So much of modern philosophy begins with the late medievals in Milbank, and in this case, the strong separation between theology, the positive discourse about revealed data, and philosophy, the prior science that orders being and knowledge for the sake of setting up a ground for theology and other discourses, begins with Duns Scotus. Separating the science of metaphysics from the Being of God, Scotus renders all of theological speech essentially empty, giving priority to abstract being and setting the terms within which one can speak or not speak of God. Patristic theology has a more robust sense of the connectedness of reality:
By contrast, in the Church Fathers or the early scholastics, both faith and reason are included within the more generic framework of participation in the mind of God: to reason truly one must be already illumined by God, while revelation itself is but a higher measure of such illumination, conjoined intrinsically and inseparably with a created event which symbolically discloses that transcendent reality, to which all created events to a lesser degree also point. (24)Over against this participatory mode of metaphysics, Milbank lays out post-Kantian metaphysics and epistemology as ultimately nihilistic, emptying things of their depth because, by Kantian rules, only the manifold surfaces and their transcendental products are even available.
If I can stay disciplined, I'm going to try to blog the books and essays I read for comps as I read them this summer, perhaps adding to that reflections on teaching Plato when August comes. If my ever-wonderful readers would like to comment or add to the reflections that I post, I'd be most grateful.
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