Nova et Vetera Contra Henri De Lubac
As a follow up to my last post, I want to point out a relatively recent edition of Nova et Vetera, (5:1), which contains a series of articles by some Thomists who argue against what they call Henri de Lubac’s “supernaturalizing” of human nature. They follow Lawrence Feingold’s dissertation, which I mentioned in my last post. The editors at Nova et Vetera were motivated to compile these articles by a desire to respond critically to John Milbank’s The Suspended Middle, which dismisses Feingold’s dissertation. In fact, Milbank is so dismissive of Feingold that he gets his name wrong — he refers to Feingold as “Feinberg.” This speaks ill, in my opinion, of Milbank’s credibility as a scholar, but that is a story for another day. I am merely providing this link as a public service to aspiring Catholic theologians. Do go check out the abstracts for the articles, which give an intriguing summary for each article. But, you will have to order the actual journal to read the whole of each article, unless they have the articles on-line in a special, secret file that I don’t know about, and that you can hack into. I heard something about The Thomist, in this regard. At any rate, here’s the link.
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That bit on Milbank would be amusing if were just an isolated accident; Conor Cunningham is the only one of the RO crowd that I’ve ever seen bother to cite something correctly and to check real scholarship on a given topic (not just french works and translations into french).
Comment by lee faber — July 31, 2008 @ 1:04 am
After an initial period of fascination with the radically orthodox, I am entirely over them. Now that post-modernism is no longer fashionable, I do not get the point of trying to interpret the whole tradition through the lens of Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology.
Comment by hierothee — July 31, 2008 @ 12:22 pm
And what of their trenchant critiques of Heidegger? To suggest that RO follows Heidegger’s critique of Western philosophy suggests some misunderstanding of their work.
Comment by David — August 5, 2008 @ 1:52 pm
Certainly, they critique Heidegger. But their analysis of modern theology and “Baroque Thomism” takes its starting point with Heidegger’s genealogy of Western philosophy, which he said had lost its sense of being. The radically orthodox seek to reorient Heidegger in a Christian direction. Their desire is to show that Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology is valid, but that he wrongly accuses Platonism and Christian theology as being the root cause of ontotheology. Wayne Hankey has effectively shown how this leads them to read the tradition in a tendentious manner.
Their project is like a postmodern variant of transcental Thomism, in that it follows the general direction of a modern thinker but tries to Christianize him from within the direction of his own thought. The transcendental Thomists tried to reorient Kant in a Christian direction; the radically orthodox try to do the same with Heidegger.
And they also share this commonality with the transcendental Thomists: they reject the traditional, Christian anthropology at the root of Humanae Vitae. For all their critiques of Rahner, the radically orthodox follow him in this area. They defend “gay marriage,” priestesses and contraception. They dismiss John Paul II’s theology of the body as Romantic. I just can’t take them seriously. I wish that Tracey Rowland wasn’t involved with them.
Comment by Hierothee — August 5, 2008 @ 3:23 pm