Praise for Beyond Secular Order :

‘Exploratory, daring, irritating and illuminating by turns, John Milbank cannot be compared with anything else in the intellectual life of our times. Whatever our conclusions on the positions he has defended, he has succeeded in posing the questions that have really mattered, so that those who have simply wished not to know, have risked being all too obviously granted their wish. Now in a work of synthesis he revisits his early modernity-criticism, enriching it with the reflections on ontology, politics and theology that have occupied him since. It will become the cardinal text for interpreting him and arguing with him.’

Oliver O’Donovan, University of Edinburgh

‘This rich and many-sided work documents the remoter origins of modern Western philosophy in the theological controversies of the later Middle Ages, arising out of the nominalist rebellion against Aquinas’ synthesis. But tracing this connection has much more than an antiquarian interest. Milbank goes on to show how we can understand the strains and tensions within modern philosophy, and the contemporary attempts at critique, in new and fruitful ways in the light of this history. And he extends these insights to our contemporary understanding of politics. New and exciting avenues of exploration open again and again in this richly suggestive work.’

Charles Taylor, McGill University

Illuminations: Theory and Religion

Series editors: Catherine Pickstock, John Milbank, and Graham Ward

Religion has a growing visibility in the world at large. Throughout the humanities there is a mounting realization that religion and culture lie so closely together that religion is an unavoidable and fundamental human reality. Consequently, the examination of religion and theology now stands at the centre of any questioning of our western identity, including the question of whether there is such a thing as ‘truth’.

Illuminations aims both to reflect the diverse elements of these developments and, from them, to produce creative new syntheses. It is unique in exploring the new interaction between theology, philosophy, religious studies, political theory, and cultural studies. Despite the theoretical convergence of certain trends they often in practice do not come together. The aim of Illuminations is to make this happen, and advance contemporary theoretical discussion.

Published

Sacrifice and Community: Jewish Offering and Christian Eucharist
Matthew Levering

The Other Calling: Theology, Intellectual Vocation, and Truth
Andrew Shanks

The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God
Stanley Hauerwas

The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism
John Hughes

God and the Between
William Desmond

After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J.G. Hamann
John R. Betz

The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist
Angel F. Mendez Montoya

No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology
Michael Hanby

This edition first published 2013
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In memory of my uncles and aunts

DAVID AND HAMISH MACLAGAN, MARGARET WOOD AND RUTH MILBANK

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows.

            Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Conor Cunningham and Aaron Riches for the initial suggestion for this book – though in the end it has turned out very differently – and to my head of department, Simon Oliver, for his support while finishing it. Also to Sam Kimbriel for his comments on the project during this period. My other intellectual debts are now too numerous and deep to be readily recorded, but my thinking here has been profoundly informed by continual conversation with my wife Alison and my children Arabella and Sebastian. Also by frequent interchanges with my former student Catherine Pickstock of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and with her former student Adrian Pabst, now of the University of Kent. Finally, my great thanks go to Rebecca Harkin and Karen Raith at Wiley Blackwell for enabling this book quickly to appear in print, to Janet Moth, project manager, and to Eric Lee for compiling the index.

J.M.

Preface: The Hidden Dimension of Humanity

This book is a successor volume to Theology and Social Theory, and seeks to deepen its analyses.¹

Like that book, it is in part an exercise in tracing the roots of ‘the secular’. The first ‘sequence’ of the current book does so in terms of philosophy. A proposed sequel, On Divine Government, will further do so in terms of theology and the history of religion. The reason for this triple division we shall shortly see.

There is an intrinsic difficulty in any such genealogical endeavour. Human existence is split between actions and verbal or other symbolic performances on the one hand, and reflexive verbal theorisations (in whatever degree of abstraction) on the other. Apparently, we usually act without reflection and without reference to our theoretical assumptions. Equally, we often present our theoretical musings as if these arose from a void and were not intended as pragmatic interventions. Yet in reality all our actions assume a mythical, metaphoric, or rational framework, while all our theoretical utterances and writings are practical interventions in human history, whether deliberately so or not.

This means that both acting and thinking typically occur in the shadows, always with half-concealment. As a result, human history but rarely comes to the light of day and we remain unable clearly to see ourselves. The task of the genealogist is therefore to penetrate these shadows, and to reach a level where we can regard actions in the light of their presuppositions and theories in the light of their practical tendencies.

Yet precisely because this dimension of full daylight is hidden, to try to reach it can appear to be a further venture into the murk, a departure from the apparently clear evidence of events on the one hand, and the exegetical perusal of texts on the other. For the problem is that presuppositions have generally gone unsaid in actions, while practical contexts and implications have been obfuscated on the page. It follows that both mere empiricism and mere philology are self-defeating: in seeking to reach the objective, they fail to reach the real.

By contrast, the assumption of my genealogy is that there can be perspectives from which one can see the homology between human theory and human action. Yet this truly illuminating light is hidden under a divided bushel, and can be glimpsed but fleetingly, because what history most disguises through division into thought and event is the deepest substance of its own occurring. Hence, in the name of truth, one must run the risk that any claim to illuminate human history at depth will present conclusions that can seem excessively abstruse or even implausible. Yet it may be this very abstruseness that is the mark of their authenticity.

Such a circumstance is not a licence for guesswork, even if it reveals the unavoidable need for interpretative ‘abduction’ that necessarily goes (one hopes with caution and good judgement) ‘beyond the evidence’. Of course as much evidence as can be gleaned should be gleaned, yet the most relevant evidence here is the witness of elusive echo back and forth between the two registers of verba and pragmata.

Given my argued position therefore, it is not simply a matter of seeing whether or not these echoes can be traced. Rather, it is taken to be the case, for reasons of historical ontology, that a deep homology must exist, since specifically human action is theoretically informed and all human words have a performative dimension. Also, given the fact that human beings can communicate with each other in greater or lesser degrees, one must apply this principle at a more collective level: there will always be a shared hidden horizon of coincidence between act and meaning, whether at the level of a locality, a culture, or the entire human race – which undoubtedly shares, at some level, a single culture.

In consequence, the presupposition of this book is that there has to exist a concealed symmetry between the most rarefied expressions of modern thought in ‘philosophy’, on the one hand, and modernity’s collective ‘political’ deeds on the other. A further presupposition is that it is possible to take a short cut to locating this isomorphism by looking at specifically ‘political philosophy’ or ‘political theory’ in the broadest sense (as much of it is the work of jurists and not of philosophers). For it is likely that within this discourse metaphysical abstraction and lived events will theoretically come together in a markedly acute fashion

It should be noted that this is a different proposal from that of reading the history of political thought ‘contextually’, though that is involved and by no means disparaged. Instead, it is rather that political thought is taken to be a level of writing that begins to disclose a concealed, more ultimate ‘context’ that is itself theoretical as much as practical.

The focus of the present book is therefore on a certain homology between metaphysical philosophy, on the one hand, and political philosophy on the other. Within the scope of theory at least, it is intended to show how ideas about being coincide with ideas about human action. What is ‘seen’ corresponds to what is done or made, in accordance with the Aristotelian understanding that, while an ergon proceeds from an essence, an essence is something that always performs an , such that a blinded eye is for Aristotle no longer an eye at all.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!