Mir - Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

Modern Theology 28:3 July 2012 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
A PANENTHEIST READING OF JOHN MILBANK

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AMENE MIR
There is no one place in Milbanks writings where one can point to a clearly delineated doctrine of God. It is scattered amidst a range of theological and philosophical commentary covering the whole range of theology and philosophy from Plato to Derrida, Augustine to McFague. This article does not question Milbanks sometimes controversial readings of these thinkers. It seeks rather to glean the tenor of Milbanks own understanding of the nature and attributes of God and their bearing on the question of creations relation to the divine, especially in the light of his return to the participatory theology of Augustine and Dionysius.1 In this return Milbank radically uproots much of the theological and philosophical endeavour of modernity2. This article, however, will argue for evidence of a far more radical turn in Milbanks thought towards panentheism. Namely, that creation is embraced and contained within the life of the divine, such that creation and the divine can be said to be in dipolar asymmetrical relation.3 Milbank makes no explicit mention anywhere in his work of the word panentheism. Yet, as one looks more closely at his writings, it certainly becomes possible to give a panentheist reading of his thought. This article, then, is essentially a colouring-in of the latent and implicit underlying panentheistic contours to be found in Milbanks thought in order to reveal the hidden implications owing from his understanding of God and the divine relation to creation. Initially it appears that Milbank offers a strong defence of classical theism and divine transcendence4 as found for example in the thought of Aquinas. Here God is pure act, As innite power which is unimpeded, nothing in God can be unrealised, so that it would appear that God is actus purus. . . .5
Amene Mir 9 Mylne Close, Upper Mall, London W6 9TE, UK amenemir@ymail.com

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank
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Milbank speaks of God as . . . a plenitudinous supra-temporal innite which has already realised in an eminent fashion every desirable effect.6 In God there is . . . an innite coincidence of act and power. . . .7 Gods simplicity has . . . no outside, and therefore it is also beyond the contrast self-sufcient versus affectable-from-without.8 God does not become9 or enter time.10 Divine aseity, immutability and impassibility are underlined in that God . . . never, properly speaking, interacts with creatures.11 God is . . . utterly replete and self-sufcient. . . .12; . . . nothing can be added to divine knowledge or divine power.13 Nor can anything be taken from the impassable God.14 Considering the problem of evil, Milbank agrees that it would be an error even to argue for a temporary putting aside of divine omnipotence.15 He notes Aquinas agnostic reserve16 in considering nite realitys relation to the divine: It is only Aquinas agnosticism which really exemplies the principle that there is no ratio between nite and innite, and upholds the ontological difference.17 We will see, however, that in his desire for a return to a participatory theology Milbank will depart from a straightforward reiteration of classical theism allowing for a strong panentheistic reading of his work. Milbank is well known for his rejection of Duns Scotus univocalist ontology. This rejection rests in part, I would argue, in its failure to offer an adequate doctrine of divine transcendence. This may seem an odd claim to make. After all, Scotus God is not that of an immanent force identied with creation but a distant and removed deity who if he intervenes does so only occasionally and by seeming arbitrary acts of will.18 The offence, however, against transcendence in Milbanks eyes is that Scotus allows for an ontology in which Being is itself a transcendental category prior to the divine, in which both creation and the divine share, albeit God possessing Being to an eminent and innite degree unlike created beings which possess it only nitely. In turn, Creation, by sharing in transcendental being, comes to possess its own autonomy grounded in this prior transcendental category without need for the initiating and sustaining presence of the divine. Being becomes . . . transcendentally indifferent to innite and nite . . . the nite Creation fully is, in its own right as Creation. . . .19 With Scotus we end up with the wrong type of transcendence (a mere removal of the divine from an autonomous creation), and the wrong type of ontological divide (God, although separate from creation, univocally shares with creation in a transcendent ground of Being). God is reduced to being one more being (albeit innite) amongst other beings (nite). Milbank names this error ontotheology.20 It is an ontology unconstrained by, and transcendentally prior to theological truth.21 Milbank would assert that modernity and notions of the secular in part arise from this theological error, in which nite reality can be understood as having an ontological grounding apart from its participatory relation to the divine. Finite reality becomes an end in itself to be studied both philosophically and scientically.22 Milbank responds that unless we
528 Amene Mir . . . redene being and knowledge theologically . . . the radical otherness of God, will never be expressible in any way without idolatrously reducing it to our nite human categories.23 Further, for Milbank, this theological error undergirds the nihilism implicit in modernitys world-view, for a transcendental univocal Being can only exist in so far as it is instantiated in some way or other, beyond which there is nothing.24 Milbanks rejection of Scotus transcendental univocity as the medium of differentiated content will be important in arriving at a panentheistic reading of his work. For Milbank believes Scotus position leads to a pure heterogeneity of instantiated content25 in which Gods relation to creation comes to be understood as . . . a bare divine unity [who] starkly confronts the other distinct unities which he has ordained.26 For Milbank such a relation denies to theological discourse the use of analogy and hierarchy which he holds essential to a correct understanding of creations relation to the divine and the preservation of a correct doctrine of divine transcendence. For heterogeneity exemplies itself as non-hierarchical and arbitrary,27 resulting in difference (in contrast to analogical likeness) that has to be continually held back from conict by a ruling monarch and a coercive and arbitrary will in a shared theatre of action. God becomes one more causal inuence amongst others.28 Divine transcendence, then, for Milbank is not primarily about Gods distance from creation, from which the divine occasionally intervenes, but certainly it does, as we shall see, include a notion of ontological divide through an analogical and hierarchical understanding of participation that Milbank truly believes preserves a correct understanding of divine transcendence. Milbanks defence of divine transcendence is further displayed in his rejection of immanentism and his attack on so-called eco-theology.29 Part of the reason for the rise of this particular error Milbank suggests lies in the Scotist roots of modernity. Here, creation is no longer understood in its participatory relation to the divine but as occupying its own autonomous ground of being. Subsequently, nature in and of itself can be objectied according to laws governing the inter-relationship of physical bodies through scientic experiment, to be supplemented later by the determination of the laws governing the nature of human societies.30 Ironically, God becomes identied with these immanent laws.31 Such a . . . purely immanent, embodied, developing limited Godhead . . .32 becomes merely a spiritual factor within the world, which in turn imposes limiting constraints upon him.33 With immanentism God comes to be identied with lure and process.34 Divine omnipotence is rejected in favour of a God who . . . does his best . . . to persuade recalcitrant nature. . . .35 It is in the context of defending divine transcendence that Milbank confronts what seem to be certain theological impossibilities36. Namely, that a
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transcendent God can create and that such a God can become incarnate. Impossibilities because they offend against divine transcendence and divine aseity. Why should God to whom nothing can be added create? How can this God become incarnate in time? Does not the incarnation involve change in the Godhead? Milbank notes that whilst for Aquinas creation . . . is exterior to God . . . Milbank asks how should we understand this, since . . . there cannot really be an exterior to God since he is all in all?37 Whilst preserving divine transcendence Milbank seeks to give answers to these aporias and begin to undo what he sees as the errors of modernity by a return to the participatory theology of Augustine and Dionysius. For the question at the heart of his Radical Orthodoxy project is the question of creations relation to God and of how much of the theological understanding of the last six hundred years has undermined a correct understanding of this relationship. Given the importance of divine transcendence to Milbanks theological position, it might seem incredible to offer a panentheistic reading of his work. Yet I will suggest that it is only within such a reading that the method by which Milbank deals with these aporias can properly make sense. For Milbank pushes further the Dionysian idea that God as utterly replete and self-sufcient can share himself with another38: a God who is replete; a God who shares his life with what is not God. The one is necessarily selfcontained; the other goes beyond self-containment to another. I will show that this pushing further of the Dionysian idea leads Milbank into important qualications of classical theism. We will see evidence of a developing yet unacknowledged dipolarity in his doctrine of God: God as he is in himself; God in his ecstatic sharing in relation to another. Milbanks treatment of Gods ecstatic going beyond self-containment to another underpins his understanding of the nature of culture, language and history. Scotus univocal ontology allows creation an autonomous space, the secular, on which God acts occasionally and from afar. Here revelation is received arbitrarily from without to become an object of theological study and scrutiny.39 Milbanks understanding of revelation is very different. He argues that for the Church Fathers . . . revelation . . . is . . . conjoined intrinsically and inseparably with a created event which symbolically discloses that transcendent reality, to which all created events to a lesser degree . . . point.40 God is revealed to us not from without but is embedded within culture, and indeed pre-eminently in human makings, in language and history.41 Here lies the essence of Milbanks return to a participatory theology. Creations relation to the divine rests not with a far off God revealed by an extrinsically imparted revelation in which grace comes from without, but by a creation that can only be viewed and nally dened by its orientation to the divine, leaving . . . nothing in nature which the light of faith might not re-interpret and indeed no true nature which has not been transgured by
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grace.42 It is a creation that participates in God. The hard and fast distinction between revealed religion and natural religion, between faith and reason, between nature and grace, is overthrown, for creation in toto cannot be understood other than in its relation to the divine.43 For Milbank such an approach can be interpreted as a kind of appeal to a natural religion and natural theology,44 not in terms of a remote designing deity (whose vestigial effects we can discern in the laws governing an autonomous nature leftto-itself) but rather in terms . . . of the corporeal depth of things . . . in which . . . we take the surface of things as signs disclosing or promising such depth.45 This depth relates to a things actual existence over and against nothing in so far as it held in the mind of God46: . . . the world is Gods speaking it out of a void. . . .47 This grounds actuality in the divine rather than in Scotus transcendental Being which is in and of itself nothing other than its nite instantiations.48 In dealing with the aporias of how a God who is replete can create we begin to see here intimations of a panentheist position as Milbank pushes further the Dionysian vision of Gods ecstatic going beyond self-containment to another. In place of an autonomous grounding for the created order Milbank agrees with Jacobi and Hamann in their insistence that no nite thing can be known, not even to any degree, outside its ratio to the innite; hence they denied the validity of the enterprises of ontology or epistemology as pure philosophical endeavours, or else argued that if they were valid their conclusions would be nihilistic. . . .49 We have noted that in defending divine transcendence Milbank mentions Aquinas agnostic reserve,50 in which there can be no ratio between the nite and innite, thus upholding the ontological divide between the divine and creation. In Milbank, however, we see a shift, such that the nite cannot be known outside its ratio to the innite. This is not in terms of an assertion that God and creation operate on the same plane of activity only to be distinguished in terms of a ratio of lesser or greater proportionality as found in a univocalist ontology, but rather in terms of a gifted participation. Here created actuality is understood as pure gift: . . . in Creation there are only givens in so far as they are also gifts: if one sees only objects, then one mis-apprehends and fails to recognise true natures.51 Created things can only be gifts; all that they are is given, the created is the gift through and through, with no being, substance or material that is ontologically prior to or independent of gift. It is only within the innite that the nite can be known as gift. The gift is only through its participation in the ecstatic outpouring of the divine. In terms of the relation between the created and the divine Milbank writes, . . . gratuity arises before necessity or obligation and does not even require this contrast in order to be comprehensible. The creature as creature is not the recipient of a gift; it is itself this gift.52
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Apart from this givenness there can be no being.53 Consequently, there can be no prior medium to which grace is conveyed extrinsically. To deny this is to fall into the trap of the univocalist ontology of Scotus in which being becomes a universal common medium between God and creatures in terms of a shared esse, in which grace (like revelation) is conveyed to a pure nature extrinsically.54 Milbanks position here reafrms the rejection of any shared ratio between the created and the divine in terms of a proportionally shared or prior ground in which both divine and nite reality participate as distinct unities.55 Rather, participation is to be understood in terms of the movement from the divine understood as pure gratuity, such . . . that no nite thing can be known, not even to any degree, outside its ratio to the innite. . . .56 The relation, then, between creation and the divine for Milbank is not of an exterior God, who acts from afar, but one of deepest intimacy. It is a creation as contained in the divine such that to understand God as cause and creation as effect is not to understand cause as preceding effect but rather cause as realised in . . . the event of the giving of the effect.57 This Milbank describes as a Neoplatonic rather than as an Aristotelian understanding of cause58. It is in the light of this Neoplatonic understanding of causality that Milbank reads Aquinas. Creation is intimately and internally related to the divine: . . . for Aquinas, in the case of divine causality, the decision to create and the eminent reality of creatures are included in the eternal uttering of the Logos. . . . an effect does not really come after a cause, since only the effect realises the causal operation and denes it.59 Indeed it is . . . the entire gift of the effect and the emanation of the effect, which itself denes the cause as cause.60 In contrast to the ontotheology of Scotus, Milbank describes his own position as a theontology61 which avoids the need for theological discourse to be rst situated and dened within the parameters of a metaphysical discourse concerned with being and substance indifferent to its nite and innite instantiations. Rather, creation is to be understood in terms of sheer divine gratuity. Milbank insists on reading Aquinas within this participatory tradition; Creatures, for Aquinas. . . . are radically accidental. But not thereby of course, accidents of the divine substance; rather they subsist by participation in this substance.62 The relation being described here between the divine and creation is not of a God who is in creation, but more precisely a creation that is in God. Another way of describing this would be panentheism. We see here that, in relation to Aquinas, Milbank makes reference to the language of accidents and substance. In developing his own return to a participatory theology Milbank himself, however, rejects the use of such language in talking of the divine relation to creation.63 In place of substance Milbank wishes to speak of relation: nite reality can only be understood in relation to divine gratuity. There can be no substantial medium between
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divine gratuity and nite reality. Creatures are, not by inhering in any prior substance, but solely through their actual participation in the divine. The rejection of ontotheology, of Scotist Being, and of Thomist language of substance and accident for that of an understanding of nite reality as a relational participation in the pure gratuity of the divine allows a strong panentheistic reading of Milbanks position, for if creation here is not within the divine what other relation to God can it have? There can be no without, no autonomy through any shared ground in terms of a univocalist ontology. Nor is actuality for Milbank the inhering of some formal or abstract idea in any prior substance. It is through and through relational in terms of a participation in the divine. Milbank writes approvingly of Eriugenas assertion that . . . God acts and knows because he internally makes or creates.64 That creation is not identical with God (pantheism) but is rather within God in relationship panentheismis underlined by Milbank when he says because Eriugenas ontology is . . . based on God as internally creator . . . [he] is therefore more profoundly Christian than Aquinas.65 Why should this be so? The answer for Milbank is that under the inuence of Aristotle Aquinas . . . thought of making as merely a modication of existing forms. . . .66 i.e. as the manipulation of some pre-existing external substance or matter. The clear implication of Milbanks rejection of substance in favour of relation is panentheist, that there is nothing external to God, substance does not underlie Gods creative activity. The whole act of creation is radically and completely internal to God. It is a relation through participation in the divine, not through a sharing in some external being or substance. Milbanks references to creations externality then, need to be understood in this context:67 not that creation should be considered as outside the divine68 but rather as not identical with the divine yet nevertheless internal to it: The harmony of the Trinity is therefore not the harmony of a nished totality. . . . the doctrine of the Trinity discovers the innite God to include a radical external relationality.69 We can read this in terms of an asymmetry between God and creation God includes creation but creation cannot be said to include God, thus preserving divine transcendence. For panentheism too afrms the error of pantheism, namely, that because God includes creation we should deem God and the world to be in symmetrical relation. There is no symmetry between God and creation, but nor is there any medium between God and creation, allowing creation to be understood as purely external to the divine. Rather there is only a pure relationality owing from a transcendent asymmetrical divine gratuity. The created world of time participates in God who differentiates; indeed it is this differentiation insofar as it is nitely explicated, rather than innitely complicated. Just as God . . . is not a substance, because he is
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nothing fundamental underlying anything else, so there are no absolute self-standing substances in creation, no underlying matters not existent through form and no discrete and inviolable things.70 Milbank further reads Aquinas as saying that creation can only be understood . . . as a self-exceedingthat is to say as the lesser and other to God which only exists . . . as always cancelling this lesserness and otherness.71 This cancelling of the lesserness and otherness of creation occurs through the excess that the divine gratuity engenders in creation itself. Milbank uses the analogy of suspiration, the breath of the divine which goes forth in creation and returns deied: Gods goal is the existence of creatures outside himself, yet since there is nothing outside God, all creatures suspire . . . only in returning to God and attaining an outcome in excess of their rst occasioning.72 This leads Milbank to suggest that even the resulting excess the divine gratuity engenders goes beyond what God himself envisages. Here the nal upshotdeicationis extraordinarily in excess of the original goalCreationsince it would be pointless for God to aim for deication, which is already himself. This strange structureoutcome in excess of goalonly applies to the relation between God and Creation, and is a result of its impossibility.73 This idea of creation going beyond and in excess of its goal colours Milbanks understanding of the divine and its relation with creation. For the divine cannot be understood in terms of an undifferentiated unity, a henological totality74 as in Neoplatonism where the accommodation of difference was problematical. For example the Plotinian One cannot be participated in since it dissolves all distinctions and even reasonings. By contrast, for Christian theology the hyper-diverse and eminently intellectual essence of God can . . . be imparticably participated. . . . everything . . . not just humanity, is already as itself more than itself, and this more is in some sense a portion of divinity. (Everything is therefore engraced.)75 The in some sense of this last quotation leads us to ask, In what sense can Milbank mean? A panentheistic reading of Milbank explains in what sense creation can be as itself yet more than itself, as already engraced as, in some sense, a portion of divinity. For it is the intimate relation between the divine and creation by which all that is, all that is other to the divine, is held and contained within the divine. After all it is Milbank himself who criticises Scotus for destroying the basis of a participatory understanding of creations relation to the divine precisely by his elevation of nite being to ontological equality with innite being, such that it can be understood . . . as standing spatially alongside the innite.76 What Milbank rejects is the very ontological exterior complementarity of creation
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in relation to the divine, between nite and innite, as found in Scotus theology.77 This stands in contrast to the panentheism to be found here, where creation is related to the divine not as divine itself, but as that which suspires from within the divine in such a way that creation can never be exterior to the divine life, for its very being is to participate in the divine. Creation for Milbank is not lifted up into the divine as in Scotus theology, where in the case of human being the possibility of the beatic vision can only be a divinely extrinsically willed supplement; rather it already is engraced.78 This panentheistic intimacy between creation and the divine can be read in Milbanks treatment of the Trinity. His prioritisation of the immanent over the economic Trinity79 allows him to speak of a coinciding of human and divine poesis in history. In Milbanks Trinitarian theology, creation is brought to the very heart of the life of the divine in a very intimate and dynamic way so different from classical models of Gods relation to creation, For the Trinitarian God does not possess the unity of a bare simplicity, a naked will, nor does he stand in an indifferent relationship to what he creates. Gods love for what he creates implies that the creation is generated within a harmonious order intrinsic to Gods own being.80 Once more Milbank sets this understanding against that of Scotus where the world is no longer . . . enfolded within the divine expressive Logos. . . . where the divine is understood as an extraneous presence, a bare divine unity which . . . starkly confronts the other distinct unities. . . .81 For Milbank creation can only be understood within a consideration of God as Trinity, here understood as more than an undifferentiated unity but rather as the origin and source of all difference, not only in the Godhead itself but in creation too. As such the Trinity is not a nished totality, and nor does it stand in a Scotist external relation to all difference but rather . . . the Trinity discovers the innite God to include a radical external relationality.82 External is once more in inverted commas because there can be no externality in any Scotist sense but rather because creation is other to the divine, yet enfolded and included within the divine. Milbank argues that the economic Trinity can only really be understood in relation to the Fall rather than to the act of creation itself. One is not talking, therefore, of an incidental relation between God and creation, between God and difference, but one that goes to the very heart of what the divine is as the inclusive source of all difference. Properly speaking there is only an immanent Trinity, participated in by creation.83 Hence, Milbank criticises Scotus for disassociating the act of creation ad extra from the act of generation ad intra that is the life of the Trinity.84 Milbank writes, . . . God in his creation ad intra in the Logos incorporates within himself the creation ad extra, including human history.85 It is only in this context that one can understand Milbanks elaboration of human poesis,
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culture and history in terms of its coinciding with divine poesis such that in human poesis, culture, and history God is revealed not from without creation but from within it, as completely and utterly constitutive of all that is. Created reality is none other than its relation to the divine through participation in the divine.86 There is no remove between God and creation by which the divine underlies nite reality, whether in terms of a divine substance or indeed of any other substance. It is for this reason, in terms of a participatory theology, there can be nothing discrete or inviolable in and of itself,87 for nite reality is through relation to the divine and because of this is intimately related to all other difference as held within the divine life.88 The logic of this position, as Milbank points out, is that God never interacts with creation89 precisely because there is no remove between God and creation.90 Creation is panentheistically embraced within the life of the divine. It is in this light that Milbank reads the Cappadocian Fathers,91 whom he draws upon to develop his own understanding of both human and divine poesis as coincidental and as opening up the dynamic possibilities of participation.92 For Milbank a substance metaphysic gives rise to a once-and-forall denition of things as static, discrete and heterogeneous.93 Rejecting this in favour of a participatory model leads to a multi-faceted view of actuality in terms of . . . innitely revisable . . . networks of relation,94 not in terms of the agonistic heterogeneity of Scotus transcendental univocity,95 but in which all difference originates and is contained within the divine. In this essentially panentheistic understanding, Milbank makes a crucial qualication of Aquinas metaphysics to better accommodate Aquinas to a participatory understanding of creations relation to God: if Thomist participation in esse is prised apart from lower level form/matter dualism then this would permit . . . the idea that human beings, in their cultural reality, are clusters of differentia . . . which are held together . . . as grace-given participations in the divine unity. . . .96 This allows Christian thought to arrive at . . . a peaceful afrmation of the other, consummated in a transcendent innity.97 Milbank terms this a metaphysics/metasemiotics of relation rather than of substance.98 Is such a panentheistic reading of creations relation to the divine as I am attempting here merely a type of emanationism as found for example in Neoplatonism? The answer is yes and no. Yes, Milbank himself recognises that in contrast to Aristotelianisms . . . cosmic and unassisted vision . . . of an ordered reality, Neoplatonism attempted to explore the boundary between supernatural deity and material nature by reference to the innate belonging of the soul to the supernatural. It was this latter vision that the Church attempted to Christianise.99 We have referred above to Milbanks use of the idea of suspiration.100 But the answer is also no because, as Milbank elaborates, in his return to a participatory model we see that there is nothing alien to the divine, there is no divide or medium that acts as an interface between the divine and creation, between God and difference.
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Creation does not fall into something alien and intrinsically evil, that gives rise to the distinction in the Trinity between the immanent and the economic. Rather the relation of creation to the divine is understood by Milbank in terms of the prioritisation of the internal life of the Trinity itself as pre-eminently immanent, as contained in the movement between the persons of the Trinity.101 So, we are not talking of creations relation to the divine in terms of an externalisation through emanation but a panentheistic internalisation of creation within the divine that stands in contrast to Neoplatonic emanationism. It is the case, however, that sometimes Milbanks language can be confusing if one does not pay close attention to it. For instance, in his discussion of the shift in meaning around the mid-thirteenth century of the Latin inuentia as applied to the understanding of creations relation to the divine, understood as . . . a owing in of something higher to something lower to the degree that it could be received.102 Milbank, however, in unpacking the meaning of this word in the context of his own participatory theology, actually colours this words meaning more subtly, in that higher and lower although other to each other are not alien to each other in a way that for instance matter would be to the One in Neoplatonic emanationism. Rather, for Milbank, creation is nothing other than divine inuentia. Creation is not a medium through which God is in external relation, but is itself within God. The creative inuence of God does not inuence creation, but posits creation as inuence. . . .103 Certainly, the relation here is radically asymmetrical, since it is the innite God who posits nite creation as inuence, but it is a relation of the greatest possible intimacy though the participation of nite reality in the life of the divine as a result of an initiatory divine gratuity. In essence, Milbanks summing up of this can be read as strongly panentheistic. Hence God is the single inuence, the single unilateral and total cause of everything. . . . he causes by sharing his own nature, by giving his gifts to-be. . . .104 Further evidence for this reading is given in how Milbank contrasts his participatory theology with that of Scotus. After the mid-thirteenth century inuentia came to be understood as an extrinsic conditioning, in which divine causality began to be thought of as a general inuence, supplemented by special inuencesmiracles and the action of gracecompeting with specic nite causes in a shared concursus or ontic plane.105 Here creation is no longer held within the divine for the divine comes to the nite discretely and externally very much in the way of any other cause sharing an ontic plane, albeit as a potentia absoluta. Milbank writes of this that . . . there was now a dubious reciprocity . . . pertaining between an ontically reduced God on the one hand and ontic creatures on the other.106 Here too we see an example of the wrong sort of divine transcendence in which the innite and nite collaborate in a single eld of operation. This stands in contrast to a divine gratuity which transcends any ontological realm, and through which the divine grants participation in its life, giving rise to nite reality, an
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inuentia or owing-in of the innite to the nite. Whilst the nite is, then, held within the divine, it can be read as held in complete and absolute asymmetrical relation to the divine, being having no ontological status other than what is gifted, thus preserving the divine transcendence, the Giver of the gift. It is in the context of this panentheistic reading that we can make sense of Milbanks uses the word coincident to describe the relation between divine and human poesis.107 This is not a coinciding in terms of causal action within a shared ontic plane, but rather is an unfolding of the nite within the innite, such that through participation there is always a depth to things that actually makes them what they really are, as grounded within the divine. As such, creation is the work of the divine as much as it is the work of the nite as it participates in this unfolding. We have mentioned above how Neoplatonism attempted to explore the boundary between supernatural deity and creation by reference to the innate belonging of the soul to the supernatural,108 and of how Milbank rejects notions of substance for that of relation.109 We can draw out the implications of this further and say that, for Milbank, in the unfolding of creation from the innite there is an innate belonging of all reality, not just the human soul, to the divine. Thus, Milbank can describe nature as . . . sutured by psyche. . . . and that its unfolding is realised in a participation in the divine vision that is . . . entirely psychic in character. . . .110, a natural orientation towards the supernatural which exists only by participation, without which relation there would be nothing.111 It is true that Milbank rejects the notion of God as world-soul112 but he does so very much in the context of an immanentism that identies nature with the divine and thus overthrows divine transcendence.113 Panentheism avoids such an identication as it can be elaborated within an asymmetrical understanding of the relation between creation and the divine that preserves divine transcendence. Within this context Milbank comes as near as possible to a notion of the divine as world-soul.114 For Milbank, the divine is the animating principle of all that is, not as a Prime Mover, or a causal principle within creation, but as the gratuitous ground of creations very own unfolding through its participation in the divine. The relation of the nite as held within the innite is, for Milbank, theologically all we can point to when we speak of what is truly real:115 . . . there are no absolute self-standing substances in creation . . . no discrete things. One can only think of . . . inherently interconnected qualities which . . . participate in the divine creative power/act . . . which is the condition of their mutual externality . . . through time.116 Milbank writes in this last quote that the participation in the divine of all that makes up nite reality is the condition of their mutual externality. This calls for a panentheistic emphasis in reading Milbanks work, for how one thing is ordered to another lies not in Scotus distinct unities confronting
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each other; it lies rather in the hierarchical ordering of one thing to another as enfolded within the divine, in whose unity all difference is interconnected and contained.117 Milbank calls this . . . a plenitudinous supra-temporal innite which has already realised in eminent fashion every desirable effect.118 The relations between nite things reect that found within the divine unity. This divine unity, however, is not static but is one that overows, a Dionysian understanding of divine unity, as . . . both a dynamic happening and a complex relation. It is . . . transcendental peace which overows in a surplus of its peaceful fecundity, preserving [all things] in their distinctness yet linking them together.119 For Milbank, the nite and innite are inextricably related: the innite overows within itself as surplus; the nite cannot be but in relation to the innite, which relation is the innites nite explication. There is an unacknowledged dipolarity to be found in Milbanks thought between the divine and creation, a dipolarity held together in asymmetrical panentheistic relation, thus preserving divine transcendence with the nite in participatory relation to it.120 The divine is not a unity beyond the infection of difference. For Milbank here lies a Christian transformation of Neoplatonism . . . situating the innite emanation of difference within the Godhead itself.121 In this context Milbank can speak of Gods innity as a . . . never exhausted surplus.122 Unlike nite reality, which participates in the divine, God can never be limited. Again we nd a further dipolarity here; that which emanates from the divine, the actual; and that which is still yet surplus, the unlimited of pure possibility. Milbank ends up radically modifying the classical understanding of God as actus purus understood as innite realised act, in favour of allowing there to be potential within the divine understood as innite unrealised power. This is presented within a Trinitarian framework: Innite realised act and innite unrealised power mysteriously coincide in God, and it must be this that supports the circular life, that is more than stasis, of the Trinity.123 It is because God is Trinity that Milbank can approach the divine in terms of unity in difference and difference in unity, allowing an openness to creativity in which . . . the play of potential . . . introduces relation as a moving and dynamic element.124 This in turn qualies Gods knowledge. It is because Gods innity is a never exhausted surplus that The unity, harmony and beauty of the emanation of difference cannot . . . be anticipated in advance, even for God himself. As Eriugena realised, Gods knowledge is not before but in the innity of generation, and this knowledge can only be ordered, only be, in some sense, as Dionysius says, limited if it is the innite happening of the new in harmony with what precedes it.125 Dipolarity, then, is to be found too in Milbanks understanding of divine knowledge, in that, on the one hand, Gods knowing appears not to anticipate
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the actuality of participation, yet God does have perfect knowledge of all the possible ways, realised and unrealised, in which he can be participated, this latter innite plenitudinous vision forming the template of the nite as it is realised in participation. The unfolding of the innite plenitudinous vision that is the creation then is also an enfolding of its nite instantiation within the divine as it originates and as it is known. This process is nothing other than . . . the divine self-realisation in nitude. . . . and creations own participation in . . . Gods innite self-realisation. . . .126 The dipolarity we nd here reinforces the panentheistic nature of this vision which can be read in terms of the asymmetrical realisation of the nite in the innite, the one the unlimited transcendent innite surplus of all possibility, the other the created partial nite realisation of the divine vision in time. Milbank illustrates this dynamic character of creations relation to the divine by drawing on Deleuzes insights into the nature of the Baroque understood as an innite ornamentation overtaking that which it actually embellishes, . . . every detail . . . is a fold within an overall design, but the design itself is but a continuous unfolding, which reaches out ecstatically beyond its frame towards its supporting structure.127 We can read in such a description the asymmetrical relation between nite and innite, of fold to unfolding, which overows into an exuberance of difference within the unity of an overall vision (its supporting structure) that is not constrained but emanates ecstatically in creation, the divine making. Such a vision of creations relation to the divine, the unfolding as contained within the fold, the nite within the innite, creation within divine gratuity, is panentheistic in nature. Milbanks return to a participatory theology is a return to a Dionysian baroque in which creations relation to the divine is one of utmost intimacy.128 As Milbank says elsewhere, illustrating the dipolarity we have found, The God who is, who includes difference, and yet is unied, is not a God sifted out as abstract truth, but a God who speaks in the harmonious happening of Being. . . . God must be known both as the speaking of created difference, and as an inexhaustible plenitude of otherness. . . .129 Here the intimate relation between human and divine poesis is revealed: history, culture and language are not alien to the divine but are the divines actual revelatory unfolding. The recognition of transcendence in terms of an asymmetry between the nite and the divine does not then release a secular space of human autonomy. Rather, with the divine, not only in creation but in history, culture and language, human beings are to be understood as co-partners of God.130 For Milbank any attempt to deny this is to desacralise creation as participatory in the divine.131 It is here perhaps that Milbanks return to a participatory theology is at its most radical. For he accepts that those who have espoused a participatory theology have usually limited participation to a divine sharing of being and knowledge, playing down the importance of language, culture, time, and history as engendering divine relativism. Conversely, those who stress these
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areas have usually rejected the possibility of participation in the divine in order to preserve creaturely autonomy. Milbank, however, marries the two. He writes, Thus when we contingently but authentically make things and reshape ourselves through time, we are not estranged from the eternal, but enter further into its recesses by what for us is the only possible route.132 The language of panentheism is clearly evident here: that of not being estranged, an entering further into the divine. Human making appears to be a further intensication of nite creations participatory relation to the divine, an entering into the deeper recesses of God. Creation does not come to the divine from without but is clearly understood as already being within, with the ability to deepen this within-ness.133 Milbank accepts that such a perspective throws up massive aporias for understanding the divine and its relation to contingency.134 I shall argue in the conclusion of this article that Milbanks return to a participatory theology actually leads him to qualify the classical attributes of God in some very easily overlooked but signicant ways as he grapples with these aporias. In so doing we shall see further evidence of what essentially is a panentheistic participatory model at the heart of his understanding of creations relation to the divine. Milbank criticises Aquinas for falling short of Eriugenas vision where . . . making . . . is, for Christianity, a transcendental reality located in the innite, and God acts and knows because he internally makes or creates.135 Whilst Milbank seeks throughout his work to read Aquinas in a participatory light, in one important passage he admits that Aquinas actually denies participation. He does so for two reasons: rstly, under the inuence of Aristotle, Aquinas saw making as merely the modication of existing forms; and, secondly, because of a dual rejection of the idea of God as internally creative and of the created as itself creativethe created being for Aquinas merely as something which is. He goes onto say, . . . it is vital to realise that contingent making should naturally be conceived by Christianity as the site of our participation in divine understanding. . . . The great failure of modern Christian ontology is not to see that secular reason makes the unwarranted assumption that the made lies beneath the portals of the sacred, such that a humanly made world is regarded as arbitrary and as a cutting off from eternity.136 Whilst for Milbank all making has its origin in the divine this is not to say that creation cannot fall short of the divine vision for it. This brings us to a closer consideration of the place of analogy and hierarchy in Milbanks thought and of how creaturely making relates to the vision the divine has for creation. Panentheism after all is not the same as pantheism where symmetry between the divine and the world means that creation cannot fall short of the divine vision for it.
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In his insistence on the central importance of hierarchy and analogy for Christian thought137, Milbank is offering an alternative to Scotus transcendental univocal ontology and a return to what he understands as an older tradition in which everything is linked,138 more especially linked within the divine. In contradistinction to both the univocity of Neoplatonism in which all distinctions are dissolved, and the equivocity of univocal transcendental being which ends in an ontology of pure antagonistic difference, Milbank argues for a God who is hyper-diverse.139 Analogy for Milbank embraces difference as contained within the divine and so does not seek to reduce it to a common essence;140 nor does it arrive at an external equivocation of distinct unities standing over and against each other. For in the most fundamental of senses all things belong together in God without fusion of difference, without detriment to unity. Thus Milbank speaks of God as . . . the innite realisation of this [analogical] quality in all the diversity and unity of its actual/possible instances.141 Creation is the analogical reection of this holding together, the nite explication of the innite in terms of participation in the life of the divine. One might argue that this nite analogical reection of the divine is without the divine rather than held panentheistically within it. But as we have seen above, for Milbank creation in and of itself has no autonomous being as found in Scotus transcendental univocity.142 Milbank says that his understanding of participation is a mathexis of donation.143 Apart from participation in the divine, creation can have no reality, it is nothing.144 Creation, then, is not an equivocal other nor is it a univocal same but a relation that proceeds from and within the divine in participation and analogical likeness such that it bears the mark of the giver.145 Creation is analogical reection.146 Against the Scotus plane of immanence147 in which being manifests itself, beyond which manifestations being is nothing in itself,148 creations participatory analogical likeness to the divine points to the image of the divine, as an entering more fully into the divine: . . . . Gods Oneness contains within itself a superabundant plenitude which our very diversityor very difference from Godseeks to express, albeit analogically. . . . Precisely because God is One, no otherness lies outside Him, and since this oneness cannot ever be diminished, it can be entirely shared amongst all . . . variety.149 Milbank offers, then, a theological rather than a metaphysical perspective on the nature of cause. The metaphysical understanding of cause is that which is prior to its effect. To understand causality in terms of participation is . . . to know God as causeas supreme form, as supreme goal, as supreme being, perfection and manifestedness of things . . . and this . . . must mean to enter more deeply into effects, in such a fashion that one starts to know more of them also in their source and origin.150 There is no prior or after but rather effects are contained within their cause, that
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is panentheistically within the divine. To enter more deeply into effects, then, is to enter more deeply into that relation that gives them effect.151 This stands in contrast to the effects of an exteriorised God who ends up as an abstract postulation derived from nite reality, the prior before the after of creation.152 Milbank sums all this up when he says, Thus analogy presupposes not just a metaphysics of participation, but also a phenomenology of participation. . . .153 When we read Milbank panentheistically this last quotation is of even more signicance, framing as it does his suspicion and rejection of any apophatic view of theology and language as ending with . . . an uncatholic Deus Absconditus . . . and . . . an agnostic construal of analogy.154 Analogy can never be agnostic because creation always bears, through its participation in the divine, the mark of its giver.155 And to enter deeper into creation is to enter deeper into the divine, to know more of creation in its source and origin. It is for this reason that Milbank insists that analogy is more than the merely semantic, for it points to a real participation in an innite degree of eminence rather than simply pointing to a range of nite meaning contained within a linguistic concept.156 Participation is not in a xed and determinate range of possibilities precisely because participation in the divine is participation in an innite which cannot be contained.157 Created being, then, for Milbank, is not . . . an empty, univocal category of mere existentiality . . . but . . . an attribute of perfection . . . the nite expression of the divine.158 Creation is the analogical nite reection of this innite range of eminence, an innite which is dynamic rather than static. Milbank characterises this in terms of a contrast between an Aristotelian teleology which aims at a self-realisation of an original given potential and a Proclean teleology which is always orientated to a raising above to a new potential.159 Creation can never be a static and achieved external realisation of the divine vision but a dynamic going deeper into the life of the divine in terms of a realisation of the nite in the innite.160 Discussing Aquinas in this context, Milbank agrees that in this respect God is both architectonic and artisanal. Here once more we nd a dipolarity: one pole, abstract architectonic possibility; the other, concrete artisanal actuality. Neither can be divided in the sense of a cause and effect metaphysic, but rather the artisanal is an entering into the architectonic, a participation of the nite in the innite. This essentially is a dynamic dipolar panentheistic vision of a creation driven and unied within the life of the divine, . . . since Gods theoria is also practice, his preceding idea is only realised with the completed work of his emanating verbum. . . . And since God is esse, he does indeed immediately contain in a unied expression which is also a single intuition . . . an innitude of participated knowledge.161 Practice and theoria cannot be separated but are contained in a unied expression that emanates from and within the divine. The essen 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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tial point to grasp here is that creation is not to be understood in terms of a horizontal plane of immanence where effects are caused from without and which can only be understood necessarily and wholly in relation to these said causes. Indeed, for Milbank, such an understanding can allow no new events for within a causal perspective the preceding always accounts for the later. Creation, rather, is to be understood in terms of the vertical which allows for each event to be individually constituted in relation to its participation in the divine plenitude. The contrast is between caused sequence and hierarchical emanation.162 That all things relate each to the other, then, is not as a result of causal sequence163 but because within the divine plenitude all things are held together in graded relevance, which the nite by its relational participation in the divine reects.164 Each new event is a theological supplementation of the superadded (the vertical) in which the nite points to the more that is a reection of the innite plenitude to be further instantiated in the nite. This is to . . . grasp . . . creation in the light of grace, as itself graced or supplemented. . . .165 The actuality of nite reality relates not to any causal past but wholly to its present and future participation in the divine such that apart from the divine quite literally it is nothing. Milbank writes, Only if reality itself is regarded as given from some beyond does it become possible to trust that that which is communicated and circulated may assume new meanings which can blend seamlessly with the old. Or inversely, a reality limitlessly receptive to the renewal and perpetuation of gift, understood as that which both surprises and unites . . . must be a reality that derives from a source that is always and eternally the plenitude of such blending.166 We nd here more evidence for a panentheist reading but also for a dipolarity: God is both architectonic (theoria) and artisanal (praxis, poesis). Yet the two poles, God and creation, cannot be separated but are held together in asymmetrical relation, transcendent innite giver of nite gift, the more that creation can become lying within the innite plenitude that is the life of the divine. That which is not God, the ad extra which is creation, is panentheistically enfolded within the divine, ad intra. Such dipolarity is to be expected with panentheism, for unlike pantheism creation and God are not in symmetrical relation nor do they stand as distinct unities in external relation to each other.167 As Milbank himself says, I am not speaking of the other-worldly as something opposed to the world-intime.168 And yet, neither are they the same. We can only read this in terms of a panentheistic dipolar asymmetrical relation. We have noted above Milbanks dislike of the notion of the divine as a kind of world-soul primarily because of its immanentist connotations which can so easily topple over into a vague kind of pantheism. Hence he rejects the idea of God as an immanent process and lure active and at work within
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creation.169 Yet elsewhere Milbank himself makes certain references to God as lure. We can only contrast these references to the immanentism he rejects if we are able to read Milbank panentheistically, where creation and God are not in symmetrical relation. Thus to understand this use of lure it is necessary to relate it to Milbanks description of the divine unity as a differentiated hierarchy170 and creation as the reection of it. Hierarchy here is understood not in terms of a static immutability which creation must reect, but a hierarchy in which differences are ordered in graded relevance each to the other. We can use a simplied analogy to try to understand what Milbank is trying to say here. Let us imagine an innite series of points expanding in all directions. Creation mirrors this innite series in a nite and limited way in so far as it traces itself horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Each point is distinct, yet related to all others around it in an overall unity. So in reecting this graded and differential hierarchy, creation by its participation in the divine has many paths it can pursue, for there is no xed single hierarchy that creation must follow. Hierarchy here is dynamic rather than static.171 There can, then, be a discontinuity between what God may see as the ideal path for creation to follow and what creation actually achieves in participation in the divine. Creation, and human being in particular, may and does fall short of the divine vision for it but even as it does it still participates in the divine, for all that it does achieve is located in the innite plenitude that is the divine life. And as we have seen, this means that creation, history, culture are not only the poesis of the niteand of humankind in particularbut also of the innite, of the divine.172 Evil, as opposed to that which merely falls short of the best it can possibly be, is, for Milbank, always privativeit has no reality for it can never be located within the divine vision which creation analogically reects. It is, then, within this understanding of Gods relation to creation that Milbanks references to lure have to be understood, namely, in terms of a two-fold movement, of the divine to creation and of creation to the divine. This movement is asymmetrical, for creation can only move to the divine because it is rst gifted by the divine, unlike the divine which moves to creation as pure Giver. Divine lure does not involve pantheistic immanentism, but is to be read panentheistically: the transcendent and innite plenitude lures or draws creation deeper into the itself.173 Thus, Milbank speaks of the . . . lure of analogical participation . . . but balances this with creations own orientation to the divine in which . . . we have to discover the content of the innite through labour, and creative effort. . . . Within the lure of analogical participation Milbank goes on to say that there are . . . certain preferred additions . . . deemed essential to our conception of the true direction of this process . . . and it is within this context . . . that certain human products are more desirable than others.174 The lure of the analogical then is not irresistible; there are preferred additions if the nite is to pursue its optimum direction but these additions are not inevitable.
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Creation can and does, because of its partial vision, pursue other paths and ends, albeit always in terms of its participation in the divine. It is the divine plenitude, however, that always draws or lures creation further. Milbank believes this understanding lies at the heart of Aquinas endeavour; . . . the metaphysics of participation . . . is immediately and implicitly a phenomenology of seeing more than one sees, of recognising the invisible in the visible.175 It is this more that draws creation deeper into the divine.176 Thus, for Milbank, the manifestation of perfection is not in an a priori proof pointing to some sublime and unknown horizon (as with Kant). It is, rather, to be found in the created as a . . . faint conveying of a plenitude of perfection beyond its scope. . . . we do not refer to the good or life of God because he is the source of good or life in creatures; rather we refer to the good or life of creatures because they manifest a good which is pre-eminently precontained in God in an exemplary and more excellent fashion.177 Creation, rather than being understood as an autonomous realmas in Scotus univocal ontologycan only be understood in its relation to the divine, as the limited realised nite manifestation of the innite.178 An asymmetrical dipolarity is once more evident here. Milbank himself comes close to admitting such a dipolarity in discussing Aquinas arrival at a . . . most extraordinary chiasmus . . . in which Gods presence to creatures . . . indicates that Gods omnipresence simply is God himself, and that there cannot really be any being other than God.179 In creation, then, we do not leave God but go deeper into the divine who encompasses all. Milbank reads Aquinas in this light and understands him to mean that . . . all creatures subsist by grace in the sense that they only subsist in their constant return to full divine self-presence. . . .180 If grace is nothing other than the divine presence, and all creatures subsist by grace, if there cannot really be any being other than God, then creation can only be such as embraced panentheistically. The only other alternatives Milbank has rejected: immanentism (pantheism) and Scotus transcendental univocal ontology. As Milbank says, . . . there can be a created exterior to God, because Gods interior is self-exteriorisation.181 But what are we to make of Milbanks seemingly approving reference to Aquinas assertion that . . . God is not really related to . . . Creation . . . but that because Gods knowledge is perfect he . . . knows perfectly the myriad ways on which he may be participated in by creatures.182 This reference is wholly at odds with the tenor of Milbanks understanding of creations relation to the divine as we have so far discussed it. For, if God is not related, it essentially posits a creation that stands in external relation to God, in which the divine has knowledge only through contemplation of the divine self beyond infection of difference.183 Yet Milbank says that in participation that which is not God cannot stand in distinct external relation to the divine. The impossibility that creation involves is not that there cannot be a reality that is not God, but that this reality can ever be understood as exterior to the divine. As Milbank says, . . . the participation of beings in esse involves
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something quite other than the external relation between beings, and is, for us, ultimately unthinkable.184 The something quite other can only involve a panentheistic understanding of creations relation to the divine, in which what is not God is held within the divine.185 It is the innite interior of the divine which is also, then, the nite self-exteriorisation of God through the divine gratuity that overows into a creation that participates within the life of the divine.186 This has a bearing on how one understands divine omniscience. It implies the relation between God and creation, by which God knows his creation, is more than an unrelated, eternal static, abstract and xed selfknowledge of the various ways in which the divine can be participated inas would be implied by a classical conception of divine omniscience. Milbank himself goes beyond this classical conception in a way that prioritises a panentheistic reading of his work. Gods eminent knowledge is not an abstract totality but like the divine gratuity itself overows and embraces all difference in its dynamic and open eventuality.187 Gods knowledge then . . . is as much present in the individual and accidental as in the general and substantive . . . and . . . unlike the knowledge of the metaphysician, stretches down to every last particular.188 It is the God who is related who creates and knows.189 It is precisely in this context that Milbank criticises Scotus for disassociating the act of creation ad extra from the Trinitarian generation ad intra, leading to a displacement of the Trinity from the centre of Christian dogmatics to a God of innite will beyond creaturely participation. The Trinity is not that of a nished totality. No theology which denes the divine essence, following Scotus, as innity and freedom . . . will be able to do justice to the theme of essential relatedness, because this must include the idea of a knowledgethrough-this-relatedness.190 There is a dipolarity to be found in Milbanks treatment of divine omniscience: a move away from the classical understanding of Gods omniscience in terms of a pure contemplation of the divine self, in terms of a plenitudinous supra-temporal innite, to that of omniscience as a never nished totality. This latter knowledge is not Scotus external knowledge-through-relatedness achieved in terms of efcient causality but a knowledge in terms of the essential relatedness through participation of all that is within the life of the divine. The innity that is God is a never exhausted surplus in which nite reality participates and resulting in development and novelty in the nite realm. As Milbank writes, The unity, harmony and beauty of the emanation of difference cannot, in consequence, be anticipated in advance, even by God himself.191 Milbank contrasts Scotus God understood as a distinct unity externally confronting other distinct unities as ultimately empty in itself192 with that of Augustine and Dionysius whose Trinitarian theologies, according to Milbanks readings of them, go further than Neoplatonism . . . by situating the innite emanation of difference within the Godhead itself. . . .193 Gods
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knowledge, for Milbank, cannot be that of a static and xed self-identical reality or a Neoplatonic One beyond the sphere of division and contrast.194 The God Milbank presents here is decidedly panentheistic in character. It is in terms of panentheism, then, that we can make better sense of Milbanks statement, . . . God . . . is replete Being. For this to be possible, God must have gone outside of himself, and yet there is no exterior to God, no sum which might add to his amount.195 Nothing is added because creation is not in any external relation to God but is panentheistically embraced by the divine. Here we discern an asymmetrical dipolarity between God and creation: through its relation to the divine, the nite reects in its life the transcendent and innite divine vision in which it participates and in which it is embraced. As Milbank says, Not only do being and knowledge participate in a God who is and who comprehends; also human making participates in a God who is innite poetic utterance: the second person of the Trinity. Thus when we contingently but authentically make things and reshape ourselves through time, we are not estranged from the eternal, but enter further into its recesses by what for us is the only possible route.196 Divine simplicity, then, cannot be understood in terms of a God alone nor a static and eternal completion beyond the inclusion of difference. We have noted Milbanks prioritisation of the immanent Trinity, and of how the divine emanation that results in nite creation cannot be divorced from the relations between the persons of the Trinity. As such the divine unity does not merely embrace the difference of the three persons but all difference is embraced within the life of these relations as . . . an absolute origin that is always already difference and succession.197 The divine is hyper-diverse,198 . . . an outcome exceeding occasion. . . .199 A simplicity that involves the inclusion of all difference calls for a panentheistic understanding of creations relation to the divine, For the Trinitarian God does not possess the unity of a bare simplicity, a naked will, nor does he stand in an indifferent relationship to what he creates. Gods love for what he creates implies that the creation is generated within a harmonious order intrinsic to Gods own being.200 Nor does the harmonious order intrinsic to Gods own being mean that God can be understood here as an archetype that creation reects apart and separate from the divine.201 For only in terms of . . . an analogous exchange of predicates between God and nitude, can one conceive of an absolute that is itself difference, inclusive of all difference, unlike nihilism, which can only posit a transcendental univocity.202 Likewise, God as actus purus is qualied in terms of a creation that is constituted solely by its relation to the divine in which it participates and in
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terms of which participation all things are related within the divine unity. In this context, rather than God understood as pure act, Milbank can write that God is eminently becoming: . . . eminently that moulding or shaping through which alone subjects communicate with each other, and together modify their shared objective medium to produce history. God, as esse, exceeds the contrast of being with becoming, and is eminently becoming.203 This again is signicant in pointing to an asymmetrical dipolarity within the divine in that whilst God possesses the fullness of the innite plenitudinous supra-temporal vision, the nite explication of the divine vision, as constituted purely in relation to the divine, means that God can also be described as eminently becoming. The xed and static conception of the divine as actus purus comes to include an open eventuality and dynamism.204 Nor can divine aseity be understood in separation from the God who includes all difference. Milbank says we cannot arrive at God or a First Principle in terms of that which remains self-identical, but rather as that which is persuasively communicated . . . in . . . the harmony of difference . . . as . . . something continuously added to this world. . . .205 We can further expose this dipolarity by reference to Milbanks discussion of Dionysius conception of God as . . . a power within Being which is more than Being, an internally creative power. Milbank argues that this must qualify how we understand God as pure act. As innite power which is unimpeded, nothing in God can be unrealised, so that it would appear that God is actus purus, yet it must equally be the case that no actualisation of every limit, even an innite one, exhausts Gods power, for this would render it merely nite after all.206 This means that there is indeed a surplus in the divine that gives rise to creativity and results in actuality. It is this surplus that overows panentheistically within the life of the Trinity in terms of . . . a gratuitous creative giving of existence, and so difference. . . .207 We see here a dipolarity at the heart of the divine, a . . . moving and dynamic element . . . which is a . . . movement . . . from unity to difference. . . .208 Milbank sums all this up by saying, Innite realised act and innite unrealised power mysteriously coincide in God, and it must be this that supports the circular life, that is more than stasis, of the Trinity.209 Divine omnipotence comes to be re-understood as nothing other than the exercise of . . . creative love . . .,210 the nite realisation of the innite plenitudinous vision of the divine. This is a God who embraces creation within the divine.211 Gods self-sufciency can only be understood panentheistically, given that the Trinity is not the harmony of a nished totality.212 Indeed, Milbank makes the point more strongly: that which denies surplus in favour of a pure
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self-sufciency can only be doomed to mere repetition,213 a God who is a static and complete totality. Rather it . . . is the God who is related, who creates, and that from, and within, the compulsion of this immanent goal, freedom (as the Spirit) arises.214 From within the dynamics of the divine relations between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the divine gratuitous love brings to birth nite creation; Gods . . . power-act plays out through, and is constituted by, the Trinitarian relations. . . .215 From Gods essential relatedness Milbank notes that creation is intrinsic to Gods own being.216 Elsewhere, he refers to God . . . as essentially creative, as compelled . . . to create.217 It is the immanent Trinity which is the site not only of the immanent divine relations but also of the participatory inclusion of creation itself.218 God is not indifferent to the world he creates because it liespanentheisticallyat the heart of the Trinity itself.219 God is self-sufcient because the divine need not look outside itself for completion. Here, rather, we have a God who embraces all difference in unity, whose very own nature compels and entails that the divine creates. This is a God who is related; a God who embraces creation (that which is not-God) within the life of the Trinity that goes beyond itself in dynamic surplus. In summary, we can see how Milbank moves away from a classical conception of the divine. His God is not static and self-enclosed. Gods act is not xed but can be described as eminently becoming. The divine knowledge is not conned to an ideal and eternal vision of all things, but rather like the Trinity is not a nished totality and goes beyond itself in surplus. Gods simplicity is not bare but involves the inclusion of not just the Trinitarian relations but of all difference. Gods self-sufciency is not that of a self-identical enclosed being but one that suspires, compelled from within the divine being to give life to that which is not-God, in relation to which God is not indifferent. Yet all is embraced within the life of the Trinity to which there can be no outside220. Creation for Milbank can only be understood as dynamic surplus, . . . as a self-exceeding . . . on the part of the divine, giving rise to a lesser and other to God. Creation is not the nite realisation of an immutable and static divine vision but is rather itself an analogical reection of the nature of the divine as open, dynamic, as always going beyond itself in surplus. This process is our participation in divine Being, now understood as a participation also in the divine creativity which reveals itself as ever-new through time.221 That all things hold together rests not in any causal nexus belonging to creation itself but rather because creation is embraced panentheistically within a divine that holds all difference in graded relevance.222 There is real relation between creation and the divine. Creation here is held within the divine as opposed to being without a wholly self-sufcient, unchanging, immutable God devoid of any degree of potentiality. To reject participation of creation in the divine leads, as Milbank says, to . . . a loss also of a sense of exchange between innite and nite.223 Rather, . . . material things are paradoxically removed
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from themselvesreferred beyond themselves in order to be recognised as themselves. . . .224 We need look nowhere beyond creation in order to recognise the divine, since created esse is nothing other than that which is borrowed from the divine.225 It is . . . the divine self-realisation in nitude . . . and creations own participation in . . . Gods innite self-realisation.226 Reading Milbank panentheistically, in which the relation between the divine and the nite can be understood as both dipolar and asymmetrical in character, one can see how it might be possible to address the aporias Milbank faces in his return to a participatory theology, for the answers are already embedded in his own work if so read. These aporias rest mainly in accommodating the contingent in relation to the divine, (creation, historicity, time, culture, language) in contrast to a classical conception of a God who is simple and who cannot contain any other, omniscient and immutable in that nothing can be added, self-sufcient and in pure act without any degree of potentiality. Milbanks return to a participatory theology does not allow him to hold a purely classical theism. His doctrine of God overows its classical framework, within which it cannot be contained. If one does not accept an explicitly asymmetrical panentheist reading of the relation between the divine and creation, in which the polarities between innite and nite are not irreconcilable opposites but complementary dipolar aspects contained within the divine, then how else can the aporias Milbank mentions be resolved? Indeed, how else is Milbank able to locate all poetic activity, both divine and creaturely, within the life of the Trinity?227 After all, it is Milbank who criticises secular reason for seeing the world as cut off from eternity.228 Certainly, there is a tension in Milbanks thought. In places he seems to want to maintain a purely classical understanding of God as replete, immutable, and eternally omniscient, where the Logos is not really related to the human Jesus, nor the divine really related to the nite creation. Thus, it is only in the divine foreknowledge229 of both (a foreknowledge which actually is eternal) that they are not cut off from the divine. Yet surely this is to deny divine dynamic surplus in favour of creation understood as the absolute repetition of the completely static that Milbank criticises?230 It is a foreknowledge that can never change in relation to another and is frozen eternally. Such knowledge is the antithesis of all Milbank has been trying to say elsewhere in relation to a God who is not eternally closed off and static, giving life to what is not divine in terms of the emanation of all reality from a single divine source231 which includes all difference and is the ground of all differentiation,232 a God who is internally creative,233 in which there is a concursus of the divine and creaturely, the innite and the nite.234 Here, creation analogically reects a hierarchy that is neither a xed nor an eternally static foreknowledge, for analogical participation reects the very nature of the divine itself as dynamic.235
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Milbank goes on to say, This process is our participation in divine Being, now understood as a participation also in the divine creativity which reveals itself as ever-new through time.236 After all, what are the choices open to Milbank if he is to escape the aporias of a God who is replete yet who creates; of a God who is innite in relation to a creation that is nite; of a God who is eternal in relation to a creation that is contingent; of a God who is selfsufcient yet goes beyond himself? The answer does not lie in the univocal transcendentalism of Scotus which, for Milbank, is the source of many of the woes of modernity. Nor is it to be found in pantheism. Rather, Milbanks thought demands a reading in which the relation of the divine to the created is dipolar, asymmetrical and panentheistic. This dipolarity stands in contrast to Hegelian dialecticism which is rooted in an ontological subject in opposition to its object,237 to be resolved in some nal synthesis of complete inclusion.238 Rather it is the embrace of the nite by the innite, of creation by the divine in asymmetrical relation, such that the divine is the transcendent constitutive ground of all that is. It is only in relation to divine gratuity and graciousness that the nite can be through the gift of its participation in the divine life. To be created is to be related, to be inseparably bound within the life of the divine. This does not make the divine dependent on creation, for if creation did not exist God would still be God, but as Milbank has stated, such a God would be wholly abstract.239 Yet it is the nature of the divine, in that it contains all difference within the divine unity, that it can go beyond itself in . . . absolute uninterrupted giving.240 As Milbank has said, Just because there is no outside to God, God can most freely and ecstatically exceed himself. . . .241 This excess is nothing other than panentheistic . . . because Gods interior is self-exteriorisation.242 Such dipolarity stands not in an antagonistic relation to be resolved but lies at the very heart of the divine creativity itself, that gives rise to that which is not God from the transcendent innite ground that is the divine life. They are distinct yet in asymmetrical relation, Creator and created, the created arising out of and panentheistically embraced within the life of the Creator. We can agree with Milbank that this is nothing other than . . . the divine self-realisation in nitude.243
NOTES 1 John Milbank, Being Reconciled (hereafter BR) (London: Routledge, 2003), p. x; cf. BR p. 194; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (hereafter TST), edition, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. xix. Milbanks return, however, is not a nostalgic one in terms of some kind of lapse into pre-modernity (John Milbank, Word Made Strange (hereafter WMS), (London: Routledge 1997), p. 7f). Rather, the task of theology is to learn from the mistakes of pre-modern thinkers (BR, p. 136). To this end Milbank elaborates a new reading of Augustine and Dionysius (TST, p. 263). Certainly he wishes to recover the insights of the Platonic tradition as found within their work, particularly with regard to the integration of philosophy and theology. His new reading, however, involves bringing to the fore their . . . latent . . . concern both with historicity and with human poesis. . . . (TST, p. xxiv).
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BR, p. 194: For Milbank modernity begins from the 1300s onwards with the shift towards the created gradually being . . . accorded full reality meaning and value in itself, without reference to transcendence. . . . Cf. BR, p. 111; TST, p. xxii. Panentheism here is to be understood in contrast to pantheism where the relation between the divine and creation is held to be symmetrical such that we would not speak of a divine-world relation but an identication of the divine and the cosmos. In contrast, classical theisms underlying assumption can be typied as holding that creation is in external relation to the divine. TST, p. 297; p. 330. TST, p. 430. TST, p. 309. TST, p. 432; cf. TST, p. 431, . . . an innite God must be power-act. . . . WMS, p. 110. TST, p. xxvii. BR, p. 203. John Milbank, The Suspended Middle (hereafter SM), (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), p. 43. Milbank here is discussing the views of Gilson. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (hereafter TA), (London: Routledge 2001), p. 85. Most of the citations used in this article come from Chapter 2 of this work as authored by Milbank himself (see Preface TA, p. xiv). I take it, however, that TA as a whole accurately reects the views of Milbank in that he is happy to give his name to it as co-author. The few citations outside Chapter 2 therefore are made in this light. TA, p. 35. BR, p. 99. WMS, p. 23. WMS, p. 13. WMS, p. 9. This claim is made in the context of a discussion of Kants understanding of Gods relation to creation in terms of an analogy of proper proportionality (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics). Here God and man share in a univocal efcient causality in terms of a ratio of proportion: man having the lesser ratio, God the greater. Hence God constructs the world outside himself according to this greater ratio of univocal efcient causality. In contrast, an artisan, for example, constructs his object outside himself according to a lesser ratio. Milbank makes the point that for Aquinas there cannot be any such ratio between God and the world or the innite and nite, for God and the world do not operate in the same plane of action. Milbank sees Kants offence as an undermining of the divine transcendence, even though he accepts Kant is agnostic as to what God is in himself. BR, p. 77. Thus, for Milbank Scotus God involves a loss . . . of a sense of exchange between innite and nite. God ends up as . . . a one-way giver. . . .; BR, p. 78, . . . the Scotist God has become more like a bestowing tyrant. Cf. TST, p. 15. BR, p. 74 and 76 cf. TST, p. 16; BR, p. 194. WMS, pp. 40ff; TA, p. 35; cf. SM, p. 96. John Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 23 (hereafter RO). This error too gives rise to philosophy as an autonomous discipline, the content of which is the elaboration of this ontology and the separation of reason and faith, in which theology becomes . . . a regional, ontic, positive science, grounded either upon certain revealed facts or upon certain grace-given inner dispositions or again upon external present authority (the Counter-Reformation model.) RO, p. 24. Cf. BR, p. 74. RO, p. 22. TST, p. 306. This transcendental univocity, being entirely empty of content, and indeed the medium of a sheerly differentiated content, cannot possibly appear in itself to our awareness, but can only be assumed and exemplied in the phenomena which it organises. TST, p. 306. TST, p. 15. TST, p. 302. WMS, p. 262; SM, pp. 93 and 94; TST, pp. 15 and 435; cf. TST, pp. 14 and 26f. where Milbank discusses how this conception of voluntarist sovereignty inuenced in part a new metaphysic of political power, later giving rise to modern absolutism.
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See WMS Chapter 11: Out of the Greenhouse pp. 257ff. WMS, p. 258f.; cf. TST, pp. 38, 40f. where Milbank refers to sociologists and others who delineate the hidden hand of God as being at work in these social laws. . . . God as embodied in nature, as gravity, mysterious ether active principle, world-soul, general law; newly limited by the intractabilities of matter, and newly veriable through the evidence of his operations.(WMS, p. 260). WMS, p. 262. WMS, p. 264. WMS, p. 264. WMS, p. 262. Milbank goes on to say, . . . Creation is not ex nihilo, but an evolution from small time beginnings somewhere on the cosmic prairie, to ever greater complexity. . . . Cf. WMS, p. 260: For by turning to nature, we cannot really nd the key to value. TA, p. 85f. TA, p. 85. TA, p. 85. E.g. SM, p. 34, as . . . extrinsic divine decree. . . . Milbank criticises Barths theology as being complicit in this model that has so fashioned modernitysee RO, p. 33 note 1: Theology is not positive knowledge of an object [whether of God, Christ, or a deposit of propositional revelation], but nite intimation of innite understanding. Cf. WMS, p. 28f.; SM, p. 31; and BR, p. 119 where Milbank describes how with the birth of modernity a . . . literal punctilinear revelation . . . became . . . now the only trace on earth of an inscrutable deity. RO, p. 24. TST, p. 139, where Milbank says acknowledgement of transcendence does not release . . . a secular space of human autonomy . . . rather . . . human origination is seen as coincident with divine, sacral origination. Cf. TST, p. 150f.where Milbank discusses Herders expressivism such that unless we recognise human creative expression is something . . . which is not merely our own, [then] there can be no truth of any sort. RO, p. 30. See e.g. TST, p. 252 where Milbank with Aquinas rejects the view that reason can ever be autonomous in relation to faith. Rather the distinction between faith and reason is located . . . in a much more fundamental framework of participation of all human rationality in divine reason. Such that all knowledge remotely implies faith in God, and which in turn strengthens our grasp of natural reason. Cf. RO, p. 24 where Milbank, discussing Jacobi and Hamann, says, . . . there can be no reason/revelation duality: true reason anticipates revelation, while revelation simply is of true reason which must ceaselessly arrive. . . . RO, p. 27. RO, p. 27; cf. BR, p. ix, . . . when we contingently but authentically make . . . we are not estranged from the eternal but enter further into its [the divines] recesses by what is . . . the only possible route. RO, p. 29. RO, p. 30. RO, p. 32; cf. RO, p. 37 n.49: . . . a philosophical treatment of being on its own, or the search to know being by reason, will reach aporetic and nihilistic conclusion. RO, p. 24. See above p 527. BR, p. xi; cf. TA, p. 34. SM, p. 43; cf. RO, p. 29. WMS, p. 97f. Creation can only participate in the divine as in toto wholly constituted by divine gratuity. This stands in contrast to the more partial and limited understanding of participation in strands of Hellenistic thought, in which an eternal and uncreated matter takes form by participating in an ideal (transcendent or otherwise) or in which a semi-divine power moulds prime matter, presupposing notions of a prior selfsufciency or self-grounding for nite reality (BR, p. xi). Thus too, for Milbank the arrival of Aristotelianism from the 1300s onwards created a crisis for the theology of grace (SM, p. 101). Part of the limitation Milbank sees in Aquinas is due to Aristotelian inuence (TST, p. 432). Whilst, for Milbank, Platonism has the advantage over Aristotelianism in that it ultimately speaks of what is as partially the manifestation of a transcendent source (see
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WMS, p. 40), nevertheless, because of this partiality, Milbanks aim is to provide a Christian critique and theological transformation of Neoplatonism in terms of the location of all difference within the divine itself (TST, p. 435f.; WMS, p. 50). SM, p. 45f.; cf. SM, pp. 92, 93. Cf. SM, p. 46 where Milbank agrees with de Lubac that any notion of a . . . pure nature in fact ruins the articulation of divine gratuity. RO, p. 24. TA, p. 31. TA, p. 31f. Here Milbank is delineating a theological understanding of creation beyond metaphysics where . . . metaphysics tends to view cause as straight-forwardly prior to, and independent of, its effects. TA, p. 31my italics. TA, p. 32. TA, p. 35; cf. WMS, p. 40f. where Milbank discusses the origins of both ontotheology and theoontology and their bearing on subsequent philosophy and theology. Also, SM, p. 96, where Milbank discusses Bruaires comparable ontodology. TA, p. 35my italics. WMS, p. 110. For Milbank the suspicion of substance arises from . . . a theological metacritique of the metaphysical tradition. Substance for Milbank is not integral to the denition of Christian orthodoxy. Indeed it was the suspicion of substance that for Milbank allowed . . . the rst linguistic turn in modern thought. Cf. WMS, p. 98. TST, p. 431my italics. TST, p. 432. TST, p. 432. Cf. BR, p. 63 where Milbank discusses the theological . . . impossibility that anything else should exist outside God, who is replete Being. For this to be possible, God must have gone outside himself, and yet there is no exterior to God, no sum which might add to his amount. And BR, p. 65f.: Just because there is no outside to God, God can most freely and ecstatically exceed himself; just because God cant share anything, he can share everything. Cf. WMS, p. 110. Cf. WMS, p. 110 where Milbank says we cannot actually talk of Gods self-sufciency, for to do so implies that there is an outside to the divine. TST, p. 431my italics. TST, p. 431. BR p. 66. BR, p. 69f. BR, p. 66my italics. Cf. BR, p. 74 where Milbank points out that unlike Aquinas, Scotus does not share the perspective of the impossibility of creation, for Scotus takes the view that . . . being is transcendentally indifferent to innite and nite . . . the nite creation fully is, in its own right as Creation, and holds ground ontologically, simply as what God has determined it should be. In contrast, Aquinas, recognising the impossibility of creation, held that for the nite to be constituted by the innite it must suspire and in this . . . be self-cancelling. . . . [and] must aspire to return to God. WMS, p. 80; cf. TST, p. 430. BR, p. 115. Even with Plato there is a chaotic material residue that does not participate in ideal reality. It is in this context, Milbank argues, that participation is logically more Biblical than Hellenistic. BR, p. 76my italics. BR, p. 74such that . . . being is transcendentally indifferent to innite and nite . . . [in terms of which] the nite Creation fully is, in its own right as Creation, and holds ground ontologically, simply as what God has determined it should be. BR, p. 74f. Thus for Milbank humans in particular have an innite natural capacity capable of the highest possible relation with the divine by virtue of their participation in the divine. WMS, p. 182. TST, p. 437my italics. TST, p. 15my italics. TST, p. 431my italics.
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However, since the fall entraps the divine glory which is Trinitarian, an economic presence of the Trinity as such in creation (Incarnation, Spirit, Church) becomes tragically necessary. . . . Or, indeed one might go further to say that the fall alone occasions the existence of an economic Trinity. (WMS, p. 182). WMS, p. 177. WMS, p. 80. Cf. WMS, pp. 112, 155 where Milbank points out that in contrast to postmodern nihilism, a Trinitarian vision can arrive at a peaceful afrmation of the other consummated in a transcendent innity. TST, p. 431: Just as God . . . is not a substance because he is nothing fundamental underlying anything else, so there are no absolute self-standing substances in creation, no underlying matters not existent through form and no discrete and inviolable things. TA, p. 85: . . . participation of beings . . . involves something quite other than external relation between beings. . . . Cf. SM, p. 15f. where Milbank discusses de Lubacs understanding of this position in terms of which . . . human being . . . retains a profound ontological kinship with the divine origin . . . a position abandoned by late medieval and early modern scholasticism. Elsewhere Milbank notes Olivier Boulnois contention that it was the arrival of Aristotelianism that ultimately gave rise to the notion of a pure nature and the conception of grace as extraneous. See SM, p. 101f. SM, p. 43. Milbank notes de Lubacs reading of such a position in Aquinas as gift without contrast. See SM, p. 97f. E.g. Gregory of Nyssa: creation is to be understood in terms of combinations of divine logoi; Basil of Ceasarea: that there is no substratum of material behind appearance, all being is sustained by the Creators power alone. Milbank also notes the afnity of aspects of Berkeleys thought with this tradition. See WMS, pp. 97ff. TST, p. 139: . . . human origination is seen as coincident with divine, sacral origination. Cf. WMS, p. 127 in which Milbank describes God as . . . co-partner in responsibility. . . . and TST, p. 438: The God who is, who includes difference, and yet is unied, is not a God sifted out as abstract truth, but a God who speaks in the harmonious happenings of Being. Milbank for instance points to the hard and fast dictionary denotation and location of things that a substance metaphysic entails (WMS, p. 99) ending in . . . the glorication of mere originality. . . . (TST, p. 308). This forms part of the basis of Milbanks criticism of modernity in that science comes to be understood as the manipulation of autonomous xed objects in contrast to the plasticity of the postmodern world view (the latter which actually ts better Milbanks understanding of the pre-modern as the prioritisation of ever-changing relations) in which meanings are uid (BR, pp. 202, 203; cf. BR, p. 107). Milbank, too, accuses capitalism of being complicit in a metaphysic of spatial identity which it seeks to dene, hold on to and store, and thereby desacralise, closing off the created to its transcendent origin. See BR, pp. 170 and 171. WMS, p. 99my italics. TST, p. 15. WMS, p. 111my italics. The problem for Milbank lies with Aquinas Aristotelian legacy, whereas the Cappadocian Fathers are clearly Platonic in their thinking. Thus Milbank admits that participation is actually denied by Aquinas (see TST, p. 432). Insofar as there is a form/matter dualism in Aquinas we can say there is too a residual medium that conveys the divine from without in contrast to a participatory model in which creation is wholly constituted by divine gratuity. It is no surprise, then, that Milbanks return to a participatory understanding of creations relation to the divine will nd difculties dealing with the divine attributes as understood by Aquinas in which creation is understood as somehow exterior to the divine (see TA, p. 85). WMS, p. 113my italics. WMS, p. 112. SM, p. 18. BR, p. 69f. See page 533 above. WMS, p. 182. SM, p. 89f. SM, p. 90.
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SM, p. 91my italics. SM, p. 92f. SM, p. 94. TST, p. 139. SM, p. 18. WMS, p. 112see above page 535. BR, p. 107. BR, p. 114f. WMS, p. 260. WMS, pp. 257ff. WMS, p. 103: Milbank looks favourably on Berkeleys propagation of a theological physics in which the latter takes the Platonic step of seeing that all the parts of the world are . . . such that they seem animated and held together by one soul. This too is the basis of the theological understanding of Truth that Milbank and Pickstock espouse in Truth in Aquinas. E.g. see TA, p. 11: . . . truth is also a property of all nite modes of being in so far as they participate in God. . . . Cf. TA, p. 8: The Truth of a thing is an aspect of Being as it exists . . . supremely in the divine Soul. And TA, p. 23 discussing Aquinas understanding of Truth: Were one to attempt to comprehend a nite reality not as created, that is to say, not in relation to God, then no truth . . . could ensue, since nite realities are of themselves nothing and only what is can be true. TST, p. 431my italics. Cf. WMS, p. 103 where we see how close Milbanks position is to that of Berkeleys, of a creation animated and held together by one soul. Cf. TST, p. 408f where Milbank discusses St. Augustines overcoming of the antinomy of the polis and psyche, in which the political community is to be seen as an individual ruled over by Christ and its bearing on the analogical relation of the divine as the world-soul and animating principle of creation. TST, p. 15. TST, p. 309. TST, p. 436; cf. TST, p. 430. This movement, as Dionysius explains, is from unity to difference, constituting a relation in which unity is through its power of generating differences and difference is through its comprehension by unity. Milbank writes, . . . God is superabundant Being, and not a Plotinian unity beyond Being and difference . . . a power within Being which is more than Being, an internally creative power. (TST, p. 430). TST, p. 435my italics. TST, p. 436. TST, p. 430. TST, p. 430. TST, p. 436my italics. TST, p. 436. TST, p. 436. TST, p. 436. TST, p. 438. Note the dipolarity here, God as the speaking of created actual difference and God as an inexhaustible, i.e. innite, plenitude of otherness. WMS, p. 126f. TST, p. 133. Milbank holds that the writers of the Old Testament understood this, . . . human origination is seen as coincident with divine, sacral origination. (TST, p. 139). BR, p. ix; cf. TST, p. xxiv where Milbank refers to his new reading of Augustine and Dionysius involving bringing to the fore their . . . latent . . . concern both with historicity and with human poesis. . . . E.g. See BR, p.66. Deication is not the imposition of an external grace but something that is already inherent within human being. BR, p. x. TST, p. 431. TST, p. 432f.my italics. Beneath should be taken in the sense of beyond, outside. It is interesting to note here that for Milbank the origins of modernity and its errors have their roots not just in Scotus univocalist ontology but also in the medieval reappropriation of Aristotle. Thus Plato, for Milbank, stands in contrast to Aristotle, given that Plato
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. . . never sought a categorical inventory of what is in the world, nor explained what is in becoming through an ultimate efcient or nal causality, but rather referred what becomes to a partial manifestation (donation?) of a transcendent source. . . . (WMS, p. 40) Cf. SM, p. 101; SM, p. 17f.; cf. WMS, p. 40. TST, p. 297. BR, p. 194; cf. BR, p. 111. BR, p. 115; cf. TA, p. 13. TST, p. 429f.; cf. TA, p. 13f. TST, p. 307. Thus for example, Milbank points out that for Cajetan and the neo-scholastics human nature can be specied without reference to God or only in relation to God as an external efcient cause. In no way does the created anticipate grace. Thus when grace arrives it is as overwhelming exterior force. See SM, p. 30. BR, p. xi. cf. BR, p. 115 where Milbank criticises Scotus for creating . . . a new space of univocal existence . . . in which a things existence is a question of its simple thereness, a question of being in abstraction from any consideration of its divine derivation according to a participatory framework. It is in this light that Milbank reads Aquinas: . . . nite being is not on its own account subsistently anything, but is granted to be in various ways. . . . Nothing, for Aquinas, in the nite realm properly is of itself, nor is subsistent of itself, nor is essentially formed of itself. . . . all nite being emerges from nothing only as, and through, its likeness to the divine. (TA, p. 34). BR, p. Xi. SM, p. 99. BR, p. 194. Cf. TA, p. 44 where Milbank describes transcendental being as . . . an empty, univocal category of mere existentiality, and no longer an attribute of perfection. . . . This results in sheer arbitrary heterogeneity and equivocity which has become the dening theme of modernity. See TST, p. 299f and TST, p. 306f. TA, p. 13; cf. TST, p. 15 where Milbank notes that it is no surprise that Scotus played down the Trinity in favour of voluntarism: No longer is the world participatorily enfolded within the divine expressive Logos, but is instead a bare divine unity starkly confronts the other distinct unities which he has ordained. Cf. WMS, p. 80; cf. TST, p. xxvii where Milbank favourably points to Eckharts Trinitarian theology in answering these sorts of issues. TA, p. 32. E.g. see BR, p. 107: Emanation by contrast is not causality (efcient causality), and permits the event, because it views an effect as the development of the cause, which itself unfolds and denes its very nature. . . . Cf. TA, p. 85 where, writing with Pickstock, Milbank says, . . . the participation of beings in esse involves something quite other than the external relation between beings, and is, for us, ultimately unthinkable. Cf. WMS, p. 9. TA, p. 48. TA, p. 48. BR, p. xi. SM, p. 30f. This too throws into question the stark divide between natural and revealed theology as portrayed, for example, by Barth, in which revelation stands over and against a nature depraved and passive in the face of the divine. Cf. WMS, p. 15: For Aquinas the possibility of analogy is grounded in this reality of participation in Being and goodness. Analogy is not, as he conceived it, primarily linguistic. . . . Cf. TA, p. 46. TST, p. 436. This conception too colours Milbanks understanding of virtue, not as an Aristotelian achievable mean between two extremes to be arrived at through heroic effort (an immanent telos discoverable by reason). Rather, virtue is understood as a surplus that is always more, beyond containment and so involves an always-goingbeyond (a transcendent lure that is found through our participation in the divine). See TST, pp. 338 and 366. TA, p. 44. SM, p. 101.
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RO, p. 29; cf. TA, p. 42: . . . material things are paradoxically removed from themselves referred beyond themselves in order to be recognised as themselves. . . . TA, p. 40. BR, p. 107. BR, p. 180. BR, p. 107: . . . at the top of the ladder there is Unum or Esse which holds in complicated fashion the entire explicated sequence (to use Nicholas of Cusas terminology). TA, p. 51; Cf. BR, p. 180: . . . future contingency is super-added to the present, and not emergent from it by mere instrumental causalitywhose absolute sway would demand that everything was given from the very rst instance of time. BR, p. 171. TST, p. 15. BR, p. 177. WMS, p. 264. E.g. see TST, p. 435f, where Milbank contrasts the Christian accommodation of difference within the divine unity as found in Dionysius with that of pagan Neoplatonism where the One is . . . beyond the sphere of division and contrast. . . . For Dionysius . . . unity ceases to be anything hypostatically real in contrast to difference, and becomes instead only the subjective apprehension of a harmony displayed in the order of differences. . . . unity has become both a dynamic happening and a complex relation. For Milbank both Augustine and Dionysius . . . went further by situating the innite emanation of difference within the Godhead itself. . . .my italics. See BR, p. 107 where Milbank discusses this with reference to Nicolas of Cusa: . . . there is Unum or Esse which holds in complicated fashion the entire explicated sequence. . . . WMS, p. 126f.; TST, p. 139. Thus, revelation is embedded in culture and history rather than arriving from some extrinsic source. See BR, p. 122; BR, p. 119; SM, p. 31; TST, p. 432f; in this context the Trinitarian God is more than just social, it is . . . a cultural God. (WMS, p. 80Milbanks italics). BR, p. 66: This going deeper ends for Milbank in deication. Thus, he gives his reading of Aquinas: . . . deied humanity comes more and more to participate in the Sons return to the Father within the Trinity. But this too involves the whole of Creation: And since, for Aquinas, the Creation is not really outside of God, it is, through humanity, able to make an adequate return of love and honour to God. . . . God is able in the Creation to realise a telos commensurate with his own innite nature. It is a going-deeper of the created into the divine of that which is already properly there within the divine. Cf. SM, p.108, where Milbank writes . . . of . . . the cosmos as lured by grace. . . . TST, p. 309. This too allows Milbank to escape the charge of relativism as certain historical and cultural makings will be more conducive to discovering the divine purpose for creation than others. TA, p. 47. Even though elsewhere Milbank says Aquinas denies a theory of participation. See TST, p. 432. This denial explains Milbanks assertion that Aquinas is not . . . retrievable without revision. . . . See WMS, p. 17. cf. TA, p. 41 where Milbank says his approach is to give an essentially Platonic and theoontological reading of Aquinas. BR, p. ix; cf. SM, p. 42 where Milbank notes de Lubacs suggestion . . . that without the lure of grace there would be no self-exceeding lan that generates the diversity and restlessness of human culture. TA, p. 47. Hence Milbanks rejection of apophaticism and any agnostic construal of analogy. See TA, p. 48. TST, p. 309. TA, p. 37my italics. TA, p. 37f. TA, p. 86my italics. TA, p. 86; cf. Milbanks assertion elsewhere: TST, p. 437: For the Trinitarian God does not . . . stand in an indifferent relationship to what he creates. And WMS, p. 182: . . . one should insist that God is the God who is related, who creates. . . . TST, p. 434. It is such a being, as found both in Plotinian Neoplatonism and Scotist voluntarianism, that Milbank criticises: . . . the only transcendental self-identical reality is the recurrence of an empty will, or force . . . emphasising respectively divine unity and
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absolute simplicity at the expense of the inclusion of difference and ultimately issuing in nihilism. See TST, p. 435my italics. Cf. TST, p. 437: in contrast the divine . . . is an absolute that is itself difference, inclusive of all difference. . . . and BR, p. 115, where Milbank argues that Christian theology must hold to a God who is . . . hyper-diverse. . . . TA, p. 85my italics. . . . there cannot really be an exterior to God since he is all in all. (TA, p. 85); cf. BR, p. 63: . . . there is no exterior to God, no sum which might add to his amount. In terms of the nature of the divine, Milbank therefore favours surplus over pure self-sufciency. See BR, p. 170. cf. TST, p. 437. TA, p. 86; TST, p. 436: God is a . . . never exhausted surplus . . . and this . . . means that the context for development is always open to revision by the development. Cf. TST, p. 430: within the divine there is a . . . moving and dynamic element . . . which is a . . . movement . . . from unity to difference. . . . BR, p. 71. Phrases such as stretching down need to be understood in terms of divine emanation and not as from one distinct unity to another; they need to be understood as not involving any degree of efcient causality but in terms of relation and donation by which the nite is constituted by its participation in the divine, apart from which it has no reality in or of itself. Cf. WMS, p. 14: . . . Being is not mere fact [but] . . . sheer givenness. WMS, p. 182. WMS, p. 177. TST, p. 436. Milbank here approvingly refers to Eriugena and Dionysius, who . . . realised, Gods knowledge is not before but in the innity of generation, and this knowledge can only be ordered, only be, in some sense, as Dionysius says, limited, if it is the innite happening of the new in the harmony with what preceded it. Empty because Scotus God is devoid of difference. The only transcendental selfidentical reality is the recurrence of an empty will. . . . (TST, p. 435). TST, p. 435my italics. For Milbank this does not simply refer to the procession of the divine persons but also to creation itself as originating within the life of immanent Trinity. See WMS, p. 182; cf. TST, p. xxvii. TST, p. 435; TST, p. 436: . . . unity has become both a dynamic happening and a complex relation . . . preserving [all things] in their distinctness yet linking them together. BR, p. 63. BR, p. ix. WMS, p. 176. BR, p. 115. BR, p. 78. TST, p. 437. Milbanks understanding of divine unity and simplicity as inclusive of all difference stands in contrast to the strongly voluntarist Scotus. E.g. see TST, p. 435: The only way the voluntarists could characterise God in contrast to this was to emphasise his unity and absolute simplicity; these become properties of a sheerly inscrutable will of whom no nite qualities can be eminently predicted. Creaturely participation in the divine means, as we have seen, that The God who is, who includes difference, and yet is unied, is not a God sifted out as abstract truth, but a God who speaks in the harmonious happening of Being. In the context of an ontology of difference. (TST, p. 438). TST, p. 437. In that transcendental univocity issues in pure heterogeneity for Milbank, it denies difference as embraced within a primordial harmonious unity and order, and is thereby constituted by ontological violence: . . . univocity of being . . . upholds difference as violence (TST, p. 309). Pagan peace and order becomes nothing other than . . . the arbitrary limitation of violence by violence (TST, p. 391f.). Cf. TST, p. 440. TA, p. 87. This dipolarity is illustrated not only in Milbanks understanding of God as Creator but as we have seen in how he understands God as the God of culture and history. See WMS, p. 126f.; TST, p. 139. See p. 539 above. TST, p. 437my italics. The use of the word persuasive is interesting here, being indicative of God as the ultimate lure of creation. See above p. 544; cf. TST, p. 308 where Milbank points out that univocity leads to the glorication of the original whilst analogical process is a constant discrimination of preferences and erection of hierarchies.
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TST, p. 430. TST, p. 429. TST, p. 430. TST, p. 430. WMS, p. 23. One can only think of the elements of creation as inherently interconnected qualities which combine and re-combine in all sorts of ways . . . which participate in the divine creative power/act. . . . (TST, p. 431). TST, p. 431. BR, p. 170; cf. TST, p. 437 and TST, p. 435: . . . the only transcendental self-identical reality is the recurrence of an empty will. . . . WMS, p. 182my italics. TST, p. 430. TST, p. 437. WMS, p. 177; cf. WMS, p. 182: . . . God is the God who is related, who creates and that from, and within, the compulsion . . . freedom . . . arises. WMS, p. 182. TST, p. 437. BR, p. 65f. TST, p. 308. Creation is not the glorication of an original but the constant discrimination of preferences. See TST, p. 308. BR, p. 77; cf. TST, p. 308. TA, p. 42. TA, p. 41. TST, p. 436; cf. TST, p. 431. As Milbank writes, . . . the notion of a participation of the poetic in an innite poesis is to be complemented by the notion of a participation of reciprocal exchanges in an innite reciprocity which is divine donum. (BR, p. x). TST, p. 433. BR, p. 73f. BR, p. 170. TST, p. 416. TST, p. 429. TST, p. 431. TST, p. 215. If analogy is seen as entering into all unities, relations and disjunctures, then it is rendered dynamic: the likenesses discovered are also constructed likenesses (whether by natural or cultural processes) which can be refashioned and reshaped. And if certain things and qualities are like God, then it must also be true that the analogising capacity itself is like God. (TST, p. 307). TST, p. 308. TST, p. 156. Milbank of course recognises that Hegel does not achieve quite such an eventuality; hence, he deems Hegel as at heart gnostic. See TST, p. 161. TST, p. 438. BR, p. 67; cf. WMS, p. 182: . . . one should insist that God is the God who is related, who creates, and that from, and within, the compulsion of this immanent goal, freedom . . . arises. BR, p. 65f. TA, p. 86my italics. TST, p. 436.
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Mir - Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

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Modern Theology 28:3 July 2012 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

A PANENTHEIST READING OF JOHN MILBANK

Amene Mir 9 Mylne Close, Upper Mall, London W6 9TE, UK amenemir@ymail.com

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

A Panentheist Reading of John Milbank

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2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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