Radical Orthodoxy is a contemporary theological movement emerging in the 1990s that critiques modern secularism and seeks to reclaim the integral role of Christian theology as foundational for philosophy, culture, and social life.

Rooted primarily in Anglo-Catholicism, particularly within the Church of England, Radical Orthodoxy defends a robust sacramental worldview that emphasizes the primacy of God’s revelation and the ecclesial tradition as necessary for authentic knowledge and social ordering. It challenges the presumed neutrality of secular reason by insisting that all human understanding and social structures must be illumined by the theological vision rooted in the Christian narrative of creation, fall, and redemption.

Despite its Anglican context, Radical Orthodoxy offers Catholic social teaching (CST) vital insights and developments by resituating social, political, and economic issues within a framework deeply attuned to divine transcendence and incarnational theology.

Whereas classical CST sometimes operates with assumptions from modern natural law and political philosophy, Radical Orthodoxy engages these from a more explicitly metaphysical and narrative vantage point. It underscores the theological unity of creation and grace and the inseparability of worship and social praxis.

By returning to the sources of patristic and medieval thought John Milbank (one of its founders), adds to Catholic social reflection a richer ontological sense of human subjectivity and community.

Radical Orthodoxy critiques secular ideologies that fragment human existence into isolated spheres—such as economy, politics, and religion—arguing instead for a holistic vision in which social order arises from a shared participation in divine life. Its sacramental ontology affirms that social institutions are not merely human constructs but mediated realities that reveal divine truth when rightly ordered.

This perspective encourages CST to move beyond pragmatic policy prescriptions to a deeper vision of the social as a liturgical and eschatological reality, steering the Church’s social mission toward restoring cosmic harmony and human flourishing as integral to God’s kingdom.

Moreover, Radical Orthodoxy’s emphasis on the centrality of the Trinity, the incarnation, and the Eucharist provides a theological grounding for the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good in CST, showing these as rooted not only in ethical reasoning but in the divine life itself.

Through its fusion of rigorous philosophical inquiry with bold theological claims, Radical Orthodoxy challenges Catholic social teaching to embrace a more profound, holistic, and metaphysically grounded approach to contemporary social challenges—restoring theology’s primacy in shaping just societies and renewed communal life.

Radical Orthodoxy's three principal founders—John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward—launched the movement through their 1999 anthology Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, building on Milbank's seminal Theology and Social Theory (1990).

Milbank, an Anglo-Catholic theologian at Nottingham University, critiques secular social theory as inherently violent, proposing a "post-secular" narrative theology that recovers patristic and medieval participation in divine being.

Pickstock, a liturgical scholar at Cambridge, explores philosophy's consummation in worship, arguing language and ritual disclose transcendent truth against postmodern nihilism.

Ward, Manchester's Regius Professor of Divinity, integrates cultural theory with ecclesial practice, emphasizing desire and community as sacramental realities.​

The phrase "Once there was no secular," coined by Milbank, encapsulates Radical Orthodoxy's rejection of modernity's myth of neutral, autonomous spheres.

In premodern Christendom, all reality—politics, economics, culture—participated holistically in God's creation, mediated by the Church's liturgy and doctrine. Secularism emerged as a violent ontology, positing autonomous reason and power divorced from divine grace, leading to nihilism and injustice. Radical Orthodoxy insists theology must reclaim primacy, narrating reality as a divine gift where "secular" domains find meaning only in participatory relation to the Triune God, fostering peace through ecclesial counter-ontology.

Radical Orthodoxy (RO) proposes a participatory metaphysics that reclaims the patristic and medieval insight that all creation exists solely through dynamic sharing in God's infinite being, overturning modernity's autonomous ontology.

Drawing explicitly from Henri de Lubac's retrieval of Aquinas, RO insists creatures possess being "per participationem," not per essentiam as God alone does.

De Lubac critiqued the extrinsicist "two-tiered" nature-grace schema of post-Reformation Thomism, which posited a purely natural order alongside supernatural ends, arguing instead for an intrinsic supernatural vocation woven into human desire.

RO amplifies this: creation's essence-existence distinction renders it radically dependent, yet gratuitously gifted with participatory excess—creatures "non-identically repeat" divine simplicity, harmony, and creativity.​

John Milbank builds on de Lubac to diagnose secularism's genesis in late medieval nominalism, where natura pura (pure nature) bifurcated reality into immanent autonomy and transcendent add-on.

Participatory metaphysics restores unity: God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens sustains secondary causes, infusing them with primary efficacy without instrumentalizing them. Aquinas's analogy thus ensures difference without univocity—creatures analogically "burn and cut" through divine infusion, blending freedom and necessity in liturgical harmony.

RO extends de Lubac's paradox: natural desire for God is created gift, demanding grace as justice-yet-beyond-justice, preserving creation ex nihilo's gratuity.​

This framework dramatically deepens Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Classical CST, rooted in natural law, risks pragmatic accommodations to secular liberalism's neutral spheres—economy, politics, rights—subordinating theology to autonomous reason. RO's participatory lens reveals social structures as sacramental extensions of divine peace: solidarity mirrors Trinitarian perichoresis, subsidiarity echoes analogical causation, and common good participates in eschatological kingdom.

Unlike CST's ethical critiques, RO narrates capitalism and socialism as "ontologies of violence," positing rivalry where participation summons gift-exchange. Human dignity surges from de Lubac's supernatural ontology—persons exceed material reduction through graced self-exceeding.​

RO thus propels CST toward "theurgical" sociality: liturgy consummates politics, fostering "maximally democratic and socialist cooperation" via virtue and excellence. Globalization becomes cosmic liturgy, not mere trade; poverty, refusal of participatory abundance. By resituating CST in de Lubac's vision, RO unveils social theology as metaphysical participation—Church as vanguard of creation's deification, rendering justice a foretaste of divine harmony. This "post-secular" deepening equips CST to confront nihilism, reclaiming theology's primacy for human flourishing.

Radical Orthodoxy posits that secular social science embodies an "ontology of violence" intrinsic to its foundational assumptions, betraying a rupture from Christian participatory peace.

Theology and Social Theory (1990), argues that modern disciplines like sociology, economics, and political theory arise not from neutral observation but from a nominalist genealogy post-Duns Scotus, where univocity of being flattens divine-human distinction, birthing autonomous "secular" realms.

This secular genesis assumes reality as chaotic flux, stabilized only by force: Hobbes's Leviathan enforces order amid bellum omnium contra omnes; liberal economics posits self-interested agents in zero-sum rivalry; Marx unveils class struggle as history's motor.​

Secular social science, RO argues, masquerades as descriptive yet prescribes violence as normative. By bracketing God—the source of harmonious difference—it reduces society to immanent power dynamics, where identity emerges via repression of the Other. Capitalism's market "freedom" conceals exploitative agonism; socialism's state coercion mirrors it; liberalism's rights discourse enforces tolerance through sovereign violence.

All share a "post-secular" myth: neutral reason managing primordial conflict, yet this presupposes rivalry as ontological default, legitimizing domination—colonialism, totalitarianism, neoliberal precarity—as pragmatic necessities.​

Contrastingly, Christian ontology narrates creation as gift: ex nihilo participation in Trinitarian peace, where difference (creaturely multiplicity) flourishes without suppression, sustained by divine logos.

Patristic participation (per Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas via de Lubac) yields "analogical" sociality—hierarchies of gift-exchange, not rivalry. Secular theory, renouncing this , deforms humanity, positing "pure nature" severed from supernatural telos, breeding nihilism.​

RO's critique unveils CST's potential complicity: natural law applications risk secular liberalism's neutral spheres, diluting theology's primacy.

By exposing violence's genealogy, RO deepens social theology: justice demands liturgical counter-ontology, where economy participates in eucharistic abundance, politics in ecclesial synodality. Society heals not via policy but metanoia—reclaiming participatory peace against secular war.

This "radical" vision equips CST to prophetically dismantle violent structures, narrating alternatives from divine harmony.

Radical Orthodoxy (RO) and Catholic Social Teaching (CST) converge, sharing an audacious vision to reorder society around the unqualified affirmation of human dignity,.

RO pursues this through a more metaphysically intensive, participatory lens. CST, from Rerum Novarum onward, grounds dignity in the imago Dei, insisting economic systems, politics, and law serve persons as ends, not means—prioritizing the poor, subsidiarity, and solidarity for integral flourishing. RO amplifies this: dignity surges from creation's analogical participation in Trinitarian life, where humans, as icons of divine persons, exceed immanent reduction through graced self-exceeding.​

Both traditions reject secular ontologies that erode dignity. CST critiques capitalism's commodification and socialism's collectivism for instrumentalizing persons; RO radicalizes this, narrating modernity's "secular" spheres as violent myths positing autonomous rivalry over gifted harmony. Human dignity demands reordering: CST via just wage, family primacy, and common good; RO via liturgical ontology, where society mirrors eucharistic exchange—economy as abundance, politics as synodal peace.

Salvation, for RO, liberates nature and community into "maximally democratic and socialist cooperation" through virtue, echoing CST's call for structural justice yet rooting it eschatologically.​

RO deepens CST's vision by resituating dignity metaphysically. Patristic participation (per de Lubac, Aquinas) renders humans constitutively relational—perichoretic like the Trinity—not isolated rights-bearers. Secular liberalism's "neutral" dignity risks abstraction; RO insists dignity unfolds dynamically in deifying communion, binding rights to responsibilities within ecclesial vanguard. ​

Both summon metanoia: personal conversion yielding structural renewal, theology reigning over profane power for a civilization of love and excellence.

Proponents of Radical Orthodoxy (RO) and Catholic Social Teaching (CST) must read each other to unlock their profound synergy, where RO's metaphysical depth amplifies CST's ethical praxis.​

RO Gains from CST

RO's participatory ontology critiques secular violence but risks abstraction without CST's concrete applications. CST provides policy-oriented tools—like just wage principles from Rerum Novarum, solidarity in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, and fraternity in Fratelli Tutti—grounding RO's "peaceable ontology" in actionable justice for workers, migrants, and the poor. RO's Anglo-Catholic vision of society as liturgical harmony finds real-world traction in CST's preferential option for the poor and subsidiarity, preventing metaphysical speculation from ignoring structural sin.​

CST Gains from RO

CST excels in natural law diagnostics of inequality yet often accommodates secular liberalism's neutral spheres. RO, via Milbank, de Lubac, and Aquinas, resituates dignity in analogical participation, revealing capitalism and socialism as "ontologies of rivalry" rather than mere flaws. This equips CST students to prophetically dismantle violent genealogies, subordinating economics to eucharistic abundance and politics to Trinitarian perichoresis—deepening common good beyond ethics to cosmic liturgy.​

Mutual Enrichment

Together, they forge holistic social theology: CST's scriptural-magistral principles meet RO's post-secular narrative, yielding "theurgical" reform—Church as vanguard reordering globalization toward divine peace. This complementarity counters nihilism, blending RO's boldness with CST's prudence for transformative witness.