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The wisdom of John Milbank: a critical appraisal of Milbank's sophiology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2020

Richard May
Richard May*
Affiliation:
Canterbury Christ Church University, North Holmes Road, Canterbury
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Despite the theological controversy surrounding ‘Russian sophiology' amongst Orthodox theologians, John Milbank has claimed that it has proven to be one of the most daring theological breakthroughs within twentieth-century theology. He further considers it to be a fecund avenue of theological and philosophical reflection that has the potential to effectively communicate his central theological arguments in a new idiom. However, many of the positions which Milbank adopts within his sophiology prove to be controversial. This article offers a critical appraisal of Milbank's sophiology, drawing particular attention to several theological aporias it appears to generate and leave unresolved.

Keywords

Sergius BulgakovJohn MilbankRadical OrthodoxysophiologyWisdom
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 55 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 For a comprehensive example of their approach to the history of Christian theology see: Cunningham, Connor, The Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar; see also Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 121–67Google Scholar.

2 See Scotus, John Duns, Cognitio Naturalis de Deo I, II, in John Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, ed. Wolter, Allan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), pp. 20–4Google Scholar; Ockham, William of, Quodlibetal V: I, in William of Ockham: Philosophical Writings, ed. Boehner, Philotheus (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990), pp. 97–102Google Scholar.

3 For a classic example of this taking place, see Bultmann, Rudolf, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, trans. Ogden, Schubert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1984), pp. 1–45Google Scholar. In the case of Barth, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer appears to have recognised, Barth rejects the liberal project to the extent that he refuses the task of ‘abridging the Gospel’; however, by his conservatism (‘positivism of revelation’) he also affirms and retreats more deeply into these isolated spheres that have been allotted to theology by liberalism itself. See Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: SCM, 1953), p. 89Google Scholar.

4 Hippo, Augustine of, Confessions 1.2, trans. Chadwick, Henry (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 4Google Scholar.

5 Milbank's position is not entirely novel to British theology. John Henry Newman appears to outline a similar conception of metaphysical participation in his conception of knowledge as its own end; neither is it foreign to political theology, as Eric Voegelin outlines a similar ontology in order to combat political totalitarianism. See Newman, John Henry, The Idea of a University (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 25–91Google Scholar; Voegelin, Eric, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1997), p. 30Google Scholar. Milbank frequently praises theologies and philosophies that have questioned the typical dichotomies outlined in the text. Most consistently, he appeals to Henri de Lubac's conception of the natural and the supernatural (see Milbank, John, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005)Google Scholar); and philosophers such as F. H. Jacobi and J. G. Hamann in their rejection of autonomous reason removed from faith (see Milbank, John, ‘Knowledge: the Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi’, in Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine and Ward, Graham (eds), Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 21–38Google Scholar; cf. Milbank, John, ‘Hume versus Kant: Faith, Reason, and Feeling’, Modern Theology 27/2 (2011), pp. 276–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

6 Milbank, John, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (London: SCM, 2009), p. 337Google Scholar.

7 Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ibid.

9 Milbank, John and Pickstock, Catherine, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 46Google Scholar. David Burrell appears to agree with Milbank on this point. See Burrell, David, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 115–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid., p. 50.

11 Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. xii; emphasis added.

12 Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, p. 37; emphasis added.

13 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 220–30.

14 Milbank, The Suspended Middle, p.77.

15 Ibid., p. 104.

16 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. xxvii.

17 Milbank, John, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon’, in Pabst, Adrian and Schneider, Christoph (eds), Encounter between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World through the Word (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 50Google Scholar. Brandon Gallaher has recently lent support to Milbank's reading of Bulgakov. He claims that Bulgakov's understanding of Wisdom is grounded in his philosophy of antinomy (антиномия) and that his sophiological speculation ‘quickly evolved into a metaphor for understanding the tension between God and the world’. Brandon Gallaher, ‘There is Freedom: The Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity in the Trinitarian Theologies of Sergii Bulgakov, Karl Barth, and Hans Urs von Balthasar’, D.Phil. diss., Oxford University, 2010, p. 46; see also Jonathan Seiling, ‘From Antinomy to Sophiology: Modern Russian Religious Consciousness and Sergei Bulgakov's Critical Appropriation of German Idealism’, Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2008.

18 Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, p. 50.

19 Ibid., p. 62.

20 Ibid., p. 54.

21 Ibid., p. 55.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., p. 56.

24 Ibid., p. 57.

25 Ibid. As to be expected, there is no acknowledgement of Kant here; instead Milbank tries to ground his position in Gregory of Nyssa's suggestion (developed in his On Not Three Gods: To Ablabius) that the transcendent God is known in his dynamis which is his self-manifestation. Although there are undoubtedly some similarities here, it seems unlikely that Nyssa would have gone on to suggest that the creation's need for God's self-manifestation in his power or economy could be reversed to imply the necessity of the creation as the comprehending other that God needs in order to be, as Milbank and Bulgakov would seem to imply. More recently, Quentin Meillassoux has argued against this ontological connection between knowing and being, proposing instead that being is independent of subjectivity (whether divine or human). See Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2009)Google Scholar.

26 Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, p. 57.

27 Ibid., p. 60.

28 Ibid., pp. 60–1. There are similarities here with the trinitarian ontology that Milbank outlines in Theology and Social Theory, pp. 423–7; cf. also Milbank, John, ‘The Return of Mediation’, in Milbank, John, Žižek, Slavoj and Davis, Creston (eds), Paul's New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010), p. 222Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., p. 62; emphasis added.

30 Ibid. This is not an uncommon theme in Milbank's theology; he grapples with it at various points, and it seems to be an inherent tension in his participation metaphysics. For instance, he has also referred to it as the problem of ‘the impossibility of creation’ (Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. 63).

31 Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, p. 63. Milbank also states this explicitly elsewhere, for instance: ‘there can be a created exterior to God, because God's interior is self-exteriorization’ (Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, p. 86).

32 Hegel, G. W. F., The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. Geraet, T. F. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), p. 148Google Scholar.

33 Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, pp. 64–5.

34 Ibid., p. 65. This is by no means an isolated instant confined to Milbank's sophiology. When appealing to the thought of Eckhart, Milbank argues that: ‘to ensure that God is not trumped by esse, one must indeed face up more radically to the aporias of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo: if this doctrine insists that God is the plentitude of being and that all created being derives from God, then in some sense the ground of created being must be uncreated’ (Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. xxvi). Similarly, ‘Eckhart therefore claims that, while the relation of creature to Creator remains always analogical, that nonetheless the relation of the soul to God in its ground is univocal. Since there Is a horizontal ‘univocity’ between the Persons of the Trinity who are equal in being … within whose dynamic the souls is ultimately included’ (ibid, p. xxvii).

35 Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, p. 65.

36 Milbank, John, ‘Materialism and Transcendence’, in Milbank, John, Žižek, Slavoj and Davis, Creston (eds), Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 404Google Scholar.

37 Milbank, John, ‘The Double Glory, or Paradox Versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek’, in Žižek, Slavoj, Milbank, John and Davis, Creston (eds), The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (London: MIT Press, 2009), p. 112Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 114.

39 Ibid., p. 164. Milbank further elucidates his admiration of Eckhart and Cusa in Milbank, John, ‘Life, or Gift and Glissando’, Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 1/1–2 (2012), pp. 121–51Google Scholar.

40 Milbank, ‘The Double Glory’, p. 167.

41 Nicholas of Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance, I:III’, in H. Lawrence Bond (ed.), Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), p. 89.

42 Milbank, ‘The Double Glory’, p. 167.

43 Ibid., p. 191.

44 Perhaps, this critique further substantiates those commentators that have acknowledged certain ‘totalitarian’ tendencies in Milbank's theology. For instance, Mary Doak has written: ‘Milbank leaves no doubt that he considers his Christian story to be superior to any and all other temporal views, and to need no correction from them … It can only give us further pause that Milbank defends the use of violence to constrain those who would damage themselves by refusing to act in accordance with this story. Can we be so sure that a Milbankian clarity about the Christian story is an antidote to the horrors of history and not simply another basis for future horrors?’ Mary Doak, Reclaiming Narrative for Public Theology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 32.

45 Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, p. 69.

46 Ibid., p. 78.

47 Ibid., p. 79.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., p. 80.

50 Milbank, John, ‘Life, or Gift and Glissando: Evolution, Vitalism and Transcendence’, in Turnball, Neil (ed.), Radical Orthodoxy: Annual Review I (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), p. 93Google Scholar.

51 On the topic of theurgy, see Shaw, Gregory, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

52 Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, p. 71.

53 Ibid., p. 72.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., pp. 72–3.

56 Ibid., p. 75.

57 Ibid., p. 83.

58 Ibid., p. 78.

59 Ibid., p. 79.

60 Ibid., p. 80.

61 Ibid., p. 81; emphasis added.

62 Gallaher, Brandon, ‘Graced Creatureliness: Ontological Tension in the Uncreated/Created Distinction in the Sophiologies of Solov'ev, Bulgakov and Milbank’, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 47/1–2 (2006), p. 179Google Scholar.

63 Milbank, ‘Sophiology and Theurgy’, p. 82.