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Contemporary Theology and the Turn to Rhetoric
Introduction: The Urgent Situation
In the introductory essay to their edited volume, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward suggest ominously that “for several centuries now, secularism has been defining and constructing the world.”1 The authors are especially concerned that secular reason has constructed a world in which “the theological” has no ultimate relevance. That is, they worry that ours is a world in which theology is not free to propose an alternative to the predominant, immanentist construal of human “social” reality, and instead must accept the position of “a harmless leisure-time activity of private commitment.”2 Radical Orthodoxy, which Milbank has more recently described as “an ecumenical theology with . . . a set of specific recommendations,”3 asserts the urgency, in the late stages of secular reason’s reign, of reclaiming theology’s supremacy as a discourse, especially in the domain of “social theory.” Thus Radical Orthodoxy is, at the outset, positioned critically vis-à-vis any so-called theology that acquiesces to secular reason’s assertion that the religious life is essentially personal or private.
If theology has lost its grip on the world in the secular age, it is also true that secular reason “grips” the world more tightly than theology ever needed to. We will explore this below when we consider secular reason’s pretension to a metaphysical justification, which theology proper does not require, according to Radical Orthodoxy. But secular reason’s tight grip is now faltering, Milbank et al. suggest, and it is reaching its self-destructive end. For a secular world-construction implies the supposedly liberating detachment of finite reality from its former eternal situatedness, and the nihilistic consequences of this severance are becoming more and more blatant—for example in Las Vegas, where all self-grounded and apparently free objects of desire are but thin facades upon a barren desert. It is in the midst of contemporary Western culture’s provision of such dead-end destinations that Radical Orthodoxy offers an “ontology of participation,” in which lies the sole possibility of once again “allowing finite things their own integrity.”4 Thus, as the finite objects that secular reason sought to liberate now melt into the desert sand, Radical Orthodoxy intends through its alternative, rhetorically justified ontology, to “reclaim the world”5 itself.
In order to be better able to assess the “radicality” to which this reclamation calls all theology and even all thinking, we must first explore in greater depth why, for Radical Orthodoxy, all secular reason is nihilistic, and then consider why a specifically “rhetorical” theology might be uniquely well-equipped to address and correct this pervasive trend in Western thought. Accordingly, in this chapter I will offer a reading of John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, a book that is comprehensive in scope—i.e., it relates “all” of modern, postmodern, and antique reason to Milbank’s unique theological alternative—and which has had an undeniably seminal influence upon more recent Radical Orthodox imperatives. My sense is that some readers will balk at this prospect nonetheless, since Milbank has an established reputation for intractable writing,6 and because more recently it has become fashionable in the “blogosphere” to dismiss Radical Orthodoxy on account of its bombast. I think neither of these criticisms is wholly baseless; but I also think they can serve as strategies for avoiding the hard work of mounting a serious engagement of Milbank’s oeuvre. Whether or not it warrants unqualified agreement, I hope at least to show in this chapter that Theology and Social Theory deserves close and serious attention, not least for having changed the manner in which contemporary theology may respond to suspicion of religion. I hope also that the reader will find some of Milbank’s most notoriously complex arguments clarified here.
I aim to cover several sub-topics over the course of the chapter, the structure of which runs parallel with Milbank’s book itself. First, we shall see how Milbank’s advocacy of theological “meta-suspicion” in the face of all sociological critiques of religion is intended primarily to undermine the “boundary” that modern thought posits between “religion,” on the one hand, and “the social,” on the other. Undermining this barrier has become the primary tactic of all Radical Orthodox theology. Second, I will demonstrate that Milbank’s “for” and “against” readings of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics hinge on the possibility in such thought of a genuine Sittlichkeit, which is to say, a conception of virtue that unites the universal good with the particular, customary instance, and so refuses the boundary upon which secular reason is staked. Third, we shall see that Milbank’s hostility to postmodern thought is due, perhaps strangely for a theologian, to the reluctance of such philosophy to be sufficiently historicist, sufficiently post-modern, in its account of social genesis. Finally, I shall attempt to clarify, with reference to Milbank’s criticism of Alasdair MacIntyre’s “dialectical” means of persuasion, why theology’s overcoming of the secular finally requires a specifically rhetorical form of communication. In relation especially to this last point, I shall try along the way to problematize the possibility of communicating a seemingly existential Christian “identity” (for Milbank, to be Christian is not to be an objective substance but to enact a particular “movement”) by means of rhetoric. These critical interjections will be fleshed out in later chapters. For now, let us try to get a handle on Milbank’s account of how modern thought reduces religion to something that is entirely transparent to an objective sociological analysis.
The Modern Separation of “Religion” from “the Social”
Meta-Suspicion
Milbank tells us that Theology and Social Theory is “addressed to both social theorists and theologians”—especially to those theologians who assume that “a sensibly critical faith is supposed to admit fully the critical claims of sociology.”7 In this comment Milbank is targeting any theology that is, for supposedly “theological” reasons, too ready to agree with modern sociology’s explanation of religion in terms of immanent, transparently “social” factors. In response to this kind of putatively sensible theology and social theory, Milbank’s primary aim is to persuade us to adopt a theological “‘meta-suspicion’ which casts doubt on the possibility of suspicion [of religion] itself.”8 It may be helpful first of all to identify just what sort of theology Milbank imagines is ready to agree with sociology that religion is not a mysterious presence in history but only serves a transparent social function.
Milbank will often stress that the metanarrative of modern and especially Protestant theology tells of a “providential” emancipation of true, “personal” religion from the authoritarian grasp of institutional order. His identification of the problems arising from such a Protestant view of the inwardness of Christian truth and its purely negative or iconoclastic relation to social reality as it is actualized in history has remained at the center of even his most recent polemics.9 According to Milbank, the belief that true Christian religiousness constitutes a transcendent interruption of the normal, “immanent” course of human action and history, an interruption that can only be maintained inwardly, immediately justifies secular reason’s takeover of social theory. Of course, what makes such thinking still “theological” is the hope that its concession of the social domain to immanent explanations will be a “propaedeutic to the explication of a more genuine religious remainder.”10 That is, once we are disabused of the idea that our immanent social achievements and failures have anything to do with our participation in the economy of salvation, we will come into more certain possession of the true, inward locus of that salvation. But as Milbank is quick to remind us, if this remainder of the truly t...