Living with Unintended Consequences

It is an honor to be invited to respond to Brad Gregory's extraordinary and fascinating new book. The work is phenomenally learned, intricately and ingeniously argued, deliberately provocative, and sometimes exasperating. Let me begin by expressing wholehearted approval and support for a great deal of what Brad Gregory is seeking to achieve in this work. He takes theological ideas and their intellectual impact seriously. He ascribes real causative power, and not just totemic significance, to changes and developments in belief and thought. In his portrait of the longue durée of Christian history, changes in thought and the major events of European culture appear intertwined. All this is good news. Brad neither apologizes for ideas nor seeks to revise away great movements of change.

That said, I do not recognize his portrait of the Reformation. Nor am I comfortable with the role in which Brad seeks to cast the reformers in his grand narrative. The Unintended Reformation consists of a long threnody for a lost age of grace, specifically, the lost age of medieval Western European Catholicism, or even more specifically that of Thomist philosophy and medieval monastic/sacramental piety. The reformers, he argues, are to blame for destroying not just the religious culture of the Middle Ages, but the whole edifice of Christian thought, culture, and ethics. There is nothing new about Catholic historiography blaming the reformers for breaking up the medieval synthesis, of course. Brad's approach on one hand absolves the reformers from intending the harm that they caused; but on the other hand he insists that they did far more damage than anyone has so far recognized. His Reformation did not just destroy medieval Catholicism: it unleashed a series of collapses that led to the secularization of the West and marginalized religious thought. The reformers wanted to maintain the edifice of Christianity without papal obedience, monasticism, and sacramentalism. But the cascade of falling dominoes that they had started could not be stopped. Changing metaphors, the reformers in Gregory's story seem like disobedient children who played with fire inside the house, then found that it burned down around them.

The book is argued with astonishing intellectual virtuosity as well as erudition, and it is impossible in a few pages to do it justice. This essay will touch only on a handful of key points where the argument may merit further reflection. It will end with an affirmation of one of Brad's key arguments—the attribution of change to unintended consequences and unforeseen effects—but in a quite different sense from that in which he has pursued it in this book.

An illustration of Duns Scotus. From George Shea, Some Facts and Probabilities Relating to the History of Johannes Scotus . . . (Cambridge, 1890).

Gregory's argument advances by cumulative steps, and each step plays a critical role in his exposition. It is therefore appropriate to begin by reviewing the claims made in chapter one about the rise of "metaphysical univocity" and its implications for ideas about God in the West. Gregory adopts the theory advanced by Gilles Deleuze and popularized by the "radical orthodox" school of postmodern theologians that Duns Scotus did serious damage to theistic metaphysics by arguing that one could speak of the existence of God and the existence of creatures in one and the same sense, una voce (36-37).¹ According to Gregory's version of this argument, if God "exists" in the same sense as a created being or thing "exists," and not as an utterly transcendent entity whose being is of a quite different order than that of creatures, then it becomes philosophically possible to think of God as one being among others, whose existence is no longer logically necessary. Thus far Gregory advances in line with thinkers like John Milbank (though, as he stresses, with a quite different intention). However, he then implies in the remainder of the chapter that once the original sin of late medieval univocity had been perpetrated, all subsequent thought treated God as a being whose existence need not, in the long run, be insisted upon. The alleged dominance of univocal...