ABSTRACT
The difficulties of the relations of participation, of discerning insides and outsides, and conceiving appropriate thresholds and middles, are themselves evidenced in potential difficulties concerning Radical Orthodoxy's own location. Behind the robust intellectual engagement with the sites in which secularism has invested heavily lies Radical Orthodoxy's demand that all scientia be granted - and recognise - its proper theological place. For Radical Orthodoxy, what went wrong in the late Middle Ages was the false division of philosophy from theology. Ambiguities are critical for Radical Orthodoxy's programme, for its central theological framework is participation as developed by Plato and reworked by Christianity, because any alternative configuration perforce reserves a territory independent of God. In pursuing an autobiographical yet thoroughly theological difficulty, the author attempts to articulate a series of hesitations about the rhetoric deployed by Radical Orthodoxy in its attempt to reawaken a lost sense of participation and thereby reclaim the world, the city and the soul.
