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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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