On Milbank the Word Made Strange

THE WORD MADESPECULATIVE? JOHN MILBANK’SCHRISTOLOGICAL POETICS

FREDERICK CHRISTIAN BAUERSCHMIDT

I

In The Word Made Strange1 John Milbank gathers together essays written over

a fifteen year period and molds them together to form a more or less coherent

presentation of his constructive position on the irreducibly linguistic and narra-

tive character of existence and the consequences this has for theology. As such,

the book fills out some arguments only roughly sketched in Theology and SocialTheory, and at the same time moves beyond that book’s largely (meta)critical

deconstructive narration of modernity to provide a fairly comprehensive set

of hints at Milbank’s alternative. This is a book that Milbank’s critics—and

they have been legion—will ignore at their peril, for it makes clear that his pos-

ition cannot be contained in any such dismissive categorizations as “neo-

orthodox”, “sectarian” or “triumphalistic”.2 At the same time, The Word MadeStrange reveals problematic aspects of Milbank’s position that I will character-

ize as the ill fit between the highly particular content of Christian language

and Milbank’s attempt to provide a theological metaphysic, particularly where

this metaphysic draws on Stoic themes. This lack of fit can be seen most

clearly in his Christology, in which his desire to make the “speculative

excess” of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine integral to discourse about

Jesus seems to run the risk of losing its grounding in the stories of the man

Jesus.

Modern Theology 15:4 October 1999ISSN 0266-7177

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Frederick Christian BauerschmidtDepartment of Theology, Loyola College, 4501 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210, USA

II

The book is arranged in six sections—Arche, Logos, Christos, Pneuma, Ethos,Polis—each consisting of two chapters. This arrangement is important for

understanding the book, for while Milbank claims (rightly) that each essay

can stand on its own and the essays as a whole might be read in any particu-

lar order, to do so is to miss much of the force of the book’s argument. That

argument, briefly put, is that postmodernism is correct in seeing reality as

fundamentally linguistic, but that this is something that had already been

realized, at least incipiently, in the Christian doctrine of the Triunity of God

and the equiprimordiality of Word and Spirit with the Father. Therefore, the

task for theology at the end of modernity is to rethink itself in light of this,

its own most basic insight.

The first section, Arche, is an exercise in ground clearing that seeks to liber-

ate God from two modern containments. The first chapter, “A Critique of the

Theology of Right”, attacks the Kantian containment of God within the “as

if” agnosticism of critical philosophy. In opposition to this Milbank argues

for a recovery of a Thomist “discourse of participated perfections” in a “post-

modern, metacritical guise” (p. 7). The second chapter, “Only Theology Over-

comes Metaphysics”, takes up the phenomenological containment of God

represented in the work of Jean-Luc Marion. While Milbank finds Marion’s

position in many ways congenial, he sees it as insufficiently radical in free-

ing God from the constraints of philosophical discourse because it too readily

grants philosophy the rights to “being”, leaving God “without being”. Ap-

pealing again to Aquinas, Milbank argues quite effectively that a Thomist

understanding of esse can offer a non-idolatrous account of God’s being—that

is, one that does not, in Scotist fashion, suppose a univocal predication of

being to both God and creatures.3 This ground clearing prepares the way for

a distinctively Christian metaphysics.

The second section, Logos, begins to develop Milbank’s constructive alter-

native. The two chapters, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing” and “The Linguistic

Turn as a Theological Turn”, develop, by way of examination of such figures

as Warburton, Lowth, Vico, Hamman, and Berkeley, a Christian account of

language. Milbank’s point, which by the end of two chapters has been per-

haps excessively argued, is that there is a Christian metaphysics that sees

reality as fundamentally linguistic. If we understand creation to be ex nihiloand through God’s Word, this has several important consequences. First,

creation is not a matter of the imposition of form upon a pre-existent sub-

stance but is a generation of forms that are as much material as they are intel-

ligible. Second, if language is primordial, then the distinction between nature

and culture is blurred, if not obliterated. Language (by which we should

understand the entire range of significant human cultural productions) is not

representative but constitutive of “natural” realities. Thus the Christian meta-

physics proposed by Milbank might be characterized as an idealist materialism

418 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

(or a materialist idealism?) in which the generation of conceptual structures

is a process that is coextensive with the generation of material cultural forms.

Here he is following Vico’s dictum that “the order of ideas must follow the

order of institutions”.4

In the third section, Christos, Milbank takes up the Christian mythos in light

of this view of language. The two chapters in this section, “A Christological

Poetics” and “The Name of Jesus”, to which I shall return in more detail below,

seek to display the intrinsic connection between the person and work of Jesus

and the “poetic” activity of the church. This involves a rethinking of Christ-

ology in such a way as to insert a genuinely new moment of poesis in the

church’s “non-identical repetition” of the practice inaugurated by Jesus.

The fourth section, Pneuma, pursues the path embarked upon in the previ-

ous section in presenting the Spirit as the link between divine and human

poesis. In “The Second Difference” Milbank argues that only an account of

the Trinity that takes seriously the “linguistic” character of the relationship

between Father and Son can sufficiently account for the need for the “second

difference” of the Spirit. For since language is never simply representational

but always interpretive, the Spirit stands in that interpretive “gap” between

Father and Son. The Spirit’s immanent Trinitarian role is mirrored economic-

ally as the guarantor of the Church’s “poetic” imitation of Christ as exem-

plar. In “The Force of Identity” Milbank moves from an explication of God’s

Spirit to an analysis of the human spirit, by way of an exegesis of certain texts

from Gregory of Nyssa. Not unlike his earlier argument that a thorough-

going theological metaphysics will eschew any understanding of reality as

rooted in stable substances, here Milbank argues that a thoroughly theo-

logical—and especially Trinitarian and pneumatological—account of identity

will focus on flux and movement rather than on a stable self.

These views are further expanded in the fifth section, Ethos. To the ques-

tion posed in the essay title “Can Morality be Christian?” Milbank answers

“no” on the grounds that “Christian morality is a thing so strange, that it must

be declared immoral or amoral according to all other human norms and

codes of morality” (p. 219). After this provocative beginning, the essay pro-

ceeds to argue that “morality” is fundamentally a matter of the containment

and mastery of an originary violence through the use of a counter-violence,

whereas Christianity rejects the mythos of original violence in favor of cre-

ation ex nihilo. Thus unlike “morality”, Christianity stresses the original plenti-

tude of divine gift so as to make Christian virtue a matter not of containment

but of the proliferation of acts of charity. We can see here how the view of

human action sown in “A Christological Poetics” bears fruit in ethics. Simi-

larly, in the following essay, “The Poverty of Niebuhrianism”, we see the

linguistic ontology put forward in section two (Logos) play a crucial role in

critiquing “Christian realism”, as represented by Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr’s

mistake, according to Milbank, is to think that there is some neutral “reality”

that constrains the possibilities of realizing the Christian narrative in history.

The Word Made Speculative? 419


Against this Milbank argues that in light of the resurrection, the Christian

story simply is reality. “There is no independently available ‘real world’ against

which we must test our Christian convictions, because those convictions are

the most final, and at the same time the most basic, seeing of what the world

is” (p. 250).

The final section, Polis, deals with questions of “social ethics”. The first

chapter of the section, “Out of the Greenhouse”, offers a critique of “green”

theologies that follows logically from the preceding chapters. If language is

not simply representative but constitutive of reality, and therefore the line

between “nature” and “culture” is blurred, then appeals, so common in eco-

theology, to nature as the bearer of its own intrinsic value actually undercut

the serious project of understanding how human beings should relate to other

creatures. The final chapter in the book, “On Complex Space”, goes some ways

toward spelling out the concrete social alternative that Milbank hinted at

throughout Theology and Social Theory. This turns out to be a non-marxist, de-

centralized socialism that seeks to steer a path between the brutal oppression

of organicist fascism and the banal freedom of liberal capitalism. Again, the

emphasis is upon language and culture as constitutive of the very structure

of reality—thus Milbank’s advocacy of the “complex space” of civil society

as constitutive of both state and individual.

III

Such a brief summary misses the richness of these essays, each of which con-

tains numerous brilliant hints and suggestions, casually tossed off in passing.

These essays equally contain many arguable points of interpretation,5 a few

errors of (if I may use the term) fact,6 and a number of downright dangerous

ideas.7 There is something in this book for everyone to disagree with. How-

ever, rather than enumerate all these points, I have tried to sketch each essay

in order to give a sense of the overall movement of the book. For, as I said at

the outset, these essays make a sustained argument about what theology

should look like at the close of modernity; they present a picture of the task

of theology and it is with regard to this overall picture that I would like to raise

some questions.

In a number of places Milbank indicates that a key element in his theo-

logical project is the retrieval in Christianity of certain themes from Stoicism.8

In particular, Milbank appeals to the Stoic notion of the lekton, the incorporeal

sign that signifies not according to some “dictionary definition” by which it

refers to some non-linguistic thing, but through its connotation of an entire

mobile continuum of other signs (p. 89). Thinkers such as Augustine, accord-

ing to Milbank, are willing to follow the Stoics only part way down this path.

Thus in his Trinitarian thought Augustine is willing to present the person of

the Logos as constituted by a relation, but with regard to actual human lan-

guage he retreats into an Aristotelian “linguistic rationalism” in which signs



are denotative rather than connotative (p. 90). Milbank might be seen as

attempting to push Augustine to extend the Stoic account of language that

he maintains regarding the Trinity to encompass all language, and thus to

overcome the instrumental view of language and ultimately to display a

metaphysics in which substance is replaced by relation. Such a “Stoicized”

Christian theology has obvious resonances with postmodern linguistic anti-

realism. I want to make clear that Milbank is not saying that Christian the-

ology must simply be reconciled with either Stoicism or postmodernism.

However, inasmuch as Milbank does want to re-emphasize the Stoic reson-

ances of Christian theology, there is something about this that might give us

pause.

Amos Funkenstein notes that, for Stoicism, “just as terms assume their

precise meaning from the context of a proposition—the whole proposition is

the sign of a unit of meaning (λεκτον)—so also the propositions become

clearer only in the context of discourse, so that the various λεκτα are actually

part of one grand concatenation of propositions—the logos itself”.9 This

logical structure is mirrored by the Stoic metaphysics, in which “each

discrete portion of matter, each identifiable body, was held together by the

‘tension’ (τονος) of its interdependent parts; and all forces were particular

instances of one and the same force that permeates and unites all—the

Pneuma. The Pneuma is both divine and mundane, spiritual and material.”10

Given this Stoic logic and metaphysics, it can be seen why early Christian

thinkers so readily took up Plato (and medieval Christians Aristotle) rather

than the Stoics: “Admitting the physical, equal, homogeneous presence of

God everywhere—with or without a material substrate—could amount to a

relativizing of Christology (God would be in each of us equally) and make

the sacraments and the hierarchical Church superfluous”.11

Whether Funkenstein is right about the Christian rejection of Stoicism or

not, his claim points out some of the theological difficulties posed by a logic

in which connotation entirely supplants denotation and a metaphysics that

emphasizes flux and tension over substance. Can we still use the name “Jesus”

to speak of—to “refer to”—a particular person? In a world in which bodies

are simply temporary instantiations of pneumatic tonos, can we speak of

the church as an entity with historical and institutional continuity? Is it

possible to understand the self no longer as a hylomorphic composite, an

ensouled body, but rather as the “force of identity” and not diminish or even

eliminate the moral significance of our specific embodied actions? In short,

how would a Stoicized Christian ontology relate to the concrete particulars

of Christian faith and practice? The difficulties posed may not be in-

surmountable, and indeed Milbank undertakes to show that they are not.

The question remains, how successful is this undertaking? Christology may

serve as a test case.



IV

Milbank’s concern with the primordial, non-instrumental character of our

linguistic being leads to some extremely interesting, even brilliant, Christo-

logical reflections. In the chapter “A Christological Poetics” Milbank stresses

the “poetic” character of human existence and explores “how Jesus Christ is

to be understood in this context” (p. 123). Milbank develops this account of

poesis under three headings. Under the rubric of poetic activity he uses his previ-

ously developed account of “pleonasm” or “repetition-with-variety” (p. 65)

to account for the way in which human activity always outstrips itself through

poetic productions that exceed the agent’s intention. This self-exceeding activ-

ity is also the basis of poetic understanding. Milbank draws on Vico and others

to argue that human beings understand primarily through images and meta-

phors, from which more abstract concepts are derived. Human poetic activity

produces “concrete universals” as a “measure and telos for human activity”

(p. 128). Finally, in discussing poesis and praxis he argues that our “ethical

activity always occurs within the bounds afforded by our poetic represen-

tations” (p. 129). For instance, our ability to conceive of the good of heroism,

and therefore to act heroically, is bounded by our stories and images of heroes.

At the same time, our attempts to embody these stories may exceed the prior

bounds (because of the nature of poetic activity itself) and thus we are always

pushed toward deeper and more adequate conceptions of the human good.

This poetic account of human existence leads into an account of “the poetic

encounter with God”, in which the fact that “our cultural products confront

us and are not truly ‘in our control’ or even ‘our gift’ … allows that some-

where among them God of his own free will finds the space to confront us”

(p. 130). But this “confrontation” is not one between two “things”. Earlier, in

characterizing and affirming Hamann’s position, Milbank says: “Since God

is genuinely transcendent and not a mere higher transcendental reality with-

in the same order as us, he never confronts the creature in an ‘I-thou’ relation

but always addresses the creature (from the beginning and always) as the

expressive self of this and other creatures” (p. 74). Milbank is here attempt-

ing to dismantle the opposition between identity and alterity by stressing that

it is precisely that which is most our own (the products of our cultural making)

that is most “un-possessable” and thus most not-our-own. The “otherness” of

God is poetically and Christologically reconfigured so as to account for God

being, in Augustine’s terms, interior intimo meo or, perhaps more appositely

in Nicholas of Cusa’s terms, non-aliud. What Milbank offers is a “non-competi-

tive” account of the relationship between divine and human activity; the

“natural” excess of human poetic activity is simultaneously the “supernatural”

activity of God. Thus the poetic quest for an adequate human telos becomes

the quest for God and, moreover, God’s quest for us. Revelation is not an

imposition from “outside” poesis but is the surplus within poesis itself.12 At

the same time, in the quest for a truthful representation of the divine image



we are subject to “the infinite power of God upon the finite reality of our rep-

resentations of his glory, resulting in the constant progress from image to

image, each modifying the other in turn” (p. 133)—a kind of poetic epektasis.

Ultimately revelation must consist not of a particular word spoken by

God, one word among others, but of the created order as “one grand con-

catenation of propositions”, the sum total of lekta apprehended as ordered by

the Logos of God.13

Milbank then turns to Christ as simultaneously (and non-competitively)

divine and human utterance, the Word spoken by the Father and the fruit of

Mary’s fiat. “As divine utterance, Jesus is the absolute origination of all mean-

ing, but as human utterance Jesus is inheritor of all already constituted human

meanings” (p. 136). Thus Christ is the privileged figura of God, without ceas-

ing to be entirely a human being. In him the poetic boundaries of human be-

havior are definitively established, but this establishment is at the same time

fraught with paradox because Christ is a sign that is broken on the cross: “all

the signs he offers us are broken signs that offer their internal asymmetry as

a testimony to their own inadequacy and to the infinite distance between hu-

manity and God” (p. 137). On the cross Christ redefines beauty as the “incorp-

oration and transfiguration of the ugly” (p. 139).

Because Christ is definitive of “the true poetic bounds of behaviour” the

priority of Christ over charity must be maintained if one is to avoid “too

abstract a notion of charity which may veer between too purely an ‘ethical’

idea of an intuited responsibility, and too purely a ‘technical’ idea of a pre-

defined duty”. We can “glimpse the possibility of charity as a creative good-

ness which forever presents man with new and appropriate opportunities in

particular situations” because we “already perceive in Christ’s entire activity

the plenitude of such a performance: all our work, already made, in advance of

us”. In other words, what Milbank calls the “accuracy” of charity—perhaps

we might say the efficaciousness—“cannot be known at first as an abstract

possibility, but only as an already realized one” (p. 137). It seems to me that

here Milbank is at his closest to Marion and others who “[i]n the traditions

of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle théologie, … seek to think God through the

pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God in himself” (p. 36).

Abstract notions of charity must be subordinated to Christ, the concrete uni-

versal through whom we have perfect charity represented to us.14

Yet it seems that it is precisely at this point that certain difficulties arise.

Despite the fact that Milbank posits the priority of Christ over charity, the

actual practice of Christ remains largely unnarrated. And this is not, it seems,

accidental. The direction of Milbank’s Stoicized Christian metaphysics

leads away from putting undue emphasis on the specifics of Jesus’ life in favor

of stressing his relations, his position within the concatenation of signs. Mil-

bank writes that “[b]ecause Christ’s person is present only in and through

his work, this means that it is present in the relations that he enters into with

other people and the things of this world” (p. 140). The meaning of the lekton



“Jesus” depends on its place within a network of relations, not on a reference

to a “thing”.

This means that “Jesus” is defined as we continue to “form the image of

Christ” through our non-identical repetition of his practice of charity. Part of

what Milbank means when he speaks of “the word made strange” is the way

in which the church can feel again, “the authentic shock of the divine word

by performing it anew, with variations” (p. 1). One cannot narrate the practice

of Jesus without narrating the subsequent practice of the church, which prac-

tice itself consists of a poetic renarration. In a sense, Milbank is merely empha-

sizing here the catholic view that the whole Christ—the totus christus—includes

both head and members.15 Thus his remark that “Christ’s full incarnate ap-

pearance lies always ahead of us” (p. 152). Or, to draw on another traditional

catholic theme, he seeks to remind us that the three-fold Body of Christ in-

volves the mutual indwelling of the ecclesial and sacramental bodies with

the natural, historical body of Jesus.16 However, Milbank seeks to push all this

to a new level, to posit a logical (and even temporal, see p. 152) priority of the

ecclesial body over the natural, a priority that is of a piece with the priority of

connotation over denotation in language. This raises the question of whether in

Milbank’s theology, as James Buckley has put it, the word made strange does

not eclipse the word made flesh.17

V

In attempting to spell out the relationship between Christ and the church,

Milbank explicates and defends the thesis that “one can retrieve this doctrine

[i.e., of the atonement], along with a ‘high’ view of Christ’s person, precisely

by focusing more upon the Kingdom than upon Jesus” (p. 148). In shifting

the priority from Jesus to “the Kingdom, or the universal community”—

which he seems to identify with the church—Milbank seeks to avoid the

extrinsicism that often attends articulations of incarnation and atonement:

God takes flesh and dies “for us”, and this is somehow supposed to make some

existential difference for us, but the connection is never articulated. His ques-

tion is “how can incarnation and atonement be communicated to us not as

mere facts, but as characterizable modes of being which intrinsically demand

these appellations?” (p. 148). Transposing this question into a Wittgensteinian

idiom, one might ask: what forms of life not only allow but require the lan-

guage games of incarnation and atonement? And his answer is that form of

life called “church”. To put it baldly, for Milbank “what the gospels are about”

is not Jesus-as-subject, but the origin of a form of life, which point of origin-

ation we mark with the name “Jesus”.18 Again, “Jesus” signifies not because

it is tied to a particular individual, but because it occupies a certain place—

indeed a central or “originating” place—within a web of signification.

Milbank thus distances himself from the position of Hans Frei, who speaks

of the gospels as history-like narratives that render for us the identity of the



person Jesus.19 In contrast to Frei, Milbank maintains that “[t]he gospels can

be read, not as the story of Jesus, but as the story of the (re)foundation of a new

city, a new kind of human community, Israel-become-the-Church”. He goes

on to say, “Jesus figures in this story simply as the founder, the beginning, the

first of many” (p. 150). Jesus is, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau,

the “inaugurating rupture” from which issues the ever-differing practice of

the church.20 As the point of origin of a new practice, Jesus “cannot be given

any particular content”, rather, “all we can do is to identify him with the generalnorms of that practice” (p. 152). Christianity makes its affirmations about the

real through the repetition of “a formal becoming, a structured transformation”

(p. 152), which is rendered for us in the gospel narratives of the cross as

“Jesus’ utter refusal of selfish power” (p. 153). These narratives, despite the

fact “that there is a certain specific ‘flavour’ of personality binding the various

incidents and metaphors … are nonetheless essentially formal statements

about, and general instructions for, every human life” (p. 156; cf. p. 149).

This is where Milbank shows the compatibility of his position with a “high”

Christology. Jesus is not a “realistic character” because his character—his

“person”—is that of God. To identify Jesus with “that which is always tran-

scendentally presupposed, is to evacuate that person of any particular,

specifiable content” (p. 150). Well, this certainly is a high Christology, but

Christological error moves in both directions. Therefore we must ask whether

Milbank’s Christological position amounts to, if not docetism, at least a “mono-

physite” absorption of Christ’s humanity into his divinity.

Milbank says that “for reasons belonging to the logic of discourse” we must

reject the language of “absorption”, and say instead that what we have in

Christ is an “assumption” of a human nature by the divine person. Thus far

he is presenting a classically “Thomist” high Christology (see ST 3.17.1–2).

Then he goes on to say, “All that survives that is particular in this assump-

tion is the proper name ‘Jesus’” (p. 150). What does Milbank mean by this (to

my mind) puzzling claim? At least part of what he means is that the

“primary” narrative of the man Jesus is overtaken by the metanarrative of

the incarnate Logos, so that by the time we reach the story of Jesus’ handing

over to death “the metanarrative commentary actually merges with the pri-

mary sequence of events” so that “not just the person of Jesus alone, but ap-

parently the whole history of Jesus with Judas, Peter and the other disciples

is assumed out of normal temporality into a vertical drama about cosmic sal-

vation” (p. 146). The name “Jesus” remains as a cipher marking this point of

assumption, not unlike Jesus’ footprints left behind on the Mount of Olives.

But does this assumption in fact amount to an absorption (concerns over the

logic of discourse aside)? While Milbank maintains that “the name of Jesus”

is not dispensable, does the same hold for the particular events concerning

Jesus (and Judas and Peter)? Yes, but only because “they enshrine and con-

stitute the event of a transformation which is to be non-identically repeated,

and therefore still made to happen” (p. 153). In other words, the narrative



forms of the Gospel must be submitted to the ascesis of abstraction so as to

reveal “the ‘formality’—the aspiration to provide universal, normative con-

texts—of all the most particular, most intense, most momentous, most genera-

tive and therefore most abstract events of history” (p. 154).

This is not, let us note, a “liberal” reduction of the gospels to some set of

universal principles, along the lines of “the Fatherhood of God and the brother-

hood of man”. In classic liberal Christianity such principles are thought to

have an advantage over the positivity of the gospel narratives because they

coincide with what can be known through common human reason and thus

can be embodied by anyone, anywhere. For Milbank, on the other hand, the

“event of transformation” marked by the name “Jesus” is the constitution of

a polis whose “‘aim’ is sociality and conviviality itself”; it is the playing of

“the continuous ‘music’ of community” (p. 154). “Jesus” signifies not bland,

universal brotherhood to be practiced by individuals, but a social practice that

is communally embodied. The question is, what does it mean to aim at some-

thing as abstract as “sociality and conviviality itself”? How, armed with only

the name of Jesus, might one discern, amidst the many and varied modern

quests for “community”, where one finds the church?

The answer to this question proves elusive. The church is “the Other Space

of our history” (p. 285), but it seems a remarkably elusive space. It is not a space

defined by Papal institutions—nor, it seems, by the Petrine office. Neither is

it defined by a certain mode of life that could be codified, since, according to

Milbank, the resurrection “cancels death, and appears to render murder non-

serious” and thereby “restores no moral order, but absolutely ruins the possi-

bility of any moral order whatsoever” (p. 229). Both Christian institutions

and Christian morality suffer the same evacuation of content as the name

“Jesus”. Indeed, it seems that apart from a more robust account of the human

particularity of Jesus, the church that is his body, and its mode of life in the

world, is condemned merely to float above the messy world of ecclesiastical

institutions and laws. Or, perhaps put better, its identity is subject to the same

“flux” as personal identity.

VI

Put perhaps most plainly, Milbank simply fails to make his case that Jesus is

not the ascriptive subject (to use Frei’s term) of the gospel narratives and his

attempt to shift the subject matter of the gospels away from Jesus and on to the

church burdens the church with a load it cannot bear. It is true that Jesus is

not a “character” in the sense one finds in a nineteenth-century novel, and it is

also true that the story of Jesus exceeds the boundaries of his human life

by virtue of his resurrection. But this does not mean that the story does not

remain in some determinative sense the story of Jesus. Thus in Luke’s

account of the road to Emmaus, the story that the two disciples tell is the



story of “the things that happened to Jesus of Nazareth” (Lk. 24:19). And

though Jesus “breaks open” that narrative—just as shortly he will break the

bread—so as to include within it the story of Israel (Lk. 24:27) and to invite

the two unnamed disciples to become a part of it, it still remains funda-

mentally his story.

It is not so much that Milbank is wrong when he claims that the gospels en-

shrine an “event of transformation” that is the genesis of the church; rather,

he poses a false alternative when he says that one may read the gospels eitheras the story of Jesus or as the foundation of the pilgrim city. One might argue

that it is precisely when the church has failed to attend to the gospels as the

story of Jesus that the path has been opened to some of its most dramatic un-

faithfulness. It is when Jesus is “evacuate[d] … of any particular, specifiable

content” and his story is taken as a set of “essentially formal statements about,

and general instructions for, every human life” that the gospel narratives lose

any critical edge. Despite their hermeneutical unsophistication, the movement

of the Spirit is often manifested most clearly in figures such as Francis of Assisi,

Ignatius of Loyola, Dorothy Day, Franz Jaegerstetter, and Christian de Chergé

who quite flatfootedly seek to repeat the actions of Jesus, as Francis put it in

his Testament, “without gloss”. Of course, such repetition is always non-iden-

tical. It is done in different times and different places by different people. But

in the case of the saints this does not bury Jesus of Nazareth beneath a palimp-

sest of difference, but it brings him into even sharper relief. And this is be-

cause the saints have sought to make themselves transparent to the mystery

of Jesus Christ, and not simply to the Jesus whose story has been “assumed”

into a cosmic drama, but to the Word made flesh. The depiction of Jesus

receives a certain canonical intractability in the four gospels that requires

Christians constantly to return to these stubborn texts and, as it were, to place

themselves under their judgement. This is not to ascribe agency to the texts

themselves, but to say that God acts to make these texts “the word of the

Lord”.

If we attend to the lives of the saints, what we see is passionate love for

Jesus Christ spilling over in imitation of him into love for the members of his

body. The two forms of love are not separable, as the first letter of John, and

indeed scripture as a whole, reminds us, but they are distinguishable. In fact,

they must be distinguished if we are to speak of Christ as head and lord of

the church and if the relationship between Christ and the church is to pos-

sess the “nuptial” character described by Ephesians 5:25–32. The church of

necessity repeats Jesus’ actions differently, but she also seeks to repeat them

faithfully. It is not clear to me that Jesus as the degree zero of a new practice

is sufficient to account for this dynamic. Or, to shift back to the terms of

Stoic logic and metaphysics, the language of “faithfulness” seems to imply

not simply a decorous assemblage of mutually connotative terms, but the

stubborn attempt to make our invocation of the name “Jesus” in some sense

refer to the one who lived and died some two thousand years ago, and to



one who is risen so as to stand over and against a community that is often

unfaithful.

Milbank seems to sense this. Toward the end of “The Name of Jesus” he

issues several qualifications that seem to restore some “content” to the person

of Jesus. Thus he writes, “it is nonetheless not quite the case that we are here

instructed to copy precisely that model which is left wholly undescribed …

We have only a frugal outline, painted in clear primary colours—somewhat

quattrocentro—yet this sketch still holds us with a certain ‘quality’ that per-

suades us to take seriously its abstract import” (p. 158). Also, Milbank notes

that the speculative “excess” of Christian doctrine “serves to conserve the

sense of divine personhood and body of Christ as ‘over against’ the Church”

(p. 163). In passages such as these he perhaps moves a bit closer to Frei’s

view—and, I would argue, to the orthodox Christian view—of Jesus as the

ascriptive subject of the gospel stories. This move seems forced upon him by

the ill fit between the purported contentlessness of the name “Jesus” and the

actual practice of Christians with regard to that name—a practice that pro-

ceeds as if that name belongs to a person whom one can both know and know

about. Yet this attempt to return some content to the name “Jesus” is not really

integrated into Milbank’s overall theological project.

VII

Some more light is shed on this issue if one looks at the Trinitarian, and there-

fore ontological, underpinnings of Milbank’s Christology as displayed in “The

Second Difference”. This chapter attempts to bridge the “gulf between the con-

fident proclamation of the Spirit as a separate hypostasis, and the lack of an

adequate rationale for this separation” (p. 171) by understanding the Spirit in

relation to the Logos as “a receptive comprehension or judgement constituted

through the comprehended image, yet ‘retroactively causal’ for the form of that

image itself” (p. 187). This issues in what Milbank describes as “a Pneuma-

tology in terms of an ‘aesthetics of reception’” in which “[t]here is a dynamic

surplus that surpasses the formal object and constitutes ‘subjectivity’” (p. 188).

This understanding of the relationship of Word and Spirit grounds Milbank’s

version of poesis and therefore his Christology. The Spirit is the supplement

at the origin that makes it impossible to conceive of the Word as possessed

of a stable, given meaning; it is what makes sense connotative rather than

denotative. This leads Milbank to speak of a relationship of “retroactive caus-

ality”, in which it is the response of the Spirit/Bride that is constitutive of the

Word/Son. Milbank’s scheme presents us with Trinitarian relations that are

characterized by (to borrow terms from Gerard Loughlin) “processional in-

determinacy” and “omni-directionality”.21

Thus the questions I have tried to raise regarding the relation of Christ and

the church and the person of Jesus are rooted in prior questions concerning the



relationship of Word and Spirit. Just as Milbank’s emphasis on the Spirit’s

act of reception of the Word reverses the normal direction of Trinitarian caus-

ality, so too his emphasis on the Spirit-constituted church’s non-identical

repetition of the practice of Jesus reverses the normal relationship between

head and body. And the objective indeterminacy of the Spirit’s reception—

it is the “dynamic surplus” of the Spirit’s act of judgement concerning

the Word’s form “that surpasses the formal object and constitutes ‘subject-

ivity’” (p. 188)—means that it is impossible to speak of Jesus apart from that

reception.

This display of Milbank’s Trinitarian ontology raises the question of whether

we have a case here of the philosophical tail wagging the theological dog.

The essays in The Word Made Strange might be thought to move in two direc-

tions: ontology is defamiliarized by being read through a Christian theology

of the Word made flesh, and the Word is defamiliarized by being brought

into contact with Milbank’s linguistic ontology. Yet while Milbank posits an

oscillation between the “formally distinguished moments” of narrative and

of speculative conceptualization (see his critique of Kasper, pp. 178–180), it is

the former moment that usually seems to receive short shrift. One need not

wish “to turn primary discourse and practice into a foundational point of refer-

ence” (p. 179) in order to note the thinness of Milbank’s account of Jesus, Chris-

tian morality, or the sacramental and institutional life of the church. On an

uncharitable reading, which I do not wish to give, Milbank presents us with a

postmodern philosophy tricked out in Christian theological language—a kind

of postmodern version of Hegel’s project. On a more charitable reading, one

must at least note that at times Milbank’s commitments to certain philosophical

positions regarding language push him in directions that seem to run counter

to the stories and practices of the church, which movement is then subjected

to a later “containment” that often seems arbitrary. As I have noted, toward the

end of “The Name of Jesus” Milbank issues several qualifications—if not

retractions—that move him closer to positions, such as Frei’s, that he had

earlier rejected as “neo-orthodoxy”. Similarly in “The Second Difference” he

retreats from a nihilistic version of the aesthetics of reception by asserting that

“the categories of reception, and so the constitution of the receiving subject,

are entirely derived from ‘privileged’, selected dimensions of nonetheless ob-

jectively recognizable patterns of structuration” (p. 188). And in “Can Moral-

ity be Christian?”, after the sweeping statement that the resurrection “ruins

the possibility of any moral order whatsoever”, he rather tamely adds, “[t]hat

is to say, any reactive moral order, which presupposes the absoluteness of

death” (p. 229). Such discursive “hiccups” seem to be a result of “primary dis-

course and practice” reining in speculative excess, yet because Milbank’s

presentation of his linguistic ontology is so much more powerful than his

thin narration of Christian practice—not to mention the person of Jesus—one

is left wondering whether it does not simply represent a loss of postmodern

nerve.



VIII

Might one recognize a moment of speculative excess in Trinitarian and Christo-

logical language—meaning that in “performing” the scriptures one does not

engage simply in transposition but in Spirited improvisation—while at the

same time preserving a certain priority of story and practice to speculation?

Milbank himself recognizes this possibility in appealing to “objectively recog-

nizable patterns of structuration”, which seems to imply that while the “text”

of God’s salvation in Christ through the Spirit is subject to an infinite number

of possible interpretations or performances, this does not mean that every

interpretation is valid or that all performances are equally worthwhile. These

patterns of structuration may remain dead letters apart from the life-giving

activity of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:6), but it is necessarily these patterns that must

be brought to life by the Spirit. To keep with the metaphor of performance,

we might say that the activities of transposition, improvisation, and compos-

ition represent a continuum without neat divisions, and that the line between

improvisation and composition is not simply “given” in the musical score,

while at the same time maintaining that it is only through reference to the

“original” score that we could ever hope to distinguish between improvisa-

tion and composition.

Milbank’s desire to provide a fully-blown Trinitarian ontology—not to

dissociate, à la Marion, God from Being—is understandable, particularly

given the false humility of modern theology that he so brilliantly analyzed in

Theology and Social Theory. But perhaps there is a more genuine theological

humility that involves a stubborn cleaving to the very particular stories of Jesus

and to the practices that grow out of those stories. This is not to renounce the-

ology’s speculative moment, for such renunciations simply mask back-door

importations. But it is to suggest that theological speculation might proceed

in a more ad hoc, Christologically focused, manner. This need not take the form

of a “Barthian” rejection of metaphysics. One might imagine something more

along the lines of Aquinas, in which one offers a full-blown, theologically in-

formed ontology, while at the same time paying scrupulous attention to the

mysteries of the life of Christ. There is more than one way of being philosoph-

ically ad hoc.

Milbank’s discursive “hiccups” may indicate that his practice is in fact

more ad hoc than it first appears. On the other hand, they may indicate that

what we have here is a kind of neo-stoic linguistic ontology that continues to

run up against certain Christian convictions. Which of these is the case is un-

clear, lacking a more richly developed account of Jesus and a more concrete

account of the church and the Christian life. However it is clear that a Trini-

tarian ontology that adopted a true theological humility would need a

closer attention to and description of “the things that happened to Jesus of

Nazareth”. Lacking this, it is difficult to see how Milbank’s linguistic

ontology, whatever its virtues, can ever inform Christian practice. That being



the case, it runs the risk of remaining in the realm of the “merely”

speculative.

NOTES

1 The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).2 For a sense of the critical reception that Theology and Social Theory has found, one can look

at the special issues devoted to Milbank of several journals. See New Blackfriars, vol. 73,no. 861 (June 1992); Modern Theology, 8:4 (October 1992); and Arachne 2:1 (1995).

3 This is a point with which Marion now seems to agree. See Brian J. Shanley, O.P., “St. ThomasAquinas, Onto-theology, and Marion”, The Thomist 60 (1996), pp. 617–625.

4 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico §238, Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max HaroldFisch, trans., rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 78. To get a sense of theformative influence of Vico on Milbank, see John Milbank, The Religious Dimension in theThought of Giambattista Vico, 1688–1744, 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press,1991–1992).

5 E.g., Did Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council really have “a tendency to bap-tize modernity wholesale” (p. 270)?

6 E.g., Aquinas, in ST 1.1.4, does say that sacra doctrina is both practical and speculative, buthe also clearly says that it is primarily speculative (since it is concerned with what God doesmore than with what human beings do). Thus he does not “deny that reason and intel-ligibility have any priority over existential activity” (p. 14).

7 E.g., Milbank says that in Christ’s “eucharistic giving, he opens himself out to recruci-fixion” (p. 141)—an extraordinarily bad piece of eucharistic theology that confuses thehistorical body of Jesus of Nazareth with his sacramental body. One might say that in theEucharist Christ offers himself anew to the Father (though some mention of anamnesiswould clarify things here), but this offering is clearly made through the action of thesacramental rite, not the nailing of his body to the cross.

8 Thus Milbank says in a note: “An important project for postmodern theology might be to‘Spinozize’ Augustine, so as to make him more materialist, but in a fashion playing uponthe Stoic resonances in both thinkers” (p. 166, n. 13).

9 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination From the Middle Ages to the Seven-teenth Century, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 38–39.

10 Ibid., pp. 37–38.11 Ibid., p. 45.12 While one might ask whether this account of revelation can give sufficient “density” to the

language of divine agency, there is clearly a sense in which Milbank’s point is an unob-jectionable articulation of the classical Christian understanding of God’s transcendence.As Brian Davies has pointed out, the Thomist tradition has always sought to conceive ofdivine action in such a way that it does not occasion any change in God, understandingdivine activity to be analogous to a human activity such as teaching, in which the teacheris the agent, but that agent’s action is in fact tied to a change that occurs in the student. Or,as Davies puts it, “the action of the agent is in the patient” (“The Action of God”, New Black-friars, Vol. 75, no. 879 [February, 1994], pp. 76–84. Cf. Herbert McCabe, “The Involvement ofGod” in God Matters [London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987], pp. 39–51). Likewise, the notionthat God does not confront us with a “Thou” has resonances with the Thomist position thatDeus non est in genera.

13 Note here the difference from Stoicism, for which the sum total of lekta simply is the Logos.Milbank clearly wishes to reject the Stoic (and Spinozistic) identification of God and nature.

14 Another way to put this is that Milbank is here taking up a theme found in the first letterof John: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into theworld so that we might live through him” (4:9) and “We know love by this, that he laiddown his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (3:16). In theclaim that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides inthem” (4:16), the love that is spoken of receives its specification from “what was from thebeginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at



and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1:1). It is not enough to claimthat God is love, or that caritas is the adequate human telos. “God is love” must receive itsexplication through the claim that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (4:2).

15 See Augustine, Homilies on First John 1.2.16 See Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen-Age, second ed. (Paris:

Aubier, 1948).17 James Buckley, review of The Word Made Strange, in Scottish Journal of Theology (forthcoming).18 Strikingly absent here, and throughout The Word Made Strange, is any substantive account

of Israel. For indeed, unless one subscribes to a supercessionist account of the relationshipof the church to Israel, the “form of life” of the People of God does not have its point of originin Jesus, but in God’s calling of Abraham and in the covenant made at Sinai. Milbankmakes a few passing references to Israel, but he never grasps the nettle and addresses (inthe manner of Paul in Romans 9–11) the question of the relationship of the church to Juda-ism as it continues to be practiced after Jesus. I should note that he does briefly address thisquestion in responding to the pointed remarks of Daniel Boyarin in Arachne 2:1, pp. 171–172,where he explicitly rejects supercessionism.

19 Milbank does not seem to appreciate how close Frei’s position is to his. Particularly in hislater work, Frei was at pains to stress that it is communal Christian practice that determineswhat the “plain sense” of the Biblical text is. See “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrativein the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break” in Theology and Narrative: SelectedEssays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 117–152.

20 Michel de Certeau, La Rupture Instauratrice, Esprit (June 1971), reprinted in La Faiblesse deCroire, Luce Giard, ed. (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1987).

21 Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1996), p. 192.



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