Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living

Immature Christianity

In the wake of the discussion of Radical Orthodoxy some time ago, I’ve finally got round to listening to this CBS program about Milbank and Pickstock, two of the movement’s founders. It’s an extraordinarily good radio show – I can’t imagine the militantly middlebrow Radio 4, or it’s repetition-as-farce NPR, producing something half as intellectually serious. Great podcast though it is, it’s obviously not a complete account of Radical Orthodoxy; still, if it was accurate I can see where some of infinite thought’s concerns come from. Milbank and Pickstock put forward some interesting and persuasive criticisms of modernity; but there seemed to be an absence of the kind of thinking necessary to move forward from that critique, leaving Radical Orthodoxy in the end, as IT says, reactionary.

The problem is, Radical Orthodoxy appears to put forward an account of modernity as a decline—Pickstock I think says as much, describing modernity as a movement away from the immanence of God. What I don’t see, though, is an account of the internal necessity of this decline. Without such an account, it seems to me, we’re left with no way of understanding how the decline could be reversed, except by attempting to repeat a lost past; this is, surely, the very definition of reaction (and a claim that Milbank is reactionary should surely not be based on his avowed political commitments, but on the logic of theory with which he claims to ground them). I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages from Marx:

The still immature communism seeks an historical proof for itself – a proof in the realm of what already exists – among disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a hobby-horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.) By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this process contradicts its own claim, and that, if it has ever existed, precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to reality (1844 Manuscripts).

The last sentence is the crucial one. Does Radical Orthodoxy invoke a properly Christian past that “precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to reality”? As I say, this is all based on one hour of radio, so it may have little relationship to actually-existing Radical Orthodoxy, but the mistake Marx points out here seems pretty prevalent in would-be radical thought, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for.