Radical Orthodoxy: Part One

With Phillip Blond making such a name for himself, and with the expectation, and indeed hope, that John Milbank will be a major figure in the reconstruction of the British (and wider) Left, here are the thoughts of a long-standing friendly critic and critical friend of Radical Orthodoxy, a tendency about which you are going to be hearing a whole lot more.

Will Radical Orthodoxy heed the lessons of history? Whether apart from Rome or in internal dissent from Rome, High Church movements have always become progressively less orthodox theologically, and thus (among much else) progressively less radical politically. Meanwhile, ultra-Augustinianism produced the Remonstrandt Brotherhood, the Socinian ‘New Licht’ within the Free Church of Scotland, the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, and Unitarianism among English Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. Look at the once-Gallican, once-Jansenist Old Catholics.

In order to entrench the sensibility that Radical Orthodoxy has helped to bring to such prominence, we must eschew much of Radical Orthodoxy itself. Radical Orthodoxy makes the Church little more than an abstraction, with all authority transferred to a romanticised version of the distant past. Academic theology is effectively erected into its own self-sufficient religion.

Secular Modernity is indeed very largely the creation of Nominalism’s perverse theology, the opposition of reason to revelation is indeed a Modern corruption, and all thought that brackets out God is indeed ultimately nihilistic. But any reduction of the origins of secular Modernity to the rise and influence of Nominalism is as erroneous and dangerous as is any failure to take account of that rise.

Adherence to Credal and Chalcedonian Christianity is necessarily also adherence to the exemplarity of its Biblico-Patristic matrix, which extends up to, but does not include, Nominalism’s Great Schism between the potentia absoluta and the potentia ordinata. Thus, such figures as Anselm, Aquinas and Bonaventure are certainly among the Fathers. But Scotus was not himself a Nominalist, and should not be read as such. And it is astonishing that those who seek, both to “retrieve” the Tradition (which, of course, affirms the indivisibility of spirituality, scholarship and manual labour, with monastic communities therefore necessarily at the cutting edge), and specifically to “retrieve” a sense of Aquinas and Thomism as continuous with Augustinianism, should go about this without mentioning that Aquinas, as a Dominican, stood in the Augustinian monastic tradition.

The wish to “reach further in recovering and extending a fully Christianised ontology and practical philosophy consonant with authentic Christian doctrine” is undoubtedly the natural and logical continuation of la nouvelle théologie’s profound appreciation of the consequences of Modern theological decadence. However, although a richer and more coherent Christianity was gradually lost sight of after the later Middle Ages, von Balthasar’s ‘lay styles’, just for a start, stand in contradiction to any suggestion that this loss was anything like universal.

Given much Postmodern thought’s many startling similarities to the teachings of the Scriptures and the Fathers, the Postmodern “return” to Biblico-Patristic roots is especially a “return” to the Augustinian vision of all knowledge as divine illumination. But that vision must be deployed boldly and systematically in the service of a comprehensive and coherent ontology, epistemology, ethic and aesthetic, with all that this entails in economic, social, cultural and political terms, including in relation to each and all of the fine arts, the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.

Such deployment upholds ontology and epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, economics and politics, society and culture, art and science, as against radical pluralism’s intolerance of any but its own claim to absolute truth, as against eclecticism’s refusal of the mediation of whole systems of thought by whole cultures, as against historicism’s denial of the enduring validity of truth, as against scientism’s restriction of objective truth to the findings of the natural-scientific method (or, perhaps, of that method’s actual or supposed analogues), and as against radical pragmatism’s failure to recognise the fundamental human need to be more than pragmatic alone.

This upholding safeguards natural science against the eternalism, animism, pantheism, cyclicism and astrology that always characterise the thought of fallen humanity apart from the Biblical revelation. Those precluded or arrested the rise of natural science everywhere other than in Mediaeval Europe, and ‘post-Christian’ culture is now visibly regressing to them. To confine “scientific disclosure to revealing the technical transformability of the world, thereby allowing it to be potentially subservient to charity” looks like a frightened surrender to scientism, itself ignorant of the intellectual climate that alone made possible the rise of science.

It is obviously necessary to rethink the Tradition in the light of its partial, though by no means total, collapse in the later Middle Ages, and of the Enlightenment as a critique of such decadence as characterised much, though by no means all, of Early Modern Christianity. Yet, while of course rejecting both “Biblicism” and “positivist authoritarianism” when or where these might happen to arise, the Confessional Protestant position is not in fact Biblicist, nor is positivist authoritarianism the position of the Roman Magisterium as such.

“To articulate a more incarnational, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialised, even ‘more Platonic’ Christianity” is to “suspend” “embodied life, self-expression, sexuality, aesthetic experience, human political community”, both in terms of interrupting them, and in terms of “upholding their relative worth over-against the void”, within “a central theological framework of ‘participation’ as developed by Plato and reworked by Christianity, because any alternative configuration perforce reserves a territory independent of God.” Thus, “every discipline needs to be framed by a theological perspective”, or else it will “define a zone apart from God, literally grounded in nothing.”

But such Christian “reworking” by definition includes a searing critique of Platonism, even in order to say that “All there is only is because it is more than it is”, and “all real knowledge involves some revelation of the Infinite in the finite”, with “revelation as essentially a matter of special illumination of the intellect, in which the imaginative interpretation of external signs, the recognition of these signs as revelatory, and the inner transformation of the soul are all one single, indivisible occurrence”, so that “The material and temporal realms of bodies, sex, art and sociality, which Modernity claims to value, can truly be held only by acknowledgement of their participation in the Transcendent.”

Once that has been said, the aesthetic articulation of truth repeats the ontological, epistemological and ethical articulations “with a difference that is essential if we are really to see what has already been said”, since aesthetic experience is “at once objectively disclosing and yet disclosive only for subjective feeling.” Therefore, von Balthasar’s “proposal to put the aesthetic at the centre of theology” both “overcomes the post-Renaissance split between ‘rational’ natural religion and ‘revealed’ positive religion”, and “refuses any post-Romantic attempt to ground religion in supposedly indefeasible structures of subjectivity.” Well, with von Balthasar come Communio, and the immensely Balthasarian John Paul the Great, and Benedict XVI.

To affirm all of the above is to stand in that broad, deep, rich and pluriform Christian tradition which has always sufficiently valued the mediating participatory sphere that alone can lead us to God, and no small part (though by no means all) of which is in fact attributable to the “subterranean” influence of Hamann and Jacobi. Our many sub-traditions never made of Schleiermacher “the pivotal figure for the history of modern theology”, and never manifested a “discrete theological domain and method”, because we never “assumed a liberal sundering of philosophy from theology”, so that we were never “insufficiently critical of both Romanticism and rationalism.”