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In the fourth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with John Milbank, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. Milbank opens by offering his assessment of the current state of theology, the way it is practiced in the academy, the way it is practiced in the Church, and the way it orders and influences life this side of eternity. While Milbank notes he witnessed considerable progress over the course of his life in the ability of theologians to rightly understand their calling, he also acknowledges institutional support for that calling has declined. Even if only for their own selfish institutional benefits, Milbank contends the academy and the Church need to work together to cultivate historically orthodox Christian discourse. Absent such an effort, both will (and perhaps already are) finding themselves grappling with the consequences. Milbank then turns to his own formation as a theologian, the ways history, philosophy, and theology all worked together, and how he came to lead (along with Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward) what is known as Radical Orthodoxy. Its presence is most evident in the thirteen titles comprising the book series published by Routledge. For over a quarter century, however, that movement has also redrawn the relationships theology shares with an ever-increasing range of academic disciplines and professional practices. Milbank then closes by sharing how he understands the commitments that define the theologian’s vocation and ways such a calling can hopefully be of greater service to both the academy and the Church in years to come.
- John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (2nd ed.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)
- John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (Routledge, 1999)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is John Milbank, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. Thank you for joining us.
John Milbank: Pleasure, pleased to be here.
Todd Ream: I want to start by asking what is your assessment of the present state of theology as practiced in the university in the West or North Atlantic region?
John Milbank: I’m not sure that I fully know what’s going on any longer, which may itself be symptomatic of a situation that perhaps is increasingly diversified. And that, that, my impression is that there are all sorts of different ways of doing theology and they’re not really talking to each other. You know, there are a lot of confessional bubbles. There are various different factions, shall we say.
I hope, you know, that I can identify perhaps the more serious currents. So I think amongst people who are seriously doing what you can think of as sort of traditional Christian theology. I think it’s, I think it’s very notable that confessional boundaries have perhaps increasingly dissolved and that the, particularly sort of traditional Protestant hostility towards Catholic theology has evaporated to, to a very, very large degree, the, the sense that maybe not before time, that you know, Christians are better hang together now, and that we have things to learn from each other and not all the divisions run between confessions, I think. Yeah, I think that’s extremely strong.
And, and you know, it was perhaps anticipated by it going the other way that, you know, Catholics had shown Schleiermacher a lot of respect then they showed Karl Barth and, and Bonhoeffer a lot of respect. And I think increasingly that has been sort of reciprocated, you know, and that if anything, it’s more the trajectory of Catholic theology that has become increasingly the main line. If Protestants remain significant, then sometimes that’s the Protestants of long ago, like Jonathan Edwards, for example.
And increasingly, it’s also clear that Orthodoxy has come into the mix and attention towards Russian theology, perhaps, ironically in view of the political situation, has become ever more dominant. You know, that when I began, I mean that it would’ve been incredible rarity for anybody to be working on Russian theology, but now, it’s quite common, I would say.
So I think there’s a minority of people working in a very serious way, and I think that also the boundaries between theology and philosophy, have become much more fluid than they were in the past, that the people who are serious now tend to have a pretty good working knowledge of philosophy and the history of philosophy as well.
Todd Ream: When asked for names of living theologians, say in the English speaking world, whose work is of great benefit to the university, who would you recommend one read?
John Milbank: Well, probably kind of expected names, certainly Rowan Williams, certainly David Bentley Hart, whom I think within America is entirely, you know without rival. But David Schindler, Jr. is very good John Betts and there are many other names of people who are decent, I think, you know.
And I won’t mention the sort of Radical Orthodoxy group because I feel as if sort of um, you know, they’re the people I’ve worked with. Obviously, I think they’re important. And I would say, you know mentioning David Bentley Hart, I think we feel very, very close to his understanding of things.
Todd Ream: I want to shift now, if there’s a distinction between how theology is practiced in the university and how theology is practiced in the Church then, what is your assessment of the current state of how theology is practiced in the Church in the same region, the West or the North Atlantic?
John Milbank: That’s a good question. I mean, I think one of the disturbing things, especially speaking from a British perspective is that there’s a general perception, you know, that the last 50 years or so have been quite good for British theology that, you know, prior to that period, it was much more downloading things from the continent.
But in the past 50 years or so, the British theologians have achieved more sort of global recognition. And yet, within the sort of British churches, not only is that ignored, I mean there’s barely any awareness of it really. Very little sense, I think. And that’s despite the fact that, you know, Rowan Williams, who’s obviously, one of the people in the forefront of all that you know, as being Archbishop of Canterbury. But that didn’t seem to make a huge difference.
And I would say that on the whole, the churches seemed to be very content with more kind of pietistic works of Christian spiritualities, sometimes not terribly good or else they’re very, very devoted to ideas of experientially based theology, which are sort of loosely based on the Latin American liberation theology model, or at least aspects of it. And that seems to be almost de rigueur, whereas I think sort of people who are kind of academic theologians can’t really make much sense of that or what it would really mean. And, and so there’s probably a lack of any dialogue or understanding going on at that point.
But I think that includes the fact that the churches in England, the Anglican Church, but also the Catholic Church as well, and the other Protestant denominations, haven’t really made much effort to take theological education very seriously. And, you know, the education of priests and ministers has been, if anything, rather sort of dumbed down over that period. I would say.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now, you, you mentioned that it’s been a fairly important shift has taken place in British theology over the course of the last 50 years. And some confessional lines that might not have been as important to the practice of theology have dropped in terms of the barriers that used to exist.
But I want to ask you, you know, broadly, in what ways over the course of your lifetime has the practice of theology changed and in what ways do you think it’s arched toward historic orthodoxy or perhaps arched away from it and maybe it’s moved in both directions at the same time?
John Milbank: Yeah, no, the last point is a very good one. Of course, it’s important to say that the practice of academic theology in Britain is very different to most of North America in that it is set up less confessionally because what were originally kind of Anglican theology departments came to accept Protestant dissenters and Catholics in the course of time. So that you’ve got this legacy of probably a more ecumenical pursuit of theology. Whereas the American pattern has tended to be, you know, division between department of religions on the one hand, and divinity schools on the other.
In Britain there’s been a drift towards religious studies and away from theology, certainly at the departmental level. And then that’s left us with, on the other hand, no real equivalent of American divinity schools. So that, you know, the institutional support for theology in Britain is probably a lot less weaker.
But, as you rightly suggest, you know, things are very contradictory. I mean, when I began studying theology, I would say that the, the dominant mode was sort of liberal Protestant, so that it was, it was very normal for people to be skeptical about the Trinity or about the doctrine of the incarnation and to to advocate a sort of, a much looser form of Christianity. And this would’ve included Patristic scholars as well.
And then you had just very few people who represented an older mode of what we call in the Anglican church, liberal Catholicism, slightly misleading term. It just means that you don’t deny evolution and you don’t deny biblical criticism. So it’s a Victorian term, but in that sort of liberal Catholic tradition, which was nonetheless very orthodox you know, represented by people like Gore and Wes Scott and Scott Holland.
When I arrived in Cambridge in the seventies, the only representative of that tradition was really a brilliant Scottish philosopher called Donald MacKinnon, who worked in the theology department. And he kind of was defending that. And then Rowan Williams had studied theology at undergraduate, at Cambridge, and he went on to do his thesis on Vladimir Lossky in Oxford. That was the beginning of an interest in the Russians. And he was sort of lone voice in sort of, kind of saying, well, actually MacKinnon is right. And, and that was sort of the turning of the tide.
And then when I was studying theology in Cambridge, I was taught quite a bit by Rowan Williams. And the feeling then was that that was the beginning of a shift against liberal Protestantism. But that tradition was still very much in the ascendant. When I was at Cambridge, The Myth of God Incarnate was published, you know?
But then nonetheless, I think probably, amongst the students, we had the sense that the tide would go in Rowan’s direction, not noting kind of the sort of Don Cupitt direction. You know, Don representing a sort of very extreme version of that, that liberal Protestantism, but perhaps so extreme that in a, in a paradoxical way, it sort of started in itself to tip things over. But his more kind of honest consistency I think was a factor in so that, yeah.
I would say that what’s happened since then is similar to what’s happened in North America in that I think people who were liberal Protestants have kind of left the theological game altogether. It’s become more or less about religious studies or it’s become so politicized and, and more recently kind of so woke, you know, that it, it’s not theology in any recognizable sense. It’s sort of saying, we should be nicer to disabled people or something like that, you know?
I’m sure we should be, but, you know, it’s not exactly theology whereas I think the people who sort of remain in what we would traditionally recognize as systematic theology, tend to be orthodox. You know, whether we’re talking about people attached to denominations, or even people in mainly in academia like David Bentley Hart, Rowan Williams, myself, Sarah Coakley, you know, many, many other figures.
You know, we may not agree amongst ourselves about everything, but we’re broadly, creedal orthodoxy is being upheld. And I think, I think that’s gone along with. Again, when I began it was as if we only really read people in the 20th century and we sort of read Patristics as a kind of footnote to the Bible, but the general view was it had all been distorted by politics or else Greek thought had distorted the Bible or something like that.
Now, it’s interesting that, that now almost seems like a joke sort of position that nobody would take seriously any longer, because, you know, the Bible itself is already so kind of hellenized. I mean the New Testament and so I think we’ve definitely got this, this, this duality that people who remain serious, I think there’s far more reading of historical theology than there was.
I mean, that that’s another part of this huge ship that, that people were not sort of reading reading Gregory of Nyssa or Maximus the Confessor or Augustine or Aquinas or Bruges or Dietrich of Freiberg or something, as if, as if they were sort of historical curiosities any longer that much more, these are seen as kind of live inspirations today and, and that has gone along with it, you know, an increasing recovery of almost totally forgotten historical figures as well. You know, could name many names.
And I think that process is continuing, like say Robert Grosseteste’s work on Christology, this kind, I mean, I noticed that that comes into a new book by Sam Wells, another, another figure one might mention, you know, and, and, and his new book on Christology. I noticed that that name is there.
And, and this is, this is a big shift, you know, people’s knowledge of the Middle Ages. When I came into the game, it was like, well, you know, there was Anselm and Aquinas and that was about it. You know, there certainly weren’t sort of big debates about Duns Scotus for or against, and whatever you think about all that, you know, it’s very good that there are now these debates and that people understand what are the importance of past theologians in the legacy of Western thoughts.
And again, I think there’s the barrier between theology and philosophy has gone down. You know, that we’ve become much more aware that even the very idea of theology, Augustine didn’t really define himself as a theologian, you know, and yet that would’ve, is something people just didn’t take any notice of, you know, back 50 years ago.
So I think, I think the changes are enormous, but, but against incredibly ironic backgrounds. You know, where I’ll look at places like Oxford and Cambridge and St. Andrews and Aberdeen and, and think to myself, well actually, you know what the standards now are higher than in my lifetime amongst graduates. And what they try to do the thing that they try to do are more ambitious, and yet the institutional support is crumbling. I mean, it is kind of holding up in the places I’ve mentioned, but I mean, Nottingham for example, its collapsed theology has been absorbed into philosophy completely. And who knows what that will mean in the long run.
But it’s certainly, you know, the institutional support is no longer there, which is not necessarily, of course, the end of the story. I mean, look at, look at France, where, where, where theology survived very well being sort of done by philosophers half the time. But there are also Catholic universities and religious orders and so on. Which we, again, we tend not to have in Britain, but I think we’ve probably got to the point now where we’re going to have to invent new institutional frameworks, you know, to support things.
And unfortunately you know, and I’m as much responsible as anybody else, but you know, we’re all too busy. You know, nobody’s done very much about securing that into the future, but it probably does need to be done.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you about those moments in the seventies, as you mentioned, when you were at Cambridge, because you studied, you know, modern history at Oxford before earning doctoral degrees in philosophy at Birmingham, and then theology at the University of Cambridge.
John Milbank: It’s the other way around actually. I did theology before I did philosophy. I was at Westcott House because I was training for the priesthood, but in the event I remained lay and became an academic. But I did three years of ordination training. And so that’s in fact the very, I didn’t do a degree in theology. That’s the very eccentric way in which I came into theology.
I, my only theology degree is, is a DD, is the higher doctorate from Cambridge. But which they give on the basis of books. But no, I did theology first and then because I wanted to work on, for various reasons on Giambattista Vico, I found myself in a philosophy department and slightly to the despair of my supervisor when he discovered I hadn’t read The Critique of Pure Reason even, but I went away and did that.
But so philosophy came as it were, third in the train of sort of switches. But I think history, theology, philosophy, you know, they’ve all remained very important strands.
Todd Ream: Can you tell me a little bit more about that discernment process and about how your vocation then began to take hold in the form that you described?
John Milbank: Well, yes, I, you know, these things can be rather hard to recall, I suppose. I certainly felt a very strong commitment to trying to understand theology. And I suppose that was to do with my Christian faith evolved. I was brought up by Evangelical Methodists and the Holiness tradition, sort of discovered at Oxford that, that left me with very little in common with the main line of evangelicals, and therefore, I sort of gravitated towards a more kind of high Church mode of Anglicanism, sort of returning Wesley to his home, as it were.
And, yeah, I mean but my road to orthodoxy was kind of longer than that, you know, that, that I think I was quite sort of vaguely liberal and sort of pantheistic for a long, quite long stretch of time. And then it was sort of while I was doing ordination training and I started reading people like Balthasar and de Lubac. And I think it was then that I realized how you could link history with theology.
I think I’d had problems in understanding how history came into it. I thought of history as sort of how things were and how people fought in the past, and I thought of theology and philosophy as sort of permanent reality. And then by reading people like Balthasar and de Lubac, I started to see the link between nature and grace was in a way, history, and I read Gadamer at the same time.
And I sort of switch from my very sort of historian sense, historicist sense of history as it was all about trying to understand how things once were to a much more hermeneutic sense of history. That history is an ongoing process of living and thinking in which the past is simply not over. We still inhabit it. And that human insights don’t derive all at once. And they’re linked to events and new openings of human awareness.
And I think that allowed me to understand how you could take revelation and grace seriously. And I think seeing that history was the link between, a sort of timeless philosophy on the one hand, and and religion on, on the other was very, was very important for me. And sort of one reason why I’m very, very resistant to a sort of pure nature account of things. It would kind of undo my way into orthodoxy, if I can put it that way.
I have to see a strong continuity that is basically to do with history. That human beings achieve more insight as time goes on, and you can understand that as the divine speaking to us. Of course, some people feel that I’m at base too rationalist because of that. And I understand I’m saying that, but that’s how it is. And my view would be that the best Christian theologians always people like Origen, Eriugena, but even Augustine and Aquinas have really seen it that way.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You mentioned Radical Orthodoxy earlier in our conversation, and I want to turn now if I could, to ask you a couple questions about that movement and your assessment of it and where you think that it’s at, but while you were at the University of Cambridge and anchored at Peterhouse, if I remember correctly.
John Milbank: I was the second sojourn at Cambridge. Yeah, so I was supposedly at Birmingham. I was living in London with my wife, doing the doctorate, mainly in the British Museum reading room, in the British Museum. And then after that, by chance, I got this fellowship in Christian social and political thought at University of Lancaster, and I was there for about eight years.
And then after that, I got the job at Cambridge, initially in ethics, although that sort of turned into philosophy of religion at some point. And, and so that, yeah, that was the second.
Todd Ream: Would you describe some of the conversations and or experiences that led to the formation of this movement?
John Milbank: I think there was a feeling that the break with a theological liberalism hadn’t been made sharply enough. I think that was that was one of the factors and obviously we were aware of the Yale School, post-liberalism and so on, but that had a basically kind of both post-Barthian character and was very concerned with narrative and with a kind of what they understood to be a sort of grammatical, a second order reflection or a grammatical reflection on first order language of belief and confession and so on.
And we said, well, this is just another mode of liberalism. It leaves metaphysics out of the picture. It’s basically in this kind of post-kantian space still, just as Barth was and that we need something much more metaphysically robust, you know, something prepared, not simply to take the Kantian turn against speculative metaphysics for granted, but to critically investigate that.
And to insist that actually sort of Christian theology does need a robust metaphysics. Otherwise, it does turn into, in the last analysis, into some kind of fideism or else a very kind of weak agnostic rationalism, that’s basically simply reducing Christianity to ethics or something along those lines.
So I think we were, for that reason, you know, part of it was about sort of reinstating, you know, the great tradition, whether we’re talking about the Greek fathers or Augustine, Aquinas, and so forth. Another part was about questioning the Kantian rift so that we were very interested in people like Herder, Jacobi, Hamann, who were engaging in a meta-critique of Kant, and perhaps suggesting that Kant was sort of knocking out of the picture, a sort of access to God by a kind of natural theology based upon the categories of the understanding that are only sort of appropriate to investigating this world.
But when it comes to something like an intellectual intuition of the divine, that he, he’s, he’s on much shaky grounds, particularly if one tries to link that intuition to a sense of analogy and participation in the divine that Kant isn’t really considering.
And the more my kind of research has gone on, the more I would say that in fact, romantics and people like Schelling, that’s precisely what they were doing or Coleridge in England, that they weren’t fully accepting this sort of the Kantian ban on metaphysics. But they were, they were certainly saying, well, traditional metaphysics was, it wasn’t done in this rationalistic way. It was much more to do with degrees of mystical intuition.
But I think that one can add to that, a sense that even our grasp of the unities of this world can’t fully be accounted for unless one has that traditional sort of metaphysical understanding. I mean, why, why isn’t the world simply a kind of blur? I mean, is it, or is it the case that we identify distinct things in distinct patterns of relationship? Is it that simply pragmatic, which could be if you took Kant seriously, that could be the conclusion you came to that it’s just pragmatic and conventional.
But in, insofar as we do really do see unities and structures and patterns and beauty in this world, don’t we have to say that this is part of our intuition of a participation of everything in a kind of absolute unity, so that this sort of traditional, basically kind of Neo-Platonic synthesis of Plato and Aristotle way of looking at things isn’t really knocked out of the account by Kant. And increasingly people’s research is into people like Hemsterhuis, the Dutch, the philosophy contemporary of Kant, who was part of this circle along with Hamann and Jacobi and, and people around Prince Gallitzin.
And when we look at the influence of that group on the German romantics and so on, we have a sort of very rival genealogy. And I think already the first essay, radical authors, where I talked about Jacobi and Hamann was the beginning of this sense that we’ve got to tell a different story and the so-called Scotus story was another part of that because it was essentially saying, look, once you lost analogy of being, once you think that there aren’t degrees of being that everything either exists or it doesn’t, that easily inverts to the notion that it’s what we know of things with, with clarity. That is the only certain thing.
And in that sense, you can see Kant as simply carrying out a critique of this basically Scotus-inflected attitude to things that is very rationalistic, including very rationalistic arguments towards God. So that if you say, and many philosophers of historians philosophy now say this, there is a road from Scotus to Kant and, and in a way, Kant is marking the end of that road.
On the contrary you, if you think that actually Scotus was always wrong, it’s questionable anyway and Aquinas was right and then it isn’t so clear that actually Kant has knocked out away this entire sort of analogical participatory way of looking at things that has roots right back to Plotinus and is to do with the way in which sort of late antique thought you thought that you could read Plato and Aristotle in harmony with each other, and this is essentially sort of what Christianity has inherited, but then it has tried to show how history fits into that, the incarnation and the Trinity, sort of qualify that, that sort of Neo-Platonic picture of reality.
But to imagine a Christianity not espousing that sort of neoplatonic vision of reality, I think is extremely hard. I mean, people find that very controversial, but, but something like that picture, which I think the New Testament already kind of opens out onto. But then it’s a case of understanding, you know, already somebody like Plotinus says that, you know, when we perceive the good, it’s only the good acting in us. He already has an idea of grace.
But then why is it that, Christianity seems to have a sort of more drastic view of our fallen condition that, you know, we only God uniting with a humanity and the rest of creation in Christ can close that gap and sort of allow us to renew this sense of analogical ascent.
And at the same time, I think that wholly Platonic legacy still leaves us with a kind of question of if everything comes from the One, you know, what is the status of everything after the One? Is it, is it, is it kind of simply subordinates? Is the all, if you like, simply subordinate? And I, I think the Trinity opens up the possibility of instead seeing that God in Himself is this sort of self-giving of beyond Himself.
And return to that is, you know, in my view, you can’t really separate the Trinity from creation, outgoing, and return. But, but I think we can see that, that this is some, somehow fully happens in God and we participate in that. So that, I think one of my reasons, sort of strong interest in Trinitarian ontology, which is what I’m still working on, is to understand how the Trinity is sort of reworking that Neo-Platonic legacy. This is why I’m interested in Schelling, why I’m interested in the Russians.
And of course, you know, the objection to that is it, it sounds, if you know, you’re saying Christianity is only making a difference to philosophy or something. But I think that’s not the case because I think the existential and mystical dimensions to that. You know, for example, when we go to God, when we ascend to God, do we simply leave the world behind? And if we’re going to God in Christ, I think then the answer is no. You know, we’re going upwards and outwards, both at the same time. And I think that’s kind of a more Pauline vision.
And then also the question of the nature of our religious or mystical experience. You know, are we, are we in a sort of shuttle where we, our identity sort of vanishes into God? But on the other hand, if we preserve our identity, are we separated from God? And again, I think this is something that Christianity more resolves by seeing God as sort of inherently relational, and, you know, that, that our ultimate unity with God, remains one in which our integrity is in, is maintained, but also our relationship to other people.
So the sense there, kind of the Church in the sense of the heavenly Jerusalem is ultimate as well. But you know, that has a finality about it. So it’s, again, you are sort of, you are not abandoning the social dimension. And again, you know, you can see within the Platonic tradition struggles over that issue.
But I think that sort of Christianity helps to resolve it more so that I think by adopting this approach, which might seem, you know, insisting on the platonic in a way that, you know, other people do have insisted on this as well. It’s a way of trying to get out of this idea that theology sort of exists in a kind of ghetto. That no, it’s fundamental and universal and gives us a more universal, philosophical, existential, and mystical vision.
And it also allows us to start thinking in a different way about the relationship of Christianity to Eastern religions and philosophies. You know, again, avoiding the sort of saying, well, they’re completely different and they’ve got the wrong answers. On the one hand, or saying, you know, they’re exactly the same. On the other hand, because I don’t think that’s true.
I think in a way the Christian vision is in the end a profoundly monistic one or its monistic as you can in the sense of participation in it. In the sense of also recognizing the ultimacy of the many and not centering the many, one or the many over against each other.
But I think to that sort of monism, it does add a deeper degree of valuing the person and personal relations and so on. So that sort of, particularly in the Western Christian legacy, I think that’s why kind of the ethical and uh, the social and political aren’t simply subordinated to a kind of other worldly experience, which is, you know, the danger in the Russian legacy.
I mean the greatest Russians, in fact, you know, the kind of people I’m interested in, like Solovyov and Soloveitchik, which were precisely trying to escape from that, you know. And they were, they were trying to achieve an ecumenical unity, trying to be both, both monistic and personalistic, if I can put this really, really simply, which is why I think, you know, some of what’s going on in in Russia today is tragic because you’ve got this sort of disdain in the Orthodox Church of what those great exiles were doing.
And then on the other hand, you have in sort of the current currents of Russian cosmism and so on, are sort of perversion of what, of what somebody like, Solovyov was doing, you know, a sort of an anti-Western Slavophilism and so on, you know. You know, I wish theologians would take much more seriously their responsibilities to world history and current world politics, you know, because it is around us.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to shift now to asking you about your understanding of the academic vocation as a theologian.
So in your estimation, what qualities or characteristics define what it means to be a theologian who exercises the academic vocation? And in what ways have those qualities or characteristics changed over time, at least in terms of how you’ve expressed it?
John Milbank: It’s always struck me that there’s in sort of the theologians who taught me and an older generation, it’s as if there’s a sort of duality going on that there’s a sort of world of piety on the one hand. And yet, the academy on the other, and they’re sort of trying to justify themselves in terms of the norms of the secular academy so that they’re kind of desperate to be accepted as Church historians or objective biblical critics or rigorous philosophers or something like that, you know?
And that’s all well and good. And I, you know, I’m not trying to say they’re simply wrong in doing that, but what I feel this, this tends to ignore, is the question of whether the academy can be neutral. And the academy is the world here. You know, the academy is originally the Platonic academy. And so, you know, the issue is do we think the world is completely explicable in physical terms, imminent terms, horizontal terms, what we would now think of as natural scientific terms. Or not? Or do we think that there is a metaphysical realm literally?
You know, so I agree with Lloyd Gerson when he says that if there isn’t a metaphysical realm, there simply isn’t an area for philosophy to be philosophy. It might as well be, it might as well be physics, because natural reality is all there is. You know, so I think but the academy, we have our modern academy, which isn’t a Platonic academy, is not sort of very, is not very sort of clear to itself about this. It’s basically committed to a kind of naturalism and the basis on which it would do humanities is not clear.
And so I think, I think it’s not an accident that increasingly the humanities are failing from the scene that fading away, you know, they’re in as much trouble now as theology and it, it increasingly looks as if only something like theology can protect them, just as philosophy is also in trouble because it looks like a very marginal activity in relation to science, that, you know, physicists may not see as necessary or may feel they can do the job themselves simply by reflecting on theoretical physics or finding a synthesis.
So it seems to me that it is a question for the academy. Do you believe that there is a psychic realm? Do you believe that there is a spiritual realm? Do you, do you believe that there is soul and spirit, not reducible to matter? And after all, most of the time, sort of every day we kind of behave as if moral values, aesthetic values, mental intention as if these things are real. And as if we are embodied souls, and therefore, if soul is more than body, that the intellect is something more than soul. This is exactly, you know, what Neo-Platonists thought or their kind of Asian equivalence.
And so, you know, there’s a case for an academy that does believe in those realities. Or maybe, you know, a university world that is open to both perspectives, but consciously aware, if you like, that is staging a debate between those perspectives.
And I think part of that also is my sense that traditionally education was a moral and spiritual formation. You know, that it was never regarded as simply knowledge in, in some kind of existential vacuum that would’ve probably been seen as extremely dangerous. If we have an educational social process that produces Elon Musk, I mean, don’t we have to ask ourselves very, very serious questions here about what is going on.
You know, and I think we have got to that kind of juncture. We have got to that kind of crossroads, that kind of point of decision. And I think in very distorted ways, people are realizing that. And you know, this is sometimes where we’re getting the wrong answers. We are getting a very réactionnel answer or weird kind of hybrids, weird, weird kind of mutations as people go on and on about their famous Gramsci quotation.
But I can see why we do it. The morbid symptoms, it’s true. You know, we can see that. But yeah, we do need to think about, at least sort of make space for a kind of education that is within, to begin with, a series of assumptions that there is a more than material realm that we are kind of investigating and trying to understand how it relates to the material realm.
So I, but this, you know, I’m in favor of something that goes much more against the set reigning assumptions. And I don’t think that, I think it’s clear that theology won’t have any home within an academy that isn’t an academy, an anti-academy. I mean there’s a, there’s a very respectable Islamic liberal arts college in California and I, I can understand the point of those kind of enterprises that you, you are setting up something on a different set of metaphysical premises.
And well, you know, the other way to go is to say, we really won’t have any metaphysical premises. We really will have an open debate. That’s very difficult. But I don’t think anybody’s clear about what they’re really doing.
Todd Ream: Now the phrase, the phrase that you used that the university is not clear to itself in terms of what it is, is one that’s going to, to stick with me for some time, and for theologians who find themselves presently working in such a space or such spaces, what virtues, intellectual or moral, do you think are most important to cultivate? You know, or then also, you know, what theological virtues do you believe are most important to seek to receive or hope to receive?
John Milbank: I think courage becomes a particularly important virtue. Obviously, you know, the most important things are, you know, faith, hope, and charity and justice and fortitude and so on. But I think there’s a particular call to be courageous, and I’m very honest with oneself, you know, what, what are one’s motivations? Where is one compromising for the sake of survival? I mean, I’m not saying that people never have to do that. They do, but you need to know that that is in fact what you are doing.
And I think above all, you have to be committed to finding the truth. You know, if this isn’t true, then it’s nothing. And, you know, even if you are saying this is the final truth, then it must make a difference to everything. It can’t not sort of, too much theology has carried as if that is the case.
I keep saying I do think the theology/philosophy boundary is dissolving. And I do think it’s becoming impossible to do serious theology without engaging with the whole of philosophy. They say you can’t just be doing philosophy of religion, for example. You have to be aware that theology affects your account of reality. So you have to engage with things like ontology and metaphysics.
Todd Ream: Yeah. In such a context then too, you know, sort of the question in converse then is, against what vices do you believe it’s most important for theologians be vigilant against?
John Milbank: I think that what they must all need to be vigilant against is sort of the wrong kind of compromise or dishonesty, sort of dressed up as being nice. In other words, I think a lot of the time, you know, the people who sound peaceful and reasonable can sometimes be the people who really selling out, you know, and you’ve got to risk being unpopular or even sounding nasty, I think.
And you mustn’t deceive yourself into thinking that you are being kind of modest or peaceful or respectful, when in fact, what you’re doing is sort of betraying the cause of God. I mean, not kind of the way that an Islamist might mean that, but in the sense that we have the sense that to believe in God is to believe everything was created ultimately peaceful and harmonious, but there’s been some kind of terrible rupture. And in a mysterious way, Jesus has descended to restore that, to undo that. And we’re within that work.
So we can’t sort of portray that profound sense of, of reality, maybe in the name of sounding within a very sort of polite secular discourse about pluralism and rights and so forth. You know, we can be modest on behalf of ourselves, but sort of pretending we’re being modest on behalf of God is kind of ridiculous. And I think too many people fall into that trap.
Todd Ream: As we close our conversation then, in terms of the academic vocation as we’ve been talking about here, in what ways do you view that its health is reflective of the health of the relationship that the university shares with the Church?
John Milbank: Yeah, that’s an extremely good question. I think that’s a relationship that needs to be repaired. I think perhaps in the future theology will sort of sit between two things. There’s a sort of general need to discover a discourse about wisdom, the various people have talked about. And that might be to do with recognizing, you know, that the soul and the spirit are real. Otherwise we’re, we’re trying to explain an awful lot of things away, and that’s not very plausible.
We need at least a big space in the secular academy for that kind of awareness, sort of something open to all the wisdom traditions of the world, if you like. But then on the other hand, I think those traditions, whether they’re philosophical or religious, have always also had a social and an existential and mystical dimension.
And that in terms of Christianity, for that reason, you know, the links to the Church are all important. You know, I think there’ll continue to be, and there should be, you know, diverse modes of institution. There might be secular universities, there might be smaller institutions pursuing what I call this kind of wisdom space there might be other things that are very specifically, you know, Christian institutions. And I’m sure that kind of diversity is needed, but um, I think there’s a very strong need to heal the rift between the churches and theology.
So theologians perhaps need to take a, and, and I’m hopeless here, but theologians need to take a leaf out of the book of sort of people like Tom Holland and people who popularized history and, and, and try to write more accessible theology books, that it can be done without selling the whole thing out.
But on the other hand, church leaders need to stop pretending that the intellectual stuff doesn’t matter because I think it’s easier for them to appear to be doing a lot of social good and so then you don’t have to think about the hard questions, but ordinary people do think about the hard questions of meaning of life, why we are here, and so forth.
And it’s incredibly important to have very intellectually well-trained clergy. And not to leave theologians stuck in a kind of academic ghetto. I mean, with the current collapse of not just theology departments, but universities themselves are in crisis. This is an important moment to sort of rethink that relationship, I think.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been John Milbank, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
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Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
