Radical Orthodoxy & Christian Psychology, Milbank & Oliver

Edification: Articles
Interview and Conversation with John

Milbank and Simon Oliver: Radical Orthodoxy
and Christian psychology I - theological
underpinnings
John Milbank
University of Nottingham, UK
Simon Oliver
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
University of Bern, Switzerland
Peter Hampson
Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, UK
Radical Orthodoxy is a vibrant theological response to postmodernism which has much to offer to
Christian psychology in particular and to dialogue between theology and secularity in general. In
this, the first of two Edification interviews with leading members of the Radical Orthodox group at
the University of Nottingham UK, John Milbank (JM) and Simon Oliver (SO) discuss the theological
roots and current concerns of the movement and explore its relevance and challenge for secular and
Christian psychology with Peter Hampson (PH). Zo Lehmann Imfeld (ZL) assisted with question
planning, transcription, and editing of the interview.
JM: It is quite difficult to sum up briefly what RO

is, and what it has become. It started out in the
context of responses to post-modernism, beginning
with a deep dissatisfaction with Christians who
merely wanted to baptise post-modern philosophy.
Within RO we wanted both to appropriate postmodernism and to criticise it. The key here was the
idea that post-modernity had somehow dissolved
a humanistic confidence, suggesting instead that
everything is in flux, everything is uncertain and
undecidable, everything is commanded by power.
We wanted to say that in a way this is positive,
because it gets rid of an immanentist certainty, to
affirm that in theology, also, everything is finite or

approximate. The challenge of post-modernity would
then become a choice between either an immanentist
post-humanism or a return to a theological posthumanism. This led to a sense that the uncertainty
and the flux of the world can still be read in Platonic
terms, especially if you realise that Platonism does
not completely subordinate matter and the body.
We wanted to return to a notion of methexis, or
participation, as being at the centre of theology
(see Smith & Watson, 2007). However, we wanted
somehow to increase the sense of the importance of
the world changing and recreating itself, and human
beings particularly reconstituting reality. This is the
sense that life and human creativity participate in
the creative life of God. One might say that this is
a modern reworking of the notion of participation.
By putting participation at the centre of our theology
we were also stressing that one should not choose
between a fideism on the one hand, only stressing
faith, or the foundationalism of reason on the other
hand. We need to recover the sense that both human
faith and reason participate in the divine mind, that
there is a continuum between them. There is a sense
in which reason always requires faith, and faith goes
on using reason. It is a much more Augustinian way
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Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology
PH: Following and building on the earlier Edification

interview with James K.A. Smith (Smith & Watson,
2007), it is a great pleasure to talk with key members
of the Radical Orthodoxy (RO) group, including
those directly and very closely involved with the
RO project for some time now, to learn more of its
possible relevance for Christian psychology. It might
help readers, John, if you first outline some of the
main themes and current concerns within the wider
movement, if movement it is, how you envision the
RO project right now, and how it might develop in
the future.
of putting things. On the other hand, RO theologians

tend to read Augustine in a very Catholic, Thomistic
way, a more humanist Augustine, if you like, than
the pessimistic Augustine of the Reformation or of
Jansenism.
But then conversely we have also always read
Aquinas in a very Augustinian way, and in a way that
relates him to Greek patristics. This allows us to test
readings which put a sharp divide between faith and
reason in Aquinas.
Over the years, as Radical Orthodoxy has
developed, it has become clear to me that the
key notion is really paradox, in ways that pick up
elements both in Kierkegaard and Chesterton (e.g.
Chesterton, 1908; Kierkegaard, 1985). I think that
the key notion is paradox because one has the idea
that we are naturally orientated to a supernatural
destiny, so that our end is to receive a gift, which
is itself paradoxical (Milbank, 2003). We read the
whole of Christian doctrine with a strong stress on
paradoxicality, which sees creation as both outside
God and yet not outside God. There are other
theologies that would put a much stronger stress
on the idea of creation as simply being outside
God, to try to read it less paradoxically, but then I
think you end up with a kind of literalism. So we
would stress that God is both completely replete
and yet paradoxically in himself more than God. We
would also read the doctrine of the incarnation very
paradoxically, that Christ is most man, precisely by
being divine, and not merely a human person. Again,
this is a very paradoxical take on Christology and
ecclesiology. We also extend that paradoxicality to
our approach to social and political thinking, and this
has been more manifest in recent times, in the idea
that equality paradoxically requires hierarchy because
otherwise a flattened uniformity exposes each
individual to the play and vicissitudes of sheer power
in the political realm (Blond & Milbank, 2010). This
has had some kind of impact at least within British
politics. It would be very interesting to consider how
there might be a paradoxical psychology, although I
do not know exactly what that would look like (but
see Hampson, 2010, for some initial thoughts). I
think that human beings themselves are paradoxical
creatures. We are animals and yet we are more than
animals, and yet we remain animals. We are thinking
animals.
PH: Ill ask Simon to come in here; Im still a little
concerned that the background to the notion of
participation may not yet be crystal clear to people in
the human and social sciences. I wonder how we can
best explicate the idea for them, and indeed what its
implications might be. In his Edification interview,
James K.A. Smith spoke of the basic approach of
resourcement, or recovery of lost ideas and concepts,
and mentioned participation as a key recovered
idea in RO. As he said:
the unique emphasis of Radical Orthodoxy
on a participatory ontology, with its

notion of the material world being charged
with transcendence, points to a kind of
third way for understanding the human
personand thus perhaps a third way
between crass, biologistic materialism and
nave, supernaturalistic dualism. (Smith &
Watson, 2007, p. 71).
We have clearly established that participation
is a key notion. Can we now unpack the useful phrase
charged with transcendence a little? I am thinking
here of the philosophical and theological roots of this
and idea, in Plato for example, and what this implies
about our relationship with and dependence on God
and accounts of human nature. Also, do you agree
with James Smiths suggestion regarding the third
way?
SO: Participation, methexis, as Radical Orthodoxy
has tried to recover it, does goes back to Plato, and
actually to a very straightforward idea that we find
in the Republic, and in other dialogues as well, that
in the end there is only one source of being, and
therefore one source of truth, beauty and the good.
Transposed into a Christian theological mode in the
doctrine of creation, the claim then is that when
God creates, there is not one thing, and then all of
a sudden two things, God and the universe. There
is only ever one source of being, in which all else
shares or participates. Plato expressed this through
his famous simile of the Sun in the Republic. Just as
the Sun is the single source of light and illumination,
making all other things visible and therefore
knowable by its light, so the Good is the single source
of being in which all else participates, thereby
coming into being. What we see in the realm of flux
and change, in becoming as Plato puts it, is not
something that is self-standing, but something that
taken in itself in isolation is nothing, and therefore
is, to use the subtitle of the first Radical Orthodoxy
volume, suspended over the nihil.
Transposed into Christian theology, the idea is
that God is the single source of life and being. No
creature accounts for its own existence, but can
only be accounted for in terms of its relationship
to the divine. The key problem then is, how do you
preserve that from the charge of pantheism? How do
you stop everything collapsing back into what the
Neoplatonists called the One, or what Christian
theology calls God? Pantheism is avoided by
distinguishing ontologically between God, who
exists by his essence, and creation, which exists only
by the constant donation of their own being by God.
So the Christian doctrine of creation is not about a
single moment of creation, it is not about privileging
some primordial moment of creation several billion
years ago, but instead it is about the sustaining of
creation and existence at all times. This is what
Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology points to
in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of
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nothing): the view that, at every moment (and not

just at some Big Bang moment), creation is out of
nothing, receiving its created being from beingitself, namely God.
Meanwhile, the notion of participation is
trying to describe the sense that being itself, God, is
infinitely proximate to creative being, to the realm
of becoming. Other words that Plato uses, which we
often translate as participation, describe this for us
very well. Symploke, interweaving, is an example.
The metaphor of interweaving preserves the sense
of difference between God and creation, while also
expressing an infinite proximity. That difference
between God and creation is itself a gift of the divine.
It is not something which creation has in itself
(Milbank & Oliver, 2009, 3-27).
PH: And of course, that is a paradox in itself. In the
one sense, there is the collusion between the two,
God and the world, in the other sense, as we have
just established, God and creation are not the same.
Treating these categories as interacting containers,
of God being in or outside of creation, is simply
inapplicable.
SO: That is absolutely right, and we should be clear
that whatever we mean by the difference between
God and creation, it is not like the difference between,
say, you and me. The real problem begins when we
think of God as an object, as a cause amongst causes,
and another item in our conceptual or perceptual
landscape. This is why Radical Orthodoxy is very
committed to the view that to talk about God is
always to talk about something else. Because if we
conceive of theology as having a bounded subject
matter, where we are concerned with God, we
are treating God as if he were another item in our
perceptual landscape, competing for our attention
with other things, an entity among other entities, in
the way that chemistry treats chemical substances. If
theology is concerned with all things in relation to
God, then in principle this precludes nothing. That
is not to say that theology usurps all other disciplines
(quite the contrary), but it is to say that all things
qua created things have theological meaning and
implications.
things turn out not to be real, that we are living

out a fantasy all the time. Only something like a
theological discourse allows us to think that these
notions are ultimately real, that there is something
called spirit, and the ultimate source of everything is
spiritual rather than material. Also, participation is
linked to the idea of the primacy of relation; that the
relationship of the Trinity is symmetrical, but that
our relationship with God is utterly asymmetrical,
God is not related to us, but we are related to him.
That gives a certain primacy to the relational that can
really only be secured by the doctrine of creation.
If you have an immanentistic doctrine, either you
say that everything is all one, or everything is all
completely atomistic and differentiated. But the
way we normally think of things is relational, and
allied to that, we tend to think of things as being not
completely unlike but somewhat like, therefore
analogical. Once again, analogy is a very paradoxical
idea, in that it is not that things are a bit like each
other or a bit unlike each other, but that they are
both at once. This keeps in play the idea that we
live in an analogical reality, that there are affinities
between things, maybe that there is some kind of
affinity between the ordering of our mind and the
order within things, as Kant discerned.
Again you need this sense that the ultimate
source of everything is meaningful, in the sense that
it relates identity and difference. This is what I think
Plato is talking about, that the dominance of thought
or dialectics is to do with a blending of the same and
the different, whereas if you have a philosophy only of
the same, or a philosophy only of the different, these
are inevitably materialist or idealist philosophies.
And yet there is something profoundly human about
the alternative view that we interact with the world
and with each other in this relational and analogical
way. Something like participation would allow you
then to have a sociology and a psychology which put
that at the centre.
JM: One thing I would say is that without this sense

of transcendence and participation in transcendence,
you cannot save something that might seem
otherwise seem quite commonsensical; it is really
a matter of saving the ordinary world. At its most
extreme, I would say that ordinarily we believe in
meaning, intentions, emotions, and love, and this
sort of thing, and yet, if you adopt a naturalistic
or scientific view, there is a sense in which those
PH: If I have understood you correctly, you are

starting to make quite strong connections between
paradox on the one hand, and analogy on the other.
That is very useful because it implies that there is
a way of working with and through paradox, not
simply acknowledging it and backing off, but rather
celebrating it.
Perhaps we might think about the split that afflicts
certainly Anglo-American psychology, and probably
many other disciplines in these terms, a split between
what we might call scientific/modernist approaches,
and
post-modern/hermeneutic
interpretative
traditions. In Anglo-American psychology at least,
this often results in something of a stand off. I know
colleagues who are almost tribal in their adherence
to what they would call quantitative measures, and
the set of assumptions that go with them, while
others are drawn to qualitative measures. This surely
is a very reductive way of looking at a much more
complex split. And we know from the experience
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PH: In trying to ground that notion further for

people who are interested in human nature, but
often in a different way from theologians, what can
we usefully give them?
and scholarship of other theological colleagues that

this fissure afflicts the European tradition less than
ours, but it certainly has done here in the UK, and it
certainly has in the United States. I wonder if we have
become stuck in an unnecessary and false dichotomy.
Is a possible way through this, by appeal to paradox
and analogy perhaps?
JM: Im not sure that I could answer that adequately,
but I would say that we need something much more
like a metaphysical approach that would undercut
the opposition between naturalism on the one hand
and hermeneutics on the other.
We need perhaps to see the continuity between
our feeling and our interactions in the world. Looking
back at somebody like Whitehead, and his notion
of apprehension, that everything in reality exists
through its negotiation of its relations to everything
else, its awareness of everything else, this fits with
the way that RO has always wanted to talk about
non-identical repetition rather than interpretation,
because there is something about interpretation
that suggests that you are standing outside whatever
you are reading, and that we are playing a sort of
humanistic game that spins round in a cosy circle and
that does not have very much ontological bearing.
I think repetition somehow helps to break up
the opposition between causation and interpretation.
By interpreting, one is altering reality, and causation
itself is in itself like an act of interpretation. Notions
of repetition and habit are here very allied, in that
there are realities composed of habitual patterns,
and, in the case of human beings, habit is much
accentuated in terms of freedom, but that we only
establish genuine freedom by creating second nature
as a skill. For instance, the lightness of the ballet
dancer is a profoundly learnt thing, even though it is
free. It is significant that Kierkegaard is obsessed with
the example of ballet.
PH: I spotted a fascinating insight in one of John
Haldanes essays recently (Haldane, 2004). He makes
the point that Aquinas effectively pulls together
cognitive and moral psychology, but then Haldane
moves on, and does not address the idea in any great
detail. Yet in an interesting way you can see that this
is what is happening. At one level Thomas is not
really providing a neutral epistemology, but he is
nevertheless addressing some of the basic concepts of
the raw material of human nature, and then looking
at these in (moral) action, in their moral applied
context. It is not as if the one, the natural and sociocognitive we might say, is de-theologised, or despiritualised, and then the second, the moral, is retheologised. The theology runs right through.
So what are the fundamental linking concepts?
Given that we now have the very interesting domain
of cognitive psychology, which examines cognition,
neuroscience, memory, reasoning, thinking, and
on the other hand we have what might be called
an infant field of moral psychology, what are the
key concepts that link them? Perhaps it is habit, or

habitus in the full Thomistic, paradoxical sense. But
I wonder, is it really habit that is properly basic, or is
it act? After all, a lot of contemporary psychology has
privileged perception and cognition over and above
action. Is habit really primary, or do we need to get
psychologists to go back to first principles and think
about action and motion?
SO: If we think about movement in relation to
habit, what the pre-modern tradition understands
by movement is what we would now describe
as change, (learning, growing, ripening, as well
as locomotion). Such motion in general can be
described as from potency to act. Motion also goes
back to the relational idea that John was talking
about in the sense that there is always a mover and
that which is moved. Aquinas has an understanding
of motion that includes a doctrine of grace, which
is quite interesting, because he understands motion
as not only a mover acting on that which is moved,
but also the donation to that which is moved, of an
ability to make that motion its own. So as motion
intensifies towards its conclusion and towards
actuality, that which is moved makes the motion
more properly its own by habit, which emerges from
its nature, and that nature is characterised by an
habitual, settled way of being. Now, there is a big
debate about what moves a heavy object to its lower
position. The answer that comes back if you correctly
interpret Aristotle and Aquinas is it is whatever gave
the stone its nature in the first place; that then allows
the stone to make its motion its own.
Motion, then, is not a straightforward category
by any stretch of the imagination, but it allows
something to actualise its own nature, sweetly and
delightfully, as Aquinas puts it, so that something
is fully itself through habit. That is what constitutes
its freedom. A bird is most bird-like when it is in
flight, which it does habitually. It does not perceive
this as a choice, shall I fly or shall I not. Its freedom
does not consist in sheer choice Its freedom
consists in the bird being most fully itself, and that
settled way of being is what we call habitus. But the
question is, then, where does that habit come from?
From where does the habit of forming habits come
from? The bird cannot account for itself. It cannot
account for its own nature through itself, therefore
it has a donating source. Aquinas would say that
human beings are most fully human in their rational
nature. Where does that nature come from? We are
recovering a tradition which suggests that its nature
is a gift from a donating source.
PH: It might be worth emphasising that motion
is a broader category than simply the output of
behaviour. We are talking here about any change
from potential to actualisation. This, I suspect, is a
concept that might usefully be re-learned in certain
parts of psychology. Combined with a teleological
understanding, this idea of motion becomes very
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powerful. Extending your bird example, for instance,

we can say that the intellect is most intellectual
when it is truth-seeking, when it is moving to truth,
the will is most will-like when it is good-seeking,
and that the true and the good are the same thing, so
the operations of will and intellect, at best, converge.
It would be interesting now to learn more about
non-identical repetition which John mentioned
earlier, and concepts such as habitus, and to connect
them with your work on motion, Simon. When I
read Aquinas on habitus, the eye-opener for me
was that if you approach these sections as, say, a
jobbing cognitive psychologist might, you could be
forgiven for thinking the guy is simply talking about
skill, but actually he is talking about a deepening
participation in being, as a function of each of those
repeated engagements. That really is a very different
concept to apply not only to skill, but of course, to
virtue as well, because people tend to think these
days, however benignly, of virtue as simply the
practice of a good act.
SO: Yes, we should probably give more background
to habit than we have done, and explore the idea of
the history of habitus as being in some sense contrary
to reason or freedom. The notion of habit is treated
with enormous suspicion in modern philosophy, as
it seems to denote things that we do simply by rote
rather than by reflection. Typically, many Protestant
thinkers have been very suspicious of habit, as they
believe our religious actions in particular should be
done consciously, and not merely habitually.
To see how moral effort drops away, let us take
the example of learning to kick a football well. The
process which we call learning to kick a football is
itself a motion, from potentially being able to kick
a football, to actually being able to kick a football.
Now, imagine that I have never seen a football, and
I do not know what one is. One would have to say
that my potential to kick a football is very acute.
Then I watch a football match, so I see other people
doing it, then I have a go myself, then I practice and
practice, until in the end I score a goal every time,
and I do so without trying. In other words, I kick
a ball and score a goal without thinking about it
in the usual deliberative sense of the term. I do so,
as it were, habitually. That is part then of who I am.
The business of practice and repetition is crucial
to the habit of being able to kick a football, to the
point where there is a sense in which I know how to
kick a football in a way that a scientist, who would
experiment on my anatomy, observes how I kick the
football, knows in a completely different way. And
the intimacy of that knowledge, that is part of the
habit; its the biblical notion of knowing something
as second nature. The point is that the motion of
learning to kick a football intensifies towards the
actuality of being able to kick a football, to the
point where it gets easier and easier. The movement
becomes sweet and delightful (Oliver, 2005).
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JM: Another thing about virtue is that it cannot

really have a beginning. It is a skill that you have to
be already in, so that you learn it from somebody.
Simon and I have been reading Ravaissons (2008)
book about habit in the nineteenth century, and
the whole tradition of thinking about habit again
emphasises the paradoxical, because if you say that
habit is fundamental, rather than law, you are faced
with the question of how habit begins, as a habit is
by definition something that is formed. If you say
that there nothing more fundamental than habit,
then this is very paradoxical, and it is interesting
that Ravaisson actually does invoke notions of grace,
even when thinking about paradoxia. And he cites
theological traditions of thinking about grace, so that
somehow habit begins by grace. Again you have this
notion that the most natural actually seems to require
something beyond and outside nature.
SO: Thats very important. No matter how much
I tried or practiced, I could not kick a football like
Wayne Rooney. It is simply not in me; its not
something I have been given to do. So habit must
begin with the gift of a particular and unique being
which is brought to realisation (actuality, in Aristotle
and Aquinass parlance) through deeper habituation
to certain ways of being.
PH: If motion is a key linking concept it is because
motion, understood as you do, is right there in the
dynamics of the psychological system itself, as well
as in a humans overt activities. It becomes a binding
concept which runs right through. It must do in
Thomist thought of course, because, among other
things, Thomas is interweaving Aristotelian ideas
into his theology. But we underestimate the extent to
which this could once again be a radical and useful
new way of looking at people in the human sciences.
It is not perhaps as unfamiliar for those of us who
come to it via a long philosophical and theological
tradition, of course, but it is these days for many
psychologists.
JM: I think it is absolutely fundamental that
somehow we too easily think that there is no
intrinsic connection between thought and reality,
so that the relationship tends to get narrowed
down to a matter of representation, as if we were
an empirical investigator taking a photograph of
reality. Then, the effective parts of the mind are not
seen as referential in any way, whereas earlier I think
passions were referential, often in a bad sense, in that
they distorted your ability. I think you are right to
raise the issue of whether psychology is too much
about perception, which seems to be linked to the
model of representation, or alternatively it is about
interpretation, and that action and feeling, or action
and emotion, really ought to be at the centre.
Here I think Simons idea about motion is very
relevant, because as he says in his book (Oliver,
2005), there is a continuity between material and
psychic motion for somebody like Aquinas. In fact,

he thinks of the mind almost quite naturalistically, as
when motion becomes reflexive, when it returns to
itself, then you have mind. In a way, Bergson (2009)
recovers this in a new sense, in that there is a deep
link between movement and meaning. I think this
is much more the way that we need to think about
things, in that things affect us that becomes reflexive
in us, and that we are then able, unconsciously and
then consciously, to affect things. A perception is
primarily a reaction to something, and feeling is
more fundamental than perception because there is
no uninflected response, it is always a feeling.
This is why I am very interested in Hume, and
like a lot of people, I think that Hume has been
totally misread. I do not think he supports this
representationalist view of things at all, and that
by actually making feeling primary, he is trying
to overcome a scepticism that results from just
concentrating on freedom, so that in a way he is
very open to the idea that feelings do actually have
a referential context. In fact, there is something
actually counter-modern about Hume, which is
what the best Hume readers are saying, that he is
pointing towards a romantic alternative, and that
the current coming through Ravaisson and Bergson
is really reading Hume in a very different way. In
Hume, already this importance of habit is becoming
fundamental. So one tries to recover this continuity
of motion and meaning, but the stress on feeling, on
the effective, becomes even stronger, just as the stress
on the imagination becomes stronger, beginning
with Hume, but also in someone like Coleridge. This
is the sense that we never sense anything without
imagining, so that an impression or feeling is always
an action. The primacy of action and reaction here is
crucial, and that could help to give us a different type
of psychology.
SO: There is also a strong tendency in modern
moral philosophy to say that if I need to make a
mental effort to act well, then my action is more
praiseworthy, because I have had to make the effort,
whereas Thomas would say exactly the opposite, that
if it has required an effort of will, then you do not
have the correctly settled habit, and therefore you
do not have the correctly oriented will to the good.
So the fact that one does something habitually is
actually an indication of a settled and good will. The
business of moral philosophy as deliberative moral
reasoning is indicative of the fact that we do not have
good moral characters.
I would want them to be seen by a good neuropsychologist or neurologist, because they will be able
to tell what she can do, what she cannot do, what she
needs to practice and so forth.
JM: Of course. But Im fascinated by the genealogy
of all this, that there has always been a discourse that
has recognised the link between the soul and the body,
such as the discourse about the humours and so on,
which were clearly aware of that, and the relationship
between these discourses and theological ones about
the soul, I do not fully know or comprehend the
history of it, but certainly naturalistic psychology is
not completely new.
PH: Let us return to the notion that ideally
psychology does need to look outside itself, the
notion that there has to be some sort of meaningful
reference for feeling, for example. In the 1970s,
many psychologists realised that perhaps they
should get interested in the everyday world! It is
not sufficient simply to explain activities that go
on inside peoples heads without some explanation
or account of the environment in which people
are immersed. This leads to a whole tradition of
studies of everyday memory, of reasoning in everyday
contexts and so on. As Mace (1977) wrote of
perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson, Ask not whats
inside your head, but what your heads inside of. We
can take that idea as an analogy and ask, is it really
that we need psychology and the social sciences to
embed themselves within the wider theological and
philosophical environment? It is not then simply the
natural environment that we are talking about, but a
set of meanings and concepts that those disciplines
can bring to bear make a conceptual environment
for psychology.
JM: It is very strange the way naturalism seems to
trade on a materialised Cartesian idea that somehow
soul is simply something inside you, as if we simply
think with our brains, whereas a lot of work has
been done on how we think with our bodies, with
our environment, and so strangely, the more we
materialise, or recover, the soul as something tangible
that is part of this entire set of interactions, the more
you understand that you cannot really reduce the
soul.
PH: But what we are doing, perhaps, is challenging

psychology to think again about the ontological
milieu in which it is doing its job. On some occasions
I have accused psychology, for all its strengths, of
PH: I agree, but before we get too radical, perhaps being guilty of ontological opacity. To take another
what is first needed may be to re-triangulate that example, beliefs arguably change what and who we
which we already know, not to reject or rewrite all are as much as how we think.
secular psychology! I think it would be foolish in
the extreme, for example, to assume that we have JM: This is where I would suggest something bold
not at our disposal a lot of useful and practical and simple, that the problem for psychology is that it
knowledge from, say, many of the explorations of the should either just be honestly naturalistic and utterly
neurosciences. If I had a relative who has a stroke, reductive, or it should realise that soul discourse
65
is in the end related to something metaphysical or

theological. If you do not do that, you get almost a
folk discourse about relation, intention and love, or
you get something like a brilliant pseudo-theology,
and this is how I would read Freud. By saying
that, I do not mean to say that the whole of Freud
is wrong, or that he does not have some genuine
metaphysical insights, but in a sense Freud occupies
a weird hinterland in which he goes on believing in
the soul after a fashion, and yet is naturalistic, so you
end up with new myths, of which most, I think it is
fair to say, have been empirically falsified. So oddly,
part of my critique of Freud would be that he is not
naturalistic enough, but often reads things that were
completely physical in social terms.
PH: Fine, so one route out of this is for psychology
to become humble and honest and to say, OK, were
simply going to be a naturalistic discipline. What
that might do would be to force us to let go of certain
domains, or to considerably reduce their scope. One
area for downsizing would be the psychology of
religion, which would probably have to be severely
curtailed, another might be moral psychology. And it
is very interesting to read work on moral psychology
at the moment. It seems to come in and out of
focus when it wants to have accounts that simply
talk about moral activity and moral behaviour, but
without recourse to any notion of the good, or God.
One could say that it is not possible to have any such
coherent account in this domain, unless it is fully
contextualised. On the other hand, I do think that
it is possible to have a fully coherent account of the
visual cortex and its operations, without recourse to
concepts like participation.
JM: Here one is on the controversial terrain of saying
that humanism is a bit silly, and the alternative is
either a complete naturalism or actually proposing,
shockingly, that something like psychology does
not have to be dogmatically secular, it does not
have to be free of all metaphysical or all religious
commitments. This does not mean that it is going to
be something ludicrously doctrinaire, but that it will
be trying to explore, phenomenologically, normal
human phenomena without reducing them, and it
will have to take account of the hinterland, and say,
if this stuff makes sense, then it involves some sort of
metaphysics. It will have to be more in relationship
to philosophy and theology.
borrow, or repristinate, of which virtue is a classic

example. And while some of its simple assumptions
may make you as theologians wince, nonetheless,
it is paying dividends and moving the discipline of
psychology on. Secondly, there is what we might call
the more evangelical position, informed either by a
strong Biblicism, or Reformed Epistemology. Again
this is helping out some of the assumptions of
secular psychology, but in a different way from RO.
The third, which we are exploring here, introduces
a more nuanced, Radical Orthodox/Catholic
tradition which looks to position psychology within
a theological context in which there is a powerful
account of the relation between faith and reason,
grace and nature, and so on. Suddenly then, we see
something not unlike the spread within the Anglican
communion, or even the Christian church in general.
Is it inevitable and healthy for Christian
psychology to acknowledge that these three positions
are in some sort of ecumenical creative tension, or
is it that denominations are inevitably going to
emerge from Christianised psychology?
JM: I think people will become aware that if you
have a too fideistic approach, it tends to either a sort
of fundamentalism, or it becomes a self-referential
discourse in a way that does not make a difference
to anything. If you use the correlationist approach,
this does not run well in the new, more aggressive
environment, in which the idea that there are
philosophically posed, neutral existential questions
is just not true. It is far more apparent nowadays
that Heidegger only thought that because he was
still thinking like a theologian. There is effectively,
then, this sharp Tillichian division between the
philosophical and the theological, and the dualism
of form and content which he had. And, in general,
I think Church people are very nostalgic about
what I call this type of humanism, and they are very
frightened of a situation in which there is not that
as a mediator. But the fact of the matter is that that
is rapidly how things are becoming, that there is not
that safe ground for them to stand on. Increasingly we
face a persecuting secularity. So it is crucial that we fall
back on our genealogy and our Christian traditions,
and I think that if we are to avoid the implications
of apparently liberal secularity that will not be liberal
at all, and if we are to avoid a fundamentalist corral,
then we need this much more fluid and paradoxical
discourse about faith and reason.
PH: Well, I would agree with you again, and so I hope

might a growing number of psychologists too. But at
the moment, what we seem to have is the emergence
of three groupings in Christian psychology. There
is the liberal integrationist stance, which seems to
rely almost on a correlational account of psychology
and theology, and at that level at least appears to be
somewhat philosophically uncritical. It effectively
says there are theological concepts that we can raid,
PH: I realise I am asking for a magic bullet here,

but what might we recommend, as something to get
psychologists a little more interested in this critical
relationship between faith and reason?
66
SO: The best, briefest account, is probably Pope

Benedicts Regensberg lecture (Benedict XVI, 2006).
JM: Unfortunately it is only known for one thing,
but it is actually a very thoughtful, perceptive lecture. from the implications of what he is saying, which
does require a re-enjoinment with the world, but it
SO: I have been recently reading some work by Hans is as if nobody wants to look at that or thinks it silly.
Jonas, who was a German Jewish phenomenologist,
Another simple way of putting this is that if
a pupil of Heidegger, but who in the end turned on there is no God, you seem to be stuck with saying
Heidegger, who wrote a lot about the phenomenology that either matter is primary, or reason is primary,
of life (Jonas, 2000). Jonas has a very simple, but ending up either with materialism or with idealism,
very striking essay, in which he comments on the but theology allows you somehow to have both these
invention or prioritisation of death, or necrophilia, realities, and there is a higher reality that transcends
so he is saying that for the ancient, pre-modern them, especially if you bring in some things from
tradition what was always primary was life, and the theological neo-Platonism which allows that there
cosmos was understood as a living organism. Motion is something in matter which reflects the One, that
is indicative of life, and saturated in motion, the mind does not capture. I think this needs to be more
universe is in some sense alive, and the notion of life worked into Christian theology, in order to justify
is analogically attributed to various aspects of the the sacramental.
natural. Even the inert is still in some way oriented
towards the generation of life. This dies away with SO: Its also worth mentioning that faith is not
modernity and what becomes primary is the inert, simply a propositional state, at least not as Aquinas
the object as opposed to the subject. He argues that or Augustine understand it; faith is actually a way of
the invention of the science of biology is essentially being. So, in this way, the best scientists are those
the prioritisation of death, because life is then treated who tend to be quite faithful, in the sense that they
as the aberration, as something that is weird and odd, have a certain way of being. Any research project, by
and requiring explanation. I wonder if psychology is necessity, is always going to begin with best guesses
running on the back of that, because consciousness is and intuition, and is never going to be able to
suddenly an aberration, it is that which is weird and delineate its outcome with any precision. Being able
has to be explained. It is something that goes on in to make best guesses, based on what has gone before,
one corner of the universe, as opposed to something or what we understand now, is actually quite a skill,
which is part and parcel of the way things are.
which comes partly by practice and through sheer
This is where, I think, psychology might have experience. So many of sciences best breakthroughs
a recovery of nerve and gain a clearer sense of its have been based on the best intuitions, which reason
own place within the hierarchy of scientia. If human then works on, and yet so many of those discoveries
intellectual life is in some sense the apex of material have surprised us. If it was simply a matter of
life itself (as Aquinas thought), and psychology is the extrapolating or unfolding what we already know,
particular study of that life, it is placed at the heart nothing would ever really come out of science, and
of our study. Yet this requires some sense that the yet it does. In any human intellectual enterprise, we
phenomenon of human intellectual life is not some are always working with that which we perceived
unbelievably weird fluke in an essentially lifeless through a glass darkly, that we then try to illuminate
universe, but is in fact the goal of that creation. The or elucidate the meaning and implications of, by
raises the problematic spectre of teleology, but it reason of different kinds and in different contexts.
is an issue which I think we need to confront very
urgently.
References
Benedict XVI (2006). Faith, reason and the
JM: This is where it seems to me that we have a loss
university: memories and reflections. The
of hylomorphism, in which you had the sense that
Regensburg Address. Given at the Aula
everything is composed of form and matter, that
Magna of the University of Regensburg Tuesday,
the mind is the form of forms, that you had this
September 12th, 2006. Available via: http://
mediation. It was as if the forms of the things out
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/
there were like embodied meanings.
speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_benxvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_
PH: I think it is not just the notion of consciousness
en.html , accessed June 4th, 2010.
which is problematic, it is meaning, it is teleology, as Bergson, H. (2009 ed.), La pense et le mouvant.
we were discussing earlier. It is as if the burden of
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
explanation or proof is set in the wrong direction. Blond, P., & Milbank, J. (2010). No equality in
Given the background assumptions of modernity, we
opportunity. The Guardian, January 27th,
have to swim against the tide to establish the validity
2010. Available via, http://www.guardian.
of ideas which from a different standpoint could be
co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/27/inequalitytaken for granted.
opportunity-egalitarian-tory-left, accessed July
12th, 2010.
JM: John McDowells (1994) book Mind and World Chesterton, G. K. (1908). Orthodoxy. London: The
edges towards the idea that meaning is not just
Bodley Head.
something inside us, but then curiously backs off Haldane, J. (2004). Faithful reason: Essays Catholic
67
and philosophical. London and New York:

Routledge.
Hampson, P.J. (2010). How to walk a tightrope.
Society for Christian psychology blog, May 31st,
2010. Available via, http://christianpsych.org/
wp_scp/2010/05/31/how-to-walk-a-tightrope/,
accessed, June 4th, 2010.
Jonas, H. (2000). The phenomenon of life: Toward a
philosophical biology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (Johannes Climacus) (1985).
Philosophical Fragments [trans. and ed. H. V.
Hong and E. H. Hong]. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Mace, W. M. (1977). James J. Gibsons strategy for
perceiving: Ask not whats inside your head, but
what your heads inside of. In R. Shaw and J.
Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting and knowing.
(pp. 43-65). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and world. Cambridge,
MS.: Harvard University Press.
Milbank, J. (2003). Being reconciled. London and
New York: Routledge.

Milbank, J., & Oliver, S. (eds.) (2009). The Radical
Orthodoxy Reader. London and New York:
Routledge.
Oliver, S. (2005). The sweet delight of virtue and
grace in Aquinass ethics. International Journal of
Systematic Theology, 7(1), 52-71.
Ravaisson, F. (2008), Of habit [trans. C. Carlisle and
M. Sinclair]. London: Continuum.
Smith, J. K. A., & Watson, P. J. (2007). Interview
with James K.A. Smith: Radical Orthodoxy,
secularity, and the roots of a Christian
Psychology. Edification: Journal of the Society for
Christian Psychology, 1(1), 68-72.
68
Suggestions for Further Reading

Milbank, J. (2005). Theology and social theory: Beyond
secular reason (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Oliver, S. (2005). Philosophy, God and motion.
London: Routledge.
Shakespeare, S. (2007). Radical orthodoxy: A critical
introduction. London: SPCK.
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Edification: Articles
Interview and Conversation with Conor

Cunningham and Aaron Riches: Radical
Orthodoxy and Christian psychology II
Ontological Naturalism and Christology
Conor Cunningham
Aaron Riches
Instituto de Filosofa Edith Stein / Instituto de Teologa Lumen Gentium, Granada, Spain
Zo Lehmann Imfeld
University of Bern, Switzerland
Peter Hampson
Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, UK
In this, the second of two Edification interviews with leading members of the Radical Orthodoxy group at the University of Nottingham UK, Conor Cunningham (CC) and Aaron Riches (AR) offer a robust and lively Radical
Orthodoxy approach to ontological naturalism and Christology and begin to explore their relevance and challenge
for secular and Christian psychology with Peter Hampson (PH). Zo Lehmann Imfeld (ZL) assisted with question
planning, transcription, and editing of the interview.
matter thus and now matter so, even if in our folk
language that change might be rape, murder, cancer
PH: Conor, perhaps a brief definition of what you and so on. This is the very liquidation of existence.
understand by the term ontological naturalism
PH: At the recent Religion and Naturalism
would be a good way to start.
Conference at Heythrop College, University of
CC: Ontological naturalism is a pathology plaguing London (12th June 2010) it was not clear to all
Western culture, to the extent that we do not even participants that all types of ontological naturalism
know we see through its lens, yet it informs our need be so physicalist or materialist in their
thinking to the highest degree. In short, it is the reductionism, I wonder what you think about
intellectual position that will do everything in its attempts to offer what we might call an expanded
power to banish the divine, to the point that it is naturalism in which there is supposedly some room
quite literally willing to cut off its nose to spite its for values and meaning or even human valuing,
face (Cunningham, 2010). From colour to free will, but which are not necessarily theistic? Are these
the mind to beauty and truth, all are sacrificed in worth considering or does the centre not hold in
the name of an ontological cleansing that is more your opinion?
accommodating to a world without God. Indeed,
as a number of atheist, analytic metaphysicians have CC: Yes, echoing W B Yeats, the centre cannot hold
admitted, if we appeal only to ontological naturalism, for naturalism. Indeed, the most accurate definition
we cannot in all honesty say that the Twin Towers of naturalism is probably that of hopeful naturalism
fell, for the simple reason that there is within the - we really just hope there is no God in fact,
grammar of that philosophy no such things as towers rather tellingly, Karl Popper referred to promissory
nor people (Baker, 2007). And that means that materialism (see Popper & Eccles, 1977). But
ontological naturalism is, when you think about it, such wishful naturalism really will not get us very
a more heinous ideology than all the diseases, wars, far. So there seems to be two choices. On the one
crimes, and disasters combined, because, in short, it hand, we can embrace restrictive naturalism; the noforces us to be Holocaust deniers, for how if matter nonsense, hard-nosed stance that accepts the limits of
is all there is, can we discern real difference between naturalistic explanation no matter the consequences,
Ontological Naturalism
69
even if they include incoherence, rabid scepticism,

and the undermining of science, which is, in the
end, the undermining of naturalism as an intellectual
position. On the other hand, we can follow Stroud
(2004), who recommends a much more open form
of naturalism, but points out that we might just as
well call it open-mindedness and therefore drop the
otiose, or maybe even distracting, tag of naturalism,
because in the end, it is just dogma, in the pejorative
sense. And I really cannot bring myself to speak about
something so vulgar and incoherent as valuing.
Well, being intemperate, what we should ask here is
what the value of valuing is? Such a question reveals
that all is reduced to function, and thus devoid of
content.
CC: As far it goes, evolutionary psychology is a

good thing, insofar as most of its findings are fully
consonant with, for example, Aquinas view of
human behaviour, especially sex. But the problem
it faces, as do all disciplines when operating outside

theology, is that they fall into the temptation of
functionalisation (Spaemann, 1985). In other words,
in the absence of theology, or a proper metaphysics,
the only terms in which much discourse can anchor
itself is that of function: religion, society, mental
thought, art, literature, and of course ethics. But
this leads to absurdity, and indeed nihilism. It does
so, quite simply, because that which performs the
function is wholly underdetermined, by which we
mean, content is impossible. For example, National
Socialism or the Decalogue are equal candidates for
the provision of social cohesion, identity, and even
ethics, which is to say, a realist account of ethics is
now wholly impossible. But even more disturbingly,
if that is possible, all rational, formal thought
likewise becomes merely functional, and in so being
is epiphenomenal a mere shadow cast by the hard
sides of brute matter, in this case the evolved brain
(Stroud, 2004; Plantinga & Tooley, 2008; Fodor,
1998; Nagel, 1986). But this lands us in radical
scepticism, both epistemologically speaking and
ontologically. The former because we can no longer
trust thought, the latter because entities which we
took to be real are again only shadows. Here the
person is the most notable casualty.
This radical challenge presented by evolutionary
psychology runs all the way down, for, as mentioned,
it threatens to undermine ethics, formal thought,
and free willnot to mention science itself (Stroud,
2004; Fodor, 1998; Nagel, 2003; Ruse, 1986).
Crucially though, we must not think that evolution
or natural selection is in some sense outside us or is
going on somewhere else, like some external force.
Rather it is us, to the degree that we are vehicles for
genes. And this makes us liars or, more accurately,
a lie. We are what Nietzsche called a true-lie: true
because we do have a function and a lie because
that function is not about us. We are a lie in the
sense that we are not what life is about, since life
is about the replicator, at least from the perspective
of ultra-Darwinism. Consequently, all our actions
are tainted. All our thoughts have an underbelly.
There, just at the edge of our peripheral vision, we
can maybe just catch the briefest of glimpses of our
true reflection. Recall all those journalists relaying
back their reports from foreign lands via satellite,
telling us at home what is happening in the rest of
the world. But because of the distance there is a
time delay. Likewise, for us, our mental lives suffer
an analogous delay, for in their midst lies evolution,
and of course, we should ask, Does that evolution
include the thoughts of Charles Darwin? There is, as
it were, a mconnaissance between our animal natures
and our humanity. Consequently, it seems we are left
without any solid reference points or foundations.
Now disorientated, man stumbles around the
rooms of his own home as if it were someone elses
house. What was once familiar seems strange, odd,
even threatening. Sigmund Freud refers to this as
the uncanny (this has the double etymology of
70
PH: The issue of ontological naturalism is of course

crucial for trying to sort out the relationships
between theology, philosophy, and psychology and
for the ways in which psychology goes about its
business. There are some people who are engaged
in psychology and theology debates who maintain
that simply because psychology is methodologically
naturalist, it need not succumb to the assumption of
ontological naturalism. I am not sure I agree. The
Radical Orthodoxy critique of the implicit atheism
of the social sciences is for me easily extendable to
psychology, and challenges this position which
basically says business as usual. The debate on the
relation between faith and secular reason seems to
have implications then. Do you agree? Should our
critique of naturalismbe more far reaching than a
position which remains methodologically naturalist?
If so what might the consequences of rejecting
naturalism be for psychology?
CC: The problem here is keeping naturalism
methodological, because in a certain sense, the
methodology implies ontology and vice versa. What
needs to be done is a collapse of the divorce between
what people say and how people live (Cunningham,
2010). For lives are lived in a manner that is replete
with the signs and goods of transcendence, yet they
are denied by the fashionable, wilful philosophies
espoused. The position that methodological
naturalism is laudable though may be nave. I will
return to this in the next question.
PH: The fact that you are writing on Darwin suggests
that you may have interesting views on evolutionary
psychology (EP). There are many psychologists
who would have criticisms to make of evolutionary
psychology, but from within the discipline of
psychology itself. I assume you have criticisms to
bring to bear from the outside. Could you sketch
out some of these?
Heimlichhome-like, familiarand Unheimlich

eerie or strange). In light of this, ultra-Darwinism
(and ontological naturalism) leaves us in a world
that is no different from brains-in-a-vat or the world
portrayed in the movie The Matrix. For there, too,
truth was subordinated to function. It did not matter
that one of the characters knew that the steak they
were eating was not real, as it makes no difference.
Likewise, ultra-Darwinism need only guarantee
function, that of survival, not truth (Fodor, 1998;
Ruse, 1986).
The problem being that on its own, a discourse
such as evolutionary psychology cannot help but
pretend to be a metaphysics, a First Philosophy, as
it were (witness universal Darwinism, as espoused
by Dawkins). However, any such expansive move is
wholly self-defeating. With regard to bare function,
which is now the only game in town, all thought is
subsumed by the one prime objective: Darwinian
fitness.
With regard to this prioritisation of sex, there
is a wonderful story told about one of the greatest
footballers (soccer, that is) who ever playedthe
outrageous George Best. Having prematurely ended
his career, he is holed up in a posh London hotel
with yet another Miss World, and he orders up
Champagne after winning 30,000 in the casino.
The money is lying all over the bed. A knock comes
to the door from room service. Best opens the door,
and the waiter peers in, seeing Miss World walking
half-naked across the room, the money on the bed,
and the Champagne on the traythe very dream
Darwinian fitness is made from. The waiter pauses,
plucks up the courage, and says to Best, Do you
mind if I ask you a question? Best replies, No, go
ahead. Mr. Best, Where did it all go wrong? Does the
waiter, then, live in a world at least partially outside
that of ultra-Darwinismwhich would rather have
us ask, Where did it all go right? It seems that in the
shadow cast by the ultra-Darwinism that underwrites
a great deal of EP, Einsteins famous formula E=MC
becomes a roundabout way of getting someone to
breed with you (and Einstein was, after all, rather
popular with the ladies). As Fodor says, Have you
heard the joke about the lawyer who is offered sex
by a beautiful woman? Well, I guess so, he replies,
but whats in it for me? (Fodor, 1998). But is this
not all a drastic conflation of sex and reproduction?
(Bunge, 2003; Berry, 2001).
or to philosophies which reify it and find it hard to

discern the difference. In this context, Simon Oliver
suggested that you may have some thoughts to share
on rigid, Fodorian modularity. What are these?
PH: Evolutionary psychology, and their associated

psychologisms, have to some extent piggy-backed
on early uses of the concept of modularity. This
is a concept which is pragmatically and flexibly
deployed in experimental cognitive neuroscience
and neuropsychology where, I should add, it can
be practically useful and readily applicable for
understanding the brain injured, for example.
Perhaps the problem starts when we shift from
honest, everyday science and its valid use of a
theoretical construct such as modularity to scientism
CC: A major characteristic of modularity is

informational insensitivity with regard to information
that exists elsewhere in the brain. Put simply, some
parts of the brain have information that others do
not, and such parts (i.e. modules) are not interested
in information possessed by other parts of the brain
(Fodor, 1983, 1985). Three main theses seem to
underwrite modularity. First, there is nonglobalism,
according to which a function involves some subset
of neurons that are small in relation to the rest of
the brain. Second, there is anatomical localization,
whereby the relevant set of neurons appears to reside
in an identifiable part of the brain. Third, there is
implied in modularity the thesis of nativism, based
on the work of Noam Chomsky, which holds that
some functions are nativistically determined and
thus not learned as such. For Fodor there are input
systems such as perception, and central systems or
cognition. The former are analogous to the blades in
a Swiss army knife (think of touch, sight, and so on),
whilst the latter do not have any obvious architecture
at all, or at least it remains beyond our epistemic
reach (probably because it is just too holistic to be
identified in any particular sense).
According to Fodor, input systems are
encapsulated, that is, sealed, so to speak. Thus, there
is little or no cross-domain thinking. For example,
taste does not encroach on sight. Or consider
illusions: that they do not actually alter suggests there
is something impenetrable with regard to the module
that deals with this type of perception event. For this
reason, Fodor calls input systems stupid. For they are
so hardwired that they afford little reconsideration
or adjustment, as it were, no matter what evidence
to the contrary. By contrast, cognition is quite
different, being characterized by non-encapsulation,
creativity, holism, and the analogical. In relation to
evolutionary psychology, modularity suggests that
not all is cultural (and if it were, we will see that
that would be a very bad thing indeed). Some things
are fixed. Thus relativism is a non-starter. And it is
good that everything is not plastic because it helps
us survive. The fast but dumb systems or modules
appear to be content rich, and as we already know,
this simply means that they dont start from scratch
since they are function specificfor to be functional
in this way requires that a great deal already be in
place. An analogy might be the difference between
a general bodyone that grew the required organ
or limb in reaction to certain demands or needs
(besoin)as opposed to a body already organized
into functional units. And to be honest, we speculate
that it is easier to run from a pursuing predator if we
already have legs in place, rather than having to grow
them. Thus a body with hardwired specifications is
better than a general body. And so it is also in the case
71
the mind, which certainly benefits from not simply

consisting in general intelligence.
Consider Chomskys nativism, which helps us
understand language acquisition in terms of a content
rich module or hardwired disposition (Chomsky,
1972). Chomsky famously argued that children
could never learn language the way they do without
some sort of native propensity; after all, they only
ever hear a limited number of linguistic examples
from their parents (a phenomenon called poverty
of stimulus). Yet they manage to get all that syntax,
grammar, etc. correct, doing so rapidly. If nativism is
not correct, then we would have to suppose that the
children have been taking secret lessons that Ma and
Pa just do not know about. Advocates of modularity
appeal to something called the frame problem. To
understand what this means, we need only think of
animals trying to avoid being eaten. Now, predatordetection (or the disposition to detect that which
will eat you) is coarse-grained and thus leads to false
positives, that is, false attributions of agency, in this
case to predators. But this is a good thing in the case
of predator-detection. For example, imagine that
two demiurges create two different animals, both of
which are herbivores. The first of them is a deer, and
it is a rather stupid animal as it tends to think nearly
everything is a sign of a predator. So it is perpetually
nervous, fleeing at the slightest sound. But even
though it gets it wrong more often than not, such
behaviour still protects it from its real predator, the
tiger on the occasion when there is actually one there.
Hence the deer manages to breed. By contrast, the
second animal is very intelligent and apt to extensive
deliberation, for its cognitive target is much more
narrowin this case an actual tiger, stripes and all.
Consequently, when a sound is heard, the animal
engages in extended assessment: Is that really a
tiger? And if it is, is it a hungry one? Maybe it is a
tiger cub. And so on. The point is that the trigger
for actual flight involves the confirmation of a real,
hungry tiger. And to be honest, that is usually too
late. Or recall the football match in Monty Python
played between the philosophers, all of whom take
an inordinate amount of time to actually kick the
ball because they are too busy thinking about what
they should do. Thus the frame problem: if thought
were purely general, then any particular thought
would fail to cohere into a whole, so to speak.
Any candidate for a boundary would always invite
extension beyond it, or any single thought would, in
an almost Hegelian sense, have to contain infinity.
Think of a single object, a cup. It rests on a table,
which rests on the floor, which rests on the earth
beneath, not to mention the sky above, and so on,
ad infinitum. Crudely put, the buck has to stop
somewhereif, that is, there is to be any thought at
all. Or, recalling Monty Python, if the ball is actually
going to be kicked.
Maybe somewhat surprisingly, Fodor is actually
quite conservative with regard to modularity, in stark
contrast with some evolutionary psychologists who
appear less temperate (to say the least), devising

wholesale lists of modules, even to the point that
there appears to emerge something approaching a
module for modules. An example of this profligate
modularity (or what Fodor calls modularity gone
mad) is offered in the work of Tooby and Cosmides
(1992), who basically have a module for everything bar Santa Claus, lest we think that is the case.
Indeed, it does seem that at times evolutionary
psychologists have a deus ex machina in the form
of natural selection, and this god bears the same
qualities as a C19th Paleyite (mechanical designer)
creator (Paley, 2006). Accordingly, it is natural
selection (or the adaptations nature has selected) that
does the thinking, as it were, whilst we are left to
do the doingone example being the pianist whose
performance is impaired when she suddenly becomes
aware of her hands (did not Nietzsche say as much
about cows?). And of course there is some truth in
this, for when we drive our car between two posts,
for instance our brain (or part of our brain), and not
any mode of explicit deliberation, tends to inform
the act (we shall return to the question of invented
histories below).
With regard to the massive modularity thesis, it is
in fact undermined by the evolutionary psychologists
own cherished analogythe Swiss army knife
because in this analogy modularity appears to be
subordinate to other modes of thinking (Gardner,
1983). And if this is not the case, then there would
indeed have to be a module for modules. Crudely
speaking, this is somewhat similar to what is known as
the binding problem: In any particular representation
there are many separate representations, raising
the question of how these come together to form a
single image. Consider, for example, what is involved
in our perception of a cup of coffee: There is a
plurality of distinctions, yet in spite of this there is
a unified perception. Similarly there may be many
blades, but the knife seems to unify them. Others
argue that the mind is not at all analogous to a Swiss
army knife but is rather a general-purpose learning
program. There is modularity, but it comes late in
the day as a product of development. Moreover, the
nature of the developmental environment will help
determine what modules do in fact fixate, as it were.
It may be a knife, then, but the types of blades it
possesses are not set from the start. In addition,
while there is domain specification (very generally,
parts do have a particular function or role), they
nonetheless accommodate flexibility, in other words,
knowledge that is represented in a certain domain
becomes reused, so that new forms of cross-domain
knowledge arise. An analogy might be feathers, for
they are supposed to have been used originally for
thermo-regulation, but evolution co-opts them for
flight. Similarly, a thought native to a specific domain
becomes used in some new and exotic wayjust as
an action hero might adopt an everyday object for
use as a weapon (a magazine springs to mind, as seen
in a recent movie). The point is that during evolution
72
areas are redeployed in a different manner, so that

there is more cognitive fluidity than the modular
model allows.
Another major challenge to strict modularity
comes in the massive redeployment hypothesis,
advocated most notably by Michael Anderson (2007).
This does exactly what it says on the tin: modules
are reused for completely different tasks. It should be
noted, however, that Fodor himself does not think
that modularity is an all-or-nothing matter. While a
module may well be strictly insensitive to other types
of information, for example, it is not necessarily so
insensitive to all other information. In addition, he
is highly critical of evolutionary psychology (Fodor,
2005).
CC: The relation between appropriate critiques

of naturalism and the grace/nature debate are
intrinsically related. Let me explain it this way. I
read recently in the paper that Richard Dawkins
has funded a childrens summer camp, one that will
encourage atheism, and the old campfire song of
Kum-bi-ya my Lord is to be replaced with John
Lennons secular hymn Imagine. And this brings
us to the heart of the matter. In that song, as you
will remember, I am sure, we are asked to imagine
a world without religion, it is easy if you try, no
heaven, above us only sky, and so on. If we would
only embrace this rational account of the world, then
most of our problems would vanish, all the religious
superstition and mumbo jumbo, all that theological
guff. And in its place, we would behold a pristine
nature, overflowing with self-evident sensibleness.
Not at all, quite the reverse! Indeed, it is here
that we can locate the cultural confusion that has
bedevilled the debate between science and religion,
between the natural and the supernatural. For we
have, it seems, articulated this debate in a wholly
question begging manner, and I must say that both
sides are guilty of the same crime. On the one hand,
we have theologians, and religious people, speaking
about their faith in manner that leads them to be
guilty of what I would term anonymous atheism, to
corrupt a phrase of Karl Rahners (1969). For they have
indeed bought into the idea that the supernatural is
something discontinuous or unrelated to the natural,
it is, in short, something extra, even if, to them, it is
something extra special. In a manner reminiscent of
Descartes division of reality into mind and extended
matter -- a division that arguably accommodates the
eradication of the former, and the veneration of the
latter -- in other words, the division allows for the

eradication of mind. Religious people have bought
into the idea that faith is something of a lifestyle
choice, like marathon running, or Pilates (or mere
individual salvation, understood as a ticket that
gets us somewhere else, namely, Heaven a bit like
that very special holiday we have always been saving
for).
And here the new atheist is in complete
agreement, religion is indeed something extra, the
supernatural is therefore over and above the purely
natural, but for them, in the name of economy,
Ockhams razor, if you willwe can just ignore
it, setting it adrift, to the point were it becomes
irrelevant. For we can indeed imagine its absence,
and can get along without it very well, thank you
very muchwhy not, it does not seem to do very
much. And it is here that the debate is conducted
today, at least in the press, especially the Sunday
papers. But this is a false debate, and it this debate
that is irrelevant, and moreover, nonsensical.
John Milbank (2006) once wrote that once
there was no secular, meaning that the theological
affected all areas of life. And in one sense Milbank
is absolutely correct, but this is not quite enough.
Why? Because there is still no secular realm, and there
never will be, at least without begging the question.
Let me explain. My waking hours (not to mention
my dreams) are filled with the writings of atheist
thinkers, philosophers, scientists, and so on, whether
it be about evolution, philosophy of mind, ethics, or
metaphysics. And one thing is clear in the starkest of
terms: Ontological Naturalism is in crisis. And there
are two types of reaction to this crisis: celebration
and acceptance, or disconcerting alarm. Those that
celebrate it, do so because what they have set out
to achieve is the banishment of the divine, doing
so, no matter what the cost. These fundamentalist
atheists will bring the whole house down, so as to
leave no room for God. To repeat, they quite frankly
are willing to cut their noses off to spite their faces.
Whilst those who are alarmed, face up to the crisis
in as brave a manner as possible, admitting the
shortcomings, yet unsure as what to do, but certainly
aware that something is dreadfully wrong.
Let me spell out this crisis, however briefly. The
banishment of God, something enabled by the strict
opposition of the natural and the supernatural, has
come at an enormous cost. We have ended up in
world, a supposedly natural world, which is devoid
of that which we presume to be natural: people, free
will, 1st person language, colour, ethics, organisms,
and indeed life itself. Now you may think I am
over egging the omelette a little. But here is a taster
sample: As one Nobel winning biologist put it:
Biology no longer studies life (Jacob, 1973). And
as a philosopher of science tells us: if we ask the
question when did human life begin? The answer
is never (Ghiselin, 1997). Here are four more
philosophers: Could it turn out that no one has ever
believed anything. (Baker, 1988) No such thing as
73
PH: To what extent can we connect your critiques

of naturalism with debates on the grace-nature
relationship and participation (see Smith &
Watson, 2007; Milbank, Oliver, Lehmann Imfeld
& Hampson, 2012) and then bring the implications
to bear back on psychology and the human sciences?
(Presumably there is a wider question behind this
on the relation between metaphysics and scientific
approaches to the person.)
selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a

self (Metzinger, 2003). Ethics is an illusion fobbed
off on us by our genes (Ruse & Wilson, 1983).
Biological fitness is a function of reproductive
advantages rather than a philosophical insight. Thus
if we benefit biologically by being deluded about
the true nature of formal thought, then so be it. A
tendency to objectify is the price of reproductive
success (Ruse, 1986).
Now, Dawkins may just tell us to pull our
socks up, stiff upper lip and all that, as we just have
to accept that there is such a thing as just being plain
wrong. Right on! And we have, it seems, been indeed
wrong, presuming that people, and so on, exist. But
the problem here is that there no longer seems to be
any such thing as being plain right! As the philosopher
Paul Churchland admits, in light of a universalised
Darwinism (that is, the idea that Darwinism is
applicable outside the realm of biology to the point
that, as said, it becomes a First Philosophy), truth is
epiphenomenal - like some shadow cast by the solid
stone of evolutionary survival (Churchland, 1986).
There we are, at Dawkins summer campfire, singing
Lennons song, but we, with our stiff upper lip, have
embraced our situation, and have altered the lyrics:
Imagine theres no people, its easy if you try, no free
will within us, nor life, or death, ethics, or reason,
arts or sciences. Was it not one of Darwins most avid
supporters, E.O. Wilson, who told us that evolution
was the best myth we have (Wilson, 1978). This
being the case, prisons become a cultural artefact,
an eccentric unjustified one at that. Indeed we all
become Holocaust deniers, for reality is merely the
agitation of matter (not that matter is any longer a
well-principled term), matter once thus and now so,
for we find it impossible to provide a metaphysics
that can notice real difference, consequently, all
wounds become impossible, cancer is removed from
the dictionary, and is no longer to be eradicated, for
this is a radicalized democracy, the very flat-lining of
reality (Cunningham, 2010). Such notions now only
appear in folktales.
So if we were tempted to adopt the vulgar tactics
of the new atheists, and pay for slogans to be put
on London buses, we could try this one: Theres no
God, so no joy or life. As I said, there is still no such
thing as the secular, by that I mean the secular is an
achievement, not a given, it is not just simply there,
but is in fact a gift. If we continue to debate in the
manner outlined earlier, it is not Heaven that is under
threat, but earth, the common sense world, the world
of nature, and of the natural, it is the end of Man,
not God. We must, therefore, save the natural by
reconfiguring the debate, realizing what is at stake not the afterlife, but the everyday, for the ideological
exclusion of the importance of religion is indeed the
very beginning of realitys destruction.
potentially a more important RO concept than (or at

least equally basic as) participation. Does this have
any resonance with your work?
74
CC: Well, thats a difficult one, because prioritising

one over the other would involve a paradox, no pun
intended: paradox is crucial because of participation.
For example, according to Aquinas, creation involves
what is called a mixed relation, which simply means
that creation is only a logical relation for God, but
for creatures it is a real relation; indeed he tells us that
creation is only a change for us. But yes, the only way
to avoid heresy or the domestication of God or of
creation is through paradox, as all other approaches
end up creating an idol.
AR: Echoing Cyril of Alexandria, Henri de Lubac

used to call the Incarnation the supreme paradox,
the paradox of paradoxes (de Lubac, 1987). In this
sense paradox is perhaps a more concrete concept
than participation: Jesus Christ is himself the
paradox. But then, we can immediately add that the
paradox of Christ is the content of what we mean
by participation: in the Incarnation the Logos
becomes himself the paradigm and ground of the
God-creature relation. So the Christian conception
of participation will have to be worked out in a way
that confirms the paradox of the hypostatic union,
where the mixed relation of God and creation is
exemplified in its most radical form according to the
doctrine of enhypostatos. According to this doctrine,
the human nature of Christ subsists wholly in union
with God such that the human nature of Jesus cannot
have any independent subsistence it is insofar
and only insofar as it is one with the Son of God.
In this way, following the French Oratorian Pierre de
Brulle, we can perhaps see that the nothingness
of Jesus human nature apart from its oneness
with the Logos precisely unlocks the full reality of
creaturely existence: the creature is created ex nihilo
and is nothing apart from God (Brulle, 1996).
Therefore, the difference of created life should be
thought of as actualised in direct proportion to its
communion with God maior dissimilitudo [ever
increasing difference] is perfected in unio [union].
Or to pick up on what Conor was saying about
heaven: the newness of Christ is not an absolute or
discrete newness, but the newness of the truth of
creation itself. The newness of Christ does not point
elsewhere, it points to the hidden root of created
being, to the absolute before which is the Lamb
slain before the foundation of the world. Heaven
is not an elsewhere, heaven is that dimension of
creation where the soil of created reality touches and
is in perfect communion with the Father himself.
This pattern of paradox is one way of thinking the
concrete mode of creaturely participation our
creaturely difference from God is realised in perfect
PH: I detect Chestertonian rhetorical flourishes here. oneness with him, a oneness that is always already
In this vein, John Milbank mentioned paradox as the ground of being as such. Being is communio.
forms of dementia, foetuses and embryos, etc. are

neatly moved to not to be granted the rights of the dignity afforded
just completed a to other human creatures.
connections with
Within this contemporary erosion of the
What are its aims inalienable dignity of all human beings, I wrote and
researched with an eye to resourcing the dogmatic
foundations of a polemic against the self-sufficing
AR: Yes, my Ph.D. was an attempt to articulate a humanism of liberal bourgeois culture, which tends
Christological humanism. I wanted to explore what to underwrite precisely this erosion of the universal
kind of conception of the human person is tenable in dignity of all humans and so tends to negate the
light of the grammar of orthodox Christology, which human as a meaningful category of social and
claims that Christ is verus Deus et verus homo [true political discourse. At the beginning of the third
God and true man]. What does it mean to claim millennium, in the realms of philosophy, science,
that Christ is the true human? This question, as I law, and politics, we are witnessing an unprecedented
understand it, lies at the heart of Christology from negation of the human as such. In its most acute
its origin: what is disclosed in Jesus Christ is utterly form, this is happening where liberal biopolitics
unique; nevertheless, what is revealed in him is not and capitalist bioethics converge. In the realm of
for us a mere speculative exception but the revelation biopolitics, as Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005) has
of the mystery of what it means to be truly human. shown, a renewed logic of homo sacer [the sacred
I took a significant cue in my research from human] has come to play an increasingly normative
the contemporary French Jesuit theologian, role, especially in the practice of erasing or bypassing
douard Glotin, who has suggested that in the the legal status of certain individuals, classifying them
early development of Christological doctrine, from unclassifiably as enemy combatants, individuals to
the first Council of Nicaea in 325, the primary whom the legal norms of the Geneva Convention or
impulse of investigation concerned the status of Miranda rights can be suspended at will.
true divinity revealed in Christ. But then, from the
In the realm of bioethics, likewise, the dignity
Third Council of Constantinople in 680-81, more of the human creature is being called into question,
and more theological reflection began to focus on governed nowby an ideology that, on the one hand,
the true humanity revealed in the divine person unquestioningly subjects human life to the pure
of the Son (Glotin, 2007). The dyotheletism of the decisionism of a supposedly inalienable human
Council of Constantinople allowed for a new focus right, while on the other hand objectifying certain
on the synergism of divinity and humanity in Christ, forms of human life in the service of a neo-eugenicist
as the Council Fathers proposed that in Christ project of scientific necessity that purports to
salvation was divinely willed through a human will. A operate in the name of human progress. In all
millennium and a half later, this new doctrinal focus events, the dignity of the human person is called
made possible the Conciliar articulation of Gaudium into question in the name of humanity itself. And
et spes, paragraph 22 paraphrased from Henri de so, in the name of humanity, humanism becomes
Lubacs Catholicime (McPartlan, 1992), beloved of impossible.
Pope John Paul II and offered by the last two popes
The condition of this post-humanist crisis is,
as the hermeneutical key to the whole of the Second I think, the internal logic of secular humanism, of
Vatican Council. The text states: Christ in the trying to configure humanism in purely immanent
very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his terms. This was already apprehended by Pope John
love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light Paul II and expressed his address to scholars at Lublin
his most high calling.
University in 1987:
On one level the intention of my thesis has
The
reduction inherent in the
everything to do with beginning to formulate a
Enlightenment view of man, of man in the
Christian response to secular accounts of the human
world, to the dimensions of an absolute
person, even while this is not directly my topic nor is
immanence of man in relation to the world,
it explicitly explored in the thesis itself.
ushers in not only Nietzsches issue of the
Robert Spaemann (2007) has noted how, since
death of God, but the prospect of the death
Boetheus, the term person served always as a nomen
of man who in such a materialistic vision of
dignitatis [a dignified name], deployed to signify the
reality does not in the final eschatological
inalienable dignity of the human creature. In the last
sense have any possibilities other than those
century, however, the function of the term person
objects of the visible order. (Rowland,
was reversed coming now to play a key role in
2003, p. 39).
overturning the idea that every human being has a
necessary dignity and therefore inalienable rights Secular humanism is not humanism at all. Freed
before other human beings. The contemporary from transcendent guidance, the Kantian autonomy
argument is that not all human beings are persons, of enlightened man leads to the Nietzschean
and those humans who are not persons the proclamation of the death of God, which was
severely disabled, the elderly who suffer from acute always already the fulfilment of Michel Foucaults
Christology
PH: At this point we have
Christology. Aaron, you have
Ph.D. on this and its possible
secular accounts of the person.
and main themes?
75
(2002) prophecy, that man would be erased, like a

face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea (p. 422).
Far from confounding the tradition of Catholic
humanism, this post-human situation confirms
it: the modern conception of the human
materialistically confined to an autonomous, selfenclosed immanence conditions, not humanism,
but the end of humanism. As de Lubac (1995) put it
in Le Drame de lHumanisme Athe: It is not true, as is
sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world
without God. What is true is that, without God, he
can only organize it against man (p. 14). Secular
humanism arrives unwittingly at the same position
as Catholicism: there is no pure humanism. The
choice was always post-human: either the death of
man or the God-Man.
AR: I fully agree with Conor here, but I would say

that the word spiritual is only bad to the extent that
it is misconstrued in a way that does not correlate
with its paleo-Christian meaning. To understand
the spiritual correctly, I think, is to understand
it in terms of the pneumatic principle of St Pauls

anthropological trichotomy of spirit, soul, and
body (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:23). Here the spiritual
life is the ecclesial life of communion, the life of the
Resurrected Christ described concretely by Paul in
Romans 8, where he writes of the Spirit interceding
with our spirit with sighs too deep for words, crying
Abba! Father! on our behalf. The spiritual life of
our adoptive filiation is the Christoform deification
of our humanity caught up through the synergism
of our spirit with the Holy Spirit into the life of the
Sons pure relativity of being in relation to the Father.
For Paul, this life is irreducible to either the body
or the soul or to any juxtapositioning of immanent
and transcendent, material and non-material, natural
and supernatural. Pneuma is the deep secret of the
human mystery realised in the crucified and risen
Son: if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the
dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from
the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also
through his Spirit which dwells in you (Romans
8:11). Here the spiritual life can be thought of as the
supreme activation of a quasi created/uncreated
principle of integral communication of spirit and
Spirit, where nature/matter is made perfectly porous
to the supernatural life of God. And I think this
is what de Lubac was getting at when he said that
pneuma is simply the paradox of the human creature:
desiderium naturale visionis dei [the natural desire to
see God]. And so in the conclusion to Surnaturel, de
Lubac (1946) describes the spiritual life, not as an
occupation of the creature with an other worldly
reality, but rather the liberation of the most intimate
desire of the creature on the one hand, now purged
through the radical transformation of metanoia on
the other (p. 483).
In terms of the second part of this question,
it relates for me to the possibility or impossibility
of duplex hominis beatitudo [mans happiness is
twofold ] or, the status of Aquinass claim that
the human being has a twofold end. Of course RO
rejects categorically the Surezian reading of duplex
hominis beatitudo as an ontological duplex ordo
[a twofold order] a paralleling of two discretely
perfect ends, one governed by debitum naturae [the
debt of nature], the other realised as an extrinsic
donum perfectum [perfect gift]. But if RO rejects
this parallelism, it does so precisely in a manner that
refuses every trace of monism that would confuse
the two ends by collapsing them one into the other.
The eminent Russian Orthodox patrologist John
Meyendorff, for example, used to say that deification
was not a supernatural gift, but rather the core of
human nature (Meyendorff, 1975, p. 11). I would
want to both agree and disagree with Meyendorff:
the deification of the creature in the bliss of vision
of God is a supernatural gift, while at the same time
it is also the heart of the human vocation. On my
view, the two ends must be integrally related without
confusion and without separation the hermeneutic
again is Christological.
76
PH: One things which strikes me about Christological

compared with psychological accounts are that the
former deal with the scandal of particularity the
uniqueness of Christ, whereas, a lot of the time (but
not always) psychological accounts are normative. Do
you have any comments on this? Is the relationship
between the two always likely to be problematic?
CC: Well, this is not quite true, because the
particular is in fact the possibility of the normative,
it is, in other words, the truly normative, and it is
for a very simple reason, already touched upon
above. Any normativity that psychology might
attain cannot resist functionalisation, and this means
that any instance of such normativity, say, Jim is
easily replaceable by, say, Susan. In contrast, the
particularity of the Christ makes normativity possible
because it underwrites, and thus makes possible
analogical thinking, and thus resists reductionism,
and therefore nihilism (Cunningham, 2002, 2010).
PH: If Christ is truly God and truly human and
held up as a pattern or example for us, what does
this suggest about a) any account of the human
which neglects the spiritual or theological and b) the
(ultimate/ eschatological?) perfectibility of human
nature?
CC: Spiritual is a bad word, because misleading;

again, it sets the natural over and against the
supernatural, so-called. In short, there is no such
thing as a person without theology, and this is not
a religious view as such, one need only survey the
conclusions of Western thought in the last century
to see the pervasive and wholesale annihilation of the
person, whether in philosophy (both Continental
and analytic), science, or sociology, and arguably
psychology.
If the new creation in Christ cannot rely on

any prior created ground, if it does not build
on creation (de Lubac, 1949, pp. 104-105), then
the incarnation is the analeptic condition of the
possibility of creation as such. Christ fulfils for the
first time every longing of nature and the vocation
of the human creature so that in Him human nature
is explained and never the inverse. But if grace
explains nature and not otherwise, grace explains
precisely the deep truth of nature interior intimo
meo [more intimate to me than I am to myself ]. The
supernatural is therefore supra-intimate, it is the
supra-immanence of the world itself or, as Nicholas
Healy (2008) puts it, it is the nature of nature.
The supernatural is the secret truth of nature which
nature cannot disclose, which nature itself does not
even posses. The movement of natural being toward
the supernatural therefore requires a radically ecstatic
movement, a patient waiting that is a receptivity (in
a Marian sense) of being in non-contrastive relation
to God. In this way is accomplished the unio [union]
of maior dissimilitudo [ever increasing difference],
which alone fulfils the longing of the human heart
and alone accomplishes the human vocation. With
this in mind, we can approach the twofold end of the
human creature in a manner that is neither monistic
nor dualistic: for the human creature there is one
perfect end, which is nevertheless twofold. How so?
In this regard I can only reiterate what de Lubac
argued in this 1948 article on the duplex hominis
beatitudo, published in Recherches de science religieuse.
There de Lubac showed how the doctrine of duplex
hominis beatitudo in Aquinas articulates the difference
between (1) the imperfect beatitude of human nature
within the purview of its contemplation of divine
things, and (2) the perfect beatitude of human
nature according to the vision of God himself
through grace in the lumen gloriae [light of glory].
Duplex hominis beatitudo specifies the distinction of
the happiness of the viator [traveller] and that of the
comprehensor [one who understands or has attained
full knowledge]. On the one hand, we have a beatitude
by participation, a contemplative anticipation of the
visio divina [divine vision]; on the other hand, we
have the ultimum [end], the perfection of the second
gift of grace in the divinising vision of God himself.
One beatitude has clear ontological priority and is
the prime analogate that gifts itself (in diminished
intensity) as the sufficient ground of the other, which,
in turn, anticipates and is insofar as it is toward
the ultimum (in a quasi-enhypostatic fashion, if we
can use that language in this context). Just as sacra
doctrina [sacred doctrine - includes Scripture but
not only Scripture, PH] is a speculative participation
in the beatific vision, so the happiness of the viator
is likewise a speculative anticipation of the gift of
the beatific vision of the comprehensor. The duplex
hominis beatitudo is one indivisie, inseparabiliter
[indivisible and inseparable].
not surprisingly cropped up in my discussions

with Simon Oliver and John Milbank (Milbank,
Oliver, Lehmann Imfeld & Hampson, 2012). I am
gathering here that both of these are relevant for any
attempts to relate Christology and secular accounts
of the person, but can you sketch out a little more in
what way paradox is?
CC: The person is ultimately a paradox because the
person is not empirically verifiable, yet it is the very
possibility of all and any acts of verification. You
cannot, in other words, locate a person. And here we
see the strange fundamentalism, and crudity of much
modern, scientistic thought so often beholden to a
strange Cartesianism. Cut the skull open and we do
not find a soul, ergo there is no soul. But all we need
do is ask how this is falsifiable? Say we find a soul
inside the skull, but then we need to cut its skull
open, so to speak, and of course an infinite regress
of absurdity gets on its merry way. The point being
that such modern thinking is absurdly Gnostic, for
the big revelation, the main accusation is ah ha
you are material pointing to our organs, as if that
actually meant anything interesting. This being the
case, the ultra-Darwinist, or indeed the modern
materialist or ontological naturalist resembles the
fundamentalist who goes to Bible college, only to
discover that Moses may not indeed have been the
author of Exodus (which should not come as that
much of a shock, since it contains an account of his
death!) and subsequently loses faith. But he remains
a fundamentalist by default, insofar as he has not
thought to question the original model of truth
that governs his approach to existence. For example,
because he cannot find people in a pure, objectified
mode, he presumes, as a behaviourist would, a merely
symbolic reality - think of Walter Gilberts comments
about being able to carry a person on a CD in his
back pocket (Gilbert, 1992). In other words, the
person, or the persons reality, is not real. Instead,
when we witness consciousness, pain, etc., there is no
real presence as suchthis then is their Zwinglian
metaphysics; in other words, the reality of evolution,
the reality of that which appears in evolution,
and thus the reality of our lives is forbidden true
existence, it being merely symbolic, as it is subjected,
once more, to a functional logic.
In precise terms, we cannot, on pain of crass
dualism or matter-hating Gnosticism, locate mere
matter. In other words, the swamp cannot be found,
at least not innocently. We cannot find mere matter
for, as we know, to do so is to presume its opposite.
God asks in Genesis: Who told you that you were
naked? (3:11). Usefully, we can we translate this
question as: Who told you that you were merely
matter?or that matter was mere? To argue, then,
that man is merely animal because he is continuous
with animals is to employ a logic that presumes
mind to be res cogitans [a thinking thing]. Indeed, to
approach matter or animality in this way is strictly
pre-Darwinian, and in terms of Christianity, heretical
PH: As I said earlier, participation and paradox (Cunningham, 2010).
77
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Edification: Articles

Interview and Conversation with John

JM: It is quite difficult to sum up briefly what RO

affirm that in theology, also, everything is finite or

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

PH: Following and building on the earlier Edification

of putting things. On the other hand, RO theologians

on a participatory ontology, with its

nothing): the view that, at every moment (and not

things turn out not to be real, that we are living

JM: One thing I would say is that without this sense

PH: If I have understood you correctly, you are

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

PH: In trying to ground that notion further for

and scholarship of other theological colleagues that

key concepts that link them? Perhaps it is habit, or

powerful. Extending your bird example, for instance,

JM: Another thing about virtue is that it cannot

psychic motion for somebody like Aquinas. In fact,

PH: But what we are doing, perhaps, is challenging

is in the end related to something metaphysical or

borrow, or repristinate, of which virtue is a classic

PH: Well, I would agree with you again, and so I hope

PH: I realise I am asking for a magic bullet here,

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

SO: The best, briefest account, is probably Pope

and philosophical. London and New York:

New York: Routledge.

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

Suggestions for Further Reading

Copyright of Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology is the

Copyright of Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology is the

Interview and Conversation with Conor

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

even if they include incoherence, rabid scepticism,

CC: As far it goes, evolutionary psychology is a

it faces, as do all disciplines when operating outside

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

PH: The issue of ontological naturalism is of course

Heimlichhome-like, familiarand Unheimlich

or to philosophies which reify it and find it hard to

PH: Evolutionary psychology, and their associated

CC: A major characteristic of modularity is

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

the mind, which certainly benefits from not simply

appear less temperate (to say the least), devising

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

areas are redeployed in a different manner, so that

CC: The relation between appropriate critiques

latter -- in other words, the division allows for the

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

PH: To what extent can we connect your critiques

selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a

potentially a more important RO concept than (or at

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

CC: Well, thats a difficult one, because prioritising

AR: Echoing Cyril of Alexandria, Henri de Lubac

forms of dementia, foetuses and embryos, etc. are

Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology

(2002) prophecy, that man would be erased, like a