John Milbank and the “Suárez Affair”

Abstract

The article focuses on the key concepts of the philosophical theology of Francisco Suárez and the post-Suárezian scholastics. These concepts were used by John Milbank, contemporary English theologian and initiator of the «radical orthodoxy» movement, to historically justify his own views. In Milbank's interpretation, four points define the transition of medieval scholasticism from the “correct” Thomistic understanding to the pernicious innovations of Duns Scotus; through Suarez and his younger contemporaries, according to Milbank, they have been adopted by theologians and philosophers of modernity. The concepts in question are: univocation of being, cognition as a mirror image, potentiality, and “coincidence” (concurrentia). Milbank believes that these concepts have replaced the original ones – analogy, cognition as a formal identity, the primacy of actuality and “influxus”. Milbank's specific work with these notions often looks like a forced subsumption of a range of complex and heterogeneous problems that receive one-sided and even historically incorrect coverage. Such is the subject of this article. Its purpose is to analyze, on the basis of Milbank's views, the textual evidence of the meaning of these concepts and to draw certain conclusions concerning the adequate methodology of modern thinkers' engagement with the scholastic tradition.