Radical Orthodoxy: Part Two

Therefore, first, the “boldness” of the original Radical Orthodox critique was not in fact “unprecedented”, as will become strikingly apparent when the sub-traditions are all read in terms of each other.

Secondly, Barth must be read without mistaken preconceptions about “plodding exegesis”, or about the fideism of “a positive autonomy for theology”, rendering “philosophical concerns a matter of indifference”, and thus remaining “captive to a Modern – even liberal – duality of faith and reason”, such as “runs the risk of allowing worldly knowledge an unquestioned validity within its own sphere.”

Thirdly, Rahner and Lonergan must be read within their actual, radically orthodox, context, including the works of Blondel (no Modernist he, when kept in this company), Maritain, Gilson, de Lubac, Congar, von Balthasar, and each other.

And fourthly, we must engage directly, informed by all the above, with the Biblical text; with the Christian East; with non-Western readings of our common Biblico-Patristic heritage; and with the claims of non-Christian religions, of non-Western metaphysical and ethical systems, and of analytical philosophy.

The lack of direct Biblical exegesis in Radical Orthodoxy goes back to Lux Mundi and to the Kenotic theory developed therein. That position represents a full concession to the rationalist fallacies and liberal presuppositions of Biblical criticism, in surrender to which the Divine Attributes are made separable from the Divine Essence, and all meaning is thus emptied out of the Chalcedonian Definition.

From there, it is a very short step to believing that the teachings of Jesus might just be wrong or outdated: somehow, Jesus could be God without being Omniscient, or indeed Omnipotent (among other things). Since this necessitates the existence of attributes of omniscience, omnipotence and so forth separable from the Divine Essence, theism becomes logically untenable. The assumption that dealing directly with Scripture, and above all with the Gospels, necessitates such a descent is still evident from Radical Orthodoxy’s attitude to the Bible. It has conceded the ground, a concession which, if and when translated into pastoral or evangelistic practice, would and does cause ecclesial life to collapse.

Furthermore, the Apologists’ unanswerable repudiation of Pythogorean reincarnation, employed wherever such ideas have been and are held, is also applicable to the view of the Logos held by Kenoticists, and assumed in most of Anglo-Catholicism to be the only way of reconciling the (actually irreconcilable) claims of Chalcedonian orthodoxy and Biblical criticism.

It is in fact necessary to confound Biblical criticism by reference to Chalcedonian orthodoxy and to all that it represents. The Authorship of God’s Written Word is, like the Person of His Incarnate Word, both fully human and fully divine, so that its canonical and ecclesial, allegorical and typological, tropological and moral, anagogical and eschatological senses are integral to its literal (i.e., authorial) sense. Likewise, just as Jesus of Nazareth must be a factual historical figure, so also the Salvation History recorded in and as Scripture must be no less historically factual than it is doctrinally, morally and eschatologically significant.

As John Milbank ought to be the first to point out, anything else is no less a ‘faith position’, but it is not the ‘faith position’ that defined the Canon in the first place.

The attitude to Eastern Christianity is also very Anglo-Catholic: if it is thought about at all, then it seems to be as a sort of Rome-Without-The-Pope. Likewise, the strange, ambivalent Anglo-Catholic attitude towards Rome is evident: no more a willingness to enter into full visible communion with the Petrine See than a desire to convert people from “post-Tridentine Catholic positivist authoritarianism” to any concrete alternative. But after all, exactly where might a disaffected Papist, or indeed anyone else, practise Radical Orthodoxy instead, Sunday by Sunday?

Radical Orthodoxy’s siding with liberal North American Anglicanism on the presenting issue of what to do about homosexuality will make it very difficult indeed to attend to what is being said in the two-thirds world. Yet there, societies are often in the early stages of Christianisation, or else in the first flowerings of fully Christianised civilisations: they are like Patristic society, and they manifest this by their own Biblico-Patristic fidelity.

Related to this departure from the best of Radical Orthodoxy’s Anglo-Catholic heritage, but with much larger ramifications for the developed world as well, is the retreat of some of its supporters from a “practical philosophy consonant with authentic Christian doctrine” in political terms.

It is one thing to point out the perverse theological roots of princely, and thus also of republican, absolutism. But it is quite another, and quite preposterous, to suggest that the State itself is but a product of that perversity, so that Christians ought simply to go about doing allegedly Christian Socialist (or Red Tory) things without reference to any civil power, as if that power really were the (purportedly) “neutral secular State” the alleged historical origins of which are rightly debunked. This is particularly ludicrous in a State born out of a Civil War between princely absolutists and gentry-cum-mercantile republican absolutists; we may thank God that both sides lost.

Maybe Radical Orthodoxy is afraid of the Marxist strain in Anglo-Catholic Socialism? If so, then it should take heart from the fact that it can recognise the danger. Maybe it is worried about accepting insights from the social sciences that it despises? If so, then it must see how far removed it is from its own tradition, and from the Tradition.

Or maybe this is political quietism as an expression of decadence and indolence, born out of a lack of contact with the poor? If so, then it would tie in well with the attitude to theodicy, deriving from a wholly untraditional scorn for metaphysics, which can hardly be said to recall Augustine, Anselm or Aquinas.

Faced with, say, the Asian tsunami, we are just told to celebrate the Mass, perform acts of charity, and not ask why God allows these things to happen. So much for Job, or the Psalms, or Irenaeus, or Augustine. This ‘Mass’ is certainly not the Source and Summit of a rich ecclesial life in the world, the daily contradiction of both capitalism and Marxism.

Any Christianity that refuses to engage with metaphysics, and not least with theodicy, has nothing to do with the Scriptures or the Fathers, and will never convert anyone or anything inside or outside the Church. Furthermore, it is only possible in the most decadent circumstances that there have ever been.

Like Jean-Luc Marion, Radical Orthodoxy has sold the pass as regards the theological critique of philosophy, by presupposing the anti-metaphysical strand in French Postmodernism and working from there in an attempt to contrive an ostensibly non-metaphysical theology in order to gain for its advocates professional and social acceptance among the biens pensants.

There is no more of a case for this than there was for the attempted contrivance of a theology subordinate to Logical Positivism or Gramscian Marxism, both of which have, of course, been attempted. The truly radical and truly orthodox response to all things ‘post-metaphysical’ was that of John Paul the Great in Fides et Ratio, the template for post-secular thought, including all of approving quotations from Radical Orthodox literature here.