‘Non tali auxilio’: John Milbank's Suasion to Orthodoxy

Extract

I finished this breath-taking book lost in admiration for the breadth of intellectual culture that lies behind it; for its situating of different enquiries—theological, philosophical, sociological—in illuminating inter-relation; for the masterly way in which it weaves together negative analysis and positive proposal so as to commend Christian faith as the only world-view, and recipe for social living, truly worth having. That a British author, writing at the end of the twentieth century, could take on, in profoundly informed fashion, every major proponent of autonomous thought and religiously emancipated social action (‘secular reason’), from the Athenian enlightenment to the Parisian nouveaux philosophes, all with a view to showing the inadequacy—not simply de facto but de jure—of their projects, and, correlatively the sole adequacy of a religious, and more specifically a Christian, alternative in both theory and practice; this is, evidently, a publishing event of considerable magnitude. Moreover, the subtlety and sophistication of Milbank’s criticisms of a range of secular constructs for both thought and social action so broad as to include virtually the entire contemporary intelligentsia of Western Europe and North America, will require a response of equal incisiveness from the inhabitants of these systems, and, as such, makes his book an event in intellectual history as well. That his critique of secular rationality in its various guises is mounted in the name of Christian orthodoxy and Catholic tradition can, it seems, only gladden the heart of a Catholic believer, a priest, a Dominican.. . In the hour of Catholic Christianity’s desperate intellectual need (a glance at the pages of the Times Literary Supplement is enough to show the disappearance of Christian orthodoxy, as a source of meaning and truth, from high culture in Britain), God has, apparently, visited his people.