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Modern Theology 26:1 January 2010

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

1
2
THE NEW DIVIDE: ROMANTIC
3 VERSUS CLASSICAL ORTHODOXY moth_1574 27..40

5 JOHN MILBANK
6

7 Of course, a lot of what goes on in theology today is much the same as a

8 quarter of a century ago. But this is only the case for theological exponents
9 who have not realised that all is now different or who dislike this difference.
10 Some of the shifts were already apparent at that time, but are now far more
11 palpable. The Anglo-Saxon countries and France have displaced Germany as
12 the fulcrum of international theological activity. The debate within Protestant
13 theology has ceased to be the decisive one for all theology, much affecting
14 Catholic theology also. Today, instead, it is the debate within Catholic theol-
15 ogy that is the vital one, to such a degree that a denitively Protestant
16 theology is now extinct, even though Protestants are still doing much inter-
17 esting and important work. (And one thinks here especially of the decisive
18 writings of Stanley Hauerwas.)
19 Another shift was scarcely anticipated at all. This is the simultaneous rise of
20 a more militant atheism and a return of religion to political and public
21 inuence. The grey agnosticism and fear of religious irrelevance which char-
22 acterised most of the latter half of the twentieth century has, for the moment,
23 departed.
24 These three changes, geographical, confessional and cultural, have inter-
25 acted with each other to engender a new theological divide between what I
26 shall dub romantic and classical modes of orthodoxy. This has now
27 displaced the older divide between theological orthodoxy and theological
28 liberalism. Let me explain.
29 Ken Surin, in his introduction to this special twenty-fth anniversary issue,
30 well explains the dilemma of the older divide, which was primarily located
31 within Protestant thought. Neo-orthodoxy was locked within a deist ghetto
32
33
34 John Milbank
35 Department of Theology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK
36 [email protected]

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28 John Milbank

1 of cultural irrelevance. Liberal theology, however, was of equal irrelevance,

2 because of its dening embrace of whatever cultural norms happened to be
3 going. Both the rejection and the embrace of cultural mediation appeared to
4 lead to impotence. In the latter circumstance, the Barthian might perhaps
5 rejoice, by invoking the notes of tragedy, unheard prophecy and apocalyptic.
6 Yet for anyone with a social conscience, a double irony here was quickly
7 apparent. By rejecting all within fallen reality, one in practice embraces every
8 variant of the all, with indifference. Moreover, by rejecting the analogia entis,
9 and the paradoxically supernatural destiny of human nature, one still
10 embraces modern liberalism when it comes to the immanentist understand-
11 ing of human reason and human politics. Both neo-orthodoxy and Protestant
12 liberalism in consequence remained within an unquestioned post-Kantian
13 conceptual space.
14 The response to this situation within the last twenty-ve years has there-
15 fore logically been the quest for a mode of mediation which will also be
16 critical of secular norms. This quest has been greatly accelerated by the
17 perception that secularity has been becoming more hostile: that basic Chris-
18 tian attitudes towards human dignity, human life, birth, death and sexuality
19 are now being overthrown by a culture that is sloughing off a respect for
20 Christian values as well as Christian belief. Included within this perception is
21 a realisation that both economic liberalism (supposedly of the right) and
22 cultural liberalism (supposedly of the left) are underwriting a culture of
23 narcissistic self-interest while ironically eroding civil liberties that are histori-
24 cally grounded in respect for relational personhood and reciprocity, not in the
25 Lockean/Rousseauist liberalism of natural rights.
26 All this adds up to a context in which it is more difcult for Christians to
27 make their peace with secular liberal democracy. Moreover, the new mili-
28 tantly secularising currents have been most manifest in the Anglo-Saxon
29 countries. Hence if crisis tends to foment intellectual reection, this may be
30 one factor in the geographical migration of the theological cutting-edge.
31 Another is the circumstance that the ordo-liberal politico-economic settle-
32 ment of post war Germany in reality blends liberalism with organic conser-
33 vativism. This hybrid character of Germany, which in the long run may prove
34 unstable, tends perhaps to render liberalism in German eyes a more benign
35 phenomenon than it is for contemporary Anglo-Saxons. The exception here
36 would be German thinkers like Joseph Ratzinger and Robert Spaemann, heirs
37 to a Catholic political critique of Nazism (as in Aurel Kolnai) that blamed
38 liberalism itself for the slide into totalitarianism.
39 The sense of crisis and the need for a common Christian defence of basic
40 values of our humanity has led to a far greater Protestant understanding of
41 the Roman Catholic Church and even to a partial acceptance of the need for
42 the kind of authority which it embodies. At the same time and just as crucially
43 for theology, a younger generation has come to see that the Protestant legacy
44 cannot, on the whole, offer the kind of critical mediation which appears to
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The New Divide 29

1 be needed if theology is to be effective and consequently true to its incarna-

2 tional witness. Hence a new willingness to embrace ideas of analogy, partici-
3 pation, sacramentality, phenomenology and metaphysics. Roman Catholic,
4 Eastern Orthodox and Anglican theology are now to the fore. In the Anglican
5 case one can speak both of a new impact of Anglo-Catholicism (in poignant
6 contrast to its institutional decline) but also of an Anglican Evangelicalism
7 tinged with a new post-Protestant respect for the whole of Christian tra-
8 dition. Indeed one of the most striking things about the contemporary theo-
9 logical scene compared with twenty-ve years ago is the way in which the
10 live names in debate are now not so much Barth, Bonhoeffer, Moltmann
11 and Rahner etc, but rather St. Paul, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, Augustine,
12 Anselm, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, Cusanus . . . and even Cajetan!
13 For all the reasons adduced above, contemporary theology tends to look
14 for a more robust Christian intellectual account of everything under the
15 sun and its searching tends to be both more catholic in scope and Catholic in
16 its fundamental outlook. Does this mean that theological liberalism has
17 simply expired? Not exactly: it has rather mutated into various modes of
18 academic religious study and various pragmatic endeavours to keep the
19 peace between religions and between religion and secularity. But in doing so
20 it has become not so much parti-coloured as rather tinctured with many
21 shades of fading grey.
22 Leaving these shadows to one side, what one now sees within the academic
23 daylight is the return of the older phenomenon of competing orthodoxies.
24 These are multiple, and the spectacle of their competition is not always
25 edifyingjust as contemporary Church life often exhibits both sectarian
26 retrenchment and new forms of sectarianism.
27 Nevertheless, within this theological morass (much of which no single
28 individual can possibly know about) two opposed tendencies stand out and
29 are conducting a respectable if not always good-tempered argument with
30 each other. These tendencies I dub the romantic and the classical. One
31 can briey sum up the difference between them by saying that the former
32 sees Wordsworths feeling intellect as lying at the heart of theology, while
33 the latter sees the role of an entirely objective reason as vital for theological
34 practice.
35 Both positions consider that they represent the authentic Christian tradi-
36 tion and neither claim drastically to innovate. The romantics think that the
37 collapse of a reason linked to the higher eros led to the debasement of
38 scholasticism and then to secular modernity. Resistance to the latter had
39 therefore to oppose rationalism and even to insist more upon the role of the
40 eroticthe passions, the imagination, art, ethos etc than had been the case
41 up till and including Aquinas.
42 The exponents of classicism on the other hand (largely located in the
43 United States)1 trace secularity simply to a poor use of reason and regard the
44 scholastic legacy, mainly in its Thomistic form, as sustaining a true use of
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30 John Milbank

1 reason to this very day. The poor use of reason in Ockham, Descartes, Hume
2 and Kant led eventually to scepticism, nihilism and the exaltation of subjec-
3 tive emotion. For religion and theology, therefore, to try to rebuild itself upon
4 this ground is the most dreadful error imaginable. Instead, we must return to
5 the tradition of the manuals and insist that uninected human reason can
6 prove the existence of the creator God; that reason can demonstrate the
7 likelihood of God giving a revelation; that reason can likewise argue on the
8 basis of evidences for the plausibility of the revelation as claimed by
9 scripture and the Church. This rationalist emphasis will alone convincingly
10 oppose secular hegemony.
11 However, far from betraying faith, for the classicists it is only this ratio-
12 nalism, that, in nally confessing its own inadequacy, can fully embrace the
13 completely supernatural content of the act of faith. Hence Reginald Garrigou-
14 Lagrange OP, Thomist of the strict observance (and, now astoundingly
15 risen from the most apparently terminal intellectual death of all time), not
16 merely upheld the full Baroque rationalist rigour already outlined, but also
17 insisted (in a way somewhat consonant with that of his romantic oppo-
18 nents) that every life of faith and ascesis is in nuce the mystical life.2
19 But, for the romantics, to embrace such rationalism and to risk such
20 deism is in reality to surrender to liberal modernity. For if decadent scho-
21 lasticism itself engendered this modernity, then to perpetuate it is to inhabit
22 the mansion of our times in Baroque fancy dress, in a curiously camp forget-
23 fulness of the peculiar circumstance that, as it would seem, only Catholics
24 (and often only members of religious orders) happen to be exercising their
25 supposedly objective reason rightly. The conict between these two parties is
26 therefore one between opposed metanarratives.
27 According to both stories, the other side are fake conservatives, who in
28 reality give comfort to liberalism and secularity. I think that the romantics are
29 (almost) entirely right and the classicists are (almost) entirely wrong. Let me
30 try to indicate why, in a very short compass.3
31 In the case of the romantic view, I would also dene it as radically
32 orthodox in a generic sense. The reason for this nomenclature is, rst, that it
33 captures the desire of ressourcement to get back to the true Christian roots,
34 whereas, for the neo-neo-Thomists, such a venture is not of primary impor-
35 tance if Aquinas can be deemed to have summarized and surpassed all
36 preceding tradition. Secondly, the word radical also captures the need to
37 restore the tradition in an inevitably somewhat new way, given the rational-
38 istic rupture and the novel circumstances that it produced. Within this genus
39 I would locate the Communio group (including Pope Benedict XVI), both
40 neo-patristic and sophiological currents of Orthodox thought, various mav-
41 erick Catholic intellectuals (W. Desmond, P. Rosemann, J. Hoff, O-T Venard
42 O.P. etc), besides Radical Orthodoxy specicallya movement of Anglo-
43 Catholic origins with many adherents from all denominations and strong
44 friendly and practical ties with perhaps the most important contemporary lay
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The New Divide 31

1 Catholic movement, Communione e Liberazione. Radical Orthodoxy is an eclec-

2 tic tendency and not all of the particular opinions of its leading exponents
3 coincide with those of many of the radically orthodox in the generic sense
4 that I am using here. Nonetheless, in its most fundamental outlook there is
5 such a coincidence, and Radical Orthodoxy stands at the fulcrum of the new
6 interconfessional Catholicism in theology.4
7 For the romantics or the radically orthodox the search for a critical
8 mediation is crucial. The nouvelle thologie and kindred spirits in Germany
9 and Italy had already embarked on this quest far back into the previous
10 century. They held that such critical mediation already lay to hand in the
11 Patristic to High Medieval sources of Christian tradition. For paleochristian
12 theological practice, as they rightly saw it, it was always a matter of operating
13 in a cosmic middle that was being epiphanically transformed through the
14 course of time. To know God is to worship God: to risk words and actions
15 into which God descends, in participatory recollection of his absolute descent
16 in the Incarnation. This, as Ratzinger stresses, was the descent of reason
17 itselfa descent which restores and exalts the human reasoning process
18 which had been damaged, but never totally corrupted. Thus in meditation
19 upon what happens in the liturgy one can seamlessly reect upon all the
20 words which wise men have ever uttered, but more especially upon the
21 words of the Bible which contain the most sublime reasonings of all because
22 they anticipate, echo, enforce and again anticipate the epiphanic descent of
23 reason itself to humanity.
24 There is no a priori knowledge of this reason, nor is there any possibility
25 that a cold undesiring human reason might be able to infer from the things of
26 nature a supreme efcient cause who alone caused also himself. Instead, the
27 entirety of the natural world constitutes a book signed by its author in whose
28 being it participates by virtue of that authors creative action. We can read the
29 symbols of this world because our intellect is illumined (and so able to think
30 at all) through its participation in the very mind of this same author. The book
31 of creation itself points obscurely to the paradoxically world-exceeding book
32 of scripture. At the same time the latter refers in the rst place always to
33 things of this world and so must be read through the world-book, just as the
34 scriptures also refer to many languages and cultures and thereby assume and
35 anticipate the whole of human history. Christianity therefore requires, as a
36 full exercise of reason, innite precise study of human language and innite
37 exact study of the natural world. All this is focussed on the Bible that is itself
38 authorised by its crucial place in enabling liturgy, the true worship of the
39 triune God. (Lubac rightly insisted that the allegorical in Origen itself
40 required the literal, which in the long run nurtured historical study and the
41 rise of natural science.)
42 It follows that there is something more fundamental than a relatively
43 detached exercise of reason on the one hand, or the rational consideration of
44 propositions of faith on the other. Prior to both comes meditation on the
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32 John Milbank

1 liturgy, the eucharist and the scriptures. It is this which renders all of theol-
2 ogy mystical, and such mysticism is an elevation of, and purication of,
3 human reason. By appealing to this antique scheme the nouvelle thologie, and
4 Henri de Lubac above all (though also Karl Rahner in one of his aspects),
5 sought to restore the true preconditions for doing Christian theology.
6 These were especially:
7 1: The doctrine of the spiritual senses whereby we gradually come to
8 realise that in all sensory, but especially liturgical sensory response, we are
9 more fundamentally sensing with our imaginations and our intellect. To
10 believe in spiritual realities is precisely to believe that we can intensify this
11 sensing and even elevate our bodily senses in the process. In this way, the
12 phrase spiritual senses is no mere metaphor, since sensing itself is shown
13 to be not merely physical.5
14 In exercising these spiritual senses in contemporary space we also enter
15 into:
16 2. An unfolding of meaning in time. The Bible is to be read literally as
17 regards the past, but all the events which it records point allegorically for-
18 wards to Christ and the eschaton. Inversely, we can only interpret the latter
19 things in the light of the signs which they both manifestly and obscurely
20 full. And we ourselves are morally situated within this living tension
21 which we must seek to exemplify. The scriptures, for Origen, provide us with
22 that re that enables us to make of ourselves a living holocaust to God.
23 For the paleochristian tradition, therefore, the mystical was located at the
24 intersection of the elevation of the senses in the eucharist and the Christo-
25 logical dynamic of time disclosed by the senses of Scripture. Here to
26 perform was to read and to read was to perform. Equally to touch (in ve
27 ways) was to signify (in four ways), while to signify was also to touch. In other
28 words, meaning and feeling were fused in one for our encounter with the
29 divine.
30 As Lubac convincingly showed, explicit dogmatic formulae depended
31 upon this prior theological practice. To behold the Son and be led to the
32 Father, the Holy Spirit must guide our sensing and desiring. Through all this
33 we dimly intuit the life of the Trinity itself. Similarly, the Cappadocian
34 mixing of the divine and human natures in Christ is incomprehensible
35 (and will be denied, as later proved to be the case) unless we understand how
36 in Christ the literal and the allegorical have come absolutely to coincide. For
37 this outlook (common to both East and West yet perhaps more marked in the
38 East), nature is in continuity with grace and it is precisely such a perspective
39 which Aquinas tried to bring to speculative consciousness with his notion of
40 an analogy of being (as it was later validly termed). The latter is not a theory
41 about human reasoning alone, but rather an account of the mysterious oscil-
42 lation between identity and difference that applies to both rational and faith-
43 based discourse about the divine. It is completely concerted both with a
44 Cyrilline Christology and with a theology linking Creation and Trinity which
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The New Divide 33

1 afrms the Fathers eminent and paradoxical identity, within the inner ema-
2 nation of the Son, with his exterior manifestation in the Created order.
3 For the older Christian tradition, as Lubac newly realised, all of the above
4 is held together by the nuptial analogy. Canticles was regarded as the Bible
5 within the Bible because it was the point where the spiritual senses and the
6 senses of scripture most coincided. Here we behold guratively and sen-
7 suously Christ and his bride, the soul, but also Christ and his bride, the
8 Church. This is the very knot of Christian delity. For Catholic tradition has
9 always understood Gods love for us to be both generous and specic and
10 desiring, while our love for God is also desiring as well as self-giving. Hence
11 the best image for this love must be that of the most intense mode of human
12 love which brings together kindness, passionate desire, mutual interest,
13 bodily union and fertility: the love between man and woman. This is all the
14 more the case because God chose to restore and full our humanity by
15 becoming physically as well as spiritually united with us. He did so as a male
16 human being and he only did so because of the loving assent of a female
17 human being whom the New Testament speaks of as being literally the
18 mother of God and spiritually the bride of God (Luke 1:43; John 2:1 and
19 19:2527). As such she is at once the location of every human soul and also of
20 the Church which must evermore in time give eucharistic birth to the Son
21 once again.
22 But here is the problemand we must wonder whether this is not really
23 the heart of the whole romantic/classic divide. Lubacs claimand it is
24 surely correctis that the ultimate source of this very logic of Christian
25 theology is none other than the dubious Origensuspected perhaps wrongly
26 of Christological subordinationism, but known rightly to be a universalist!
27 Given Origens early date in relation to Christological controversies, the
28 former is irrelevant. For it is in the line of his reections that a full Christo-
29 logical orthodoxy was eventually articulated. But the latter is not. Implicitly,
30 Lubac and Balthasar raised the question of whether universalism, or at least
31 an ever-open heaven, was not the more truly primordial Christian position, as
32 it appears to be in St Paul. And now that Charles Taylor has newly pressed the
33 case for the role of the repugnancy of the Western doctrine of hell in promot-
34 ing secularisation, this issue is likely to come evermore to the fore.
35 In assessing the fate of Lubac, Danilou and Balthasars legacy today,
36 several things stand out:
37 1. New research suggests that actually Aquinas was far more in continuity
38 with Patristic thought than they sometimes thought. Indeed in some ways it
39 turns out that it is Bonaventure who instigated some of the ideas that led
40 eventually to Scotus, Ockham and in the long run neoscholasticism.6 Hence
41 the Communio position need not threaten the nineteenth-century papal dec-
42 laration of the centrality of Aquinas for Catholic thought. Yet our reasons for
43 embracing this centrality may have shifted: we can now see Aquinas more as
44 the synthesis of Augustinian with Byzantine thought, as of Aristotle with
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34 John Milbank

1 elements of Platonism, in the Proclean traditionwhich already carried this

2 fusion, and in a theurgic mode which took a positive view of material
3 embodiment for Platonic as well as Aristotelian reasons.
4 2. Communio remains in speculative decit, despite the efforts of many.
5 Fergus Kerr is right to say that some younger people who now ascribe to this
6 position no longer grasp the technical issues which Lubac etc were address-
7 ing and which remain valid. It also needs a better account of just how the great
8 tradition collapsed and of whether it was sufciently guarded against ratio-
9 nalistic corruption. Likewise, it needs a better account of the ways in which
10 romantic recuperation adds something decidedly new. More specically
11 we need to retrace the third(neither Kantian nor positivist) reading of
12 David Hume as variously espoused by Jacobi and Maine de Biran (and then
13 Ravaisson) according to which he implicitly re-establishes that realism of rela-
14 tions, substance and causality in terms of the mystery of habit and the
15 trusting intuitions of feeling and imagination, which he initially removes in
16 sheerly rationalist terms by thinking through nominalism to its absurd,
17 unliveable, unthinking limit. (Hume is the later lowlander lying in ultimate
18 wait for that other lowlander, Scotus! This reading also reminds us that in
19 many ways the Enlightenment was itself a partial reaction against a moder-
20 nity dened by theological voluntarism supporting kingly absolutism and
21 the cynical anti-humanist materialism of Hobbes and Mandeville.)7 Finally,
22 Communio needs on these bases to elaborate a fully metaphysical theology in
23 a new waythereby answering some of the more valid criticism of the
24 classicists.
25 The exponents of the phenomenological turn (Jean-Luc Marion et al) are
26 relevant here, but there remains an inconsistency between their genealogy
27 which traces ontotheology back to Scotus and their espousal of transcenden-
28 tal phenomenology which lies itself within a Scotist-Kantian trajectory. In
29 short: their very refusal of metaphysics remains metaphysical in the pejora-
30 tive sense of an immanentist, atheological ontology that inevitably turned
31 into a foundational epistemology. But here the work of J-L Chrtien stands
32 out in its blending of necessary phenomenological insight with (seemingly) a
33 neoplatonic metaphysical framework and its disregard in practice for any
34 divide between philosophy and theology.8
35 3. The Communio theologians have tried to respond to the twentieth-
36 century sex and gender revolution by insisting upon the literal corner of
37 Origens triangular nuptial allegory. In this way they validly try to complete
38 the gurative triangle which he invokes between man/woman, Christ and
39 the soul and Christ and the Church. To intimate, accordingly, a new link
40 between the sacrament of marriage and the sacrament of the eucharist is
41 surely a valid development. One can certainly carp at some of the possibly
42 unjustied consequences drawn from this nuptial mysticism as regards the
43 social position of women, women priests, contraception, homosexuality and
44 so forth. All that remains debatable. But how else, one wants to ask critics of
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The New Divide 35

1 this development, was the Church to respond to modern sexuality?9 Short of

2 either denying its inherited views or blindly refusing the new general sense
3 of the personal importance of sexual relations, it had to develop a new
4 doctrine of marriage as a spiritual path. The authentic tradition allows one to
5 do so in a radical way which links this path to the very centre of Christian
6 tradition.
7 Resistance to this creative response comes from two androgynous direc-
8 tions: either from liberals resisting any claims for the superior normativeness
9 of heterosexuality, or from mostly male conservatives who think that any
10 celebration of heterosexual eroticism will prove incompatible with Catholic
11 moral rigour as regards sexuality, about which they are, apparently, much
12 exercised. The worst aspect of the current situation is the preparedness of
13 some liberals to half-ally with the conservatives over this issue and with their
14 classicism in general, in the fond belief that they might now be allies
15 against an over-assertive papacy for whom the nouvelle thologie is the new
16 norm. And here one often senses a contradictory outrage that the heirs of the
17 modernist critique (in its more valid aspects, I would say) are now themselves
18 enthroned in the eternal city.
19 As for the view of some that this nuptial theology is incompatible with
20 Aquinas or Dominican tradition, this ignores the work of Catherine of Siena,
21 the link of Eckharts birth mysticism to the same Origenist complex of
22 ideas and Augustine and Aquinass understanding of marriage as the highest
23 instance of friendship. In addition it ignores the fact, as long ago disinterred
24 by Rousselot, that Aquinas understood charity in a reciprocalist and partici-
25 patory way that combined it with eros, unlike the unilaterally self-abnegating
26 ecstatic understanding of charity as usually advocated by the Franciscans
27 amongst others.10 Finally it ignores the fact that Aquinas, unlike some others
28 at the time, strongly encouraged the elevation of marriage into the status of a
29 sacrament, reportedly declaring that it partook of Christs passion in its
30 aspect of charity (rather than pain), whereby He suffered for the Church
31 who was to be united with him as his spouse (S.T. Suppl. Q. 42 a. 1)11
32 While certainly Aquinas located the imago dei in human reason rather than
33 sexual difference, it is simply incorrect for Fergus Kerr to say that either
34 Wojtyla or Ratzinger or Scola have denied this Thomistic theology.12 Instead,
35 by adding in the wake of the Eastern tradition that the image is also located
36 in our entire embodied personhood, they have suggested that this person-
37 hood must therefore include gender characteristics and relations. This is
38 logical, since gender is an exhaustive specic division of the human genus,
39 taken abstractlyif one denies that either femaleness or maleness is an onto-
40 logical accident. It follows that our reason also is gendered and, as Wojtyla
41 makes clear, the orientation to the opposite sex is a rational as well as corpo-
42 real orientation, one aspect of the teleology of the human mind.13 Attribution
43 of the image to every individual and yet also to sexual difference is therefore
44 a perfectly plausible gloss upon Genesis.
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36 John Milbank

1 One can nonetheless certainly have reservations about Balthasars version

2 of this theology, whereby sexual difference is grounded in a Trinitarian
3 difference in which the Son is virtually approximated to motherhood and
4 the Spirit to offspring. The danger here is that the masculinity of rst the
5 male laity, then the male clergy, then the male Christ (and male Son) and
6 nally the male Father (femininely passive in the face of a tragic logic of
7 Trinitarian sundering) are all lost in favour of a perversely feminist mys-
8 tique that underwrites a masochistic approach to hierarchy. Fergus Kerr
9 obliquely signals this, yet fails to mention that, for Ratzinger following Lubac,
10 it is the Spirit not the Son who is metaphorically femininethereby allowing
11 a far more genuine theology of sexual difference.14
12 The usual accompaniment to conservative androgyny is a classicism
13 surfeited with dust and tedium that is ironically blind to the operation of
14 time. One can ignore, like Ralph McInerny, all the welter of careful con-
15 tinental research (Fabro, Finance, Courtine, Honnefelder, Libera, Boulnois,
16 Marion, Schmutz etc) which has abundantly conrmed (while modifying in
17 certain respects) the scholarly intuitions of Lubac and Gilson and simply
18 criticise their pioneer and inevitably awed efforts as to detail, while wood-
19 enly miscomprehending the main issues concerning grace, being, participa-
20 tion, causality, modality and analogy that are at stake.15 Likewise one can
21 present a mere empiricism illogically aspiring to realism as though it were a
22 true realism, which requires the full weight of an Aristotelian doctrine of
23 knowledge by identity and a Thomistic theory of universals and esse inten-
24 tionale. One can pretend that Aquinas has a doctrine of sufcient reason
25 instead of an apophatically aesthetic accounting for the being of things as
26 they are. In all these ways one can thereby seek respectability in the halls of
27 the second division of analytic philosophy. Above all one can seek to suggest
28 that, with a slight tweak, American liberal modernity is really in tune with
29 Catholic neoscholasticism. That is to say, if one is not secretly regretting the
30 defeat of Marshal Ptainbut I will be generous to some who do not hesitate
31 to slander the Pope on political grounds, against the entire tenor of the
32 evidence and especially the evidence of Caritas in Veritate.
33 The pure classicists are conservatively orthodox. However, there
34 remain the liberally orthodox who often make bizarre common cause with
35 them or migrate from the latter camp to the former, like Rusty Reno.16 These
36 are the neo-Rahnerians and various types of theological Wittgensteinians. In
37 either case one has a tendency to forget the postmodern critique of all modes
38 of transcendentalism (Quine, Sellars, Rorty, Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou, Meil-
39 lassoux, etc) in favour of the view that the latter allows a certain updating of
40 neoscholasticism from which we now know that transcendentalism is ulti-
41 mately derived.17 Hence today, as compared with twenty ve years ago,
42 Rahner appears as nearer to conservatism than the Communio group, while
43 their radicalism looks for some to be dangerously subversive of our cultural
44 present: at once too nostalgic and too innovatory. As to the more linguistic
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1 variants on transcendentalism, there are no good arguments for supposing

2 that language projects quasi a priori limits and also none for supposing that,
3 just because emotion is always already symbolically expressed, that there is
4 some sort of emotion-free prior linguistic moment.18 On the contrary, feeling
5 and articulation run in tandem and rst utterances of either children or
6 early human cultures are manifestly emotion-imbued.
7 The liberally orthodox need to have a long hard think. A devils alli-
8 ance with the conservatively orthodox will do little to save them from
9 overweaning Vatican bureaucracy, while in principle Ratzinger has the
10 beginnings of a genuinely organicist rather than juridically centrist view of
11 ecclesial authority.19
12 In the case of all the classicists, they actually perpetuate the Protestant
13 dilemma which Surin articulates. Indeed are they not somewhat protestant
14 in their desire for a single authoritative doctrinal text and an Aquinas
15 accorded the canonical status of a Luther, along with their suspicion of the
16 primary role of the aesthetic, poesis and cultural mediation? And as such
17 protestants they are stuck between a cultural surrender of reason and a
18 cultural esotericism of faithneither of which can be incarnational. Their
19 double irrelevance should conne them to the theme-park irreality of some
20 American Catholic campuses where they can continue to compose their
21 sub-Chestertonian20 detective novels and pronounce on the casuistry of ado-
22 lescent courtship.
23 For myself, as radically orthodox, I am convinced that the future of
24 theological reason will be neither cold, nor ill-lubricated, nor androgynous. It
25 is through the feeling exercise of intellect that it will be able successfully to
26 articulate a renewed metaphysic of the Triune God and the divine humanity.

27

28 NOTES
29 1 I am thinking of Romanus Cessario, Stephen A. Long and Ralph McInerny among many
30 others. It is important to mention that the Dominican Freibourg-Toulouse school, including
31 J.P. Torell and S.-T. Bonino, mediates between the tendencies I am describing. But they are
32 more romantic than classical, and if they remain neo-Thomists then this is partly
33 because they want to show that all the romanticism one could want is in Aquinas himself.
34 Hence their new stress on Thomas the commentator and Thomas the spiritual master.
35 2 See Aidan Nicholls O.P., Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought
36 (Naples FL: Ave Maria Press, 2008). The sense of lets wait and see in this book is
37 overpowering.
38 3 Readers will realise that what follows is an implicit comment on Fergus Kerrs important
39 and gently amusing book Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians: from Neoscholasticism to
40 Nuptial Mysticism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007) which certainly bends in the classi-
41 cist direction. Yet, in a very Scottish way, Kerr surely remains caught between the dryness of
42 the one option and the passion of the other.
43 4 As evidence that critically mediating theology is less culturally impotent, I would offer the
44 tremendous impact of Communione e Liberazione on Italian cultural, economic, social and
45 political life and the beginning of a transformation of British politics exercised by Radical
46 Orthodoxy through its crucial role in engendering both Red Toryism and Blue Labourism,
47 with their new combination of economic radicalism and ethical conservatism.

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38 John Milbank

1 5 For the new and supreme treatment of this topic, see J-L Chrtien, Symbolique du corps: La
2 tradition chrtienne du Cantique des Cantiques (Paris: PUF, 2005). See also Catherine Pickstocks
3 unpublished paper, The Mystery of the Senses.
4 6 See Jacob Schmutz, La Doctrine mdivale des causes et la thologie de la nature pure
5 (XIIIe-XVIIe sicles in Revue Thomiste, Jan-Juin, 2001, pp. 217264; John Milbank, The
6 Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the debate concerning the supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI:
7 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), pp. 89, 96; Lydia Schumachers unpublished
8 Edinburgh PhD thesis, Divine Illumination in Augustinian and Franciscan Thought; Aaron
9 Riches unpublished Nottingham PhD thesis, Sequela Christi: Towards a Christological
10 Humanism.
11 7 In the case of the Scottish Enlightenment, one sees the admittedly much mutated inuence,
12 via Hutcheson after Shaftesbury, of the Cambridge Platonic conjoining of an intellectualist
13 anti-voluntarism with an equal stress on the sympathetic character of reason as participating
14 in God. In the case of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, the return to the Renaissance against
15 Descartes and Hobbes is yet more marked and the Platonic element is sometimes explicit
16 (Doria, Vico, Genovesi).
17 8 Chrtien, though a philosopher, is arguably the greatest living theologian. His subtlety and
18 penetration is nothing short of extraordinary.
19 9 One suspects that Fergus Kerr and other liberally orthodox writers of his generation remain
20 deeply perturbed by Humanae Vitae. One can agree with them that here the line was drawn in
21 slightly the wrong placewhile remembering that it was drawn in the same place by Adorno
22 and Horkheimer. Yet that a line was drawn at all now seems the more important factor, in the
23 face of the commodifying of reproduction by the market and the Statist biopolitical search for
24 demographic control through the separation of reproduction from love and sex. Opposing
25 sperm and egg donation, alongside most practices of abortion, is now far more important to
26 a radical communitarian politics than worrying about contraception.
27 10 Pierre Rousselot, The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages: a Historical Contribution, trans. Alan
28 Vincelette (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001).
29 11 The Supplement to the Summa Theologiae was compiled by Rainaldo da Piperno based upon
30 Thomass Sentence Commentary. See also Angelo Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, trans. Michell K.
31 Borras (Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), p. 196. Kerr at one
32 point half-concedes that Graham McAleer successfully blends Aquinass rigorous hylomor-
33 phism with recent nuptial mysticism. See Fergus Kerr, Twentieth Century Catholic Theolo-
34 gians, p. 180; Graham McAleer, Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics (New York: Fordham
35 University Press 2005). I thoroughly agree with the main ontological and political theses of
36 this brilliant book and have no idea why McAleer does not see that his own ecstatic
37 reading of Aquinas requires the ultra-ecstatic reading of the Angelic doctor, stressing the
38 Proclean element, provided by myself and Catherine Pickstock in Truth in Aquinas. Cessario
39 and company cannot possibly be his natural allies. Though he confessedly draws from me at
40 least one crucial theme, he seems otherwise mysteriously to hunt for the bits in my writings
41 he can most dissent from.
42 12 See William L. Portier, Thomist Resurgence, Review Essay of Twentieth-Century Catholic
43 Theologians, Communio Vol. 35 no. 3 (2008), pp. 494504.
44 13 See John Paul II, Fides et Ratio 33. I am grateful here to discussions with Aaron Riches,
45 Research Assistant at the Nottingham and Southwell-based Centre of Theology and
46 Philosophy.
47 14 This is not to say that Balthasarswhich one nds already in William Langlands Piers
48 Plowmanis totally incorrect. Indeed, allowing both analogues prevents any literal miscon-
49 strual of such gender attributions to God. However, I think that the comparison of the Spirit
50 to the female is more metaphorically natural, since the breath bearing the Word can also
51 be seen as a Womb bearing the Son. Augustine only rejected this image because of its
52 implication of female equality. Aquinass objection that this makes the Spirit the principle of
53 the Son is avoided if one allows the unthinkable Trinitarian difference whereby the womb
54 itself springs from the child it nonetheless carries. See Joseph Ratzinger, Daughter Zion:
55 Meditations on the Churchs Marian Belief, trans. John M. McDermott (San Francisco, CA:
56 Ignatius Press, 1983), pp. 2529.
57 15 Ralph McInerny, Praeambula dei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, DC:
58 Catholic University Press, 2006).

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1 16 See Rusty Reno, Theology after the Revolution in First Things, May 2007. His assertion
2 here that Lubacs late work A Little Catechesis on Nature and Grace bitterly reverts to a
3 neoscholastic framework is utterly bafing. In fact the book merely repeats in telescoped
4 form his earlier post- Humani Generis position and actually, by citing the pre Humani Generis
5 book which sparked off the entire controversy, Surnaturel, implies his real non-repentance of
6 his original position. I have shown in The Suspended Middle how the also late Pic de la
7 Mirandole obliquely signals an even more radical statement of this position. Also bafing is
8 Kerrs suggestion that Lubac sympathised with Joachim of Fiore when, to the contrary, he
9 sees his anti-Christological spiritualising as the other crucial source (complementing the
10 natura pura) of modern secularity, since it drains concrete historical human forms of sacra-
11 mental signicance. And still more bafing, as others have noted, are Kerrs unwarranted
12 insinuations against Lubacs scholarship, apparently on the elitist grounds that he did not
13 receive a standard Jesuit formation. This amazes me, since I am myself the eternally grateful
14 recipient of Fergus Kerrs utter disdain for elitism in his incredibly generous encouragement
15 of others. In the age of the internet especially, it needs to be said that one is right about
16 Aquinas (or whomever) if one is right in the light of the texts, not by virtue of any pedigree
17 whatsoever. Yet Kerr is discerning from his own perspective in his targeting of Lubac rather
18 than Balthasar as the master dissolver of neoscholasticism. As he rightly indicates, his Barth
19 book shows that Balthasar has not quite escaped that grip after all.
20 17 See Ludger Honnefelder, La mtaphysique comme science transcendentale entre le Moyen ge et
21 les Temps modernes, trans. Isabella Mandrella et al (Paris: PUF, 2002).
22 18 This assumption sometimes allows people to hover inauthentically between objective
23 Religious-Studies style study of theology, committed theology and theologically fruitless
24 inter-religious textual study.
25 19 Ratzinger rightly insists against Walter Kasper that the earthly church must possess an
26 earthly centred reection of its eternal authoritative centredness and that the former cannot
27 be merely secondary in relation to local churches. Otherwise it would be merely an
28 alliance of local bodies and not truly united as the body of Christ and the outcome of
29 countless missions. Yet this need not imply any continued modern downgrading of the
30 authority of local bishops, which downgrading he has, as Pope, indeed started to reverse.
31 See Joseph Ratzinger, The Local Church and the Universal Church: A Response to Walter
32 Kasper in America Vol. 185, no. 16 (November 19, 2001), pp. 78, 1011.
33 20 With respect to Garrigou-Lagranges philosophy of sens commune, Aidan Nichols remarks
34 that he is not G.K. Chesterton!: Reason with Piety, p. 13. To which the response must be no
35 indeed, he was no such philosophical or theological genius with respect to ideas of
36 common sense as the exponent of the romance of orthodoxy. It is remarkable that
37 today French Catholics have a far better appreciation of the theological brilliance of George
38 Macdonald, Chesterton, D.L. Sayers and the Inklings than the general dry run of British and
39 American Catholic thoughtalways anxious, perhaps, to guarantee through its empiricism
40 an Anglo-Saxon character that Catholicism is still perceived to compromise. By comparison,
41 Anglicans and Episcopalians, English by virtue of their religion, seem more readily to
42 cleave to the minority report of the English (and British tradition): the old, spiritual
43 Platonic England of which Coleridge spoke. This then gives them a curiously easier
44 resonance with continental Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

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