I’ve agreed to do some readings on
Radical Orthodoxy (RO) with
Nathan, and we’re starting with the keynote of that theological movement, John Milbank’s
Theology and Social Theory (TST). Because of the extremely turgid prose that RO elects to use (it remains unclear to me why cultural studies/social theory and the theological reflection that employs these disciplines insist upon neologism and opacity), we thought the dialogical structure of dueling blog posts would best serve comprehension. Thus, I will start here by posting a summary of the Preface to the 2d. ed., to which I hope Nathan will respond with corrections/insights, then he will post on the introduction on his blog, and so forth. Anyone else interested in following us in the reading/discussion is welcome to comment as well.
In the preface to the 2d. ed., Milbank addresses his critics, which are many, refining his critique of secular reason and his reflections on certain seminal Catholic figures, e.g. Scotus, Cusa, de Lubac, Balthasar, and so forth. He makes note that the text of the 1st ed. suffered a bit from ambiguity, and that the text of the 2d ed has been altered to reflect his original intention. His revised views, esp. of the Catholic figures mentioned above, have not necessarily been inserted, as he regards TST as a period piece of sorts, a snapshot of his views at this time.
Milbank positions his critics as emerging from several distinctive camps. First, there are the sociologists, who were outraged that he challenged the social construction of religion. Their critic, however, misses the mark, because Milbank’s critique of sociology is more fundamental. He objects to implicit secular bias of the “social”, which is itself “an unreal, unhistorical, and quasi theological category.” Secondly, there are the dialecticians, who are still committed to some sort of amorphous Marxism--no longer the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism that expected a “’final’ crisis of capitalism”, but those who operate within the Hegelian structure of history that expect a “gradual unleashing of the anarchically positive.” Related to the second category of critics is the third, the left-Nietzscheans who protested against Milbank’s critique of Nietzsche as supporting an “ontology of violence.” They claim instead that totalized otherness creates space for “variegated coexistence with others.” Milbank positions both these groups within the tension between liberalism and positivism. Liberalism maintains a formal openness to the other, a tolerance of diversity, as it were, but positivism, a dynamic internal to liberalism, threatens to undermine the “mere suspended hostility” of liberalism by imposing an arbitrary set of meanings upon the traditions operant within a liberal polity, whether “scientific” or “religious.” There is no clear way within either of these traditions to move beyond liberalism and positivism in their secular varieties.
After responding briefly to his critics, Milbank attempts to clarify and sharpen his critique against them. First, he notes that the clear trend of historical scholarship on seminal modern western theorists, Heidegger and Nietzsche among them, tends to accentuate their conservative and fascist tendencies. The left-Nietzscheans, then, appear paradoxically as anti-Nietzschean, or at least massively revisionist, because “the most radical thinker of difference never pretended anything other than that it was grounded in an ‘ontology of violence.’” Secondly, Milbank notes that his critique of secular reason is not absolute, because the metaphysic of Catholic Christianity never refuses otherness but, in a sense, colonizes it with a counter-narrative. What Milbank does is position secular reason as a recrudescent form of paganism, and set up Catholic Christianity as an alternative which superabundantly fulfills “the best pagan impulses.” Thirdly, as a consequence, Catholicism offers a genuine liberalism and a genuine positivism. Pariticipation, gift, and consensus as central features of Christianity operate to create a genuine peace that moves beyond the merely “contractual” peace offered by liberalism, and the conception of evil as privation opens up the possibility of conceiving that which is positively different as instances of the Good which must “analogically concur in a fashion that exceeds the liberal agreement to disagree.” This leads to a counter-Nietzschean genealogy—not a tale of successive instances of the will to power, but a tale of successive analogical irruptions of the Good into the finite. Fourthly, and again relatedly, Milbank argues that secular reason, rooted as it is in a univocal rather than an analogical worldview, leads inevitably to nihilism. Pure reason is impossible because univocity of being is impossible.
Milbank is then constrained to clarify what he means by an “analogical ontology of peace” (a question which I have been asking of Milbank’s interlocutors, notably Balthasar, and some other participants of RO, esp. Ward—per an email from Nathan critiquing dialectics and the “infinite qualitative distinction” in Kierkegaard and Barth), and here he clarifies and corrects his thinking about the Scotist legacy in several seminal Catholic figures: (1) Milbank asserts that in the church fathers theology and philosophy were integrated rather than divided, and that for Augustine, faith does not seek understanding, but “knowledge, by faith, seeks wisdom.” Thus, theology is already a “third term” that links ontology and historical interpretation. A worldview is in place here that sees an analogy between human and divine operations, and the creativity expressed in “craft” and “art” is especially ripe for such comparison. Augustine’s legacy is an enmeshed theology and philosophy which dovetail with an analogical interpretation of history and creativity. (2) The “conservative” readings of Post-Aquinas Medieval theology offered by Gilson and Balthasar are basically flawed in that they too simply correlate post-Scotist theologians with a progressive reduction of the analogical into the univocal understanding of being. An alternative to this genealogy is produced by de Lubac, who Milbank argues is not driven by a neo-scholastic division between nature and supernature and therefore is not seeking an explanation for this state of affairs. The superiority of de Lubac’s starting point is that there a tense balance between philosophy and theology, a “suspended middle”, an intermeshing or interweaving of the two terms, that refuses the autonomy of either: “Even though I see philosophy, in its very nature as philosophy, as only completed by theology, I also see the latter, short of the final intuition of God, as always inevitably blending its intuitions of the advents of presence with a philosophical and abstracting discursiveness (which a narrative mode already implicitly assumes), as well as an empirical appeal to lived history and geographical situatedness.” Scotus, for Milbank, remains the root of all evil, but Ockham and Eckhart are now reconceived not as followers of Scotus, but as defenders of the analogical worldview who are each responding to Scotus.
Here are my questions at the outset of this study of RO. Is the problem with modernity really a deficient ontology or metaphysics? In other words, if the problem as such is theoretical, then the answer is greater consistency within our theory. But what if, as Vincent Miller has ingeniously argued, our central problem in modernity is not incoherence, but abstraction? In other words, what if no matter how consistent our liturgics and doctrine are, those symbols can be abstracted from their institutional and communal contexts and deployed in alternative ways, namely, in ways that subvert the original political intent of those symbols? I wonder if RO has a response to this critique. Secondly, I’m still unclear, even with Milbank’s clarification, of the ontological status of the analogia entis, and therefore I’m not sure how it represents a decisive improvement on the dialectic logic of Barth and Kierkegaard. Nathan?
Labels: john milbank, radical orthodoxy