Prof. John Milbank - Why the theological future is Cusan rather than Thomist

Cusanus Society UK & Ireland First annual conference
Tuesday 20 to Wednesday 21 June 2023, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, UK

Speaker: Prof. John Milbank. University of Nottingham.
Plenary Paper: “Why the theological future is Cusan rather than Thomist”

For all the continuing value of Aquinas when rescued from neo-scholastic confusions, the approach of Cusa more points the way forward for us today. His fusion of Albertinism, Eriugena and Chartrian humanism in a post-nominalist context allowed him to begin to develop a new discourse of participated creativity that refused any distinction between theology and philosophy, or any thinking of monotheism that is not also Trinitarian and Christological, while remaining more strictly monotheistic and even monistic in character (and thus open to other religious perspectives). It is in these terms that he more drastically confronted the inherent paradoxes of the Creator-Creation relationship than had been the case hitherto. In all such aspects (which do not anticipate Kant so much as the various currents of Romanticism) he opened out an ‘alternative modernity’ rather than a mere return to the pre-modern that is now theoretically and culturally impossible, besides being less than fully Christian.

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