Theology or Anti-Theology 'In Disguise'?John Milbank and Richard Webster both describe the rise of
purportedly secular and scientific accounts of social and mental realities as
being either theology or anti-theology ‘in disguise’.
The emergence of a purportedly secular and scientific concept
of ‘emotions’ provides an occasion to re-examine this methodology with
reference to a particular historical case-study. In this study of the creation
of the concept of ‘emotions’, the fruitful but sometimes over-ambitious
methodologies of Milbank and Webster are modified by the addition of the
category of ‘atheology’ to their categories of theology and anti-theology in
disguise. The importance of this modification is that it denies that ‘theology
in disguise’ and ‘anti-theology in disguise’ are mutually exhaustive
characterisations of secular texts. The category of ‘atheology’ includes
texts that are untheological and, as a subset, some texts that are
additionally quasi-theological.
Contributed by: Thomas Dixon
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