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Charles Taylor and John Milbank: A Footnote
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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In his recent study of the sources of the modem identity, Charles Taylor coined the phrase, ‘the affirmation of the ordinary life.’ He argues that modem culture has been marked not only by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of human beings but also by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of the ordinary life—the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. Taylor calls this affirmation of ordinary life ‘one of the most powerful ideas in modem civilization.’ It has certainly become one of the predominant themes in Catholic theology in the second half of this century.
Taylor notes, however, another ‘extremely important fact about modern moral consciousness. . . . We are in conflict, even confusion about what it means to affirm ordinary life.’ So for example, Catholics may, almost unanimously, describe the post-Vatican II era as the age of the laity, but particular attempts to live the Gospel in the modem world and to theologize about that experience create storms of controversy. The debates surrounding liberation theology, which with its turn to the economic, social and political life of man is nothing if not an affirmation of ordinary life, are one such example.
One particularly illuminating instance of the debates surrounding the affirmation of ordinary life and liberation theology is Juan Segundo’s Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church (Minneapolis, 1985). In it Segundo responds to the ‘‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation’ issued by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
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- Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 See especially Part 111 entitled, “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life' in Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 211–304Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., p. 14.
3 Ibid., pp. 23–24.
4 For an English version see Origins, 14 (1984): 193–204.
5 ‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation,’ VI, 4 and X, 6.
6 See ‘Founding the Supernatural: Political and Liberation Theology in the Context of Modem Catholic Thought’ in bank, John Mil. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 206–255Google Scholar.
7 Ibid., p. 76.
8 Thomas Aquinas, QD. De Veril. 6.1 ad 8: ‘Ad octavum dicendum quod praeparatio importat, proprie dispositionem.’
9 Thomas Aquinas, QD. De Pot. 3.4 ad 7: ‘. aliqua forma naturalis est quae per creationem in esse producitur, scilicet anima rationalis, cujus materiam nature disponit.’
10 For a more detailed argument see Sparrow, M.F., “The Proofs of Natural Theology and the Unbeliever,' American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 2 (Spring, 1991): pp. 129–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I–II, q. 113, a. 10: ‘…naturaliter anima est gratiaecapax.’
12 De Lubac comments on this danger in his Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (London: Burns A Oates, 1950), p. 166Google Scholar.
13 See, for example, de Lubac, pp. 166–167 and Joseph Komonchak's discussion of this theme in de Lubac, , ‘Theology and Culture at Mid–Century: The Example of Henri De Lubac,’ Theological Studies 51 (1990), pp. 579–602Google Scholar.
14 On de Lubac's failure to realize the full implications of his work see Milbank, pp. 206–209 and p. 226.
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