Orthodoxy With a Hint of Radical

Once upon a time, there was no secular. And once upon a time, that thought roused me from my dogmatic slumber of theological indifference. Years ago I was intoxicated by Radical Orthodoxy and considered myself an unwavering Milbankian. The sheer energy of the movement and the boldness of its claims imbued Christianity with an intellectual prestige I never imagined it had or could ever attain. I remember reading everything in the series I could get my hands on and not understanding a word of any of it. Many of my notes that are still in the margins testify to the utter paucity of my comprehension. But it all just seemed so beautiful.

Eventually the mystique began to fade as I was exposed to Milbank's critics. And man were they critical. Reading Milbank and kin with a bit more maturity and in light of their opponents has sobered me a great deal. Now that I have a better sense of the problems that characterize the movement, I strongly resist identification with Radical Orthodoxy. I've come to think that much of what it gets right is better said by figures in the Catholic tradition (the nouvelle theologie specifically). What it gets wrong has often more adequately resolved in a Thomist idiom. Honestly, I've found orthodoxy to be radical enough without the added qualifier.

On the other hand, I have to acknowledge the influence that Radical Orthodoxy continues to have on my intellectual development. I may no longer be on the band wagon, but I am still walking in the same general direction. While none of the radically orthodox answers have satisfied me, the radically orthodox questions continue to fascinate me and inspire a great deal of contemplation. A few years ago I tried to pin down in what sense I could still be considered "radically orthodox." I came up with the following list of things that I still find meaningful about RO theology:

• Analyzing the origins of secular modernity at it's theological roots (Michael Gillespie offers similar narratives)
• Chief among these developments: the sundering of faith from reason as a distinct and utterly autonomous subject matter. Emphasizing the conceptual problems with nominalism, voluntarism, univocal metaphysics, etc.
• A theological understanding of nihilism (in a sense inverting Nietzsche): secularism of modernity, in its peculiar way of articulating distance from God, is ultimately nihilistic; any such "zone" apart from God can only be reduced to nothing
• A conception of tradition and development of doctrine that allows us to articulate the inspired authors of Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the Medieval theologians as part of a coherent and ordered (though symphonic) enterprise of faith seeking understanding (a "Biblico-Patristic matrix")
• Seeing oneself as a heir of the “la nouvelle theologie” in attempting to reclaim the Biblical,Patristic, and High Medieval voices as resources to overcome modern errors
  
• Concern for the influence of modern theological decadence for philosophy and wider culture
• The need to, in opposition to the divisions of modern secularism, redefine the theological value of ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, economics, social sciences, politics, culture; that is, to articulate once more how each of these forms of inquiry (and every creature) is ultimately ordered to God (though I believe the best approach to this is Thomas's)
• “Suspending” these aspects of life and thought by upholding their worth over and above the void (of meaninglessness) within a central theological framework of participation, posited as the only true alternative to modernity’s territory "independent" of God; the logic of participation and ordering to God necessarily implies that all meaning and value can only derive from being properly –and I mean properly- understood as oriented to and participating in God
• Thus the material dimensions (bodies, sex, art, society) which modernity supposedly values, can only really be valued by identifying their participation in the divine (though this has to be done with proper attention to the precise way in which that participation and relation to transcendence is realized)
• Sympathetic to Balthasar’s placing of transcendental of beauty at center of theological method, and as means to overcome modern divisions between subjective and objective
• An eye for unsung figures in the theological traditions who began to articulate opposition to the major currents and trends leading to modern theological perversion (Hamann and Jacobi are big for Milbank, but others are far more helpful in showing how resistance and alternative to modern forms can be constructed now)
• The attempt to analyze modernity in terms of the pagan and heretical categories: as theological perversion as well as the rearticulation of pre-Christian philosophical forms (atomism, atheism, materialism, etc.)
• In general, the emphasis on Christian Neoplatonism as providing the resources to successfully overcome the perversions of secular modernity and modern theology; even possibly articulating the rise of modern thought in terms of deviation from the best of an essentially Christian Neoplatonic worldview (here Milbank, Hankey, Marion, Desmond, show similarities)

I also recorded a few of the reasons why I part ways with RO:

• Over-reliance upon or sheer imprecision in historical declension narratives: leads to self-fulfilling accounts of figures in the tradition that often warp charitable and hermeneutically precise interpretation. Duns Scotus is an example; de Lubac; perhaps Nominalism; Thomas of course. Though the historical narratives are still indeed essential to any such project of genealogy, there must be far more attention to detail, to the utter complexity and messiness, to the qualifications and limits of what and how much such narratives can do to prove a point, etc. A much more rigorous historical hermeneutic needs to be in play
• Theological epistemology: resurrection of the Augustinian illuminationism and thus the potential conflating of the orders of reason and revelation is a danger; fails to address the Thomist reception and criticism of this tradition in its integration of a more Aristotelian epistemology into the ontology. Perhaps a generally greater distinction between the dynamics of ontology and epistemology is needed. But the dependence upon illuminationism certainly places RO proponents beyond the careful distinctions of Thomas and his school, as well as beyond much Catholic theology
• The imprecision with regard to the spheres of nature and grace: relies upon a somewhat exaggerated account of de Lubac in holding him to be a founding father. While de Lubac’s project is, in my opinion, salvageable, and his theological supremacy in the 20^th century demonstrable, Milbank radicalizes him at all of the places where he was mistaken. The denial of the distinction between nature and grace follows from a mistaken perception that all such distinction translates into the modern separation of subject matter. The theological and philosophical consequences are not hard to show, ironically undermining Milbank’s very own concerns
• Over-reliance upon post-modern philosophy: failure to carefully draw the line between what is useful in the war against modernity and what is adopted as simply an extension of it, thus committing one to the same heretical and pagan notions that Milbank wants to overcome (most evident in The Word Made Strange and parts of Theology and Social Theory). Basically cf. Wayne Hankey and Frederick Bauerschmidt on this
  

Pax Christi,