The "Radical Orthodoxy" Movement

Every generation or so, something "new" comes along. Once it was Protestant Liberalism. Then it was Barthian Neo-Orthodoxy. Then, responding to the skeptical logical empiricism of the earlier generation of "atheologians" came the gallant Alvin Plantinga in the seventies with his "Reformed Epistemology" and asseverations of doxastic warrant and "proper basicality" of theistic belief. A concurrent continental development was that of the French Jewish student of Husserl, Jacques Derrida, who, after his dissertation On the Origin of Geometry, developed the startling new postmodern rave of "deconstruction." When all is said and done, however, whatever contributions can be found in these developments that are actually really interesting, there is very little that is actually substantially new. When A.N. Whitehead said that all of philosophy has been nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato, he was, of course, exaggerating. But only a bit. I realize that there are individuals, such as John D. Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion, and to some extent, perhaps, Marold Westphal, who have made personal careers out of endeavoring to demonstrate that something worth discovering may finally reside beneath all the superficial hype surrounding the now deceased Derrida and his deconstructionist reading of philosophical texts. They may be right. For all I know, the ebullient new proponents of "Radical Orthodoxy" may also be right: perhaps, after all is said and done, there will be something after all -- beneath all the hype -- worth noting in the contribution of RO thinkers. But from the vantage point of the long view -- the view of philosophia perennis -- I really don't see much likelihood of the Solomonic dictum being overturned that there is, in the final analysis, nothing (or at least, very little) new under the sun.

For the little time, money, and energy I have left at the end of the day, give me much rather some of those dusty tomes of forgotton "bygones" like Etienne Gilson, Joseph Owens, Josef Pieper, Henri de Lubac, Garrigou-Lagrange, Ronald Knox, and perhaps above all the Venerable Cardinal Newman. I spent my graduate studies immersed in the epistemology and critical ethics of Kant and the post-Kantian critiques of Kantianism emanating from the Husserlian phenomenological movement -- including Scheler. I spent the next ten years immersed in acquainting myself with the postmodern developments stemming from the phenomenological movement, beginning with the later Heidegger and coming up through Foucault to the French Jewish thinker, Derrida -- especially Derrida. When all was said and done, I found these thinkers -- as valuable as the have been for understanding where we are today -- utterly disappointing. In the beginning, they entice. They seduce. They draw one in with the promise of profundity. But their larders are empty, their cisterns dry, and they leave their victims empty, famished, parched with thirst. By contrast, I have found that turning back to some of the forgotten, neglected, rejected, derided "scholastic" sorts of thinkers that I have mentioned above has turned up an unexpected oasis within the deserts of modernity and postmodernity -- a place with fertile growth and deep wells where one can drink deeply and find satisfaction. Does "Radical Orthodoxy" provide that? Something one can feed on? Something to quench one's thirst? Perhaps. But if so, is it by means of anything new under the sun?

References:

• Radical Orthodoxy Online: Resources and Information
• Al Kimel, "Is Radical Orthodoxy radical and orthodox?" (Pontifications)
• John Wright, "When Radical Orthodoxy Is Neither"
• R.R. Reno, "The Radical Orthodoxy Project" (First Things, Feb. 2000)
• Christopher Blosser, "Impressions of Radical Orthodoxy" (a survey of the current debate)