Abstract
In Charles Taylor, the radical orthodoxy theologians, and Michael Gillespie, the genre of the large-scale renarration of Western modernity has been recently reanimated as a means to challenge the modern secular age. Secularisation was not inevitable, these narratives purport to show. It need not have happened, and has left an ambivalent heritage in its wake. It might be rolled back or transformed, if only a different narrative can take a central cultural place. Focussing on John Milbank’s work, this chapter examines the epistemological importance narrative takes on, in fact and in principle, in these works. Drawing on earlier theological and philosophical critics (Richardson, Insole and Cheetham) of Milbank’s work, I will assess the limitations of this turn to narrative as a means of defending any—theological or secular—understanding of where we find ourselves today. These limitations include a tendency to reductively misread figures and moments in the history of culture; they embrace a tendency to systematically, retrospectively cover over alternative possibilities in “slippery slope” arguments; and, it will be argued here, they tend to produce a disempowering sense that the present cannot be changed, since it lies under the weight of centuries-old cultural trajectories. The largest question is whether we can promote the laudable aim of a ‘unity-in-difference’ elevated by Milbank in the contemporary West, with a narratological view which presents different traditions as so many competing narratives without any higher court of appeal to adjudicate their truth or legitimacy. If radical orthodoxy cautions against theologians adopting their discourse to frameworks taken from secular social science, I will rejoin that theologians, philosophers and citizens alike should take as great a care to question the present influence of the postmodern genealogical, historicising turn in the history of Western ideas.
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Notes
- 1.
Here as elsewhere, one should be careful that there are exceptions to such sometimes helpful generalisations: for one, Emmanuel Levinas’ position explicitly prioritises peace over violence. See Levinas Totality and Infinity Section III.
- 2.
Note that Blumenberg (1993: 18–25) tracks the origin of the term ‘secularization’ to the expropriation by secular powers of Church property, and process in which the Church was the ‘legitimate’ owner of the expropriated properties, and in which their secularization is coloured as illegitimate. Blumenberg argues that this taint of illegitimacy (‘the odium of the violation of another’s rights’ (1993: 38) is carried in later expanded uses of the term as a ‘background metaphorics’, even when not explicitly spelled out, as in Milbank (Blumenberg 1993: 25).
- 3.
As Michalson points out, it is in fact demonstrably true that such a demonstration (as a premise) can lead to substantively opposed conclusions, as exemplified by Hans Blumenberg. The latter’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age agrees with Milbank on the theological antecedents of the modern break with the medieval theological orbit, the self-forgetting of these origins in the predominant modern self-images—yet for all that holds to the legitimacy of the secular. Indeed, he claims that modernity only falls in to illegitimacy when it sets about trying to ‘reoccupy’—as against secularising—argumentative territory staked out by foreign, theological questions. Just as Christianity is forced to the ardors of allegoresis in order to make revealed texts answer philosophical, Hellenic questions, so Blumenberg claims that modernity is forced into (e.g.) the philosophy of history because of a felt need or obligation (‘a mortgage of prescribed questions’ (1993: 65) to answer Christian questions, like the meaning of history as a whole (Blumenberg 1993: esp. 34–5, 48–49, 60, 137, 196–7; Michalson 2004: 371–374).
- 4.
Take two counterexamples: (1) what does the claim that ethics have evolutionary origins do to, say, our evaluation of some good action in the present? If, concerning an action we admire according to a sense of its good consequences, the good character it reveals in its exponent, or the moral law it exemplifies, we are told by scientists also has ‘selection value’ for the type of natural creature we are, why should this latter claim detract from the former? Why could a neoAristotelian approach be excluded, wherein the same object or process could be described truly with reference to different aitias (material, efficient, formal, and teleological)? Mutatis mutandis, what hidden premises do we have to have accepted to take such a disclosure as ‘undermining’ ethics itself? Need we take our ethical house to be built on such easily shaken foundations? (2) What does Hegel, Nietzsche or Gibbon’s highlighting of the slavish origins of Christianity speak against its truth? Can’t this demonstration indeed be as plausibly countered by the position that it was precisely only those who had no status in the positive orders of their time could have accessed the ahistorical truth of revelation?
- 5.
First, critics have noted that Milbank is performatively enacting a theological renarration of the secular social sciences ‘for positive appropriation’ by other theologians (TST: 1). That is, he is acting as if the ‘struggle’ for metadiscursive hegemony that TST’s ‘Introduction’ announces as to be fought and won had already been so fought and won. This is why he can claim repeatedly that modern institutions and practices really amount to a counter-religion, and secular social sciences to a heretical counter-theology. ‘In a sense, the simple thesis is that everything is theology’, Douglas Hedley remarks—and that is where Milbank starts (Hedley 2000: 272). One critic has described this rhetorical strategy as ‘realised eschatology’, and it certainly represents an important dimension of Milbank’s culture-history, which is also a polemical move (Richardson 2003: 275).
- 6.
The eschatological shape of culture-histories, pre-eminently Hegel’s, should also be noted, although whether ‘secularization’ is the finally best term to describe the isomorphism between theological Heilsgeschichte and modern philosophies of history is a question we suspend here (see Michalson 2004: 366–367).
- 7.
One criterion, which Milbank’s own, near omniscient culture-history would seem de facto to propound, would be the sheer scope of what one’s story includes: ‘Through an often daunting conversancy with a massive array of philosophical and literary texts, and through highly complex interplays of mutually supportive readings of these texts in the service of a particular ideology—such outlooks give the appearance of having established an independent authority or broader legitimacy…’ (Janz 2004: 393). This coheres with a version of the truth as coherence outlook. But if no particular validity claims can veridically represent the real, neither will any proposed, holistic ‘metanarrative realism’ allow us to avoid what John Macdowell calls ‘frictionless spinning in a void’ characteristic of forms of idealism (MacDowell 1996: 11). By elaborating such total perspectives, the problem is deferred, or its scale is changed—but this is not to resolve the problem.
- 8.
Nominalism, which incidentally had been proposed as early as the eleventh century by figures like Berengar of Tours (c. 1010–1080) and Roscellinus (1050–1125).
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Sharpe, M. (2014). ‘In the Beginning Was … the Story’? On Secularization, Narrative, and Nominalisms. In: Sharpe, M., Nickelson, D. (eds) Secularisations and Their Debates. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7116-1_7
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