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Essay submitted for Tijdschrift voor Theologie EssayPrize for Theology and Contemporary Culture 2015

The relationship of theology to culture can be negotiated with

reference to the concept(s) of nature with which it has always

been twinned in Western thought. ‘Nature’ and ‘culture’ are

innately theological concepts, since they pertain to the

contrast between the made and the given. This essay argues

that the salvation of culture from empty subjectivity is

linked to the salvation of nature from mute objectivity, which

is undertaken by theology through restoring to both an

intrinsic orientation to transcendence.

In the dominant configuration of culture in European thought

since the Enlightenment, culture and nature were defined in

relation to one another as opposite terms. After the collapse

of the mediaeval consensus, which resulted in multiple rival

configurations of meaning, thought took refuge in a new and

supposedly secure objectivity of nature over against the

variable and contestable subjectivity of culture.1 ‘Nature’

thus appeared as a haven from conflicts of interpretation,

generating the move toward positivistically conceived natural

science as a realm in which differences could be settled

through reference to neutral data via established

1 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Cf. John Milbank,‘Out of the Greenhouse’, in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell,1997): 257-267, 258.

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methodologies. ‘Modernity’ itself was characterised by the

invention of this external, inert nature which was

unproblematically given and transparent to the rational

observer.2

The boundaries of nature and culture so drawn were quite

rigorously policed as early as the fifteenth century.3 But

this policing was complicated by the central place of nature

in modern notions of the social, with the Hobbesian ‘natural’

society typifying this; nature mediated humanity to itself.4

In its provision of a given norm prior to human invention,

modern nature offered ‘a ready shelter for social ideals’ and

so became crucial to legitimation of human practices.5 This

dependence of the definition of the human on the natural went

paradoxically together with the modern need to separate ever

more firmly humanity and nature.6 In this sense, nature and

culture in modernity were co-constituting: in their very

separation as opposite poles, they defined and established one

another.

The fundamentally theological character of these developments

is apparent in that the concept of ‘nature’ and its

counterpoint in ‘culture’ concern the question of whether

2 Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: John HopkinsUniversity Press, 1992), gives a thorough account; see especiallychapters 1-4. 3 As for example in Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man(1496), but of course going back much further than the Rennaisance,to Greek physis. See Gerard Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature (New York:SUNY Press, 2006).4 Examined in Noel Castree, Making Sense of Nature (Oxford: Routledge,2013).5 Evernden, Social, 39.6 Evernden, Social, 28.

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anything is absolutely given and prior to human being: what is

there for human beings to stand on, to take for granted, to

rely on as a norm for thought and behaviour? God and nature

have, in this sense, a certain conceptual reciprocity.

Ratzinger framed the question of belief accordingly in his

classic treatment: ‘Essentially [belief] is entrusting oneself

to that which has not been made by oneself and never could be

made’.7 The religiously constituted sense of modern nature as

autonomous and self-explanatory itself traded on prior

theological shifts;8 the idea of ‘nature’ is itself a product

of the Western history of the sacred.9 The new meaning of

‘nature’ is that which is invulnerable to human making:

sheerly external ‘facts’ discoverable by empirical methods.10

Its brute materiality, its externality to mind as an inert

impenetrable given, was the source of its epistemic security.

Knowability came to be coterminous in this sense with modern

objectivity as externality; that which we can rest on is that

which is beyond our change, our influence: what we did not,

and never could, make.11 The implication of this ‘nature’ is

that ‘culture’, the made, is merely subjective, with no

epistemic or ontological purchase.

7 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd edition (San Francisco:Ignatius, 1990), 70.8 For a classic account, see Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay inthe Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press,1993.9 Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred (Oxford:Blackwell, 2005).10 See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1986), 6ff.11 In this sense, and in light of my argument below, Ratzinger’saccount of belief would be problematically modern.

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The persistence of such notions of the ‘natural’ as a refuge

from the vicissitudes of human variation and opinion is

evident in contemporary culture. Nature and culture still

function dualistically in the contemporary mind, and there is

a persistent attribution of higher value to ‘nature’, whether

this be in terms of science, health or spirituality. In his

survey of the formation of modern identity, Charles Taylor

identifies the conscious location of the self in nature as a

key factor in the modern conception of the good: modern nature

is a spiritual and moral source as well as the location of

epistemic security.12 ‘Nature’ still expresses our sense of

the ideal and the normative, both an object of yearning and a

measure for understanding.13 This is true most obviously in

the influence of so-called ‘natural science’, which at the

popular level often appears as a dogmatic naturalism. In its

deliverance of (apparently) factual information with normative

force, science has a quasi-religious authority in the

political realm.14 But the adulation of ‘nature’ over against

human being is also influential in the ethical and spiritual

nature-rhetoric of late-modern personal and political

discourse, with the ‘natural’ identified as the true measure

and norm for human and planetary wellbeing. What Szersynski

calls ‘the rise of the natural body’ is a familiar expression

of this, as seen in the fetish for ‘natural’ food, clothing,

12 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).13 Szerszynski, Nature, 159ff.14 Examined in D. Collingridge and C. Reeve, Science Speaks to Power: theRole of Experts in Policy Making (London: Pinter, 1986); see also D. Price,The Scientific Estate (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,1965).

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health therapies, and leisure-time, with associated consumer

behaviours.15 The case of environmentalism and ecology shows

how inextricable are the cultural and scientific conceptions

of nature; ecology and environmentalism have made common cause

since their early days.16 The ideological power of this

partnership is considerable: ‘nature’ as pristine refuge from

the humanly constructed is a central motif in the National

Parks movement, which incarnates ethical, spiritual and

scientific ideals of nature in a single political project.17

The impulse toward nature preservation cannot simply be

regarded as an outcome of an objective change in the condition

of nature, but is a culturally generated phenomenon.18

The identification of the humanly made with the unreliable (in

epistemic terms) or the impure and degenerate (in evaluative

terms) has drawn criticism.19 In an article which started a

new era of debate about the concept of ‘wilderness’,

environmental historian William Cronon recommended that we

abandon the ‘the wilderness myth’, since it presumes an

ahistorical and Eurocentric concept of nature which15 Szerszynski, Nature, 73ff.16 Examined at length in Tim Forsyth, Critical Political Ecology (Oxford:Routledge, 2003). For the narratives of ‘nature’ which informecology, see J. Kricher, The Balance of Nature: Ecology's Enduring Myth(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009).17 See Lynn Ross-Bryant, Pilgrimage to the National Parks: Religion and Nature inthe United States (London: Routledge, 2012), and 18 The somewhat question-begging character of a notion of ‘theenvironment’ being a case in point. See Szerszynski, Nature, 84ff;also Andrew Jamison, The Making of Green Knowledge: Environmental Politics andCultural Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).19 For key readings in this debate see J. Callicott and M. Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998) and The Wilderness Debate Rages On (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2008).

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definitionally excludes the human.20 The response of some

thinkers to discovering that ‘nature’ is no refuge from human

variability and perceptual bias has been to eradicate ‘nature’

altogether in favour of culture. Social constructivist

approaches, such as Steven Vogel’s call to ‘end’ nature,21 or

Paul Feyerabend’s demand that science abandon the search for

the immutably objective,22 find the cultural everywhere and the

‘natural’ nowhere. But postmodern moves to ‘end’ nature

display a curious congruence with scientific naturalism, for

naturalism erases the human-nature boundary in the direction

of the natural: the human is ‘merely’ biological, ‘merely’

physical.23 Reduction is occurring both ways; by postmodernity

towards the humanly made, and by positivistic science towards

the natural and given. With these alternatives, thought

remains captured by the underlying choice between nature and

culture: either all is invented (postmodernism) or all is

given (naturalism). In the one case, nature is cultural; in

the other, culture is natural. But the terms of the

opposition are still determining the outcome.

British theologian John Milbank has argued that it is on the

rock of this antinomy that the modern project to explain the

human founders. ‘Social science’, as a discourse which seeks

20 W. Cronon, 'The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to thewrong nature' in J. Callicott and M. Nelson, eds., The Great NewWilderness Debate (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998):471-499.21 Against Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).22 See e.g. Against Method, 4th edition (London: Verso, 2011); TheTyranny of Science (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).23 See e.g. E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA:Belknap Press, 2000).

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to account for the social, confusedly pursues both the human

construction culture and society, and the cultural and

societal construction of the human.24 Such projects of

explanation seek an absolute beginning of thought in terms of

which explanation is offered. In fact the antinomy is endemic

to modern thought as such, insofar as it characteristically

seeks a vantage point for a total account of things.25 What is

needed for this explanatory project is a most basic category in

relation to which the social and the human can be isolated,

and in terms of which they can be explained.26 We seek for

‘nature’, but soon find ourselves explaining ‘nature’ as a

product of the human: we seek for ‘culture’, but find

ourselves explaining it as ‘natural’. A most basic category

cannot be discovered,27 and so the aporia of human construction

of society/social construction of the human is pervasive.28

The failure of the modern search for a most basic category, in

terms of which explanation can be offered,29 engenders the

characteristic nihilism of postmodernity with its surrender to

24 Beginning with the ‘scientific’ analysis of the social as thatwhich is irreducibly given, in the original positivism of AugusteComte. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,1990), Chapter 3.25 Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: OUP, 1989).26 Milbank, Theology, 136.27 Milbank, Theology, 70-1.28 Bruno Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1993), offers a justly renowned account ofmodernity’s failure to separate nature and culture. But he lacksthe theological resources to resolve the aporia at the most radicallevel. Simon Oliver highlights this in ‘The Eucharist Before Natureand Culture’, Modern Theology 15.3 (1999): 332-353. 29 Not that all admit that this failure; new explanatory idols arestill appearing, such as ultra-Darwinism. See Conor Cunningham,Darwin’s Pious Idea (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011).

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a flux of meaning, which is all that remains after the

implosion of modernity’s universal and irreducible givens. In

this scenario, culture is as meaningless, in ultimate terms,

as the ‘nature’ that has been reduced to it.30 Proclaiming

‘the end of nature’ in an unqualified way, as Vogel does, or

calling for an ‘ecology without nature’, as recently advocated

by Slavoj Žižek,31 collapses nature into culture with a loss of

any overall orientation to meaningfulness, rather than

questioning the antinomy that gives rise to this opposition in

the first place. The postmodern understanding that culture is

everywhere, nature nowhere, leads not to an elevation of

culture but its dissipation in a sea of conflictual

heterogeneity which is indifferent to its own difference.32

In denying the lust for the given, the postmodern elevation of

culture at the expense of nature leads, ironically, to a loss

of confidence in the real and abiding significance of human

making. In scientistic modernism, culture is fictional

projection; in postmodern flux, it becomes an endless play of

difference with no purchase on the real and the true.

Theology, holding that the so-called ‘natural’ just is the

divine making, that all is a factum of God in whom being and

act coincide, is bound to contest these reductive

alternatives, and by this means to challenge the loss of

culture’s dignity as a mediation of reality. Given the

30 For more on postmodern nihilism’s origins in the modern, seeConor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2002).31 Or even ‘ecology against nature’; see his In Defence of Lost Causes(London: Verso, 2008), 420ff. 32 Milbank, Theology, 207.

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twinning of nature and culture in Western thought, a

theological saving of ‘nature’ from its modern fate as the

brute objective given is a first step towards this end.

Challenging the theology which led to such a conception was a

major project of Catholic theology in the last century. With

Cajetan’s natura pura, which gained hegemony through Suarezian

Thomism, the Scotist account of being as univocal between God

and creatures came to a head.33 Being was now conceivable

without any reference to God; it was conceptually self-

standing. This marked a drastic departure from the late

antique and early mediaeval analogical ontology, in which

‘nature’ was not even formally separable from grace.34 These

theological moves towards a self-contained natura pura are

originative of modernity’s autonomous nature, conceptualizable

and comprehensible without any reference to transcendence.35

Against these moves, the theologians of the nouvelle théologie

denied self-referential sufficiency to nature, either

historically or conceptually.36 In their ‘ressourcement’, nature

is not separable from its call to transcendence, which is

paradoxically both essential to its naturalness and at the

33 Cf. Dupré, Modernity, 176.34 Explained with admirable clarity in Hans Boersma, ‘Theology asQueen of Hospitality’, EQ 79.4 (2007): 291-310, 301ff.35 See Dupré, Modernity, 175; also Eric Alliez, Capital Times, trans.Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1996), and William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence(Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). 36 Not to downplay the difference in emphasis between them. For thelocus classicus see Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: études historiques (Paris:Aubier, 1946).

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same time beyond its ‘natural’ capacity. Nature cannot be

grasped in purely natural terms.37

However, a critique of pure nature is not enough to redeem

culture (or, in a post-Darwinian age, nature) if an

ahistorical notion of the action of grace is presumed. The

coming of God must not be, with respect to history and human

action, unprecedented and discontinuous, breaking into our

merely human constructs from the outside. Milbank sees the

nouvelle théologie as an incomplete project because, although it

challenged theological extrinsicism in relation to nature and

grace, it did not sufficiently carry this through in relation

to culture, language and history.38 He charges De Lubac and

Von Balthasar, who defend a nature-grace integralism, with

failing to face up to what he sees as its proper consequence:

an understanding of the ineradicably historical condition of

human knowing, and the inescapability of cultural mediation.39

Milbank argues, in Augustinian fashion, that reason, and so

access to truth, is inseparable from faith and desire, but

adds to this an emphasis on the mediative significance of

history as a human factum, inspired by Giambattista Vico.

Recognising the force of the postmodern critique which exposes

constructed character of the known, Milbank regards this

realisation as latent in Christian orthodoxy. Resisting a

problematically modern positivity of revelation, he argues

37 But note Steven Long, Natura Pura (New York: Fordham, 2010), whocontests this.38 See Milbank, Theology, Chapter 8.39 Arguably Joseph Maréchal and Pierre Rousselot, precursors to thenouvelle théologie, had already started this project. See Hans Boersma,Return to Mystery (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 62-82.

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that orthodoxy can destabilise the boundary between the human

(made) and the non-human (given), but without courting the

nihilism of endlessly proliferating conflictual narratives

that postmodernism drifts into.40 This is somewhat counter-

intuitive, since postmodernity’s emphasis on construction is

usually associated with immanence and horizontalism. But

within a framework of participation, a recognition of the

constructed character of the known does not entail confinement

in a Deleuzian ‘plane of immanence’.41

Postmodern confinement in immanence is rooted in the modern

equation of knowability with the inertly given, circumscribed

and autonomous, as brought to a head in the Kantian turn in

metaphysics. By claiming that the finite can be

circumscribed, that there are boundaries to finitude which are

the same as the boundaries of the knowable, the Kantian

outlook assumes against mediation, separating knowledge of the

finite and limited from knowledge of the infinite.42 Against

the circumscription of finitude, Milbank posits a broadly

neoplatonic metaphysics of participation, but one radicalised

by an emphasis on poesis: human making. Milbank sees this

radicalisation in the Baroque idea of a 'revelation in

language', according to which God's revelation is inseparable

from our power to make signs and meanings, as well as the

40 Compare Milbank’s critical reception of postmodernity with CarlRaschke, The Next Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004). 41 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life’, in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life(New York: Zone, 2001): 25-33.42 The critique of Kant is ubiquitous in Theology and Social Theory, butsee particularly 63ff. Milbank argues that Kant is making anillicit (and typically modern) claim to a total knowledge of thewhole, by claiming to be able to identify the bounds of finitude.

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premodern illuminatio of the intellect by God's light.43 Through a

‘counter-Enlightenment’ lineage which emphasises materiality,

temporality and embodiment, including Vico, Kierkegaard,

Hamann, Jacobi and Herder, Milbank argues that acknowledgement

of the inescapability of language and sign-making, when placed

in a framework of the metaphysics of participated

transcendence, enables an appreciation of the intrinsically

transcendent orientation of human creativity and its products,

to which the dualistic modern opposition of ‘fact’ and

‘fiction’ is foreign.

The modern notion of fiction as ‘invention’ implies a given

substratum in relation to which the fiction can be defined as

constructed. If culture and nature are both conceived in

participative terms, ‘fiction’ is not the opposite of

‘reality’. Rather, human making is a participation in the

real, and the etymology of ‘fact’ is restored: a made thing,

in which reality is somehow grasped. In Vico's dictum, verum

esse ipsum factum: we know truth by creation or fabrication.

This exactly reverses the modern identification of the natural

with the reliably knowable, which led to an elevation of

objectivity as the locus of the true.44 Far from being over

against history, time and change, truth is an event in which

human doings, thinkings and imaginings participate in the

divine; or, to use the premodern metaphor of light, truth is

the coincidence of divine illuminatio with human ’making’ of the

world in interpretation.

43 Milbank, Theology, 160.44 Milbank argues that the ‘social’ is actually more knowable than the natural. Theology, 272.

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The philosophical architect of a theological appreciation of

human making as more than ‘merely subjective’ is Maurice

Blondel, whose ground-breaking work in L’Action45 Milbank

considers to have been insufficiently carried through by the

nouvelle theologians whose work Blondel helped inspire.46

Blondel argued that human action is the concrete mode of ingress

of the divine. Supernatural grace is implied in every human

act, whether this be an internal psychological/mental act, or

an external physical act.

Blondel's phenomenology of action reveals the paradox of the

human will which demands a completion that it cannot, of its

own resources, supply.47 The product of the will is never

equal to the original act of the will; our makings always

exceed and escape us, and it is this excessive character of

action, the inability of human agents to contain or predict

the meaning that we ourselves make, that gives all our makings

a transcendent orientation.48 This excess of the human product

means that we are never in control of the significance of our

actions. ‘Nothing is inviolably ‘internal’, or ‘our own’’.49

In the logic of action as self-transcending in both time and

space, a plenitude of the supernatural becomes inescapably

apparent to philosophy. For Blondel, supernatural grace is

present in every human act. Our receptivity to the

45 Translated as Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans.Oliva Blanchette (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).46 See Boersma, Mystery, 52-61.47 For an accessible account, see Oliva Blanchette, Maurice Blondel: APhilosophical Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 63ff.48 Cf. Rowan Williams’ reflections in Grace and Necessity (London:Continuum, 2006).49 Milbank, Theology, 234.

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supernatural thus coincides not with passivity, but with our

point of greatest creative initiative; making and receiving

are here united.50

For Milbank as for Blondel, ‘making’ or poesis encompasses the

whole of human existence, intellectual, social, and physical.

Even an act of perception or a physical movement is a

‘making’: ‘only by convention are some makings thought to be

‘doings’: only by a particular [cultural] coding’.51 Further,

the modern regards some human makings as more ‘cultural’ (i.e.

biased, subjective, limited) than others: fictional invention

versus factual discovering. Blondel’s reading of human

action, combined with Milbank’s critique of the Kantian

circumscription of finitude, leads to a radically transcendent

reading of the whole of culture, considered as the totality of

human action, interior and exterior. Whether considered in

modern terms as ‘fact’ (the sciences), or ‘fiction’ (drama,

literature), or having no ‘truth-value’ at all (music,

architecture), our makings can never be securely bounded by

immanence but intrinsically reach beyond themselves,

speculatively extending towards infinitude. The stories we

tell, the interpretations we make, the cultural objects we

move among, in some uncertifiable and undemonstrable way

(because the stories and cultures are inescapable and could

never be assessed from outside) reflect, approach, or

participate in reality itself. Like ‘nature’ in the work of

the nouvelle theologians, on this reading ‘culture’ is never

50 Milbank, Theology, 218.51 Milbank, Theology, 357.

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merely immanent, never without an inherent leaning beyond

itself. Every interpretive act becomes a mode of ingress of

the divine. In this way the factum becomes not the guardpost of

autonomy but the opening to transcendence: ‘it is precisely

this historicist confinement of our thought which renders it

irreducible to any immanent process’.52 Culture cannot be confined

in pure immanence any more than nature can. There is no

culture without grace; no human action that is not

intrinsically oriented to supernatural supplement.

These reflections on culture, which seem to assimilate

postmodernity’s relativist denial of an inertly given,

rationally accessible nature, unexpectedly underscore the

universality and all-sufficiency of grace. No finite act of

knowledge is circumscribable as merely finite, for grace

enters into every action as a matter of (paradoxically)

gratuitous necessity. This overcomes the modern

epistemological impasse which results from nature-culture

dualism in which realism and antirealism mirror one another.

The participated-graced-action model, which Milbank terms

‘theological objectivism’, sees the divine as really mediated

in every human action, including the act of interpreting and

reinterpreting the world (and God).53 But this objectivism

remains adamantly historical: even in theology there is no

‘before’ interpretation, no pre-linguistic, pre-cultural

moment. We are always situated in the middle, and language is

constantly carrying out syntheses which go beyond both the a

52 Milbank, Theology, 218.53 Milbank, Theology, 219.

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priori and the empirically given, but which are nevertheless

necessary for understanding.54 These conditions mean that 'one

can never see any meaning as once for all fixed and complete',

but rather, within the constantly unfolding and developing

system of signs, as subject to endless revision.55 There is

'always a background of implicit meaning’ which can never be

totally clarified, and from which it is impossible exclude

'the pressure upon us of a transcendent and infinite

reality',56 a reality which is simultaneously beyond and yet

really present to our makings.57

In this view, there is no longer any stigma attached to

science’s cultural and social conditioning;58 and the ‘arts’,

lambasted in contemporary higher education as economic

luxuries,59 appear as equally vital explorations of the real.

Philosophy and theology need no longer seek respectability in

an alien form of rationality. Most importantly, the power of

every act of human making to reveal and participate in the

true and the real restores to the whole history of human

culture a transcendent dignity.

54 Milbank, Theology, 152.55 Milbank, Theology, 153.56 Ibid.57 See Rowan Williams’ eloquent reflections on this present-yet-beyond quality of the sacred: The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).58 See the protests of Robert Klee, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford: OUP, 1997).59 At least in the UK; see e.g. Alex Preston, ‘The war against the humanities in Britain’s universities’, The Observer 19th March 2015 (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/29/war-against-humanities-at-britains-universities?CMP=share_btn_fb, accessed 30th March 2015).

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An obvious concern arises here, not far in motive from the

original modern impulse to flee from culture to nature. With

such an estimation of the whole of culture, how can one escape

the flux of infinite difference which results inevitably from

the unmeasurable divergence between human subjectivities? 60

How can one speak of ‘truth’ at all if the multiplicity of

human action produces only a cacophony of heterogeneity? Will

not ‘truth’ always be conflictual and agonistic? For Milbank

this is the locus of the necessity of Christian theology, and his

principle charge against Blondel, whose account of graced

action he otherwise wholly adopts: it is in the Christian

narrative alone that difference is reconciled as peace.61 It

is not the logic of action alone, philosophically conceived,

that saves, but only action deciphered as love, in the story

of creation, redemption and eschaton.62 Christian theology is

simply the endlessly renewed reading of all things in light of

their beginning, which is God’s un-coerced and un-rivalrous

gift of being, and their end, which is the divine peace of the

city of God. The deciphering of action as love, and so of

culture as finally peaceful rather than conflictual, can only

have this specific narrative form in which difference is a

promise of harmony.

60 I don’t have space to treat here the important question of thepossibility, in this scheme, of theology as cultural criticism. Fora pugnacious example see Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist TraditionAfter Vatican II (London: Routledge, 2003).61 Milbank’s conception of culture has a definite social dimension.Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), x.62 Milbank, Theology, 217.

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How then does this account avoid the collapse of nature into

culture for which postmodern constructivism was held

accountable above? As we have seen, ‘explanation’ trades on

the fantasy of the most basic, the absolute beginning, the

total vantage point, which is only the confused dream of

modernity. An elevation of narration over explanation is the

only resolution of the original antinomy: is culture natural?

Or is nature cultural? For Milbank culture and nature are

inexplicable, in the sense of 'explanation' which he

polemically excludes; they can only be narrated. It is this

inexplicability of nature and culture that theology alone,

which is narration and not explanation, is equipped to

address; a narration which, because it accepts the paradox of

origin and yet does not constitute this paradox as a defeat

for thought, can find this inexplicability to be not an arrest

for knowing, but an invitation.

This tale has focused on the retrieval of culture from the

dustbin of ‘mere’ subjectivity to the dignity of participation

in the divine. To perform the ‘narration’ of nature and

culture more fully, in a way which avoids the disintegration

of ‘nature’ as a theological category, a complementary account

is needed of a participative ontology in which nature is not a

static and inert given, but living and dynamic gift which is

suffused with the divine life by the free donation of being.63

But, in anticipation of such an account, we can tentatively

63 See e.g. D.L. Schindler, ‘The Given as Gift: Creation and Disciplinary Abstraction in Science’, Communio 38 (2011): 52-102, though he may not be inadequately sensitive to the cultural constitution of ‘science’.

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suggest what sort of reading will be made possible by it: in

this nature which is gratuitous and fundamentally peaceful

gift of being, intrinsically oriented to the grace of the

divine life, human beings are paradigmatically poetic animals

whose cultural activity is the divine poesis making and re-

making the world and giving it to itself anew. Nature is then

simply the divine culture, and culture is nature seen not as

given but as gift. ‘Culture’ is not a mental projection onto

a given world, but is the form of nature itself as the divine

making, and the makings of human beings are the world’s

knowing of itself in endlessly renewed and diverse ways: the

world’s giving of itself to itself, in image of the triune God

whose difference is entire harmony. In this way human culture

is a revelation of nature to itself; and at the same time,

nature as gift is the form of all our makings.64

It is by this sort of account that theology can resist an

essentialism of nature and culture, which leads to the

extinction of one by the other in modern and postmodern

thought. We might paraphrase our theological reflections here

by suggesting that a loss of appreciation of human making

follows on the neglect of divine making, conceived as the

endlessly renewed and most intimate reality of the world

itself. It is only the recovery of the organic relatedness of

divine and human making which can restore nature and culture

to each other.

64 A ‘realist’ theological account of the imagination would be particularly important. Alison Milbank’s Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (London: Continuum, 2009) is an outstanding example.

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