Catherine Keller‘s references to ―Grace: The Midwinter Sacrifice‖ are appropriate. That essay‘s third section contains an accessible summary of Milbank‘s polemic against unilateralism.31 As already indicated, however, Keller does not take account of the broader context of that chapter of BR.
29 For the sake of simplicity, I have put aside the role that the (idea of) the infinite plays in founding the subject, according to
Descartes‘ Meditations. Thus ―Cartesian‖ is placed in scare quotes.
30 Kevin Vanhoozer makes a similar point. He is right to exact precision in the use of ―relationality‖, a word which can cover
―a multitude of sins‖. ―The term relation is by itself not very illuminating, for there are many kinds of relations ... Kenotic- perichoretic theism focuses on loving relations that are mutual, reciprocal, and inclusive. Yet these latter qualifiers are hardly adequate, for hatred can be mutual, reciprocal and inclusive as well.‖ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 144-5. Vanhoozer‘s emphasis.
31BR, 154-61. See also John Milbank, ―Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysics‖ in L.
Gregory Jones and Stephen E. Fowl (eds), Rethinking Metaphysics (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 119-61; ―The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice‖ First Things 91 (1999), 33-38; ―The Soul of Reciprocity, Part One: Reciprocity Refused,‖ Modern Theology 17 (2001), 335-391; ―The Soul of Reciprocity, Part Two: Reciprocity Granted‖ Modern Theology 17 (2001), 485-407; ―The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority,‖ New Blackfriars 85 (2004), 212-38; ―The Shares of Being or Gift, Relation and Participation: an Essay on the Metaphysics of Emmanuel Levinas and Alain Badiou.‖ Centre of Theology and Philosophy (2006), 24, accessible at www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers.php#milbank ; ―The Gift and the Mirror‖, esp. 292-300; ―The Transcendality of the Gift: A Summary‖ in The Future of Love:Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2009), 352-363; ―The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek‖ in Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 110-233, esp. 123ff.
29
Usually, Christianity is seen as suppressing ‗moral luck‘, or the idea that, to a degree at least, we require good fortune if we are to be good. However, in this chapter, I want to argue to the contrary, that Christianity embraces moral luck to such an extreme degree that it transforms all received ideas of the ethical.32
In the essay in question, Milbank seeks to invert the position that ―modern ethics‖ (paradigmatically, that of Kant) supposedly takes in relation to antique (Greek and Roman) ethics. Christianity neither (i) continues the antique resistance to moral luck (the idea that fortune plays a large part in whether we are ethically good) in favour of autonomy, nor (ii) abandons the antique concern with happiness. Of course one might object that there certainly have been, and still are, some historical expressions of Christianity that do more or less follow this pattern, but Milbank is making a counter-claim, against Jan Patočka, in regard to the authentic essence of Christianity.33 Dependence on and hope for the grace to do and be good, is (i) the Christian version of moral luck; such grace is also (ii) the foretaste and promise of resurrected life. Hence it is not the destiny of Christianity to be secularised.34
If [the self-sacrificial or other-regarding morality] is the Christian stance par excellence, then it can be readily secularized, as Patocka argued, because omission of the hope for resurrection and eternal life will tend to purify the strictly other-regarding motive still further ... However, this construal may be called into question ... [I will argue that] Christianity, unlike Stoicism, was able to stick with and even augment the goal of happiness or beatitude
32BR, 139. In that chapter Milbank draws on the work of Nussbaum while making subtle criticisms of her thesis: Martha C.
Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
33 Milbank admits that Christianity might have reversed this pattern only ―sporadically.‖ See BR, 147. For a fairly recent
essay expressing his take on Protestantism(s) (as opposed to his Anglo-Catholicism), see ―Alternative Protestantism: Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition‖ in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant, and Participation, eds. James K. A. Smithand James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 25-41. In regard to Patočka, Milbank‘s critique of certain stern and moralistic versions of Christianity brings to mind the juxtaposition staged between a festive and a non-festive ethos in three Scandinavian films: Ingmar Bergman‘s Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander, 1982), Gabriel Axel‘s Babettes gæstebud (Babette‘s Feast, 1987), and Kay Pollak‘s Så som i himmelen (As It Is in Heaven, 2004).
34 The first place to look for Milbank‘s thoughts on secularization is his Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) [henceforth: TST2] (the first edition was published by Blackwell in 1990). More
recently, see for e.g. his ―Only Theology Saves Metaphysics‖; and―On Theological Transgression‖ in The Future of Love, 145-174 [the original version appeared alongside other articles responding to Milbank‘s work, especially Theology and Social Theory, in Arachne, vol. 2, no. 1 (1995)]
30
through a novel abandonment of the goal of self-possession, even in its mode of ethical reduction ...35
Milbank‘s words on the ―dispossession‖ of one‘s own (hopefully good) deeds form a refreshing counterbalance to the self-congratulation which often comes with our contemporary ethical sensibilities. And while Milbank does not subscribe to the complete ―death of the subject‖, one can detect here the influence of French post-structuralism (throughout his career, Milbank has always kept ―up to date‖, even as he looks back to the Church Fathers and the high Middle Ages36). As for Germany, parts of the following passage (not the reference to Christianity) are reminiscent of Heidegger‘s lecture against humanism.37
We never know in advance, strictly speaking, what we are going to do or say ... Suppose it is the case that to be ethical is not to possess something, not even to possess one‘s own deed. Suppose it is, from the outset, to receive the gift of the other as something that diverts one‘s life, and to offer one‘s life in such a way that you do not know in advance what it is that you will give, but must reclaim it retrospectively. A total exposure to fortune, or rather to grace...38
As already indicated, Milbank associates the event of the gift, not just with the arrival of grace, but also with the theological motif of resurrection. In this way he is able to argue that
35 ―However, this construal may be called into question. Should one read Christian ethics as abandoning the antique concern
with happiness, and yet sustaining its requirement for secure self-possession (even if this is now reduced to the willed gesture of absolute non self-possession)? Or can one construe things precisely the other way round? That is to say, that Christianity, unlike Stoicism, was able to stick with and even augment the goal of happiness or beatitude through a novel abandonment of the goal of self-possession, even in its mode of ethical reduction? ... This is what I eventually wish to argue.‖ BR, 141-2. Milbank‘s emphasis.
36 Compare Hans Urs von Balthasar, ―The Fathers, the Scholastics and Ourselves‖, Communio: International Catholic Review, 24 (1997), 347-96. Refer to note 131 below for Milbank‘s ambivalent relation to postmodernism.
37 Martin Heidegger, ―Letter on Humanism,‖ trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, in Heidegger, Basic Writings,
edited by David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 2008), 213-66.Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. John Kulka with an introduction by ArletteElkaim-Sartre(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).Milbank is far more conversant with French scholarship. Sartre is not worthy of his attention, Lévinas appears mostly as an example of how not to think (Milbank, ―The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice‖ and ―The Shares of Being‖, also ―The Gift and the Mirror,‖ pp. 270, 327), while Merleau-Ponty receives praise for his intertwining of subject and object and his overcoming previous dualisms between the visible and the invisible, plus his thoughts on touch and the body (Milbank, ―The Soul of Reciprocity, Part Two‖; ―The Double Glory‖, 124; ―The Gift and the Mirror‖, 270). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) and The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1962).
38 At the first ellipsis: ―Intentions ‗come to us‘, as it were, from the Muses, and we are not in command of them ... Even to
formulate a good intention, it seems, we need moral luck ... But here, at last, at the most extreme point of ruination of even the ethical intention, everything can run into reverse. Christianity is perhaps (sporadically) the history of this running into reverse.‖ BR, 147.
31 the ―dispossession‖ of one‘s self in favour of the gift and the other need not be thought in terms of self-sacrifice. The place of resurrection and eschatology in BR, and also Milbank‘s references to marriage and feasting, will be explained below (next two sections). Along the way, the legitimacy of Milbank‘s approach to the gift will be questioned further, using explicitly, this time, the Scholastic distinction between intentio benevolentiae (benevolence) and intentio unionis (desire for interpersonal union).