Being Reconciled

Ontology and Pardon

John Milbank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134405893
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Being Reconciled is a radical and entirely fresh theological treatment of the classic theory of the Gift in the context of divine reconciliation. It reconsiders notions of freedom and exchange in relation to a Christian doctrine which understands Creation, grace and incarnation as heavenly gifts, but the Fall, evil and violence as refusal of those gifts. In a sustained and rigorous response to the works of Derrida, Levinas, Marion, Zizek, Hauerwas and the 'Radical Evil' school, John Milbank posits the daring view that only transmission of the forgiveness offered by the Divine Humanity makes reconciliation possible on earth. Any philosophical understanding of forgiveness and redemption therefore requires theological completion.
Both a critique of post-Kantian modernity, and a new theology that engages with issues of language, culture, time, politics and historicity, Being Reconciled insists on the dependency of all human production and understanding on a God who is infinite in both utterance and capacity. Intended as the first in a trilogy of books centred on the gift, this book is an original and vivid new application of a classic theory by a leading international theologian.

1 EVIL
Darkness and silence

I

Traditionally, in Greek, Christian and Jewish thought evil has been denied any positive foothold in being. It has not been seen as a real force or quality, but as the absence of force and quality, and as the privation of being itself. It has not been regarded as glamorous, but as sterile; never as more, always as less. For many recent philosophers, however (e.g. Jacob Rogozinski, Slavoj Zizek, J.-L. Nancy), this view appears inadequate in the face of what they consider to be the unprecedented evil of the twentieth century: the mass organization of totalitarian control and terror, systematic genocide, and the enslavement of people who are deliberately worked to the point of enfeeblement and then slaughtered.¹ Such evil, they argue, cannot be regarded as privative, because this view claims that evil arises only from the deliberate pursuit of a lesser good. Power directed towards extermination suggests rather destruction and annihilation pursued perversely for its own sake, as an alternative end in itself. Such an impulse towards the pure negation of being, as towards the cold infliction of suffering – that may not even be enjoyed by its perpetrators – suggests that the will to destroy is a positive and surd attribute of being itself and no mere inhibition of being in its plenitude. This supposed positive evil for its own sake is often dubbed ‘radical evil’, following a term used by Immauel Kant in his book Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason.² With some plausibility, Kant’s account of evil is seen as encouraging a break with the traditional privation view focused upon being in general, in favour of a view focused purely upon the finite human will. This new view comprehends evil as a positively willed denial of the good and so as a pure act of perversity without ground. The development of such a position is traced from Kant, through Schelling, to Heidegger.

In this way, a specifically modern theory of evil is held to be adequate to account for a specifically modern extremism of evil practice, which the theory, nonetheless, predates. Despite this predating, which might suggest some causal link, the modern practical extremity of evil is held to be, at least in part, the outcome of a far older Western tradition of metaphysical reflection on evil which trivializes it and underrates it. So not only is evil as privation refuted by Auschwitz, it is also indicted by it as responsible for such an outcome. Evil denied as mere denial leaves us unvigilant against its real positivity.

This position, then, traces no lineage to the Holocaust from the specifically German and modern accounts of radical evil, yet asserts, perhaps all too vaguely, a lineage from the age-old western metaphysical understanding of evil as privation. Here, however, the advocates of ‘radical evil’ (or ‘postmodern Kantians’, as I will henceforth describe them), have to face the diametrically opposite alignment of theoretical and practical evil proposed by Heidegger’s pupil, Hannah Arendt, and arguably against her former teacher.³ For Arendt, famously, the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem, discloses not a pre-Satanic will to evil, nor a lust for horror, but instead ‘the banality of evil’, an incremental and pathetic inadequacy of motive which escalated imperceptibly into complicity with unimaginable wickedness. It has now been shown, against those prone (for various reasons) to doubt this, that Arendt’s account of evil as ‘banal’ is most certainly linked with her Augustinian predilections, and support for Augustine’s account of evil as negative.⁴ Thus the horror of Auschwitz, for Arendt, is not the revelation of evil perpetrated for its own sake, but rather a demonstration that even the most seemingly absolute evil tends to be carried out by people who imagine, albeit reluctantly, that they are fulfilling the goods of order, obedience, political stability and social peace.

In this fashion, Arendt implicitly saw the Western metaphysical account of evil in terms of privation as confirmed, not denied, by the Holocaust. A fortiori, therefore, this traditional theory of evil was not for her complicit with the modern practical excess of evil. In addition, Arendt established very astutely certain links between a debased Kantianism, and the co-operation of many of the German people with the implementing of the final solution.⁵ To this degree she also raised the question of a link between the modern theory of evil and the modern excessive practice of evil. And where she did, in her political theory, deploy Kant favourably, she adverted to social convergence in judgement, which is linked, by Kant, with the beautiful, and not to the common experience of the natural sublime that for Kant has profoundly to do both with respect for the formal law, and with radical evil.⁶

Despite this opening of the issue concerning the relation between modern theory of evil and modern evil as practised, Arendt veered well away from any indictment of Kant as such. Debased Kantianism is culpable, not the real Kantian philosophical legacy. Thus while, in relation to the Holocaust, the ancient view of evil is confirmed and therefore exonerated, the modern, positive view of evil is not accused of a certain responsibility. And yet this intellectual lineage would seem to be, at least prima facie, more plausible in terms of time, locality and proximity than the supposed genealogy which traces back to Western onto-theology. It would allow some significance to the predating of the modern practice of evil by the modern theory of evil. After all, the opponents of the privation theory have already contended for the profound alignment of radical evil with the Holocaust, since this theory alone is held adequately to interpret it. Supposing, instead, that privation theory can interpret the Holocaust, then this alignment would appear very differently: not as the retrospective match of event to detached theory, but as the prior perverse attempt to enact a false theory. Instead of the view that the negation of evil as merely negative permits its positivity to erupt, one would have the view that the false assertion of evil as positive leads to an impossible quest to enact such positivity, which can in reality only unleash a bad infinite of further and further privation, since being will not permit any final solution, any finished or perfected evil.

Nevertheless one can see immediately, from this formulation, why Arendt could not have traced the genealogy it expresses, quite apart from her residual respect for Kant. To ascribe causality to the pursuit of the Satanic illusion, the illusion of the pursuit of evil for its own sake, appears clean contrary to the invocation of the banality of evil behaviour. And Arendt, as many have pointed out, had all too little to say about the psychology of the instigators of the final solution, rather than that of people who must be judged its mere executives, albeit paramount ones, like Eichmann. All the same, this is not to say that a privation theory, nor even aspects of a banality theory, cannot apply also to the instigators. Hitler and his henchmen were not exactly Satanists, and their articulations of their motives were not like that of the Californian Charles Manson or the English ‘Moors murderer’ Ian Brady – a close student of de Sade and decadent literature. In these extreme cases one has something like the illusion of the belief that evil is being performed for its own sake, although privation theory is able to discern amidst this vaunted Satanic glory the pathetic desire for control in those whose high self-esteem has been in no way socially confirmed.⁷ Something of that may, indeed, have been operative amongst the Nazi cohorts, but they still articulated their defective desires more positively, in terms of the promotion of the racial health and excellence of humanity: indeed in their paganism or atheism they remained all too humanist, and Hitler sought avowedly to produce a human being worthy of worship.⁸ Likewise, the suppression and, finally, liquidation of the Jews was not articulated in nihilistic terms, but could be viewed as ‘rational’, given that one’s objective was to secure a German power absolutely untainted by socialism and the influence of international commerce, and a German identity based on cultural uniformity and demotion of the Christian and Biblical legacy in favour of a Nordic one.

The Nazis did not, therefore, like Charles Manson, avowedly elect radical evil, saying ‘Be Thou my Good’. Such Satanism discovers itself to be an illusion at the point where it finds it can establish no stable positive kingdom of evil, nor encompass absolute destruction of being, but instead can only unleash an ever-escalating slide of deprivation which will usually cease with self-destruction. Clearly, the theory of radical evil is not implicated in the Holocaust in this extreme Satanic fashion. However, in a much more subtle fashion, it may after all, be implicated. Here one can claim first of all (as I will later demonstrate), that Nazi concepts of universal power and legality were much more compatible with, and even derived from, the Kantian categorical imperative, than Arendt allowed. In the second place, one can claim that if the Nazis still affirmed a Kantian free will as their good, then they also inherited the aporias of this free will, as half-admitted by Kant in Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason. For these aporias, there is no clear way of distinguishing between the will which genuinely wills freedom, and the will which wills against itself, restraining freedom: this self-opposition for Kant characterizes the evil will.⁹ As we shall see, these aporias arise because of the lack, in Kant, at this highest level, of any teleology which can discriminate the good substance of what is willed from a deficient instance of such substance. Here, instead, the only thing willed is the law of free-willingitself, which defines legality as untrammelled autonomy, and it might seem that the free will to bind oneself equally instantiates such autonomy. At the very least one can ask, exactly how is one to discriminate between the will binding itself to be free, and the will binding itself in unfreedom, if there is no desirable content here to prove the goodness of the genuine good will to freedom?

But if this is really the case with Kant, then one must face up to something which seems at first sight highly unlikely: namely that political totalitarianism and terror really could, with a certain plausibility, pose as the fulfilling of the categorical imperative, just as much as the most stringent code of personal self-denial. Later we shall see more clearly how these opposites can converge and mutually reinforce each other. In effect, the promotion of formal freedom can become akin to the systematic promotion of the inhibition of freedom by an imperceptible slide. And such self-deceivingespousal of evil would in practice be very like the setting up of a Satanic organisation. Here also, no stable realm of evil would result, but instead the pace of privation of being would be horrendously quickened.

In what follows I shall offer, in the first place, a further defence and exposition of the view of evil as privation and banality. I shall therefore argue that it can apply also to modern extreme evil, and is in no sense responsible for this evil. However, in the second place, beyond Arendt, I shall argue that the modern, positive theory of evil is in a measure responsible for the modern actuality of evil.

II

To begin with, however, I must offer a much fuller exposition of the modern theory of evil as positive and ‘radical’.

Contemporary proponents of this view start with the proposition that totalitarian phenomena of the twentieth century, and in particular the Holocaust, exhibit something uniquely terrible. These phenomena include, of course, state terror enacted in the name of socialism. However, while I do not doubt that the Soviet State, like the Nazi one, was intrinsically criminal, I would claim that this criminality flowed from Lenin’s nihilism, from the exacerbation of modern state sovereignty, and certainly also from Marxist productivism and anti-agrarianism, but not from socialism as such. Indeed, the presence of genuine socialist ideals allowed the Soviet State later somewhat to reform itself, whereas the more unadulterated nihilism of the Nazis led shortly to self-destruction. On the other hand, European and American liberal democracy has also engendered a continuous horror almost as grave as the Holocaust, and a more troublingly sustainable mode of nihilism, appropriately disguised by an unparalleled reign of kitsch (including the American Holocaust industry): this is the sequence of deliberate terror and extermination deployed against civilian populations as a primary instrument of war and neo-colonial power from the Congo and the Philippines through Hiroshima, Palestine, Kenya, Algeria and Vietnam to the Gulf War and Afghanistan. This sequential instance – unparalleled in pre-modernity – shows that the source of terror is not simply ‘totalitarianism’, but rather the emptiness of secular power as such. It also shows that ‘liberal democracy’ is a mere virtual circus designed to entertain the middle-classes of the privileged world. For in its global instance, liberal capitalist power is also totalizing and utterly inhuman. The rapid dismantlement, since September 11, 2001, in both Britain and the USA, of age-old Anglo-Saxon liberties (including Habeas Corpus), reveals that once the empty heart of liberal sovereignty, which pursues only naked power (whether of the totality or the individual) for its own sake, is threatened, global terror is quickly injected into the domestic scene also.

If we allow that ‘totalitarianism’ be replaced by the wider concept of ‘secular immanence’, which is totalizing and terroristic because it acknowledges no supra-human power beyond itself by which it might be measured and limited, then we can still agree that twentieth-century politics has displayed something unprecedently sinister. For in the instances of the Holocaust, the Gulag and US foreign policy, law has itself consented to criminal principles and dedicated the resources of the State to mass murder on a legal, organized and bureaucratic basis. In particular, in the case of the Holocaust (although there are certainly some earlier imperial near-analogues), sections of the population deemed difficult or surplus to requirement were not simply oppressed or incarcerated, but were literally worked to death and discarded. So whereas previous slave economies still preserved some sense of the human status of the slaves, here this was denied in the context of a new hierarchical humanism which restricted full humanity to certain racial, physical and mental ideals.¹⁰

For the postmodern Kantians, this new degree of malevolence suggests in effect a will towards evil for its own sake, not merely evil as a lack of reality, or a lack of power, but evil as an alternative and viable exercise of power, whereby some human beings can devote themselves primarily to the destruction of others. This is now revealed as a possibility: it worked – scarcely any Jews now inhabit Germany. And if evil is now revealed as having equal potency with the good, an equal potency which proceeds to an equal actuality, then it is also shown as proceeding entirely from the rational will. It would surely be unthinkable to proffer any excuses for the Holocaust, or to lay out a set of mitigating circumstances. Yet the postmodern Kantians suggest that privation theory unfolds precisely by offering mitigating circumstances for all evil, so allowing radical evil to slip through its theoretical net. What it amounts to, they argue, is a kind of justification of being, an ontodicy (by analogy with theodicy), which also exonerates all creatures who exist, including human beings. For privation theory, all being as being is good, and since all power in order to be effective manifests the actuality of being, all power, as power, is good, and evil not only is impotent but can even be defined, at least in one valid way, as weakness and impotence (this is underscored most heavily by Dionysius the Areopagite).¹¹ It follows that, since the will is a potency, it is only actual and effective when it wills the good; hence for both Dionysius and Augustine, it is not exactly the case that evil can be willed: rather there is evil precisely to the degree that there is an absence of willing. No one, as willing, wills anything but the good, and evil only affects the will to the extent that a deficient good is being willed.¹²

This exoneration of the will as such suggests, to the postmodern Kantians, that thereby the will is excused, and evil displaced from human origin. Instead of a primary referral of evil to potency and will, privation theory seems to imply a root of evil prior to power and will, in impersonal ontological circumstances, or rather in meontological circumstances.¹³ For according to Jewish and Christian tradition, at least up to Maimonides and Aquinas, Being in its pure self-origination is infinite, and if Being as such is good, then, also, the infinite as such is good, indefeasibly good, beyond the possibility of swerving. Hence it would seem that goodness is a property of non-limitation, and not a derivative of personal election. Conversely, if evil is only possible for finite creatures, then finitude can always be proffered as something of an excuse: the will falls into evil by choosing the lesser good (since to will at all it must will some good), but here it is a victim of its finite partiality of perspective, and its finite lack of power to affirm. Indeed, even St Paul appears entirely to exonerate the will, lamenting that he does what he hates, the opposite of what he wants to do (Romans 7: 15, 18; Galatians 5: 17). Thereby he blames...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1: EVIL DARKNESS AND SILENCE
• 2: VIOLENCE DOUBLE PASSIVITY
• 3: FORGIVENESS THE DOUBLE WATERS
• 4: INCARNATION THE SOVEREIGN VICTIM
• 5: CRUCIFIXION Obscure deliverance
• 6: ATONEMENT CHRIST THE EXCEPTION
• 7: ECCLESIOLOGY THE LAST OF THE LAST
• 8: GRACE THE MIDWINTER SACRIFICE
• 9: POLITICS SOCIALISM BY GRACE
• 10: CULTURE THE GOSPEL OF AFFINITY
• NOTES