John Milbank on Radical Orthodoxy's Evolution Toward Historic Orthodoxy

It appears that a big question up for debate now is whether the theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy will eventually become truly orthodox. A blog "Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex" recently featured an article entitled: "John Milbank: Friend of Catholics or Just Plain Delusional?" in which the author criticized Milbank as " a theological modernist who just happens to love some smells and bells."

Who should happen along in the com box but John M. himself and he had this to say:

"Many thanks indeed for all the contributions above. I just want to clear up two points. Most importantly I have recently celebrated and NOT criticised the ‘romanticism’ of the theologies of both the present and the last Pope with respect to nuptial mysticism in a Modern Theology article which defends their views against the criticisms of Ferkus Kerr OP — whom I hasten to add, I enormously admire in general. Secondly the essays about homosexuality in the RO volume are in certain crucial ways at odds with my own views."

One of the blog authors sent Milbank an email with some questions and Milbank responded. I thought the whole response was interesting enough to post.

Many thanks for your email. RO isn’t a movement that demands ‘assent’ to a list of propositions. In my view that should be for Church bodies alone. It’s a loosely defined ethos, tendency and network, close to several other tendencies and to more specifically defined movements: to Communio, the JP II Institutes, Communio e Liberazione, Focolare (beginning a little), Russian sophiologists and to the entire nouvelle theologie legacy.

RO does not see itself as an Anglican movement, but as an ecumenically Catholic movement that includes Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, and some ‘post-Protestants’ in the Protestant communions.

Anthropology is crucial as you rightly say. I suppose though that theologians might agree in general about human nature and its relation to God and still disagree about questions of gender and sexuality — even though there is an intimate link.

On the latter front, as on some others, I would say that RO has evolved and that currently it is somewhat more ‘conservative’ than it was at the outset. This applies both to a shift in perspective on the part of individuals and the arrival of younger more emphatic people plus the falling-away of some of the first batch who have moved towards a more liberal position. Others of that same batch remain highly sympathetic to RO in many, or even most ways, while being critical in others.

If this helps, I would say that perhaps the most crucial RO-leaning authors are now John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Conor Cunningham, Simon Oliver, Adrian Pabst, Phillip Blond, Aaron Riches, Andrew Davison, Michael Hanby, Robert Miner, Peter Chandler, John Montag, Anthony Baker, Alessandra Gerolin, John Hughes, Matt Bullimore, Angel Mendez OP and John Betz — along with many other emerging names in the UK and elsewhere. (If I’ve left someone out here inadvertently, then apologies.) But there are several others who would not formally identify with the movement but are very close to it indeed and very supportive of it.

Of the above names, six are Catholics, one is Eastern Orthodox and eight are Anglicans of which three are likely to become Catholics in the future. (This does not at present include me.) The ecumenicity is therefore reflected in personnel as well as in theory.

In terms of my own positions re gender and sexuality I suspect that some Catholics would find me a shade too liberal, but in terms of contemporary positions I would be classed as extremely ‘conservative’: against abortion, experiments on foeteses, against any idea that homosexuality can be the subject of equal rights, in favour of the importance of sexual difference, critical of liberal feminism, and holding the opinion that the separation of sex and procreation is in effect a state capitalist programme of bioethical tyranny etc etc. To my mind the Papacy is the crucial bulwark against this, even if I favour married clergy, ordaining women (my wife is an Anglican priest who is at least as conservative as the current Pope in most ways) and recognising gay civil partnerships (though certainly not gay marriage, which I regard as ontologically impossible — I also think that civil partnerships not linked to sex should be included for reasons of inheritance etc.) Some within RO are more conservative than me on these points.

In more general terms RO represents a desire for a rethought metaphysical realism — linking Thomism to the French Spiritual realist tradition — Biran, Ravaisson, Bergson, Blondel, Lavalle, Bruaire etc. This is what a more philosophical version of the nouvelle theologie needs I think and many on the continent like Emmanuel Tourpe agree. It also of course supports Lubac’s position on the supernatural and reads this in a radical way that favours an integralism of philosophy and theology and of the social and the spiritual in the the practical arena. The Anglicans amongst is also think that the deeper currents in Richard Hooker’s thought go in this direction.

Politically an originally Christian socialist direction has evolved into a post right versus left associationism/communitarianism that stresses civil society and civil economy against both the state and the agnostic capitalist market. In the UK Blond and myself are seen by British Catholics as the best interpreters and supporters of Caritas in Veritate even though we both Anglicans. The CoTP at Nottingham has links to Blond’s thinktank Respublica and Pabst’s embryo organisation Cosmopolis.

I hope that all the above is of some interest and use to you in assessing what is going on here!

All best wishes, John Milbank

I find this response interesting insofar as it shows Milbank's thought obviously moving toward a more traditional and orthodox position. Some big names (eg. Graham Ward) are missing from that list but some of the more conservative people I expected to see are not there (eg. Tracy Rowland). In any case, RO appears to be in flux and it makes me want to read more in the authors named above. I have found Michael Hanby's and John Betz' work to be very helpful and many of the Communio writers and de Lubac to be of great interest. Of course, the present pope and John Paul II are seminal in many, many ways.

It always did seem to me that eventually people would need to go in a liberal Protestant direction or else take Catholic moral theology and theological anthropology more seriously. That sorting out process appears to be in progress.

One problem I see that will need to be faced eventually is the Marxist influence. There is already a hedging going on in the attempt to transcend the left-right divide; the question is whether an outright break with Marxist thought is not inevitable if there is to be a real return to the classical orthodoxy of the Church.

Peter Liethart on Milbank's Critique of Modernity

Peter Leithart has an excellent summary of the first part of John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason here. Here is how it begins:

"Once, Milbank begins, there was no secular.

And the appearance of the secular is not merely a matter of removing something superfluous, as sociology generally tells it in its theories of “desacralization,” the image of the stripping of a sacred covering so that some realm of pure humanity and nature is brought into the open. That portrayal assumes that there is such a thing as a pure humanity, which is always there under the surface of the sacred and of religion, which has nothing to do with the sacred, and it assumes that humanism is the natural destiny of history, the inevitable telos toward which all human societies move. Both of these assumptions must be contested.

This is an important theme throughout Milbank’s book: there is no “natural” human ordering of life."

and this is how it ends:

"Voluntarism grounds political absolutism because, it is argued, the sovereign cannot bind himself. At the same time, voluntarism grounds liberalism (not as opposed to “conservatism,” but as the post-Enlightenment order): The freedom of individuals depends on their being left alone by the law to do what they will, and individuals have more or less absolute power to do what they will with what lies within their dominion. The two political implications of voluntarism come together when we ask how there is to be peace and some semblance of social unity in a liberal society. We need some sort of unity to preserve freedom. What brings unity to a collection of people who are left alone to pursue whatever they will? The modern answer is, either consensus (but this may not come) or a sovereign direction by the state (which is more secure). Thus liberal freedom requires absolutism and tends to fall into it.

With the public realm defined as a realm of absolute will and sheer power, theologians had to conclude that the church played no public role. On this definition of power, the church could not be associated with power, and therefore, it cannot be associated with public life.

The other contributor to this secular space was a renewed paganism, which Milbank particularly associates with Machiavelli. Machiavelli revives a pagan view of virtue as heroic manliness particularly exercised in war, and promotes a manipulative political practice, which sees a social good coming out of the fostering of social conflict. External conflict is also socially useful, since it preserves an independent spirit. Machiavelli explicitly sees the public sphere as a sphere of sheer power, manipulation, self-seeking calculation. The Machiavellian fosters conflict among rivals in order to promote himself; and this “science of conflict” becomes the scientific approach to politics. The public sphere is a secular sphere, as a sphere of sheer power and self-promoting manipulation.

Thus, the modern secular was imagined and constructed by cooperation between heretical theology and paganism. As a result, Milbank says, Christianity cannot find a place for the “secular.” It has to simply reject it."

Read it all here. This is the most concise and incisive summary of Milbank's critique of modernity I have seen. I would quibble with Milbank about his use of the term "secular" and wonder if what he means by "secular" might not be better conveyed by the term "secularism," which would allow the term "secular" in its Augustinian sense to be retained. But his critique of voluntarism leading to political absolutism and his understanding of modernity as being rooted in a heretical, non-Trinitarian doctrine of God is absolutely right, in my opinion.

John Milbank on Socialism and Liberalism

I have not read much John Milbank except for a few scattered articles here and there and Theology and Social Theory twice (which is an insufficient number of times for anyone wishing to understand it).

However, I have been thinking about how Christians should think about contemporary politics for a while now and recently I noticed Halden Doerge worrying about Milbank's increasingly conservative position on sex, which some attribute to the influence of Pope Benedict XVI and others to growing up. Anyway, in the comment thread was a link to this Milbank essay "The Politics of Paradox" in Telos. In reading this essay I felt as though someone was reflecting back to me some of the thoughts I have recently written (some of which I have included in conference lectures that are to be published in a couple of upcoming books of essays).

It appears to me that Milbank is on a similar journey to the one I've been on for the past few years. I used to say that I was conservative in theology but liberal on social issues and I even got to the point of becoming slightly uncomfortable with the label "conservative." But over the past five years I have lost all confidence in anything leftwing at all and have come to view political and theological liberalism as two aspects of one reality. I have never been able to see that socialism and liberalism are really all that different from one another in their philosophical presuppositions, although many people view them as opposites. Socialism, insofar as it has anything to do with Marxist or other modern thinking, seems to me to be to share too many assusmptions with liberalism and can be subsumed under the heading "modernity" along with liberalism. (Pre-modern "socialism" seems to me to be a completely different animal and not usefully labelled "socialism" at all.) Contemporary Western democracies are moving toward an integration of the equality principle (Marxism) with the freedom principle (Liberalism) in a statist paradigm that I refer to as "soft totalitarianism."

Anyway, the only adequate label I have found to describe my political and theological stance is conservativism. The problem, of course, is that neo-conservativism,which is a form of classical liberalism, has been taken by many to be the only possible definition of conservativism. But I think this use of neo-conservative is a passing fad and will eventually be a footnote in history. Future historians will revert to more accurate terms like "capitalism" and "classical liberalism."

To be conservative is to be respectful of tradition, suspicious of all forms of utopianism, aware of the limits of politics, conscious of the effects of original sin and to know that ultimate hope for peace and justice lies beyond this world as it now is. Therefore, conservatism comports well with the Christian hope in the glorious second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Chirst, which will usher in the radical transformation of both us and the world that is necessary for the kingdom of God to come in its fullness. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus and Paul were all conservatives in this sense. The Bible as a whole and creedal orthodoxy are also conservative in this sense.

Below is an extract from Milbank's article. I will put my comments in [bold and brackets].

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"As Phillip Blond has suggested, there are now three crucial global forces in the world: capitalist rationality, Islam, and Christianity. [I mostly agree, but I would say "liberal modernity" instead of "capitalist rationality" because pure capitalism is pretty well non-existent in the 21st century. Big business and big government now cooperate and inter-penetrate in the bureaucratic micro-management of so much of modern life that freedom has been reduced to consumer choice rather than true moral freedom. If capitalism were triumphant, big government would be practically non-existent.] And of the latter two, the global reach of Christianity is far more serious and far more likely to prevail in the long term. This means that the anomaly pointed out almost a century ago by Hilaire Belloc is likely to pose its cultural contradiction ever more strongly upon the world stage. This is the manifest gap between the teachings of Christianity which still undergird Western morality, on the one hand, and the theory and practice of capitalism, on the other. [Agreed with one priviso - that we understand that even democratic socialist countries (which after all are supposedly alternatives to capitalism!) also share in the rational administration of life that is the bane of modernity. Is Sweden or Spain really not fully immersed in modernity's individualism, hedonism and rationalistic disdain for tradition, family and the sanctity of life?]

I believe, along with Radical Orthodoxy in general, that only the Church has the theoretical and practical power to challenge the global hegemony of capital and to create a viable politico-economic alternative. [Amen] I stand thereby in a long tradition of Anglican and Catholic Christian socialism, which has always insisted on the necessity of the "Christian" component for the "Socialist" one. In that sense I have always stood proudly amongst those who see themselves as "conservative theologically, radical politically." [The debatable point here is whether "Christian" and "socialist" in the modern sense can ever be reconciled.]

But over the years I have become more aware of the potential for smugness and inertia in that perspective. [Me too.] One can gently challenge it in three ways. First, there is a dimension that I have already hinted at. Can Christians really, fundamentally, categorize themselves as either left or right? [This is to rephrase my question at the end of the paragraph above.] Surely, as André de Muralt has argued, both the ideas of "the rule of One," of the sovereign center, and of the "rule of the Many," of individuals either in contracted dispersion or collective unity, are equally "nominalist"—both genealogically and ontologically? For both deny primary real relation, the real universal that is "the common good" and the role of "the few," whether that of the guiding virtuous elite or of the mediating institutions of civil society. But "right" and "left" define themselves variously in terms of either "the One" or the "the Many," both nominalistically construed. [Now we get to the heart of the issue! This is what I have been meaning all along by referring to socialism as "modern."]

Today, of course, what we really have is two versions of a "left" celebration of the "Many" either as individuals or as a democratically voting mass. For reasons still not yet sufficiently accounted for by historians and social theorists, we have a "liberal right," stressing economic negative liberty, and a "liberal left," stressing cultural and sexual negative liberty. In reality, of course, the two liberalisms are triumphing both at once and in secretly collusive harmony. [Yes, this is what I meant above when disussing the convergence of the equality principle and the freedom principle in contemporary politics. Western welfare states are merging Marxism and Capitalism into Statism.] So perhaps what still sustains party conflict is alternating anxieties among the populace about the inevitable insecurities generated by now economic and now cultural "freedom" in different temporal phases.

It follows that the very division of left and right assumes a nominalist social ontology, which of course I would reject. And it is also critically important to remind oneself that this division only postdates the French Revolution. [Right - it is modern.] This has created a curious historical delusion from which almost no one is really free. For we suppose that the premodern is somehow allied with "the right," just as barbarous journalists frequently imagine that the divine right of kings was a medieval theory, when it was in reality an early modern one. But pre-nominalist modernity was neither left nor right, neither "progressivist" nor "reactionary"—it was simply "other" to most of our assumed sociopolitical categories. [Exactly; this is what I have been trying to say for a year or more now on this blog. The reason we have to go back behind modernity is to get something that is not contaminated with dead-end dualisms. The idea that pre-modernity (i.e. Medieval Europe) was "right wing" is ludicrous.]

There is a further point to be made here. When the French revolutionaries invented "left" and "right," they arguably took us back to paganism and indeed they often explicitly supposed that they were doing so. [I have not encountered many writers who have had the insight and courage to say this - but any I have encountered (Lasch, Belloc, Chesterton, Kreeft, Kirk, etc.) have all been conservatives.] For characteristically, the ancient Greeks lined up philosophies of the spirit and of "ideal forms" with aristocracy and philosophies of matter with democracy. It is as if they assumed that the latter was always a matter of lowest common denominator and not of highest common factor. But as I have already suggested, the Christian revolution cuts right across this categorization. Instead of siding with "the noble" over against "the base," or inversely "the base" over against "the noble," it paradoxically democratizes the noble: hence Paul addresses his interlocutors as "all kings." [This is the reason why Paul's letters contain the Haustafeln, rather than radical manifestos for slaves and women to revolt. Paul is so radical on relationships in Christ that he can be conservative about secondary issues like social organization.] Yet at the same time, if there is now a new possibility of the spread of virtue (virtue being redefined as the more generally possible attitudes of love and trust, immune to the instance of "moral luck" as usually understood), there is still a political place for the superior role of the more virtuous and of those appointed to be the "guardians" of virtue, the virtuosos of charisma." [This need for virtue as the prerequisite for true freedom is the reason for Pope John Paul II's great disappointment with much of the consumerism and debauchery that followed the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. They became like Western Europe to a great extent, which was not John Paul's goal.]

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You can read the whole article here. It is not a clearly thought out manifesto, but rather a slow-moving groping toward the light. If Milbank keeps reading Benedict XVI and John Paul II, he is bound to end up a conservative and that would be a very interesting development!

Milbank and Yoder on the Church and Society

In his Theology and Social Theory, John Milbank notes Max Weber's point that "salvation-religions . . . are generally most promoted by lower-middle class strata in towns and cities." (88) For Weber, this means that the strong ethical emphasis of salvation-religions must be connected with an "individualistic, enterprising and socially aspiring way of life, to which rational predictability, the matching of promise to conduct, and strong eschatological expectation make a great appeal." Milbank grants that, as a near tautology, it is obviously true that Christianity, (for it is clear that Weber only has Christianity in view, despite his use of the abstraction "salvation religion"), "has an affinity with certain modes of social action and not with others." (88) Milbank's point here seems solid. As he says, it did not require sociology to teach us that it is easier for an artisan to be a Christian than say a wealthy merchant or a warrior noble.

The more important point of Milbank's analysis, however, is his challenge to Weber's contention that what he has showed by his analysis is that the form of religion preferred by certain people is a function of their prior economic and social status, as if religion were an epiphenomenon of sociology or economics. Weber's recognition, described by Milbank as, "the medieval town, dominated by guilds of self-regulating producers, an economics of frugality, and relatively free from aristocratic and kinship dominations, was uniquely able to instil a Christian ethos" is true because of the nature of Christianity. As Milbank points out, there is little point in making the "social" prior to or fundamental to religion since "there is nothing identifiably 'social' that can be separated from political, economic or religious arrangements." (88) Practices engendered by Christian faith lead to the social organization of the medieval town and to try to "explain" religion in terms of social and economic structures is to confuse effect for cause.

Milbank says that military-aristocrats are not attracted to salvation-religions because they practice a way of life which is "itself sustained by a particular ideological code, itself a kind of religion." (90) Here he is deconstructing modern sociological explanations of religion that rest on the assumption of the secular as the given and religion as the odd thing that requires explanation. Behind such assumptions are a whole set of narratives and presuppositions that themselves are never brought to the surface or debated in modern social science. The modern understanding of "the secular," (as opposed to the Augustinian understanding) thus functions religiously as a starting point accepted by faith and used as the basis for understanding everything else. The hypocrisy comes when those who do this criticize Christians for staring with the particularity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and using that as the basis for understanding everything else. Hence, we see the meaning of Milbank's claim that theology must abandon its false humility and take its place as the master narrative it must be if it is true to the Gospel.

The question I find fascinating in all of this is the issue of what forms of social practice encouraged by the Church on the basis of theological presuppositions ought to inform the way the Church lives in the contemporary world? And are such practices even possible in modernity, with its massively-constituted, bureaucratic, managerial state with its commitment to social engineering in the name of perpetual progress? Does social space exist for the Church to be the Church without attracting persecution? The ethos of Medieval towns still exists to a certain extent in the sense that much rural life continues to resist modernity to this day in some ways. But to the extent that the Church lives out radically Christian practices within the limits of modernity, is it not the case that either the practices tend to be trivialized by virtue of being limited to the sphere of the "private" or they attract persecution and get denounced as "oppressive" to the exact extent that they infringe on what some interest group perceives as the "public?"

There is an interesting parallel between Yoder and Milbank on the question of how the social practices of the Church are to impact society in general. In both cases, the Church simply goes about its business and the resulting way of life seeps out in the wider society a little bit at a time. In Body Politics, for example, Yoder speculates about the possible relationship between the "rule of Paul," New England town hall meetings, and Anglo-Saxon democracy. In describing his own position, Milbank says that there is no need for a Christian social theory. Instead, he says: "the social knowledge advocated is but the continuation of ecclesial practice, the imagination in action of a peaceful, reconciled social order, beyond even the violence of legality." (6)

There is no doubt that there are serious differences between Yoder and Milbank on how the Church should influence society, but the puzzling thing is how these differences arise from two starting point that are so similar. Both Yoder and Milbank see Christianity as resting on a mythos of peace, in distinction from both pagan antiquity and modernity. Both are theological realists who nevertheless accept a great deal of modern historicism and therefore see the task of Christianity as being to try to "outnarrate" our opponents. Yet Yoder is a pacifist and Milbank is not. Does this indicate some deep contradiction in their basic beliefs? Or does it mean that both pacifist and just war forms of Christianity can express the social ethical task of the Church adequately?

To raise the stakes a bit higher, can Yoder's goals of social ethics be attained without adopting Milbank's frank endorsement of "Christendom?" Is a Christendom without violent coercion, i.e. based on evangelism, social consensus and a shared commitment to Christ, possible? Is Yoder's vision all that different from Milbank's in the end? If coercion is all that separates them, does that not mean that in certain historical situations (i.e. ones in which a Christian consensus prevails at least temporarily) their ecclesiologies and understandings of mission might be virtually indistingushable from each other?

A Reply to David Deane's Response to My Discussion of His Book

My thanks to Dr. David Deane, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax for his response (see the last post) to my discussion of his book Nietzsche and Theology: Nietzschean Thought in Christological Perspective (Ashgate, 2006). He is a conservative Roman Catholic who likes Karl Barth. I am an Evangelical Protestant who likes Barth, but John Paul the Great and Benedict XVI as well. I am criticizing him for being insufficiently Catholic and he is responding by trying to get me to take Barth more seriously! What fun! The dialogue continues. If you can get your hands of a copy of his book, by all means do so. It is excellent.
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First of all, I would like to say that I don’t think we are as far apart as it might appear – and I don’t think Benedict is as far from Barth as it might appear. Benedict stands in a tradition shaped by Lubac and Balthasar, who surely learned much from Barth’s criticism of 19th Century Liberal Theology and his Christological concentration. Surely Benedict, like them, transcends the worst of Enlightenment rationalism. And everyone named in this post (including you and I) fancies himself an Augustinian of one sort of another.

As for First Things, it should be noted that that journal does not have a single position in the sense that one could convert to it – it is too eclectic for that. It brings together voices from Jewish, Catholic and Protestant traditions to converse in such a way that no one is forced to leave behind his own set of philosophical/theological presuppositions. I see it as being valuable especially insofar as it provides a place for dialogue between Paleo-conservatives (like me) and Neo-conservatives.

Secondly, to get to the substance of the issue, David, you say that you can’t agree with Benedict because you believe that “only the presence of the Holy Spirit (who is inseparable from the Word) can make Reason possible.” You also say:

“Only a Christian can know the meaning of, say, “power”, as only a Christian knows the power of God revealed most perfectly on the Cross of Jesus Christ. As such this “power”, power indistinguishable from servitude and sacrifice, renders our common uses of “power” to be meaningless, referring to nothing but the play of signifiers.”

I think I have read enough Barth and postliberal stuff to understand you here. But where I get confused is when you go on to say: “I recognize the Nietzschean story in scripture and tradition.” You elaborate as follows:

“When people talk about my book they wonder why I find Nietzsche "helpful" or how I'm trying to "beat" or "outnarrate" Nietzsche. The first thing to say is that when I read Nietzsche's depiction of knowledge (babel) and the self (Eden) qua salvation I say, "this is true!".”

So does that mean that Nietzsche has the Spirit? How can Nietzsche have a true vision of the human condition if what you say is true when you write: “Reason is butchered by sinfulness and only Grace can restore it. Nietzsche cannot see the world for what it is because he is not in relationship with and being conformed to Christ.”

My question is “does Nietzsche see the human condition clearly or not?” It seems to me you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. If Nietzsche can see sin clearly, but not redemption, that sounds pretty much like what Aquinas thought was often true of pagans. The Reformed traditon accounts for things like this with its notion of common grace. The light of natural reason is not pure darkness, but it isn’t sufficient to find our way out of the labyrinth of sin and error either. Salvation requires grace. I can’t imagine what part of this Benedict would have a problem with. All he wanted to do at Regensburg is to say that recognizing that this world has a rational structure should lead us to realize that it has a moral structure and this moral structure, to the extent Christians and Muslims can agree on it, might give us the basis for world peace instead of the clash of civilizations. He certainly was not envisioning Muslims getting saved by reason.

And if Nietzsche offers us so much good insight into the nature of original sin – and I fully agree with you that he does – then why not call that the kind of dialogue that Benedict XVI was envisioning in his Regensburg Lecture? I think you and I would both want to say to Nietzsche something like: “Yes, that is true as far as it goes, but you know God has provided a way of escape from the tyranny of biological drives and if we look at Jesus Christ – really gaze on his beauty and goodness – we will find forgiveness and liberation.”

Thirdly, you write: “So Nietzsche grounds the 'fact of relativism' in our biological nature and this, as an Augustinian Christian, fascinates me, why? Because Augustinian Christians do too.” But of course, the Holy Father is an Augustinian as well and I suspect that he would like your project with regard to Nietzsche. I don’t presume to speak for him, but as I read him and you and think about these issues, I don’t see any real conflict. It is a shame that he has never written the big book on sin that he wanted to do as his magnum opus.

The pope surely is well aware that, just because inter-faith dialogue on moral issues is possible, that does make it easy. Sin is a pain in the inter-faith dialogue rear end for sure. This may be why he has sought to shift the focus away from trying to find common ground on theology to trying to agree on a basic common morality (and I mean really basic – things like the right to life, the family as the natural unit of society and marriage).

Fourthly, when you talk about disordered desires as fundamental I am right there with you and want to endorse bringing eros into the discussion. But here, Benedict is way ahead of us. In Deus Caritas, after clarifying that love includes both agape and eros, he unites love of God and love of neighbor. Then, quoting St. Augustine, he writes: “If you see charity, you see the Trinity.” Nietzsche could not see charity in the Benedictine sense and therefore could not really see the Triune God. Yet he saw some truth – truth with which we have to engage.

Guest Post: David Deane Responds to My Discussion of His Book

I agree with you, Craig, about the deficiencies in Nietzsche and Theology but I'd like to offer a properly Protestant caveat in relation to the kind of position Benedict models at Regensburg (and, indeed, that the RO people gathered in Rome last summer to advocate). As you note - we're through the looking glass here!

The word is that you have "gone all First Things"! :) Now I'm a very traditional Catholic. I see the "old Roman Rite" as the peak of our liturgical expression and a student claimed recently that, liturgically at least, if I was any more to the right I'd fall off the edge. But I also have a deep suspicion of the faith in human nature and reason that grows exponentially in Roman Catholic thought after, and in response to, the Reformation. I believe that reasoning properly is only possible when we desire properly and we can only desire properly when we can see objects for what they are; that is, qua God and not qua us. Doesn't this require a God's eye view? Yes, and so only the presence of the Holy Spirit (who is inseparable from the Word) can make Reason possible. I honestly believe that Fides et Ratio, Veritatis Splendor and Benedict's own pronouncements at Regensburg fail to pay due respect to this. My problem with First Things is that they too, time and again fail to pay due respect to the impossible possibility that is human reason and meaningful utterance. By “meaningful utterance” I mean the possibility of connoting that which is. In modernity we tend to think of meaning as the capacity for the transmission of opinion. If words allow an other to apprehend what we perceive to be the case then, we seem to assume, they mean. For the pre-moderns, of course, meaning is the capacity of a thing to re-present, and participate in, that which is. “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” are meaningful words, they have power and authority because they represent that which actually (albeit mysteriously) is. Such meaning cannot be “worked out” by us. It must be given to us by God in revelation. Only a Christian can know the meaning of, say, “power”, as only a Christian knows the power of God revealed most perfectly on the Cross of Jesus Christ. As such this “power”, power indistinguishable from servitude and sacrifice, renders our common uses of “power” to be meaningless, referring to nothing but the play of signifiers. First Things, like the Holy Father and the RO people, often seem to think that we’re engaged in a common pursuit of wisdom and we must out-narrate competing discourses. But in so doing they are failing to see that the question of reason is a question of mission! Only Christ renders the world meaningful and reasonable. If the one reasonable thing is God and Man, finite and infinite, impassible and nailed to a cross, omnipotent and crucified, the only righteous man and a criminal, dead and the only really living thing then we must acknowledge that we are being, at best, disingenuous when we pretend that we are involved in enterprises that are collectively “rational”. This point is what separates me from his Holiness’ position and I hope, will take more coherent form in what follows. I hope to explain that I differ from him because, unlike Milbank and Benedict, I think that Nietzsche is right about human knowledge and nature and, because of this, I see the overcoming of this situation only in terms of the action of the triune life. They speak in terms of Reason and dialog when the only philosophically responsible position is to speak in terms of salvation and mission. Let me explain[1].

While I did go overboard in Nietzsche and Theology it should already be somewhat clear “Why Barth?[2]”. But why Nietzsche? Nietzsche alone combines the worst of continental relativism and anglo-American biological positivism. The former is based in the latter. Because we are oriented by our drives toward self assertion we experience the world through selfish lenses. I mean this biologically. Right now I can see my one year old daughter Chora in the corner of my eye playing near the window. I note her green shirt but she's ill-defined. She's carrying something in her hand, it could be a block or it could be a peeled apple, I can't see it. Now if she was carrying a big sharp knife - I'd see it clear as day! Our brains are processing vast amounts of information right now, sounds are reaching your ears unheard, little aches and sensations going unnoted. But if our brain decides that such sounds are important, a baby's cry, an ache which indicates an illness, our brain will bring these to the forefront of our minds. Our basic sensory experience of the world, let alone our filtering of this data into concepts and beliefs, are determined by our biological drives.

So Nietzsche grounds the 'fact of relativism' in our biological nature and this, as an Augustinian Christian, fascinates me, why? Because Augustinian Christians do too.

Milbank et al respond to this Nietzschean vision and I'm with them 100% about modernity. But Barth is preferable to Milbank for me as a respondent to Nietzsche and especially his two step-children - postmodern relativism and biological positivism. Why? Well, the first reason is the "Qua" question. The Nietzschean story qua... what? For Milbank it's the Nietzschean account qua a different, possibly more coherent and certainly more beautiful story. Ok. For Barth though it's the Nietzschean account qua salvation. Salvation is the concept which frames the enquiry in Barth and this resonated far more with me. For Milbank the Nietzschean account is a story competing with other stories within the narratival carnival that connotes the now and the question for Milbank is "how can this story be out-narrated"?. From the Barthian perspective the question, to me, seems to be "do I recognize this Nietzschean self?" and if so, "what does God have to say to this through the man Jesus Christ?". This is the important question.

I recognize the Nietzschean story in scripture and tradition. Babel, as Derrida knew well, said all that Derrida was to say about the state of our signs and the impossibility for communicating using them. This impossibility is based on a biological state that is inaugurated with our fallenness. We do not do what we want to do, it is sin that dwells within us that orients us. It forces us to see the world in terms of our own utilitarian necessities. If you strike me adrenaline courses through me causing me to take flight or fight, I am not biologically oriented to turn the other cheek[3]. And with such hormones and neurotransmitters screaming though my cells how can I see you as someone to be loved as am I intended by God to love you?

I can only love you if I can somehow see you as you are, loved by God and because of this having dignity. Your dignity is not based on your intelligence, sentience or your capacity to survive unaided outside the womb. Your dignity is not about who you are in ways I can discern, it’s about God’s love for you which is not based on things I can discern or things that affect me or “my body”. In modernity though we actually prohibit such an understanding! Rather, from Kant on, my perspective on you will be determined by how you are qua me, the very mode of thinking which is, in nuce, the epistemology of our fallenness. The self marked by original sin Kant affirms as the epistemologically normative self - bracket das ding in sich as things can only be understood qua me. Our fallenness becomes epistemologically normative in modernity! And so yes, I agree with Milbank and Benedict that we must outnarrate this. But we didn’t “start” to view objects qua me in modernity. In modernity we simply gave up the hope of viewing them any other way. But beating modernity will not overcome the problem that we do, innately, view objects through our own “selfish” neurological lenses. And so beating modernity will not solve the problem. If it would then we should view the problem, as Milbank and Benedict tend to, in terms of reason and dialog. But only transforming the self can solve the problem and therefore we must see things in terms of salvation and mission!

When people talk about my book they wonder why I find Nietzsche "helpful" or how I'm trying to "beat" or "outnarrate" Nietzsche. The first thing to say is that when I read Nietzsche's depiction of knowledge (babel) and the self (Eden) qua salvation I say, "this is true!". Not ‘helpful’ or ‘rhetorically useful’ or any other category we've used in academia in the last 50 years, but "true" as in, "the case". Nietzsche's concept of the human person and human capacity to know and the relationship of our signs to that which is, is, well, true.

But only true of the human being without the Word, without Wisdom, without the Triune God calling out to it and weaving us into relationship with Him.

Benedict talks about "Reason", but I'm with Gene Rogers and Bruce Marshall and others, Aquinas himself cannot envision the self seeing the real as it is without the presence of the Holy Spirit (who is not separable from the Word). Reason is butchered by sinfulness and only Grace can restore it. Nietzsche cannot see the world for what it is because he is not in relationship with and being conformed to Christ.

And so what my book hopes to do is say, “yes” to Nietzsche. Milbank and Benedict say, “no”. But Nietzsche is right. Our biological nature makes experiencing and thinking outside of selfish categories impossible. Only through a re-orientation of this biological reality through relationship with Christ by the presence of the Holy Spirit can this be altered. Let me say again, the question of “Reason” is most honestly understood as a question of mission. Our reasoning is contextual, only if our context is life in the triune God[4] can we perceive, desire and reason coherently. If when Benedict says ‘dialog’ he really means mission, then I agree with him. If not then I think that we must all re-read Nietzsche and ask ourselves - do I recognize this account of the self? Because if it’s true we can only be converted, not convinced.

What my book most lacks is an account of desire. How desire without the activity of the Spirit cannot be other than lust, lust for persons, for objects, as lust cannot be avoided if we look at things qua ourselves. As Kantian modernity refuses to speak of knowing except by understanding all objects qua ourselves then it forces lust as the only possible form of desire in modernity. Any other form of desire becomes epistemologically impermissible!

Only the Spirit can cause us to look at objects in the world qua God and therefore qua their own intrinsic dignity and so our desire can begin to be re-ordered. Once this is in place then we can reason about the objects in the world having begun to experience them as they are. Without the agency of the Spirt whose word is the Word (the Spirit has no other word to speak) perceiving, desiring and reasoning is illicit and doomed to affirm only the world of which Derrida and Dawkins speak. Speaking about this as a problem of dialog and reason and not a problem of mission and salvation is a misconstrual of the reality of the situation and this is why I’m not entirely with Milbank and the Holy Father in this matter.
__________

[1] You see, I am indebted, at least rhetorically, to Milbank.

[2] I agree that De Lubac, to some extent, and certainly Von Balthasar could have been useful for this. Barth though is perfect. Nietzsche offers “Dionysius versus the Crucified” and Barth concurs. The “truth” of the world is the survival of the fittest for Nietzsche and for an ever increasing number of our young people. Barth’s doctrine of the Royal Man is so clear about what he calls, teasing Nietzsche, “the transvaluation of all values” where the last are first and the first are last where the poor He hath filled up and the rich He hath sent away empty. This radical juxtaposition appealed to me greatly. The radically and beauty of the Christian vision was made clearer in Barth in dialog with Nietzsche than it would have been if de Lubac or Von Balthasar had been the dialog partners.

[3] Which I know in Christ as being that which I am called to do, that which I am intended to do.

[4] For there is no other

Milbank's Critique of Nietzsche

In his excellent book, (see previous posts), David Deane sheds new light on the interpretation of Nietzsche. We have examined his chapters on N's epistemology and N's anthropology. Now I want to discuss Deane's critique of John Milbank's treatment of N. in ch. 10 of the book that launched the radical orthodoxy movement: Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990). Deane's thesis is that Milbank's critique of N. is good so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Despite Deane's modesty and deference to Milbank's reputation, it is quite clear that Deane's criticism is of great importance to the future of RO.

In the inside cover to the volume, Radical Orthodoxy, ed. by Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, we read that RO is characterized by four claims, the third of which is that "All thought which brackets out God is ultimately nihilistic." If we can agree with this proposition, the question I think that arises next is whether or not "God" here must be understood with the help of a philosophy of being, such as was developed by the Fathers in dialogue with Greek philosophy and which came to a climax in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. Or can we avoid nihilism with a "God without being"?

Here is how I think Deane's book is furthers this debate. It suggests that Milbank's way of dealing with the challenge posed by N. is insufficient - not wrong, just incomplete - and this, in my opinion, it shows the necessity of some sort of a philosophy of being in order to overcome N., who is the quintessential philosopher of modernity. Why is this so? N. brings together two streams of modernity that are often not thought together: the political/ethical emphasis on the will and the scientific emphasis on biological drives in the truely modern view of the self. N. combines liberal politics and technological reason and grounds both in the will-to-power.

In N's philosophy, man in the Christian sense of "person" dies and the human race splits in two to become the overman and the last men. In modern genetic engineering we see the scientific possibility of humans taking control of evolution and splitting the genetic ties that make the human race one. The result could be a series of social classes determined genetically as in Huxley's Brave New World or simply the evolution of a slave race and a master race. With the advent of genetic engineering, N's vision of the overman and the last men becomes feasible technologically. The question we need to be asking is "Do sufficient resources exist in the dominant liberalism of the West that could enable a firm "No" to such a course of action?" The difficulty in answering this question reveals the extent to which the West has become Nietzschean and its glaring lack of such resources. This situation (in my view) makes the discovery of a renewed philosophy of being not a luxury for Medieval hobbists or a pipe dream of pious traditionalists, but an absolute necessity for the survival of human persons.

Deane begins by rejecting the strategy of responding to N. by re-articulating "a modernist anthropology by seeking that which is universal in human experience to ground a notion of self, thought and text and that core concept of the modern 'humanity.'" (77) Such an anthropology cannot be grounded in evolution, which can only throw up a barbaric and amoral social Darwinism. "Maximizing our potential for genetic replication" is not a basis for ethics and love, but for a radical individualism as the basis for violence. Both the laudable and the cruel are interchangeable within the context of our biological constitution, which means that evolution cannot be the basis for liberal ethics.

Deane opts instead for Radical Orthodoxy of Milbank and David Bentley Hart as a better approach than liberal modernity. (78) They both construe the self in pre-modern terms and reject the fundamental presuppositions of modernity. They both advocate an ontology of peace, rather than an ontology of violence. However, Deane argues that it is necessary to defeat N. in a different manner than these two theologians try to do.

First, in what may seem to be a surprising opening move, Deane says that Milbank rejects the truth of N. too completely. He says that Milbank's approach "risks repeating the problems of pre-modern theology in failing to see the radical juxtaposition between humanity and the humaniuty offered to us through the one human whom God uniquely intended, Jesus Christ" and therefore "risks failing to take the reality of natural human sinfulness seriously enough." (79) It is on Christological grounds that he challenges Milbank and his concern leads him to distinguish between fallen man as described by N's Darwinian will-to-power and man in Christ as described in this book by Barth's Christological anthropology. (The last 3 chapters of the book, with which I am not as concerned, deal with a Barthian Christological anthropology as an answer to N.)

So what Deane is suggesting here is that N. must be taken seriously as describing what man outside of Christ, man under the conditions of the Fall, man in sin, really looks like from an empirical and philosophical perspective. The strength of N's philosophy is that it is rooted and grounded in the observations of modern science, especially in the Neo-Darwinism celebrated in the work of Richard Dawkins and co., who view DNA in strictly materialistic and amoral terms. Deane's point, which I take to be unassailable, is that this is what science done from an atheistic set of presuppositions ends up looking like. This means that N's philosophy, including the will-to-power, is rooted in empirical reality, rather than in philosophical assumptions, except at the point of the very first presuppositions regarding God and the nature of reality. Neither the Neo-Nietzscheans, (Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Levinas), whom Milbank treats as a group along with N., nor the RO, like Milbank and Hart, reckon with the truth claims of N. when he claims that his philosophy is right, not because he has told a better story but because it is rooted in empirically verifiable reality.

Now, I do not believe it is actually rooted in empirically verifiable reality and I think this is the point at which N. must be challenged if he is not to triumph. But this is a question that Milbank and Hart do not take up and, (I can't believe I'm saying this) Deane and Barth do not really get to terms with either! Why? Milbank and Hart don't get to grips with N's truth claims because they opt for trying to tell a better, more convincing story than N., on the assumption that no one can prove that any story is true by means of science. Deane critiques their atttempt for being insufficiently Christological, which gets us half way there, but not all the way. What seems to me to be still missing is the claim that Christian theology describes reality better than the version of modern science that begins with atheism as its presupposition.

This is precisely the claim that Pope Benedict XVI made in his Regensburg Lecture. Modern science is comprised of a Platonic (Cartesian) element plus an experimental method. The Platonic element, the Pope points out, “is the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently.” (Par. #40) By applying mathematical description to reality and combining it with the experimental method, modern science advances by means of verification and falsification. Every new technological advance is further proof that the world is rationally ordered, not random chaos. So science bears within itself a question to which it has no answer: why is reality structured in such a way that it can be described mathematically and why are our minds able to grasp this structure? Atheistic science has no answer, but Christianity with its account of the Logos does. This is just a hasty sketch of Benedict's argument that science naturally arises out of Christianity and needs Christianity to be itself.

So I agree with Deane that the answer is Christology, but not merely the Christological description of man under sin and as reconciled, but the Christology of creation in which we understand the Logos as the source of order and structure in the universe. Only this doctrine can ultimately defeat N's will-to-power philosophy.