ABSTRACT
A retrieval of Neoplatonism is essential to Radical Orthodoxy. The same holds for other postmodern Christian theologians and philosophers with whom it is engaged, for example, Jean-Luc Marion, who returns to Dionysius the Areopagite, and Michel Henry, who draws upon Meister Eckhart (Hankey, 2004, pp. 203-10 and 224-38; Hankey, 1998c).2 John Milbank is conscious of his debt to these French phenomenologists working in the wake of Heidegger's conquest of French philosophy and theology in the second half of the twentieth century (Janicaud, 2001). The thought of Heidegger himself, although it misrepresented Neoplatonism in absolutely fundamental ways, may be regarded as a kind of Neoplatonism, or at least as reiterating some of its most important gestures (Hadot, 1959, p. 542; Narbonne, 2001, passim; Hankey, 2004a). The French postmodern Christian theologians and philosophers upon whom Radical Orthodoxy depends reproduced Neoplatonic positions in order to get around Heidegger's critique of western metaphysics as onto-theology. This is also the concern and method of Milbank, although his post-Heideggerian Christian Neoplatonism differs importantly from that of any of his French models by refusing to give up the western Christian attachment to Being as the highest name of God. Crucially, however, the 'neo-Neoplatonism' of all these - Heidegger, the French phenomenologists and the Radically Orthodox - has a fundamental logic which characterizes Heidegger's alternative metaphysics. In contrast to the Neoplatonic tradition in its pagan and Christian, ancient, mediaeval, renaissance and modern forms, these twentieth century revivals eschew the mediation of intellect when relating the sensible, corporeal and psychic to the Absolute Principle. The present postmodern *neo-NeoplatonisirT unites the transcendent and the world of our experience immediately (for the Heideggerian and the old Neoplatonic logics, and their difference, see Narbonne, 2001, pp. 280-81).
