Fergus Kerr once remarked that John Milbank's argument in his magisterial Theology and Social Theory could be described as 'simplicity itself' (New Blackfriars 73 (1992)). This will be seen as an extremely odd claim for anyone who's attempted to slog through the 400 plus pages of a book densely packed with references to just about every important and even somewhat marginal figures in the history of Western thought. The general contours of his argument are not, however, difficult to grasp and I offer a brief summary of his thesis below which, if anyone ever comes across it, may be of some use as a very short introduction to John Milbank's theology.
Milbank’s aim in Theology and Social Theory is nothing less than to show how all social theory is in fact ‘heresy’, for it is parasitic upon theology. There is no such thing as an autonomous realm of the secular; as Milbank has it: “once there was no secular”. Milbank decries the “false modesty” of theology which has abandoned its position as the “queen of the sciences” and entered an unholy alliance with social theory. He calls for a complete overturn of this situation: theology must no longer allow itself to be positioned by other discourses.
If secular reason is itself a contingent narrative competing amongst others and not the unfolding of a universal and foundational reason there is no need for theology to prove itself before the tribunal of secular reason. There is no such fundamental account of society and history available and so theology itself must provide its own account. The ‘post-modern condition’ creates the space for Christian theology to reassert itself as a master-discourse. Milbank explains that if Christianity is persuasive then this because of the intrinsic persuasive power of the Christian Logos itself “not the apologetic mediation of a universal human reason.” The virtue of Christianity is that, in contrast to the narratives of modernity and post-modernity, it alone affirms an ontological priority of peace as opposed to an ‘original violence’: “theology, alone remains the discourse of non-mastery”.
Modernity and post-modernity ultimately end up in nihilism. Modernity’s pretensions are exposed as a genealogy of violence by Nietzsche and post-modernity abandons any attempts to ground the human telos in any notion of the good, leaving only an anarchic reality which can only be controlled by subjecting it to the will-to-power. Milbank tells us that the any attempts at a separation of the term ‘good’ from the term ‘God’ invariably lead to the positing of the priority of ‘right’ over the ‘good’ and the abandonment of any objective telos for human beings at all.
I was initially extremely attracted to Milbank's robust assertion of the claims of Christianity as master-discourse and in many ways I still feel he is right about a lot of things. However, it is clear that from a Roman Catholic perspective, Milbank's position cannot be adopted in its totality. He allows no room for any natural law or 'natural' knowledge of God - a position which is simply untenable in Roman Catholic theology. Of course it is tempting to jettison such concepts, especially in today's theological climate, but doing so would go against the grain of the entire Catholic tradition including Vatican I. Milbank (and Pickstock's) attempts to gain Thomas Aquinas for their project are thus rather strange in this context. The fact is Thomas did allow for a 'natural' knowledge of God (i.e. one which has no recourse to revelation) and despite Milbank and Pickstock's tendentious exegesis in Truth in Aquinas, I do not believe it is possible to claim Aquinas for their position.
Denys Turner's book Faith, Reason and the Existence of God is a strong defence of Aquinas' (and Vatican I's) claim that the existence of God can be known through the light of natural reason and he also offers a strong critique of Milbank's claims that Aquinas never meant for his "5 ways" to be taken as demonstrative proofs of God's existence. I hope to write something about this in the future.
