ABSTRACT
Radical Orthodoxy authors have assumed a certain Catholic voice, above all in their unquestioning appropriation of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is this appropriation of Aquinas that has led to the accusation that Radical Orthodoxy indulges in a nostalgia towards Mediæval authors. The suggestion is that this inventive appropriation of Mediæval authors seems somewhat dislocated, or even ahistorical. The key to understanding Pickstock's analysis is in the phrase noble estate of bumpkinhood, for she is making claims about immediacy of knowledge through an appeal to rusticity as the guarantor of her argument. Aquinas is simply being co-opted as an authority for this view. The noble bumpkin is none other than the no less noble savage of French Rationalism. Radical Orthodoxy could, however, defend the appeal to Aquinas by reference to an unimpeachably Catholic tradition. Because God can be known through creation, God can therefore be known without being known as Trinity.
