John Milbank | University of Nottingham (original) (raw)
Papers by John Milbank
The Downside review, 1982
THE several volumes of Hans Urs von Balthazar's Herrlichkeit' have presented the argument... more THE several volumes of Hans Urs von Balthazar's Herrlichkeit' have presented the argument that revelation needs to be understood in its aesthetic as well as its logical and ethical dimensions if it is to be adequately grasped at all. This thesis is specifically allied to a Christocentric emphasis deriving immediately from Barth, but owing much also to patristic and mediaeval theologians, not to mention the lone figures of Pascal and Hamann. The present paper attempts to proceed within a kindred ambience but stress is placed upon the poetic moment in aesthetic experience. By 'poetic' is meant here the realization or manifestation of the Beautiful, in contrast to the being of the beautiful object or the perception of beauty, which is the subject of aesthetics in the Kantian sense. Nevertheless, an ontology of the aesthetic object and a phenomenology of aesthetic experience are implicitly involved in what follows. The paper will move from a consideration of human poetic existence through a questioning of how Jesus Christ is to be understood in this context, to an attempted presentation of our poetic existence in Christ.
... diation that lurks within traditional speculative theology. By bringing these three prob-lema... more ... diation that lurks within traditional speculative theology. By bringing these three prob-lematics together, it arrives at a new sort of Trinitarian ontology which makes conjoined ... what they are if that nature is simply an abstract set of divine qualities; what they love is the capacity ...
Modern Theology, Oct 1, 2001
Telos, Nov 12, 2015
The English Hegelian philosopher Gillian Rose attempted a remarkable critique of postmodern and p... more The English Hegelian philosopher Gillian Rose attempted a remarkable critique of postmodern and poststructuralist thought, aiming to eschew its celebration of nothingness and death and promotion of an impossibilist ethic, removed from all the circumstances of historical actuality. By contrast to unsituated critiques of all law and governance in the name of aleatory difference and liberty, she insisted on the legal and political framing of all human thought and association. However, the very rigour of her analysis tends to reveal, as in the case of Žižek who was eventually influenced by her, that Hegel's immanent and all-inclusive rationalist horizon is itself nihilistic, suggesting the ultimate proximity of the modern and the postmodern. Rose rightly argued that without 'middle' institutions of civil society, integrating personal with political flourishing, there can be no social nor political order. Yet she also contented that the very emancipatory basis of modern society “dirempts” the personal from the political and the ethical from the legal. The middle has to remain, yet it is now ineluctably broken. Thus latent within her thought, but not fully admitted is the argument that any dialectical attempt to extend enlightenment by healing it through a restoration of the middle will also offend enlightenment in seeking to return to the premodern or “feudal”. Hence attempts at reform that Rose herself would seem to half-endorse can only give rise to ersatz 'holy middles' which are themselves ethically estranged from law. Their promotion can only land up reinforcing diremption after all. Thus Rose's 'modernism' looks postmodern after all -- change towards justice becomes aporetic and impossible; attempts to mend must further break apart. To go beyond this one must first point out that not all positive, analogical mediations in human history have been “feudal”. Second that the primacy of the [political ignores the even greater primacy of the religious, that is able to integrate the ethical with the “paraethical” -- with circumstances but half-chosen by us -- in a way that does not see this realm as simply violent and outside the ethical, a Machiavellian assumption endorsed by Rose and which is the final basis of her claim for the non-surpassability of diremption. Today the only hope for surpassing political nihilism is a religious reinsertion of the mediating power of corporate bodies, able to relate personal finality to shared human purposes in time.
... Gil,Janell Watson, Regina Schwartz, Antonio Ne-gri, John Milbank, Joseph Prabhu, Abdulaziz Sa... more ... Gil,Janell Watson, Regina Schwartz, Antonio Ne-gri, John Milbank, Joseph Prabhu, Abdulaziz Sachedina, Ruth Groenhout, Mohammad Azadpur, Kenneth ... of Duke University's Reli-gion Department; Nicholas Issac Graber-Grace, Laurel Anne Woodworth, and Lela A. Graham ...
Les donneurs de sperme devraient-ils rester anonymes? Certains pensent que oui, d’autres non. Mai... more Les donneurs de sperme devraient-ils rester anonymes? Certains pensent que oui, d’autres non. Mais la plupart pensent que le débat peut être résolu en s’appuyant sur de bons principes et des arguments indiscutables. Mais si ce ne n’était pas le cas? Si nous démontrions que la controverse est insoluble? Si nous faisions l’hypothèse que nous nous trouvons face à une impasse éthique: un exemple de ce que les Grecs anciens appelaient une «aporie», quand toutes les voies où aller sont également impossibles? Qu’est-ce que cela signifierait?
Revista portuguesa de filosofia, Sep 23, 2021
Critical responses to the pandemic have divided between the need to control and defeat it and fea... more Critical responses to the pandemic have divided between the need to control and defeat it and fears of a new medicalisation of human existence. In the short-term the first response is right, but in the long-term the second. The ideological division on this issue on the left roughly correlates with a relative stress on the power of the market on the one hand or the power of the state on the other. But these are two halves of the same picture: the mechanisation of human life and the artificial rendering of the natural scarce and threatening. The tendencies that give rise to pandemics and those which exult in increasing total control are the same. Resistance can only come from a resistance to liberal mechanising as such. This requires the double sense that we are as spirits located within nature and yet as spirits transcend nature, which the theological doctrine of creation upholds. The challenge is to create a new global consensus and shared metaphysical politics around this legacy.
Studies in Christian Ethics, Aug 1, 1997
U sually, Christianity is seen as suppressing Òmoral luck,Ó or the idea that, to a degree at leas... more U sually, Christianity is seen as suppressing Òmoral luck,Ó or the idea that, to a degree at least, we require good fortune if we are to be good. However, in this essay, I want to argue, to the contrary, that Christianity embraces ...
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd eBooks, Aug 16, 2012
Modern Theology, Nov 1, 2022
Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This n... more Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This not only contradicts the Incarnation, but has its own genealogical origins in a dubious loss of Christian philosophy as an integral enterprise. In general, genealogy can be seen as negative or positive. Negative genealogy alternatively traces a break with myth, as with early philosophy, or else, as with Hindu thought, traces a break with the spiritual dominance of the One through the inevitable corruption wrought by the Many. Nietzsche offers a strange materialist version of this and Heidegger a nihilistic mutation of the same ‘Asiatic’ account. Some Catholics on the Right have instead stressed a Nietzschean decline through the dominance of a false, ‘herded’ One, abandoning the supremacy of personhood. Positive genealogy is rooted in the Incarnation, is at once natural and cultural, and seeks a blending of the One and the Many, the common good and the personal. Christianity is committed primarily to a positive genealogy and a positive development along these lines. However, theology can make use of a negative genealogy by tracing at once a decline from Unity (like the Hindu narrative) and a decline from a truly personalist fusion of the One with the Many that inherently involves a historical and incarnate generation of the truth.
Maynooth philosophical papers, 2020
The apparent contradiction between subjective and objective approaches to time in Augustine can b... more The apparent contradiction between subjective and objective approaches to time in Augustine can be resolved if it is understood that he regarded cosmic time and the finite things it engenders as being of itself, in some sense, both psychic and self-recording. This interpretation holds whether or not Augustine affirms a world soul. It is justifiable in terms of the continued applicability of his earlier liberal-arts writings to his later texts and his blending of Plotinian vitalism, Porphyrian spiritualism, and his own ‘theurgism’ (especially in his commentary on the Psalms), which is parallel to that of Iamblichus. Augustine’s ‘musical ontology’, which is also a metaphysics of number, word, and seminal reason, leads him to develop a theory of time and memory that anticipates more the spiritual realism of Bergson than it does idealist and phenomenological philosophies. However, for Augustine, time as an image of eternity remains aporetic, and its aporia is ‘resolved’ only by the Incarnation and its sustaining as the liturgical and political community of the Church. Through Christological, and not just angelic, mediation, our memories and expectations truly reach to past and future realities, just as our intentions reach to really located things, but only because all of these are both inherently psychic/intellectual and sustained by the divine eternity.
Telos, Sep 21, 1998
1. See Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, tr. by Amos Weisz (Cambridge, UK: Poli... more 1. See Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, tr. by Amos Weisz (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1995). 2. See John Milbank, “On Complex Space,” in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 268-92; and “Were ...
... In addition, we thank Georgi Georgiev, Joe Hughes, and Caleb Jones for their help with the IT... more ... In addition, we thank Georgi Georgiev, Joe Hughes, and Caleb Jones for their help with the IT side of this project. I (Creston) would also like to thank my students in the spring 2010 continental philosophy seminar at Rollins College, along with my col-leagues Mario D'Amato ...
© 2005 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. All rights reserved Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 255 Jeff... more © 2005 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. All rights reserved Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 255 Jefferson Ave. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503 / PO Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU UK Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 ...
BEING RECONCILED Being Reconciled offers an entirely fresh treatment of the ethical and theologic... more BEING RECONCILED Being Reconciled offers an entirely fresh treatment of the ethical and theological dimensions of reconciliation in the context of the complex questions of the Gift. 1t reconsiders notions of freedom and ...
Modern Theology
Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This n... more Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This not only contradicts the Incarnation, but has its own genealogical origins in a dubious loss of Christian philosophy as an integral enterprise. In general, genealogy can be seen as negative or positive. Negative genealogy alternatively traces a break with myth, as with early philosophy, or else, as with Hindu thought, traces a break with the spiritual dominance of the One through the inevitable corruption wrought by the Many. Nietzsche offers a strange materialist version of this and Heidegger a nihilistic mutation of the same ‘Asiatic’ account. Some Catholics on the Right have instead stressed a Nietzschean decline through the dominance of a false, ‘herded’ One, abandoning the supremacy of personhood. Positive genealogy is rooted in the Incarnation, is at once natural and cultural, and seeks a blending of the One and the Many, the common good and the personal. Christianity is committed p...
The Downside review, 1982
THE several volumes of Hans Urs von Balthazar's Herrlichkeit' have presented the argument... more THE several volumes of Hans Urs von Balthazar's Herrlichkeit' have presented the argument that revelation needs to be understood in its aesthetic as well as its logical and ethical dimensions if it is to be adequately grasped at all. This thesis is specifically allied to a Christocentric emphasis deriving immediately from Barth, but owing much also to patristic and mediaeval theologians, not to mention the lone figures of Pascal and Hamann. The present paper attempts to proceed within a kindred ambience but stress is placed upon the poetic moment in aesthetic experience. By 'poetic' is meant here the realization or manifestation of the Beautiful, in contrast to the being of the beautiful object or the perception of beauty, which is the subject of aesthetics in the Kantian sense. Nevertheless, an ontology of the aesthetic object and a phenomenology of aesthetic experience are implicitly involved in what follows. The paper will move from a consideration of human poetic existence through a questioning of how Jesus Christ is to be understood in this context, to an attempted presentation of our poetic existence in Christ.
... diation that lurks within traditional speculative theology. By bringing these three prob-lema... more ... diation that lurks within traditional speculative theology. By bringing these three prob-lematics together, it arrives at a new sort of Trinitarian ontology which makes conjoined ... what they are if that nature is simply an abstract set of divine qualities; what they love is the capacity ...
Modern Theology, Oct 1, 2001
Telos, Nov 12, 2015
The English Hegelian philosopher Gillian Rose attempted a remarkable critique of postmodern and p... more The English Hegelian philosopher Gillian Rose attempted a remarkable critique of postmodern and poststructuralist thought, aiming to eschew its celebration of nothingness and death and promotion of an impossibilist ethic, removed from all the circumstances of historical actuality. By contrast to unsituated critiques of all law and governance in the name of aleatory difference and liberty, she insisted on the legal and political framing of all human thought and association. However, the very rigour of her analysis tends to reveal, as in the case of Žižek who was eventually influenced by her, that Hegel's immanent and all-inclusive rationalist horizon is itself nihilistic, suggesting the ultimate proximity of the modern and the postmodern. Rose rightly argued that without 'middle' institutions of civil society, integrating personal with political flourishing, there can be no social nor political order. Yet she also contented that the very emancipatory basis of modern society “dirempts” the personal from the political and the ethical from the legal. The middle has to remain, yet it is now ineluctably broken. Thus latent within her thought, but not fully admitted is the argument that any dialectical attempt to extend enlightenment by healing it through a restoration of the middle will also offend enlightenment in seeking to return to the premodern or “feudal”. Hence attempts at reform that Rose herself would seem to half-endorse can only give rise to ersatz 'holy middles' which are themselves ethically estranged from law. Their promotion can only land up reinforcing diremption after all. Thus Rose's 'modernism' looks postmodern after all -- change towards justice becomes aporetic and impossible; attempts to mend must further break apart. To go beyond this one must first point out that not all positive, analogical mediations in human history have been “feudal”. Second that the primacy of the [political ignores the even greater primacy of the religious, that is able to integrate the ethical with the “paraethical” -- with circumstances but half-chosen by us -- in a way that does not see this realm as simply violent and outside the ethical, a Machiavellian assumption endorsed by Rose and which is the final basis of her claim for the non-surpassability of diremption. Today the only hope for surpassing political nihilism is a religious reinsertion of the mediating power of corporate bodies, able to relate personal finality to shared human purposes in time.
... Gil,Janell Watson, Regina Schwartz, Antonio Ne-gri, John Milbank, Joseph Prabhu, Abdulaziz Sa... more ... Gil,Janell Watson, Regina Schwartz, Antonio Ne-gri, John Milbank, Joseph Prabhu, Abdulaziz Sachedina, Ruth Groenhout, Mohammad Azadpur, Kenneth ... of Duke University's Reli-gion Department; Nicholas Issac Graber-Grace, Laurel Anne Woodworth, and Lela A. Graham ...
Les donneurs de sperme devraient-ils rester anonymes? Certains pensent que oui, d’autres non. Mai... more Les donneurs de sperme devraient-ils rester anonymes? Certains pensent que oui, d’autres non. Mais la plupart pensent que le débat peut être résolu en s’appuyant sur de bons principes et des arguments indiscutables. Mais si ce ne n’était pas le cas? Si nous démontrions que la controverse est insoluble? Si nous faisions l’hypothèse que nous nous trouvons face à une impasse éthique: un exemple de ce que les Grecs anciens appelaient une «aporie», quand toutes les voies où aller sont également impossibles? Qu’est-ce que cela signifierait?
Revista portuguesa de filosofia, Sep 23, 2021
Critical responses to the pandemic have divided between the need to control and defeat it and fea... more Critical responses to the pandemic have divided between the need to control and defeat it and fears of a new medicalisation of human existence. In the short-term the first response is right, but in the long-term the second. The ideological division on this issue on the left roughly correlates with a relative stress on the power of the market on the one hand or the power of the state on the other. But these are two halves of the same picture: the mechanisation of human life and the artificial rendering of the natural scarce and threatening. The tendencies that give rise to pandemics and those which exult in increasing total control are the same. Resistance can only come from a resistance to liberal mechanising as such. This requires the double sense that we are as spirits located within nature and yet as spirits transcend nature, which the theological doctrine of creation upholds. The challenge is to create a new global consensus and shared metaphysical politics around this legacy.
Studies in Christian Ethics, Aug 1, 1997
U sually, Christianity is seen as suppressing Òmoral luck,Ó or the idea that, to a degree at leas... more U sually, Christianity is seen as suppressing Òmoral luck,Ó or the idea that, to a degree at least, we require good fortune if we are to be good. However, in this essay, I want to argue, to the contrary, that Christianity embraces ...
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd eBooks, Aug 16, 2012
Modern Theology, Nov 1, 2022
Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This n... more Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This not only contradicts the Incarnation, but has its own genealogical origins in a dubious loss of Christian philosophy as an integral enterprise. In general, genealogy can be seen as negative or positive. Negative genealogy alternatively traces a break with myth, as with early philosophy, or else, as with Hindu thought, traces a break with the spiritual dominance of the One through the inevitable corruption wrought by the Many. Nietzsche offers a strange materialist version of this and Heidegger a nihilistic mutation of the same ‘Asiatic’ account. Some Catholics on the Right have instead stressed a Nietzschean decline through the dominance of a false, ‘herded’ One, abandoning the supremacy of personhood. Positive genealogy is rooted in the Incarnation, is at once natural and cultural, and seeks a blending of the One and the Many, the common good and the personal. Christianity is committed primarily to a positive genealogy and a positive development along these lines. However, theology can make use of a negative genealogy by tracing at once a decline from Unity (like the Hindu narrative) and a decline from a truly personalist fusion of the One with the Many that inherently involves a historical and incarnate generation of the truth.
Maynooth philosophical papers, 2020
The apparent contradiction between subjective and objective approaches to time in Augustine can b... more The apparent contradiction between subjective and objective approaches to time in Augustine can be resolved if it is understood that he regarded cosmic time and the finite things it engenders as being of itself, in some sense, both psychic and self-recording. This interpretation holds whether or not Augustine affirms a world soul. It is justifiable in terms of the continued applicability of his earlier liberal-arts writings to his later texts and his blending of Plotinian vitalism, Porphyrian spiritualism, and his own ‘theurgism’ (especially in his commentary on the Psalms), which is parallel to that of Iamblichus. Augustine’s ‘musical ontology’, which is also a metaphysics of number, word, and seminal reason, leads him to develop a theory of time and memory that anticipates more the spiritual realism of Bergson than it does idealist and phenomenological philosophies. However, for Augustine, time as an image of eternity remains aporetic, and its aporia is ‘resolved’ only by the Incarnation and its sustaining as the liturgical and political community of the Church. Through Christological, and not just angelic, mediation, our memories and expectations truly reach to past and future realities, just as our intentions reach to really located things, but only because all of these are both inherently psychic/intellectual and sustained by the divine eternity.
Telos, Sep 21, 1998
1. See Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, tr. by Amos Weisz (Cambridge, UK: Poli... more 1. See Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, tr. by Amos Weisz (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1995). 2. See John Milbank, “On Complex Space,” in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 268-92; and “Were ...
... In addition, we thank Georgi Georgiev, Joe Hughes, and Caleb Jones for their help with the IT... more ... In addition, we thank Georgi Georgiev, Joe Hughes, and Caleb Jones for their help with the IT side of this project. I (Creston) would also like to thank my students in the spring 2010 continental philosophy seminar at Rollins College, along with my col-leagues Mario D'Amato ...
© 2005 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. All rights reserved Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 255 Jeff... more © 2005 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. All rights reserved Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 255 Jefferson Ave. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503 / PO Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU UK Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 ...
BEING RECONCILED Being Reconciled offers an entirely fresh treatment of the ethical and theologic... more BEING RECONCILED Being Reconciled offers an entirely fresh treatment of the ethical and theological dimensions of reconciliation in the context of the complex questions of the Gift. 1t reconsiders notions of freedom and ...
Modern Theology
Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This n... more Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This not only contradicts the Incarnation, but has its own genealogical origins in a dubious loss of Christian philosophy as an integral enterprise. In general, genealogy can be seen as negative or positive. Negative genealogy alternatively traces a break with myth, as with early philosophy, or else, as with Hindu thought, traces a break with the spiritual dominance of the One through the inevitable corruption wrought by the Many. Nietzsche offers a strange materialist version of this and Heidegger a nihilistic mutation of the same ‘Asiatic’ account. Some Catholics on the Right have instead stressed a Nietzschean decline through the dominance of a false, ‘herded’ One, abandoning the supremacy of personhood. Positive genealogy is rooted in the Incarnation, is at once natural and cultural, and seeks a blending of the One and the Many, the common good and the personal. Christianity is committed p...
Greek translation of Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought... more Greek translation of
Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event:
Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought
ed. Sotiris Mitralexis
Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2018
Ακαδημαϊκή επιμέλεια: Σωτήρης Μητραλέξης
Μετάφραση: Γιάννης Πεδιώτης και οι συγγραφείς
Επίκουροι επιμελητές:
π. Ανδρέας Ανδρεόπουλος
Pui Him Ip
π. Ισίδωρος Κάτσος
Διονύσιος Σκλήρης
Συγγραφείς:
π. Ανδρέας Ανδρεόπουλος
Deborah Casewell
Jonathan Cole
Brandon Gallaher
Άγγελος Γουνόπουλος
π. Daniel Isai
Νικόλαος Κορωναίος
Marcello La Matina
John Milbank
Σωτήρης Μητραλέξης
Διονύσιος Σκλήρης
Paul Tyson
Rowan Williams