several conferences and more than one book series have been devoted to propagating its approach. But in spite of the reviews, symposia and even published collections of essays that have appeared seeking to interpret the movement, much of the work of understanding and, perhaps more important, of evaluating the nature and claims of Radical Orthodoxy remains to be done.

The publications of scholars affiliated with this trend, especially the pioneers John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, are typically marked by sweeping historical judgments, a sprawling range of sources and topics, and writing of formidable density. In light of this, and in light of the rapidly ramifying discussions touched off by these leaders and their students, attempts at a general overview or critique of Radical Orthodoxy as a whole will more and more exemplify the law of diminishing returns. To help the theological public gain perspective on Radical Orthodoxy, it will increasingly be necessary to take up more precise angles of approach, subjecting to close investigation some vital structural point of its huge conceptual edifice. Only in this way can theologians begin to address and answer the bold claims that are being so excitedly made in its name. A number of these claims are tied to a surprising revisionist portrait of the greatest of medieval theologians, Thomas Aquinas, and this appeal to Aquinas constitutes one of the vital structural points just referred to. In order to see why this is so, a word is in order about the general orientation of the movement.

II. IT CAME FROM CAMBRIDGE

Radical Orthodoxy originated in the 1990s among a group of Anglo-Catholic theologians at the University of Cambridge. It reportedly began meeting in late July 1997, already equipped with a manifesto, the first of many attempts to encapsulate its stance that have appeared in the years since.² Various details concerning the group’s first emergence, the thinkers who influenced its leaders, and the development of the larger movement can now be readily gleaned from any number of interviews and surveys; equally available are good overviews of the different ingredients entering into the Radically Orthodox perspective.³ Rather than cover this burned-over territory yet again, this section will seek only to highlight those peculiar characteristics of Radical Orthodoxy as an intellectual trend that make it highly sensitive to how it aligns itself with philosophers and theologians of the past in general, and with Aquinas in particular.

In a nutshell, Radical Orthodoxy is a theological critique of modernity, especially of those socio-political structures and cultural practices installed under the sign of secularity; these are in turn assumed to be rooted in certain fundamental, if usually unacknowledged, ontological assumptions. Basic to Radical Orthodoxy’s orientation is the broad outline of a historical narrative, a genealogy that “traces the violence, anomie and exploitative technophilia of secular societies back to impoverished philosophical notions of being as sheer givenness without inherent order, meaning or beauty.” The rise and continued prevalence of this nihilistic ontological dogma was, and still is, “unwittingly abetted by deficient theologies which solidify dualistic relationships between reason and faith, nature and grace.”⁴ To counter the dereliction in face of these threats that has plagued most theologies since the modern epoch, Radical Orthodoxy promotes the critical recovery of the unsullied ontological vision that predates the rise of modern ideas. That this is a fundamentally catholic theological orientation (all of its original adherents were either Anglo-Catholics or Roman Catholics) is true for at least three reasons. First, it links its ontological premises to the defining doctrinal parameters of classic orthodoxy: creation ex nihilo, Chalcedonian Christology, the Nicene Trinity. Second, it is especially concerned to argue that its stance, precisely as a way of seeing the world anew, is encoded and practically inculcated in the luxuriant exercise of unreformed liturgical practices. Finally, it is sharply critical of Protestantism in its past and present reigning forms; these are traced back to the absorption by the reformers of the same late medieval proto-modern distortions that also underlie the equally suspicious deviations of Tridentine and Baroque Catholicism.

Let us look in more detail at the implications of all this. Obviously, Radical Orthodoxy as an intellectual program ambitiously takes up a therapeutic stance to Western culture as a whole. First, the diagnosis: its founders argue that true Christianity implies and demands nothing short of an entire ontology (with related epistemology). The well-established dualisms with which theology and philosophy continue to work, especially those of reason and faith, nature and grace, are actually inimical to the pre-modern Christian tradition and have in fact obscured the genuine Christian worldview. Although usually considered ancient, these dualisms are actually the result of the rise of “modernity” as an implicitly anti-Christian phenomenon.⁵ In light of this diagnosis, modern history is seen as little more than a disaster in slow motion, a dark descent into the nihilistictechnocratic capitalist present inevitably following upon the instauration of the “secular” thought-world (defined as the positive refusal, in effect if not intention, of the Christian worldview).

Given this set-up, few will be surprised by the proffered cure: the solution to our contemporary intellectual and socio-political impoverishment is to be found in a creative retrieval of a past truth prior to the fateful fall of Western thought. That fall is located in a catastrophic although largely unwitting late medieval departure from the ontology of classical orthodox Christianity, which reigned from the Church Fathers with their appropriation of Platonism, all the way up to a last great witness of the unbroken tradition: “The ‘metaphysics’ that [needs to be] saved … is the perennial ‘realism’ that lasted from Plato to Aquinas.”⁶ Judged against the standard of this Christian metaphysics, much that characterizes modern theology, both Protestant and Catholic, such as the above-mentioned distinctions between nature and grace, faith and reason, must be rejected as in fact modern corruptions of Christianity. Radical Orthodoxy’s vision of Christianity “challenge[s] human assumptions most fundamentally … point[ing] toward the joining of humanity with divinity … seeing faith and reason as belonging integrally together.”⁷ According to Milbank and those in his wake, theology’s loss of this vision, its capitulation to the thought-forms of “modernity,” has put the Christian church in something close to a terminal state.

This double maneuver is crucial: Radical Orthodoxy diagnoses the philosophical and theological approach to reality that suffuses contemporary churches and societies as a kind of “sickness,” but it also argues that the confusions and failures involved were already rejected beforehand by the pre-modern Christian tradition. This provides one clue to the attractiveness of Radical Orthodoxy: its “radical” views on epistemology and ontology, at times strongly reminiscent of many recent secular critiques of “modernity,” gain considerable theological traction by the claim that they represent in fact a recovery of the deep structure of Christian truth underlying all the major classical voices up to Aquinas. In other words, the success of the project is tied up with the ability of its supporters to uncover the subtle lineaments of their “true” epistemology and ontology in the great theologians of the past. Aquinas plays a special role here, for it is frequently claimed that he represented the culmination of these radical ideas about being and knowledge. But his vision was misunderstood and lost, even among those who claimed to follow him; his eclipse and the resulting trend of thought inaugurated by Duns Scotus represent nothing less than “the turning point in the destiny of the West.”⁸ And indeed, as will become clear in the following chapters, for Milbank and Pickstock a stubborn incomprehension of Aquinas continues largely to this day, for the ample scholarly community of his readers relies too much on conventional and superficial interpretations that fail to comprehend the radical implications of his thought.

The obvious need to back up these challenging assertions has driven the two intellectual leaders of Radical Orthodoxy just mentioned, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, to a particularly detailed engagement with the thought of Aquinas, culminating in 2001 in a jointly authored book, Truth in Aquinas, which will be the special concern of the following chapters. As several references in his 2006 talk at the Grenada conference indicate, even the most recent developments in Milbank’s ideas continue to rely for support on the readings of Aquinas that he and Pickstock developed there.⁹ Probing this sensitive point is thus an essential place for critical assessment of the Radical Orthodoxy project to begin. As Milbank and Pickstock tell the story, the essential Christian worldview obscured and distorted by modernity but rediscovered by Radical Orthodoxy can definitely be glimpsed in Thomas Aquinas, once he is given a sufficiently “attentive reading.”¹⁰ Immediately, the following question becomes urgent: is this account defensible, or does Aquinas in fact offer a quite different or even incompatible position on the central ontological and philosophical issues defining the movement? The current conversation around Radical Orthodoxy might assume different shapes based on how this question is answered. If it can be shown that the proleptically “anti-modern” stance attributed to Aquinas ends up blurring or distorting important aspects of his thought, serious repercussions would seem to follow for Radical Orthodoxy’s determination of the essence of Christianity, and for its proposal of a diametrical opposition between the “modern / secular” and the Christian.

In view of such pressing questions, it is remarkable that the views of Milbank and Pickstock on Duns Scotus have received far more attention, including two special issues of scholarly journals, than their discussion of Aquinas. Yet not only is the thought of Aquinas currently much more broadly known, respected and discussed than that of Scotus, the claims of Milbank and Pickstock regarding him are arguably far more central to their conjoined intellectual programs, and perhaps even to the program of Radical Orthodoxy as a whole. What they have to say about Aquinas is just as complex and imaginative as their account of Scotus, and it is closer to the heart of their adventurous theological projects. In light of this state of affairs, there is a real need to put a sizable set of their difficult utterances about Aquinas in context and analyze them in breadth and detail. (The scale of the examination is an especially sensitive factor because many of their claims about Aquinas are interconnected and difficult to assess individually.) Of critical importance to this endeavor will be the careful evaluation of some readings of Aquinas’s own texts offered by Milbank and Pickstock in support of their more paradoxical claims. That will be the task of the bulk of this book. Before that can begin, it will be necessary in the following chapter to give a painfully brief survey of the role over time that Aquinas has played among a selection of authors associated with Radical Orthodoxy. But before that, it might be helpful to make some suggestions as to the way in which elements of Radical Orthodoxy’s stance might, from the outset, tend to inflect any discussion of Aquinas in peculiar ways.

III. THE REPUDIATED ANCESTOR AND THE ADOPTED FATHER: HEIDEGGER’S GENEALOGY AND DE LUBAC’S ANTI-DUALISM

“Where did it all go wrong?” This is the fundamental question animating that procedure of theological and philosophical inquiry, one name for which might be “genealogy,” which has proved a very popular option in these days of modernity’s self-doubt (although the naïve bluntness of the question is usually softened by a thick blanket of technical verbiage and/or historical erudition). Such attempts to locate one’s proximate intellectual terrain within a broader landscape, or rather to provide it with a backstory (these days, almost always a story of decline) can be informative, even necessary; and like all approaches to fundamental self-orientation they can be executed badly, and have their own blind spots. From what has already been said about Radical Orthodoxy, it should be clear that narratives in this register, pinpointing the fall of the West, are pretty fundamental to the whole enterprise. Awareness of some probable precursors of the radically orthodox style of narration, forerunners that contribute to its particular flavor, will help to clarify how it might impinge on readings of Thomas Aquinas.

The ancestral figure here is surely Martin Heidegger. It was Heidegger who first had the audacity to trace the accumulating ills of modern society to a steady deterioration of human sensibilities with regard to the wonder of things in their sheer radiant existence, the miracle of Being that gives all things that are. The cultures of the West gradually lost their capacity to mediate and develop this sensibility, the core of truly human existence; the consequent hollowing out of our traffic with beings is manifest both in the way our care for what is has curdled into the manipulation of things as tools, and in the way our communities have devolved into impersonal structures of social management and exploitation. All this, as a result of a fall away from the authentic apprehension of Being, a defection encoded in and abetted by virtually the entire canon of Western philosophy since the pre-Socratics.

So many of the judgments and rhetorical gestures that characterize Radical Orthodoxy’s accounts of the “big picture” probably owe their almost unconscious naturalness to the absorption by readers (whether at first hand or not) of this Heideggerian way of looking at Western history. This is not to say that Heidegger is revered in its precincts; in fact, he is something of a bogey there. But this is in fact a back-handed compliment to him, for the Radical Orthodox diagnostic outlined in the previous section is identical to his in its basic orientation and assumptions: a narrative of Western decline, traced to a fatal series of ontological missteps that have delivered us into an impoverished culture and polity in which the things that fill our experience have become meaningless, opaque to their transcendent ground. The difference is simply that the “fall” is located elsewhere. For Heidegger’s essentially atheistic account, the degradation of the Being that mysteriously animates all things is expressed as an incoherence at the heart of all Western metaphysics from Plato to Hegel, such that thought has consistently consigned Being to a hidden, self-nullifying competition between two roles, that of universal but empty abstraction and that of falsely transcendent demiurge (thus metaphysical systems have compulsively reproduced themselves as variants on the same “onto-theo-logy”). In Radical Orthodoxy it turns out that in fact the true apprehension of Being was actually perfected in the Christian Fathers with their participatory ontology of divine creation ex nihilo; the descent into onto-theo-logy thus comes much later, with the decline initiated by Scotism.

It can readily be seen that assigning this role to Scotus almost automatically elevates Aquinas to a position of supreme importance in the narrative as the last great witness of the reigning consensus on the eve of its dissolution. This is acutely the case if Scotus is interpreted, as he often has been in these circles, as positioning himself more-or-less deliberately against Aquinas, although this is not really necessary for the story.¹¹ But Radical Orthodoxy was by no means the first theological tour de force that tried to accept the ground rules of the Heideggerian narrative while reassigning the roles more favorably to Christianity. Indeed, even before Heidegger Roman Catholic theology, with its particular, historically conditioned structural affinity for a “correct” philosophical propaedeutic, had in the later decades of the nineteenth century initiated a massive counter-modern retrieval of scholastic metaphysical schemes grounded in realist epistemologies. By the turn of the century Catholic theological critiques of the “modern” anthropocentric and quasi-idealist turn in philosophy (founded in Descartes and Kant) had become a commonplace; the skeptical, even solipsistic labyrinth in which philosophy now found itself resulted, it was held, from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Theology So Different, So Appealing?”
• A Note on Aquinas References
• 1. Radical Orthodoxy: A Genealogy of a Genealogy
• 2. Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox: Investigations, Invocations, Altercations
• PART I. On Being Heard but Not Seen
• PART II. On Seeing Only What One Wants to See
• Notes
• Index of Aquinas References
• Index of Names
• Index of Topics