Truth and Politics

A Theological Comparison of Joseph Ratzinger and John Milbank

Peter Samuel Kucer

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780800699963
• eBook ISBN: 9781451465303
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Truth and Politics tackles the crucial question of how the concept of truth is defined and how such is grounded theologically, through an analysis and comparison of the thought of two of the most important contemporary Catholic and Protestant theologians, Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) and John Milbank.

Peter Samuel Kucer traces out the critical question of the relationship of theology and politics, particularly as it intersects with ecclesiology, through a focus on the issue of the theological relationship to socialism. In this, Kucer demonstrates the competing accounts in the theologies of Joseph Ratzinger and John Milbank, arguing that Ratzinger's theology is oriented in such a way that it maintains a provisional openness with regard to political forms—that theology and politics, while interconnected, do not demand commitment to a singular form of political model—in contrast to Milbank's work, which subscribes to a particular pattern of church and politics.

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Milbank on Truth as Created

For Vico, as stated in the introduction, truth is convertible with factum. According to Milbank, this claim is in accordance with Christianity. Consequently, he defends Vico’s assertion that truth is created both by human beings and by God, internally and externally. Milbank furthers the concept that truth is created by, in place of an analogy of being, developing an analogy of creation. Out of this analogy of creation, Milbank describes a correspondence theory of truth and explains how truth is illuminated and mediated.

Correspondence and the Analogy of Creation

In this chapter we will examine how Milbank confirms Vico’s concept of truth by first determining how Milbank perceives truth in its final divine state as convertible with the made. Then we will look at Milbank’s description of how one corresponds to this truth. As with Vico, Milbank’s view of this relationship is fundamentally based on an analogy of creation, in which humans analogously participates in the inner divine creation, rather than an analogy of being.

Milbank’s Defense of Vico in Divine Truth as Created

For Vico, according to Milbank, divine truth is a socially created reality since God is a triune communion of persons. In clarifying this position of Vico, Milbank explains that the knowing of God involves an “internal creation”^[1] that is the “generation of the Son.”^[2] The Son as the Word generated by the Father “is then said to be the supreme locus of verum-factum, because it comprehends all actual and possible truth.”^[3] As Milbank points out, consequently Vico in “the first chapter of De Antiquissima, De Vero et Facto, presents the generation of the second person of the Trinity as the most perfect paradigm of verum-factum.”^[4]

Furthermore the verum-factum principle is the first truth “of all being”^[5] divine or created. As interpreted by Milbank, Vico’s verum-factum principle subverts the Platonic understanding of truth in which, “in its Christianized version, there is a prior truth in God, preceding all images and works, and human understanding, forced through its material involvement to express itself in words and images participates in the original through a dim recall of the purity of truth.”^[6] According to this Christianized version of Platonic thought, truth, in the form of divine ideas in God, has precedence over what is made. In contrast, according to Vico, explains Milbank, “this picture is precisely reversed: the perfection of divine understanding consists in its character as a completed work, a perfect spiritual artifact; the imperfection of human understanding consists in its relatively theoretical and less perfectly constructive and practical character.”^[7] By being in an eternal dialectal relationship with “the infinite factum”^[8] divine truth is, for Vico, created.

According to Milbank, by placing truth and the made in a dialectical relationship in which neither has precedence over the other, Vico’s schema “upsets two usual assumptions of traditional thought.”^[9] First, “it relies on the view that God is primordially creative, creative in his very being, and not merely in relation to an external Creation.”^[10] This means that in God ideas (verum) and what is made (factum) equally constitute the being of God. Making and creating, is not, therefore, a reality external to God, as in “traditional thought,” but constitutes his nature. Second, explains Milbank, Vico’s schema “denies that the ideas of making, of representation, and imaging, are necessarily connected with the corporeal or mind-body world, although for human beings this is, contingently, the case.”^[11] Since making is constitutive of God, who is pure spirit, making is not necessarily connected to physical realities. This means that “all reality,” whether of God or external to God, “is made or created, and for this reason is convertible with ‘truth,’ which as a ‘transcendental’ can also be predicated of everything.”^[12]

According to Vico’s dynamic conception of truth, in which making is not only an external activity of God but is also an internal divine activity, truth does not have precedence over the made since, in God, divine ideas and the made are dialectically related one another. By defining making as constitutive of God’s nature, Vico, explains Milbank, with his “immanent teleology of art” subverts the Platonic understanding and thus replaces the “priority of the true by the priority of the made.”^[13] In this view, what is made determines what is true, for God is primarily more a creator than a thinker. The created or factum “is the hinge of Vico’s transcendental system; through it alone are the other transcendentals convertible with each other,” explains Milbank.^[14]

Milbank, though, admits that “despite Vico’s proposal of the priority of the made, it remains the case that the maker must always have a vague anticipation of what he is to make.”^[15] Milbank solves this apparent contradiction in Vico’s assertion of the priority of the made over the true by explaining that only in God “where verum and factum infinitely coincide”^[16] can the made be understood as having primacy over the true, for “the Father is exhaustively Father of the Son.”^[17] However, in human beings, since “verbum mentis must always be accompanied by physical making,”^[18] this means that “verum and factum continually transcend each other, in a ceaseless alternation,”^[19] and, consequently, for humans truth, at times, has precedence over the made.^[20] In God, according to this logic, one can consistently claim that making causes what is known as truth. In humans, though, due to the “genuine dialectical oscillation between an indeterminate and a determinate moment,”^[21] this is imperfectly true. This contention of Vico contrasts with the Platonic view that maintains that truth, both in God and received by humanity, causes what is made, since by being consequent to truth it reflects it in varying degrees.^[22]

Milbank admits that conceiving of the second person of the Trinity as an internal creation contrasts with the dominant patristic view that holds that the son is “coincident with created reality at one point only, the historical person, Jesus Christ.”^[23] According to this patristic view, the eternal generation of the Son within the Trinity is not related to making and creating, since the Son as eternally generated “is equiprimordial with the Father—not himself the origin.”^[24] If the internal generation of the Son is understood as a kind of making and creating, this erroneously, according to the patristic perspective, sees Christ as less than the Father. Consequently, the patristic v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• Ratzinger on Truth as Essentially Uncreated
• Ratzinger on Truth as Illuminated and Mediated
• Milbank on Truth as Created
• Milbank on Truth as Illuminated and Mediated
• Ratzinger and Milbank Compared
• Ratzinger’s Theology of Politics and Milbank’s Political Theology
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index