[John] Wimber at his core was not a modernist. Rationalism had not indoctrinated him. While the modern church tried, it did not socialize him. It burned him out. He kept asking, “When do we get to do the stuff?” By the “stuff” he meant what Jesus did: minister to the poor, heal the sick, cast out demons, and even raise the dead . . . Wimber was more like a premodernist, a man at home in the Christian worldview and experience that dominated the church and the West prior to the Enlightenment.1

Perhaps the Vineyard, a charismatic evangelical church-planting and renewal movement that began in the late 1970s in southern California, is an unlikely dialogue partner for John Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order.2 Unlikely, yes; but not unsuitable. Both claim deep roots in premodernity, both see theology as integrally connected to the life of the church, and Milbank’s insistence that we are “naturally oriented to the supernatural” brings to mind the many self-descriptions of Vineyard life and practice as “naturally supernatural.”3 In particular, I would like to bring the practice of healing prayer into dialogue with Milbank’s description of humans as “fabricating animals” who are “only human through making things and ‘making things up,’” such that the “‘artificial’ character which belongs to the individual through artefacting is an aspect of that individual’s integral nature” (136, emphasis original). In doing so, I suggest that healing prayer may be understood as a kind of creative act by which humans Christologically participate in the divine creative will. Furthermore, healing prayer is a creative act in the sense that it is a gift, a discovery, and experimental. Milbank’s description of the experimental nature of fabrication allows Wimber’s (and the Vineyard’s) approach to healing prayer to be seen as linked to premodern theological understandings of fabrication. Finally, by encouraging everyone to pray for healing, the Vineyard enacts Milbank’s vision of releasing the creative capacity of all people.

Milbank writes that fiction has an “indispensable role . . . in disclosing truth” (193). This was recognized in the premodern period, and was closely tied to understanding human creativity through a Christological lens. Milbank reads Ambrose as “opening up the possibility of understanding drastic human action as creative” when Ambrose draws a connection between the word of Christ creating the world ex nihilo and the word of Christ changing the nature of the Eucharistic elements (195–96). Human creativity is understood as a “participation in the transmission of this power to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ” (196). Milbank writes:

The very first “creative artist” in western Europe was taken to be Christ himself and in his wake the figure of the Pope . . . who had the power of drastic creative innovation, because he mediated first of all liturgically, but then legislatively, the trans-creation of Christ himself, Christ’s deployment of fictions, Christ’s institution of new birth at baptism, and finally Christ’s act of transubstantiation on Maundy Thursday . . . The power [to share in creation and to originate creation] is restored to us in the Incarnation and even newly augmented by it. (198)

However, Christ’s creativity is not limited to his use of fictions in parables, his institution of new birth at baptism, and his act of transubstantiation on Maundy Thursday, but also includes his ministry to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, and to set the oppressed free and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18–19). Milbank hints at this relationship between creativity and “proclaiming good news to the poor” when he points out that in the Enlightenment “benevolence . . . tended to mean a one-way sympathy towards the other person and as such it lacked the range of resonance of caritas in the Middle Ages” (227). He also hints in this direction when he describes human creativity as public, legal, and political, “the power to create new historical realities as such, new modes of living which human beings must perforce inhabit,” and writes that “human endeavour becomes a constant effort to discern and to repair” instead of “an elitist pagan retreat to already given norms” (210–11). Christ’s ministry created new historical realities for the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, and the oppressed, and the church’s Christological creativity is expressed when we do the same. As one of many ways that we participate in Christ’s ministry of “proclaiming the recovery of sight for the blind,” healing prayer may be understood as a creative act, a Christological participation in the divine creative will.

The idea of healing prayer as a way that we participate in the divine creative will and participate “in the transmission of this power to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ” strongly resonates with Vineyard theology (196). It is common to hear leaders in the Vineyard refer to human creative participation in Christ’s ministry as “doing what the Father is doing.” This is drawn from the Lord’s Prayer in conjunction with Jesus’ statement in John 5 that the Son can do nothing by himself, but only does what he sees his Father doing. Wimber writes, “The Lord’s Prayer to the Father was that ‘your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6:10). Jesus’ entire life was built on the principle of doing the will of the Father, walking in His way and doing His works.”4 Milbank’s description of creativity holds two realities in tension: first, “only because an absolute non-human origination lies at the bottom of all human reality are humans able to a degree to share in this,” and second, the power of creativity is “restored to us in the Incarnation and even newly augmented by it” (198, emphasis original). Similarly, Vineyard theology holds in tension an insistence that power for ministry (including the ministry of healing prayer) can only originate in the Father’s will, and a belief that Christ’s incarnate ministry of “doing what the Father is doing” restores to us the possibility of “doin’ the stuff” (as Wimber liked to say) that Jesus did: ministry to the poor, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead.

Healing prayer may also be understood as a creative act in the sense that it is a gift, a discovery, and experimental. Milbank writes, “Because the creative human being is ‘inspired,’ and because she does not fully grasp or command the new thing which she has brought about, there is no absolute creation here: the new thing invented is also ‘discovered,’ given to the creator herself as a mysterious new potency” (196). Similarly, healing prayer in the Vineyard is understood as both a charism, and as something which Christians discover through experimentation. Much like Milbank’s sense of integral hybridity, it is impossible to divorce the “gift” of healing prayer from the “discovery” of healing prayer through experimentation. When Wimber led healing conferences and seminars, after the teaching portion, all the participants would practice what had been taught by praying for one another. Wimber called these portions of conferences “clinics.” While Wimber believed that supernatural healing was a gift from God, he also thought that all Christians could be taught to pray for healing, and that “clinics” such as these could provide the context for gifts of healing prayer to be discovered. Nevertheless, healing prayer is never a “discovery” or “gift” that is fully grasped. Healing prayer remains “mysterious,” as anyone who has wrestled with experiences of seeing some people healed while watching others continue to suffer will testify.

Wimber was occasionally critiqued as having a too “scientific” or “modern” approach to healing prayer. In addition to describing these times of prayer training as “clinics,” he taught healing prayer through a five-step model, and wrote that he tried “to create an atmosphere that is clinical and rational . . . while at the same time it is powerful and spiritually sensitive.”5 However, I would suggest that Milbank’s description of the experimental nature of fabrication provides a better way of interpreting these apparent concessions to modernism. In response to Ficino’s and Galileo’s “hubristic claims . . . that humans could univocally equal divine creativity had they but sufficient materials to command,” Milbank writes, “this absolute open power ceases to be a power of exploration through the genuinely ‘experimental’ contingencies of fabrication, echoing not simply the absolutely powerful divine creator but also the eternal Paternal kenotic generation of the Verbum” (219). Homo faber only participates in the divine creative will via Christ, and the power of creativity is only given to humanity via the Incarnation. In light of this, Christological creativity has a kenotic shape, and is enacted in an experimentation that embraces the contingencies of fabrication. In this way, the conception of healing prayer as a gift discovered through experimentation can be seen as connected to premodern theological understandings of creativity and fabrication, rather than modern scientific hubris.

In closing, I would suggest that if healing prayer is understood as a creative act, the Vineyard insistence that all Christians may pray for healing enacts Milbank’s vision of releasing the “creative capacity of all” (264). Vineyard pastor Marty Boller tells the following story:

[Wimber] asked people who wanted prayer for healing to come forward. Then, rather than getting up and praying for these folks, he asked for any children in the audience to come up front with him. I recall a handful of kids bravely came up on the stage, gathering around him. And with the patience of a loving grandpa, he encouraged the children to gather round those who needed prayer and after about five minutes of simple instructions, folks who needed healing were being blessed big time as the powerful presence of the Spirit began moving across the room. Later that day, he asked for those who received healing that morning to come tell their stories and I recall a large number of folks sharing amazing testimonies on how the Lord touched them powerfully as these kids prayed for them. “You see,” Wimber proclaimed, “Everybody can play!”6

The phrase “everybody can play” was frequently repeated by Wimber, and continues to be prominent in Vineyard theology and teaching. Imagining healing prayer as a kind of “play” underscores the sense in which all people are understood to have this creative capacity, not unlike Milbank’s statement that “the necessary creative fiction . . . will not allow . . . that art is something exceptional or reserved to the isolated genius” (211). Rather, the “creative capacity” of healing prayer belongs to all, and all participate Christologically through the inspiration of the Spirit.

It is almost academic cliché to say that we live in an “order of the simulacra,” to use the phrase coined by Jean Baudrillard. Images of things have taken on such a gravitas that they have become the determinant, rather than the reflection, of the ordering of things themselves. Popular culture is one that is more saturated with digitally enhanced imagery than any age before. Body images are being shaped by photoshopped images of models on glossy magazines, generating new income streams for plastic surgeons in Australia, China, America and Brazil. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have generated communities even fomented revolutions. The proliferation of massively multiplayer online role-playing games has become an avenue not only for the forging of communities, but also for lives to be lived out and even money to be made. At a more banal level, the normalisation of twenty-four-hour news cycles has undergirded a twenty-first-century spin on the nineteenth-century anarchist “propaganda of the deed” in the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, with the looping television sequences of planes slamming into buildings being more potent a form of warfare than the actual slamming of planes into buildings.

The reference to television might make one (rightly) think that the origins of this “order of the simulacra” predates social media, to the age of the big screen and the radio, both of which were used to propagate simulated images of enemies real and imagined, with devastating consequences. Historians in the vein of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities might locate the origins of simulation to a time before there was electricity, with the arrival of the printing press. Indeed, Baudrillard traces this text based simulation to a premodern era. Given Baudrillard’s genealogy, the question to be asked is not just how it all came to this, but also how long it had been like this. Moreover, it should be asked what the length of the genealogy of the simulation would say about not just pop culture, but contemporary culture in all of its institutional varieties.

It is here that Baudrillard’s work dovetails with John Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order. A reader familiar with Milbank’s work would recognise a criticism laid out in his other important work, Theology and Social Theory, a criticism that has in many respects undergirded the theological project named Radical Orthodoxy and many other sympathetic theological currents. According to this criticism, a fundamentally theological distortion—in which God could only be understood and spoken of if he were situated at the same level of being as his creatures— was perpetrated by the Franciscan Duns Scotus in the 1200s. Post-Scotus, it had grown possible to conceive of a creation as ontologically independent of God, whether in terms of a Platonic participation by creatures in God, or in terms of an Aristotelian orientation of all creatures to a common end in God. This move would slowly give way to the metaphysical current known as nominalism, which would in turn give way to a societal attitude of voluntarism, in which the individual will, rather than participation in a community of virtue aiming at a common telos, was given primacy in societal arrangements.

This revisiting of Milbank’s most famous thesis might initially be a call for patience for a reader already familiar with this line of argumentation. This patience, however, will be richly rewarded once this review of the emergence of Scotist metaphysics fans out to encompass its various ontological and political implications. The bridge that Milbank deploys to keep these paths of inquiry together is the move from a politics of identity to a politics of representation. The fascinating corrollary to this inquiry, however, was the series of simulations that suddenly became possible post-Scotus.

Simulation becomes possible in a univocal world, according to Milbank, because the integrity of being is defined in terms of its not being a divine creation. The ground of existence, in other words, is not a positive affirmation but the “upshot of a double negation” (52). With no solid foundation on which to ground the claim, Milbank argues that such a ground is manufactured by taking only one negation out of a whole series of possible options and making that negation normative. In a univocal schema, the negation that is sheer nullity (as a direct contrast of being) becomes the normative ontological ground. In Milbank’s words, “the decision to make ‘is not not’ normative is a decision for the priority of the not,” thereby generating in ontological terms from Scotus onwards “the new priority of the possible over the actual” (52). When possibility is to be given the same ontological status as what actually is, one notices the beginnings of a deterioration of the actual. Unfortunately, the deterioration of the actual does not stop with mere equivalence when being becomes conceived in a univocal mode. Indeed, as Milbank argues, the actual undergoes a double negation post-Scotus, first in the being “thinned out by possibility” and second in the being “hollowed out by nullity.”

This deterioration of the real at the metaphysical level seeps into the epistemological. In Milbank’s estimation, premodern knowledge in its Judaic, Augustinian and Thomistic vein was founded upon the acknowledgement that when something is apprehended by the intellect, something ontologically higher gave that thing its own reality. At the same time, this ontological other also was responsible for casting a light upon the images of the thing formed within the intellect. In other words, the reliability of the images of the temporal thing formed by the intellect, like the apprehended thing itself, relied upon the images hanging off a transcendent anchor. What a univocal framework did was to unhinge the former from the latter. When this happened, says Milbank, one not only speaks of God sensibly by bringing God down to our rung of the hierarchy of being (for indeed, no hierarchy can exist in a univocal mode). As we brought God down to the same level as our language post-Scotus, we have also elevated our knowledge to the same level as God’s, whereby thought alone is enough to ground the being of things. In a univocal register, there is no longer a need for any ontological other to anchor the apprehension of a thing. There is now not even a need for the thing itself to serve that purpose. Post-Scotus, what is known now has the same ontological status as what is, and thus the image now has the same ontological status as the actual.

However, as univocity gives way to nominalism, one also witnesses more than mere ontological equivalence between the imagined and the real. Indeed, Milbank argues that, in a univocal mode of being, one actually witnesses an ontological reversal in the relationship between the imagined abstract and the real concrete. Whilst the premoderns post-Aristotle, especially post-Aquinas, affirmed the primacy of concrete substances, one post-Scotus gets a more intimate and “fundamental kinship with the abstract than the . . . concrete” (138). This paves the way for the bias Descartes would later give to thought over sense. Milbank sees such a neat continuity between Scotus and Descartes, which partially grounds his argument that even now, we are still living out “a certain middle ages.”

If the metaphysics of modernity and postmodernity are an extension of the middle ages, its politics are also similarly medieval. However, where Milbank seems to break with caricatures of the medieval is that instead of a crass materiality justified by irrational ideology, politics is built upon a foundation of a rationally justified simulation, simulations that appear from as early as the Renaissance onwards. The complex layerings of medieval society that were nonetheless bound by a common participation in a real transcendent reality via a life of virtue, had now become flattened out in a univocal age. In such an age, rather than embodied exemplars of virtue, it is now concepts of society—Milbank uses the term “representations”—that have assumed the greater organisational agency. In other words, images of the polis, now having a higher ontological significance than the real, have now taken on take on a more powerful organising role than the actual polis itself, and artificiality comes to pervades every sociopolitical category in a univocal mode. In the case of the polis, organic communities become superceded by fictions of nationhood defined as sociality solely at a “centralised and overarching level”—the basis of modern statehood (156). More than supercede, these fictions actually rob organic communities of any social, economic and political legitimacy, as “the state” or “the economy” become politically fetishised. As for the members of these now eviscerated communities, Milbank argues that under the guise of representing the people, “representation . . . in reality . . . substitute[d] for the people the body of citizens” (143). In other words, actual residents now have to conform to these simulations of political life by becoming themselves a simulation, which is achieved through “a uniform civil mask” of radical individuality. Both these simulations thereby feed off each other, generating their own base of legitimacy and perpetuating themselves at two levels. At the political level, this is done by presuming the state to be an outlet of the will—and it matters little whether that will be that of an individual despot or a faceless mass (163). At the social level, this is done through the mechanism of the market, where the point of exchange of commodities between buyer and seller becomes the inevitable and sole expression of human freedom—and it matter little what gets sold, who gets sold, and how it gets sold.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, with its advances in technical wizardry—in particular the rapid proliferation of the screen through tablets and smartphones—and we see hyper-intensifications of this post-Scotist fetish for simulation over reality, covering even more areas of activity than in the middles, but still operating on the same logic of ontologically favouring the simulation over the actual. Newscasters drive, rather than reflect, policy agendas. Governance is now a manifold simulation, whereby bureaucratic imperatives are deemed to reflect those of elected representatives, which in turn are the simulation of the will of the polis, which in turn are comprised of typecasted fabrications of actual residents, which we now call “voters,” “consumers” or “citizens” (176–77). Photoshopped magazine covers circulated in websites now determine the contours of beauty. Computer-generated imagery on advertising simultaneously stoke human desire and perpetuate fictions of customer sovereignty. The masturbatory process of online pornography now gives more sexual pleasure than actual intercourse between two actual individuals. Economic well-being is judged with reference to modelling that does not account for, nor need, actual persons living in it (because what counts as a person in such fictional models is itself a fiction). In this age of the simulacra, it is not important if it does not work in practice. What matters is that it works in theory.

Milbank has done a wonderful service insofar as he has diagnosed the medieval (and metaphysical) roots of post/modern simulation, and from that the threats to the practice of true democracy within any polis. Where the enthusiasm might be tested is in his veiled suggestion of a restoration of the role of “the few” as an embodied mediator between the one and the many, which might strike the modern reader as a questionable prospect within the civic body. Nevertheless, Milbank has planted seeds of an alternative program to theocracy in this work, the heart of which is a liturgical antidote to simulation, in which a liturgically constituted few standing outside and alongside the civic framework constitute this bridge between the rulers and the ruled. For “in the narrative of Christ and the continuous emergence of the Church” as a distinct civitas which sits alongside and moves within the civic body (without succumbing to it),(247–50) Milbank suggests the beginnings of a doing away with the chasm between representation and identity in which simulation resides. It is yet to be seen how such a diagnosis and antidote will play out within the warp and woof of life within the civic body, but we should be grateful to Milbank for resisting the inevitability of being lorded over by the hosts of simulacra.

It’s not quite clear when Radical Orthodoxy stopped mattering, but what is clear is that John Milbank hardly cares. In Beyond Secular Order not only does Milbank continue unabated the impossible quest he initiated in Theology and Social Theory but indeed Beyond Secular Order’s arguments double down on that quest. What I find most fascinating is Beyond Secular Order’s central proposal and the context of Radical Orthodoxy’s irrelevance in which it is made. Briefly I will try to say something about how Beyond Secular Order completes Radical Orthodoxy’s vision at a time when that vision has lost its luster. I suggest that this feature is what makes Beyond Secular Order so important and intriguing.

I take Beyond Secular Order’s central constructive proposal to run as follows: ontology and politics relate analogically to one another.1 The best way to speak of this analogical relation is to use the language of participation whereby creaturely political life participates in the ontological life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—to imagine one life is to imagine the other, though in uniquely occurring ways. Analogically, creatures live the relationally creative and creatively relational life of God by taking up their share in this politics of making, organisms participating in God’s life as they make in their manifold respective ways (hence Beyond Secular Order’s central character, homo faber).2 All creaturely life is hardwired for making it through the bodied pragmatics of adaptation; one could say, crudely, that survival-by-making just is what it means to be an organism.3 But, and this is crucial to Milbank’s proposal, survival is not all that creaturely life (creaturely participation) amounts to. There is more, indicated by Milbank’s term “trans-organicity,” organisms transcending bare survival, striving beyond themselves. While survival proves the mechanism for transcendence, survival is ultimately a function of adaptation (and not vice versa) as transcendence becomes adaptation’s final form, the creature adapted to life in God, adaptation shown in its realization. In this rather novel way Milbank ties a philosophical account of participation to animal behavior through an ecological formulation able to affirm the dignity and integrity of creaturely life from start to finish. Christian theology aesthetically imagines this transcendence as life’s striving toward the Good, True, and Beautiful, and this metaphysics can be seen materially—the materiality is hermeneutically understood as displaying the metaphysics. The material display of creaturely transcendence is nothing less than the cultural deposit of goodness, truth, and beauty that results from creaturely adaptation and thus exceeds the sum of pragmatic considerations and can be, at this point in the proposal, described as creaturely self-showing where what is shown is creation seeking after God.4 Though all animals are thusly hardwired, humans are those animals whose constitution make for self-showing by wording the world, and “church” names those gathered humans whose words explicitly and determinatively intend the linguistic universe in terms of the One in whom it journeys.5 For Milbank, the church has the best chance of arranging political affairs for journeying in God; all culture as deposits of self-showing organic life materially displays goodness, truth, and beauty, but the church uniquely orders itself to the through-and-through graced structure of creaturely life that manifests the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and will hence organize political life in ways hospitable to the political forms this manifold trans-organic manifestation of creaturely (i.e., self-transcending) life takes up.6 It is the church that strives most determinatively toward the interdependence of all life, where interdependence finally names the analogical relation between ontology and politics such that the trans-organic culminates in the trans-natural as the source of all life. Insisting on crude terms one could put the church’s making along the lines of survival of the fittest, that society, in more appropriately positive terms, most adapted to and expressive of life in the Spirit. It follows the drift of the proposal to conclude, “a genuine ecumenical project is inseparable from the project of establishing a global Christendom—the distinction of Christianity from Christendom being rejected as semantically and theologically confused” (233). The same logic entails a particular mode of government: “for democracy to work, it must be complemented by a non-democratic ‘Socratic’ sense of the importance of the role of the few as pursuing truth and virtue for their own sake” (264). The project of legitimating the establishment of a global Christendom and its governance, the “impossible quest” and doubling-down to which I alluded earlier, imagines the world allegorically as the display of God’s beauty. Beyond Secular Order lays out the “political metaphysics” of the proposal and Milbank’s promised On Divine Government will, ostensibly, tell us what judgments the proposal practically warrants, with the two volumes completing the vision Milbank started in Theology and Social Theory.

*  *  *

Do I register my admiration and my worries clearly enough if I say both that I can’t wait for On Divine Government and that I am less than confident that it can succeed? Going forward, Milbank to me feels caught between two equally undesirable outcomes. Here is what I mean. Beyond Secular Order means to show how political arrangements in every facet of late modern life—for example traffic jams (154)—reveals a rotten ontology, setting On Divine Government up to make good on a better ontology/politics. The best version of On Divine Government, the version Beyond Secular Order promises, would advance proposals that simultaneously deal in eventualities—and their “all too real suffering”—while reflecting in the manner of those dealings the beauty of God. Yet, On Divine Government can only make good on its promise by explicating the kinds of objectionable judgments intimated by its political metaphysics. And here, speaking of traffic jams, we can imagine the suggestion of philosopher kings directing the course of civil engineers in the organization of interstate highways. If On Divine Government does not deal in these kinds of practical engagements and remains at the level of theory, it will leave us feeling hoodwinked with yet another, however elegant and learned, argument for analogy when no one seems to be seriously questioning it as a theoretical framework. (This is where the stakes of doubling down are highest—for all of us; the inability of the framework to parallel salutary engagements unleashes a vicious counterexample inside the theory.) Either outcome will continue Radical Orthodoxy’s shockingly quick departure from the broader guild of Christian theology, which of course isn’t necessarily a bad thing except when it means the marginalization of voices that need to continue to inform us. Professor Milbank insists on arguments and kinds of arguments that for many have outlived their usefulness and while I see here, as I said, genuine innovations, the sense will feel unfortunately familiar to those of this persuasion. Remember—Beyond Secular Order seemingly forgets—that plenty has happened since the appearance of Theology and Social Theory. Two quick things come to mind: first, the ascendency of the Augustinian liberalism (i.e., a tragicomic view of politics necessitating something like a pragmatist approach to normativity) that Jeffrey Stout encouraged from Christian theologians through Democracy and Tradition; second, Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination’s sobering account of what happens when people are caught unawares by self-consciously confident political metaphysics (i.e., the sad history of European colonization wasn’t Christendom off the rails but Christendom right on track).7 It may be that Milbank does not consider these serious challenges to his case, but isn’t it enough that others will, since he, presumably, is doing more than preaching to the Radical Orthodoxy choir? One would expect that he would at least try to show that Augustinian liberalism cannot be both Augustinian and liberal or that global Christendom does not have to, or ever, look like the Christian conquest of the Americas. Democracy and Tradition and The Christian Imagination represent the kinds of sensibilities (call them post-Christendom sensitivities—we might also call them Christological or eschatological sensitivities—that both predate these two publications and break new ground in them) that would receive a seriously engaged On Divine Government with skepticism and even alarm, if not also a little morbid curiosity.

But maybe our lack of confidence is part of Milbank’s point. To him, it’s just obvious that society should be organized accordingly (that our highways or commuter choices shouldn’t be dictated by civil engineers not asking philosopher king questions), and he takes as indication of a lack of intellectual nerve our stopping short of imagining the world—and its interstate highways—as God’s, the civic equivalent of indecorously stripping the altar of some parish. His case is made stronger, I think, or at least I find myself more attracted to it, now that fewer are listening and so a congruence between the asceticism of its message and its feasibility. And maybe the arrival of serious challenges to Radical Orthodoxy’s program is something that is anticipated as exactly the kinds of false humility it was meant to call out—perhaps Milbank doesn’t engage Stout and Jennings not because he doesn’t see them as serious challenges but because he always has and thinks he’s addressed them, headlong in a text called Theology and Social Theory. The affective difference for the unconvinced-but-still-listening is that amidst the reports of Radical Orthodoxy’s demise, indication of its ongoing life and unabated quest begins to feel less like triumphalism and more like fortitude, that sliver of a difference where Christian faithfulness and worship take place. Overconfidence here stems from a commitment to a vision broad enough to cover any manner of eventuality, from traffic jams to the publication of competing accounts, a vision politically metaphysical.

Once, there was no Christendom. And Christendom was not latent in the Greek and later Hellenistic philosophical schools that preceded it, awaiting catalysis and ferment by the dew of heaven, the word made flesh. Rather, there emerged a ragtag group of social, cultural, and economic nobodies who invoked strange tales of messianic fulfillment. They gathered in houses to celebrate and enact these stories, outside the watchful eye of Rome and its regulation of superstitio. Very soon, wealthy patrons were involved, hosting these assemblies in their homes and providing food for their celebratory “love feasts.” As the community grew, the story goes, so did persecution and clashes with the regime. Defenses and appeals were made. Eventually, some high-profile governmental officials joined the movement. Finally, an emperor.

What began as a marginal and particularist sect (its arguably universalist claims notwithstanding) would have its vision (or, better, one of its many internally competing visions) projected across an empire. The voices and views of a small community, initially pursued by power, came to be extended from the seat of power itself, an inversion that has long-ranging consequences. Christendom had to be instituted and imagined. And disciplined. And enforced. This institution is not meaningfully grasped in the language of inevitability or with the hindsight of what would come to be called, agonistically, orthodoxy.

John Milbank knows these roots and must celebrate them in the name of incarnational materialism and truth as historically developed. For the origins of the church according to apostolic and patristic witness depend upon “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). Ecclesial historical actualization required “seeing our teacher, and hearing his voice with our own ears” (Irenaeus Haer. 5.1.1). In short, the ragtag team-turned-fathers-of-the-church emphasized the necessity of a material encounter with an initially nondescript human in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. This encounter was specific and its universalization denotes a transition.

Such a problematic is, of course, nothing new for the history of Christian reflection in theology, ecclesiology, and, in particular, missiology. I review it here because it raises questions about where we begin narrating the history of the church in the claims we make about its relation to power, politics, and broader society. My aim is not to wave an anti-Constantinian banner1 but to flag the periodization that begins and ends with Christendom. This is relevant to the question of an outside, an externality to the system (of thought and practice) that Milbank proposes.

For Milbank’s tale is unapologetically totalizing. And yet it leaves out so much. My aim, therefore, in the first part of this review is to note the possibility of alternatives that may work within the strictures of Milbank’s project as presented in Beyond Secular Order. In particular, I claim that provincializing Christendom (to take a page from Chakrabarty) opens up suppressed strands of thought that provide interesting challenge to the narrowness of his vision. Recalling the marginal particularity at the heart of Christian tradition thus helps recall the provinciality of one of its moments, the European imperial Christianity that serves as both centerpiece and horizon of Milbank’s proposal. I then go on to consider two provocative aspects of Milbank’s political theology: his advocacy of an elite, virtuous aristocracy and his recuperation of an imperial Augustine.

Part 1 of Beyond Secular Order is a refreshingly lucid and irenic recapitulation of claims asserted by Milbank and many of his Radically Orthodox associates.2 We find a review of the original sin of late medievalism—its fall into nominalism—and its issuance of a cursed progeny: the modern. Platonic and Aristotelian ideals are recalled as correctives to the divergence toward four cardinal philosophical vices: univocity, representation, possibilism, and concurrence.

In light of the unswerving European focus of Milbank’s vision (which includes the classicist induction of Greece and Rome into such heritage), what if we seek to tell a different tale and to think with, alongside, and against Milbank on the conceptual roots of Christendom?3 What if we pursue the specter of origins and ask why we must stop at Augustine or the early councils? Pressing further, why stop at Plato and Aristotle?4 In the name of archaic authenticity, what might it meant to recall African, Near Eastern, and Asian influences on early philosophy as it came to be incorporated into Greek, Roman, and eventual Christian tradition.5

In keeping with “tradition,” we might take up the quaint patristic claim that Plato and Aristotle had been tutored by Moses (invoked to graft such philosophical forbears into biblical tradition) to assert a more probable genealogy: that the Greek philosophers were influenced by ancient Near Eastern thought systems. We should recall, further, how potentially diverse the “pre-Socratics” are, a category that could be taken to include an Afro-Asiatic heritage, one ignored or suppressed by most Western philosophy, as Lewis Gordon recalls.6 To this end, Martin Bernal’s controversial work has done much to posit the lines of influence from Africa to Greece.7

Our periodization and the sources we recognize as instrumental to Christian thought and eventual Christendom might thus take into account Africa and its role in ancient Mediterranean culture and philosophy.8 (This is also to note the eventual centrality of Egyptian Alexandria in theological tradition and even to reclaim Augustine as a North African, both of which require attention in the scholarship.) Allowing for such genealogical links opens up fruitful reconfigurations of inherited thought systems.

For instance, Akan thought provides us with a temporalized, participatory ontology that might find creative resonance with Milbank’s system. In this paradigm, a past founding event exhibits the “thickest” ontology, as the ground of being, while the present, and then decreasingly the future, participate in this origin.9 Visually, we might depict this as a horizontalized chain of being seen in Platonized schemes. Rather than a ladder of ascent, with beings exhibiting varying vertical proximity to and participation in the One as source and/or ground, here the gradation moves horizontally through history.

This accords well with Milbank’s move ad fontes and provides ontological justification for it in a way not supplied by, and possibly in tension with, both the stasis of a vertical scheme and the futurity implied in the developmental and historical manifestation of truth he proffers. The upshot is that rather than a synchronically (because eternally) ranked chain of beings that transports the hierarchy unchanged through history (as in Platonism), all beings in a given historical moment participate equally in the past source of being, standing relatively subordinate instead to preceding generations.10 This perspective may offer a salutary counterpoint to the latent presuppositions of European ontological discourse that included questions about “the place of the savage in the chain of being,” queries that were not ancillary to its overall self-construction.11

This is but one brief example of an alternative ancient sourcing that might allow for cracks in the façade of the unbearable whiteness of being as set forth by Milbank.12 While I don’t share his vision or agenda, it might help his proposal if, in advocating for a participatory ontology, he attended to the possibilities of participation by those outside Europe. More nuanced attention to origins and the polyphony of voices in the invention of orthodoxy may offer imaginative routes forward.

Part 2 of Beyond Secular Order provides a remarkable and insightful exploration of the political, where Milbank expounds on the correlates to the philosophical ideals set forth initially. There is so much to laud and critique. I will only here briefly question the pristination of ancient political thought, idealized as a pragmatic blend of kingly, aristocratic, and general populace interests, mediated by a virtue ethic horizon provided by the ethical aristocracy. As Milbank recalls, almost wistfully: in the ideal condition of ancient Aristotelian norms, “where one man was obviously outstanding [in virtue], it was considered that he should rule, although this notion was generally viewed with sensible ambivalence. On the other hand, if there was an elite body exemplifying the right virtues relevant for politics, then this body should rule” (161).

This state of affairs being before the (post)modern hermeneutic of suspicion, there is no space to ask the obvious (by contemporary standards) question: right virtues relevant according to whom? Clearly it is this elite class that decides that its virtues are in accordance with its ideals, for if the demos was in a position to render such judgment this would imply the conditions of possibility for democracy—or “polity.” Organic, sacramental incorporation into such a body politic apparently requires trust (pistis) by the many that their interests will be beatified through participation in and eventual conformity with the interests of the few. Remarkably, Milbank admits potential for corruptibility among the elite (172), but offers no guidance on discernment except to advocate the training in true virtue, which puts the cart before the horse. Furthermore, predicating corruption assumes an outside from which to render such judgment, which the virtuous aristocracy might disallow.

Milbank heralds “folk tradition” as the ideal repository of virtuous wisdom and practice that should be reclaimed in the face of modern state encroachment (166–67). Perhaps this might be the corrective to a corrupt aristocracy? The problem is that one could defensibly cast lynching as part of folk tradition.13

One way this aristocracy of virtue might extend its governance is hinted to in Milbank’s stimulating excursus on Augustine’s three cities. As Milbank shows, compellingly, Augustine can be read as much more supportive of Rome as trope and as earthly vessel of divine justice and ecclesial administration. Rome is not simply the Rome of libido dominandi and corruption of virtue, but also, per Milbank’s rereading, stands for glory and the “manliness” (234) of true virtue, as a legitimate tool of ruling according to divine plan and purpose.

What is not yet fully persuasive (and in fairness is Milbank’s preliminary sketch to be fleshed out in the next volume) is Augustine’s apparent vision for a plurality of spheres, a variety of overlapping institutions and corporate bodies that aid in distributing justice and training in virtue. These align with Milbank’s call for intermediaries between subjects and the state, for institutional forms that embody the few, the virtuous elite. To the end of clarifying this balance of powers, more could (and perhaps will) be said about Augustine’s carrying forward of a Eusebian vision of sharing in rule, a prominent theme in the latter’s Oration. Milbank identifies a value for sharing that legitimates authentic kingship. This echoes Eusebius’ observation that Constantine’s grandeur is augmented though sharing his rule with his sons and various delegates, a sharing that mimes the Father’s sharing of rule with the Son, and the Son’s co-rule with Constantine.14 Such sharing of power may ground theologically the interlocking spheres of rule limned by Milbank.

The sketch of Augustine here does at least provide some answer to the quandary of aristocratic enforcement of virtue alluded to above. If it is the few who decide what virtue and justice are, according to their interpretation of tradition, how is this to be foisted upon the one and the many if discord arises? At least one tactic emerges, made possible through the mediation of a one-world empire and Augustinian cosmopolis: “‘stern necessity’ in the face of injustice will sometimes require ‘the good’ imperially ‘to make war and to extend the realm by crushing other peoples,’ understood as a form of “international ‘policing’” (230). While this is problematic in its own right, its coincidence with “the project of establishing a global Christendom” (257) is particularly troubling, even more so when a Schmittian “nomos of the earth” is invoked as template!15

I do find Milbank’s presentation of Augustine here interesting, fascinating, and at least preliminarily persuasive. I find refreshing the implication that Augustine continues rather than miraculously and radically diverges from a Eusebian template. This opens up possibilities for rapprochement between Eastern and Western traditions of political theology.16 It also helps establish lines of transference for Eusebian political thought westward and not simply to Byzantium. While Milbank finds the rehabilitated imperial Augustine salutary for his purposes of a theology of ruling, some readers, including myself, might find this as additional confirmation that the Augustinian legacy is to be viewed with deep suspicion.

Overall, Milbank has offered a helpful reprise and a bold and provocative set of new proposals. His project’s openness to asynchronicities and alternative temporalities provides welcome challenge to the fixities of the modern. In eschewing the charge of anachronism (used as a geopolitics of regulation and control),17 his project offers possible sites of productive reconfiguration of the present. To avoid getting in its own way of doing so, it should resist the modern temptation of totalization and embrace the particularity and provinciality of the origins it exalts.

John Milbank invokes Edmund Burke at key points in his brief on behalf of the restoration of Christendom. The epigram—from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—sets an ominous and accusatory tone:

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows.

The “academy” to which Burke refers is a school of instruction in a “barbarous” philosophy: the appalling and disruptive idea that political institutions are human contrivances, not the edicts of an omnipotent divinity, and that underneath all pomp and rectitude lies the vulnerable flesh of human beings:

A king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order . . . Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity.

This iconoclastic rationalism is “the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings” and is “as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance.”1 Once reason reduces monarchy, family, and religion to fables of power, then society will degenerate into an orchestrated anarchy, as individuals vying for self-interest will respect only the terrors of legalized violence. Hence, Milbank contends throughout the volume, the pandemonium of liberal modernity, inaugurated with the French Revolution and continuing for the next two centuries and counting.

Later, Milbank calls again on the Burke of the Reflections, arguing that the only alternative to a further descent into chaos is Burke’s Christian teleological politics—presumably free of coercion and carnage, with no gallows in the groves of its academy—that fuses “the animal, the artificial-historical and the human orientation to their final end in God” (BSO, 182). Milbank rehearses “the most famous of all the passages in [Burke’s] writings” (BSO, 182):

Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible worlds, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and moral natures each in their appointed place.

This “great primeval contract” attests, Burke argues, to “a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection.” It’s a Great Chain of History, this partnership—continuous, Burke implies, with the Great Chain of Being that unites the “visible and invisible worlds”—for it is contracted “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” G. K. Chesterton, that most charming of reactionaries, would later dub this lineage “tradition,” a “democracy of the dead” to counterbalance the weight of “that small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”2

Of course, this means that the present is forever outvoted—and by an accretion of the small and arrogant who themselves once merely happened to be walking about—and Burke’s “partnership” similarly weights the scales against both the living and the unborn. It’s because of this charming mendacity that critics of Burke from Thomas Paine onward have rejected his Reflections as ideological camouflage, servitude to power masquerading as sagacity, propaganda for a decadent ancien regime dressed up in “the equivocal idiom of politeness,” as Mary Wollstonecraft characterized the orotund prose. Whether tagged as a “conservative” or a “patriot” Whig (as Milbank prefers to think of him), Burke cared more for the maintenance of extant hierarchy than for any “tradition.” Perhaps no one knew this better than Burke himself. For all the grandiloquence he lavishes on behalf of the feckless and beleaguered Bourbons, Burke is no dewy-eyed fabulist. Even Paine missed the joke when Burke described Marie Antoinette as “glittering like the morning star,” for he was not paying her a compliment; her dazzle exemplified the decadence of a dynasty too soft to bludgeon its opponents. Later, in one of his Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795), Burke expressed a grudging admiration for the radicals whose “barbarous” philosophy he despised. “In ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors,” he conceded; seeing through the Bourbons’ glamour, they knew a decrepit order when they saw one.3 With a ruling class so indefensible, Burke had nothing but the frippery of eloquence to prettify its injustice and dissipation.

Yet Burke thought the “distinctness” of Jacobinism an iniquity as well as an advantage, and his reasons for preferring obfuscation to transparency shed light, not only on the counter-revolutionary mind, but on the shortcomings of Milbank’s political thought. Burke’s Reflections should not be read apart from his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), where he argues, in effect, for the virtue of ignorance. “It is our ignorance of things,” he writes, “that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions.” A “great clearness” about anything or anyone “is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever.” Get too close or become too curious about a beloved object, idea, or person, and the inexorably depressing result is a thoroughgoing “loathing and weariness.” (The end of “simplicity” would appear to have a similar effect, as the complications produced by knowledge erode the incredulity necessary for obedience to a law whose origins we dare not question.) This unlovely thought reveals much about the depressive psychopathology of conservatism, which seems to consist of a simmering stew of disinheritance, disappointment, and grievance; but what I want to underline is Burke’s political linkage of ignorance and “admiration” in the Reflections. Recall this, the truly most famous passage of all his writings, in which he rhapsodizes “ancient chivalry”:

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal . . . All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature . . . are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.4

Many readers find the sentimentality of those lines unbearable, but we should give the devil his due—Burke tells us quite clearly that the wardrobe of chivalry is comprised of an ensemble of “illusions.” Covering our “naked and shivering nature”—the nature shared by Bourbons and peasants—the costumes of illusion ensure ignorance, obscuring the knowledge that, yes, the king is but a man, and the queen is but a woman, both of whom require a “pleasing” embellishment of lies to guarantee their station. Burke’s keenest fear is that the emperor’s body will be seen through the beguiling but threadbare raiment of political and religious illusion, and that the fabric of the “great primeval contract”—the fraudulent “partnership” of monarchs, nobles, clergy and commoners through the ages—will be unraveled to reveal the naked truth of men and women without rank, status, or title. To “explode” these phantoms with criticism (a jarring but effective change of metaphor) is to peruse and abrogate that contract, discovering in its clauses the illegitimate pretentions of bodies like ourselves.

Like ruling classes and their lackeys everywhere, Burke insists that most of his fellow human animals—“the swinish multitude,” as he hisses in the Reflections—are unfit to manage their collective affairs. When the multitude goes without the “habitual social discipline” of “the wiser, the more expert, and the more opulent,” Burke mused in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791)—a subordination intended, of course, to “enlighten and protect the weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of fortune”—then “they can scarcely be said to be in civil society.” Their daily labors incapacitate the swine for the exalted deliberations of political life. “The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person,” Burke harrumphs in the Reflections, “to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments.” While graciously averring that such rabble “ought not to suffer oppression from the state,” Burke insists that “the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.” “Such as they,” or slaves in the American South, whose masters Burke breezily compared to the citizens of “ancient commonwealths” and “our Gothic ancestors.” An ocean away from the inferno of slavery, Burke could write with the callous insouciance of the clueless that the grandees of mint-julep tyranny tempered their “haughtiness of domination” with a “spirit of freedom” that was invincibly “noble and liberal.” It’s not hard to see why Burke was beloved by John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, George Fitzhugh, and other ideologues of plantation paternalism.5

I’ve dwelled at some length on Burke because Milbank upholds him as a paragon of Christendom—and he is, which says a lot about Christendom—and affirms his “great primeval contract” as an exemplary expression of Christian political ontology. It’s a perfectly apt choice, in its way, for it suggests that Milbank’s version of “Christian socialism” is precisely what Marx derided as “the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heartburn of the aristocrat,” and that the “democratization of exaltation” he envisions (BSO, 269) means the evacuation of democracy. Indeed, the present volume confirms what many have long feared since the publication of Theology and Social Theory (1990), Milbank’s sprawling, provocative, and pugnacious treatise on the ills of and cure for modernity: that what began as an effort to revitalize theology as a form of social and political imagination would evolve into a bizarre and fantastical enterprise in Christian imperialism. Beyond Secular Order is (so far) the most daring and grandiose argument for Christian imperium made in our time outside of fundamentalist circles—the “Christian Reconstructionism” or “dominion theology” that has percolated into American Protestantism is eerily similar but not as highbrow and humane.6 (I say “so far” because Milbank warns us that this book is the prolegomena to a tome entitled—God help us—On Divine Government.) “Radical orthodoxy” has finally culminated in a genteel dominion theology, shorn of the punitive moralism and capitalist economics advocated by Reconstructionists. (If Milbank wouldn’t let gays and lesbians marry, he certainly doesn’t want them stoned to death.)

It’s not as if there weren’t any warning signs of Milbank’s retreat into political chimera. Always combative, Milbank has grown steadily more strident, quixotic, and offensive over the last fifteen years. It’s loopy enough when a theologian of politics turns to J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings as a model for political life in the twenty-first century. (“Monarchic anarchy,” Milbank calls it elsewhere; “no law in the Shire, but the orderly echo of remote kingship”—remote, of course, as long as the hobbits remember their place.) But things get no better when he turns from medievalist fantasia to the realm of history. Christianity, he informs us, is “the sustained source of feminism”—which would be news to the countless suffragettes who encountered little but opposition and vilification from the churches. Unable to restrain his ill-tempered brio, Milbank winds up adopting some truly unedifying and even downright sinister positions. He once referred to liberal Protestantism as “nihilism lite”—a flippant dismissal of a theological lineage whose most courageous political archangel was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then there’s his hysterical opposition to gay marriage, or his equally delirious pronouncement that “the separation of sex and procreation” is a “state capitalist programme of bioethical tyranny.” And consider Milbank’s melancholic twaddle about “the lamentable premature collapse of the Western colonial empires.”7 The white man laid down his Burden too soon, in Milbank’s infallible judgment; the swinish multitudes needed more Euro-Christian tutelage in the disciplines of divine government.

That’s the inexorable terminus of every longing for “Christendom,” and it’s sad to see so learned a theologian waste his mind on so discredited and futile a project, especially as our politics desperately needs a strong and engaging theological presence. Alas, Milbank’s is not that presence. It is strong, to be sure, replete with his ostentatiously encyclopedic erudition and laced with polemical braggadocio. The prose alternates between turgid disputation and romantic evocations of the power of divine love. Calling on Christians to nurture “the steady fire of a confident and yet absurdly hopeful charity” (BSO, 221), Milbank reminds us that

genuine interpersonal love—both erotic and generous—begins as the supernatural love of God for us, which we share in by loving him in return and by echoing this bond in terms of our mutual relations with other human beings and other creatures. (BSO, 222)

Amen; yet it doesn’t warrant the political ontology that Milbank outlines in this book. Milbank’s voice is certainly vigorous (I would say “robust” but that’s one of the most overused words in our theological vernacular these days). But it is also less than engaging, and its unpleasantness stems from the imperious benevolence it so gorgeously and sophistically defends. Committed, like Burke, to a Great Chain of History sanctioned by a Great Chain of Being, Milbank derives an elitist theory of democracy from an “ontology of participation” in a similarly hierarchic and unalterable cosmic order.8 Profoundly suspicious, like Burke, of “the many” yet resigned to their historical achievements, and determined to reinstate some ascendency of the virtuous that he imagines to have characterized “Christendom,” Milbank argues for a democracy of the few: an enfranchised but circumscribed populace, overseen by an aristocracy of righteousness and united in thrall to some principle of monarchy.

It’s a vision without political purchase anywhere save in the groves of the theological academy, where resentful savants of divinity disinherited from cultural preeminence can imagine their restoration. Like other mandarins divested by modernity, Milbank rightly identifies the dynamic hierarchies of money and technology as the culprits of their dispossession. Yet the irony of Milbank’s “Christendom”—embodied ideologically in the “Red Toryism” associated with his former student, Philip Blond—is that far from promoting a new medievalism or a “Christian socialism” (itself of dubious provenance), it assists in furthering the neoliberal project that Milbank claims to abhor. As desperately as we need alternatives to the insidious ascendency of neoliberalism, another round of Christendom is not one of them.

Milbank has never made a secret of his desire to resurrect the broken body of Christendom. He dedicated Theology and Social Theory to “the remnant of Christendom,” at once a reference to the Christendom Trust (now renamed the M. B. Reckitt Trust in honor of its founder)—an Anglican research foundation devoted to “Christian social thought and action”—and also a nod to those longing for the restoration of Christianity to cultural and political supremacy in Europe and in the rest of the world as well. In that first book, Milbank was more concerned to deconstruct “the secular” than to reconstruct a vision of Christendom, so his gestures in that direction were relatively reticent. Over the 2000s, Milbank gradually dropped any pretenses. In a representative 2010 essay, he brashly defended Constantinianism against critics such as John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, characterizing their opposition as “politically disingenuous and theologically dangerous.” (He even threw in a charge of Marcionism for good measure.)9 With “Radical Orthodoxy” as his Fellowship of the Ring, Milbank became the Gandalf of Christian theology, calling for an Army of the West to do battle with the Sauron of liberal modernity.

In Beyond Secular Order, Milbank is straightforward and dismissive in calling for a postmodern renaissance of Christendom. “The idea of Christianity without Christendom is a self-deluding and superficial illusion” (BSO, 233). He writes scornfully of “‘anti-Constantinian’ Christians” who “would have preferred that the Church remain a quasi-Montanist nomadic puritanical sect, whether in the deserts of North Africa or those of New Mexico.” Such fools and cowards display “a somewhat deficient sense of both mission and common humanity” (BSO, 248). As he has in his previous work, Milbank enlists Augustine, citing approvingly the bishop of Hippo’s dictum that Christian emperors should exercise their power “towards the promotion of the ecclesia” (BSO, 228). He even quotes—again, with apparent approval—Augustine’s observation that “stern necessity” will often force “the good” (or to be more specific, the Christian emperor) to “make war and extend the realm by crushing other peoples.” Milbank sees here, not a tragic perversion of the Gospel, but rather “the incarnation of cosmopolis in ecclesia,” a conception of an “international commonwealth” (BSO, 230–31). What Milbank envisions, in fact, is an ultramontane Christian imperium—“peaceful” and “ecumenical” he assures us, superintended by “a symbolic and representative centre of world government” (which replicates “the lapsed imperial role”) that would ideally recognize “the spiritual primacy of the Pope.” This new world order would champion “the collective pursuit of innately desirable human goals”; only in this imperium can humanity be oriented to enter “the eternal kingdom of love” (BSO, 257–61 passim).

To be sure, Milbank suggests an illustrious and seductive prospect, so beautiful that many readers might experience a rapture of theo-political ecstasy. But that’s why we developed that hermeneutic of suspicion that Milbank and his ilk find so nettlesome; it compels us to examine the picture and ask if its loveliness conceals something flawed, even hideous. And when one recalls Milbank’s more outrageous statements about liberal Protestantism as “nihilism lite” or the “lamentably premature collapse” of Western colonialism, a broader and much less enchanting ensemble of possibilities comes into view. Let’s start with Milbank’s invocation of Augustine’s “Christian emperor” who acts with “stern necessity” to promote the church and “extend the realm.” If God acted through Rome in antiquity to spread the gospel and promote the ecclesia, then surely the Western colonial powers who brought Christianity to the indigenous peoples—and whose “premature” departure from their conquests Milbank professes to find so lamentable—surely they were the agents of divine providence? The stern necessities of genocide, slavery, and colonial brutality, atrocious and regrettable as they were, were surely unpleasant but small prices to pay for the global promotion of the ecclesia. Were the slaughtered and commodified natives the unavoidable collateral damage of providence?

And what of those today who oppose the promulgation of the gospel by a Christian state? The dominion theology of Christian Reconstructionists is clear on this point: death. As the theorist of what purports to be a kinder and gentler Christendom, Milbank is elusive on this point. He tells us that the advance of Christendom will provoke “enemies,” but he argues for downgrading their status from “terrorists” to “criminals, who still have souls worthy of saving” (BSO, 260). I feel less than reassured by this. Who are these criminalized enemies? It would appear to include those who do not participate in “the collective pursuit of innately desirable human goals.” But who will identify these goals? And what if—as I sense Milbank is really saying here—it will be Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox who determine them? Will “enemies” then include atheists? Muslims? Liberal Protestant “nihilists lite”? Mennonites, Quakers, and other pacifists who would not defend Christendom with violence? Theologians and philosophers who purvey “univocity,” the ontological position that Milbank and his cohorts consider the modern road to perdition? Surely all of them will be enemies of Christendom, for in one way or another they would deny or inhibit the purpose of the Christian imperium. Will they be jailed? Executed? Sent to camps for re-education in orthodoxy? It would seem that in practice, Christendom would have to be much less “peaceful” and “ecumenical” than Milbank claims.

All of this should end speculation about Milbank’s thinly veiled leaning toward theocracy, an inclination he has long denied but which he might as well stop repressing after this volume. In Being Reconciled (2003) he contended that “theocracy” rests on the very dualism of secular and sacred produced by modernity. “A theory which limits rule only to a sacral class,” he explained, “requires there to be a distinct secular sphere over which to exercise this authority.” On the other hand, he reasoned, “where access to the divine is mediated throughout by an elusive participation [the ‘ontology of participation’ that serves as the substratum of Milbank’s political thinking], the secular is less distinct, and theocracy finds no scope for its peculiar logic” (BR, 175; see also TST, 225, for a brief precursor to this argument). This is pure sophistry: however lissome the elision of the secular, the dualism is still abolished by absorbing the secular into the sacred—the realm where ecclesial hierophants reign.

In Beyond Secular Order, Milbank tries to continue prevaricating, but the pleasing illusion is wearing pretty thin. The slippery move that allows Milbank to avoid an open avowal of theocracy is his insistence that “secular office” must be both inside and outside the church. While “secular office” should remain outside the church in some conveniently hazy fashion, it should also, Milbank maintains, be “also partially located within the Church” (BSO, 229). It belongs inside the church because “political rule, and especially monarchic rule” (for which Milbank demonstrates an unmistakable and extravagant affinity) should “reflect the general order of the cosmos”—a cosmic order apprehended, of course, by ecclesiastical officials and their theological preceptors (BSO, 241). But political office must also sit outside the church because, as the community of divine charity, the ecclesia cannot use coercion or violence to extend its boundaries. “A certain externality of the political to the ecclesial helps to ensure that the latter will remain true to its vocation to be a society of charity without exception” (BSO, 245). Again, this is sophistry, this time a way of keeping two sets of ledgers. If the rulers of the Christian state must employ “stern necessity” to promote the church and “reflect the general order of the cosmos,” the church can claim innocence, for to the extent that “stern necessity” remains external, the ecclesia can dote on its beautiful soul, safe in the knowledge that—as with the Inquisition—no ecclesial fingerprints will be found on the implements of violence and coercion.

If the peaceful ecumenism of Milbank’s Christendom is dubious, so too is the “democracy” that he claims will come into its own in the Christian imperium. Here, the “participatory” ontology and “analogy of being” (analogia entis) that underwrite Milbank’s political imagination are crucial, and they come together in this passage (BSO, 56):

Finite being as such is hierarchical, because it “participates” in various analogical degrees (and in different spheres in different degrees) in that infinite actuality which, for Dionysius the Areopagite, was “thearchy” beyond hierarchy.

Here is Burke’s Great Chain of History (“finite being”) that partakes of a Great Chain of Being (“infinite actuality”); and since “infinite actuality” is itself hierarchical (Pseudo-Dionysius’ and Aquinas’ “celestial hierarchy” of seraphim, cherubim, etc.), then so, by analogy, is “finite being.” The political import is unmistakable: someone has to be in charge, for as Milbank contends, “while the differences of being may often be egalitarian, they can only strike us at all within certain complex hierarchical patterns of overarching and overarched, predominantly influencing and subtly inflecting” (BSO, 56). Equality must always exist within a larger framework of inequality. That’s just the way the world is.

I’m not going to even attempt to adjudicate the controversy over the analogia entis. Thomist scholars such as Ralph McInerny and Fr. Herbert McCabe have argued that analogy in Aquinas concerns the language we use to apprehend the divine, not what the visible world tells us about God. Even if we must use analogies from the world to understand God, they insist that it is dangerously misleading to rely on them too heavily. “We always do have to speak of our God in borrowed words,” McCabe once mused. “He is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well. We always have to be on our guard against taking these clothes as revealing who and what he is.” I’ve long found this more “apophatic” mode of theology congenial, just as I find attractive the agnosticism of Mary Jane Rubenstein about the ontological order that Milbank seems to know so well. “I do not know whether there is a great chain of being or not,” Rubenstein has written, “but I do know what happens when Christians act like there is”: slavery, genocide, and misogyny, for starters, all of which conservatives routinely slough off as the tiresome resentments of liberals.10

For Milbank, the hierarchical nature of finite being is distilled politically in the classical ideal of “mixed government,” a constitution that combines monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—the “the one, the few, and the many” in Aristotle’s formulation that Milbank appropriates. Even though he devotes quite a few pages to a paean to the monarchical principal of “the one” (lamenting the atrophy of “the old dynastic mechanisms,” he remarks that “we need either to preserve or restore them in a new way or find equivalents for them”—“in the interests of democracy,” he adds hastily), he is most concerned about the role of “the few” and what he sees as their plight in liberal democracy. Modern political theory—“which is always liberal political theory,” Milbank emphasizes (even when it’s Marxist or anarchist?)—represents “an attempt to excoriate and remove the role of the few, regarded as the seat of privilege, of non-consensual power, of debatable claims to ethical value and as a threat alike to overall unity and individual liberty” (BSO, 159). It’s the perennial mandarin (first enunciated by Plato in the Republic, and resounding from Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville to Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott) about the fate of the talented and virtuous in a world where democracy levels everyone to rubble. Democracy empowers the illiterate, the workaday, and the boorish, in this view, the masses too busy to enter the shrine of philosophy, the hairdresser who believes herself the equal of a professor of religion and ethics at Nottingham. The resentment is as old as Plato, who expressed his disdain for the Athenian demos in this memorable ejaculation of bile:

For as compared with other occupations, philosophy . . . enjoys a higher prestige, and attracts a multitude of stunted natures, whose souls a life of drudgery has warped and maimed no less surely than their sedentary crafts have disfigured their bodies. For all the world they are like some bald-headed little tinker, who, having come into some money, has just got out of prison, had a good wash at the baths, and dressed himself up as a bridegroom, ready to marry his master’s daughter, who has been left poor and friendless. Could the issue of such a match ever be anything but contemptible bastards? And, by the same token, what sort of ideas and opinions will be begotten of the misalliance of Philosophy with men incapable of culture? Not any true-born child of wisdom.

What was begotten, of course, was democracy, a “contemptible bastard” that landowning families (like the one that begot Plato) were always itching to drown in the Aegean.11

Milbank can protest all he wants that Christianity represents a “democratization of virtue as charity” (BSO, 10) but—as his sourpuss hero Burke demonstrates—nearly two millennia of Christendom did little to mitigate this outraged sense of entitlement, this effrontery at the idea that ordinary people are quite capable of participating in intellectual and political life—given the time and power to do so without interference from the few. Platonism is inexorably an ideology of authoritarian rule, and it’s for that reason, I suspect, that Milbank is artfully ambiguous about “the few” and their role in his renovated Christendom. The few will perform “necessary functions of guidance” and preserve “an objective sense of the human good and its promotion” (BSO, 215, 263). He is not always clear about who “the few” are, writing at one point that he means both “the expanded Christian sense of mediating free associations”—trade unions, professional organizations, hospitals, universities, etc.—and “the antique Greek and Roman sense of the guidance of the wise” (BSO, 263).

Milbank clearly favors this latter “sense,” as becomes clear when he discusses the relationship of the few to “the many” in Christendom. Eager to swipe democracy away from liberals and socialists, Milbank maintains that the hierarchy of Christian imperium, far from smothering democracy, is rather the precondition of its full development. “The viability of democracy,” he insists, “depends upon a continued constitutional commitment to ‘mixed government.’” Since, in a new Christendom, mixed government would be “transfigured” by “the Christian democratization of virtue as charity” (BSO, 10), then all levels of hierarchical human being will be harmoniously leavened by divine love. “The few or the one are ‘identical’ with the many,” he explains, “since they are all involved in a common participation—for the Middle Ages in the body of Christ under the governance of an invisible head” (BSO, 145).

This nimble ontological move enables Milbank to completely redefine democracy. Rooted in his “participatory” ontology, “true” democracy, for Milbank, is not characterized so much by popular agency as it is by popular acquiescence, more or less avid, to the wisdom and will of the few. Because the one and the few are “identical” with the many through analogical participation, they “also ‘represent’ by consent or acclamation the needs and even the will of the many” (BSO, 145, my italics). Milbank equivocates on this score so as to preserve his democratic bona fides. He remarks that direct democracy is possible within “small-scale bodies”: monasteries, workshops, streets and neighborhoods. Indeed, he writes, “at every level, people should be able to shape their own collective lives as much as possible.” So far, so democratic, even anarchist; “but,” Milbank then adds, “the question remains of what options are put to them in the first place.” Put to them, not generated by them. It is not “true to reality,” he argues, that these options should “come from the people themselves”; “it tends to be the dynamic few, from whatever social stratum, who shape and present new options” (BSO, 215–16). (That “from whatever social stratum” is a really adroit move, enlisting the spirit of egalitarianism in its own demise.)

If Milbank were trying to argue that major historical transformations have often been triggered by the thought and action of creative minorities, I would have no objection; history if full of “dynamic few” who shaped and presented “new options”—even anarchists, who possess the most extravagant faith in popular agency without elites, are in present circumstances “the few.” But he wants to say something more: that the creative dynamism of “the few” will always be the sole catalyst of political life. In his idealized Christendom, Milbank wants to institutionalize the spirit of the vanguard—a group that by definition tries to bring others with them, and aiming to no longer be a creative few—and make it an elite, a “few” in stasis. Genuinely popular politics is inconceivable to him—mainly, as he suggests himself, because despite his profession that Christianity “democratizes” virtue, he cannot conceive that virtue and truth are truly open to popular access. Even though Milbank insists at one point that “genuinely educative processes . . . must keep pace with the extension of direct democracy,” he writes later that “the ‘educative’ dimension cannot be itself democratized without an impossible infinite regression” (BSO, 216, 264). I’m at a loss as to what “infinite regression” means; but the crux of the matter appears when Milbank continues that democracy must be complemented by “a non-democratic ‘Socratic’ sense of the importance of the role of the few as pursuing truth and virtue for their own sake” (BSO, 264). The “Socratic sense,” that is, that bald-headed little tinkers are incapable of “philosophy,” that the many cannot possibly pursue truth and virtue for their own sake, mired as they are in everyday labor.

In this way Milbank is able to redefine democracy as popular consent to the wisdom of the few. The few, he assures us, will “respect democracy as the importance of free consent” and as a “majority testing” of elite proposals, but they will “resist any idea that what people want en masse defines the nature of the good itself” (BSO, 263). Milbank never explains why something desired “en masse” is ipso facto not good; like the antique triad of his political ontology, it is asserted or assumed rather than argued. Since all “participate” in the transcendent reality that exceeds their differences, their interests are by definition harmonious, if not identical; and since the one and the few are wise enough to discern the terrestrial import of this participation, they can speak and act on behalf of their many, less sagacious brethren in transcendence. Thus the role of the many in a renewed Christendom will be to accede to policies already formulated for them, not to govern themselves through popular forms of deliberation. The next Christendom will be a democracy of the few, an aristocracy of wisdom and virtue.

What will happen if the many reject or dispute the rule of the one and the few? What if the demos refuses consent, or if, after “testing,” the majority flunks rather than acclaims the proposals of the few? Milbank never really answers these questions—perhaps he will in On Divine Government—but he clearly hints that such misbehavior will be countered with some elite interdiction of popular will. “Sometimes the advice of the few or the will of the one must override the popular will in the interests of equity” (BSO, 263). Just as we never learn how domestic “enemies” of Christendom will be handled, we never learn how this annulment of democracy will be enacted—perhaps through some (educative) exercise of “stern necessity” among the populace.

This transfiguration of democracy into the rule of the few is paralleled by the metamorphosis of “socialism” into a benevolent capitalism. As in his previous work, Milbank advances “Christian socialism” as both a critique and an alternative to the secular socialism of the left. Drawing on Marxist, Romantic, and distributist writers—Marx, John Ruskin, Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Eric Gill—he rejects the view of capitalism as an arduous but necessary phase of history, chastising the modern “left” for embracing its antagonist’s mythology of “progress” and for sanctioning the industrial centralization that pulverizes skill, perverts poesis into productivity, and eviscerates political community.12 I’ve long thought that this form of anti-capitalist critique is both more historically defensible and politically fertile than Marxist “dialectical materialism.” But that’s why his account of “Christian socialism” here is such a huge disappointment, for we need a vibrant and credible alternative to revolutionary socialism and social democracy. In this volume “Christian socialism” amounts to “the extension of chivalry and noble aims to all through the formation of ‘knightly’ guilds of work and trade,” “high standards,” and “virtuous practice” (BSO, 268). All of this is unobjectionable, but it is moral exhortation, not political economy, and it is not “socialism”—unless, as Milbank puts it lamely and abstrusely, socialism means simply “the primacy of ‘the social’ as against the economic or the political” (BSO, 168). Elsewhere, he calls for “the greatest possible equal distribution of private property and a justification of larger private property always in terms of both the specific needs and capacities of different individuals . . . and the fulfillment of functions which genuinely serve the common good” (BSO, 175). Milbank leaves “private property” undefined, even though it must be distinguished from capitalist property if its existence is even to be considered, let alone accepted, as compatible with “socialism.” And there is nothing here about workers’ control of technology, or the abolition of wage labor, or the eradication of class society—all classic demands of socialists (as well as communists and anarchists).

What Milbank seems to be advocating is not socialism but rather a more localized and parochial capitalism. Although he states that “Christian socialism” represents “a ‘left’ reading of Catholic social teaching” (BSO, 268), the scare quotes around “left” are telling: they signal that his reading isn’t really left (since a repudiation of the left-right binary is part of the upshot of “Christian socialism”) but that it’s sort of left in that it contains a critique of capitalism. Yet in both papal-encyclical and lay forms, Catholic social teaching has never been fundamentally antagonistic to capitalism; it has never envisioned anything like a rearrangement of property and class relations, and its ahistorical and flexible account of “private property” has enabled it to embrace capitalist enterprise (with a number of qualifications). Emerging from a sickly Christendom confronted by a burgeoning industrial society, mass democratic politics, a powerful socialist movement, and an emancipatory cultural modernity, Catholic social teaching is best understood as an attempt to graft a medieval moral economy onto a capitalist political economy, an effort that ends either in “Christian democratic” politics (Adenauer in West Germany and De Gasperi in Italy after World War II, who advocated moderate business regulation, a modicum of welfare provision, and moral traditionalism) or in some “corporatist” brand of reaction (Austria under Dollfuss, Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar). Milbank’s references to guilds, chivalry, and the “common good” reflect this medievalist moral imagination, as does his ideological filiation with the “Chesterbelloc,” idealists of all things organic and patriarchal, champions of the yeoman farmer and village artisan.

But when one inspects closely the “Red Toryism” of Milbank’s former student Philip Blond—founder of the think-tank ResPublica and erstwhile guru to Prime Minister David Cameron—the medieval veneer drops to reveal a paradise of the petty bourgeoisie, an arcadia of local accumulators suffused by a magnanimous paternalism. As the political distillation of “Christian socialism,” Red Toryism attempts to separate conservative moralism from neoliberal capitalism, a bond forged in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and in the United States under Ronald Reagan. The antipathy toward corporate globalization, cosmopolitan sensibility, and moral libertarianism is palpable, but it winds up suborning a homespun capitalism, not a distributist retro-medievalism. (Unless, of course, a homespun capitalism was really what distributism was always about.) In the Red Tory republic, public policy would enable small towns and villages to predominate over metropolitan areas; markets would sell products made locally; small farmers and artisans would supplant agribusiness and mechanized production; families (with heterosexual monogamous couples at the head) and voluntary associations would both revive civic life and assume many of the duties now performed by the alienating welfare state.13

Yet although the “big society,” as Blond calls it, would reinstate a hierarchy based on virtue rather than money or technical expertise—the goal, Blond and Milbank have stated, is to “link social and economic prestige with virtue”—the “justifiable inequality” that would result would not, by definition, be onerous or oppressive. As in the larger political hierarchy of Christendom, the virtuous few of the locality—rewarded with “prestige” and superior material wealth—and the not-so-virtuous many would be united in ontological harmony, so the small-town notables (which would include, one imagines, the local clergy) would oversee the common good, mostly free of the intrusive regulations of the distant social-democratic welfare state.14

None of this has a chance of ever happening. (Blond was soon kicked to the curb once Cameron no longer found his guru useful.) Blond and Milbank seem to expect the overlords and institutions of the neoliberal political economy—ensconced in both the Conservative and Labour parties—to simply disassemble and disempower themselves. The idea that Cameron and the Conservative Party would foster or tolerate anything that contravenes the interests of their wealthy donors is preposterous, as is the idea that a “Blue” insurgency could reverse the neoliberal drift of the Labour Party. Ironically, the primary historical significance of Red Toryism will be, I suspect, to have placed an unwitting imprimatur on the advance of neoliberalism by providing a “populist” language with which British social democracy could be further undermined. Its uncritical celebration of “localism” will not in fact empower localities, or even the small-time plutocrats who would rule if they were empowered; it does undermine the state’s welfare and regulatory functions, the last bastions of defense against the neoliberal transmutation of all things and people into commodities.

The fanciful quality of both “Christendom” and “Red Toryism” stems, I think, from the vagaries of a theological intelligentsia displaced from cultural hegemony, a dispossessed clerisy still searching for some kind of relevance to a world in which theology is no longer a lingua franca of intellectual life. It emanates especially from theologians who, conditioned in the mental reflexes of “establishment,” cannot imagine a world without Christians in charge. Especially when experienced at a time when Christians as a whole are in a state of drift and confusion, this fraught sense of displacement and perplexity can lead to compensatory delusions of grandeur. In what has to be one of the most laughably self-important sentences he has ever written, Milbank himself once complained about the burden of the contemporary theologian. “Uncertain as to where today to locate true Christian practice . . . the theologian feels almost that the entire ecclesial task falls on his own head.” Uneasy lies the head that wears a church. But it voices an anxiety that Christians are incapable of bearing the ecclesial task themselves, and that a new church must somehow arise from the febrile intellect of its theologians. It’s the same charge Edmund Burke leveled at the French revolutionaries he condemned as “barbarous,” except that in this case, it’s legitimate: a cadre of intellectuals attempting to create a new order out of their own grandiose lucubrations.

The attraction of Milbank’s reverie is, of course, undeniable, especially in the face of a neoliberal ascendency that reduces everything to pecuniary values. But we should always recall that the first Christendom collapsed, not because of nominalist or univocal theologians, but because of the confusion of faith with credulity, hope with hubris, and love with compassionate domination. Milbank would have us undertake a second venture in dominion in a haze of theo-political incense, assuring us that, the second time around, we will avoid the grotesque mistakes of our forebears. We should resist the siren songs of Constantinian imperium that Milbank and his cohorts compose, and decline their invitation to a vain and self-deluding reenactment of Christian hegemony.