Thread by @johnmilbank3

Thanks to author. But in the end RO thinks one can only save the most authentic core of Thomism by going beyond Aquinas. Eg his invention vs Boethian trad of ‘two theologies’ opens some way to pure nature; only transgressing of LNC saves analogy from reductions in later Thomists.

https://twitter.com/johnmilbank3/status/1407245744025878530

Both Eckhart and Cusa in effect realised that only such embrace of paradox is able to deny an assumption of a basic semantic univocity. As Courtine shows in his Inventio Analogiae most ‘Thomists’ after Aquinas in fact accepted this degree of Scotism.

For this and several other reasons, even though they were more radically Neoplatonic, Eckhart, Cusanus, Pico, Ficino, Giles of Viterbo, Berulle etc are really much closer to what matters in Aquinas (where he’s nearer to Greek Fathers, Augustine, Boethius) than Cajetan, Suarez etc

De Lubac already more or less saw this. Balthasar much more hesitantly.

It’s also true that both Eckhart and Cusanus returned to the Boethian unity of theology and philosophy. In this sense they were more conservative than Aquinas, over-influenced by an alien Arabic duality.

Part of the very meaning (though only part) of radical orthodoxy is the view that ‘radicals’ like Origen, Eriugena, David of Dinant (perhaps), Eckhart, Cusanus, John Pordage (the real inventor of sophiology) etc were hyper orthodox, the most consistently orthodox, not heterodox.

This is because they tried to think the paradoxes of orthodoxy through to the end and never compromised the unity and simplicity of God. As John Hughes argued, even the very slight entertaining of an absolute/ordained power distinction in Aquinas begins to do that.

Again and again the real source of the distortion of orthodoxy is voluntarism, a reason/will dichotomy and the temptation to onticise and finitise God. Not follow fully through on the truth that he is Being itself, Unity itself etc.

None of this means that one should embrace Hegel and Schelling etc. They were too contaminated by Kantian finitism, by a purely empiricist starting point (yes! as Rosmini so acutely saw)and by Boehme’s Lutheran twisting of Xn esotericism to introduce evil into the Godhead.

None of this means Aquinas is disdained: he himself would have been horrified to be treated like the Bible. The interesting cite of Aquinas is still Boethian, Dionysian and Augustinian. Eg in effect he *does* have a Trinitarian metaphysics not just based on ‘revelation’.

Marion has shown (and this links to Aquinas’s novel introduction of a philosophical/revealed theology distinction) that Aquinas actually seems to have invented a notion of isolated ‘revelation’ that was not there before.

Prior to Aquinas Boethian thinkers like the amazing Englishman Achard of St Victor (sic) developed Trinitarian metaphysics that made no reason/revelation distinction at all.

I can see the temptation just to go back to ‘Thomism’ in the face of secularity. It looks nice and clear and neat and tidy. Just for that reason it appeals to neat and tidy young men...But it is not the answer, because ‘Thomism’ is genealogically complicit with the secular.

The RO analysis (still very much in gestation, and very much undertaken in alliance with other intellectual movements) is far more sophisticated and far more likely to generate a real counter-modernity.