David Bentley Hart

Foreward to Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy

Apart from an obvious and largely accidental homonymy, and perhaps something of a
shared tendency towards combativeness, there seems little uniting Eastern Orthodoxy and
the Radical Orthodoxy movement. The former is chiefly marked or so it often seems
by its historically fated conservatism, its broad indifference to any but the Eastern Church
Fathers, its diffidence in regard to philosophical schools and debates outside its own
tradition, and its at times admirable and at times deplorable insularity; the latter by its
frissons of theological and political radicalism, its militantly Latin and Augustinian
approaches to theology, its fascination with everything au courant in the world of
continental thought, and its cheerful openness to an endless variety of influences (the
unwholesome on some occasions along with the wholesome). More to the point, perhaps,
the former is an ancient Church, comprising (at least, on optimistic estimates) a quarter
billion souls, and carrying within itself some two millennia of traditions and memories,
while the latter is a theological movement of recent vintage, the adherents of which can
be numbered (at most) in the hundreds, and the purpose of which is to influence the
development of speculative theology in all Christian communions. It is, needless to say,
difficult fruitfully to compare creatures of such disparate species.
That said, there is it seems to me a natural affinity between the two, and a sphere of
interests common to them. Both are, if nothing else, expressions of a single metaphysical
and theological tradition. One is a more organic, continuous, ramifying, and floriferous
expression, with all the strengths and weaknesses of any purely natural phenomenon, and
the other a more reactive and critical expression, nurtured under the conservatory
conditions of the academy, with all the security and fragility that entails. But both subsist
in an element of what should be described honestly and proudly as the Christian
Platonist tradition. (Some among the Orthodox take exception to this designation,
principally because it is so obviously correct, but it is a fact that Orthodoxy is never more
Platonist than when denouncing Platonism.) Everything the Orthodox treasure in the
eastern patristic tradition its emphasis upon the metaphysics of participation, the
deification of the creature in Christ, the ascent of the soul to the vision of God, the
spiritual reality of the divine image in the soul, the mystical co-inherence of the Body of
Christ, and the real will of God to save all human beings, as well as its salutary ignorance
of any real partition, conceptual or ontological, between nature and grace constitutes
the native atmosphere in which Radical Orthodoxy has evolved. Even the latters
Augustinianism is devoid of any of those special features of the late Augustines
catastrophic misreading of Paul that are so profoundly distasteful to Eastern Christians:
the doctrine of predilective predestination ante praevisa merita, the morbidly forensic

understanding of original sin, the thrashing legions of unbaptized babies descending to

their perpetual and condign combustion, and so on. The radically orthodox Augustine is
the saner, more Platonist soul of the earlier theology, rather than the author of De
correptione, the Retractiones, and the Enchiridion.
All of that, however, amounts to little more than saying that Eastern Orthodox tradition
and the theology of Radical Orthodoxy reflect many of the same broad currents of
Catholic tradition. The more crucial rationale, though, for the sort of serious engagement
between the two parties this volume represents is that they are already involved in a sort
of tacit alliance against a single enemy. Each is, in its distinctive way, a kind of evasion
of or rebellion against modernity. Granted, in the case of the Orthodox Church, the
evasion has been more a matter of omission and of historical circumstance than of a
conscious resistance to the pathologies of modern thought and culture, and so the
rebellion sometimes degenerates into a depressingly imprecise hostility towards the
West as a whole. And granted, also, in the case of radical orthodoxy, both the evasion
and the rebellion at times seem almost utopian in their abstraction from the concrete
particularities of communities and nations and ecclesial traditions. But, in both cases, one
encounters an ethos naturally antagonistic to post-Christian understandings of the self, of
freedom, and of society, and to the dehumanizing and ultimately nihilistic consequences
towards which they lead. And, in both cases also, one encounters an awareness that the
most destructive forces within modernity were in some sense incubated within theology
(though again, in the case of some Eastern Christians, this awareness is sometimes
diffused into a more general, and somewhat vacuous, distrust of Latin theology as a
whole).
It is a commonplace (though, happily, a sound one) to observe that much of the modern

vision of reality the mechanical philosophy, the reduction of the concept of freedom
to that of pure spontaneity of will, the politics of the absolutist state, and so on was to
some extent obscurely born in the late mediaeval collapse of the Christian metaphysical
tradition as it had developed over more than a millennium, and especially in the rise of
nominalism and voluntarism. The original impulse guiding these developments, of
course, was a desire upon the part of certain theologians to affirm as radically as possible
the sovereign transcendence of God; but the image of God thus produced as hardly
needs to be said was ultimately of a super-rational and even super-moral God, whose
divinity consisted entirely in the omnipotence and arbitrariness of his will, and who was
not truly transcendent of his creation, but merely the supreme power within it. In
detaching Gods freedom from Gods nature as Goodness, Truth, and Charity as this
theology necessarily, if not always intentionally, did Christian thought laid the
foundations for many of those later revolutions in philosophy and morality that would
help to produce the post-Christian order. It was inevitable, after all, that the object of the

voluntarist model of freedom would migrate from the divine to the human will, and that a
world evacuated of its ontological continuity with Gods goodness would ultimately find
no place for God within itself. And, in early modernity, when the new God of infinite and
absolute will had to a very great degree displaced the true God from mens minds, the
new technology of print assured that all Christians would make the acquaintance of this
impostor, and through him come to understand true liberty as a personal sovereignty
transcending even the dictates and constraints of nature.
Moreover more crucially the God thus produced was monstrous: an abyss of pure,
predestining omnipotence, whose majesty was revealed at once in his unmerited mercy
towards the elect and his righteous wrath against the derelict. And he was to be found in
the theologies of almost every school: not only Jansenism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism,
but also the theology of the Dominican Thomists, such as Baez and Alvarez (though the
Dominicans, through their superior faculty for specious reasoning, did a better job of
convincing themselves that their God was a good God). That modern Western humanity
came in large measure to refuse to believe in or worship such a God was ineluctable, and
in some sense extremely commendable (no one, after all, can be faulted for preferring
atheism to Calvinism or the old two-tiered Thomism).
In any event, these are old arguments and there is no need to rehearse them here. All I

wish to point out is that Eastern Orthodoxy through its innocence of these theological
deformations and Radical Orthodoxy through its rejection and abhorrence of them
are already in some way bound together in a single destiny; and, as the community of
believing European Christians continues to dwindle away (as it certainly will, far into the
foreseeable future), they should not hesitate to lend their strengths each to the other, and
to mend their own infirmities thereby. What such an interaction might produce is difficult
to say, but one might venture a few guesses. Perhaps certain Eastern Orthodox
theologians might be moved to reconsider the Eastern hostility towards Augustine that
has become such a vogue among the Orthodox in the past five decades, and that has made
many of them insensible to the brilliance even of works such as De Trinitate, and that
continues to produce offensively silly caricatures of Augustines theology in Orthodox
scholarship. Perhaps, by the same token, certain of the radically orthodox could be
weaned from their preposterous refusal to acknowledge that Augustines late theology of
nature and grace, sin and election, must be accounted the chief cause within the Latin
tradition of that traditions susceptibility to the appeal of voluntarism. Some Eastern
theologians might be emboldened partly to abandon the Neo-Palamite theology that has
become so dominant in their Church since the middle of the last century, and frankly
acknowledge its incoherence, and come to recognize that in many ways Augustine or
Thomas was closer to the Greek Fathers in his understanding of divine transcendence
than was Palamas (at least, Palamas as he has come to be understood); these theologians

might even feel freer to avail themselves of many of the riches of their own tradition that
have been forgotten as a result of the triumph of the Neo-Palamite synthesis. And perhaps
some of the radically orthodox, taking the example of modern Eastern theology more to
heart, might learn better to integrate the mystical and spiritual dimensions of the faith into
their expositions of doctrine and into their theological speculations. Most importantly,
perhaps, the Eastern Orthodox might be reminded by their encounters with Radical
Orthodoxy that a true defiance of the more nihilistic currents of modernity should take
the form not simply of a retreat into liturgical and spiritual tradition, but of a social and
political philosophy as well. And perhaps the radically orthodox might profit from an
exposure to the sheer obduracy of Eastern Christianity the effect of decades and
centuries of misfortune and oppression and learn to fortify themselves against the
almost certain failure of their project as a social and political force.
One could go on, of course, but the endless addition of one perhaps to another leads
nowhere, except in the direction of an ever more random association of ideas. Suffice it to
say that the time is ripe for a collection of this sort and both for the conversation it
comprises and for the further conversations it portends this book is a worthy object of
celebration.