Abstract

Milbank’s correlation of modern rationality with a myth of chaos and an ontology of violence can preclude a naive theological reception of the social sciences, but while Milbank suggests a critique that would trace modernity’s truncation of reason and its nihilistic outcome to the post-Thomist reification of the supernatural and to Scotus’ conceptualism, his option for Augustine’s supernaturalism appears regressive. Irony attends both the violence of Milbank’s performance on behalf of an ontology of peace and his non-analogical, typically Protestant construal of the faith/reason relationship. Nonetheless, he also suggests resources for a positive move beyond the discourse of paradox and contradiction.