John Milbank

• University of Nottingham

This book explores the contribution of Christianity to constitutional law and constitutionalism viewed from the perspectives of history, law, and theology. The historical chapters recount the relationship between the Christian faith and fundamental ideas about law, justice, government, and constitutionalism by focusing on particular eras and the co...

The apparent contradiction between subjective and objective approaches to time in Augustine can be resolved if it is understood that he regarded cosmic time and the finite things it engenders as being of itself, in some sense, both psychic and self-recording. This interpretation holds whether or not Augustine affirms a world soul. It is justifiable...

Theology was traditionally built upon the trivium and the quadrivium of the liberal arts. One ascended from approximate signs of reality to the more autonomous but thinner realm of numbers and then, beyond both, once more through signs, one intimated the higher creative numbers of God. But in modernity, the priority of grammar, whereby meaning is n...

This rough guide provides Prof. Milbank’s answers to questions from Sven Grosse for a conference, in German, held in Basel, Switzerland in 2017. This written interview will be published in German, but Prof. Milbank has kindly offered Acta Theologica the exclusive publication of this interview in English. It should be read along with the interview w...

Across North America and much of Europe, politics and economics have been dominated by two political models that are failing. Either there has been a focus on ever-more rights and freedoms, which characterises the social-cultural liberalism of the left since the late 1960s. Or else an emphasis on maximising utility that is defined either in terms o...

Excerpt Gillian Rose, as a strict Hegelian, was a thinker of the primacy of the political. From the beginning to the end of her remarkable oeuvre, she targets remorselessly the dangerous self-deceit of those who try to think away this primacy—in favor of the alternative primacy of the social, the ethical, the individual, the linguistic, or the reli...

En este artículo se desarrolla la idea de una “política del alma”, en contraste con la política liberal y neo-liberal. En primer lugar, se explica el concepto de “alma” y su enraizamiento en Platón y Aristóteles. En segundo lugar, se argumenta a favor de la idea de que el liberalismo moderno termina por contradecir sus propios términos y negar la l...

div class="page" title="Page 2"> Ha existido un matrimonio entre dignidiad y derecho que se ha mostrado más inestable de lo que parecía, sobre todo en el caso de los debates entre la tradición moderna liberal y la tradición católica. Para encontrar una solución, el autor deconstruye la historia del concepto de “dignidad” en las doctrinas de Platón...

The marriage between dignity and right now shows more unsteady than what it appeared. It is specially clear in the conflicts that emerge between the modern liberal tradition and the Catholic. In order to find a solution, the author deconstructs the history of the concept of “dignity” in the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and then Aquinas, as...

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 Theolo...

This chapter argues that the yoking together of ‘dignity’ and ‘rights’ is unstable, reflecting the ongoing incompatibility of respectively the liberal and the Catholic traditions of human rights. Both traditions adopt an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ understanding of dignity. The liberal tradition aporetically focuses on subjective right and on circums...

This chapter summarises the theological and philosophical objections to the fourfold vision of the via moderna extended into ‘modern philosophy’, beginning with the defence of analogy versus univocity. The treatment of ‘identity versus representation’ is the most extensive, since ‘representation’ shapes the space of epistemology, which is the most...

It is not true that Christianity emancipates the content of the practical from religious considerations. The current framework of the normative understanding of the relationship of the political to the religious involves a strong distinction between the theoretical and the practical, a clear demarcation between the religious and the political realm...

Education is characteristically either considered as the apolitical transmission of knowledge or, more politically, as the formation of citizens. A more fluid relation between education and politics was imagined in the ancient world and was to some extent recapitulated in the eighteenth century Enlightenment. It has since, however, collapsed one of...

There is a now longstanding debate concerning the origin of the notion of subjective rights and their definition. Subjective rights as ‘possessive individualism’ should be distinguished from active and claim rights nonetheless objectively grounded. The latter gain ground in the Middle Ages in essential continuity with classical objectivist notions...

The following essay explores the way in which notions of truth are linked to those of secure identity and hence to certain mathematical issues, from Plato and Aristotle onward. It argues that this recognition underlies traditional resorts to notions of form or eidos as securing both particular and general identity-at once the integrity of things an...

This chapter examines the relationship between religious and secular accounts of value. It challenges the basic assumption that conceptions of value can be effectively articulated within the terms of reference of secular discourse. Secular rationality can manage instrumental comparisons of value very effectively. Treatments of absolute value are qu...

The sharp separation between religion and reason in public life is not compatible with democracy. For thinkers like Habermas this separation is based upon enlightenment, but in fact it is based only on one version of enlightenment, that of Kant. If we turn instead to Hume, who made feeling, not reason, central for the workings of the human mind, th...

The Christian Bible was from the outset a dogmatic and Christological conception, which entailed a mystical reading of signs and events, a practise of speculation at once narratological and phenomenological. The trilogy of Olivier-Thomas Venard OP – Thomas d'Aquin, poète théologien – is proposed as crucial to understanding how Thomas Aquinas preser...

Invoking Zygmunt Bauman’s acute exposition of a left-critical hesitation between intellectuals as saviours and intellectuals as oppressors, this essay argues that while Bauman reveals this hesitation as crucial and symptomatic, nevertheless he leaves it unresolved. The essay shows how the human nature/ culture distinction (which is also a continuit...

Les donneurs de sperme devraient-ils rester anonymes? Certains pensent que oui, d’autres non. Mais la plupart pensent que le débat peut être résolu en s’appuyant sur de bons principes et des arguments indiscutables. Mais si ce ne n’était pas le cas? Si nous démontrions que la controverse est insoluble? Si nous faisions l’hypothèse que nous nous tro...

In his contribution, the author wishes to trace a few of the contemporary trends of western European theology. He notes that alongside the growing infl uence of Roman Catholic theological thought in the West, there also arose a new theological divide between, what he terms, the romantic and the classical modes of theological orthodoxy. Both positio...

The United Kingdom has traditionally been united by culture not ethnicity. Immigration has started to threaten this identity because of racism, lack of forethought and ill-conceived multiculturalism. The storm over Archbishop Rowan Williams' Sharia speech revealed how Islam in particular poses a problem. Williams is right to advocate more political...

In this chapter I shall first of all argue that there is much to be learnt from the thesis of neo-Marxists concerning the always partially economic character of international relations. However, I shall contend in the second place that this needs to be qualified by an equal insistence on the religious character of these relations. In the third plac...

As others have argued, modern liberalism can be seen as dominated by the biopolitical. In both the economic and the political realms, this involves a contradictory notion of how the natural gives rise to the cultural and the cultural both suppresses and advances the natural. On either side of this divide, uncontrollable excesses arise, which ensure...

John Milbank is a lecturer in theology at Cambridge University and fellow at Peterhouse. Previously he was a teaching fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University in the north of England. He is the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason; The Religious Dimension in the Thought of G. B. Vico as numerous a...

Managerialism in the Church is rooted in the very character of Reformation theology. The letter's understanding of salvation as imputation and its reduction of the importance for salvation of belonging to the Church encourages the idea that there is a religious 'product' which can be managed and marketed. Modern evangelicalism consummates this tend...

This is a revised edition of John Milbank's masterpiece, which sketches the outline of a specifically theological social theory. The Times Higher Education Supplement wrote of the first edition that it was "a tour de force of systematic theology. It would be churlish not to acknowledge its provocation and brilliance". Brings this classic work up-to...

IntroductionFrom Metacritique to DialecticsThe Realm of IndifferenceTrue and Counterfeit Sittlichkeit

IntroductionThe Marxist Critique of ReligionThe Marxist Critique of CapitalMarxism, Christianity and Socialism

IntroductionCounter-HistoryCounter-EthicsCounter-OntologyThe Fate of the Counter-Kingdom

Convergence on SublimityParsons and the American SublimeReligion and FunctionalityReligion and EvolutionReligion as Ideology

IntroductionPolitical Economy and Moral EconomyThe Machiavellian DimensionProvidence and Unintended OutcomesCritique of HeterogenesisTheological Malthusianism

IntroductionGenealogyEthics

IntroductionThe Integralist Revolution in Modern Catholic ThoughtThe Social Implications of IntegralismSalvation or LiberationDoes Theology Require Social Science?From Foundational Praxis to Supernatural Pragmatics

The New Object of Political ScienceThe Theological Construction of Secular PoliticsModern Politics as Biblical HermeneuticsPolybian Cycles Versus Ecclesial Time

IntroductionVirtue Against DifferenceDifference Against Virtue

IntroductionExplanation, Understanding and NarrationNarration, Science and the Extra-Scientific

In the false Spring of our times, everything is painted green: it is the appointed liturgical colour for our post-historical sabbath. It’s to everyone’s taste, the guarantee of minimum respectability. There’s a Green party, but that doesn’t get very far, because it appears to appropriate for a particular cause the symbol that belongs to all. The co...

I want to discuss in this essay the possible interrelations between socialism, Christianity and community. For one strange moment in the summer of 1994, it seemed as if the people of this country had become a community, united, like so many communities, perhaps all communities, around a death. The death of a Scottish Christian socialist, John Smith...

It is now too little discussed, but one key ingredient of 20th century ‘modernism’ has been its reaction to the writing of James Frazer in The Golden Bough. One can think of course of The Waste Land, but also of David Jones’s Anathemata, besides countless other examples. In some of these instances, notably that of Jones, implicit anthropological cr...

The Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University not long ago ran into controversy, because of its acceptance of a bequest which endows a post in theology on condition that its holder be a practising Christian. To some commentators this case appears as an ominous harbinger of what is to come: university departments, starved of public fun...

It is hard to imagine a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, reading, with mounting excitement, the latest work by one of the present episcopal bench of the Church of England. One should of course be less surprised to discover that a book by one of their 18th century forebears has been a stimulus on the recent French philosophical scene. The...

Jean-Luc Marion, along with several other contemporary French phenomenologists-cum-theologians, represents a curious final shift in the course of twentieth-century theology. In the traditions of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle théologie, they seek to think God through the pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God himself. This strictly...

In the western world, at least, socialism is in crisis as a political force. But it is also in crisis as an intellectual creed, and it is this crisis that concerns the present article. Nevertheless, the practical and the theoretical crises are very closely allied; the real political problem for contemporary socialism may be that, increasingly, peop...

It was not the purpose of Theology and Social Theory (whose argument has been so accurately precised by Fergus Kerr) to imagine the Church as Utopia. Nor to discover in its ramified and fissiparous history some single ideal exemplar. For this would have been to envisage the Church in spatial terms—as another place, which we might arrive at, or as t...

L'A. montre que Kierkegaard ne quitte pas l'a priori ontologique critique de la repetition afin de redecouvrir Dieu et le sujet, mais incorpore plutot le ratio Dieu/sujet comme construction de cet a priori. Cependant, cet a priori reste quelque chose d'impur puisqu'au contraire des post-structuralistes, Kierkegaard admet seulement des presupposes p...

The following essay explores the way in which notions of truth are linked to those of secure identity and hence to certain mathematical issues, from Plato and Aristotle onward. It argues that this recognition underlies traditional resorts to notions of form or eidos as securing both particular and general identity-at once the integrity of things an...

Theologians today exercise almost zero public influence. And yet, through the medium of children's literature and fantasy literature generally, a public theological debate of a kind continues to be conducted. From George Macdonald in the Victorian era through G. K. Chesterton to the Inklings, an attempt has been made to re-present Christianity in t...

Being Reconciled is a radical and entirely fresh theological treatment of the classic theory of the Gift in the context of divine reconciliation. It reconsiders notions of freedom and exchange in relation to a Christian doctrine which understands Creation, grace and incarnation as heavenly gifts, but the Fall, evil and violence as refusal of those...

Aquinas has mostly been read in the twentieth century in terms of a duality between reason and faith, philosophy and theology. However a careful reading of his texts will not support this position. All knowledge for Aquinas is by participation in the divine mind, analogically mediated, and faith and reason are simply differing degrees of intensity...

In this paper the author endeavours to bring together discussions of Georges Dumezil’s thesis concerning the tripartite structure of Indo-European mythology with discussions of Trinitarian theology. The claim is, first, that the mythology led to an intrinsically aporetic characterization of the soul as a sphere of ‘self-government in space’. Second...

The article discusses the history of monotheism from the earliest times to the present. It begins with arguments against the notion of monotheists as an evolutionarily early stage in religion and then proceeds to characterize monotheism in the Old testament. The view that there was every a pre-monotheistic phase of one ‘national God’ is called into...

In “The Soul of Reciprocity Part One: Reciprocity Refused”, the case for reciprocity was established in a negative manner. It was shown that its refusal is a crucial aspect of modernity: the result of the interacting influences of modern capitalist economics and an ontotheological outlook that is explicitly modern, not ancient. A disdain for recipr...

In this first of a two-part essay, Milbank contends that “Intersubjectivity poses itself both as a problem and as a solution only within the regime of representation that has prevailed since Descartes – although it was foreshadowed by post-Scottish scholasticism.” The first part, then, is given over to a deconstruction of modern notions of the self...

NelsonPaul. Narrative and Morality: A Theological Inquiry. Pp. ix + 180. (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987.) - Volume 25 Issue 3 - John Milbank

David Walsh, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfilment: A Stud.)' of Jacob Boehme. Gainesville, University of Florida Humanities Monographs, 53. x + 139 pp.

Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: a Study in Theological Ethics, with a new introduction by the author, Trinity University Monograph Series in Religion Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society. Winston

Warburton’s theological opponent. Robert Lowth, later Bishop of London, published (in Latin) in 1758 his seminal Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews . It is evidence of the staggering lack of interest of English theology today in historical enquiry that there exists no study of this work, described by Meinecke as one of the prime sources f...