Abstract
How does theology become a science in its own right? And how does theology develop a coherent doctrine of life—not just human life, but life itself? These are the key questions at the heart of Theology, Science and Life, written by Carmody Grey, Assistant Professor of Catholic Theology at Durham University.
The book consists of three parts with a total of seven chapters. Each of the three parts covers one of the three concepts of the title. The first two parts on theology and science focus specifically on John Milbank’s theology and his radical orthodoxy, which seeks to free theology from a modernist construct and allow theology to be queen of the sciences in its own right. In this section, Grey is deliberatively hidden as an author, and she does not articulate the extent to which she agrees with Milbank, only that she finds him useful as a dialogue partner.
The third part focuses on life and biology as a scientific discipline, particularly through Hans Jonas’s groundbreaking 1966 book The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. In this part, Grey discusses the possibilities of refreshing vitalism as a ‘theological vitalism’ (p. 233).
The book is generally very well written and well organised. Grey argues brilliantly for her main theses, and there are erudite summaries of complex literature.
The first two parts of the book concern Milbank, particularly his views on the social sciences and his alternative to secular reason. Milbank’s theology will be familiar to many readers of this journal, but in brief, his concern is to show that there is no neutral knowledge. All knowledge is discourse-dependent, but that doesn’t mean that theology is one discourse among others. Instead, it is a ‘master discourse’ because Christian theology must insist that all knowledge is enlightened by the Logos and that all knowledge is therefore a participation in God (p. 235). ‘Theology’ is therefore not a specialised field but is the unifying theme of all knowledge. Theology does not study God, who is not an object of knowledge, but ‘studies the mediation of God by creatures’ (p. 60).
In Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 2nd edn), Milbank’s fire is particularly directed at the social sciences, but in Part 1 Grey makes a link to her project by examining Milbank’s concept of nature. An important point here is that ‘nature’ is never ‘pure’. We cannot isolate it immanently so that it becomes self-explanatory. This presents both epistemological and ontological challenges that Part 2 addresses. It is not the case that natural science can create the realist ontology on which it is based; it can at most become an instrumentalism, but instrumentalism is a cultural concept. This leads to the claim that ‘narratives’ are the most basic category, more basic than ‘explanations’. Explanations can be given but must be articulated in a larger theoretical framework that mutually constitutes hypothesis, theory and experiment (p. 25). But how do you settle a dispute, then? According to Milbank, it is purely a matter of rhetoric. This sounds precarious, because how do you avoid a total verbal war with this view?
According to Grey, Milbank’s vision is that the Christian narrative is about peace. ‘The narrative of peace’ is what ‘theological reason’ reflects upon, a peace that creates ‘the peaceful cohabitation of narratives’ so that widespread pluralism can be absorbed into the theological sponge (p. 210). This requires a pragmatic concept of truth, which Milbank also advocates. But it is also an axiological point that the Good is the True and therefore cannot be translated into non-value terms. This is a transcendental point that theology must address. There still seems to be, however, a difference between narrative ontology and narrative epistemology. To some degree, I can accept the latter, but the former is more difficult. But theology can, of course, accept a structural ontology that must be unfolded narratively without overstepping its bounds. Lorenz Puntel, for example, has shown this brilliantly in Chapter 3 of his God and Being from 2011.
Part 2 of Grey’s book examines what science must look like if it unfolds within the theological framework described by Milbank. I found this part less interesting than Parts 1 and 3 because the in-depth description of Milbank does not add much to our understanding but rather meets objections. But to Grey’s credit, she is good at addressing the reader’s concerns when they turn to Milbank’s bombastic formulations, e.g., his ‘epistemological imperialism’, as some have put it. The main point is that science is theology because it is not possible to separate the immanent from the transcendent—the infinite and the finite are entangled. This should lead to science becoming ennobled, because all regional ontologies deal with the ultimate in this way.
It could be hard for some to accept this claim which is why Grey spends an entire chapter unfolding Milbank’s understanding of ‘theology’s mastery’ in light of fellow traveler of radical orthodoxy Michael Hanby’s theory of ‘a universal objectivity of reason’ that grants legitimate autonomy to the scientific disciplines (p. 236). Grey goes deep into analyzing Hanby’s contribution, but her goal is to unite Hanby and Milbank to show that Milbank’s difference-in-peace holds true. Both agree that theology must articulate a holistic theory that integrates philosophy and science, partly to avoid the modern pitfalls of atomism and mechanism, and partly because science cannot establish its own first principles. I agree, but Hanby in particular seems to fail to recognize that this is precisely why many scientists are content with instrumentalism and spontaneous realism (see p. 194). Regardless, it is the ability of theology to be the universal in the particular (Hanby) or the peace that embraces difference (Milbank) that gives theology its special status. Grey summarizes in a programmatic statement: ‘only if the discipline is regarded as a kind of theology in its own right, a kind of discourse about ultimacy, a conjecture which is intrinsically metaphysical in scope and reach, will its distinctness and irreducibility be apparent’ (p. 142).
Grey is aware of how complicated a writer Milbank is but manages to balance her introduction to his theology with an independent application. But whether she manages to justify Milbank’s rejection of external criticism is another matter.
The problem with Milbank and Grey’s position here is that they fail to recognize that we have multiple resources for intersubjective critique. And we have criteria that can be used to evaluate even positions and discourses that we do not have an affinity with, for example, the fine-grained concept of coherence that Nicholas Rescher has described in his works. Therefore, I think they are wrong when they claim things like ‘All criteria for true and false reason … are tradition-specific’ (p. 35). If you turn realism into pragmatism because the real thing is peace (‘difference-in-peace’), then you are close to committing the fallacy of equivocation (p. 95).
Milbank criticizes an understanding of science as a ‘separation of mind and world which is used to justify accounts of truth as a mirror-like accuracy to extra-linguistic phenomena’ (p. 111). But this is a simplistic criticism of a naïve positivism that few assume. So, we have a false dilemma here. A real alternative is to recognize that we do not have access to the world except through our minds and language, at the same time as we recognize that we have an increasing precision in our statements about the world that can be controlled by a third party.
A key claim in Grey’s book is that theology is biology and biology is theology. Part 3 examines the concept of ‘life’ in light of the preceding review of Milbank’s theology. Grey’s figurehead in this part is Hans Jonas and especially his The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology from 1966. A key question in theological elucidation is how we are to understand the transcendent as manifesting itself in organic life. Grey will provide ‘a vitalist agenda for theology’ to show how biology and theology coincide. I’ll return to the concept of vitalism in a moment (p. 227).
First, I want to credit Grey for bringing biology to the fore, because it is interesting to look at a natural history subject in relation to theology, because theology has often been preoccupied with the conversation with exact science, primarily physics (the distinct question of evolution vs. creationism aside). But the historical sciences are configured differently, such as zoology, botany, biology, geology, and meteorology. Here, the establishment of laws is not sufficient (abduction is required). That’s what makes this conversation interesting.
But what is life? According to Milbank, it is both basic and irreducible, it is ontologically ultimate, and he advocates a ‘nuanced version of panphysic vitalism’ to avoid seeing life as an epiphenomenon to matter (see Chapter 6). Perhaps it can be. But life can also be seen as an ability—to absorb nutrients or for metabolism (which Grey mentions, though as that which sustains rather than defines life)—or simply as that which is carbon-based. Perhaps Grey would call it philosophically under-mediated, but we also need an understanding of life that can be applied in practical experiments and not identified by speculation alone.
Another important issue is that Jonas makes life fundamental because nihilism always begins with a change in the understanding of nature. This is similar to what Lorenz Puntel explains philosophically in Sein und Nichts from 2022, which sensibly rejects ontological dualism, which, in Jonas’s case, also stems from his famous Gnosticism studies. The idea is that a dualism between mind–world or spirit–matter will end in nihilism, which is why life—understood organically—is the therapy that nihilism needs. Theology follows suit here because an ontological integration of spirit and matter can also be used by theology to ensure the fullness of being.
There is a lot of exciting material covered here, but I miss a clearer theological unfolding of what life in God means. This is a consistent shortcoming because it is not entirely clear to me as a reader how the link between God’s eternal being and the contingent world is established. But it should be clear by now that if life is a pervasive theme, and all scientific disciplines must relate to this entanglement, this can only be done by theology becoming the unifying force.
The seventh chapter concludes the project by formulating a theological vitalism. Grey understands vitalism as the notion ‘that life can be described and accounted for in no terms more basic than itself. Rather, “life” should be taken to indicate what is fundamental to reality itself’ (p. 161). The idea is that the Christian narrative can explain why present life is limited because in the light of eternity it is sustained by God. It is a teleology that shows that life has basic value.
Making vitalism the center of a theologically informed biology is one thing, but the possible implications for epistemology are another. Vitalism traditionally sees life as the prior process necessary to make cognitions at all. Since life becomes the yardstick we use to assess all propositions, these must necessarily be relativized when it is the flowing life that is to be served. Emphasis is placed on the process rather than the result, and the processes of realization therefore become instrumental. Our cognition is not about the world at all, as we might have thought, but fulfills a deeper need in life itself. If you’re a scientific realist like me, this is a deeply problematic position. Grey agrees, but from a different angle. Instead, she wants to take the concept and install it in a theological discourse in the same way Milbank has done with ‘society’. Vitalism does not refer to a supernaturalist élan vital, but ‘a regard of life as ontologically ultimate and so as coincident with peace, which is a regard of life as graspable only by narration’ (p. 169). The Christian story offers precisely the possibility of seeing life as original, as something God has in se, and therefore what it all has to end with. ‘Life is life only as over-against-death’ (p. 212), and this can be shown by placing life in a narrative framework, because organic life has a story that unfolds in time. Here, theology can help biology because it shows how that story is not so much struggle as it is peace. ‘As a participation in the life of God, life is finally real and fundamentally peaceful’ (p. 236).
All in all, Grey has written a complex and rich book that skillfully captures the essence of Milbank, Hanby and Jonas’s ideas, but also pushes the discussion further, especially for those who find radical orthodoxy compelling.