ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace of recent 'broad-brush' intellectual histories that Heidegger's onto-theology is a central component of modernity, and that, whatever these two things (onto-theology and modernity) are, they are bad. It is often hard to get any real impression from these sorts of narratives just what onto-theology is. But there is no shortage of arguments to show why - whatever it is - it is bad. This sort of situation should perhaps lead us to a healthy exercise of the hermeneutics of suspicion. For there seems to be a pervasive reluctance to question the validity of the whole onto-theological analysis. It has become, in certain theological circles, a sort of positum that forms the starting point of a theological enterprise, but is not itself open to interrogation. So questioning the whole story - and the place in it of Scotus and Suarez - is what I propose to do here. I shall largely limit myself to the contributions made by John Milbank, since these appear to have assumed normative status for those of his followers who write on the topic: it is possible to find just the same account of, for example, Scotus, in the various writers of Radical Orthodoxy.1
