Interview with John Milbank

There’s an interview/article on John Milbank at the Times Higher Education website.

He’s speaking about atheism/secularism and the returning influence of theology in the public sphere. He also touches on issues in science and politics.

Interestingly , the article states he opposes gay marriage and quotes him as saying “I don’t want to get into the situation where we deny there is something special about being attracted to the opposite sex”. Milbank has previously advocated gay marriage so I wonder whether this is a definite shift in his thinking to a more orthodox position or whether he’s simply been misinterpreted. That he’s moving towards a position more in line with that of Catholic teaching is perhaps confirmed by his statement that “By supporting the total disjuncture of sex and procreation, the Left is really supporting a new mode of fascism.”

He’s probably somewhat overselling the influence of Radical Orthodoxy, however,  when he speculates on whether the RC hierarchy is wondering whether RO can “will provide them with a way of loosening up without selling out”! Though I can’t claim any special privilege into the reading habits of those in the upper echelons of the Vatican, I’m not entirely sure they’re all reading RO.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=406157&c=1

God is Not a Story: Nature/Grace, Faith/Reason

Murphy’s work also touches on the grace/nature, reason/faith debate. The way she construes it, Gilson’s notion of ‘Christian philosophy’ lies in a “third domain”, as von Balthasar terms it. This “third domain” lies somewhere between philosophy and theology, it is neither ‘purely natural’ nor entirely theological. Thus the arguments for God’s existence are not pure philosophical arguments as has often been argued and which many contemporary theologians such as John Milbank take objection to. But neither are they merely ‘probabilistic’ arguments designed primarily for believers to give them a reasonable account of their belief in God, nor do they depend on an original intuition that God exists as Milbank would have it. As Murphy puts it: “A Christian philosopher is neither solely a Christian (‘graced’) nor solely a natural philosopher: she is standing on the ground which she knows to be grace and her interlocutor may not.” Thus the fact that nature is always and everywhere ‘graced’ (as de Lubac argues) does not preclude the possibility of engaging nonbelievers in debate and arguing for God’s existence in terms that do not immediately appeal to the supernatural.

The Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri is also brought in here to buttress this point. He claims that human beings are always ‘religated’, which signifies “a religious placement, provoking an awareness of the awkwardness of the human position within the cosmos.” (202). Zubiri made the case for a religious priority over secularity and the ‘religated’ sense of humanity’s existence as the catalyst for the growth of the sciences, including mathematics, grammar, anatomy and so on. It is because of humanity’s religious dimension, that these sciences have de facto arisen in history. Analogously, the proofs for God’s existence arise because of humanity’s ‘religation’ but they do not depend on a supernatural starting point for their validity. Non-believers may not know they stand on ‘graced ground’, but this does not mean we need to insist to them that this is the case; to do so would be manifestly self-defeating. There is no reason why Milbank should insist on the proofs not being demonstrative on the grounds of our graced nature. They can still be offered to nonbelievers who do not know that they stand on ground which is ‘already graced’. As Murphy puts it “Milbank seems to divest the natural desire for heaven of its great humanistic potency when he wields it against discursive argument for God’s existence.” (204) Hence de Lubac’s assertion of a ‘natural desire’ for the supernatural ought to retain it’s full paradoxical nature and not be construed as ruling out ‘natural’, discursive arguments for God’s existence. They may only arise because man is graced and tends towards the supernatural, but this does not thereby render them ‘unnatural’ and unfit for use as arguments with which to engage those who remain oblivious to the ubiquity of grace in our world.

John Milbank on Islam, the Crusades.

Apparently, Milbank has responded to Boris Johnson’s new series ‘After Rome: Holy War and Conquest’.

http://www.boris-johnson.com/2008/12/01/after-rome-holy-war-and-conquest-bbc/#comment-22028

Milbank has never struck me as the type who’d make comments on websites, so not even sure if it’s really him, but there you go.

A Couple of Anecdotes: Henri de Lubac

Found these and thought I’d share.

They’re taken from here.

The First:

William Russell, S.J. also became a permanent friend. He and I came to the Jesuit School of Theology in 1973, I as a member of the faculty, Bill as rector of the community. Through Bill I made the acquaintance of Henri de Lubac during my year in Cambridge. Bill had done his theology in France, where he and de Lubac struck up a friendship. Whenever de Lubac came to lecture in the United States, Bill would accompany him as a translator, since de Lubac spoke no English. During my Cambridge year, de Lubac had scheduled a series of lectures in different American cities, among them Chicago. Proclaiming de Lubac’s theology suspect, Cardinal Cody canceled his lecture at the diocesan seminary in Chicago.

The auxiliary bishops of Chicago felt so outraged at the Cardinal’s action, that they gave a special dinner in de Lubac’s honor. Since de Lubac had to give another lecture later in the evening the bishops shortened the cocktail hour before dinner and told the waiters to serve doubles. De Lubac never drank alcohol; but he told Bill that, since the bishops were going out of their way to honor him, he would on this occasion drink whatever they gave him. The bishop next to de Lubac ordered a double martini; and de Lubac, not realizing what he was doing, ordered the same. When the waiter put the drink in front of him, de Lubac saw pure poison and decided to get an unpleasant experience over with as quickly as possible. He drained his glass in one gulp. The bishop, somewhat bemused, motioned to the server, who brought de Lubac a second double martini which he again chug-a-lugged. Fortunately, Bill saw what was happening and explained to the bishop that de Lubac never drank and was, by way of exception, doing so this evening out of courtesy. During the meal the bishops had provided three wines. After dinner all drank a liqueur. Then de Lubac gave his lecture. Bill deemed his performance inspired, by far the best lecture of the entire tour.

The Second:

After that one encounter, I never saw de Lubac again; but one of my colleagues in Berkeley, David Stagaman, S.J., had lived with him in Paris, where David was completing his doctorate at L’Institut Catholique. David and de Lubac normally did not move in the same social circles. Then, suddenly the latter started acting chummily. David soon found out that de Lubac wanted his assistance. De Lubac asked David whether he thought that he could arrange for him to lecture at Loyola University. De Lubac apparently did not realize that the Jesuits in the United States run more than one Loyola University. David belongs to the Chicago province. He responded that he had several friends in the theology department at Loyola in Chicago and that he felt sure they would feel delighted to extend an invitation to him to lecture. David, however, urged de Lubac to take lots of warm clothes, if he went to Chicago in the winter.
“I do not want to go to Chicago,” de Lubac responded. “I want to go to Los Angeles.”
“Well,” David said, “we do have a Loyola University in Los Angeles; but why do you have to lecture there?”
“Because,” de Lubac told him, “ I just got a letter from Karl Rahner who lectured there, and Rahner tells me that I must not die without seeing Disneyland.” Great theologians have their human side.

God is Not a Story: Grammatical Thomists (2)

According to Murphy: McCabe, Turner and other ‘grammatical Thomists’ essentially reduce the five ways to one overarching question which was in fact first defined as the ultimate question not by Aquinas, but by Leibniz: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. Turner thus argues that the five ways are intended to prove the methodologically sound nature of asking the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ He therefore divests each of the ways of content and establishes them as “argument strategies instead”.

Murphy contends that this question will only have force for an already religious believer as there is nothing inherently absurd about pointing out that the universe is ‘just there’ (as it manifestly is) and this ties in with many accounts of Aquinas’ five ways as merely strategies for pointing out how to speak about God, not discursive proofs that could lead a nonbeliever to God. The question could quite reasonably be answered with the riposte Bertrand Russell gave Fr. Frederick Copleston in their BBC debate on the existence of God: “the universe is just there, and that’s all”. Before one has actually demonstrated the existence of God, one cannot demonstrate that there is anything inherently odd about the universe ‘being there’.(101) Their argument rests substantially on the real distinction in things between existence and essence (i.e. what they are and that they are: a chair’s being a chair and the sheer fact of its existence).

Those who use the ‘why?’ question want to bypass the concrete ways Aquinas uses to demonstrate God’s existence. But in doing this they appear to take for granted the ‘ontological distinction’ between ‘being and essence’ and their identity in the absolute simplicity of God. But this is offered to us through Revelation (the so called ‘metaphysics of Exodus’): “I am that I am” and one cannot depend on it as a proof of God’s existence without involving oneself in circularity.

Here, Murphy appears to draws heavily from Gilson’s claims that (contra to what he once previously believed) there is no ’sixth way’ in Aquinas’ work De Ente et Essentia. The proponents of a ’sixth way’ would have it that the real distinction in things between existence and essence (i.e. what they are and that they are: a chair’s being a chair and the sheer fact of its existence) leads us to that Being in which existence and essence coincide. The important point here is that it is by faith the Christian knows this. Thus the ‘ways’ which deal with things in the world can’t simply be bypassed to get ’straight to the point’. Gilson himself changed his mind on this very point. He had once held that the text De Ente et Essentia provided a ’sixth way’ to prove the existence of God. He however changed his mind on this point, denying that it offers any such proof.

As Murphy puts it: What distinguishes the Christian theologian from, say, Aristotle, is that he knows, by faith, that it is only God to whom one can ascribe an identity of existence and essence, and thus that in ‘creatures’ a real distinction pertains between existence and nature. He thus gives arguments for the existence of God which both can lead non-believers to this insight and which enables believers to corroborate their faith with evidence.(108 – 109)

It is nevertheless perhaps salutary to note the disagreement with Gilson on this point by John F.X. Knasas, something of a ‘disciple’ of Gilson himself. In his book Being and Some Twentieth Century Thomists, he argues that Gilson’s later position is not entirely consistent. Gilson argues for the act of judgement as being the mind’s access to the notion of ‘actus essendi’. (227) Unless one wishes to make the claim that Gilson has theologized the entirety of Thomas’ metaphysics, then it would be better to say that the ‘metaphysics of Exodus’ is the psychological starting point for Thomas’ investigation which he then elaborates in philosophical terms. (228). If this is the case, then it is not illegitimate to start from the fact of the real distinction in creatures and thus work one’s way to God whose essence is “to be”.

This is not to say that Murphy’s emphasis on using all the five ways is not a good one, but I have always personally found that the argument from contingency speaks most strongly to me and it is the principle I turn to when attempting to engage those who do not believe.

Moved to wordpress

Hopefully you’ve been redirected here from my old address.

I seem to have messed up the part where the direct addresses of particular posts are meant to redirect to the equivalent page here, if you need to find it you can just use the search function above or click on the relevant category in the list to the right.

Thanks

God Is Not A Story – Grammatical Thomists (Part 1)

By ‘Grammatical Thomists,’ Murphy means those Thomists who to some extent have adopted the ‘linguistic turn’ in modern philosophy, primarily through their engagement with Wittgenstein. Thus her primary interlocutors are Thomists such as Herbert McCabe and Denys Turner. What I find especially interesting about this work, is that one of Murphy’s main concerns is to re-present the ‘five ways’ of Thomas Aquinas as full-blooded proofs. Of course, nowadays, arguments for the existence of God are not particularly in vogue, mainly because of theology’s attempts to avoid any suspicion of ‘foundationalism’ and also because (post)modern theology has for the most part, bought into Heidegger’s narrative of Western philosophy as one giant exercise in onto-theology.

It may appear that her project here shares much in common with that of Denys Turner who in ‘Faith, Reason and the Existence of God’ presents a defence of Vatican I’s promulgation that the existence of God can be known with certainty by the natural power of reason. Murphy shares this belief, but she argues that Turner, by limiting himself to merely arguing for the possibility of a rational proof of the existence of God, rather than delving into any particular proof whatsoever, is himself guilty of a form of foundationalism. For, as Murphy notes, there is nothing intrinsically ’foundationalist’ about reasoning to God’s existence. Rather, foundationalism comes into play when “one reasons upon reason” (33) As she says, not even Descartes though it necessary to first prove the rationality of proving the existence of God before he went on to offer a proof! (87) One recalls here John Paul II’s lamentation in Fides et Ratio that philosophy has been reduced to epistemology – it no longer seeks to know reality but instead limits itself to asking how one can know anything at all.

On this point, I think she is a little unfair on Turner. Yes, it would be preferable to simply get on with the business of proving God’s existence, but in a climate which believes this undertaking to be an impossibility, such attempts are not going to be given a hearing in the first place. Turner recognises his goal is limited and may seem ‘pedantic’ to many, but I think a critique of those Kant-inspired arguments against the possibility of a proof and theological apprehensiveness about ‘proofs’ in relation to God’s existence is a worthy cause in itself.

God Is Not A Story

English theologian Francesca Aran Murphy’s new book, God is Not a Story continues the revival in interest in the work of Etienne Gilson that her biography of the great Thomist began. Her biography Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson is an excellent introduction to the life and work of the French scholar. In it she details the relationship between Gilson and his contemporaries such as Maritain and the indomitable Garrigou-Lagrange, providing insight into the debates that shaped French Catholic thought in the 20th Century and their philosophical, theological and political ramifications.

Her latest work is a critique of narrative theology. The book reads almost like an amplification of a section of the introduction to ‘Art and Intellect’ where she explains that “For those believers who have made a ghetto peace with nonbelief, revealed faith is without philosophical foundations. They give up the claim that revelation tells them what reality is like and say, ‘This is reality for me, a believer.’”

Murphy wants to get back to reality and in doing so she launches a critique of narrative theology, which she feels merely skims the surface and never really engages with the world of things as they are, favouring a coherence theory of truth and the claim that we all inhabit certain stories. Narrative theology is also characterized by an overemphasis on method in theology – what is deemed important is the ‘language game’ which the theological project represents and not whether reality and scripture correlate. In her book, Murphy focuses her critique on two principle targets: ‘story Barthians’ and ‘grammatical Thomists’. It is her second target that most interests me. I’ll hopefully be blogging a bit about this in the coming weeks.

Say what you will about John Milbank…

…you can’t say he’s not interesting.

First of all there’s this letter in response to this article.

It stirred up some discussion on the theological blog scene.

Personally, I’m of a somewhat ‘Red Tory’ persuasion myself, in that I’m not in favour of capitalism but I’m ‘conservative’ on most cultural and social issues. I found it a little odd that some people seemed to take his letter as a sort of lurch to the ‘right’ as if Milbank hadn’t previously espoused views that were ‘conservative’. The scare quotes around his use of ‘the family’ also struck me as rather strange: what exactly do people, including it seems some Christians, have against ‘the family’? It is clear that Milbank is no leftist turning ‘neo-conservative’ as Hitchens did; if he’s a Tory, then it’s a Tory of the old school like Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle and he makes it clear he still retains his (Christian) socialist allegiance.

It’s also important to read the letter in the context of the article he’s responding to. Thus his reference to “principled elites” is probably a reaction to the article’s hysterical aversion to the Church having any influence in society whatsoever (we should all be guided by Science, you see).

Anyway, following on from this, there’s a new interview with Milbank in The Other Journal (I was alerted to it on Inhabitatio Dei). The interview tackles the ‘new atheism’ (Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk) and touches on other subjects such as sex and politics. He once again references ‘Red Toryism’ and argues that Christians need to start taking their Christianity into the political realm in a more self-conscious and explicit manner. I found this quote particularly amusing (no doubt it’ll serve as further ‘proof’ that Milbank is a ‘fascist’ – a ridiculous claim):

We need now to celebrate instead the faithful legacy of peasants, learned, honourable and paternalist aristocrats, Christian warrior kings like Alfred the Great, yeomen farmers and scholars. Péguy is the man for the hour. William Cobbett also. Chesterton and Belloc likewise.

On a serious note, I would love for someone to present a practical blueprint for how this sort of political vision would work. It’s all very well issuing these clarion calls, but what does it actually amount to in the context of British politics? Phillip Blond seems to think David Cameron is perhaps taking some steps towards this, but I don’t think it goes anywhere near far enough (and I’m sure he’d agree). So how exactly is Red Toryism or Traditionalist Socialism meant to impact the political scene? And in what sort of changes would it manifest itself? Perhaps Blond’s upcoming book on Red Toryism may go some way towards making this clearer.

Some thoughts on the Grandeur of Reason conference

The announcement of the Centre for Theology and Philosophy’s upcoming conference on the ‘Grandeur of Reason’ has occasioned a fair amount of debate on some theology blogs.

First of all, the conference itself looks set to be spectacular with a line up of theologians and philosophers including the likes of John Milbank, David B. Hart, Fergus Kerr and Slavoij Zizek. The précis of the conference is said to have been taken from Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address wherein he calls for a renewal of the relationship between faith and reason, which avoids the extremes of a fideism wherein God’s decrees are completely divorced from humanity’s reasoning and a reason which seeks to insulate itself from God altogether.

As a Catholic, I cannot say I share the same concerns that appear to trouble some of the contributors to the debate. The idea that Radical Orthodoxy’s position sits too comfortably with that of the current Papacy is not really something that displeases me. The trajectory that RO also seems to be taking towards a more ‘universalised’ reason (as Jamie Smith contends) is, again, something I would welcome.

It does, however, strike a strange chord in me to hear RO speaking in the sort of way that they do in the conference précis: “From this standpoint we hope to begin thinking through an authentic understanding of tolerance and ecumenism. Our task is thus to establish a path of honest intercultural communication in pursuit of universal truth, guided by the “grandeur” of reason, and unashamedly grounded in the cultural and historical tradition of Christianity.”

One of my principle problems with Milbank (and to that extent with various other RO ‘adherents’) has been the relativistic position he has adopted regarding the claims of reason. Whilst I had no problem with the dismantling of the ‘Enlightenment’ pretension of a neutral reason operating devoid of all particularities, the notion that the claims of the Christian ‘meta-narrative’ could only be articulated rhetorically and its truths only adhered to through literary reasons of ‘good taste’, is simply not compatible with Roman Catholic doctrine. As I argued in my posts on Milbank’s essay ‘The End of Dialogue’, his position does not allow for any real engagement with other traditions.

Of course, Milbank has always insisted that his position is not a fideistic one and indeed he criticises the likes of Barth on that score. The exact envisaging of the relationship between faith and reason has remained somewhat opaque. However, as Smith has noted, the ‘later’ Milbank is moving towards a position seemingly less extreme than that offered in Theology and Social Theory. I don’t think he’d yet embrace the idea of ‘natural reason’ as Smith suggests or of ‘natural law’ but his comments on the subject have changed rather dramatically. In an article responding to various readings of TST he rejected Aidan Nicholls’ criticisms of his treatment of ‘common wisdom’, ‘natural law’ and the like by dismissingly calling them all “yogic delights”.

However, Smith sees in Milbank a ‘universalizing’ tendency which is almost rehabilitating a ‘natural theology’ tradition in a different guise. He sees this change most markedly in Being Reconciled. (Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p.165)

I think Smith’s qualms about this are a consequence of his Reformed background and the emphasis he wishes to place on the fallen nature of human reason. As D.B. Hart responded to Smith, despite not having placed enough emphasis on a common rationality in The Beauty of the Infinite, his project does not involve the sort of incommensurability thesis that Smith wants to hold on to. Perhaps a similar sort of thing is happening with Milbank who wants to emphasise that the continued giving of grace after the fall in effect ‘nullifies’ to an extent the idea that reason has fallen to such an extent that it simply cannot function in any ‘universal’ manner whatsoever. (Introducing, p. 165)

It might not be going too far to say that this conception of universality Milbank seems to be promoting isn’t THAT far from the Rahner’s anonymous Christianity! So instead of a ’secular reason’ acting in a universal fashion because divorced from all religious particularities, there is a universal drive of human reason towards the grace showered upon all. I think this is possible because the differences between de Lubac and Rahner aren’t as pronounced as commentators (including Milbank) would have one believe.

Eric Lee, for example, makes a similar point when he argues that it is the Universality of the Logos that allows for a certain commonality and possibility of genuine debate and engagement (as opposed, perhaps, to simply ‘out-narrating’ one’s opponent). This, however, still leaves the question of to what extent the Logos must be explicitly referred to when talking in the public sphere. Would we constantly need to articulate the entire Christian meta-narrative when proclaiming our views? With this in mind I found a comment made by Milbank especially interesting.

In the book God’s Advocates, where he features in one of the interviews, he describes just this dilemma: “let’s think of the situation of the Church, especially the Roman Catholic Church today, when it tries to speak in the public realm about moral and political issues. The dilemma is: do you speak on the basis of a natural law that should be available to everybody, whether or not they’re recognising God, in which case it’s very doubtful whether you’re talking about any kind of natural law that the Middle Ages could have recognised; or do you, on the other hand, say that our positions are grounded in our entire Catholic vision, and here the obvious risk is that people will ask why the should listen. But you might also say that that’s the only possible alternative course because, in fact, what we say only makes sense in terms of our entire vision.”

What he then goes on to say is interesting, not least because it is far removed from what the general perception of Milbank would have you think he’d say. (Again, I think this is partly due to Milbank’s own rhetorical ploys). Speaking of the trajectory of de Lubac’s theology he goes on to say that “that kind of perspective would say that, speaking in the Christian realm, we should latch onto things that aren’t completely unchristian, or that to some extent remain residually Christian. People still talk about forgiveness, reconciliation and mercy, and the idea that each person matters as much as everyone else, in a way that pagans, on a whole, didn’t. And therefore we don’t need to speak within a completely natural law-based kind of discourse: we can get people to try to see more deeply the implications of what they already think. This includes getting them to recognise that their vision isn’t completely cut off from something that in the end resembles a religious vision; but it also doesn’t mean that one has to start by overwhelming them with one’s entire Christian meta-narrative and ontology.” The part in bold is particularly interesting as it is just such a thing many would associate Milbank with advocating!

In this paper, he also calls for a renewed Christian humanism, emphasising that traces of the divine can be found in cultures and religions other than Christianity, and that the doctrine of the incarnation serves as a validation of the “human as such”. Thus Milbank seems to be moving away from the incommensurability thesis that seemed more apparent in TST. It is just such a move that I think distresses someone like Smith but in the same way that Hart stated that his theological project wasn’t intended to suggest that there was no such thing as a common reason, I think Milbank perhaps also overemphasised this point and is now seeking to redress the balance somewhat.

Rhetorical posturing may have led to many thinking that RO almost advocated not listening to others (the ‘twenty-four theses’ are a prime example of this’). In practice this isn’t really the case though. Take a look at Conor Cunningham’s critique of evolution for example, barely any reference to theology at all – so clearly a constant harking back to theological positions is not necessary, and something like Neo-Darwinism can be critiqued on its own terms. With that in mind I wonder whether Milbank would modify his critique of Macintyre in TST? Interestingly, Smith also mentions in a footnote that the Milbank of Being Reconciled is far closer to the Macintyre he criticises in TST. (Introducing, p.181)

It was also especially intriguing to hear that Milbank had allegedly said that the problem with Islam is that it has no conception of the secular! Not sure if this could be verified but if so, then he’s probably going a bit too far! That aspect of the conference (i.e. Islam) should also be fascinating although I wish I had more insight into what exactly the RO position regarding Islam (which again seems to be a bone of contention) is. The only clue I have is the articles by Adrian Pabst and Phillip Blond in the International Herald Tribune, but as regards Milbank his sparse comments on Islam have never struck me as overtly negative.

Hopefully, the conference will help elucidate these issues and provide greater insight into Milbank’s views on the role of reason. I’m also particularly interested in what D.B. Hart might have to say and whether he’ll build upon the reply he made to Smith’s assessment of his work.