Name Tags

Ever since I read John Milbank’s ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked Questions last year I have been infatuated, or more accurately haunted, by one of the many ideas Milbank raises.  For those of you who have read Milbank this essay is typical of his style and for those of you who haven’t, reread the title of the article for a hint.  The Nottingham professor has a reputation for being…let’s say “purposefully difficult.”  Although such characterizations may be true, Milbank is still a brilliant theologian.  The passage from his essay that has become such a prevalent image in my thought appears early in the article:

One way to try to secure peace is to draw boundaries around ‘the same’, and exclude ‘the other’; to promote some practices and disallow alternatives. Most polities, and most religions, characteristically do this. But the Church has misunderstood itself when it does likewise. For the point of the supersession of the law is that nothing really positive is excluded — no difference, whatsoever — but only the negative, that which denies and takes away from Being: in other words, the violent. It is true, however, that Christians perceive a violence that might not normally be recognised, namely any stunting of a person’s capacity to love and conceive of the divine beauty; this inhibition is seen as having its soul in arbitrariness. But there is no real exclusion here; Christianity should not draw boundaries, and the Church is that paradox: a nomad city.

I used the word “haunted” above because although the image Milbank develops here is so astonishingly beautiful and at the same time remarkably avoids immediate conception.  This, it seems, is due to two things.  First, as Milbank readily admits (read: lavishes in), is that this is a paradox.  Cities are by all traditional definitions understood as locatable, geographical divisions.  A city is identifiable only insofar as there is something that is “outside” the city.  The trick here is that Milbank wants to conceive of a city where there is nothing that actually escapes its bounds.

The second reason this issue is problematic, at least for me, is that even if we abstract away from the city paradox, the same issue still arises when any form of identity is established.  It seems that the moment we say there are people who are Christians we must at the same time posit an antagonist, those who aren’t “in”.  Another British theologian, James Alison, attempts to resolve this issue, although without direct reference to Milbank, in part of his book Undergoing God.  Like Milbank, Alison wants to do away with defining Christians against something, which he argues is ultimately nihilistic because it elevates conflict as the ultimate source of identity.  He does this following Rene Girard in terms of the Other as a scapegoat and the victimization cycle that maintains stability in communities.

Although Girard’s work is insightful in itself, Alison’s invocation of him here is not without problems.  He sets God up as the Other of monotheism and Christians as those who recognize (through Christ) that they are victimizers.  This is an intriguing idea but what Alison seems to be unaware of is a kind of meta-move: his solution does not escape the cycle of violence it critiques.  Christians become those people who do not (supposedly) identify an Other (other than God) which means they are not those people who do.  The Other becomes anyone who identifies an Other — this recognition of meta-moves is indebted to Slavoj Zizek.  Whether or not this problem is intrinsic to Girard’s system is something I’ll leave to the more informed.

I do think, however, that the problem arises, at least in part, by leaving the Augustinian framework that informs Milbank’s formation of the paradox.  Because Augustine, and following him, Milbank, refuse to identify anything positive as excluded, there is no sense in which there can be an Other.  There is nothing left out because violence isn’t a thing in that sense; it is a disorientation or distortion.

While Milbank’s paradox resists the meta-move critique, it is also a much more difficult task.  Modern political identities are formed over and against an Other in very explicit terms while at the same time seemingly remain ignorant of the fact.  As Alison rightly pointed out this is nihilism at its best — both functional and unseen.  Its subtleties allowing it to mechanize conflict and its seeming success at “rallying the troops” prevent any recognition (if it’s not broken, why fix it?).  One of the most prevalent examples in the American political scene is the so called “culture war”.  Both the religious “fundamentalists” on the right and the secularist on the left sell themselves as victims of the each other.  Their identities are dependent on the Other (in both senses of the word) — or maybe more accurately, on an Other.  If one group were to dissolve, it would hardly be conceivable that the other would stay stable without finding something else to hate.

Because this is the current state of politics, and the majority of religions, we have been socialized into this mechanism.  Our tendencies, accordingly, are to play into these identity games.  Milbank’s proposal is more radically than it may seem initially.  Christianity is not simply just another identity within a greater political system (no matter how much we pretend it is), it is something more powerful, more revolutionary, more beautiful.

Of course, it is not easy to begin to conceive what this entails.  There are a number of ways to express the idea but one stuck me as I was driving home tonight.  Maybe it will aid someone.

Driving through the city, the moon — a picturesque crescent — was the only visiable light.  Although there were the “lights” of the city these lights were created because of the darkness, in a sense, to conquer the darkness.  These “artificial” lights are our self-created identities, in conflict with the darkness of the Other.  They are mere appropriations of the self-generative lights in the cosmos.  However as I continued out of the city, and the constructed lights fall with the horizon and give way to an ever growing community of stars.  These lights are not lights constructed against anything but created ex nihilo and accordingly, not against anything.  In fact it is not in spite of the void that the lights are beautiful, but with the void that they shine.

The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.  Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. [Genesis 1.2-3]

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