In examining various philosophical critiques of modernity, this paper analyzes how John Milbank’s reinterpretation of Augustine’s Two Cities can be developed into a theological pathological analysis and a therapeutic discourse that critiques and overcomes the limitations and problems of modern secular reason. Therapeutic theology analyzes the pathological symptoms of individual and social values, judgments, desires, emotions, and affections, while promising its own vision of therapy. In our contemporary context, therapeutic theology must engage with a number of critical discourses of modernity.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Michelle Foucault, and Axel Honneth respectively critique the pathologies of pluralistic liberalism, power and governmentality, and capitalism with different emphases, and offer alternatives of tradition-dependent rationality, the care of the self, and the actualization of reason through conflicts. Against contemporary pluralistic liberalism, its political and economic systems and their positive domination, and the dialectics of historical liberation and progress, John Milbank proposes a counter-ontology of divine giftedness and non-violent, non-competitive self-giving; a counter-ethic of freedom, equality, and a sense of community; and a counter-history embodying a divine redemptive history. This antithetical framework, if complemented by the ambiguity and inter-mixture of the Two Cities, can capture the dynamics of the therapeutic process of values, desires, emotions, and affections in the lives of Christians living amidst contemporary secularity.