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

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 the 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 the theological story right becomes even more imperative. Daniel Horan argues in his fascinating new book that when it comes to the story that the theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy tells about the medieval Franciscan philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus (12661308), the 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 the erroneousness of what Horan calls Radical Orthodoxy's incorrect "Scotus Story" threatens to undermine the validity of the overall theological project that is predicated upon it.In their Scotus Story, Radical Orthodox theologians maintain that Thomas Aquinas's (1225-1274) analogical approach to God-talk preserved the prevailing Neoplatonic participatory metaphysics. In Aquinas, the contingent being of finite entities is held to derive from its direct, analogical relation to the non-contingent Being who is God. In this relationship, "being" must be understood equivocally, as the finite being of created entities and the infinite Being of God are utterly different. By contrast, Radical Orthodox theologians maintain, Scotuss assertion that such an analogy only works if finite being and infinite Being are understood univocally as being of the same kind (and so can be perceived as being authentically and reliably related), though crucially differentiated, is an illegitimate equation of finite creatures' being with God's Being. This makes finite being the same as and independent of divine Being in a way that was never asserted previously. Scotuss univocal idea of being, they claim, permitted the conception of a till-then unknown space standing apart from the divine, a realm that came to be called "the secular." Radical Orthodoxy's Scotus Story thus positions Scotus as the anti-Aquinas, the first philosopher to separate metaphysics and theology and, because of this, as the figure who paved the way for modernity and postmodemity. This, they argue, places Scotus at the head of an intellectual line that led eventually to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and the various nihilisms of postmodernism. Radical Orthodoxy's overall effort is aimed at defeating the line of thinking that Scotus initiated and at undoing the "secular" world they believe it legitimates.For the theologians associated with Radical Orthodoxy, especially its progenitor, John Milbank, who articulates the Scotus Story most clearly in his influential programmatic volume, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), Aquinas and Scotus thus represent the two sides of a metaphysical binary. …