RT Article
T1 Splendid Vices and Secular Virtues: Variations on Milbank's Augustine
JF Journal of religious ethics
VO 32
IS 2
SP 271
OP 300
A1 Wetzel, James
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2004
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1822385148
AB John Milbank's case against secular reason draws much of its authority and force from Augustine's critique of pagan virtue. Theology and Social Theory could be characterized, without too much insult to either Augustine or Milbank, as a postmodern City of God. Modern preoccupations with secular virtues, marketplace values, and sociological bottom-lines are likened there to classically pagan preoccupations with the virtues of self-conquest and conquest over others. Against both modern and antique “ontological violence” (where ‘to be’ is ‘to be antagonistic’), Milbank advances an Augustinian hope for the peace that is both beyond and prior to the peace of (temporarily) repressed antagonism. One aim of this essay is to consider whether virtues conceived out of such a hope are really all that different from the virtues they are taken to replace. I take a critical look at Augustine's critique of pagan virtue, Milbank's appropriation of that critique, the applicability of that critique to Plato, and the polemical value of Augustine's notion of original sin. I end up being skeptical of the notion of a peculiarly Christian way to turn antagonistically conceived virtues into love, but I am not unsympathetic to Milbank's concerns about a loveless and self-complacent secularity.
K1 Virtue
K1 Vice
K1 Sin
K1 Secularism
K1 Plato
K1 Milbank
K1 Augustine
DO 10.1111/j.1467-9795.2004.00166.x