anglomedved

I have started dipping again into the book ‘Radical Orthodoxy’, a set of essays by mainly Cambridge theologians of Anglo-Catholic or Roman Catholic background. Originally published in 1999, it insists than an a-religious explanation of the world – de rigueur for intellectual and academic discourse for the last five or six generations – is simply intellectually dishonest, and goes on to revisit certain disciplines, including politics and aesthetics, from a holistic standpoint which includes the religious.

This first time I gave up because of the s recondite language of the opening chapters, not easily accessible to a non-academic theologian. But this time round – myself needing new language to move further into the theology of society and economics  – I am beginning to find real value.

I give three examples:

“'Post-modernity', as the end of master narratives … then becomes simply the intensification of modernity’s quest for autonomy – freedom without terminus or telos.” (p. 202).

“In the absence of shared ends, individuals relate to each other by means of contract, which assumes a guarantee by force …Max Weber rightly perceived that the modern state cannot be defined by ends, but only by its peculiar means, which is monopoly on the legitimate use of force”. …. “Externally, the violence of war is necessary to provide some unity – albeit a false one – to a society lacking in any truly social progress”  (p. 194)

 “Beginning with an anthropology of formally equal individuals guided by no common ends, the best the state can do is to keep these individuals from interfering with each other’s rights. While this can serve to mitigate the conflicting effects of individualism, it cannot hope to enact a truly social progress”. (p. 193)

The first of these is superb – its last words ‘freedom without terminus or telos’ ought to find its way into the next generation of ROC social teaching documents.

The second one serves a warning against excessive reference to the Great Patriotic War.

The third one should be carved in stone over the entrance to the European Communities building in Brussels.