Workers Of The World...love One Another?

John Milbank, The Future of Love, (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2009 & London, SCM Press, 2009), 382 pp.

John Milbank's The Future of Love is a compilation of essays written over the last 25 years from which a nuanced political theology takes shape. As a collection of essays, it is impossible to find here a single unitary voice, but nor is that the point. The point, I hope I am correct in saying, is to give a sample of Milbank's tripartite method of critique, which incorporates literature, theology and philosophy. From this sample a string of interwoven arguments emerge: the need to prioritize excellence over efficiency in all walks of life; that this demands a hierarchy of values; that a hierarchy of values must be protected by a hierarchy of persons; that the secular is specifically the denial of this hierarchy; that consequently any secular socialism is doomed to fail; and that secular democracy is a misreading of democracy verging on the paradoxical. The unitary theme underpinning these arguments and returned to throughout is that true difference and diversity are best upheld by Christianity - not secularism, not nihilism. These arguments emerge against the backdrop of an increasingly secular polity. The result is nothing short of a powder keg of political insight. Placed alongside some responses to critiques of his Theology and Social Theory, these essays ostensibly intend to clear up the confusion over Milbank's politics and to reassert the socialism inherent to his agenda. They do not. Rather, they leave his work more open than ever to commandeering by the reactionary right.

For Milbank, by giving up on the priority of excellence over efficiency, we are giving up on life itself. Efficiency has not time or space for religion and religion is the primitive metaphor through which we relate to the world. This idea is best conveyed in his opening essay, The Divine Logos and Human Communication: a recuperation of Coleridge. In this essay Coleridge's lifework is shown to move 'from Unitarian Christian Socialism, through an idealist justification of liberalism, to a critique of liberalism on Christian Trinitarian grounds.' The one unitary theme in Coleridge's work is the notion of a paternalistic centre, human or divine, protecting excellence and emanating outwards. This is where it becomes clear that Milbank's criticism of the secular is not merely its prioritizing of efficiency over excellence - this would be nothing new. Rather, the crux of Milbank's argument is that there is no secular way to achieve full excellence. And this is because 'religion is none other than the primary primitive language by which human beings inhabit the world.' To contravene Milbank by giving his argument a secular language, religion is the metaphor through which we understand every aspect of life, and since the structure of the metaphor not only reflects but shapes the structure of society, religious interpretation is first philosophy, emanating outwards into politics, ethics etc. This does not seem to bode well for the nonreligious reader. But as just such a reader I feel uniquely placed to argue Milbank's case.

Milbank is no dogmatist. In his later essay, Faith, Reason and Imagination, he calls for universities and individuals to adopt what he dubs '"the Nottingham model"' of critique. It is no surprise that Milbank would call for this model; it is largely his model set up under his influence at the University of Nottingham's Centre of Philosophy and Theology. The Nottingham model is a tripartite approach to social critique involving theology, philosophy and literature. Now, there are many of us for whom the theological aspects are dormant. But this should not present a problem. And this for three reasons: First, our deficiency in one field can be made up for by excellence in one or two others. As secularism has settled and rooted itself, this has happened naturally. Milbank himself attests that nowadays it is Tolkien rather than Augustine that defends the orthodox Christian legacy - although, for Milbank, those of us that rely too heavily on one or two prongs rather than all three are critically deficient rather in the way a dyslexic reader is linguistically deficient. The second point is that our theology can be a theology of rejection, cynicism or whatever, so long as it is not naively atheist (see On Theological Transgression). Milbank does not necessarily agree with this point and I am perhaps trying to read too much of a nonreligious pragmatism into his work - but without it, he is alienating even the most Christian-friendly of nonreligious thinkers (i.e. me!). And finally, religion simply does affect the way we live, indeed, Milbank would argue, it is the way we live and think. If we deny religion a place in our discourse, we do not remove but rather feed its influence, becoming blindly and therefore uncritically indebted to a theology that may or may not have already in practice or theory been discredited by those alert or mature enough to tackle it on theological grounds. For a much more nuanced discussion of this point, see especially The Invocation of Clio, but also the whole of Part III, which comprises his responses to critiques of Theology and Social Theory.