Beyond Secular Order

The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People

John Milbank

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118825297, 9781118825235
• eBook ISBN: 9781118825303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Beyond Secular Order is the first of a two-volume work that expands upon renowned theologian John Milbank's innovative attempt to understand both theology and modern thought begun in his previously published classic text Theology and Social Theory. 

• Continues Milbank's innovative attempt to understand both theology and modern thought begun in Theology and Social Theory – considered a classic work in the development of systematic theology
• Authored by one of the world's most influential and highly regarded contemporary theologians
• Draws on a sweep of ideas and thinkers to argue that modern secularism is a form of Christian heresy that developed from the Middle Ages and can only be overcome by a renewed account of Christendom
• Shows how this heresy can be transformed into a richer blend of religion, modernity and politics
• Reveals how there is a fundamental homology between modern ideas about ontology and knowledge and modern ideas about political action, expressed in both theory and practice

Sequence on Political Ontology

1 Cosmos, Law and Morality

One reflection which the first sequence points towards is that there is an inherited yet semi-concealed division within Christian thought which today is increasingly resurfacing and which may even be more important for the future of the world than the question of the inter-relations between the three great monotheistic faiths, or the relationship of Christianity to the Enlightenment legacy.

With respect to the first circumstance, it is impossible to prophesy the future power of Islam, since it could yet benefit from a decadent implosion of the west. Yet it remains itself decadent in terms of a gradual loss of its mystical, gnostic and philosophical traditions, and increasing capture by a politicised ideology (Wahabism etc.) which ironically mimics western Protestant iconoclasm, textual literalism and focus upon the ­sovereign state (even if the latter has certain earlier origins within the Islamic focus upon the ‘One’). Equally, it remains more culturally specific and geopolitically confined than Christianity, while the more it escapes these conditions, the more perforce it must take on what is in reality a more ‘Christian’ profile – in terms of its understanding of the relation of the religious to the secular, for example, or of the place of the sciences and the arts within human culture.

With respect to the second circumstance, it is certainly the case that the twenty-first century is likely to be shaped by interactions between the one truly global religion, namely Christianity, and the only seriously rival global world-view, which is scientistic rationalism (arguably more the child of nineteenth-century utilitarianism and positivism than of earlier ‘enlightenment’). However, for many reasons (some of which I have indicated in the first sequence) the latter is always likely to exhibit a ­palpable slide into ­scepticism, relativism and nihilism. This poses at once a psychological and a political threat: nihilism is not really liveable. For just this reason, the theological phase of modernity – Scotist, nominalist, Protestant, Baroque Catholic – is never likely to be simply superseded by the secular which, as we have seen, this phase itself invented in its modern guise. Instead, what should be dubbed (following John Bossy’s ­terminology) ‘modern Christianity’ is likely to make a constant return in order to ensure a more stable modernity that is restrained by a morality confined mostly to the private sphere which ensures discipline, docility and a ‘charismatic’ ­channelling of the ecstatic (a function of religion which has become more and more important in modern times). This, arguably, is why the neoliberal advance of capitalism into a new phase of deregulation has been accompanied not just by a neo-conservative policing of behaviour which substitutes formal control for individual and social self-­restraint (which capitalism tends to abolish), but also by a new wave of Protestant evangelical ­religiosity and revived Catholic neo-­scholasticism. Even if these religious trends directly affect only a minority, they may still indirectly have a considerable restraining impact upon social norms at large. The most secular minds remain characteristically haunted by the sense that there is a ‘stricter’ religious standard which others are adhering to and which remotely guides even their own more lax conduct. One sees this particularly in people’s approach to sexual relations and even more in their aspirations for their children’s education.

But at more elevated levels also we see recuperations of what are in reality the Scotistic, Protestant and seventeenth-century ‘Classical Augustinian’ legacies which allow Christians to argue that ‘the reign of the formal distinction’ is an authentic upshot of the Christian legacy. Thus the modern separations of science, philosophy, politics, economics and ethics from an overarching religious vision are seen as the result of the Christian separation of divinity from law and from cosmic mediation, even by some thinkers otherwise acutely and perceptively critical of modernity.¹ From this point of view, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are guilty of the merely venial fault of not realising that the affirmation of the secular did not really require ‘emancipation’ from the religious, since this ­affirmation had already been made by Christianity, in such a way that modernity, at its best, when it respects the sphere of ­religious freedom, is but a more emphatic drawing out of the implications of this affirmation. It then becomes possible neatly to align one’s ­loyalties both to modern liberalism and to Christianity – or to both the American and the French republics and the Pope. The modern differentiation of spheres is regarded as a natural outcome of the evolution of rational society such that the autonomy of reason and distinction of ‘reasonings’ (ethical, economic, aesthetic etc.) are seen as occurring under the aegis of a further differentiated faith which guards against nihilism, motivates ethical behaviour (that is not seen as being of itself, however, intrinsically religious) and hints at the providential purpose of the diverse immanent orderings. Without the continued discrete ­hegemony of the Christian outlook (as opposed to the Jewish and Islamic ones, which are regarded as not having so clearly attained the ­emancipation of the content of practice from religion) the secular post-­Enlightenment settlement would be fragile.²

However, in the previous section I tried to suggest reasons why post-Scotist Christianity is a thinned-out version of the Catholic faith. If, indeed, ‘modern Christianity’ often no longer sees the cosmos as sacred, nor regards our human moral nature as continuous with our biology and with cosmic order in general, then this is a result of the late medieval ­collapse of a participatory, analogical or ‘symbolically realist’ world-view rooted in a more authentic tradition, which eastern Christians continue to maintain. It is certainly not – as so often thought – rooted in the Bible itself, nor in Philo’s writings (the first synthesis of the biblical with the philosophical outlook) which both sustain a cosmic aspect to law and a cosmic aspect to the understanding of liturgy: all creatures obey the law; human beings have a responsibility to conserve natural bounds for all creatures; through humanity a cosmic worship is fulfilled.

This should be said in qualification of Rémi Brague’s reading of Philo, in his absorbing and highly insightful The Wisdom of the World, as expressing a supposed Hebraic ‘desacralisation’ of the cosmos.³ Such a reading tends to overlook Philo’s interest in the idea that man is in the cosmos like a priest in a temple and the fact that the high priest bears on his robe an image of the cosmos because humans are enjoined to make their lives worthy of the nature of the universe.⁴ If contemplation of the latter is indeed here surpassed, then this is because active worship of God by man, but also of God by the cosmos through man, now counts higher than a merely contemplative response as hitherto advocated by philosophy. One could also variously point out in criticism of Brague the interest of the Torah in ‘just’ arrangements of non-human animal life (e.g. Leviticus 19:19, 23); the influence upon Christian thinking of the reworking of cosmic exemplarity by Plato in the Timaeus and later in his wake by Proclus; the sustaining of a sacred cosmos even by those, like Eriugena, who denied the ‘ethereal matter’ of the realm above the moon, and finally new ­renderings of cosmic sacrality by Nicholas of Cusa, Pierre de Bérulle and others after the collapse of the Ptolemaic picture and geocentrism (which Brague rightly points out, in the wake of C.S. Lewis, did not at all support anthropocentrism, but rather the idea that we occupy a very lowly position in the cosmos).

So while Brague’s book is excitingly and indispensably innovative in exploring just how the cosmos was a source of ethical norms, it is in the end perhaps too conventionally modern in suggesting that we have now outgrown this idea, which was in any case, as he (questionably)⁵ claims, already at best marginal for the biblical and Socratic visions. Therefore he sustains the usual views that the more one invokes transcendence the more the cosmos is desacralised, and that the collapse of the sacral cosmos can be ascribed to scientific developments which removed the duality between the supralunar and the sublunar spheres. In reality one can suggest that it was rather due to the eventually predominant, but by no means inevitable, philosophical influence of nominalism-voluntarism, while authentic Christianity requires a re-enchantment of the cosmos and a recovery of the way in which it mediates to us the divine pattern of goodness. As Philo wrote: ‘God intends in the first place that the high priest should have a representation of the universe about him, in order that from the continual sight of it he may be reminded to make his own life worthy of the nature of the universe, and secondly, in order that the whole world may ­co-­operate with him in the performance of his sacred rites.’⁶

Equally, and again in qualification of Brague, Christianity only removes divinity from law when, with the nominalists, divine grace gets formally detached from the shaping of merit within us, and both the ethical and the political, in terms of their substantive content and obligatory character, become subordinate to the capricious will of ‘The One’ (God or earthly potentate) entitled to issue binding decrees. These were seen as implementing certain rational possibilities and compossibilities, rather than as offering organic human institutions a modicum of participation in the ‘actual necessities’ of the divine nature, which is free as willing the ­absolutely good.

Of course it is true that St Paul had declared that law in general – by which he meant all ethical and political law-codes – cannot save us, because it cannot transform our bad desires and even colludes with them.⁷ But this was simply to subordinate the role of ‘reactive law’: that is to say, law which assumes the overwhelming presence of evil and so concentrates upon negative prohibitions and rigid positive prescriptions. Most certainly this subordination was a revolutionary move which ­distinguishes Christianity from both Judaism and Islam (although there are antinomian parallels within both traditions which are less eccentric than is sometimes thought).⁸ Diversely it was to do with an enhanced role for equity; a belief that pre-legal ‘trust’ (pistis) enables both religion and society more ­basically than commandment (Abraham before Moses); the view that, even in countering evil one should not ‘resist’ it but rather ‘overcome’ it (as Christ recommended) out of the sources of a good ontologically prior to evil, and finally a perfectionism which considers that a rightly directed desire will not require the banning of evil. A concomitant of this perfectionism is that human society should always aim beyond the negative peace of ­punishment and containment towards the true ­harmony of reconciliation.⁹

However, Paul still speaks of this new gospel path as ‘the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:2) which, unlike the old law (the work of daemons), derives directly and legitimately from God the Father.¹⁰ Likewise, for the Church Fathers and for Aquinas, ‘the law of Charity’ expressed the ­highest aspect of the ‘eternal law’ of God. The ‘natural law’ obeyed by all creatures and by rational creatures in their own appropriate way was fulfilled in the law of charity, and human positive law, while it had a relative, circumstantial aspect, had both to retain an equitable unity with natural law and to seek ultimately to ­promote the reign of charity.¹¹ The latter could even be partially and yet appropriately expressed in the compendium of principles, precepts and precedents which was ‘canon law’, concerned with the ­practical conduct of all ecclesiastical matters. If, in the west, the behaviour of the clergy came more and more to be dealt with by this Church law, then this was in part because the clergy, as the more ‘spiritual’ order, aspired more to non-coercive or more mitigatedly coercive ideals than secular Christians (by their removal from the sphere of warfare and violent punishment). Yet secular law had to be ultimately consistent with canon law and often appropriately borrowed from it, while canons could extend their reach to protecting the laity when it came to matters like criminal sanctuary or the regulation of lay fraternities – and here they impinged upon the economic and social sphere. (Of course this inserting of love into law was ambivalent insofar as it risked the diluting of love by legalism.)¹²

It follows that one can scarcely say, with Rémi Brague, that by separating divinity from law, Christianity separated the practical as such from divinity with respect to the content of human behaviour, reserving the religious aspect to merely providing inspiration for this behaviour.¹³ First of all, the supreme Christian religious ‘obligation’ to love may be a strange sort of obligation because love as an ontological bond (which is how the high Middle Ages saw charity)¹⁴ cannot exactly be commanded, and is indeed for Christian theology a gift of grace. Nevertheless, if one considers that being is such that it is more hospitable to love than anything else because it is fundamentally relational, and all relations in some degree instantiate love, then faith in this reality will understand that love can properly be commanded because love can always be discovered as newly granted or newly affordable in any arising situation. Hence love, f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Beyond Secular Order
• Illuminations: Theory and Religion
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: The Hidden Dimension of Humanity
• Sequence on Modern Ontology
• Sequence on Political Ontology
• Index