John Milbank's Divina Commedia

Extract

Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear!

(Inferno Canto 1, 3–6)

The journey towards Milbank’s representation of Augustine’s Civitas Dei calls for an epic heroism, as it passes through woods dense with philosophical thought and over chasms of vertiginous intellectual argument. Dante, then, provides a description of one’s experience of reading Theology and Social Theory. But more significantly, he provides us with a key to its method. Milbank’s polemic is aimed at modernity, the invention of the secular story and modem political theology’s collusion with it. This modernity or secularity arose following late-mediaeval/Renaissance self-awareness. Assisted by postmodern strategies of reading, Milbank allegorizes secular discourses, deconstructs their secularism and reveals their dependence upon metaphysical and theological assumptions. By doing this he therefore embraces secular discourse (whose inception and invention ‘began at least in the eleventh century’ [p.432]) within a theological metanarrative. And that is why Dante is significant; John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory is a contemporary Commedia. This does not necessarily condemn it as a piece of late twentieth century nostalgia, a fin de siècle pre-Raphaelitism. But it means that the teleological goal of Theology and Social Theory is the recovery of a pre-modem (but not antique) theological perspective. Or, put in another (albeit Dantesque) way: this book provides a new allegorical depiction of the operation of charity [pp.425-6]. Such a reading of the book has several important corollaries, binding upon both John Milbank and his readers.