Ormerod on Milbank

Milbank's radical orthodoxy rejects the significance of the general categories. [Doran, Essay 25:10n16.]

The "challenging if not devastating critique by Neil Ormerod": "'It is Easy to See': The Footnotes of John Milbank." Philosophy and Theology 11/2 (1999) 257-64. [Doran, Essay 25:10n16.]

Hauerwas inspiration for Radical Orthodoxy

Just learned that Hauerwas is actually a major inspiration for Radical Orthodoxy (see McMahon in Heythrop Journal). This does not, of course, mean that they are saying the same thing - I find myself more in sympathy with Hauerwas than with RO.

Secularism, the Scotist notion of being, and India

Milbank's bete noire - as, interestingly, also Lonergan's - is Duns Scotus and his equivocal notion of being, applicable equally to both God and creatures. It is this notion of being that made possible an account of the world as apart from God, and provided the basis for the concepts of pure nature and the secular in Western modernity.

Certainly Sankara's understanding of Being / Sat is not equivocal: even the most extreme monist interpreters would admit that, to the point of actually regarding the world as maya understood as illusion.

So: where are we?

What do we need to do as Christian thinkers in India? What kind of reading of the Western and Indian tradition? Our complexity, which is largely unknown to the West except for people like Clooney, is the new post-inculturation opposition between Brahmanic Hinduism and the subaltern / Dalit sensibility. Yet perhaps we cannot simply jettison the past. I am for engagement with it - even the Brahmanic past.

Lonergan is not 'sexy'

Extremely interesting remark by McMahon in his article on Radical Orthodoxy and Lonergan: "Lonergan's project is not 'sexy'." ["Theology and the Redemptive Mission of the Church: A Catholic Response to Milbank's Challenge." Heythrop Journal 51/5 (2010) 788.]


He goes on: "His writing is precise and seldom given over to rhetorical flourish or the playfulness found in much RO writing." [788.]

I think this remark is remarkable in the way it captures an essential difference between Lonergan and much other, extremely attractive, writing: Heidegger, for example (but not Gadamer), and now certainly Milbank, Pickstock and company.


In fact, what Milbank says about Aquinas in comparison to Heidegger might well be applied to Lonergan in comparison to Milbank and his companions: "Some thinkers, like Heidegger, appear on the surface to be obscure and deep, but on analysis are revealed as offering all too clear and readily statable positions. But as Rudi te Velde very well intimates, with Aquinas the opposite pertains. Only superficially is he clear, but on analysis one discovers that he does not a t all offer us a decently confined ‘Anglo-Saxon’ lucidity....” [John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) 20.]

The varieties of postmodernism

Certainly one of the gains of recent reading is the realization that there are more varieties of postmodernism that I have been given to understand.

Perhaps I - we - have been under the impression that postmodernism means only people like Derrida and Rorty, and Caputo following Derrida, and of course Lyotard, Foucault, Irigaray, Vattimo...

But there are some other, perhaps unwelcome, bedfellows: the recent discovery is of Radical Orthodoxy, with John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, Gerard Loughlin; the postliberalism of Lindbeck and Frei; the post-postliberalism of Stanley Hauerwas and Kevin Vanhoozer; Alasdair MacIntyre. Then also the willingness of the RO people to include Balthasar as one of their inspirations.

RO and the post-postliberals, for example - and here they have common cause with Caputo - mount a vicious attack on secularism. (I wonder whether Hauerwas' remarks on capitalism are echoes of Milbank.) But, where RO is anti-authoritarianism and anti-pope, including anti-John Paul II (I think), Hauerwas is clearly pro-John Paul II, and is even accused of being too Catholic. But he remains unfazed.

Radical Orthodoxy on faith and reason

I was trying to find out how Radical Orthodoxy understands the relationship of faith and reason in Aquinas. They certainly do not deny that Aquinas has this distinction. However, they say that it is far more porous than usually thought.

So: in what way more porous? I quote my summary:

Milbank hopes to show that the distinguished approaches “can at the very most be thought of only as distinct phases within a single gnoseological extension exhibiting the same qualities throughout. Then we will further establish that even the phases are not clearly bounded in terms of what can or cannot be achieved.... Having established these points concerning Aquinas’s method, we shall then show how his ‘rational’ treatment of Creation is informed by faith, while his exposition of the revealed Trinity is in fact highly demonstrative. [So what’s new about this?] Throughout we hope to show how a ‘radically orthodox’ position (primarily characterized by a more persistent refusal of distinct ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ phases and a consequent assault upon an autonomous naturalism as ‘nihilistic’), can indeed be rendered as an attentive reading of Aquinas.” [21.]

So the rejection of the natural-supernatural distinction – see de Lubac – is fundamental to RO. Wonderful. Something to be chewed upon! See Guy Mansini, who calls this the fundamental theological point – a watershed – in the 20^th century. See also Michael Stebbins’ excellent reading of Lonergan on this point in his The Divine Initiative. See my notes on this topic somewhere – perhaps on this blog. I have also downloaded an article by Raymond Moloney, “De Lubac and Lonergan on the Supernatural.” But Stebbins is far superior on the point.

My feeling: what RO is trying to say might not be that different - or radically new - when compared to someone like Lonergan. In fact, my feeling is that Lonergan will be far superior on the proper understanding of the natural-supernatural distinction. From my cursory reading of Stebbins, I have the impression that Lonergan even corrects de Lubac, and certainly brings a far more sophisticated reading to the distinction. 

Whatever: I must admit that Mansini - despite his snide remarks on Lonergan - seems right on when he identifies the distinction as a watershed in 20th century philosophy. 

Metaphysics and the sciences

I am reading ch. 14 of Insight, on the relation of metaphysics to the sciences and to common sense: metaphysics conceived as the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being takes the results of science and common sense, reverses their counterpositions, and integrates them.

A very precise relationship between metaphysics and science / common sense.

Also the - perhaps so far unique to Lonergan - idea that forms are obtained, not by (descriptive) common sense, but by (explanatory) science. That the insights of common sense, far from arriving - automatically, as it were - at the forms of things, are actually linguistic insights, and they give us the ability to deal with the world. But that the true understanding or explanations of things is to be obtained by the respective science. (And here, as far as common sense is concerned, plenty of echoes with postmoderns like Rorty.... My feeling that what Rorty says fits in very well with what Lonergan says about common sense.)

How, I wonder, would Radical Orthodoxy conceive of the relationship between metaphysics and science? Or perhaps there is no relationship? Not likely.

Certainly both Lonergan and RO meditate / take seriously the idea of theology as the queen of the sciences. The question is to pinpoint the differences, for differences there do seem to be. RO is aggressively anti-secular, and perhaps also anti-other-religions.

Radical Orthodoxy and Lonergan

I was searching for someone engaging Radical Orthodoxy and Lonergan, and here is one such: Christopher McMahon, "Theology and the Redemptive Mission of the Church: A Catholic Response to Milbank's Challenge." Heythrop Journal 51/5 (2010) 781-94. I have just glanced through the article, but there does not, however, seem to be any reflection on the natural-supernatural distinction.

Radical Orthodoxy and Balthasar

It would seem that Radical Orthodoxy is not averse to Balthasar. Several of the essays (see Loughlin and Bauerschmidt) in Radical Orthodoxy quote him, if not actually study him, with approval, though there is also the occasional disagreement and 'correction' of perspective.

Aidan Nichols and Radical Orthodoxy

I have been dipping into the work of Aidan Nichols as well as Radical Orthodoxy, and just now came across an interesting interaction between the two in Nichols' Christendom Awake: On Re-energizing the Church in Culture (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999). In his introduction he says:

At the beginning of the decade a courageous and encouragingly influential study was dedicated by its author, Dr John Milbank of Peterhouse, Cambridge, to 'the remnants of Christendom'. (xii)

However, in the note Nichols makes note of his own caveats in his essay, "Non tali auxilio: John Milbank's Suasion to Orthodoxy," New Blackfriars 73/861 (1992) 326-32.

Nichols also quotes Gerard Loughlin, another proponent of Radical Orthodoxy, in the same introduction.