THE WORD MADE

SPECULATIVE? JOHN MILBANKS

CHRISTOLOGICAL POETICS
FREDERICK CHRISTIAN BAUERSCHMIDT
I
In The Word Made Strange
1
John Milbank gathers together essays written over
a fteen year period and molds them together to form a more or less coherent
presentation of his constructive position on the irreducibly linguistic and narra-
tive character of existence and the consequences this has for theology. As such,
the book lls out some arguments only roughly sketched in Theology and Social
Theory, and at the same time moves beyond that books largely (meta)critical
deconstructive narration of modernity to provide a fairly comprehensive set
of hints at Milbanks alternative. This is a book that Milbanks criticsand
they have been legionwill ignore at their peril, for it makes clear that his pos-
ition cannot be contained in any such dismissive categorizations as neo-
orthodox, sectarian or triumphalistic.
2
At the same time, The Word Made
Strange reveals problematic aspects of Milbanks position that I will character-
ize as the ill t between the highly particular content of Christian language
and Milbanks attempt to provide a theological metaphysic, particularly where
this metaphysic draws on Stoic themes. This lack of t can be seen most
clearly in his Christology, in which his desire to make the speculative
excess of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine integral to discourse about
Jesus seems to run the risk of losing its grounding in the stories of the man
Jesus.
Modern Theology 15:4 October 1999
ISSN 0266-7177
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
Department of Theology, Loyola College, 4501 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210, USA
II
The book is arranged in six sectionsArche, Logos, Christos, Pneuma, Ethos,
Poliseach consisting of two chapters. This arrangement is important for
understanding the book, for while Milbank claims (rightly) that each essay
can stand on its own and the essays as a whole might be read in any particu-
lar order, to do so is to miss much of the force of the books argument. That
argument, briey put, is that postmodernism is correct in seeing reality as
fundamentally linguistic, but that this is something that had already been
realized, at least incipiently, in the Christian doctrine of the Triunity of God
and the equiprimordiality of Word and Spirit with the Father. Therefore, the
task for theology at the end of modernity is to rethink itself in light of this,
its own most basic insight.
The rst section, Arche, is an exercise in ground clearing that seeks to liber-
ate God from two modern containments. The rst chapter, A Critique of the
Theology of Right, attacks the Kantian containment of God within the as
if agnosticism of critical philosophy. In opposition to this Milbank argues
for a recovery of a Thomist discourse of participated perfections in a post-
modern, metacritical guise (p. 7). The second chapter, Only Theology Over-
comes Metaphysics, takes up the phenomenological containment of God
represented in the work of Jean-Luc Marion. While Milbank nds Marions
position in many ways congenial, he sees it as insufficiently radical in free-
ing God from the constraints of philosophical discourse because it too readily
grants philosophy the rights to being, leaving God without being. Ap-
pealing again to Aquinas, Milbank argues quite effectively that a Thomist
understanding of esse can offer a non-idolatrous account of Gods beingthat
is, one that does not, in Scotist fashion, suppose a univocal predication of
being to both God and creatures.
3
This ground clearing prepares the way for
a distinctively Christian metaphysics.
The second section, Logos, begins to develop Milbanks constructive alter-
native. The two chapters, Pleonasm, Speech and Writing and The Linguistic
Turn as a Theological Turn, develop, by way of examination of such gures
as Warburton, Lowth, Vico, Hamman, and Berkeley, a Christian account of
language. Milbanks point, which by the end of two chapters has been per-
haps excessively argued, is that there is a Christian metaphysics that sees
reality as fundamentally linguistic. If we understand creation to be ex nihilo
and through Gods Word, this has several important consequences. First,
creation is not a matter of the imposition of form upon a pre-existent sub-
stance but is a generation of forms that are as much material as they are intel-
ligible. Second, if language is primordial, then the distinction between nature
and culture is blurred, if not obliterated. Language (by which we should
understand the entire range of signicant human cultural productions) is not
representative but constitutive of natural realities. Thus the Christian meta-
physics proposed by Milbank might be characterized as an idealist materialism
418 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
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(or a materialist idealism?) in which the generation of conceptual structures
is a process that is coextensive with the generation of material cultural forms.
Here he is following Vicos dictum that the order of ideas must follow the
order of institutions.
4
In the third section, Christos, Milbank takes up the Christian mythos in light
of this view of language. The two chapters in this section, A Christological
Poetics and The Name of Jesus, to which I shall return in more detail below,
seek to display the intrinsic connection between the person and work of Jesus
and the poetic activity of the church. This involves a rethinking of Christ-
ology in such a way as to insert a genuinely new moment of poesis in the
churchs non-identical repetition of the practice inaugurated by Jesus.
The fourth section, Pneuma, pursues the path embarked upon in the previ-
ous section in presenting the Spirit as the link between divine and human
poesis. In The Second Difference Milbank argues that only an account of
the Trinity that takes seriously the linguistic character of the relationship
between Father and Son can sufficiently account for the need for the second
difference of the Spirit. For since language is never simply representational
but always interpretive, the Spirit stands in that interpretive gap between
Father and Son. The Spirits immanent Trinitarian role is mirrored economic-
ally as the guarantor of the Churchs poetic imitation of Christ as exem-
plar. In The Force of Identity Milbank moves from an explication of Gods
Spirit to an analysis of the human spirit, by way of an exegesis of certain texts
from Gregory of Nyssa. Not unlike his earlier argument that a thorough-
going theological metaphysics will eschew any understanding of reality as
rooted in stable substances, here Milbank argues that a thoroughly theo-
logicaland especially Trinitarian and pneumatologicalaccount of identity
will focus on ux and movement rather than on a stable self.
These views are further expanded in the fth section, Ethos. To the ques-
tion posed in the essay title Can Morality be Christian? Milbank answers
no on the grounds that Christian morality is a thing so strange, that it must
be declared immoral or amoral according to all other human norms and
codes of morality (p. 219). After this provocative beginning, the essay pro-
ceeds to argue that morality is fundamentally a matter of the containment
and mastery of an originary violence through the use of a counter-violence,
whereas Christianity rejects the mythos of original violence in favor of cre-
ation ex nihilo. Thus unlike morality, Christianity stresses the original plenti-
tude of divine gift so as to make Christian virtue a matter not of containment
but of the proliferation of acts of charity. We can see here how the view of
human action sown in A Christological Poetics bears fruit in ethics. Simi-
larly, in the following essay, The Poverty of Niebuhrianism, we see the
linguistic ontology put forward in section two (Logos) play a crucial role in
critiquing Christian realism, as represented by Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhrs
mistake, according to Milbank, is to think that there is some neutral reality
that constrains the possibilities of realizing the Christian narrative in history.
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Against this Milbank argues that in light of the resurrection, the Christian
story simply is reality. There is no independently available real world against
which we must test our Christian convictions, because those convictions are
the most nal, and at the same time the most basic, seeing of what the world
is (p. 250).
The nal section, Polis, deals with questions of social ethics. The rst
chapter of the section, Out of the Greenhouse, offers a critique of green
theologies that follows logically from the preceding chapters. If language is
not simply representative but constitutive of reality, and therefore the line
between nature and culture is blurred, then appeals, so common in eco-
theology, to nature as the bearer of its own intrinsic value actually undercut
the serious project of understanding how human beings should relate to other
creatures. The nal chapter in the book, On Complex Space, goes some ways
toward spelling out the concrete social alternative that Milbank hinted at
throughout Theology and Social Theory. This turns out to be a non-marxist, de-
centralized socialism that seeks to steer a path between the brutal oppression
of organicist fascism and the banal freedom of liberal capitalism. Again, the
emphasis is upon language and culture as constitutive of the very structure
of realitythus Milbanks advocacy of the complex space of civil society
as constitutive of both state and individual.
III
Such a brief summary misses the richness of these essays, each of which con-
tains numerous brilliant hints and suggestions, casually tossed off in passing.
These essays equally contain many arguable points of interpretation,
5
a few
errors of (if I may use the term) fact,
6
and a number of downright dangerous
ideas.
7
There is something in this book for everyone to disagree with. How-
ever, rather than enumerate all these points, I have tried to sketch each essay
in order to give a sense of the overall movement of the book. For, as I said at
the outset, these essays make a sustained argument about what theology
should look like at the close of modernity; they present a picture of the task
of theology and it is with regard to this overall picture that I would like to raise
some questions.
In a number of places Milbank indicates that a key element in his theo-
logical project is the retrieval in Christianity of certain themes from Stoicism.
8
In particular, Milbank appeals to the Stoic notion of the lekton, the incorporeal
sign that signies not according to some dictionary denition by which it
refers to some non-linguistic thing, but through its connotation of an entire
mobile continuum of other signs (p. 89). Thinkers such as Augustine, accord-
ing to Milbank, are willing to follow the Stoics only part way down this path.
Thus in his Trinitarian thought Augustine is willing to present the person of
the Logos as constituted by a relation, but with regard to actual human lan-
guage he retreats into an Aristotelian linguistic rationalism in which signs
420 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
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are denotative rather than connotative (p. 90). Milbank might be seen as
attempting to push Augustine to extend the Stoic account of language that
he maintains regarding the Trinity to encompass all language, and thus to
overcome the instrumental view of language and ultimately to display a
metaphysics in which substance is replaced by relation. Such a Stoicized
Christian theology has obvious resonances with postmodern linguistic anti-
realism. I want to make clear that Milbank is not saying that Christian the-
ology must simply be reconciled with either Stoicism or postmodernism.
However, inasmuch as Milbank does want to re-emphasize the Stoic reson-
ances of Christian theology, there is something about this that might give us
pause.
Amos Funkenstein notes that, for Stoicism, just as terms assume their
precise meaning from the context of a propositionthe whole proposition is
the sign of a unit of meaning (

)so also the propositions become

clearer only in the context of discourse, so that the various

are actually
part of one grand concatenation of propositionsthe logos itself.
9
This
logical structure is mirrored by the Stoic metaphysics, in which each
discrete portion of matter, each identiable body, was held together by the
tension (

) of its interdependent parts; and all forces were particular

instances of one and the same force that permeates and unites allthe
Pneuma. The Pneuma is both divine and mundane, spiritual and material.
10
Given this Stoic logic and metaphysics, it can be seen why early Christian
thinkers so readily took up Plato (and medieval Christians Aristotle) rather
than the Stoics: Admitting the physical, equal, homogeneous presence of
God everywherewith or without a material substratecould amount to a
relativizing of Christology (God would be in each of us equally) and make
the sacraments and the hierarchical Church superuous.
11
Whether Funkenstein is right about the Christian rejection of Stoicism or
not, his claim points out some of the theological difficulties posed by a logic
in which connotation entirely supplants denotation and a metaphysics that
emphasizes ux and tension over substance. Can we still use the name Jesus
to speak ofto refer toa particular person? In a world in which bodies
are simply temporary instantiations of pneumatic tonos, can we speak of
the church as an entity with historical and institutional continuity? Is it
possible to understand the self no longer as a hylomorphic composite, an
ensouled body, but rather as the force of identity and not diminish or even
eliminate the moral signicance of our specic embodied actions? In short,
how would a Stoicized Christian ontology relate to the concrete particulars
of Christian faith and practice? The difficulties posed may not be in-
surmountable, and indeed Milbank undertakes to show that they are not.
The question remains, how successful is this undertaking? Christology may
serve as a test case.
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IV
Milbanks concern with the primordial, non-instrumental character of our
linguistic being leads to some extremely interesting, even brilliant, Christo-
logical reections. In the chapter A Christological Poetics Milbank stresses
the poetic character of human existence and explores how Jesus Christ is
to be understood in this context (p. 123). Milbank develops this account of
poesis under three headings. Under the rubric of poetic activity he uses his previ-
ously developed account of pleonasm or repetition-with-variety (p. 65)
to account for the way in which human activity always outstrips itself through
poetic productions that exceed the agents intention. This self-exceeding activ-
ity is also the basis of poetic understanding. Milbank draws on Vico and others
to argue that human beings understand primarily through images and meta-
phors, from which more abstract concepts are derived. Human poetic activity
produces concrete universals as a measure and telos for human activity
(p. 128). Finally, in discussing poesis and praxis he argues that our ethical
activity always occurs within the bounds afforded by our poetic represen-
tations (p. 129). For instance, our ability to conceive of the good of heroism,
and therefore to act heroically, is bounded by our stories and images of heroes.
At the same time, our attempts to embody these stories may exceed the prior
bounds (because of the nature of poetic activity itself) and thus we are always
pushed toward deeper and more adequate conceptions of the human good.
This poetic account of human existence leads into an account of the poetic
encounter with God, in which the fact that our cultural products confront
us and are not truly in our control or even our gift allows that some-
where among them God of his own free will nds the space to confront us
(p. 130). But this confrontation is not one between two things. Earlier, in
characterizing and affirming Hamanns position, Milbank says: Since God
is genuinely transcendent and not a mere higher transcendental reality with-
in the same order as us, he never confronts the creature in an I-thou relation
but always addresses the creature (from the beginning and always) as the
expressive self of this and other creatures (p. 74). Milbank is here attempt-
ing to dismantle the opposition between identity and alterity by stressing that
it is precisely that which is most our own (the products of our cultural making)
that is most un-possessable and thus most not-our-own. The otherness of
God is poetically and Christologically recongured so as to account for God
being, in Augustines terms, interior intimo meo or, perhaps more appositely
in Nicholas of Cusas terms, non-aliud. What Milbank offers is a non-competi-
tive account of the relationship between divine and human activity; the
natural excess of human poetic activity is simultaneously the supernatural
activity of God. Thus the poetic quest for an adequate human telos becomes
the quest for God and, moreover, Gods quest for us. Revelation is not an
imposition from outside poesis but is the surplus within poesis itself.
12
At
the same time, in the quest for a truthful representation of the divine image
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we are subject to the innite power of God upon the nite reality of our rep-
resentations of his glory, resulting in the constant progress from image to
image, each modifying the other in turn (p. 133)a kind of poetic epektasis.
Ultimately revelation must consist not of a particular word spoken by
God, one word among others, but of the created order as one grand con-
catenation of propositions, the sum total of lekta apprehended as ordered by
the Logos of God.
13
Milbank then turns to Christ as simultaneously (and non-competitively)
divine and human utterance, the Word spoken by the Father and the fruit of
Marys at. As divine utterance, Jesus is the absolute origination of all mean-
ing, but as human utterance Jesus is inheritor of all already constituted human
meanings (p. 136). Thus Christ is the privileged gura of God, without ceas-
ing to be entirely a human being. In him the poetic boundaries of human be-
havior are denitively established, but this establishment is at the same time
fraught with paradox because Christ is a sign that is broken on the cross: all
the signs he offers us are broken signs that offer their internal asymmetry as
a testimony to their own inadequacy and to the innite distance between hu-
manity and God (p. 137). On the cross Christ redenes beauty as the incorp-
oration and transguration of the ugly (p. 139).
Because Christ is denitive of the true poetic bounds of behaviour the
priority of Christ over charity must be maintained if one is to avoid too
abstract a notion of charity which may veer between too purely an ethical
idea of an intuited responsibility, and too purely a technical idea of a pre-
dened duty. We can glimpse the possibility of charity as a creative good-
ness which forever presents man with new and appropriate opportunities in
particular situations because we already perceive in Christs entire activity
the plenitude of such a performance: all our work, already made, in advance of
us. In other words, what Milbank calls the accuracy of charityperhaps
we might say the efficaciousnesscannot be known at rst as an abstract
possibility, but only as an already realized one (p. 137). It seems to me that
here Milbank is at his closest to Marion and others who [i]n the traditions
of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle thologie, seek to think God through the
pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God in himself (p. 36).
Abstract notions of charity must be subordinated to Christ, the concrete uni-
versal through whom we have perfect charity represented to us.
14
Yet it seems that it is precisely at this point that certain difficulties arise.
Despite the fact that Milbank posits the priority of Christ over charity, the
actual practice of Christ remains largely unnarrated. And this is not, it seems,
accidental. The direction of Milbanks Stoicized Christian metaphysics
leads away from putting undue emphasis on the specics of Jesus life in favor
of stressing his relations, his position within the concatenation of signs. Mil-
bank writes that [b]ecause Christs person is present only in and through
his work, this means that it is present in the relations that he enters into with
other people and the things of this world (p. 140). The meaning of the lekton
The Word Made Speculative? 423
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Jesus depends on its place within a network of relations, not on a reference
to a thing.
This means that Jesus is dened as we continue to form the image of
Christ through our non-identical repetition of his practice of charity. Part of
what Milbank means when he speaks of the word made strange is the way
in which the church can feel again, the authentic shock of the divine word
by performing it anew, with variations (p. 1). One cannot narrate the practice
of Jesus without narrating the subsequent practice of the church, which prac-
tice itself consists of a poetic renarration. In a sense, Milbank is merely empha-
sizing here the catholic view that the whole Christthe totus christusincludes
both head and members.
15
Thus his remark that Christs full incarnate ap-
pearance lies always ahead of us (p. 152). Or, to draw on another traditional
catholic theme, he seeks to remind us that the three-fold Body of Christ in-
volves the mutual indwelling of the ecclesial and sacramental bodies with
the natural, historical body of Jesus.
16
However, Milbank seeks to push all this
to a new level, to posit a logical (and even temporal, see p. 152) priority of the
ecclesial body over the natural, a priority that is of a piece with the priority of
connotation over denotation in language. This raises the question of whether in
Milbanks theology, as James Buckley has put it, the word made strange does
not eclipse the word made esh.
17
V
In attempting to spell out the relationship between Christ and the church,
Milbank explicates and defends the thesis that one can retrieve this doctrine
[i.e., of the atonement], along with a high view of Christs person, precisely
by focusing more upon the Kingdom than upon Jesus (p. 148). In shifting
the priority from Jesus to the Kingdom, or the universal community
which he seems to identify with the churchMilbank seeks to avoid the
extrinsicism that often attends articulations of incarnation and atonement:
God takes esh and dies for us, and this is somehow supposed to make some
existential difference for us, but the connection is never articulated. His ques-
tion is how can incarnation and atonement be communicated to us not as
mere facts, but as characterizable modes of being which intrinsically demand
these appellations? (p. 148). Transposing this question into a Wittgensteinian
idiom, one might ask: what forms of life not only allow but require the lan-
guage games of incarnation and atonement? And his answer is that form of
life called church. To put it baldly, for Milbank what the gospels are about
is not Jesus-as-subject, but the origin of a form of life, which point of origin-
ation we mark with the name Jesus.
18
Again, Jesus signies not because
it is tied to a particular individual, but because it occupies a certain place
indeed a central or originating placewithin a web of signication.
Milbank thus distances himself from the position of Hans Frei, who speaks
of the gospels as history-like narratives that render for us the identity of the
424 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
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person Jesus.
19
In contrast to Frei, Milbank maintains that [t]he gospels can
be read, not as the story of Jesus, but as the story of the (re)foundation of a new
city, a new kind of human community, Israel-become-the-Church. He goes
on to say, Jesus gures in this story simply as the founder, the beginning, the
first of many (p. 150). Jesus is, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau,
the inaugurating rupture from which issues the ever-differing practice of
the church.
20
As the point of origin of a new practice, Jesus cannot be given
any particular content, rather, all we can do is to identify him with the general
norms of that practice (p. 152). Christianity makes its affirmations about the
real through the repetition of a formal becoming, a structured transformation
(p. 152), which is rendered for us in the gospel narratives of the cross as
Jesus utter refusal of selsh power (p. 153). These narratives, despite the
fact that there is a certain specic avour of personality binding the various
incidents and metaphors are nonetheless essentially formal statements
about, and general instructions for, every human life (p. 156; cf. p. 149).
This is where Milbank shows the compatibility of his position with a high
Christology. Jesus is not a realistic character because his characterhis
personis that of God. To identify Jesus with that which is always tran-
scendentally presupposed, is to evacuate that person of any particular,
speciable content (p. 150). Well, this certainly is a high Christology, but
Christological error moves in both directions. Therefore we must ask whether
Milbanks Christological position amounts to, if not docetism, at least a mono-
physite absorption of Christs humanity into his divinity.
Milbank says that for reasons belonging to the logic of discourse we must
reject the language of absorption, and say instead that what we have in
Christ is an assumption of a human nature by the divine person. Thus far
he is presenting a classically Thomist high Christology (see ST 3.17.12).
Then he goes on to say, All that survives that is particular in this assump-
tion is the proper name Jesus (p. 150). What does Milbank mean by this (to
my mind) puzzling claim? At least part of what he means is that the
primary narrative of the man Jesus is overtaken by the metanarrative of
the incarnate Logos, so that by the time we reach the story of Jesus handing
over to death the metanarrative commentary actually merges with the pri-
mary sequence of events so that not just the person of Jesus alone, but ap-
parently the whole history of Jesus with Judas, Peter and the other disciples
is assumed out of normal temporality into a vertical drama about cosmic sal-
vation (p. 146). The name Jesus remains as a cipher marking this point of
assumption, not unlike Jesus footprints left behind on the Mount of Olives.
But does this assumption in fact amount to an absorption (concerns over the
logic of discourse aside)? While Milbank maintains that the name of Jesus
is not dispensable, does the same hold for the particular events concerning
Jesus (and Judas and Peter)? Yes, but only because they enshrine and con-
stitute the event of a transformation which is to be non-identically repeated,
and therefore still made to happen (p. 153). In other words, the narrative
The Word Made Speculative? 425
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forms of the Gospel must be submitted to the ascesis of abstraction so as to
reveal the formalitythe aspiration to provide universal, normative con-
textsof all the most particular, most intense, most momentous, most genera-
tive and therefore most abstract events of history (p. 154).
This is not, let us note, a liberal reduction of the gospels to some set of
universal principles, along the lines of the Fatherhood of God and the brother-
hood of man. In classic liberal Christianity such principles are thought to
have an advantage over the positivity of the gospel narratives because they
coincide with what can be known through common human reason and thus
can be embodied by anyone, anywhere. For Milbank, on the other hand, the
event of transformation marked by the name Jesus is the constitution of
a polis whose aim is sociality and conviviality itself; it is the playing of
the continuous music of community (p. 154). Jesus signies not bland,
universal brotherhood to be practiced by individuals, but a social practice that
is communally embodied. The question is, what does it mean to aim at some-
thing as abstract as sociality and conviviality itself? How, armed with only
the name of Jesus, might one discern, amidst the many and varied modern
quests for community, where one nds the church?
The answer to this question proves elusive. The church is the Other Space
of our history (p. 285), but it seems a remarkably elusive space. It is not a space
dened by Papal institutionsnor, it seems, by the Petrine office. Neither is
it dened by a certain mode of life that could be codied, since, according to
Milbank, the resurrection cancels death, and appears to render murder non-
serious and thereby restores no moral order, but absolutely ruins the possi-
bility of any moral order whatsoever (p. 229). Both Christian institutions
and Christian morality suffer the same evacuation of content as the name
Jesus. Indeed, it seems that apart from a more robust account of the human
particularity of Jesus, the church that is his body, and its mode of life in the
world, is condemned merely to oat above the messy world of ecclesiastical
institutions and laws. Or, perhaps put better, its identity is subject to the same
ux as personal identity.
VI
Put perhaps most plainly, Milbank simply fails to make his case that Jesus is
not the ascriptive subject (to use Freis term) of the gospel narratives and his
attempt to shift the subject matter of the gospels away from Jesus and on to the
church burdens the church with a load it cannot bear. It is true that Jesus is
not a character in the sense one nds in a nineteenth-century novel, and it is
also true that the story of Jesus exceeds the boundaries of his human life
by virtue of his resurrection. But this does not mean that the story does not
remain in some determinative sense the story of Jesus. Thus in Lukes
account of the road to Emmaus, the story that the two disciples tell is the
426 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
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story of the things that happened to Jesus of Nazareth (Lk. 24:19). And
though Jesus breaks open that narrativejust as shortly he will break the
breadso as to include within it the story of Israel (Lk. 24:27) and to invite
the two unnamed disciples to become a part of it, it still remains funda-
mentally his story.
It is not so much that Milbank is wrong when he claims that the gospels en-
shrine an event of transformation that is the genesis of the church; rather,
he poses a false alternative when he says that one may read the gospels either
as the story of Jesus or as the foundation of the pilgrim city. One might argue
that it is precisely when the church has failed to attend to the gospels as the
story of Jesus that the path has been opened to some of its most dramatic un-
faithfulness. It is when Jesus is evacuate[d] of any particular, speciable
content and his story is taken as a set of essentially formal statements about,
and general instructions for, every human life that the gospel narratives lose
any critical edge. Despite their hermeneutical unsophistication, the movement
of the Spirit is often manifested most clearly in gures such as Francis of Assisi,
Ignatius of Loyola, Dorothy Day, Franz Jaegerstetter, and Christian de Cherg
who quite atfootedly seek to repeat the actions of Jesus, as Francis put it in
his Testament, without gloss. Of course, such repetition is always non-iden-
tical. It is done in different times and different places by different people. But
in the case of the saints this does not bury Jesus of Nazareth beneath a palimp-
sest of difference, but it brings him into even sharper relief. And this is be-
cause the saints have sought to make themselves transparent to the mystery
of Jesus Christ, and not simply to the Jesus whose story has been assumed
into a cosmic drama, but to the Word made esh. The depiction of Jesus
receives a certain canonical intractability in the four gospels that requires
Christians constantly to return to these stubborn texts and, as it were, to place
themselves under their judgement. This is not to ascribe agency to the texts
themselves, but to say that God acts to make these texts the word of the
Lord.
If we attend to the lives of the saints, what we see is passionate love for
Jesus Christ spilling over in imitation of him into love for the members of his
body. The two forms of love are not separable, as the rst letter of John, and
indeed scripture as a whole, reminds us, but they are distinguishable. In fact,
they must be distinguished if we are to speak of Christ as head and lord of
the church and if the relationship between Christ and the church is to pos-
sess the nuptial character described by Ephesians 5:2532. The church of
necessity repeats Jesus actions differently, but she also seeks to repeat them
faithfully. It is not clear to me that Jesus as the degree zero of a new practice
is sufficient to account for this dynamic. Or, to shift back to the terms of
Stoic logic and metaphysics, the language of faithfulness seems to imply
not simply a decorous assemblage of mutually connotative terms, but the
stubborn attempt to make our invocation of the name Jesus in some sense
refer to the one who lived and died some two thousand years ago, and to
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one who is risen so as to stand over and against a community that is often
unfaithful.
Milbank seems to sense this. Toward the end of The Name of Jesus he
issues several qualications that seem to restore some content to the person
of Jesus. Thus he writes, it is nonetheless not quite the case that we are here
instructed to copy precisely that model which is left wholly undescribed
We have only a frugal outline, painted in clear primary colourssomewhat
quattrocentroyet this sketch still holds us with a certain quality that per-
suades us to take seriously its abstract import (p. 158). Also, Milbank notes
that the speculative excess of Christian doctrine serves to conserve the
sense of divine personhood and body of Christ as over against the Church
(p. 163). In passages such as these he perhaps moves a bit closer to Freis
viewand, I would argue, to the orthodox Christian viewof Jesus as the
ascriptive subject of the gospel stories. This move seems forced upon him by
the ill t between the purported contentlessness of the name Jesus and the
actual practice of Christians with regard to that namea practice that pro-
ceeds as if that name belongs to a person whom one can both know and know
about. Yet this attempt to return some content to the name Jesus is not really
integrated into Milbanks overall theological project.
VII
Some more light is shed on this issue if one looks at the Trinitarian, and there-
fore ontological, underpinnings of Milbanks Christology as displayed in The
Second Difference. This chapter attempts to bridge the gulf between the con-
dent proclamation of the Spirit as a separate hypostasis, and the lack of an
adequate rationale for this separation (p. 171) by understanding the Spirit in
relation to the Logos as a receptive comprehension or judgement constituted
through the comprehended image, yet retroactively causal for the form of that
image itself (p. 187). This issues in what Milbank describes as a Pneuma-
tology in terms of an aesthetics of reception in which [t]here is a dynamic
surplus that surpasses the formal object and constitutes subjectivity (p. 188).
This understanding of the relationship of Word and Spirit grounds Milbanks
version of poesis and therefore his Christology. The Spirit is the supplement
at the origin that makes it impossible to conceive of the Word as possessed
of a stable, given meaning; it is what makes sense connotative rather than
denotative. This leads Milbank to speak of a relationship of retroactive caus-
ality, in which it is the response of the Spirit/Bride that is constitutive of the
Word/Son. Milbanks scheme presents us with Trinitarian relations that are
characterized by (to borrow terms from Gerard Loughlin) processional in-
determinacy and omni-directionality.
21
Thus the questions I have tried to raise regarding the relation of Christ and
the church and the person of Jesus are rooted in prior questions concerning the
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relationship of Word and Spirit. Just as Milbanks emphasis on the Spirits
act of reception of the Word reverses the normal direction of Trinitarian caus-
ality, so too his emphasis on the Spirit-constituted churchs non-identical
repetition of the practice of Jesus reverses the normal relationship between
head and body. And the objective indeterminacy of the Spirits reception
it is the dynamic surplus of the Spirits act of judgement concerning
the Words form that surpasses the formal object and constitutes subject-
ivity (p. 188)means that it is impossible to speak of Jesus apart from that
reception.
This display of Milbanks Trinitarian ontology raises the question of whether
we have a case here of the philosophical tail wagging the theological dog.
The essays in The Word Made Strange might be thought to move in two direc-
tions: ontology is defamiliarized by being read through a Christian theology
of the Word made esh, and the Word is defamiliarized by being brought
into contact with Milbanks linguistic ontology. Yet while Milbank posits an
oscillation between the formally distinguished moments of narrative and
of speculative conceptualization (see his critique of Kasper, pp. 178180), it is
the former moment that usually seems to receive short shrift. One need not
wish to turn primary discourse and practice into a foundational point of refer-
ence (p. 179) in order to note the thinness of Milbanks account of Jesus, Chris-
tian morality, or the sacramental and institutional life of the church. On an
uncharitable reading, which I do not wish to give, Milbank presents us with a
postmodern philosophy tricked out in Christian theological languagea kind
of postmodern version of Hegels project. On a more charitable reading, one
must at least note that at times Milbanks commitments to certain philosophical
positions regarding language push him in directions that seem to run counter
to the stories and practices of the church, which movement is then subjected
to a later containment that often seems arbitrary. As I have noted, toward the
end of The Name of Jesus Milbank issues several qualicationsif not
retractionsthat move him closer to positions, such as Freis, that he had
earlier rejected as neo-orthodoxy. Similarly in The Second Difference he
retreats from a nihilistic version of the aesthetics of reception by asserting that
the categories of reception, and so the constitution of the receiving subject,
are entirely derived from privileged, selected dimensions of nonetheless ob-
jectively recognizable patterns of structuration (p. 188). And in Can Moral-
ity be Christian?, after the sweeping statement that the resurrection ruins
the possibility of any moral order whatsoever, he rather tamely adds, [t]hat
is to say, any reactive moral order, which presupposes the absoluteness of
death (p. 229). Such discursive hiccups seem to be a result of primary dis-
course and practice reining in speculative excess, yet because Milbanks
presentation of his linguistic ontology is so much more powerful than his
thin narration of Christian practicenot to mention the person of Jesusone
is left wondering whether it does not simply represent a loss of postmodern
nerve.
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VIII
Might one recognize a moment of speculative excess in Trinitarian and Christo-
logical languagemeaning that in performing the scriptures one does not
engage simply in transposition but in Spirited improvisationwhile at the
same time preserving a certain priority of story and practice to speculation?
Milbank himself recognizes this possibility in appealing to objectively recog-
nizable patterns of structuration, which seems to imply that while the text
of Gods salvation in Christ through the Spirit is subject to an innite number
of possible interpretations or performances, this does not mean that every
interpretation is valid or that all performances are equally worthwhile. These
patterns of structuration may remain dead letters apart from the life-giving
activity of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:6), but it is necessarily these patterns that must
be brought to life by the Spirit. To keep with the metaphor of performance,
we might say that the activities of transposition, improvisation, and compos-
ition represent a continuum without neat divisions, and that the line between
improvisation and composition is not simply given in the musical score,
while at the same time maintaining that it is only through reference to the
original score that we could ever hope to distinguish between improvisa-
tion and composition.
Milbanks desire to provide a fully-blown Trinitarian ontologynot to
dissociate, la Marion, God from Beingis understandable, particularly
given the false humility of modern theology that he so brilliantly analyzed in
Theology and Social Theory. But perhaps there is a more genuine theological
humility that involves a stubborn cleaving to the very particular stories of Jesus
and to the practices that grow out of those stories. This is not to renounce the-
ologys speculative moment, for such renunciations simply mask back-door
importations. But it is to suggest that theological speculation might proceed
in a more ad hoc, Christologically focused, manner. This need not take the form
of a Barthian rejection of metaphysics. One might imagine something more
along the lines of Aquinas, in which one offers a full-blown, theologically in-
formed ontology, while at the same time paying scrupulous attention to the
mysteries of the life of Christ. There is more than one way of being philosoph-
ically ad hoc.
Milbanks discursive hiccups may indicate that his practice is in fact
more ad hoc than it rst appears. On the other hand, they may indicate that
what we have here is a kind of neo-stoic linguistic ontology that continues to
run up against certain Christian convictions. Which of these is the case is un-
clear, lacking a more richly developed account of Jesus and a more concrete
account of the church and the Christian life. However it is clear that a Trini-
tarian ontology that adopted a true theological humility would need a
closer attention to and description of the things that happened to Jesus of
Nazareth. Lacking this, it is difficult to see how Milbanks linguistic
ontology, whatever its virtues, can ever inform Christian practice. That being
430 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
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the case, it runs the risk of remaining in the realm of the merely
speculative.
NOTES
1 The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
2 For a sense of the critical reception that Theology and Social Theory has found, one can look
at the special issues devoted to Milbank of several journals. See New Blackfriars, vol. 73,
no. 861 (June 1992); Modern Theology, 8:4 (October 1992); and Arachne 2:1 (1995).
3 This is a point with which Marion now seems to agree. See Brian J. Shanley, O.P., St. Thomas
Aquinas, Onto-theology, and Marion, The Thomist 60 (1996), pp. 617625.
4 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico 238, Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold
Fisch, trans., rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 78. To get a sense of the
formative inuence of Vico on Milbank, see John Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the
Thought of Giambattista Vico, 16881744, 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press,
19911992).
5 E.g., Did Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council really have a tendency to bap-
tize modernity wholesale (p. 270)?
6 E.g., Aquinas, in ST 1.1.4, does say that sacra doctrina is both practical and speculative, but
he also clearly says that it is primarily speculative (since it is concerned with what God does
more than with what human beings do). Thus he does not deny that reason and intel-
ligibility have any priority over existential activity (p. 14).
7 E.g., Milbank says that in Christs eucharistic giving, he opens himself out to recruci-
xion (p. 141)an extraordinarily bad piece of eucharistic theology that confuses the
historical body of Jesus of Nazareth with his sacramental body. One might say that in the
Eucharist Christ offers himself anew to the Father (though some mention of anamnesis
would clarify things here), but this offering is clearly made through the action of the
sacramental rite, not the nailing of his body to the cross.
8 Thus Milbank says in a note: An important project for postmodern theology might be to
Spinozize Augustine, so as to make him more materialist, but in a fashion playing upon
the Stoic resonances in both thinkers (p. 166, n. 13).
9 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientic Imagination From the Middle Ages to the Seven-
teenth Century, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 3839.
10 Ibid., pp. 3738.
11 Ibid., p. 45.
12 While one might ask whether this account of revelation can give sufficient density to the
language of divine agency, there is clearly a sense in which Milbanks point is an unob-
jectionable articulation of the classical Christian understanding of Gods transcendence.
As Brian Davies has pointed out, the Thomist tradition has always sought to conceive of
divine action in such a way that it does not occasion any change in God, understanding
divine activity to be analogous to a human activity such as teaching, in which the teacher
is the agent, but that agents action is in fact tied to a change that occurs in the student. Or,
as Davies puts it, the action of the agent is in the patient (The Action of God, New Black-
friars, Vol. 75, no. 879 [February, 1994], pp. 7684. Cf. Herbert McCabe, The Involvement of
God in God Matters [London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987], pp. 3951). Likewise, the notion
that God does not confront us with a Thou has resonances with the Thomist position that
Deus non est in genera.
13 Note here the difference from Stoicism, for which the sum total of lekta simply is the Logos.
Milbank clearly wishes to reject the Stoic (and Spinozistic) identication of God and nature.
14 Another way to put this is that Milbank is here taking up a theme found in the rst letter
of John: Gods love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the
world so that we might live through him (4:9) and We know love by this, that he laid
down his life for usand we ought to lay down our lives for one another (3:16). In the
claim that God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in
them (4:16), the love that is spoken of receives its specication from what was from the
beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at
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and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life (1:1). It is not enough to claim
that God is love, or that caritas is the adequate human telos. God is love must receive its
explication through the claim that Jesus Christ has come in the esh (4:2).
15 See Augustine, Homilies on First John 1.2.
16 See Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: LEucharistie et lglise au Moyen-Age, second ed. (Paris:
Aubier, 1948).
17 James Buckley, review of The Word Made Strange, in Scottish Journal of Theology (forthcoming).
18 Strikingly absent here, and throughout The Word Made Strange, is any substantive account
of Israel. For indeed, unless one subscribes to a supercessionist account of the relationship
of the church to Israel, the form of life of the People of God does not have its point of origin
in Jesus, but in Gods calling of Abraham and in the covenant made at Sinai. Milbank
makes a few passing references to Israel, but he never grasps the nettle and addresses (in
the manner of Paul in Romans 911) the question of the relationship of the church to Juda-
ism as it continues to be practiced after Jesus. I should note that he does briey address this
question in responding to the pointed remarks of Daniel Boyarin in Arachne 2:1, pp. 171172,
where he explicitly rejects supercessionism.
19 Milbank does not seem to appreciate how close Freis position is to his. Particularly in his
later work, Frei was at pains to stress that it is communal Christian practice that determines
what the plain sense of the Biblical text is. See The Literal Reading of Biblical Narrative
in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break in Theology and Narrative: Selected
Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 117152.
20 Michel de Certeau, La Rupture Instauratrice, Esprit (June 1971), reprinted in La Faiblesse de
Croire, Luce Giard, ed. (Paris: ditions de Seuil, 1987).
21 Gerard Loughlin, Telling Gods Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996), p. 192.
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