Brian Hamilton

RO and Augustine on the Imitations of God

The Augustinian echo in the work of John Milbank and others of Radical Orthodoxy is sometimes distant, often transformed, as has been said many times and as they themselves would readily confess. Yet there remains one central, structural feature to their work, at least one, where Augustine’s voice is still heard clearly; that is, the way of seeing every discourse, every politics, every human action, whether explicitly or not, as dependent on God for its meaning. Even where something sets itself up against God, or without any reference to God, it still stands only as an imitation, or perversion, or they would say ‘parody’ of God. Augustine says also in the Confessions II.14, “All those who wander far away and set themselves up against you are imitating you, but in a perverse way; yet by this very mimicry they proclaim that you are the creator of the whole of nature, and that in consequence there is no place whatever where we can hide from your presence.” In the pragraph just before, A. had demonstrated this point with a whole litany of sins.

It may be, however, that I’m being too generous to Milbank. For reasons that Halden has so rightly and forcefully spelled out, it is possible that Milbank would say, rather than being an imitation of God, that every human construction is a parody of Christianity.

26 January 2008 |
tags: Augustine, Radical Orthodoxy