from 1992

Radical Orthodoxy: the Cambridge theological movement (from 1992)

Pickstock: a theological movement that arose in Cambridge in the 1990s around a return to the Christian Platonic vision of participation in being and a critique of secular reason. Its thinkers trace the loss of that vision from Duns Scotus to Kant, reject a divide between nature and grace, look for an ‘intensified orthodoxy’ in Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa, and develop a politics of virtue.

Key points

• Pickstock: the movement arose in Cambridge in the early 1990s among mainly Anglican and Catholic academics; Orthodox and Protestants joined later. Foundational texts are Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory and her own After Writing (start and end of the 1990s); the third founder is Graham Ward. In 1992 Cambridge debated an honorary degree for Derrida; the movement’s theologians sided with those, like Steiner, who saw critical value in him. The core is twofold participation (methexis): horizontal, in nature and community, and vertical, Platonic, in God (‘in whom we live’, Acts 17:28). Following the nouvelle théologie, the movement rejects a ‘purely natural end’ for humans as a misreading of Aquinas; nature is not apart from grace. Since there is no pure nature, no area of discourse is autonomous from theology; in her view the social sciences rest on false theological premises. In the movement’s genealogy, the participatory vision of Christian theology was lost by about 1300; univocity replaced analogy. Many historians traced the road from Scotus via Ockham to Kant; the movement’s distinctive question, after Gilson, is whether it was progress. In her view postmodernists stayed in ‘Kantian closure’, taking uncertainty as proof of meaninglessness; the movement reads it as a sign of eternity. Unlike neo-orthodoxy, the movement questions a divide between natural and revealed theology, which she says hardly arose before Aquinas; ‘intensified orthodoxy’ finds deficiencies even in Aquinas – his break with the Boethian unity of natural and revealed theology. The movement finds strict monotheism in Eriugena, who fused Augustine and Maximus the Confessor; Nicholas of Cusa links him to Bergson and Whitehead. Eternal damnation is incompatible with the unity of God; in her view apokatastasis (Ramelli) is a certainty, not a pious hope. The politics of participation – Blond’s Red Tory, Glasman’s Blue Labour in partial reaction, and Milbank and Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue.

People

• Catherine Pickstock
• John Milbank
• Graham Ward
• Jacques Derrida
• George Steiner
• John Duns Scotus
• William of Ockham
• Immanuel Kant
• Henri de Lubac
• Étienne Gilson
• Thomas Aquinas
• John Scotus Eriugena
• Nicholas of Cusa
• Ilaria Ramelli
• Phillip Blond
• Maurice Glasman
• Adrian Pabst
• Karl Barth

Place

Cambridge