No True Scotsman (Part Two): The Scotus Story in Radical Orthodoxy
II.
The Scotus Story: Its Presence and Character in the Radical Orthodoxy Movement
Recently, this “Scotus Story” is most typically associated
with the movement of “Radical Orthodoxy” that emerged mostly amongst
Anglo-Catholic theologians in Britain in the mid-1990’s. As James K. A. Smith puts it in his excellent
introduction to the movement “there is a sense in which [Radical Orthodoxy’s]
own identity is narratival and thus must be articulated within and by this
story [of Duns Scotus’ legacy].”[1] Key to this is the broader contention (by no
means limited or dependent upon the Scotus thesis)[2]
that “aspects of late medieval theological thought underpin later
characteristically ‘modern’ ideas.”[3]
While we cannot get into details here, there is a bit more
variation in this story than is typically suggested by Radical Orthodoxy’s
detractors. William Cavanaugh for
example, though he agrees with much of the general theological critique of
modern political and philosophical thought that Radical Orthodoxy puts forward,
and was one of the original contributors to their manifesto volume, does not
include the “Scotus Story” in any of his major works which focus on other more
proximate segments of history.[4]
Conor Cunningham spends extensive time on Scotus in his
complicated work, Genealogy of Nihilism, focusing
mainly on Scotus’ elevation of contingency.
He argues that ultimately Scotus’ definition of contingency—“I do not
call contingent that which is not necessary, or not always, but that the
opposite of which could have happened at the very same time it actually
did”—puts “nothingness” at the core of all things which could always have been
exactly otherwise than they are.[5] Cunningham believes this concept of
contingency undermines any notion of concrete identity mirroring God—for humans
in particular it undermines any sense of the Imago Dei. He sees Scotus as part of a broader story, however,
tracing Cunningham’s own neologism “meontology” back to Plotinus’
neo-Platonism.[6]
Michael Hanby, while not necessarily disagreeing with the
“Scotus Story” of his compatriots, focuses more on how reception of Augustine
was distorted through semi-Pelagianism and Stoicism, ultimately leading to
Augustine being read through Descartes.[7] Likewise, Johannes Hoff (while not strictly
speaking self-identifying with Radical Orthodoxy) notes that while “I agree
with John Milbank’s thesis that the historical decisions that led to Immanuel
Kant’s accomplished nihilism presupposed Duns Scotus’ univocal turn as a conditio sine qua non”, he caveats that
his thesis “fails to support” the idea that Duns Scotus is somehow solely to
blame for Western nihilism.[8] Small comfort for Duns fans, no doubt. This leads Hoff to focus less on Scotus, and
more on the concept of linear perspective and mathematical space developed by
Fillipo Brunelleschi and others. Far
from being the invention of moden science, the “disenchanted” mathematicized
and mechanized worldview is a product of the arts in Renaissance Italy.[9] This does not get Scotus off the hook with
Hoff though, as he mentions in passing at several points that this “representationalist”
notion of space that Descartes, and then 17th century science
elaborate is the legacy of “Bacon, Duns
Scotus [emphasis added], Ockham, and Alberti.”[10]
Graham Ward—one of the founding members of Radical
Orthodoxy—spends little time on the Scotus Story, though he displays implicit
agreement with it. Rather than the
concept of contingency, as with Cunningham, Ward promotes what he terms an
“analogical worldview” in his exploration of how architectural representation
of space and time are not neutral but signify a web of signs and concepts as
dense as any book or poem. As a
consequence he (mostly implicitly) pushes against any concept of “univocity of
being” between God and creatures. The
only real moments he discusses either Scotus or Ockham (at least in one of his
major works, Cities of God) are in
regards to how they view the presence of Christ in the Eucharist;[11]
though he does in passing remark upon how Scotus’ theory of univocity broke the
world into pieces that no longer relate to analogical wholes.[12]
Adrian Pabst in his recent demanding work Metaphysics: The Invention of Hierarchy,
(which is probably also the most sophisticated historical narrative variation
of Radical Orthodoxy so far) combines the “Scotus Story” with several other
strands that he sees as intersecting with one another to create the lamentable
modern condition:
[Much of
contemporary philosophy and theology] relies upon questionable reading of the
origin and the nature of the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern.’ … There was never
any absolute, irreversible break that gave rise to a coherent system of ideas
and institutions we commonly call ‘modernity.’
Rather, there are profound continuities between the late Middle Ages and
the modern era that continue to shape our ‘postmodern condition’ … Indeed both
modern philosophy and theology emerged from the confluence of three significant
shifts within the ‘Western’ traditions of late medieval scholasticism: first of
all, the Avicennian primacy of essence over existence …; second, the Scotist
destruction of (what later would be validly be described as) the Thomist analogia entis, in favor of the
univocity of being … ; and third, the Suarezian priority of metaphysics as the
science of general being over theology as the science of revelation and the
concomitant separation of ‘pure nature’ from the supernatural. … In turn [these
conceptions] underpin three traditions that have dominated philosophy ever
since: first, the rationalist or idealist transcendentalism of Descartes,
Hobbes, Wolff, and Kant; second, the empiricist or vitalist immanentism of
Spinoza, Locke, Smith, and Bergson; third, the residually transcendental
science of ontology masquerading as an atheological, pure philosophy (from
Husserl and Heidegger via Sartre to Deleuze and, perhaps to a lesser extent,
Marion).[13]
David Bentley Hart—who like Hoff above has, to my knowledge,
never claimed the title of “Radical Orthodoxy,” but finds his theology
comporting quite well with its sensibilities[14]—nevertheless
critiques Catherine Pickstock’s general treatment of Scotus in his review essay
of her book that appeared in the journal Pro
Ecclesia.[15] After surveying what he considers to be a few
minor infelicities in Pickstock’s study, Hart turns to her treatment of Scotus
and notes, “she seems to have exceeded her expertise here.” So great is “her (quite unnecessary) desire
to provide a precise genealogy of
modernity that she distorts Scotus’ logic considerably in order to advance her
plot.” Hart goes on to note that her
reading is hardly surprising given that it is the general one associated with
“Radical Orthodoxy,” nonetheless “Scotus certainly deserves better to be
treated as merely the first modern.”[16]
The real perpetrators of the so-called “Scotus Story” are
John Milbank, Gavin Hyman, and above all, Catherine Pickstock. Hyman follows the narrative of Milbank and
Pickstock to a “T” so we will not deal with him here.[17] It is truly difficult to exaggerate the
importance Scotus has for Milbank and Pickstock. For Milbank, Scotus represents “the turning
point in the destiny of the West.”[18] Such statements can be indefinitely
multiplied across the span of his oeuvre.[19] In
one sense, the turn to Scotus is a move explicitly made to counter certain
alternative stories that could be told.[20] From a theological standpoint, it runs
counter to what Hanby has deemed the “grim paternity” narrative of Augustine’s (supposedly)
ill-fated legacy,[21]
or what T.F. Torrance in more forceful terms has called the “Latin Heresy.”[22] As Morwenna Ludlow points out then, the
narratival character of Radical Orthodoxy is not necessarily unique, it is just
that Milbank is doing something equal yet opposite to someone like Torrance:
The dramatis personae of
Milbank’s genealogies (Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart)
are rather different from those of Torrance (Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzus,
Calvin) but the underlying method is somewhat similar. Like Torrance,
Milbank’s method has the tendency to create not only theological heroes, but
genealogies of villains which are connected by some fundamental theological or
philosophical loyalty (compare Torrance’s ‘Platonist’ line of Origen, Basil,
and Gregory of Nyssa, with Milbank’s ‘Aristotelian’ villains, such as Duns
Scotus and Descartes). … [T]he nature of such genealogies is to give structure
to Christian history, to delineate the contours of the development of Christian
doctrine: they often presuppose a period of decline in Christian theology
beyond which one has to stretch to a better age.[23]
A similar comparison could be made between Gunton and
Milbank (with Gunton generally finding Torrance’s narrative more
favorable). For example in The One, The Three, and the Many Gunton
targets Milbank’s generally quite rosy picture of Augustine and the
neo-Platonic strands of Christianity, saying he finds both this and the general
thesis of modernity arising out of nominalism to be unsatisfactory.[24] Just a page later however, Gunton himself
accuses Ockham of a doctrine of “Platonic abstraction” (!) which loses the
particular and sets the stage for some of modernity’s problems. This odd charge of “Platonism” in Ockham’s
case allows Gunton to telescope the narrative of Ockham’s deficiencies back all
the way to his previously laid critiques of Augustine’s similar flaws. For it turns out, Gunton found Milbank’s
story of modernity rising out of nominalism deficient not for the ideas it
attempts to put forward, but because on Milbank’s account according to Gunton,
modernity “arises too suddenly.”[25]
For Gunton then, linking nominalist deficiencies back to an
Augustinan Platonism is the historiographical equivalent of a slow pressure
cooker, allowing certain destructive ideas sufficient time to marinate in the
Western tradition. Case in point,
Augustine’s deficient Trinitarian theology is connected to a similar deficiency
in Ockham. Milbank, too, believes
Ockham’s trinitarianism to be deficient, for with nominalism “following Duns
Scotus [!] the Trinity loses its significance as a prime location for
discussing will and understanding in God and the relationship of God to the
world.”[26] Gunton largely agrees with the diagnosis—its
just that he wants Augustine and the neo-Platonists to be thrown in the fire,
while leaving Scotus (mostly)[27] unscathed.
If nothing else, this is a particularly interesting wrinkle
in the “Scotus Story” (broadly conceived), which still attempts to keep a
diagnosis of many of the problems that nominalism and voluntarism wrought, but
ultimately uncouples the critique from univocity, for which Gunton in his later
work Act and Being praises Scotus.[28] In a particularly fascinating moment, though
he is not making a direct historical connection, Gunton nonetheless links the
“positive” or kataphatic theology of Scotus to Gregory Nazianzus of all people,
thus grafting him into Gunton’s general love of all things Cappadocian and the
approved Torrancean hall of heroes—which, aside from Athanasius and Cyril of
Alexandria, lauds Gregory in particular.[29] Later on in his work, Gunton will take up
univocity himself saying the Scotist concept is demanded by a robust notion of
the incarnation.[30]
So what then does Milbank believe he achieves by targeting
Scotus? Part of what this narrative does
for Milbank is demonstrate the idea that theology’s seeming obsolescence and
marginalization in the modern period did not in fact come about because it was
conquered by an external, superior force (say, philosophy, or the
sciences). Rather theology went through
what is better described as a sort of self-marginalization when it made illicit
transitions away from a theology based on analogy and participation in
God.
This self-marginalization of theology does not mean theology
disappeared. As part of this “Scotus
Story” (to stick with that convenient title), univocal theology allowed
theological concepts to migrate into secular territory, and then eventually
forget that they were theological. What
was divine became nature, or society, or even the will of the human individual:
… only
the theological model [of voluntaristic sovereignty] permits one to
construct the mythos of the sovereign
power, or sovereign person, so that it is not the case of ‘essentially’ secular
and pragmatic realities being temporarily described in antique theological
guise. … Only within the terms of
[this] new theology is divine sanction [in modernity] pushed into the remote
background … It is when theology finally drops
out of modern theories of sovereignty that the real moment of mystification
occurs, because here the ‘mythic’ [theological] character of sovereignty is
forgotten.[31]
These two concepts—that theology was not conquered by an
alien force, but self-marginalized through what can in hindsight be seen as
illicit theological transformations, and the specific nature of this
self-marginalization allowed theological ideas to be transplanted into what
became secular discourse—essentially define Milbank’s task of historical
genealogy. For what this means is that
theology can remain a “meta-discourse” over purportedly secular,
“non-theological” theory and practice.
By unearthing this historically theological character of purportedly
secular phenomena, Milbank can demonstrate a) that in order to function
properly secular concepts must presuppose a theological ontology or b) if they
do not suppose a theological ontology, they will have demonstrable holes in
their logic and practice where the theology should have been. These holes are the attack points that Milbank
exploits to unravel modern secular constructs by displaying that they are not
“scientific” per se, but theological heresies.
It is a peculiar feature of Milbank’s use of Scotus that he
hardly ever engages the Oxford theologian at any length. Daniel Horan is quite right when he points
out that beyond some of the initial characterizations, Milbank does not really
advance or develop his claims in regards to Scotus.[32] Indeed, if one were simply reading his most famous
work, Theology and Social Theory,
though Scotus does show up in a few key places, one would hardly come to the
conclusion that he would become Milbank’s go-to whipping boy.
In fact, though major critiques of Radical Orthodoxy’s use
of Scotus have emerged[33]—whatever
their own legitimacy might be I leave aside in this essay—Milbank does not
answer them but largely defers to the work of Catherine Pickstock. In fact in his most recent work Milbank
functionally ignores any critiques leveled at his understanding of Scotus and
simply doubles-down on the Scotus narrative.[34]
While Pickstock is the most in-depth proponent of the
“Scotus Story” amongst Radical Orthodoxy, she also is a bit more cautious than
Milbank in that she does not want to conflate “voluntarism” and “nominalism” in
the same way he does.[35] Moreover, she is not quite as reductive as is
typically represented by many who decry the “Scotus Story.” It is only fair to state that Scotus is not
the sole focus of her story, merely the most exemplary. She writes regarding recent efforts in
scholarship to trace key shifts in the Middle Ages leading in the direction of
Modern philosophy, and notes “Duns Scotus has been seen as central to this
change, but by no means its sole instigator or contributor.” She continues and cites other important
figures: “Avicenna, Gilbert Porreta, Roger Bacon, Peter Olivi, Bonaventure,
Henry of Ghent, William of Ockham, Jean Buriden.” Moreover she does not want to present this shift
as a crude “before and after” for even “if the break from the analogical
worldview became most marked in the fourteenth-century, nevertheless it is
clear that tendencies in this direction had been put in place since at least
the twelfth century.”[36]
Nonetheless, the standard features of the story are present
in, and elaborated upon, in her work:
Duns Scotus asserted the metaphysical
priority of Being over both the infinite and the finite alike. Thus God is deemed ‘to be’ in the same
univocal manner as creatures, and although God is distinguished by an
‘intensity of being’ He nonetheless remains within, or subordinate to the
category of Being (which now becomes the sole object of metaphysics).[37]
And this, much like the rest of Radical Orthodoxy, is not
some obscure point for Pickstock. “Given
that attempts to improve society in a secular way via the state and market have
so visibly failed, perhaps this revised genealogy which stresses the legacy of
a distorted religious theory and practice, could also point us indirectly
toward a more serious alternative future polity than the liberal and postmodern
critiques.”[38] Indeed, both modern and postmodern themselves
merely represent “a certain middle ages” and so are not new, but non-identical
and distorted repetitions of the Christian past.[39]
[1] James K. A. Smith, Introducing
Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2004), 89-90. Cf. A much more
critical take in Wayne Hankey, “Radical Orthodoxy’s Poesis: Ideological Historiography and Anti-Modern Polemic,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly,
80 (2006): 1-21.
[2] For example, see the work of Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the
Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), e.g. 2: “Maurice
Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and
Pierre Bourdieu are just a few among the subsequent generation of French
intellectuals who credited [George Bataille] with inspiring significant turning
points or departures in their thought.
That Bataille did so as a practicing medievalist, however, has been all
but forgotten, the casualty of a presentism that continues in large part to
define the historiography of modern critical thought.”
[3] Catherine Pickstock, “Modernity and Scholasticism: A
Critique of Recent Invocations of Univocity,” Antonianum 78 (2003): 3-47.
Quote on page 3.
[4] No mention of Scotus in Torture
and Eucharist (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998); The Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time (New
York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2002); or The
Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
[5] Conor Cunningham, Genealogy
of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2002), 31f.
[6] Ibid., 3-9.
[7] Michael Hanby, Augustine
and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), esp. 106-181.
[8] Johannes Hoff, The Analogical
Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s
Publishing, 2013), xxii.
[9] Ibid., 44-60.
[10] Ibid., 57.
[11] Graham Ward, Cities
of God (London: Routledge, 2001), 155-160.
[12] Ibid., 190.
[13] Adrian
Pabst, Metaphysics: The Creation of
Hierarchy (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2012), 385-386
[14] David Bentley Hart, The
Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003): “Western theology made its own, quite substantial contribution
to modern ‘nihilism’: when nominalism largely severed the perceptible world
from the analogical index of divine transcendence, and thus reduced divine
freedom to a kind of ontic voluntarism …” (133); “Being itself could now be conceived of only
in absolutely opposite terms: as a veil, or an absence [of meaning]…The entire
pathology of the modern and postmodern [of Derrida, Levinas, Foucault, Nancy,
Lyotard, Deleuze] can be diagnosed as a multifarious narrative of the
unrepresentable sublime, according to the paradigm of Kant’s critical project:
what pure reason extracts from experience and represents to itself is neutral
appearance, separated by an untraversable abyss from everything ‘meaningful..’”
(44-45, 81).
[15] David Bentley Hart,
“Review Essay: Catherine Pickstock, After
Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy,” Pro Ecclesia, IX no.3: 367-372.
[16] Ibid., 370.
[17] For example, his most recent work: Gavin Hyman, A Short History of Atheism (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2010), esp. 47-81.
[18] John Milbank, The
Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 44.
[19] For a particularly pure example that hits all of the high
notes in one go, Cf. John Milbank, On the
Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene: Wipf and Stock
Publishers, 2009), 159: “Scotus anticipated transcendental philosophy, idolized
God, obscured the ontological difference, and implied (unlike Augustine or
Aquinas) that any being can be fully ‘present.’
In this fashion the Oxford theologian set us on the intellectual course
to modernity.”
[20] Colin Gunton, The
One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 138-139, accuses Aquinas,
arguing his form of analogy was what caused the “erection of theological structures
independently of Christology and pneumatology,” and was the “underlying cause
of modern atheism.”
[21] Hanby, Augustine and
Modernity, remarks:
“In its theological guise, the reassessment of Augustine is part and parcel of
Christianity’s ongoing self-assessment, especially in the West,” and, “in its
philosophical and political guise, it is part of culture’s ongoing reassessment
of Christianity,” in relation to new, secular forms of life and thought”
(6). These
connections of modern systematic theology’s historical narratives “have
provided the architecture for a grand story of modern origins now taken as
axiomatic by thinkers with little in common.
And Augustine’s place within them is crucial as one of the West’s great
metaphysical pillars” (135). Karen Kilby, “Aquinas, the
Trinity, and the Limits of Understanding,” International
Journal of Systematic Theology no.7 vol.4 (October, 2005): 415-416, also
rightly acknowledges how this narrative spills into readings of Thomas Aquinas
(or vice-versa, backwards to Augustine).
She writes: “The need for this [Trinitarian] rehabilitation stems from
the fact that, in the broader revival of Trinitarian theology over the last
forty years or so, Aquinas has often been presented as a classic example of
thinking about the Trinity gone wrong, trinitarian theology done in such a way
as to make the doctrine seem sterile, confusing, and irrelevant. … Thomas is
rarely censured in isolation: most often the context is a criticism of the
whole Western tradition of Trinitarian reflection. The pattern was set by Augustine, and it is
his influence … that is the root of the problem, a problem which, according to
many, is seen today in the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity so easily
appears to be an intellectual puzzle with no relevance to the faith of most
Christians.”
[22] T.F. Torrance, “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy,” Scottish Journal of Theology 39:6
(1986): 461-482.
[23] Morwenna
Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and
Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 270-271.
[24] Gunton, The One, The
Three, and The Many, 55n.20.
[25] Ibid.
[26] John Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason 2nd Ed. (New York:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 15.
[27] Gunton does critique Scotus for not going far enough to
subvert typical scholastic method (Colin Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003), 69).
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid., 68.
[30] Ibid., 155.; Cf. T.F.
Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), e.g. 319-322.
[31] Milbank, Theology and
Social Theory, 27.
[32] Horan, Postmodernity
and Univocity, 17.
[33] For example Mary Beth Ingham, “Re-Situating Scotist
Thought,” Modern Theology 21 (2005),
who argues that Radical Orthodoxy have “moved from interpretations about Scotus
to affirmations about his thought” while neglecting to consider Scotist thought
from within the considerations of his “Franciscan assumptions” (609); Richard
Cross, “’Where Angels Fear to Tread’: Duns Scotus and Radical Orthodoxy,” Antonianum 76 (2001) who contests the
“accuracy of the various accounts” of Radical Orthodoxy (7); and in a seminal
essay, Thomas Williams, “The Doctrine of Univocity is True and Salutary,” Modern Theology, 21 (2005): 575-585,
also aims at Radical Orthodoxy. Either
univocity is true, says Williams, or God-talk is unintelligible.
[34] John Milbank, Beyond
Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People
(Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), essentially the first half of the
book constitutes a forceful reiteration of the Scotus story (19-114) by
focusing on four key areas—what Milbank terms the “four pillars of modern
philosophy.” These are 1) univocity 2)
the “mirroring” or “representative” theory of cognition 3) primacy of the
possible over the actual and 4) causal “concurrence” of God and creature on the
same plane of existence. All four of
these are linked to Duns Scotus and provide the first movement of ontology that
leads into Milbank’s discussion on politics.
[35] Catherine Pickstock, After
Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (London: Routledge,
1998), 122-166.
[36] Catherine Pickstock, “Duns Scotus: His Historical
Significance,” Modern Theology 21:4
(2005): 543.
[37] Pickstock, After
Writing, 122.
[38] Catherine Pickstock, “Postmodernism,” in William Cavanaugh
and Peter Scott, eds., The Blackwell
Companion to Political Theology (Massachusetts: Blacwell Publishing, 2007),
471.
[39] Ibid., 475.
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