Interviews:
Orthodox paradox: an interview with John Milbank posted by Nathan Schneider
Milbank is an Anglican theologian whose ideas, distinguished by a profound skepticism of secular reason, have given shape to Radical Orthodox theology and provided the underpinnings of the Red Tory and Blue Labour movements in British politics. His most recent book, The Monstrosity of Christ, is a collaboration with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj !i"ek, edited by Creston Davis and published in 2009 by MIT Press. He is also a contributor to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a series of critical engagements with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, recently published by Harvard University Press. * * * NS: You write of Slavoj !i"ek, “In an important sense, he bears a theological witness.” How can a selfdescribed atheist bear a theological witness? JM: In Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils, one character, Kirillov, speaks of both the necessity to believe in God as the reality of infinite goodness and the impossibility of doing so. His resolution of this dilemma is deliberate, meaningless suicide on the grounds that, in an atheistic world, he himself is now God, as possessor of a sovereign will, and that suicide is the highest demonstration of this will. !i"ek tries to escape this dilemma in another way—by pointing to the figure of Christ, whom tradition has taken to be the incarnation of God in a single human life. Although, for !i"ek, God is only present in incarnate guise and otherwise does not exist at all, he still insists that outside this Christian legacy we would not have had the sense of an absolute demand, exceeding all human law and custom. Indeed, the notion of incarnation sustains for !i"ek the idea that this absolute demand, which orients our humanity, is more than human, even though it comes, he says, from “nowhere.” NS: Against !i"ek, you insist on the necessity of theism. What do you think are the prospects for a philosophical encounter with theology that doesn’t assent to a transcendent deity? JM: I think that, in the end, the prospects are non-existent. Dostoevsky saw further then !i"ek, because he dramatized the alternative existential stances in the face of nihilism, even a Christological nihilism. Kirillov tries self-assertion, but logically concludes that the only irrefutable act of “divine” self-assertion is selfslaughter. Stavorogin, in the same novel, adopts instead a malicious indifference, which he deploys seductively to derange the lives of others. But in the end, this leads to a suicide of mere despair. !i"ek’s Christ is merely a clown, the excreted everyman, the dross of the world. “The Good” is here reduced to the instance of that which exceeds reality, which finds no home. This places love beneath being, even if in a sense it is beyond being for !i"ek, as the impossibility of realized desire. But at the end of The Devils, Dostoevsky suggests through the mouth of the dying Verkhovensky that love exceeds being in the sense that the real is orientated by the Good. Here, loving faith alone closes the circle of the ontological argument. The highest, which would include existence, must indeed exist. Without this idea of a perfect happiness for all of reality, which the most extreme misery cannot perturb, Dostoevsky contends that human beings lose their defining orientation. The final episodes of the novel try to depict scenes of disclosing recognition and forgiveness between people, which show how we can authentically participate in this infinite perfection and thereby transfigure the world. Atheistic philosophy still finds itself caught in a theoretical version of the nihilistic aporia depicted by the 19th-century Russian novelist. Either, like Kirillov, it can assert human reason or freedom against the power of the void—but then this seems like self-vaunting wishful thinking; or else, like Stavrogin, it can deny the final reality of any human suppositions against the background of an indifferent nature. But in that case, the reality of reason itself is threatened. The atheistic logos will always lack either being or reason, without which there is no philosophy, no exercise of the love of wisdom. NS: Now you have a forthcoming book, again with Creston Davis and !i"ek, on Saint Paul, who has been a popular subject for Continental philosophy in recent years. Do you think it is legitimate for secular theorists to take Paul as a model for political action? JM: Certainly, in the sense that Paul provoked the first Western enlightenment, the first ideas for a universal humanity, not just for an elite. He also suggested that the norms of human life lie in excess of any customary law-code. It is to their credit that secular thinkers are seeing that Paul erected the paradigm for all later revolutionary gestures. At the same time, they sometimes underplay his paradoxicality and the way in which he was also a conservative figure, who did not mean to overturn the truth of Jewish election by God, nor of Jewish law, but rather to appeal to its deeper foundation. There is some danger of a Marcionite reading of Paul, denying the God of the Old Testament, as in the renderings of Ernst Bloch and Alain Badiou, for example. Paul, by contrast, appeals at once to tradition and yet to the hidden basis of tradition, which allows one respectfully to exceed it. To be fair, both !i"ek and Agamben allow for this far more. But then, they are also gnostic in their suggestions that Paul is caught between the aspiration to escape the somewhat sinister domain of law, on the one hand, and the impossibility of doing so, on the other. Yet because of his belief in the possibility of mediation, Paul did not just make radical gestures; nor did he, like Marx, propose the necessity of the present order’s destruction. Instead, he systematically established a new sort of international community within and alongside—and yet beyond—the state. This community was at once democratic and hierarchical, at once radically new and cosmopolitan, and yet archaic, because it returned to the pre-legal basis of a gift-exchanging order. NS: Why do you think this renewed interest in Paul is happening now? JM: It coincides with a new sense of tragic futility. If I were an atheist, I think I might ultimately condemn this interest as betokening despair. Yet Paul himself was eminently practical. It is, ironically, his mode of praxis that the atheists cannot grasp or embrace, because it is based on the possibility of imagining faith and trust in infinite goodness on earth. Paul does not ascribe to a dialectic of law and desire, nor to one of death and life. Rather, he believes, by insisting on the resurrection, that life is infinite and deathless. His politics of resurrection are the only possible politics of unrestricted hope in the coming of harmonious