Radical Orthodoxy? - A Catholic Enquiry

Laurence Paul Hemming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351906944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand 'Radical Orthodoxy', or be in critical dialogue with it. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, the three principal exponents of Radical Orthodoxy, each enter into dialogue with theologians from the Catholic tradition - a tradition with whose sources and current researches Radical Orthodoxy claims to have much in common. The Introduction explores the issues and tensions involved in Radical Orthodoxy's dialogue with Catholic theology, and David Burrell offers an important evaluation of Radical Orthodoxy in the context of North America. In the first dialogue John Milbank presents one of the clearest expositions of the Radical Orthodoxy programme to date; Fergus Kerr's reply discusses this programme in the wider context of post-war Catholic debate. Catherine Pickstock explores the work of Aquinas to show how Radical Orthodoxy is appropriating the work of past theological giants, and in reply Laurence Hemming asks what questions remain in that process. Graham Ward, Oliver Davies and Lucy Gardner debate the challenges facing contemporary theology, both from the past and the postmodern present. James Hanvey's provocative conclusion opens the way to future debate. Challenging, yet accessibly written, this book represents an important milestone in the critical reception of Radical Orthodoxy. Shedding new light on contemporary issues and current theological enquiry, this book offers important insights to students of theology and those training for ministry, clergy and informed lay people, and everyone who wants to make sense of one of the most demanding yet important debates currently taking place.

PART I
INTRODUCTION

Chapter One

Introduction:
Radical Orthodoxy’s Appeal to
Catholic Scholarship

Laurence Paul Hemming

The debate between Catholic theologians and Radical Orthodoxy¹ began in November 1997,when nearly fifty graduate students and faculty staff crammed into a room in the Divinity Faculty Building in Cambridge for the fortnightly seminar in philosophical theology. The excitement was tangible: students from other faculties sneaked in, fearful of ejection. Nicholas Lash, Norris Hulse Professor (now emeritus) was to deliver a paper on the work of John Milbank, himself then a Reader of the University.

The first meeting of Radical Orthodoxy had taken place only a few months before, in late July, around an ambiguous manifesto which was variously presented as humorous, ironic, or in earnest, and many in the Cambridge theological community either attended, or understood themselves excluded. Radical Orthodoxy has, from the outset, worked through ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’. Lash, the first Catholic to hold a professorial chair in theology in either of the ancient English universities since the Reformation, began by saying “I am going to be rude about John Milbank”, and offered only two mitigations: the need to meet Milbank’s “energetically erudite polemic” with a “countervailing pugnacity”; and “the disagreements that I want to register are set in a much vaster context of agreement and respect”.²

The discussions presented in this book continue that debate, and from much the same perspective. Few would question the excitement Radical Orthodoxy has brought to areas of theological debate in Britain since its publication. The sheer number of review articles, and their occasional acerbity, are testimony enough. More questionable, and fruitfully so, have been Radical Orthodoxy’s (the movement’s) assumptions, claims, and methods. This has been its genius, forcing otherwise treasured presuppositions out into the space of open debate.

The chapters in this volume spring from one such debate, a conference held at Heythrop College in June 1999, at which all three editors of Radical Orthodoxy generously entered into dispute with one Anglican and four Roman Catholic theologians. The exchanges, lively, and keenly argued, were marked by mutual sympathy and regard. Again the place of meeting was packed, this time with faculty members and graduates from mainly British (some North American, and one French) institutions. The same respectful rudeness re-emerged, now replicated in this text.³ It is a rudeness Radical Orthodoxy invites: its refusal to be apologetic (itself an apologetic stance), its pugnacity, and its seemingly unshakeable convictions of inerrancy, all function as stimuli to debate, if correctly understood. These postures force the interlocutor’s response, but they force her or him to think before responding. Self-conspection is the stuff of wiser thinking; challenges of this kind, though rough gymnastics mentally, nevertheless are generosity in disguise. If, in the course of replying, the original thesis is exploded, both provocateur and respondent grow with the result.

Anyone who has taught, or been taught, in the British universities of Oxford and Cambridge, or indeed at Heythrop (where we employ a similar method) will recognise this technique. It is the method of tutorial teaching, of closeting one or two undergraduates for an hour with their written essay and a teacher skilled in the matter at hand. The debate between Lash and Milbank was in many ways no more than this; fifty of us witnessed a tutorial at the highest degree, as if a master were pressing his brightest pupil to a higher wisdom. You may judge Lash’s inspirational success for yourself: Milbank’s later reply, published under the title Intensities, attempts to deal with his critic point for point.⁴ At a time when adversarial debate, and adversity in struggling for better understanding (scholarly or otherwise) are poorly understood or valued, Radical Orthodoxy represents a certain freshness. The error, on our part or theirs, is to mistake gymnastic feats for truth. The gymnasium is a place of simulation; it prepares for obstacles and hardships to be faced beyond the schoolroom if wisdom is truly to be gained; else it is all prowess and pretiosity.

We must put this whole debate in its wider contexts. There is an emerging Catholic theological voice in Britain, of an unusual stamp. Unlike North America, we have no Catholic Universities here. Heythrop College, whose counter-reformation origins as a Jesuit seminary for England (founded in Belgium, at a time when none such was possible, on pain of death, on English soil) is the closest we have yet come, briefly having been a Pontifical Athenæum before finding our current home in the University of London. The Catholic contributors to this book reflect well the spread of Catholics in the academy in Britain; if you would expect to find a Dominican and a Jesuit, so also a secular cleric and, more often now, a lay-person. Most of us, lay or ordained, work in secular or secularised institutions. The debate between Lash and Milbank was more possible in Britain than in many other lands: these two were, after all, members of the same Faculty of Divinity.

Although Cambridge is the birthplace of Radical Orthodoxy, the conference which was pretext for this book took place on Heythrop’s site in London. London is a place of harsher contrasts than Cambridge; a city of extraordinary cultural and social diversity. The postmodern is not only here to be speculatively observed, but is played out in its full euphoria and horror. The capital of ‘Cool Britannia’ boasts amongst the fastest growing incidence of infant tuberculosis in the Western world.

This book is organised in five sections, of which only this first, Introduction, is new. Each of the other four reports a conversation that took place on the day of the conference, under a specific title. The chapters in each section thereby form a unity. The Introduction adds an important comment from a Catholic perspective of Radical Orthodoxy’s emergence on the North American stage. David Burrell, surely one of the finest and most widely respected English-speaking minds in this area of theology, has undertaken his task with characteristic generous acuity. His contribution highlights the differences in the academic situations of North America and Britain, in theology, and amongst Catholics especially. If the middle three sections demonstrate the breadth of engagement of the editors of Radical Orthodoxy, the replies that match them show to good effect the emerging British Catholic voice I have indicated. This voice, well featured by Oliver Davies and Fergus Kerr and further exemplified in James Hanvey’s concluding section, demonstrates its historical perspicacity and close integration with, and understanding of, European Catholic scholarship. One important voice amongst these Romans is Lucy Gardner’s. Stemming from the same High Anglicanism as Radical Orthodoxy, she nevertheless indicates the extent to which theirs is not yet the bespoke voice for their Anglo-Catholic roots.

Who is Radically Orthodox? At various times, quite a number have participated in Radical Orthodoxy meetings. Radical Orthodoxy had twelve contributors in total, though not all (myself included) could comfortably take the label ‘Radically Orthodox’. The editors included a diversity of viewpoints, but not always so comfortably that diversity passed without comment.⁵ On the day of the Heythrop conference, and in the pages here, the three editors refer only to each other as ‘Radically Orthodox’, or tangentially to (the same) one other contributor to Radical Orthodoxy. I would therefore suggest that Radical Orthodoxy the ‘movement’ may have wider supporters, but is foremost the editors of the book itself. Even here, there are significant differences in approach: compare, for example, Graham Ward’s contribution with John Milbank’s.

Individually, and now collectively, they are a formidable force in the English-speaking debate concerning theology and culture. John Milbank is the author of Theology and Social Theory and The Word Made Strange⁶ as well as numerous articles. Catherine Pickstock has authored After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy⁷ and Graham Ward has written on Barth and Derrida, Religion and Critical Theory, as well as edited The Postmodern God and The de Certeau Reader.⁸ He, too, has produced a considerable number of journal contributions.

Of the twelve contributors to Radical Orthodoxy, seven are Anglican, but five are Roman Catholic. In this sense, although routinely classed a High Anglican project, it is also more than this, as Fergus Kerr has noted.⁹ If this volume represents a Catholic enquiry into Radical Orthodoxy, it does not do so as a disputation where theses are ranged, defended and attacked. Indeed, if my analysis below is correct, no single thesis could successfully mark the difference between a Catholic and a Radically Orthodox position.

Radical Orthodoxy, neither the book nor the purported movement, can be explained simply: it operates through a double-sidedness. In the first place, it does indeed seek to re-state a powerful Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy, largely by appeal to Catholic authors. Its resources for doing so can hardly fail to impress. It achieves this orthodox position, however, by an entirely postmodern performance and citation. That there are two sides or faces of Radical Orthodoxy explains why so often criticism has failed to dent its self-confidence or that of its supporters. Unless the critique simultaneously shows how both sides are at work, it addresses only one; every critique of one side of Radical Orthodoxy can be deflected by moves made from the other.

If Radical Orthodoxy makes a strong appeal to Catholic scholarly resources, and above all the work of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, we must question how it does so. Radical Orthodoxy has been criticised for its failure to address the question of its ecclesiology. Gavin D’Costa has observed that although both Catholics and Anglicans contributed to Radical Orthodoxy, yet “neither of these ecclesial communities ever make their real presence felt... it is a church theology, with no ‘accountability’ to any real church”.¹⁰ Whereas D’Costa has properly discerned a reluctance to address the question of the Church amongst at least some of Radical Orthodoxy’s authors, he is, I believe, wrong to diagnose there is no ecclesiology at work in the movement. A Catholic contributing to Radical Orthodoxy could assume that what he (no woman chose to contribute) wrote would be taken as within the frame of Catholic concerns. The ecclesial question was implicit, but no less present for all that; an important indication of the possibilities available in the current ecumenical situation in Britain.

The question is not so simple for the three Anglican editors. What can it mean for Anglicanism that Milbank has routinely appealed to Anselm, Augustine and Aquinas with only the explanation that they are the antidote to Scotus and the deformations (philosophical, yes, but surely theological as well) that followed; or that Pickstock has written extensively on the doctrine of transubstantiation¹¹ and the Latin Mass of the Council of Trent,¹² without particularly raising, for instance, that both transubstantiation and the Latin Mass were disavowed and condemned in Anglicanism’s origins?¹³

Rusty Reno has argued that Radical Orthodoxy inherits an ecclesiology where “predominant Anglican practice could not provide an adequately rich catholic tradition, and the Roman Church, as currently constituted, could not provide an adequate institutional basis for faithfulness to the catholic tradition. Therefore a tradition had to be invented. Of course, the invention was denied”.¹⁴ Colin Gunton has, also from a reformed perspective, drawn attention to “weaknesses” of ecclesiological treatment, concluding “these authors behave as if the Reformation is of no more than tangential relevance to theology”.¹⁵ I am not asking whether they have the right to do this (which is outside my entitlement to comment); rather, my question is how will what they write be received in contexts where Catholic doctrinal formulations are contested? It is here that D’Costa’s question of accountability is of issue.

When Catholics write of transubstantiation, or the dogma of the Assumption of the Mother of God, or the understanding of sacrifice implied in the Mass, we speak to, within, the ecclesia, or assembly, where these things are specifically taken to be true. When non-Catholics speak of the same things, they do so in ecclesial contexts which do not receive these doctrines in the same way. I do not even want to say that these doctrines are matters solely of Catholic concern - ecumenism demands that we Christians address the matter of our doctrinal formulations across the boundaries that divide us. To speak of these doctrines un-self-referentially (that is, without reference to the boundaries that contain us), however, is as Gunton, D’Costa, and others have suggested, to do something very strange indeed.

Surely, however, Rad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Radical Orthodoxy? - A Catholic Enquiry
• Heythrop Studies in Contemporary Philosophy, Religion & Theology
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II The Programme of Radical Orthodoxy
• PART III Radical Orthodoxy’s Retrieval of Theological Sites
• PART IV Radical Orthodoxy and the Question of the Contemporary
• PART V Conclusion
• Index