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 |
