Being Reconciled

BEING RECONCILED Being Reconciled offers an entirely fresh treatment of the ethical and theological dimensions of reconciliation in the context of the complex questions of the Gift. It reconsiders notions of freedom and exchange in relation to 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. A genuinely Christian understanding of reconciliation, says Milbank, involves a drastic reconception of philosophical notions of reality and of Christ’s relationship to human society – one not confined to material items and exchanges, but engaging with processes of evil, atonement, forgiveness and grace. Working on the premise that theology, unlike philosophy, regards all things as gifts, but contending that the true gift is always involved in gift-exchange, Being Reconciled argues for forgiveness as the public renewing of a positive exchange of gifts that overcomes the privation of evil, rather than as a negative and private gesture that refuses a positivity of evil. It is only meaningful in the perpetual synergy of human offering and divine gift, eternally transferred and renewed through infinite and multiple reciprocities. Both a critique of post-Kantian modernity, and a further development of a dis- tinctive new theology that engages with questions of metaphysics, historicity, culture and politics, Being Reconciled is the first in a series of writings centred on the Gift. It is an original and vivid new account of reconciliation and forgiveness by a leading international theologian. John Milbank is the Frances Myers Ball Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Virginia. He is a co-editor of the Radical Orthodoxy series, including its original first volume Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (Routledge, 1999), and is co-author with Catherine Pickstock of Truth in Aquinas (Routledge, 2000) and author of The Word Made Strange (1997). RADICAL ORTHODOXY SERIES Edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward Radical orthodoxy combines a sophisticated understanding of contemporary thought, modern and postmodern, with a theological perspective that looks back to the origins of the Church. It is the most talked-about development in contemporary theology. RADICAL ORTHODOXY edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward DIVINE ECONOMY D. Stephen Long TRUTH IN AQUINAS John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock CITIES OF GOD Graham Ward LIBERATION THEOLOGY AFTER THE END OF HISTORY Daniel M. Bell, Jr GENEALOGY OF NIHILISM Conor Cunningham SPEECH AND THEOLOGY James K.A. Smith CULTURE AND THE THOMIST TRADITION Tracey Rowland BEING RECONCILED John Milbank BEING RECONCILED Ontology and pardon John Milbank First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2003 John Milbank All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Milbank, John Being reconciled: ontology and pardon/John Milbank. p. cm. – (Radical orthodoxy series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Reconciliation–Religious aspects–Christianity. 3. Philosophical theology. I. Title. II. Series. BT265.3 M55 2003 234′.5–dc21 2002032638 ISBN 0-203-32868-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-34250-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–30524–1 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–30525–X (pbk) In memory of my father John Douglas Milbank (1920–2002) But this is Cotswold, Severn: when these go stale Then the all-universal and wide decree shall fail Of world’s binding, and earth’s dust apart be loosed, And man’s worship of all grey comforts be abused, To mere wonder at lightning and torrentous strong flying hail. Ivor Gurney, from ‘Friendly are Meadows’ . it’s as if We had left our house for five minutes to mail a letter And during that time the living room had changed places With the room behind the mirror over the fireplace W.H. Auden, from For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio Parfois prend le miroir Entre ciel et chambre Dans ces mains le minime Soleil terrestre. Et des choses, des noms C’est comme si Les voies, les espérances se rejoignaient A même rive. On se prend à rêver Que les mots ne sont pas A l’aval de ce fleuve, fleuve de paix, Trop pour le monde, Et que parler n’est pas Trancher l’artère De l’agneau qui, confiant, Suit la parole. Yves Bonnefoy, from ‘A Même Rive’ in Les Planches Courbes CONTENTS Preface ix 1 Evil: darkness and silence 1 2 Violence: double passivity 26 3 Forgiveness: the double waters 44 4 Incarnation: the sovereign victim 61 5 Crucifixion: obscure deliverance 79 6 Atonement: Christ the exception 94 7 Ecclesiology: the last of the last 105 8 Grace: the midwinter sacrifice 138 9 Politics: socialism by grace 162 10 Culture: the gospel of affinity 187 Notes 212 Index 233 vii PREFACE The following book is the first in a projected series of writings concerning ‘gift’. Why ‘gift’ exactly? The primary reason is that gift is a kind of trancen- dental category in relation to all the topoi of theology, in a similar fashion to ‘word’. Creation and grace are gifts; Incarnation is the supreme gift; the Fall, evil and violence are the refusal of gift; atonement is the renewed and hyperbolic gift that is for-giveness; the supreme name of the Holy Spirit is donum (according to Augustine); the Church is the community that is given to humanity and is constituted through the harmonious blending of diverse gifts (according to the apostle Paul). In a sense, therefore, these writings will form a sequel to The Word Made Strange which offered a fragmentary treatment of the field of Christian doctrine from the transcendental (not transcendentalist!) perspective of verbum, which is associated with God the Son. This linguistic perspective is now not left behind, but complemented by the angle of donum which is associated with God the Spirit. To theology will be added an equally intermittent theopneumatics. Why is this addition required? So far, my theological project has been primarily focused upon ‘participation’, but in a new way.1 Traditionally, methexis concerned a sharing of being and knowledge in the Divine. Those who still espouse this perspective tend to play down the importance of language, culture, time and historicity as encouraging a relativism incom- patible with any vision of a metaphysical order. Those on the other hand who stress these factors tend to do so at the expense of such a vision. Against this dismal alternative, I have always tried to suggest that participation can be extended also to language, history and culture: the whole realm of human making. Not only do being and knowledge participate in a God who is and who comprehends; also human making participates in a God who is infinite poetic utterance: the second person of the Trinity. Thus when we contingently but authentically make things and reshape ourselves through time, we are not estranged from the eternal, but enter further into its recesses by what for us is the only possible route. ix PREFACE Such a perspective is anticipated by theurgic neoplatonism, but only completed by a Christian theurgy as partially envisaged by Dionysius and Augustine. For in the end, this perspective is liturgical, since liturgy already assumes the descent of the Divine in and through our praise of the Divine. A metaphysics of the participation of the poetic at once envisages all true poesis as liturgy, and at the same time must itself be a contingent temporal liturgical perfomance as well as an expression of theoria.2 Of course I am still trying to think through the massive aporias that result from such a perspective. However, culture is not just about production (poesis). It is also constituted through exchange. The arguments of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason against the notion of a ‘social science’ were all intended to show that this false concept rests always upon an arbitrary privileging of either production over exchange (Marx), or else exchange over production (Durkheim), when in reality any such privileging is incoherent in terms of social ontology. We only exchange in producing; but equally only those in relation produce, and all productions involve exchanges. For Augustine, the donum that is the Holy Spirit is not only a free one-way gift (though it is also that), but in addition the realization of a perpetual exchange between the Father and the Son. This exchange results from the production of the Son; but equally, the Son is only brought to birth through the procession of the desire that is the Holy Spirit: a desire for communion, and a desire that even exceeds the closed communion of a dyad, looking for infinite and multiple reciprocities (though the closed perfection of the dyad is the ground for the latter; one has no figure of amorous promiscuity here). Thus the notion of a participation of the poetic in an infinite poesis is to be complemented by the notion of a participation of reciprocal exchanges in an infinite reciprocity which is the divine donum.

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