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Is There Such a Thing As a Neo-Augustinian Response to Religious Diversity? a Comparison of John Milbank and Joseph Ratzinger

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Is There Such a Thing As a Neo-Augustinian Response to Religious Diversity? a Comparison of John Milbank and Joseph Ratzinger Louvain Studies 37 (2013) 224-252 doi: 10.2143/LS.37.2.3038713 © 2013 by Louvain Studies, all rights reserved Is There Such a Thing as a Neo-Augustinian Response to Religious Diversity? A Comparison of John Milbank and Joseph Ratzinger Frederiek Depoortere Abstract. — The label ‘neo-Augustinian’ is used to refer to theologians who fall back on Augustine in times of upheaval. In today’s world, one major challenge faced by Christian theologians is the one posed by religious diversity. This article will inves- tigate if there is such a thing as a contemporary neo-Augustinian approach to reli- gious diversity. It will proceed through a comparison of two prominent, contempo- rary neo-Augustinian theologians, John Milbank and Joseph Ratzinger, with the help of the following research questions: Is religious diversity an issue for Milbank and Ratzinger? How do both theologians evaluate religious diversity and how do they respond to it? Do they fall back on Augustine when doing so? The comparison between Milbank and Ratzinger undertaken here will suggest that there is no such a thing as a contemporary neo-Augustinian approach to religious diversity (or at least not in the two authors that will be compared here). In the second part of the article, the scope will be widened and the way Milbank and Ratzinger respond to the pluralist theology of religions will be investigated. This will lead to the suggestion that Milbank and Ratzinger do not sufficiently take into account that “the break of the Enlightenment” (Slavoj Žižek) cannot be reversed. I. Introducing the Label ‘Neo-Augustinian’ Throughout the history of the Western Church, theologians have fallen back on Augustine in times of crisis and upheaval. Seemingly, the work of the Church Father has enabled them time and again to deal with new challenges and changing contexts.1 In the last decade of 1. See Lieven Boeve, “Retrieving Augustine Today: Between Neo-Augustinianist Essentialism and Radical Hermeneutics,” Augustine and Postmodern Thought: A New Alliance Against Modernity?, ed. Lieven Boeve, Mathijs Lamberigts, Maarten Wisse, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 219 (Leuven: Peeters, 2009) 1-17 (at 7). 997461.indb7461.indb 222424 119/09/149/09/14 114:194:19 A NEO-AUGUSTINIAN RESPONSE TO RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY? 225 the twentieth century this happened once more when a number of British theologians, headed by John Milbank and forming a movement that would become known as ‘Radical Orthodoxy’, developed a so- called ‘postmodern critical Augustinianism’ as the answer to the ills and problems of late-modern and postmodern life.2 But, as noted by Lieven Boeve in the introductory chapter to a recent volume on Augus- tine in postmodern thought, the neo-Augustinianism of Milbank and his fellow Radical Orthodoxy theologians is not an isolated phenom- enon. There are also theologians who do not belong to the Radical Orthodoxy movement, but who can nevertheless be considered as neo- Augustinians in the sense that they turn to Augustine to find answers to the predicaments of contemporary life. The most prominent exam- ple of these, as explained by Boeve, is without a doubt Joseph Rat- zinger.3 The aim of the present article is, first of all, to investigate the way in which contemporary neo-Augustinianism has responded to the challenge of religious diversity, which is, arguably, one of the major challenges for Christian theology today; and to determine whether there is such a thing as a response to religious diversity that can rightly be called “neo-Augustinian.” The following questions will guide our investigation of this topic: Is religious diversity an issue for contempo- rary neo-Augustinianism? How do the authors belonging to contem- porary neo-Augustinianism evaluate religious diversity and how do they respond to it? Do they fall back on Augustine when responding to religious diversity? And if they do, do they refer to specific works or even specific fragments from works of the Church Father? How do they appropriate him and put him to use? To keep our investigation manageable, we will focus on two authors, namely Milbank and Rat- zinger. This choice is justified by the fact that Milbank is the founding father of the Radical Orthodoxy movement; as such, and despite dif- ferences among the different theologians belonging to the movement, he is the one who shaped and determined its outlook to a very large degree. As for Ratzinger, he is probably, as was already indicated, the most important and influential contemporary neo- Augustinian theolo- gian outside the Radical Orthodoxy movement. 2. The expression “postmodern critical Augustinianism” was used by Milbank as a characterisation of his theological project in John Milbank, “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked Questions,” Mod- ern Theology 7, no. 3 (1991) 225-237. 3. Boeve, “Retrieving Augustine Today,” 5. 997461.indb7461.indb 222525 119/09/149/09/14 114:194:19 226 FREDERIEK DEPOORTERE II. Is Religious Diversity an Issue for Contemporary Neo-Augustinianism? Let us begin with the first of the aforementioned research questions and examine whether religious diversity is an issue at all for Milbank and Ratzinger. As recently noted by Paul Hedges, “Milbank is normally silent, even worryingly so, on the religious Other.”4 The only important exception to this general silence is a chapter that was published in 1990 in a book titled Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Plu- ralistic Theology of Religions.5 As the sub-title of the book showed, the contributors to the volume reacted against the pluralist stance in the theology of religions as it had been developed mainly by John Hick and Paul Knitter. These two had published an edited volume titled The Myth of Christian Uniqueness three years before and to which Milbank and the other contributors to Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered responded.6 Ratzinger, for his part, clearly pays more attention to the issue of reli- gious diversity than Milbank. In 2003, he even published an entire book on the relationship between Christian belief and the world religions. The bulk of this book, titled Truth and Tolerance,7 is made up of the (some- times revised, sometimes unchanged) text of lectures given by Ratzinger during the 1990s. The only exceptions to this are the first chapter of Part I – which is a revised version of a text initially written in 1963 and published the next year in a Festschrift for Karl Rahner – and the first section of Chapter 3, which was written in 2002 (TT 15, 55, and 113- 114). Thus, although Truth and Tolerance only appeared after the pub- lication of Dominus Iesus in August 2000, its content actually predates the publication of this controversial declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church.” The book gives us an insight in the 4. Paul Hedges, “Privileging Prejudice in Theology: Radical Orthodoxy and the Other” (unpublished paper) 3. 5. John Milbank, “The End of Dialogue,” Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. Gavin D’Costa, Faith Meets Faith Series (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990) 174-191. Recently reprinted in John Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (London: SCM, 2009) 279-300. In what follows I refer to the original version (henceforth cited as ED). 6. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter (eds.), The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Faith Meets Faith Series (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987). 7. Joseph Ratzinger, Glaube – Wahrheit – Toleranz: Das Christentum und die Weltreligionen (Freiburg: Herder, 2003). English translation: Truth and Tolerance: Chris- tian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2004) (henceforth cited as TT). 997461.indb7461.indb 222626 119/09/149/09/14 114:194:19 A NEO-AUGUSTINIAN RESPONSE TO RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY? 227 reflections that were behind the document, for, as explained by Gerard Mannion, while Ratzinger did not personally write Dominus Iesus, “he obviously assented to all that the document states,” something that can be derived from the fact that he “later confer[ed] a crucial promotion upon the person believed to be the document’s author.”8 Moreover, as further explained by Mannion, the topic of religious diversity is one of those instances in which the border line between the views of Ratzinger the theologian and the views of Ratzinger the Church official is blurred and difficult to draw.9 This suggests that it is justified to read and use Dominus Iesus when discussing the views of Ratzinger the theologian (and vice versa, that the views of Ratzinger the theologian also shed light on Dominus Iesus). Thus, we can answer our first research question by saying that neo-Augustinian theologians have focused different degrees of attention on the issue of religious diversity: while Milbank is almost completely silent about the religious other, Ratzinger has dealt with the challenge of religious diversity, especially during the 1990s in the build- up to the publication of Dominus Iesus, but also already long before (and as far back as 1963). III. How Does Contemporary Neo-Augustinianism React to the Religious Other? This brings us to our second research question, the question of how Milbank and Ratzinger respond to religious diversity. Let us first take a closer look at Milbank. As explained by Frank Burch Brown, Milbank employs the notion of ‘religion’ in two ways in his magnum opus Theol- ogy and Social Theory (which was published in 1990 and can be consid- ered as the founding manifesto of the Radical Orthodoxy movement).10 On the one hand, Brown explains, Milbank uses the term to refer to ‘classical metaphysics’, ‘pagan religion’ and ‘modern neo-paganism’, sug- gesting that these are essentially forms of ‘deficient mythology’ that share in the ills of modern secular reason (incoherence, nihilism, violence).
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