John Milbank doesn't like computers...

'Computers ... in so far as they impose the reign of information, are the enemies of truth and democracy. Our gaze at their screens is the constitution through watching and receiving of inherently violent transactions which in the end, when we step through their looking-glass, always involve real physical violence.

On line, therefore, we are clubbing each other to death, but invisibly, very very gradually and at a huge remove. When this process does appear, then we finally see what we collectively do, but assume that it has nothing to do with us, individually. But just as breathing is the most massive combustion, so also this slowed-down and distributed violence is actually increased violence, like a torture that is all the more torture through being long drawn-out.'
from Being Reconciled p. 37

Think about that when you next play Scrabbulous....

Can Morality Be Christian? John Milbank

I have only come lately to this essay by Milbank, and what a piece of provocation it is! The answer is, in short, no: morality cannot be Christian! It is quite a Protestant piece for him. He ends thus, with his best impersonation of Luther in full cry:

So no, the Christian man is not a moral man, not a man of good conscience, who acts with what he knows of death, scarcity and duty to totalities. He has a bad conscience, but a good confidence: for he acts ith what he does not know but has faith in. In absolute trust he gives up trying to be good, to sustain a right order of government within himself. The Romans that Paul wrote to did this already, but they still needed a letter from Paul - to hear what? Simply to hear the other, receive the other, and through the other receive the gratuitous God. Cease to be self-sufficient in the face of scarcity. Instead to be good as first receiving from the all-sufficiency of God, and acting excessively out of this excess.

Jeffrey Stout asks three good questions

It's been a hard couple of weeks!

Stout challenges MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank - who have harboured such resentment against modern secular democracy. He asks three good questions (Democracy and Tradition, p. 104):

is it not possible to discern the workings of the Holy Spirit, and thus some reflections of God's redemptive activity, in modern democratic aspirations?

is there nothing in the political life of modern democracies, or in the lives of those who are struggling for just and decent arrangements within them, that a loving God would bless?

if the plenitude of God's triune inner life shones forth in all of creation, cannot theology discren some such light in democratic political community?

Well indeed. I would add a fourth question: is it not the case that modern democratic community is the child of Christendom, even if it is somewhat of a prodigal?

Jeffrey Stout and Piety

Jeffrey Stout is a very interesting figure in the American political philosophy and ethics scene. For one, he is a liberal who takes theologians and theology seriously. In particular, he addresses the work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre as 'new traditionalists', and even adds to this company John Milbank. Stout is a finder of common ground, a man who mediates between seemingly intractable positions.

In his 2004 book Democracy and Tradition, Stout traces some interesting themes. Often, democracy is accused of 'impiety' by traditionalists: it emphasises self-reliance rather than observance of the conventions of the community and the spirit of place. Yet, in his reading of Emerson and Whitman, Stout finds that piety is in fact reconfigured rather than abandoned. He would contend then, that democracy is spiritual and pious, if not religious.

More on this anon.

The Holiness of Theology - or otherwise

In a recent discussion with friends, this passage from John Webster's Holiness book came under particular focus:

...talk of the sufficiency of Scripture is a warning against allowing theology's imagination to be enticed into giving attention to all manner of sources of fascination; for however enriching and fruitful they may present themsevles to , in the end they nearly always constitute a distraction. Theology cannot be and do and say everything; when theology does strive to relate itself to all kinds of other fields of intellectual and cultural activity, then - however much it may do so in good faith and with praiseworthy intentions - it risks losing its determincy, integrity and stability as the attempt to hear and repeat the one Word of God. (p. 21)

This comment was debated on the grounds that it allowed no room for prevenient or common grace (depending on whether you were a Wesleyan or a Calvinist!); and conceded far too much to secular disciplines such that it could not call them to account or be informed by them at all. We speculated as to what vices Webster was excoriating. What I think he has in mind is the Tillichian correlation of theology to culture, which of course within a decade becomes no more than a curiosity of history. Personally, I am stirred by Webster's vision here: I think theology's inattentivity to its own singular and decisive source - the Word of God - and its own task leaves it incapable of saying anything credible about these other disciplines in any case. At least I guess Milbank is trying: but I think he leaves far too much space for a philosophy which, like a cuckoo in the nest, soon ejects the true children and grows to become bigger than its 'parents' (see photo...)

A evening with John Milbank

Speaking off the cuff, John Milbank gave a very interesting and compelling account of his own theological programme, or agenda. It was polemical and aggressive in tone, to say the least!

The great insight of Radical Orthodoxy is the claim that there is no such thing as the secular. Milbank pointed to the fading away of sociology as a discipline as vindication of his own book in particular. He mentioned Benedict XVI's Regendsberg address as evidence of his own influence! Which is to say, the claim that the Pope made that faith and reason integrated is the best, nay only defence against the arrogance of reason unfettered and the lunacy of pure fideism. What both he and the pope agree on is that there is the need for a 'mediating metaphysics'.

1. Achievements. Milbank claimed that RO is one of the most influential and significant movements in theology today. It claims to revision philosophy as well as theology and to bring theology back to the centre of thought as in the medieval university. He claimed that the movement had global reach.

2. Themes 1. RO is a critique of the secular. The secular is an illusion! This is to me is the great attraction of RO. It has real apologetic teeth at this point. There is no neutrality when it comes to metaphysics. It is all metaphysics - just good or bad metaphysics. In analytical philosophy we see not argument but a buried theological decision. Theology saves common sense!!
2. Postmodernism. RO is very positive about the destruction of modernism and wishes to 'embrace the postmodern flux'. The flux is however not a cause for despair AT ALL but a sign of divine plenitude. Once again, I find this a very attractive feature of RO.
3. RO rests on a peculiar and contested genealogy. This to me is the least interesting feature of the movement. Duns Scotus is cited as the point of departure - where subsequent Christianity went wrong. As a post-Reformation theologian, this leaves me a little sidelined!
He went on a little here to speak about the mode of theological writing. The point is, that if you stick to pure rational discourse, you will go wrong, says Milbank. He has a bit of a point here: Christian theology when it attempts a pure rationality fails to capture the richness of its own scriptures. I would cite 17th C. scholastic protestantism as guilty of this. Narrative and metaphor in fact SAVE the grand tradition, says JM. To strip them away is a fatal move.
4. Theological ontology... RO talks a great deal of participation in the divine being. This it has learnt from thinkers like Maximus, and this participation is expressed liturgically and especially eucharistically. This is unashamedly platonistic - Milbank says that Christianity is inherently Platonist.

3. Criticism. Milbank said there were no serious criticisms. Sure, he said, you get politically correct US rant and you get a British version which is nitpicking about his reading of various thinkers, but these are not serious.

4. Future directions. JM spoke here of a number of themes that he was interested in exploring: geopolitical theology, the idea of gift exchange and so on. He was quite unabashed about being a supercessionist! He also spoke of an educational programme: theologians should be soaked in the classics and in philosophy and literature. And he has an interest in parish life and so on. He claims an ecumenical reach beyond Anglicanism.

A vigorous question time followed.

John Milbank on Radical Orthodoxy After Seven Years

This was a lecture/debate I attended here in Oxford last night.

Milbank began by eschewing 'false humility'! And went from there making sweeping and hubristic claims for his own project! It was a tantalising performance.

A summary and reflection to come.

John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason

The work of John Milbank is a daring attempt to demolish secular social theory from a Christian perspective. This audacious move is a characteristic of the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement, whose other chief protagonists are Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock. Milbank proclaims nothing less than to prove that the ‘governing assumptions’ of theories like secular western liberalism are ‘bound up with the governing assumptions of orthodox Christian positions’. In fact, it is not necessary to try and relate theology and social theory to one another, for, as Fergus Kerr summarises, ‘theology is already social theory, and social theory is already theology’. What Milbank attempts is to expose the theology (and anti-theology) implicit in the so-called secular disciplines like sociology. Conversely, and with much deference to Augustine, he extrapolates the social theory inherent in theology.

Milbank’s critique of political liberalism shares much in common with those of Foucault and Lyotard. Indeed it is self-consciously postmodern: Milbank explicitly adopts the Foucauldian tactic of an historicizing, ‘genealogical’ inquiry in order to expose the network of power struggles and claims to dominance at the root of liberal thinking. He claims that the discourses of liberalism, from which the secular is first constructed, read the world in terms of an ‘ontology of violence’ – ‘a reading of the world which assumes the priority of force and tells how this force is best managed and confined by counter force’. Violence is assumed to be basic; as a result, political theory is developed assuming that violence has to be forcefully surmounted. Following Foucault, Milbank asserts that any truth claims are in fact a means to assert the dominance of the inevitably clashing centres of power in society. Kant’s liberalism, for example, makes claims about freedom that are really only gestures in a wrestle for power. The liberal move – the ‘Kantian delay’ – only temporarily staves off the nihilism of Nietzche.

Milbank’s scepticism removes for him the possibility of theology building on the foundations of some secular discipline:
Theology has frequently sought to borrow from elsewhere a fundamental account of society or history, and then to see what theological insights will cohere with it. But it has been shown that no such fundamental account, in the sense of something neutral, rational and universal, is really available. It is theology itself that will have to provide its own account of the final causes at work in human history, on the basis of its own particular, and historically specific faith.
Consequently, Christianity does not recognise this ontology of violence but rather thinks of the prime reality as a ‘harmonic peace’: Milbank at this point introduces the triune God as ‘transcendental peace through differential relation’. The meta-narrative of Christianity – its ‘counter-story’ – is at least no less credible than the meta-narratives of violence by which modern social theories (including and especially liberalism) describe themselves, since all alike are unfounded in the traditional sense. The existence of a primal violence is challenged by a counter-history, which is established by the coming of Christ into history; a counter-ethics, in which love becomes the core of virtue; and a counter-ontology, in which true peaceful co-existence is won from violence by the practice of forgiveness. Christianity, for Milbank, is unique in that it
…does not allow violence any real ontological purchase, but relates it instead to a free subject who asserts a will that is truly independent of God and of others, and thereby a will to the inhibition and distortion of reality.

Echoing Augustine, Milbank posits the Church as the political anti-type or counter-society. In the Church there is an ‘ontological priority of peace over conflict’ : there, ‘difference’ is the foundation not for violence but for harmonious peace. Here is one of Milbank’s great difficulties; for the Church as a historical entity has not fulfilled this ‘vision of paradisal[sic] community’. As he rather wistfully admits:
Insofar as the church has failed, and has even become a hellish anti-Church, it has confined Christianity, like everything else, with the cycle of the ceaseless exhaustion and return of violence.
Nevertheless, it is the Christian vision of ontological peace that provides the only alternative to absolute nihilism.

Milbank’s critique of liberalism is dazzling. He is able to show how secular liberalism, like other theories of society, is not secular at all but in fact involves necessarily theological or anti-theological moves. He is able to show how liberal thinking has its own mythos or meta-narrative, despite its pretensions to an abstract universalism; and how it has not finally eluded the gravitational pull of nihilism’s black hole. His introduction of the Christian meta-narrative in response rightly points to the distinctive Christian emphasis on relationality generated by the triune God as an attractive conceptual alternative.

Nevertheless, Milbank’s thesis is problematic for a number of reasons. First, his self-conscious appeal to postmodern thinking enables him to make a devastating critique of secular reason; his own evasion of the critique is less than convincing. He adopts Foucault’s notion of genealogy, by which the power claims implicit in the political discourses he examines are brought to light and exposed as relying on an ‘ontology of violence’. And yet he also claims that his Christian ‘ontology of peace’ escapes this Foucauldian critique. An Icarus flying too near a postmodern sun, he relies on Foucault to prove that Foucault is ultimately wrong.

Secondly, Milbank’s strategy rests on a questionable ecclesiology, which is far too sanguine about the ‘church militant’. His is an over-realised ecclesiology, blurring the traditional distinction between the church visible and the church invisible, focussing on the concrete historical institutions of the universal Church at the expense of its local congregational instances. More recent ‘Radical Orthodox’ writings have tended to make the Eucharist the means by which the ‘ontology of peace’ is realised, following an almost medieval sacramental theology. Christopher J. Insole goes so far as to accuse Milbank of a tendency to theocracy. And yet Milbank seems genuinely baffled by the refusal of the Church to be itself within history. Within the Scriptures themselves, the churches were as much a site of struggle as of peace (the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, to take but one example, or the Corinthian church). Peace with God was declared in the gospel, but by no means automatically or easily realised in ecclesial relationships. God’s once-for-all act of reconciliation on the cross is not continued or repeated in the acts of the church this side of Christ’s return.

Thirdly, it seems pertinent to ask, along with Wannenwetsch, if the only way to defeat the violent ontologies of secular reason is by positing an alternative ontology. Milbank has difficulty, having so successfully deconstructed the ontology of political thought, in convincingly constructing something of the same species. The proclamation of the gospel of peace, which founds the church, is not a counter- ontology, but a promise. Further, the NT describes the cross of Christ as achieving peace through a victory against the powers of sin and evil – depicted in terms of a violent exclusion (see Rev 19-22 for just one example).

This third complaint leads to a fourth, which is that while Milbank offers a virtuoso reading of vast tracts of political philosophy, liberation theology and postmodernism, his method is insufficiently grounded in basic Scriptural exegesis. He offers almost no reflection on Israel’s political life; nor does he offer extensive readings of the relevant NT material – all of which ought to condition his explanation of the Church as alternative polis. Strangely, though he claims to be offering Christianity as an alternative meta-narrative, he nowhere offers his retelling of that story at any depth nor an engagement with the authoritative texts of the tradition he is advocating.