Exult, Adam and Eve, do not hide any longer as you once did in Paradise; for seeing you naked, the Lord has come to clothe you in the first garment. Christ is manifested to renew all of creation. (Troparion from Vespers for 2nd January)
I have already posted an initial tranche of photos. These are the contents of the portfolio I prepared for the OU course ‘Digital photography: creating and sharing better images’. I plan to add further images on a regular basis (up to the limit of 1000 allowed by Flickr’s entry level) and will post an entry here whenever I do so.
if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is (Marcel Proust, The Captive, p.277)
And that is precisely what the great novelists, poets, musicians, artists, photographers, etc. enable us to do.
In recent years, John Duns Scotus has come under concerted attack from the school of theology known as Radical Orthodoxy. Until now, their treatment of the Subtle Doctor has met with surprisingly little resistance: those medievalists who know better have largely confined their critiques to specialist journals and have been ignored both by the proponents of Radical Orthodoxy and the wider theological world. However, in this little book the Franciscan Dan Horan offers a useful summary of both Radical Orthodoxy’s Scotus myth and the critiques of Scotus scholars in the hope of setting the record straight.
The structure is straightforward: In the first two chapters, Horan summarizes the charges laid against Scotus by Radical Orthodoxy, then outlines the influence of their account of Scotus on contemporary theology and beyond. Chapter 1, ‘Radical Orthodoxy’s Use of John Duns Scotus’, traces the development of the Scotus myth from John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock to Conor Cunningham, Graham Ward, and Gavin Hyman. Horan clearly shows how Radical Orthodoxy presents Scotus as the antithesis of Thomas Aquinas. Since their appropriation of Thomism is at the heart of their anti-secular project, we thus find Scotus being identified as the key figure in the emergence of modernity (John Milbank), the father of nihilism (Conor Cunningham), and even denounced as a heretic (Gavin Hyman). In chapter 2, Horan offers examples of the way in which Radical Orthodoxy’s Scotus story has been adopted by a wide range of contemporary theologians and philosophers, including Stanley Hauerwas, Charles Taylor, and Terry Eagleton.
The remaining chapters set out the case for the defence. Chapter 3 outlines the major critiques of Radical Orthodoxy’s understanding of Scotus’s theology. In summary, he argues that Milbank et al. have misunderstood Scotus’s doctrine of univocity. By treating what is essentially a semantic theory as a metaphysical one, they create the false impression that Scotus has reduced the difference between God and creatures to a merely quantitative one, thus fatally distorting Western theology and enabling the emergence of the concept of the secular. Furthermore, he points out that their entire narrative is dependent on a narrow range of secondary sources and shows little evidence of engagement with Scotus himself (beyond a few well-known texts available in translation in introductory readers). Horan concludes the case for the defence in chapter 4 by offering a corrective to Radical Orthodoxy’s reading of Scotus’s doctrine of univocity. Finally, in a brief conclusion, he suggests that far from being the root of all postmodern evil, Scotus may in fact offer contemporary theologians a constructive way forward in engaging with postmodern culture.
The book is not without its flaws. In particular, I found it rather repetitive. Strangely, he chooses to leave his explanation of univocity (and other crucial Scotist concepts) until after his substantive critique of Radical Orthodoxy’s view. As a result, he has to anticipate his explanation more than once while presenting his critique. The impression of repetitiveness is reinforced by his decision to structure his overview of Radical Orthodoxy via its key personalities rather than thematically. By contrast, his corrective explanation of Scotus felt rather compressed. It would also have been good for there to have been rather more in his conclusion about how Scotus might be used to develop an alternative to Radical Orthodoxy’s eccentric neo-Thomist agenda.
However, those are minor caveats. Horan has done the wider theological community an important service by making accessible the reservations of leading Scotus scholars and thus raising important questions about the foundations of Radical Orthodoxy. This book should be required reading for anyone seeking a critical understanding of Radical Orthodoxy.
NB This is not a review, just some notes in passing.
It certainly has the appearance of an introduction to the subject. Its ten chapters cover
And it does all this in fewer than 200 pages. A further indication of its introductory nature is that it lacks the extensive footnotes one might expect in a more advanced treatise. It doesn’t even have a bibliography or suggestions for further reading.
But the list of chapter titles hints that this is no straightforward exposition of Orthodox Christianity in general. It clearly does not follow the structure of the Nicene Creed. Nor does it attempt to create some kind of catechism. Rather, it seems to be Yannaras’s own personal take on Orthodoxy. This is the perspective of someone with a firm grounding in mid twentieth-century Continental philosophy. Further, it is written with a degree of sophistication that makes me wonder who his intended readers were. An introduction to Orthodox theology for philosophy graduates perhaps?
Just a couple of caveats on what he says in these chapters:
He defines the Church thus,
the Church is the gathering in the Eucharistic meal. Not a foundation, not a religious institution, not a governing hierarchy, not buildings and offices and organizational arrangement. It is the people of God gathered in the ‘breaking of the bread’ and the ‘blessing of the cup’. It is the children of God who are scattered abroad (Jn 11.52 RSV) who are gathered now in the unity of life of the ecclesial body. (p. 122)
But, having defined the Church in this way, he goes on to focus on: the paschal meal; renewal of life; Pentecost; existential transformation; ‘transubstantiation’ and ‘symbol’; mysteries; the ecclesiastical hierarchy; synods, primacy and authority; and religious alienation. He says nothing about the gathered community that is sent out into the world at the end of the Eucharist. But we are not Church only when we are gathered together in the event of the Eucharist. That event may define us as the Church, but we remain the Church – the body of Christ – when we are scattered abroad to go our separate ways. During the week, we are the body of Christ acting for the Kingdom of God in the world. And, at the start of each week, we gather together again in the Eucharist to reaffirm that this is who we are. So, it is not enough for Yannaras stop where he does. There is a desperate need for a rigorous analysis of what it means to be a member of the body of Christ acting for the Kingdom in the world.
My other caveat regards the distinction he draws between Orthodoxy and western Christianity. He idealizes the former and with it the Hellenistic contribution to Greek Orthodoxy. By contrast, he demonizes western Christianity as a heresy that ‘has transformed radically the course of human history’ (p. 154), drawing a clear line from Augustine, through Scholasticism, to western European culture and modernity. This western Christianity and culture has, he believes, poisoned contemporary Orthodoxy. While I think he is right to position Orthodoxy as a radically countercultural movement, I don’t think it helps our understanding of either Orthodoxy or western Christianity by exaggerating their differences in this way. Various commentators on Yannaras assure us that his position is actually much more nuanced than it appears to be here. Hopefully, I will discover those nuances for myself as I continue my dive into his works.
I recently came across #ShowYourStripes , a website that offers a variety of charts to help visualize the extent of global heating over the ...
