Book Review: Postmodernity and Univocity: A Critical Account of Radical Orthodoxy and John Duns Scotus

Abstract

Postmodernity and Univocity: A Critical Account of Radical Orthodoxy and John Duns Scotus. By Daniel P. Horan, OFM. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2014. ix + 219 pp. $29.00 (paper).Theology, as an intellectual discipline, is highly narrative in character. It often proceeds on basis of a genealogical, history of ideas approach to explicating a particular view-its origin and derivation, context and significance, implications and subsequent effects. When theology is done in this mode, getting theological story right becomes even more imperative. Daniel Horan argues in his fascinating new book that when it comes to story that theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy tells about medieval Franciscan philosopher-theologian John Duns (12661308), narrative interpretation afforded his work is simply wrong. It is, in fact, more than wrong. As Horan observes, it is obstinately wrong. And, as his work implies, it may be fatally wrong, as erroneousness of what Horan calls Radical Orthodoxy's incorrect Scotus threatens to undermine validity of overall theological project that is predicated upon it.In their Story, Radical Orthodox theologians maintain that Thomas Aquinas's (1225-1274) analogical approach to God-talk preserved prevailing Neoplatonic participatory metaphysics. In Aquinas, contingent of finite entities is held to derive from its direct, analogical relation to non-contingent Being who is God. In this relationship, being must be understood equivocally, as finite of created entities and infinite Being of God are utterly different. By contrast, Radical Orthodox theologians maintain, Scotuss assertion that such an analogy only works if finite and infinite Being are understood univocally as of same kind (and so can be perceived as authentically and reliably related), though crucially differentiated, is an illegitimate equation of finite creatures' with God's Being. This makes finite same as and independent of divine Being in a way that was never asserted previously. Scotuss univocal idea of being, they claim, permitted conception of a till-then unknown space standing apart from divine, a realm that came to be called the secular. Radical Orthodoxy's Story thus positions as anti-Aquinas, first philosopher to separate metaphysics and theology and, because of this, as figure who paved way for modernity and postmodemity. This, they argue, places at head of an intellectual line that led eventually to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and various nihilisms of postmodernism. Radical Orthodoxy's overall effort is aimed at defeating line of thinking that initiated and at undoing secular world they believe it legitimates.For theologians associated with Radical Orthodoxy, especially its progenitor, John Milbank, who articulates Story most clearly in his influential programmatic volume, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), Aquinas and thus represent two sides of a metaphysical binary. …