John Milbank S Theological Ontology of Gift

John Milbank’s Theological Ontology of Gift
and its Social-Political Meaning
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology, St. Michael’s College. In partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Master of Theological Studies awarded by the University
of St. Michael’s College.
Peter Gavin-Griffin
August 5, 2014
ABSTRACT
This project engages the topic of “gift” as a theological problem, in regard to both God’s
gifts to creation and gift-giving among human beings. It particularly explores how the gift
can be both (a) freely-given, unearned, and thereby distinct from contract, and also (b) bound
up with relationships of exchange whose continuance depends on the giving of return gifts. It
does so by detailing and evaluating the theological ontology and concomitant social-political
thought of British Anglican theologian John Milbank (b. 1952), which revolves to a great
degree around gift. This project argues that Milbank demonstrates that the gratuity of the
divine gift is not vitiated, but rather ensured, by the necessity of a creaturely return gift and a
divine-creaturely “exchange.” Further, he establishes that insofar as all intra-human gift
exchange participates ontologically in this cosmic exchange, human social life—including
the political-economic order—must be structured to facilitate the sorts of relationships in
which gift exchange can take place. Nevertheless, it is also argued that Milbank’s exclusive
focus on gift as exchange pertains to humankind’s ultimate ontological destiny, and that his
ecclesiology and broader social-political thought must be modified to give greater focus to
the penultimate, finite human situation in which not all gifts are properly returned.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Milbank’s Theological Ontology of Gift 8
Chapter 2: The Social Meaning of Milbank’s Ontology of Gift 32
Chapter 3: The Ontological Significance of Gift as Exchange 57
Chapter 4: Penultimate Goods, Communities, and Justice 79
Conclusion 102
Bibliography 104
INTRODUCTION
That all created reality is a divine gift is a conviction held consistently in the Christian
tradition, despite the different ways it is articulated in various theological streams. Not only each
created entity but creation as a whole is contingent, receiving its being as a freely given gift from
the God who transcends it. A further, especially intense sort of giftedness is usually attributed to
divine revelation and to what is labelled “grace,” understood as healing us from sin and also,
according to much of the Catholic tradition, elevating us to a friendship with God that transcends
our exigencies as simply created. In each of these cases, the giving of the divine gift precedes the
response of the human creature and is in this sense unconditional. Yet this gift is not
disinterested; Christians maintain that the purpose behind it is to initiate and further a
relationship with humankind, and this requires a proper reception of the gift. Such a reception
involves the kind of gratitude that manifests itself in an offering back of our gifted selves to God,
a fulfillment of St. Paul’s directive to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1).1 The basic problem this project
seeks to address is just this relationship between the unconditional givenness of the gift on the
one hand, and the need for some sort of “return” on the other. Does the necessity of a return gift
not reduce the initial gift to a contractual exchange after all, such that God’s gift is conditional on
the creature’s response? Yet if this is the case, why even speak of “gift” to begin with? And what
implications, if any, does one’s understanding of this problem have for the practices of exchange
among human beings? This seems particularly relevant to political and economic spheres in
which exchanges tend to be contractual and emphatically not gift-based.
1
All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
2
Recent theological interventions into the problem of gift have been conducted in dialogue
with contributions from two other disciplinary clusters, so it is necessary to outline them briefly.
The first consists of the related fields of sociology and cultural anthropology, in which
discussion of gift was initiated by the pioneering work of Marcel Mauss. His 1924 work The Gift
explores the phenomenon of the gift economies in several “archaic” societies in which all
economic transactions were (and in some cases still are) conducted by way of gift exchange
rather than any formalized currency or mode of bartering.2 Far from disinterested gift-giving,
these exchanges were the primary means of constructing and maintaining the social hierarchy,
for those who could give more lavish gifts exerted power over the recipients who remained in
their debt. Others working in the sociological-anthropological fields later expanded and modified
Mauss’ account. Some, such as Pierre Bourdieu, have sought to specify more exactly the formal
dynamics of the exchange, uncovering the precise unwritten rules behind it. For instance, the
return gift could only be given after a certain duration, could not be identical to the original gift,
and so on.3 Alternately, collaborators in the “Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences
sociales” (M.A.U.S.S.) have stressed the irreducibility of the gift to formal rules and mechanisms
such as those of the market and state, and have aimed to demonstrate the ways in which gift
exists in the public life even of modern societies—primarily in various spheres of civil society—
and to enlarge the influence of these spheres.4
The second impetus for the debate about gift-giving has been provided by several French
philosophers and other thinkers beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century. These thinkers
2
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls
(London: Routledge, 1990).
3
Pierre Bourdieu, “Selections from The Logic of Practice” (1980), in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic
of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 190-230.
4
See Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé, The World of the Gift, trans. Donald Winkler (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1998).
3
largely share the conviction that the self-interested, agonistic aspects of the Maussian “gift”
render it something other than a true, pure, unconditional gift, and that a different account of the
nature and possibility of gift is required. This effort has taken two primary directions: the ethics
of “the Other” associated with Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida (gift other than being)
and Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology (gift beyond being). For the former, to “welcome”
another person truly is to welcome her unconditionally as other, without subsuming her within
one’s own horizon of expectation. Derrida in particular applies this requirement to gift, and holds
that pure gift—like pure hospitality—is impossible since its giving is inevitably tainted with
some return (even if this is simply the desire for a return), yet holds up the idea of the gift as a
sort of “im-possible possibility” that critiques and deconstructs all of our actual efforts.5 Marion
argues that rather than the presence of the pure gift being lacking in the world, it is a kind of
“saturated phenomenon” that is always in excess of our concepts and categories, indeed of being
itself. He provides a phenomenological account that “brackets” the question of the giver,
recipient, and gift itself in favour of the phenomenon of “givenness.”6 Though obviously very
different in approach, both of these perspectives are united in regarding pure gift as ultimately
an-economic and non-coincidental with the transcendental of “being” as expressed in classical
Western metaphysics.
Thus, thinkers in multiple disciplines have wrestled with the basic problem of how gifts can
be both freely given, irreducible to the conditions and self-interest usually characteristic of the
fulfillment of a contract, and bound up in concrete relationships that necessarily involve
5
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
6
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey Lossky (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002); also Marion’s essays “The Saturated Phenomenon” and “Sketch of a
Phenomenological Concept of the Gift” in his The Visible and the Revealed, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
4
exchange and reciprocity. Gift-giving is frequently deemed essential to these relationships, a
contractual basis alone appearing narrow and limiting. Yet how can gift transform such
relationships without being sullied by them?
I believe the thought of British Anglo-Catholic theologian John Milbank (b. 1952) has the
greatest potential to further our understanding of the complexity of gift. Milbank, currently
Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham, is best known as the
father of the “Radical Orthodoxy” school of theology. This movement, which Milbank also
refers to as “postmodern critical Augustinianism,” employs a theological style that makes use of
postmodern philosophy to reject the framework of modernity, while also insisting that only
Christian theology—interpreted in an Augustinian, neo-Platonic cast—can overcome what it
deems the inevitable nihilism of both the modern and postmodern paradigms. Indeed, it judges
that the dominant strains of both modernity and postmodernity agree in privileging a voluntarist
will to power, rooted in a primordial violence, which can be traced back to Duns Scotus in the
13th century. Controversially, it regards the entire history of modern (and postmodern)
philosophy, politics, and other disciplines as a theological heresy rather than the emergence of a
properly “secular” realm. It therefore refuses “dialogue” with the social sciences, instead seeking
to reposition all such disciplines vis-à-vis theology in its renewed role as the “queen of the
sciences.”7
In writing at length about the gift, Milbank has articulated a theological vision that
demonstrates why the gift’s inevitable embeddedness in reciprocal exchange does not contradict
7
For an introduction see an essay by its three leading thinkers, John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine
Pickstock, “Suspending the Material: The Turn of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology,
edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 1-20, as well as John
Milbank, “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty-Two Responses to Unasked Questions,”
in The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 337-51.
5
its gratuity but rather is essential to it. He has thus helped steer the discussion away from the
search for an elusive “pure,” disinterested, one-way gift, and towards the meaning of gift
exchange in concrete human experience. His understanding of divine-human gift exchange is
rooted in his participatory ontology (properly called a theo-ontology, since for him being is
suspended in God, rather than an “onto-theology” in which God is subject to being) in which
God’s gracious activity is expressed precisely through the active role of human poesis. Because
this ontology refuses to juxtapose the divine and the creaturely, its conception of the divine gift
also implies the need to shape relationships between human beings. He has particularly applied
his theory of gift to the “exchange” that occurs in political relationships between rulers and ruled
and in economic transactions, and has written at length on the need to reshape the political-
economic order in the West to bring it more in line with gift. In his view, such an effort will take
the form of a non-statist Christian socialism that would embed the economy in local communities
and organized associations such as professional guilds, fraternal groups, and above all the
Church itself.
Thesis and Outline
In this thesis I argue that Milbank’s theological ontology of gift demonstrates that the
gratuity of the divine gift is not vitiated, but rather ensured, by the necessity of a creaturely
return gift and a divine-creaturely “exchange.” Further, he establishes that insofar as all intra-
human gift exchange participates ontologically in this cosmic exchange, human social life—
including the political-economic order—must be structured to facilitate the sorts of relationships
in which gift exchange can take place. Nevertheless, I also argue that Milbank’s exclusive focus
on gift as exchange pertains to our ultimate ontological destiny, and that his ecclesiology and his
6
broader social-political thought must be modified to give greater focus to the penultimate, finite
human situation in which not all gifts are properly returned.
The first two chapters are an exposition of Milbank’s theological ontology of gift. Chapter 1
explores this ontology with regard to its theological and metaphysical bases, arguing that for
Milbank gift only has meaning in the context of exchange, whether within God’s Triune life,
between God and creation, or between human beings. This framework is rooted in a Trinitarian,
analogical, and participatory ontology of “active reception,” in which creation’s reception of
itself as a gift coincides with its active return to its divine source. Creation’s very nature is thus
to be “more” than itself through the necessary original supplement of grace,8 with this “vertical”
giftedness mediated through the “horizontal” exchanges of human poesis.
Chapter 2 details the social and political meaning Milbank assigns to his ontology of gift. I
argue that this meaning is centred in his concept of the Church as the true polis, a universal gift-
exchanging communion. Its life can be spread into the wider society through what Milbank
identifies as a Christian socialism rooted in the Church but extending through the many
associations and communities of civil society whose interrelationships involve forms of gift
exchange. I detail how he applies his theory of gift to the “exchange” that occurs in political
relationships between rulers and ruled and in economic transactions.
The final two chapters shift from exposition to analysis and criticism. The topics of these
chapters roughly mirror those of chapters 1 and 2 respectively. Chapter 3 engages the theological
and metaphysical bases of Milbank’s framework of gift as explained in chapter 1. First, I defend
8
This project as a whole might just as easily focus on Milbank’s “ontology of grace” because for Milbank, all
of God’s gifts are nothing other than God’s grace (which is why the “divine gift” is often spoken of in the singular
here). I have rather centred it on “gift” because (a) it is easier linguistically to connect this term to the “exchange” so
central for Milbank, and (b) despite the Catholic concept of grace as elevating as well as healing, much of the
Western theological tradition primarily understands grace as contingent or anticipatory of sin, whereas “gift” is
meaningful apart from this connection, as it very much is for Milbank.
7
Milbank against criticisms that his ontology is too Platonic and not sufficiently Christian, for the
ontological status he assigns to the “excess” of Trinitarian and creaturely difference allows a
positive affirmation of the distinctive goodness of creation (and therein its ability to offer a
return gift to God). Then I explore Kathryn Tanner’s alternate contemporary theology of the gift
and place it in dialogue with Milbank’s. I argue that although Milbank’s insistence on a
necessary human return gift rightly highlights the ultimately “intrinsic” and non-contrastive
character of the divine gift, this ontology must be complemented by an alternate approach such
as Tanner’s that stresses the unconditional nature of the gift in our imperfect, penultimate state.
Chapter 4 explores concerns with Milbank’s social-political development of his ontology as
explicated in chapter 2. I examine how his lack of attention to the penultimate human situation is
evident in an apparent conflation of the finite boundaries within which creation exists (though
not material creation itself) with evil. I argue that he thereby undermines the importance of
ecclesial practices that help form our ability to return the gift of ourselves to God, and also
adopts an overly idealistic communitarianism that lacks appreciation for the need to protect
individual rights and promote social justice. I conclude that although his exchange-based
ontology can be preserved in its overall thrust, it requires a penultimate “one-way” gift—
mediated in different ways in the ecclesia and the polis—to facilitate the occurrence of the
ultimate exchange.
CHAPTER 1
MILBANK’S THEOLOGICAL ONTOLOGY OF GIFT
Milbank’s understanding of gift flows entirely from his ontology, which in his case is a theo-
ontology—an understanding of being as rooted in and identical with God. In this first chapter I
explore his ontology of gift with regard to its theological and metaphysical basis. I first set forth
the basic contours of this ontology and argue that it exemplifies what he calls “active reception,”
in which creation’s reception of the gift of being is simultaneously its active return to the divine
source. Second, I explore how his understanding of this cosmic exchange involves a concept of
created nature as intrinsically “excessive,” inseparable from either the supplementation of divine
grace or the mediation of human poesis. Third, I argue that his concept of gift can be
characterized as one of “unilateral exchange,” both between God and humans and among
humans. Finally, I demonstrate how his understanding of the intrinsic interrelation between the
incarnation, the Church, and the world reflects this ontology of gift.
Participation and Active Reception
In the background of virtually all of Milbank’s major writings lies a contrast between two
ontologies, which he often identifies as the governing philosophies of Augustine’s two cities
respectively.1 One asserts that being is primordially and intrinsically peaceful and harmonious,
while the other regards conflict and violence as ontologically ultimate. In his view, these two
accounts diverge most fundamentally according to whether they regard difference as a good to be
celebrated or a threat to be overcome and subsumed into sameness. For Milbank the first view is
1
For an explicit recent treatment, see two of his 2011 Stanton Lectures at Cambridge: John Milbank, “Stanton
Lecture 4: Transcendence without Participation” (unpublished lecture, University of Cambridge, Feb. 9, 2011),
accessed Jul. 1, 2014, http://theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers/Milbank_StantonLecture4.pdf; John Milbank,
“Stanton Lecture 5: Participated Transcendence Reconceived” (unpublished lecture, University of Cambridge, Feb.
16, 2011), accessed Jul. 1, 2014, http://theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers/Milbank_StantonLecture5.pdf,
9
characterized as Trinitarian and analogical. In God’s Triune being there is an eternal, peaceful
coincidence of unity and otherness. One is not more fundamental than the other, for while the
three divine Persons are related substantively (the existence and identity of each is constituted by
continual relation to the other two) and share a unity more profound than that of any created
beings, their individual, distinct identities are never collapsed into one another. Insofar as the
Trinity is the fount and origin of creation, the intra-divine dynamic reveals that creaturely being
does not emerge out of a basic violence of competing wills but from an eternal harmony of love,
such that it only subsists through being gifted from this love that transcends it. Creation itself can
thus be characterized as primordially peaceful and harmonious, and creatures need not establish
their own identities by conflict with and at the expense of others.
The analogical nature of this ontology involves how it relates the essence and existence of
God and creatures respectively—that is, how what they are relates to the fact that they are. God’s
essence and existence are identical because of the divine attribute of simplicity: God’s self is
perfect being, from eternity lacking nothing that must be added, supplemented, or actualized
from outside. Conversely, there is a real distinction between creaturely essence and existence.
Insofar as our existence as creatures is contingent on what transcends us—God’s creative
providence—our essence in no way necessitates our existence, and we would collapse into
nothingness apart from this transcendent ground. If being itself is identical with God, creatures
can only exist through somehow sharing in God. As Milbank puts it, “God is esse itself, not an
ens but the eminent reality of all entia.”2 Yet though we can say both that God “is” and that a
creature “is,” we clearly stand in a qualitatively different relationship to being than does God,
and can thus speak of the creaturely mode of being only by analogy to that of God. This is true
2
John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural (Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 43.
10
also for all the transcendental properties of being such as unity, goodness, and truth that are,
because of divine simplicity, mutually convertible—where there is truth, there is also goodness
and unity, and so on. And because the being of any created entity intrinsically exceeds itself in
its relation to God, it can never be exhaustively known through human mental representation, but
only through a never-ending spiritual ascent of contemplation and practice that is identical with
the mystical ascent to God, in whom the being of all creation coincides. Milbank thus speaks of
all knowledge as gained by identity with the object known, which is also a sharing in God’s own
infinite knowledge.3 The being of creation thus exists, and can be known, only as participation
(methexis) in God’s own being.
Milbank identifies this account of being and knowledge as essentially Thomistic, though
reflecting a very particular Thomism emphasizing certain Augustinian and Neoplatonic strains
within Aquinas’ thought rather than the Aristotelian ones with which he is often more closely
associated.4 This allows Milbank to agree with certain aspects of the Heideggerian critique of
ontotheology while denying that this critique invalidates metaphysics per se. 5 For example, he
agrees with “the critique of presence, substance, the idea, the subject, causality, thought-before-
expression, and realist representation” while denying that this calls into question “transcendence,
participation, analogy, hierarchy, teleology and the Platonic Good, reinterpreted by Christianity
3
John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People,
Illuminations: Theory and Religion (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 29, 50.
4
Here I set forth Milbank’s arguments on their own terms rather than evaluate his contested interpretations of
these and other thinkers, since it is his constructive theological vision with which I am concerned. Hence, unless
indicated otherwise the views I attribute to Aquinas, Scotus and others in what follows are those that Milbank
imputes to them.
5
Heidegger subsumed all of classical metaphysics under the label of “ontotheology,” which he characterized as
the project of making being as a whole fully intelligible within a rational human system, and thereby also limiting
God to the role of “first cause” or “highest being” within this system.
11
as identical with Being.”6 He regards the latter concepts as representing a kind of “perennial
philosophy” running from Plato to Aquinas, despite the significant differences among thinkers
along this trajectory.7 His primary divergence from this tradition—its Platonic strand in
particular—lies in his rejection of a view of ultimate being as static and changeless. While God’s
being is independent of the derivative being of creation—Milbank is in no sense a process
theist—the eternally Trinitarian exchange of the former excludes any stable self-possession even
in God. In accord with characteristically postmodern philosophical strands, he argues that all
reality is in flux, “composed only of relational differences and ceaseless alterations,” so that we
are unable to represent reality externally but only “to join in its occurrence.”8
By contrast, Milbank links an “ontology of violence” above all to the univocal framework of
Duns Scotus that he deems to have held sway over the main currents of theology, philosophy,
politics, and all other areas of thought and life since the late Middle Ages.9 A Scotist univocal
view describes the essence-existence question in the same general way for God and for creatures.
The Scotist believes it is necessary to postulate a single determinate concept of existence if the
statement that both God and creatures “exist” is to be meaningful and unequivocal. “Being” is
neither identical with God’s essence nor participated in by creatures, but stands above both a
kind of a priori category. The distinction between God and creatures is thus not ontological so
much as, in Heideggerian terms, ontic: God possesses being at an infinite level and creatures
finitely, and although God is the efficient cause of creation and creatures, God is on the same
6
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2006), 297.
7
Milbank, “Stanton Lecture 5,” 1.
8
Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism,” in Future of Love, 338-39.
9
Milbank does believe that some Scotist and nominalist objections to the perennial framework have served the
useful purpose of forcing the latter’s proponents to modify it so that it accords greater significance to the
“transrational,” namely “the emotively led, the aesthetic, the imaginative and the poetic.” He believes past instances
of successful modification were made by Renaissance thinkers such as Eckhart, Cusa, and Mirandola, as well as
certain Baroque and Romantic currents. See Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 105.
12
causal plane as they. God’s being is infinitely greater than that of creatures, but this is an infinity
thought more in terms of mathematics—infinitely more of the same—than of levels of depth, in
which the higher is also the richer, the deeper, and the more aesthetically profound. This implies
knowledge by representation rather than identity because being just “is” rather than existing in
suspension from God, a given entity has no further “depth” to be plumbed other than that
immediately attainable through mental representation. While God shares the same relation to
being as creatures in this view, in another sense God becomes infinitely removed from creation,
because there is no longer an ontological continuum suspended from God’s being in which
creation participates. God’s creation of the world is thus primarily thought in terms of its non-
necessity, as an act of free divine volition, and God can only subsequently breach this chasm by
additional unilateral acts of will. This is the root of this ontology’s violence according to
Milbank: the transcendentals no longer coincide, and the will is severed from any necessary
connection with the good and the true. Rather than participating in God’s being, creatures exist
as discrete entities who do not “share” their being among each other. Otherness and differences
among them are thus not reconciled within an overarching unity, and become the source of
conflict and power struggles.
Milbank expresses the participatory nature of his ontology as the paradoxical coincidence of
sharing and imitation.10 In the creaturely realm, the activities of sharing and imitation are
normally considered mutually exclusive: to share a reality with another creature is to possess or
experience what is identical, while imitation implies similarity but also a basic otherness. Yet if
there is no being outside God, creaturely being shares in God, while at the same time creatures
are not God and, in their own activity, can only imitate God. Milbank reasons that if creation,
10
13
despite being entirely contingent on the uncreated infinite, nonetheless shares in being, “then at
bottom created things are God in some sense and God is in some sense created.”11 This apparent
blurring of Creator and creature may initially suggest a clear violation of the very ontological
distinction that Milbank so adamantly defends against the Scotist alternative. In fact, it is
precisely the need to guard the integrity of finite being that leads Scotus to argue that the creature
is fully its own reality outside participation. Otherwise, he thinks, what is most proper to its
being would also be what is most alien.12 Milbank believes that this conclusion does indeed
follow from a participatory framework, but rather than dismissing the framework as self-
contradictory he argues that exactly this paradox points to the gift character of creation. If as
created beings we are totally dependent for our existence then at every point we only exist as a
gift from God, such that one can speak of creation not primarily as a discrete act but as a
continuous sustaining of our being. Scotus, while holding that God willed us into existence,
thinks of this largely as a one-time act such that having been created, our being is now relatively
our “own.” Our having been created might have been a divine gift, but this gift quality does not
really go beyond particular acts to the continual existence of particular beings.
Milbank describes this difference in theories of causation as between the model of concursus
and that of influentia. The Scotist model of concursus reduces divine action to an ontic model of
efficient causation in which the cause merely conditions the effect extrinsically. After God
creates the creature, God can further engage it only by intervening from without, akin to the
metaphor of two horses pulling one barge. God alone contributes X, creature alone contributes
11
John Milbank, “Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon,” in Encounter between Eastern
Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World through the Word, ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph
Schneider (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 33.
12
Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 100-01.
14
Y.13 According to the influentia or “in-flowing” model that Milbank traces to Aquinas, by
contrast, the higher cause “gives” out of the abundance of its being, resulting in the emanation of
further being that only exists through continued dependence on its origin. This allows the God-
creature relationship to be thought in intrinsic terms, since the creature’s being is never outside
that of God’s. Since a creature’s very existence is a gift, what is most proper to its being is
something it has received from without, from the divine source. Two complementary truths
follow. On one hand, “God is the single influence, the single unilateral and total cause of
everything”; on the other, “since [God] causes by sharing his own nature, by giving his gifts to-
be, the lower levels [i.e., various creatures] exert within their own sphere their own secondary
and equally total causality.”14 Milbank argues that “creation is therefore not a finished product in
space”—whose finished character would render creatures passive with regard to it—“but is
continuously generated ex nihilo in time,” through the active participation of creatures
themselves.15 The creature thus does not need to render itself passive in order to let God act, for
God is present and active in what is most proper to creaturely being and activity.
This leads to Milbank’s characterization of the ontological state of the creature as that of
what he calls “active reception,” whereby activity and receptivity are identical. 16 By analogy
with the substantive relations that constitute the persons of the Trinity, a creature only exists
insofar as it receives its being as a gift, just as its reception of being only occurs insofar as it
actively is and gives itself. Milbank describes the mode of creaturely being as gratitude: the
creature only exists, acts, and exercises any functions whatever insofar as these referred to its
13
Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 46.
14
Milbank, Suspended Middle, 90-91.
15
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 431.
16
John Milbank, “Violence: Double Passivity,” in Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, Radical
Orthodoxy Series (London: Routledge, 2003), 31.
15
divine source.17 “Divine giving occurs inexorably,” he writes, “and this means that a return is
inevitably made, for since the creature's very being resides in its reception of itself as a gift, the
gift is, in itself, the gift of a return.”18 Of course, sinful human beings do frequently refuse God’s
gifts, yet in Augustinian fashion Milbank never ontologizes evil and sin, but rather regards them
as privative of being. They are a lack of the truth, goodness and beauty that should exist, rather
than entities that exist in their own right. A human being is ontologically incapable of acting in a
way at odds with the transcendental of goodness; the sinfulness of an action pertains not to the
action as such, since it is rather a negation of the action, indeed of one’s very being as dependent
on God. And because truth is transcendentally coincident with being, sin and evil are wholly
beyond rational explanation and attempts at theodicy are largely misguided. Nonetheless,
Milbank argues that even human refusal and ingratitude were returned to God—on the cross,
wherein Jesus as human turned this evil into a perfect return after all, bringing it into the intra-
divine love so that negativity was consumed by positive excess.19
Nature as Excessive Gift
Since the creature itself is a gift of God—not merely the recipient of gifts—Milbank
emphasizes that the character of divine grace is not dependent on any contrast with a pure
“nature.” He does this especially through an appropriation and extension of Henri de Lubac’s
17
Following his reading of Henri de Lubac, he associates gratitude with the consciousness of inevitably partial
reception: “One knows that one is not all of possible knowing and willing and feeling and moreover that, since our
share of these things is what we are, we do not really command them, after the mode of a recipient of possessions.
Hence to will, know, and feel is to render gratitude, else we would refuse ourselves as constituted as gift.” Milbank,
Suspended Middle, 44. Emphasis in original.
18
John Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic,” Modern Theology
11 (1995): 135. Emphasis in original.
19
Ibid., 135-36.
16
thesis concerning the integral and intrinsic character of the nature-grace relationship.20 In de
Lubac’s genealogy, the rationale for the development in Catholic thought of a theoretically
autonomous “nature” was precisely to allow for the freely-given quality of grace.21 If human
nature was intrinsically incomplete without the experience of the beatific vision, and if God’s
goodness entailed that God would not create a being whose nature could not ultimately be
fulfilled, it seemed to follow that grace would be impossible. Grace could only be free—and by
definition, could only be grace—if it initiated a supernatural state of being that was extrinsic to,
and mostly unanticipated by, nature alone. Yet for Milbank, this contrastive sort of gratuity only
has meaning within the ontic realm, in which gifts often do appear as such because they contrast
with the deserved, earned and merited.22 In the realm of the ontological difference, where all is
gift, gift precedes and transcends any notions of the necessary or the obligatory that might
otherwise be set in contrast to it.23 A gift of grace is not more gratuitous to the extent that it is
extrinsic to our nature; to the contrary, such an extrinsic donation would be “no more a gift than
is a brick wall that we might inadvertently run into.”24
Milbank has developed his own position on the relationship between nature and grace
particularly in his more recent writings, through his association between gift and “spirit.”
Building on the work of French Catholic philosopher Claude Bruaire, he argues that since God is
spirit, insofar as human beings are in the image of God we too are “spirit,” and this is what is
20
Milbank, Suspended Middle. “Grace” in the context of the Catholic nature-grace discussion is not primarily
that which heals us from sin but that which elevates us to a friendship with God that transcends our exigencies as
simply created (our human “nature”).
21
It must be noted that proponents of this notion did not argue that nature has ever existed without grace in
history; nature has always actually been supplemented with grace. They argued rather that nature does not have an
inherent exigency for grace, and that God could have refrained from offering the beatific vision to human beings
without compromising divine goodness.
22
As we will see in the next chapter, however, Milbank believes in the possibility of a social order that does
embody non-contrastive gift to a much greater degree.
23
Ibid., 43.
24
Ibid., 46.
17
most essential to our being. Indeed, it is our hidden depth that is identical with God. As spirit, the
human being can reflect on herself, unlike the rest of the material creation. Though all creation is
gift, only spirit can “give itself to itself”—that is, receive itself in an active, conscious fashion.
Thus, while all creation is destined to return to God, it can only make this return in humans.25
This gift of spirit is, for Milbank, the meaning of grace; he argues that “the doctrine of grace is
nothing in addition to the Biblically-derived doctrine that human beings are most characterised
by ‘heart’ or ‘spirit’, by an inner depth of linkage to God that unifies soul and body together.”26
Since it is human beings who unite spirit and matter, for Milbank this suggests that a creation not
containing humans is impossible, for this would lead to what he sees as the impossible situation
of a gift never being (actively) received.27 He interprets Bruaire’s insights as a furthering of de
Lubac’s basic argument about the inner orientation of creation to grace. As Milbank puts it,
“Deification is not there because of creation; rather creation is there because of deification, as the
apex and microcosmic summation of created glory,” with the human being as the means whereby
creation as whole is fully able to return to God.28 Insofar as everything must be ordered to a
telos, and deification is the end of all material as well as spiritual existence, the role of the human
being is to serve as a kind of representative (like a political envoy) within creation, and to
provide an “analogical reflection” of God’s own hierarchical rule within the created order.29
25
Ibid., 43; John Milbank, “The Gift and the Mirror: On the Philosophy of Love,” in Counter-Experiences:
Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 278.
26
Milbank, “Stanton Lecture 5,” 9. Emphasis in original. He articulates the relationship between grace and
participation thus: “The difference made by Christian grace has less to do with something ‘in addition to’
participation, or as a contingent occurrence against the backdrop of participation, as rather an increased sense both
of the personal and interpersonal character of the absolute, and of human microcosmic dignity as destined in both
soul and body for a personal unification with this absolute.” Ibid., 9.
27
Ibid., 10. Milbank does not discuss animals at any length, but clearly does not regard them as embodying
“spirit” in the way that humans do.
28
Milbank, Suspended Middle, 52.
29
Ibid., 98-99.
18
Yet it is crucial to note that Milbank is not arguing that matter is less valuable or important
than spirit—quite the contrary. Though created spirit is “closer” to God than matter because of its
intellectuality, he notes that matter is closer to God in its simplicity and non-reflexivity.30 Just as
matter can only return to God through spirit, then, spirit can only return to God through matter.
To understand this, one must grasp Milbank’s notion of language—including all sorts of human
cultural productions—as constitutive rather than representative of reality. His favoured term for
this linguistic construction of reality is poesis—creativity as expressed in all manner of
fabrication, culture and ritual—which is co-extensive with human life even in its most “natural”
existence.31 Human identity is self-transcending because the products of poesis become part of a
web of meaning that stands on its own, irreducible to the intentions of the initial subject or
author. Milbank’s purpose here, as F. C. Bauerschmidt puts it, is “to dismantle the opposition
between identity and alterity by stressing that it is precisely that which is most our own (the
products of our cultural making) that is most ‘un-possessable’ and thus most not-our-own.”32
Though this framework reflects characteristically “postmodern” linguistic and cultural theory,
Milbank insists that it is even more basically theological, insofar as “human making participates
in a God who is infinite poetic utterance: the second person of the Trinity,” the eternal Word who
is endlessly creative.33 And if the Word is the utterance, the Spirit is the original supplement
30
Milbank appreciatively summarizes the Neoplatonist Proclus thus: “material things, as non-reflexive,
although lower than intellect, are also in a certain way simpler than intellect: automatically, in a kind of slumbering
innocence, physical things have to praise the gods and God simply by existing and showing themselves forth in their
integrity.” Milbank, “Sophiology,” 61.
31
“Our conjectural thoughts and vague desires reach their highest pitch when they attempt to blend poetically
with the cosmos in every form of ritual enactment, and especially in the long, slow work of generations that seek to
identify themselves and love themselves and their surrounding material reality by moulding a ‘landscape’ that
realizes and expresses the human dwelling upon the earth and beneath the stars.” Milbank, “Gift and the Mirror,”
283.
32
Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, “The Word Made Speculative? John Milbank’s Christological Poetics,”
Modern Theology 15 (1999): 422.
33
Milbank, Being Reconciled, ix.
19
necessary for the interpretation and thus the very meaning of this utterance.34 Since human
activity is a return to God that is ultimately identical with our being given to ourselves by God, it
is in this realm of human culture that God meets us. Milbank argues that alongside theosis as the
human ascent to God, we must appeal to the notion of theurgy, or divine descent through the
mediation of human culture and liturgy. Though theurgical thought was primarily developed as a
stream of Neoplatonism, Milbank argues for its amenability to a Christian framework because it
sees spirit as descending entirely into the material realm and thus enabling the material to be
elevated with it, which approaches the truth of the incarnation as the definitive union of spirit
and matter.35
Milbank particularly employs these notions of poesis and theurgy to argue that the divine
gifts of revelation and salvation are not an extrinsic imposition on human life but intrinsically
meaningful to it. He favourably interprets 18th century German thinker J. G. Hamann to the
effect that revelation adds nothing to the already revelatory creation, and that “since God is
genuinely transcendent and not a mere higher transcendental reality within the same order as us,
he never confronts the creature in an ‘I-thou’ relation” but only in and through the entire web of
creaturely relations.36 Because we exceed ourselves through the products of our poesis that come
to take on meanings over-against us, God can meet us precisely in this space, intrinsically yet
also beyond our capabilities and expectations. Milbank writes that
The event of revelation itself may be defined as the intersection of the divine and human
creations. By this is meant that the “overtaking” by the product of the creative act that brings
it forth is now seen as the occasion on which God interposes without in any way violating
34
Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism,” in Future of Love, 347.
35
This is in contrast to Plotinus’ Neoplatonism, which denies that the human soul is fully descended into the
human body. The theurgic stream is associated with Plotinus, Iamblichus and Damascius. See Milbank, Beyond
Secular Order, 208.
36
John Milbank, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing,” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 74.
20
the range of the natural human intent. At the point where the Divine creation establishes the
human creation by overtaking and completing it, thereby exposing a realized intention more
primitive than the human intent and fully its master, there is revelation.37
Because Milbank’s poetic ontology is thus already one of constant excess—the continual
coincidence of activity and receptivity—he can integrate this with a theology of revelation
that is excessive even in relation to all else. As Bauerschmidt puts it, for Milbank “revelation
is not an imposition from ‘outside’ poesis but is the surplus within poesis itself.” 38
That we can only establish our own human identities through engagement with the rest of
creation illustrates the extent of participation in Milbank’s ontology. Vertical participation is
inseparable from horizontal participation; creaturely participation in God occurs by means of
intra-creaturely participation, by which creatures mediate God to each other. Milbank writes:
We are not close to God in our own solitary splendour; rather, in being close to God we
remain connected, in degrees of proximity and remoteness, to all other creatures who are
equally near to the divine. Some of these, on the ontic cosmic scale, stand alongside us;
others, like the angels, are above us; others, like the lesser animals are below us. But all
these creatures mediate God to us and our immediacy of presence to God accentuates and
does not cancel their connectedness to us. It is the connected me who is close to God and so
God speaks always through creatures to creatures, … even in speaking to me with the
uttermost intimacy.39
One must note Milbank’s assertion that even the most material and the most “below” us in ontic
terms is nonetheless “equally near to the divine” and capable of mediating God’s presence. He
frequently speaks of this realm of mediation as the metaxu or the “between,” and sees it as one of
the great casualties of the univocal, non-participatory alternative. All levels of being participate
in the metaxu and thus all being is interrelated and inter-mediated at its deepest level.
Milbank often uses the concept of an “original necessary supplement” to articulate his
ontology of gift in reference both to vertical and horizontal participation. Just as what is most
37
John Milbank, “A Christological Poetics,” in Word Made Strange, 130-31.
38
Bauerschmidt, “Word Made Speculative,” 422.
39
21
essential to human nature is the original supplement of grace, so what is most essential to the
nature of matter is being artistically shaped to some end by humans as spiritual beings. The
model of influentia applies not only to God’s activity vis-à-vis creatures, but more generally to
the activity of higher levels of being vis-à-vis lower ones.40 It is in such culture-making activity
or poesis that humans most image God; in this sense, not only does human poesis establish the
proper identity of non-human matter, but this same activity establishes human nature itself. As he
puts it, “ontology can only be delineated through constructive participation in ontogenesis.”41 In
his most recent work, he speaks of humans as exemplifying “trans-organicity,” or an integral yet
discontinuous unity, “a continuity of transcendence with the biological ground that it exceeds.”42
Whatever may be proper to human nature as such, it is suspended between two “paradoxically
necessary” original supplements: the vertical supplement of grace and the horizontal supplement
of culture, the latter of which always mediates the former.43 The originality of the supplement or
“superaddition” is illustrated in a number of analogies Milbank adduces, several of them taken
from Aquinas’ own examples. These include the “naturalness” of the warmth provided by hot
water, even though this capacity has been infused from fire; the “natural” light of the moon,
though this is borrowed from the sun; and the “naturally” tidal movement of the oceans, though
this is due to lunar influence. Milbank believes, again following his interpretation of Aquinas,
that these demonstrate the existence of “certain analogues to the ontological-ontic causal order
40
Milbank, Suspended Middle, 90-91.
41
Milbank, “Gift and the Mirror,” 298.
42
43
Milbank, Suspended Middle, 54, 102-03.
22
within the ontic order” whereby “the higher ‘flows into’ the lower, giving it something of what is
proper to it,” and thus serving as an analogue for the gift of grace.44
Milbank roots this dynamic of original supplementation in God’s own inner life. On one
hand, God’s Triune being is constituted through subsistent relations; this is especially apparent in
the mutual relationships between Father and Word or Son, since each are relative to the other;
there could be no ungenerated Word, nor could God be God without generating a perfect Word.
Yet this relationality is never a closed circle, with each party simply eternally and continually
reinforced by the other. Rather, it is excessive, an excess especially associated with the Spirit
who ensures that the back-and-forth between Father and Son contains an element of novelty and
surprise. Since the relationship is eternal, the excess that the Spirit brings is an original
supplement, both constituting and modifying God, and an “interpreting ‘third’” that is necessary
for the meaning of the “content” itself.45 Though from eternity lacking nothing, God has also
been eternally, paradoxically becoming “more” than what God already is, and this “extra” or
excess is what allows the divine being to flow out to what is not divine. Following his reading of
Aquinas, Milbank argues that within God’s inner being, creation’s identical emanation from and
return to God “are indeed further identical with the inner (relationally distinguished) Paternal
generation of the Word, and the ‘returning’ procession of the Spirit through the Son from the
Father,” such that God is “that in himself which goes outside God.”46
44
Ibid., 101. Emphasis in original. For Milbank, this emphasis demonstrates that Aquinas “appeals, when
discussing grace, to a Proclean ontology in which things are ‘properly’ raised above themselves to a new potential,
not to a purely Aristotelian ontology in which things are confined for self-realization to an original, given potential.”
Ibid.
45
“As an emphatically unilateral gift the Holy Spirit nonetheless raises the gift of the Son above mere
unilaterality by ensuring that his return to the Father, which is itself entirely given by the Father, is nonetheless also
a kind of novelty for the Father that renews the Father in his source—a renewal that all the same constitutes the
Father as source in the first place.” Milbank, “Gift and the Mirror,” 280.
46
Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 26; Milbank, “Sophiology,” 62. Emphasis added. This rooting of being and
gift in God’s triune nature provides Milbank with a defence against the charge that he is replacing Christian
23
Gift as Unilateral Exchange
Despite all the complexities in Milbank’s theo-ontological framework, his characterization
of the gift can be stated quite succinctly: to speak of a gift is always to speak of “a moment
within gift-exchange,” rather than an object given in only one direction.47 While he mainly
argues for this conclusion in ontological terms, one of his lengthy essays on the topic begins by
appealing to the reader’s own intuition about gifts. He suggests, for example, that if someone
were to give a bag of money to a totally random stranger on the street—except precisely not one
who appeared poor, as this might bring a sense of obligation—this action would be considered
quixotic rather than generous.48 He then suggests that the contrast often made between the
disinterested, “giving” love of agape and the self-interested, “desiring” love of eros is
overdrawn. One gives out of some sense of the value and attractiveness of the other, so the
agapic dimension is never exclusive, while erotic desire is never fulfilled by possessing this
other—this would be the abolition of desire—but sustained by the mutual exchange of gifts.
“Giving,” he maintains, “is most free where it is yet most bound, most mutual and most
reciprocally demanded.”49
For Milbank, then, there should be no strict contrast between purely unilateral gifts and
reciprocal contracts, because gifts are themselves always involved in exchange and relationships.
Yet he is clear that gifts are distinct from the modern, Western understanding of a business
narrative with metaphysics. “Does not this ontologisation of grace abandon the narrative dimension of Christianity?
Not at all … Aquinas … offers us an ontology of grace which thereby also allows for narrative and the excess of
event over substance. … What we have here is a conception of God as esse as also narrative: a God who is a fully
realised infinite process of self-becoming that was never really begun, never really self-caused and never involved
any real transition. But a story for all that, and an account of God not just as fundamentally being but as
fundamentally a fully-hypostasised personal ‘art’ which is his intellect, and as a process of such generation in turn a
fully-hypostasised ‘life’ of infinite mutual love.” Milbank, “Stanton Lecture 5,” 12-13.
47
John Milbank, “The Transcendality of the Gift: A Summary,” in Future of Love, 356. Emphasis modified.
48
Milbank, “Can a Gift,” 124.
49
Ibid. Emphasis in original.
24
contract.50 The medium of exchange in such a contract is normally agreed upon in advance by
both parties, whether this is money in exchange for a product or service, or even a mutually
judged equivalence of value in bartering. Further, the two sides of the exchange in a contract—
the delivery of the initial product or service and the payment in return—typically occur within a
very short space of time, often as simultaneously as possible. By contrast, Milbank follows
Bourdieu in asserting that a gift must be within the measure “of a necessary delay (whose term is
indeterminate, though not infinite) and of non-identical repetition between gift and counter-
gift.”51 A gift returned immediately after the original gift would turn the exchange into a mere
contractual fulfillment, as would a return of a gift that was identical in every respect to the
original.
Milbank regards the purely unilateral, non-exchangist concept of the gift as exemplifying a
modern purism that ultimately amounts to a suicidal self-sacrifice. He finds this most clearly in
Derrida, who explicitly argues that the only true gift is a “gift of death,” since only death, as the
total obliteration of the self, eliminates all possibility of the reception of some benefit that would
contaminate the necessarily disinterested quality of one’s gift.52 Milbank sees this model as
giving primacy to a false Kantian ideal of purity of will or intention, in turn traceable to the
Scotist valorization of the absolute will. Indeed, its notion that the character of gift is established
through contrast with non-gift is strikingly similar to the “pure nature” thesis against which de
Lubac rebelled. Milbank’s alternative is to argue that the genuine gift should be characterized not
as disinterested but as appropriate for the particular recipient and in the context of the concrete
50
In the next chapter we will see that Milbank appeals to older and alternative economic models in which gift
and contract are integrated to a much greater extent.
51
Ibid., 125. Emphasis in original.
52
John Milbank, “Grace: The Midwinter Sacrifice,” in Being Reconciled, 154-55.
25
relationship.53 One could consider the development and maintenance of the relationship as a kind
of reward or payment for the gift, but Milbank would surely question why such a crass and
impersonal way of thinking need have any cachet here. One who thinks of human relationality in
such terms has already condemned it to the sphere of irredeemably one-dimensional self-interest.
On the other hand, Milbank does not simply baptize the Maussian economies mentioned in
the introduction, in which gift is the primary mode of exchange and means of social stability. He
insists on the need for a “purified gift-exchange,” purged of the “archaic agonistic components”
of these traditional economies.54 According to Milbank, these economies do not actually follow
through the logic of “exchange” consistently enough—the repetition they encourage is generally
“identical,” in the interest of maintaining the organic society as a single entity over against
outsiders. By contrast, for Milbank exchange goes all the way down. Gift exchange is not a
closed “circle” but an unending “spiral” or “chain” of exchanges.55 No group or body has a kind
of inherent subsistence independent of relations and exchange with what is outside its borders.
Critiquing a common “communitarian” position, he states that “every community exchanges
outside itself, with the infinite unknown,” and “every totality … is always involved in an
exchange beyond itself, not within an ultimate circle, but within an unending chain of exchanges
throughout space and time.”56 In a real sense, then, even though every gift is situated within a
particular relationship, this relationship must not be self-referential. The latter would result in a
mutual isolation of relationships and communities—which could then go outside their borders
only through the myth of the pure contract—that is hardly different from the mutual isolation of
53
Milbank, “Can a Gift,” 132.
54
Ibid., 131.
55
Milbank, “Transcendality,” in Future of Love, 357; John Milbank, “Liberality versus Liberalism,” in Future
of Love, 257.
56
John Milbank, “Politics: Socialism by Grace,” in Being Reconciled, 165.
26
individuals. The gift must be open to the universal and to the outsider, an implication that will be
discussed in the next chapter.
While Milbank’s concept of gift involves exchange, he also insists that it entails
unilaterality, such that he refers to gift as a paradoxical “unilateral exchange.”57 Both aspects
follow from the model of influentia. In the divine-creaturely relationship, there is unilaterality
because God and creatures act on two different planes, such that divine gift and human response
never come into properly reciprocal relation. Yet as described above, there is exchange because
the only possible mode of creaturely being is gratitude and thus a kind of return to God.58
Milbank regards a unilateral and even hierarchical dimension as also present when gifts are
exchanged between humans, albeit in an analogical sense that, unlike the divine-creaturely
relationship, also involves reciprocity.59 He judges a fatal flaw in the modern bifurcation
between disinterested gift and self-interested contract to lie in the presumption of equality
between parties in both cases. In fact, there are always moments of unilaterality in reciprocity,
and this is hierarchy, albeit a reversible, “tangled,” “self-canceling” one, concerned with
educating the temporarily lower, and thus with the genuine good of the other.60 Milbank states:
When one gives, for that unilateral instance one is a monarch. One stands, as it were,
hierarchically above the one who cannot choose what you are going to give to him, say to
him, etc. … Likewise when one receives, for that instance one is a monarch receiving
tribute, even if the roles will be reversed in the next instance. Thus to give, or to receive, is
hierarchically and unilaterally to help continue a process that is nonetheless fundamentally
democratic and reciprocal.61
57
Milbank, Suspended Middle, 91; Milbank, “Gift and the Mirror,” 299; Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 47.
58
Milbank, Suspended Middle, 90.
59
Ibid., 90-91. Milbank has modified his terminology in this area somewhat over time. In his earlier writings
on gift, he tends to reject the characterization of gift exchange as “unilateral” in any sense, and to attribute
“reciprocity” to all exchange, without qualification in the case of the God-creature relationship. See Milbank, “Can a
Gift,” 132, 133, 136, 144.
60
61
Milbank, “Liberality,” in Future of Love, 257-58.
27
The clearest model here is that of parent to child or teacher to student: while elements of
reciprocity are present in both, the parties are far from equal in role, with one party in a
“higher,” largely giving position, and the other in a “lower,” mainly receptive one. Yet the
very rationale for this unilateral hierarchy is to elevate the lower gradually, to educate her so
that she develops the qualities that will eventually allow her to become a successful parent
or teacher herself.62 But even in a casual conversation between two equally developed
adults, for instance, the two do not speak at once. One gives the gift of his speech at a time
while the other receives it and waits for her turn, and then the roles are reversed when the
other contributes her speech to continue the dialogue. The words of each add something new
and to some degree unexpected by the other—if there was no newness or surprise there
would be no point conversing—and these constitute unilateral gift, but unilaterality only in
the sense of an equally ultimate exchange.
This unilateral and hierarchical pattern is also crucial in understanding Milbank’s
insights about the human relation to the rest of creation. He reasons that “precisely because
gift is a complex hierarchy and ideally a unilateral exchange … love extends also beneath
spirit to material creatures whom we help to ‘raise up’ through human apostrophizing poesis
to a quasi-spiritual level, while their own automatic return is a necessary assistance to our
own spiritual return in a fallen world.”63 From Milbank’s perspective it would follow that
those who would place human beings on the same ontological level as the rest of the
62
“When a child receives life from its forebears (naturally and culturally) this is clearly not the sort of
receptivity of something alien which merely shores you up for a time; rather it is the active reception of those
powers which are most one’s own, even though they remain always (unlike mere assistance) entirely derived from
elsewhere … Thus, in this instance, the more one receives, the more one gratefully acknowledges this reception
(‘pays back the debt’) and thereby permits oneself to receive further, the more also one is radically free, in charge of
one’s own life and able oneself to exercise authority.” John Milbank, “Paul against Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture &
Society 25, no. 7-8 (2008), 157. Emphasis in original.
63
28
material creation are wrongly abandoning the unilaterality of the human role of culture and
fabrication. However, just as parents or teachers “need” the healthy development of their
children or students in order to fulfill their own proper identities, so human beings as spirit
need all of material creation. Idolization and exploitation of the natural world are both
betrayals of the sort of creative and responsible culture-making that enables us to receive the
gift of creation and simultaneously bestow upon it our own gifts of cultivation and care.
Incarnation, Church, and World as Sites of Gift Exchange
Milbank believes the incarnation demonstrates his argument that the ontological coincidence
of gift and active reception means that there is no “unreturned” gift, and also that a gift must be
intrinsically appropriate for its recipient. Christ’s saving work is only effective insofar as, in his
terminology, it is “non-identically repeated” through human poesis. Though in one sense it is the
work of Christ alone, it is mediated at every point by the life of the Church, and through it,
human and created life as a whole. Milbank argues that if the incarnation is to reach and fulfill
human nature intrinsically—along the lines of his necessary original supplement—then it must in
some sense be always-already anticipated by creation.64
Christ, Milbank says, is only gift in light of an already-given ecclesial reception, even
though this reception is itself granted as a divine gift.65 If there were no faithful community of
disciples who walked with Jesus and later received the truth of his life, death and resurrection in
faith—a wavering, failure-prone faith to be sure—there would be no testimony about him, oral or
64
Milbank phrases his central concern here thus: “how can incarnation and atonement be communicated to us
not as mere facts, but as characterizable modes of being which intrinsically demand these appellations?” John
Milbank, “The Name of Jesus,” in Word Made Strange, 149. Emphasis in original.
65
“The countervailing movement of a faithful, ecclesial reception of God’s offer—Christ's person and finally
his suffering—commences as soon as Christ commences, and accompanies him throughout his path. Otherwise there
would remain no trace of him in human records at all. Most remarkably, Luke's birth narrative insists that a free
reception of Christ was a condition of this gift being given from the very outset. … Mary's praise already cancels sin
since it is able to speak the logos into being.” Milbank, “Can a Gift,” 136.
29
written, and his “gift” would have gone unoffered, because unreceived, in human history. This
“alreadiness” extends even before the incarnation and is particularly clear in Mary’s fiat, for
without the Marian “let it be” the Word would have never assumed human flesh. God the Father
sent Christ into a world whose constitution was intrinsically suitable to his reception, such that
the incarnation was appropriate according to the criterion of “fittingness” (convenientia) so often
invoked by Aquinas. Further,
Only God incarnate could first make an adequate return of God’s glory to God, but the point
of the incarnation was also to communicate to human beings both the spiritual power and the
Christic idiom of an adequate return, so that this could be made universally. For until there is
a universal return, then surely God must continue to suffer the “contradiction” of a loss of
his glory, an alienation of his participated being.66
The reception of the gift that is Christ continues to the present as he is received by and given
to his Church. Milbank speaks of the Church (in its universal ontological essence, not its
institutional manifestation) as an enhypostasization of the Spirit, such that its “human receptive-
response is also a purely divine response, in the same absolute sense that Christ is God.”67 In line
with his rejection of extrincism, Milbank asserts that “divine redemption is not God’s forgiving
us”—since God is eternally reconciled within the divine self and does not need to be appeased—
“but rather his giving us the gift of the capacity for forgiveness.” Indeed, Christ’s death is
nothing “in addition” to the human practice of forgiveness, which is precisely what the Church
is.68 Forgiveness itself should not be conceived as a “mere negative gesture” but as “unlimited
positive circulation,” the continual giving of gifts regardless of their (privative) refusal.69 This is
best illustrated in terms of the Eucharist in which Christ’s body and blood, as God’s very gift of
66
67
John Milbank, “Alternative Protestantism: Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition,” in Radical
Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant and Participation, ed. James K. A. Smith and James H.
Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 39.
68
John Milbank, “Incarnation: The Sovereign Victim,” in Being Reconciled, 62; Milbank, “The Name of
Jesus,” in Word Made Strange, 159.
69
John Milbank, “Forgiveness: The Double Waters,” in Being Reconciled, 48.
30
self, are given to us as another form of the same earthly gifts we present before God as bread and
wine, the fruits of the earth as cultivated by human labour.70 The Eucharistic gift would be
impossible—never given, never received—without the ecclesially-provided gifts that are its
elements. The non-identical repetition of gift exchange is thus another way of referring to a
“perpetual Eucharist,” and the ecclesia is “the attempt to erect a cosmopolis on the basis of a
universal gift-exchange.”71 Above all, this Eucharistic valuation of the material finds its
fulfillment in the corporeal resurrection for which all creation, through participation in the risen
Christ, is destined.72 It is ultimately the resurrection that proves that gift is non-contrastive and
bound up in exchange, for it guarantees that whatever ingratitude currently persists, there will be
an ultimate return of all things to God in the most material sense possible.73
Milbank’s insistence that the incarnation and the Church are related intrinsically rather than
extrinsically to created being and human history also demonstrates how he sees his resolutely
theological starting point as implying, rather than obstructing, theological engagement with the
wider world. That the incarnation arrives temporally “after” much human history has already
taken place, and that one does not need to refer explicitly to it to rightly understand creation,
does not then imply that it is merely an extrinsic extra vis-à-vis an already complete nature. One
can just as reasonably interpret everything that came before the incarnation as an anticipation and
typological foreshadowing of what was to come, as did many of the early Fathers. 74 Indeed,
insofar as all creation is grounded in and oriented to Christ, the properly functioning “nature” of
70
Milbank, “Grace,” in Being Reconciled, 160-61.
71
Milbank, “Can a Gift,” 152; Milbank, “Transcendality,” in Future of Love, 359. More about the meaning of
this universal cosmopolis will be provided in the next chapter.
72
Milbank, “Grace,” in Being Reconciled, 154.
73
Milbank, “Paul against Biopolitics,” 159.
74
Conversely, we must remember that there has never been a “pure” Christianity uninfluenced by currents of
thought originating outside it (even while modifying and often subverting these same currents). The most obvious
example is the Philonic (and therefore Hellenic) influence on the Johannine Logos, some of the central motifs of the
Book of Hebrews, and the apocryphal/deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom.
31
all created being will inevitably be Christ-ian. Considered apart from relation to Christ, its nature
can only be nihilistic, as Milbank never hesitates to affirm in light of his Augustinian notion of
privation. Thus, the insights of Christian revelation should be understood as necessarily and
originally supplementary to the participatory ontology that can also be found in the theurgic
Neoplatonists—and, for that matter, to any elements of human thought and culture that are able,
by participation in the universal Word, to anticipate Christian faith and community. The gift of
salvation is always an appropriate, fitting one that thereby enables the recipient to take part
actively in the relationship.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that Milbank primarily characterizes gift as bound up in
exchange, both between God and human beings—and through them, all creation—and among
human beings themselves. He roots this framework in a Trinitarian, analogical and participatory
ontology of “active reception,” in which creation’s reception of itself as a gift coincides with its
active return to its divine source. Created being is thus intrinsically gifted, as its very nature is to
be “more” than itself through the necessary original supplement of grace, with human poesis as
the means by which the divine gift is returned and both human and non-human creation come to
be themselves.
CHAPTER 2
THE SOCIAL MEANING OF MILBANK’S ONTOLOGY OF GIFT
If gift exchange is ontologically basic according to Milbank, one might expect that the
social-political framework that best accords with it will be one that integrates gift into its very
structure, such that gift is without contrast and intrinsic to the normal and “natural” functioning
of political and economic life. For Milbank, the social body that fully represents this reality is the
Church, and his political theology can best be characterized as an ecclesiology “writ large” into a
kind of Christendom. In the first part of this chapter I discuss how he postulates an intrinsic
relation between Church and world that allows aspects of the former’s life to be translated into
the latter. In the second section I outline the political-economic framework that he links with this
paradigm, namely a version of socialism that gives primacy to civil society associations rather
than either the state or the capitalist market. Then I argue that two particular aspects of his
framework—an integration of democracy and hierarchy in his notion of political representation
and a sacramental conception of economic production and exchange—most clearly demonstrate
its connection with his ontology of gift.
The Church as Cosmopolis of Universal Gift Exchange
For Milbank, the divine-human and intra-human relationships of gift exchange are above all
distinctive of the ecclesia, which he labels “the social practice of gratitude.”1 As a community
embodying the proleptic reality of the new creation and the resurrection of all things, the Church
is inherently bound up with both materiality and universality, so rather than being an insular
group concerned only with “spiritual” things, the Church is utterly political. Milbank argues that
St. Paul’s concept of the Church exemplifies the perfect integration of hierarchy and democracy.
1
33
Christ reigns as Head and there is an order of precedence in the communal exchange of
ministerial gifts—a “hierarchy of gifts”2—yet also a democratization of the Spirit and of charity,
of which all are capable, so that all receive the gifts necessary to participate in this polis.3
Though he deems the Church the true polis, Milbank does not therefore believe its members
must shun participation in statecraft or in other social institutions. Instead, he believes the
Christian mission demands the incorporation of all sorts of human institutions into the Church,
and even that “the idea of Christianity without Christendom is a self-deluding and superficial
illusion.”4 Indeed, “only the Church has the theoretical and practical power to challenge the
global hegemony of capital and to create a viable politico-economic alternative.”5 To see why
this is so, one must note the limitations he sees in other sorts of community. Despite prioritizing
the local community—the neighbourhood, profession, and so on—he rejects the notion that any
such community is, or should attempt to be, self-enclosed or self-sufficient. This is precisely
because of his stress, noted in the last chapter, that all reality continuously participates in relation
and exchange. “If the libertarians tend to underestimate the importance of relative self-
sufficiency to real community,” he writes, “the communitarians overestimate it, precisely
because absolute self-sufficiency can never be arrived at.”6 Thus, these sorts of local
communities must never be absolutely valorized; if they were, the very nature of gift as exchange
with the other would be compromised. “Community has been with exchange, and gift has been
possible, not simply because of organicism [as for many communitarians], but because there are
2
Ibid., 150-51.
3
Ibid., 143-44.
4
5
Milbank, Future of Love, xi.
6
Milbank, “Politics,” in Being Reconciled, 165.
34
strangers,” those outside its bounds who introduce a newness into the exchange.7 The only true
gift, Milbank maintains, is a universal gift, one open to an infinitely excessive circulation beyond
all borders.8
For Milbank, the Church is unlike all other human communities insofar as it is by nature a
universal body that it encompasses all created being, and in one sense is therefore absolute, but
in an inclusive, non-self-referential way. It is unique in its incorporation of otherness; it does not
seek a “peace” akin to Augustine’s earthly city, in which differences are either abolished or the
conflict among them merely mitigated, but rather a peace that makes of these differences a
musical harmony.9 Milbank states that
For Christianity, true community means the freedom of people and groups to be different, …
yet at the same time it totally refuses indifference; a peaceful, united, secure community
implies absolute consensus, … [yet not] something once and for all achieved, but a
consensus that is only in and through the interrelations of community itself, and a consensus
that moves and “changes.”10
In this idea of community, Milbank argues, Christianity is unique, for even Judaism postpones
the achievement of universal consensus to the eschaton.11 The Church is universal because it
does not define itself “spatially” over against any other entities; it rather exists “as time” in a
Eucharistic mode.12 This means that though it has already been “given” in Christ, it is not yet
“realized,” for “the body and blood of Christ only exist in the mode of gift, and they can be gift
(like any gift) only as traces of the giver and promise of future provision from the same
7
Ibid., 169. “Every community exchanges outside itself, with the infinite unknown,” and “every totality … is
always involved in an exchange beyond itself, not within an ultimate circle, but within an unending chain of
exchanges throughout space and time.” Ibid., 165.
8
Ibid., 169.
9
“In music there must be continual endings and displacements, yet this is no necessary violence, because only
in the recall of what has been displaced does the created product consist.” Milbank, “Postmodern Critical
Augustinianism,” in Future of Love, 339.
10
11
Ibid.
12
John Milbank, “Enclaves, or Where Is the Church?” in Future of Love, 133. Emphasis in original.
35
source.”13 The Church is “nowhere yet,” but this is the same as to say it is “everywhere.”14
Because of this universality, “Christianity should not draw boundaries”; it should exclude “only
the negative, that which denies and takes away from Being,” which is to say the violent,
including anything that stunts our “capacity to love and conceive of the divine beauty.”15
For Milbank, is this universality that connects the Church to the gift and provides its
political-economic relevance. Thus he labels the ecclesia “the attempt to erect a cosmopolis on
the basis of a universal gift-exchange,”16 and argues that “the entire ‘economy’ of human give-
and-take exceeds the political and belongs in the ecclesial sphere.”17 The Church participates in
Christ’s representation of all creation by mystical identity with him through the working of the
Spirit, by the same means drawing the rest of creation into this shared participation.18 And
insofar as nothing exists apart from participation, anything only becomes what it is through the
mediation of the Church. Thus “the Church is emphatically not … a kind of ‘extra’ religious
organisation which some people happen to belong to; it is, rather, the sine qua non for the
existence of humanity as such: nulla humanitas extra ecclesiam.”19
Milbank sets this universality in opposition to any and all “law.” He appeals to St. Paul’s
apparent setting of grace against law as a rejection of positive ontological status for nomos as
13
14
Ibid., 144.
15
16
Milbank, “Transcendality,” in ibid., 159.
17
John Milbank, “The Real Third Way: For a New Metanarrative of Capital and the Associationist
Alternative,” in The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Pope Benedict XVI’s Social Encyclical and the Future of Political
Economy, ed. Adrian Pabst (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 41. Emphasis in original. “Every economy is part
of the economy of salvation and every process of production and exchange prepares the elements of the cosmic
Eucharist.” Milbank, “Liberality,” in Future of Love, 258.
18
“Christianity,” he writes, “always should encourage another mode of democracy [other than liberal
democracy], linked to the idea of the infallible presence of the Holy Spirit in the whole body of the Church and by
extension humanity across all times and places … since all human society in some degree foreshadows ecclesia and
in this way always mediates some supernatural grace.” John Milbank, “The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and
Political Authority,” New Blackfriars 85 (2004): 231. Emphasis added.
19
36
such, not only the Jewish Law.20 Referencing passages in the Epistle to the Romans, Milbank
argues that law “reinforces sin and death by falsely assuming their irreducible ultimacy and so
offers in the face of their violence a counter-violence … rather than a removal of their
ontological grip.”21 For Milbank, Paul replaces law with pistis, conceived less as individual faith
and more as “trust,” “persuasion,” or “fidelity” that is capable of governing the community’s
political life over time. The Pauline phrase “justification by faith” is then better rendered “justice
through trust” or “just solidarity through trust.”22 He admits that
It may appear that trust is a weak recourse as compared with the guarantees provided by
laws, courts, political constitutions, checks and balances and so forth. However, since all
these processes are administered by human beings, capable of treachery, a suspension of
distrust, along with the positive working of tacit bonds of association, is the only real source
of reliable solidarity for a community.23
Rather than an ethic bound up with law, Milbank sets forth a “charismatic ethic” or an “ethic of
gift.”24 In this he claims to follow Paul, who
conceives of the reception of grace and the giving of love as a social practice and economy
that is binding without law (in the sense of written prohibitions and injunctions), because it
works through the spiralling asymmetry and non-identical repetition of gift-exchange, with
an accompanying exchange of sanctions of trust, honouring, shame, forbearance and
forgiveness.25
This is a universal justice beyond any particular law; it is the latter that is always bound to
conflict, just as the Jewish Law divided Jew and Gentile.26 Indeed, boundless universality is a
20
He argues that “it has been the fashion to claim too often recently” that Paul is simply critiquing Jewish
ritual law. “Such a stress at once wrongly plays down the supersession of the Jewish law tout court by the gospel
and belittles the logic of the Jewish ritual law which, of course, Paul considers would continue to be observed by
some Christians.” Milbank, “Paul against Biopolitics,” 165n22. Emphasis in original. In support he cites Jacob
Taubes, Dieter Georgi and Theodore Jennings.
21
Ibid., 141.
22
Ibid., 144-45, 148. These are the respective suggestions of Bruno Blumenfeld and Dieter Georgi.
23
Ibid.
24
John Milbank, “Can Morality Be Christian?” in Word Made Strange, 227; Milbank, “Grace,” in Being
Reconciled, 153.
25
Milbank, “Paul against Biopolitics,” 155. Emphasis in original.
26
Ibid., 147, 149.
37
central corollary of Milbank’s ontology of peace that postulates a harmony inclusive of
difference. “Christianity,” he states, “is the religion of the obliteration of boundaries.”27
Milbank forthrightly describes socialism as the means by which “the peace of the Church
[is] mediated to and established in the entire human community.”28 Although he is not terribly
clear as to how this mediation takes place, his basic logic seems to be that since the type of
socialism he advocates—detailed below—encourages the sorts of communities in which concrete
relationships of gift exchange are possible, and since these exchanges foreshadow and participate
in the Eucharistic gift exchange of the ecclesia, there can be an ontological fusion between the
Church and society, even a form of “Christendom.” The Body of Christ is a kind of concrete
universal in which Eucharistic flesh and blood are identical with the most cosmic, spiritual, and
universal. Insofar as gift exchange strives to integrate these elements—in terms of a gift
appropriate to the particular situation yet always exceeding itself in openness to the universal—
all human communities can be trans-organically embedded into the Church in whose life they are
fulfilled. Although gift exchange occurs in this paradigmatic, sacramentally perfect fashion only
in the ecclesial community, the embedding of other communities into the Church enables a
pragmatic transformation of political-economic life. The Church can thereby “operate as the
fulcrum for the growth of civil society.”29 Milbank insists that his is not a “utopian programme,”
and the purpose of public law is to “bend” imperfect, often merely corrective justice towards the
27
John Milbank, “Culture: The Gospel of Affinity,” in Being Reconciled, 196. Elsewhere he writes that “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. … [But] 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 recognized,
namely any stunting of a person's capacity to love and conceive of the divine beauty … But there is no real
exclusion here; Christianity should not draw boundaries, and the Church is that paradox: a nomad city.” Milbank,
“Postmodern Critical Augustinianism,” in Future of Love, 342.
28
29
John Milbank, “The Big Society Depends on the Big Parish” (Dec. 1, 2010), accessed Jul. 1, 2014,
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/11/30/3080680.htm.
38
kind of harmonious charity that is the goal of all justice.30 The following sections explore the
approach he believes such “bending” requires.
Milbank’s Associationist Socialism: Background and Program
Milbank sees not only gift but gift exchange as the meaning of being, and thus of human
being. This leads him to stress the inherently social and relationship-forming nature of human
existence. From this follows the primacy he assigns to the “free association,” a type of social
body that is joined voluntarily yet united on the basis of a mutually shared interest in the genuine
flourishing of all of its members, and so involves a thicker bond than mere contract.31 He regards
this model as best exemplified in the medieval guild tradition, but sees it even today in the
multifaceted sphere of civil society, encompassing churches, local community groups,
professional associations, labour unions, and the like. While he distinguishes civil society from
society as subject to the state and from for-profit businesses, he argues that even these must be,
in the image he borrows from Karl Polanyi, “embedded in” civil society and in the culture of the
association.32 The most basic meaning of this embedding is perhaps akin to the Catholic social
principle of subsidiarity, insofar as communities with the highest density of interpersonal
relationships are the preferred contexts for the production and exchange of goods and social
services. Such an embedding of one type of social body in another reflects the sort of trans-
organic inter-mediation discussed in the last chapter. Milbank further uses the phrases “complex
space” and “gothic space” to describe an ideal social environment in which “multiple
associations cease to ‘mediate’ between part and whole, but become themselves a new sort of
30
Milbank, “Paul against Biopolitics,” 159; Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 233.
31
He does not formally define “free association” beyond the description and examples given, but links it to
German social historian Otto von Gierke’s concept of Gemeinschaft or “community.” John Milbank, “On Complex
Space,” in Word Made Strange, 276-78.
32
Milbank, “Real Third Way,” 33.
39
context, a never ‘completed’ and complexly ramifying ‘network’, involving ‘confused’,
overlapping jurisdictions, which disperses and dissolves political sovereignty.”33 Free
associations, then, involve a closeness of interpersonal relation yet never the type of community
that refuses to exchange with outsiders.
The “socialism” that Milbank advocates is rooted in this sort of association, and must be
clearly distinguished from the movements and political entities that primarily use this label in
contemporary times, and which frequently propose heavy state involvement in economic and
social life. He traces his own concept to 19th century Christian socialism, particularly that
associated with the English thinker John Ruskin, who found much of his inspiration in the older
guild economies as does Milbank. Milbank argues that a Christian socialism is able to organize
itself around a substantive concept of the good, unlike most “socialisms” that are concerned
solely with material well-being. He argues that without a religious basis, “most socialisms … are
at bottom liberalisms, because they give ontological status only to freedom and happiness—not
to teleological human flourishing.”34 Socialism for Milbank is thus not so much “left” on the
contemporary Anglo-American political spectrum as off this spectrum altogether, insofar as it is
entirely opposed to the liberalism whose highest aim is the satisfaction of material wants,
whether this be through the free market (the modern right) or state supervision (the modern left).
In his more recent writings, Milbank has particularly rooted his social project in the concept
of a “civil economy,” which he borrows from the tradition of Italian economic thought of the
same name, closely associated with the Neapolitan School and its leading thinker, Antonio
Genovesi (1713-1769). As two of its most prominent contemporary exponents put it, “the central
idea in civil economy … is that it sees human sociability and reciprocity as core elements of
33
Milbank, “On Complex Space,” in Word Made Strange, 276.
34
Milbank, “Real Third Way,” 40. Emphasis in original.
40
normal economic life,” and that it “shows us that principles other than profit and instrumental
exchange can find a place within the economic activity itself.”35 It thus potentially facilitates the
embedding of the economy in civil society that Milbank advocates. Its chief practical outworking
is that local businesses and small-to-medium enterprises rooted in local communities take
precedence over larger corporations. Rather than the Smithian tradition’s notion that the market’s
“invisible hand” works through primarily self-interested behaviour to benefit the common good,
Milbank affirms the civil economy tradition’s view that the market can work toward the common
good only within the life of a truly civil social order, in which virtues are cultivated and personal
relationships formed in the midst of public life.36
The contemporary political current with which Milbank has closely identified himself is the
movement in British politics known as “Blue Labour,” a stream within the Labour Party
developed especially by social thinker Maurice Glasman. It echoes Milbank’s concerns that both
state and market must be curtailed and embedded in local communities—neighbourhoods,
professions, etc.—united by common values and notions of virtue, and criticizes the effect of
neoliberalism in sundering the bonds of these communities in favour of the abstractions of global
capital and the bureaucratic state. Milbank commends Blue Labour for its goal of combining
“greater economic justice with a new role for individual virtue and public honour,” such that it
symbolizes “a new combination of economic egalitarianism with (an updated) social
conservatism.”37
35
Lugino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy: Efficiency, Equity, Public Happiness, Frontiers of
Business Ethics 2 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 17. Emphasis in original.
36
See ibid., 84-86.
37
John Milbank, “Blue Labour, One-Nation Labour and Postliberalism: A Christian Socialist Reading”
(unpublished paper, Nov. 9, 2012), accessed Jul. 1, 2014,
http://theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers/Milbank_BlueLabourOneNationLabourAndPostliberalism.pdf, 1.
41
Milbank sets out his basic program in a list of seven “elements of Catholic social teaching”
that, if implemented, would represent an advance for his associationist model.38 First, he
advocates for anti-usury legislation, as usury represents the zenith of the abstraction of financial
signs from “real investment” in material reality.39 Second, just prices and just wages must be set
not according to market equilibrium but by (a) firms pursuing a public social purpose beyond
profit, (b) courts of law to ensure public welfare, and (c) free guilds, which are the third element.
Such guilds or “professional associations” in particular industries can instill an “inter-firm ethos”
and a renewed “professionalization” based on the inherent value and social purpose of the
particular work rather than merely the profits, and set industry standards establishing guaranteed
quality and ethical concern among firms and with customers.40 Fourth, responsibility for the
organization of welfare needs to belong to state-aided voluntary bodies rather than the state
itself, allowing a more visible and participatory sort of distribution that renders people more than
passive recipients. Fifth, there must be a wider distribution of assets such that with government’s
encouragement “everything possible should be done through local banks, credit unions, mutual
manufacturing investment funds, co-operative housing associations, worker share-ownership,”
and so forth.41 Sixth, a new political “corporatism” should allow businesses and other corporate
38
Milbank, “Real Third Way,” 65-69.
39
Milbank classifies as usury not the medieval concept of damnum emergens—compensation if a loan is not
paid in time—but lucrum cessans, in which the lender is compensated for a possible profit through investment he or
she might have made out of the money lent. Milbank criticizes the latter for its treatment of money “not as a medium
of exchange, but as a kind of pseudo-thing that has ‘fertility’ in its own right,” and its related assumption that profit-
making “is a valid activity outside the context of entering into a commercial association for the attainment of some
specific economic and social good that in the end serves the common good.” Ibid., 43, 45.
40
Milbank is keen to stress, however, that unlike much past guild-operation, these guilds must indeed be free,
with no legally protected sole right to trade, in order to prevent monopolies. Their function would seem to establish
a level of guaranteed reliability and pride that both fellow industry players and customers would freely want to
honour. Ibid., 66-67.
41
Ibid.,, 67.
42
bodies a share in political governance.42 Finally, a certain primacy of land—that is, the
countryside, and nature in general—over the urban must be re-established. This will allow the re-
emergence of a good “natural and social ecology,” based on small-scale farming and other
practices that allow human beings to interact more directly with both nature and each other.43
It is important to note an initial parallel between Milbank’s social vision and his integrated
view of the nature-grace relationship that informs his ontology of gift. He insists that the reforms
he proposes are “actually in line with the logic of a free market,” and that “the market economy
requires some re-embedding [in civil society] for purely market economic reasons, even though
this re-embedding will paradoxically tend to remove the very idea of such ‘purely economic’
reasons.”44 This corresponds to his understanding of nature as trans-organic, such that the only
“pure nature” is one that is not only natural, but already actively receiving itself from without as
a gift. He states further that “the point is not to modify an inherently immoral or amoral market
through welfare measures, but rather to produce not merely a just but also a charitable market in
the first place.”45 The state only needs to redistribute wealth when economic practices have
failed to result in just outcomes to begin with, but an economy that pre-distributes achieves a just
result without the need for later intervention.46 Apart from this embeddedness in what transcends
42
Milbank warns against corporatism’s perversion into totalitarianism as has occurred in past models, which he
attributes to illegitimate centralization, compulsory nature and (disguised) use by capitalists simply to exploit
workers further. It is worth noting that while in the mid-1990s Milbank held that the tendencies of papal social
teaching still tended toward just such a totalitarianism (Milbank, “On Complex Space,” in Word Made Strange, 283-
85), more recently he writes that “the current Pope [Benedict]’s support for stake-holding and share-distribution
seems to indicate a break” with this legacy. Milbank, “Real Third Way,” 67.
43
Not that Milbank is against cities; he holds that this idea will also allow them to reclaim their own integrity
as places of meeting, trade, and so on, “rather than as sites for debased modes of mass manufacture and
monopolistic and self-serving financial institutions.” Milbank, “Real Third Way,” 68.
44
45
Ibid., 41. Emphasis s in original.
46
Milbank, “Blue Labour,” 7.
43
it, human economic life because voluntarist and nominalist is reduced to a flattened zone of
competing wills seeking only power.
Democracy and Hierarchy: The One, the Few, and the Many
I suggest that the connection between Milbank’s ontology of gift and his political-economic
framework can be most clearly seen in light of two principles that run through the latter and
recall some of what was discussed in the last chapter. These are, first, his integration of
democracy and hierarchy and, second, the sacramentality of economic activity in both production
and exchange. In what follows I will explore how they shape his political-economic paradigm as
a whole and how they are rooted in his concept of gift.
Milbank stresses that a political-economic order and its components are democratic only
insofar as they are also hierarchical and vice versa. He argues that any social body, whether the
state, a business firm, or an association of civil society, has a “mixed” constitution involving
both hierarchical and democratic components. The democratic rule of the “Many” is always
fused with hierarchical rule that is itself made up of both the aristocratic rule of the “Few”—
consisting of both persons and mediating institutions—and, above it, the monarchic justice of the
“One.” This order exemplifies democracy because the membership as a whole must continually
give and renew their consent for the social order to continue.47 It is aristocratic insofar as one
person or a small group establishes the body and instills in it a certain logic, which is then passed
on through the teaching of a small class known for its virtue and wisdom, exemplifying what
Milbank calls “the hierarchy of educative guidance by virtue.”48 It is monarchic because the
isolation of a single leader or ruler above all others allows an identification with the cosmic and
47
Milbank, “Real Third Way,” 29; Milbank, “Liberality,” in Future of Love, 245.
48
44
universal, in terms of which the very existence of the body must be justified.49 Even where these
terms are not used, any functioning body will have a president, CEO, chair, director, principal, or
other in a monarchic role, and some sort of governing, assisting, teaching, or managing group in
a kind of aristocratic position. Both elements of hierarchy bring the democratic aspect into
contact with the genuinely good so that it is not bound solely to mass opinion or the sheerly
utilitarian. Though contemporary Western social life usually favours democracy instead of
hierarchy (at least in theory), Milbank believes the latter is partially reflected in examples such as
the rightful outlawing of capital punishment, even though in many jurisdictions it is supported by
a significant majority of the population, and efforts by unelected members of the European
Commission to protect minority fishing interests.50
Milbank’s form of socialism aims not to prioritize the One, Few, or Many above the others,
but seeks a constitution mixed between them, leaning to one or the other depending on pragmatic
considerations and the dispersal of virtue in a particular society.51 There can be such a balance
because of his notion of humans as trans-organic beings who participate horizontally in one
another, such that where any one of the three exercises its true role it also includes the others. He
sees premodern ideas and practices of political representation as reflecting this framework. Such
contexts supported a robust sense of collective embodiment, in which the whole of a human
corporation organically exceeded the sum of its parts, and was “represented” by a ruling
personage who was in some sense identical with it.52 It could be said that the king was the
people, that his “mystical body” was identical with the realm at large.53 This was indeed a sort of
49
50
Milbank, “Liberality,” in Future of Love, 245.
51
Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 9, 133, 261.
52
Ibid., 138, 214.
53
Ibid., 147, 214.
45
fiction, by definition “artificial” rather than natural insofar as it concerned the social artifice. But
since Milbank argues that the artificial can be paradoxically what is most natural to an entity
because of his theory of necessary original supplementation, he does not see this artificiality in
any way betraying some prior truth.54 He argues that his notion of hierarchical rule, far from
encouraging the exercise of totalitarian or domineering power, exemplifies the logic of gift
exchange in which ruler and ruled actively participate. The sovereign power “gives” good
governance and order to citizens, which are precisely what allow them to exercise their active
subjectivity by sharing in ruling.55 The shape of this representation is Christological, not in the
sense of mere substitution—Milbank is quite polemical against primarily forensic accounts of the
atonement—but in the incarnate Word’s intrinsic identification with all of human life, and in the
kenotic shape of his rule as service rather than dominance.56 Further, it is the Few who mediate
the exchange of this gift of rule in both directions. Whether the Few of aristocratic, virtuous
individuals or the “extended Few” of those free associations that inculcate this virtue into the
Many, it is this realm of mediation that facilitates the integration between the cosmic and
universal and the unique and particular.
Milbank believes modern representation, in contrast to the premodern, operates more by
substitution than by mystical identity. Without an ontology that allows the latter, the ruling class
can only stand over against the people as “other,” and its identity is therefore bound up in
administrative machinery.57 Milbank roots this change in the combined legacy of Scotist
univocalism and Ockhamist nominalism, both of which refuse a participatory framework in

54
Ibid., 183, 209.
55
Milbank, “Liberality,” in Future of Love, 245-46; Milbank, “Gift of Ruling,” 224.
56
Milbank, “Liberality,” in Future of Love, 253; Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 214. Further, given that the
medieval king was only anointed by God to the extent that he properly represented and cared for his subjects, there
was an intrinsic anti-tyrannical mechanism. Aquinas, for instance, supported the rights of the populace to revolt
against an unjust king.
57
46
favour of isolating individual interests, and thus vacillate between authoritarianism and anarchy,
unable to articulate a sense of the common good.58 Despite its secular pretensions, modern
liberalism employs a version of the originally theological thesis of “pure nature” to present itself
as not requiring any cosmic justifications. It is “biopolitical,” in the terminology of Benjamin and
Foucault, insofar as it sees the civil, economic and political aspects of human life as non-
originally supplementary to human nature in its animality. Both the contemporary Anglo-
American right and left thus agree that human nature precedes sociality.59 For the right’s
Smithian (mis)reading of the Augustinian legacy, the “pure nature” of individuals is a kind of
total depravity, self-seeking and involved in conflict with each other. The hidden hand of divine
providence covertly produces a kind of economic and political harmony through self-seeking
natural activity. By contrast, the left’s Rousseauian, Romantic form of liberalism sees individuals
as basically good until corrupted by social rivalries; most sorts of human associations will
exacerbate these conflicts, and the central state alone can lead people to sacrifice them in favour
of a common purpose. Whereas the right is commonly thought to favour the individual and the
left society, in reality it is reversed: the right takes a gloomy view of the individual and the left a
gloomy view of society.60 In both cases, though, there is little room for the sphere of the free
association: it is unnecessary for the right, for which the “natural” workings of the market bring
about harmony, and furthers human conflict according to the left. Both also assume that
utilitarian self-interest is the primary human motivation, reflecting the Scotist primacy of the
individual will.
58
Ibid., 161-62.
59
Ibid., 180.
60
Milbank, “Blue Labour,” 2-3.
47
But Milbank does not primarily see the liberalisms of right and left as two opposing paths;
rather, the two tendencies actually work in tandem, insofar as both follow from the same Scotist,
voluntarist ontology. There is, he says, a “hidden mutual complicity and reinforcement between
the voluntarism of the absolute state and the voluntarism of the self-governing, negatively
choosing individual” that governs modern economic life.61 This tends to mean that the logic of
both state and market depend on impersonal, formalistic power.62 Characteristically, this
involves a large centralized bureaucracy for the former and a realm of purely self-interested
contract on the other. Yet Milbank cites Polanyi’s insights that capitalism also requires a large
state bureaucracy to sustain it and to save it from destroying itself. This most notably happened
in the 1930s through the creation of anti-monopoly legislation, regulations concerning unions,
and so on.63 Milbank argues that without a common moral horizon that grows out of civil society
and allows for mutual trust, a large state apparatus becomes necessary to police and regulate
industry affairs. Conversely, he reasons, “the more that contracts between people are based on
trust, the more they are relatively informal, and the more that they embody a kind of gift-
exchange, then the less you need the intervention of state control.”64 In turn, if the centralized
state is to sustain its role, it must exclusively promote the impersonality of contractual exchange,
rather than the more personal associations that might capture popular loyalty away from the
state. In a real sense big government and big business go together and one can only be made
smaller and more efficient if the same is done with the other.
61
62
“The right holds that the remedy for warped relationships is the hidden hand of the marketplace; the left the
manifest hand of the state. But in either case ‘society’ is bypassed and human beings are mediated indirectly, by a
third pole standing over against them.” Milbank, “Blue Labour,” 4.
63
Milbank, “Real Third Way,” 36-37.
64
48
Milbank believes his integration of democracy and hierarchy entails a “politics of time”
enacted through the liturgical poesis of non-identical repetition, over against modernity’s
“politics of space” whose repetition is limited to the identical. As the dimension of education
over time, hierarchy allows for the learning of the genuinely new—and thus for an excess or a
surplus of creativity—and thereby non-identical repetition characteristic of gift, always
irreducible to the formalities of what has preceded it yet also always appropriate for its recipient.
Modern repetition, however, is only ever “identical” insofar as it is confined to the formality and
proceduralism of contract and bureaucracy. Since nothing new ever intervenes from a
transcendent other, Milbank labels this exchange a “demonic ritual” that “demands a ceaseless
and unremitting sacrifice of the past and present to the future.”65 Because it recognizes a
transcendence beyond death, a politics of time is comfortable with finitude and the passing of
time, and will take on a “festive” mode of communally ritualizing this passage. But lacking this
hope, a politics of space sees death as an enemy to be eluded by the creation of a “secure spatial
edifice” built by endless economic growth and enlargement of the nation-state that will
supposedly result—eventually—in a death-defying absolute future. This explains the prominence
of law and contract in the latter sort of politics; while they are approved by mutual consent, they
are “self-protective and self-augmenting devices” that are “essentially reactions in the face of the
overwhelming fact of death” that “seek for a futile while to economize death or delay its
arrival.”66 These strategies often result in a frequent oscillation between centrally planned
economies and those with virtually no market regulations. Milbank sees a paradoxical
65
Milbank, “Politics,” in Being Reconciled, 170-71. “Opposed to spatialization stands an appeal to
transcendence. The latter alone can mythically and rationally sustain the ‘universal gift’ … 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.” Ibid., 171.
66
49
combination of humanism and nihilism here: an overvaluation of the merely temporal, yet also a
hypostasization of this nullity. “By contrast,” he argues, “only the orientation to transcendence,
to the eternal, interprets the intrinsic nothingness of things in time as their existing by
participation, as their subsisting always and primordially as gifts which declare to us ever-
renewed and freely granted human possibilities.”67 The non-identical repetition of gift undercuts
the planned-unplanned oscillation in favour of a polity centred on what is creatively and
liturgically appropriate in particular social circumstances, always revisable as these
circumstances change through time.68 Such judgments can only be made in the context of the
association in which there is a real mutual identification, rather than by the central state whose
representation is a form of alienation.
Milbank rejects the liberal notion of foundational human rights in favour of what he sees as
a premodern idea of justice as “right order” in which rights as well as duties are distributed
according to one’s place in the social organism. He judges that modern individual rights, which
he links to the nominalist tradition, are actually what most threaten the individual in her
particularity. Insofar as she is seen as abstractable from her social insertion she is ontologically
isolated and thus substitutable and inessential to the constitution of the social aggregate, on
exactly the same footing as every other individual with abstract rights. This sort of individual
sovereignty is thus threatened by the arbitrary will of the state whose own sovereignty is founded
on precisely the same nominalist basis. As Milbank puts it, “because supposed ‘human rights’
are ultimately grounded in self-possession, all specific human rights can finally be suspended in
67
68
Milbank, “Paul against Biopolitics,” 137. Such a politics seeks “to ritualize life as passage, in order to
capture in the lineaments of passage certain traces of the eternal.” Milbank, “Politics,” 180. Much of Milbank’s
argument here depends on the liturgical theory of Catherine Pickstock, his fellow Radical Orthodoxy collaborator.
50
the name of ‘right as such.’”69 Thus, the individual can only be honoured and respected within
the context of a social body more along the lines of premodern representation, in which
relationships between individuals are held to have an intrinsic, rather than merely formalistic
basis.
Milbank’s seven principles listed above suggest democracy in his insistence that all persons
must be capable of participation in political and economic life. Land and capital must be
distributed as widely as possible, and there must be no significant capitalist/proletariat
bifurcation. Yet his stress on hierarchy is present in the necessity of these structured associations,
accountable to society at large and pursuing substantive notions of the good. Through them, all
people are enabled to make individual and communal judgments in which “in every economic
exchange of labor or commodity there is always a negotiation of ethical value at issue.”70 Thus,
akin to Aquinas, “market value” is “moral value,” and the “just price” relates to the contribution
to human flourishing, not market equilibrium.71 Indeed, Milbank insists that hierarchy is the only
path to the achievement of human equality. “One can lay it down as an axiom,” he says, “that
only where there is a tacit consensus as to virtue and goal, upheld and promoted by an educated
elite, is there any ground for a relatively equal distribution of material and cultural goods,” since
it is this consensus that will judge what these “goods” are in the first place.72 This consensus
involves not utilitarian calculation but the theological virtue of charity, conceived not primarily
as involving disinterested, one-way gifts to others in a lesser state, but as the virtue that enables
69
John Milbank, “Against Human Rights: Liberty in the Western Tradition,” Oxford Journal of Law and
Religion 1 (2012): 232.
70
71
72
51
all meaningful human exchange.73 Indeed, charity, or love, is virtually synonymous with gift in
Milbank’s conception, as the meaning of both centres on exchange.74
Milbank believes that hierarchy is not only necessary but inevitable and that the purpose of
free associations is to ensure a hierarchy of the good that will result in an ultimate equality,
rather than a hierarchy of mere self-interest than will benefit only those with power. As he
argues,
Only where there is an agreed hierarchy of values, sustained by the constantly self-
cancelling hierarchy of education, can there actually be an equal sharing of what is agreed to
be valuable. Without such an agreement, sustained through the operation of professional
guilds and associations as well as cooperative credit unions and banks, there can only be
market mediation of an anarchy of desires—of course ensuring the triumph of a hierarchy of
sheer power and the secret commanding of people’s desires by manipulation.75
This sort of bad hierarchy is demonstrated in the way a liberal capitalist framework supposedly
exalts individual freedom. For Milbank this is only freedom of a formal sort that is another form
of slavery, namely to capital, technology, and marginal utility. As he puts it, “the absolute real
degree of control over workers exerted by capital and its subordination of them to the status of
mere instruments of production, or else to that of consumers able to realize the profit-value of
commodities, means that they can indeed be properly described as ‘wage slaves.’”76 There is a
need, then, to limit a false sort of freedom in order to allow a true freedom. Governments should
restrict the free flow of capital in order to allow for a civic order in which workers, businesses,
73
Milbank opposes what he calls the “bureaucratisation of love” in which charity has become merely
something to be “administered” to bio-political beings by an extrinsic authority. If there is no symbolic participation
of natural in supernatural, the latter can arise only by an extrinsic imposition of ecclesiastical order as “other” (for
Catholic traditions) or from the Bible as the supernatural “other” (as is common within Protestantism). Charity thus
becomes “one-way,” something for rather than with others. Milbank, “Liberality,” in Future of Love, 258.
74
Love is “virtue transvalued as the grateful receiving of a gift, from an unknown transcendent source, and
then the social passing on and reciprocal receiving back of this gift.” Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 236.
75
Milbank, “Liberality,” 259. “In the absence of any sense of hierarchy as initiating into truth, and so as self-
cancelling, one gets all the more rigid and spatialized hierarchies in which those who lead do so by chance, by
opportunism, by possession of capital, by ability to seduce and, most often, by sheer force of acceptable stupidity
and mediocrity.” Milbank, “Politics,” in Being Reconciled, 183.
76
52
and communities can regulate economic activity, whether through co-operatives or labour
syndicates as the nature of the industry dictates. And here again Milbank has recourse to his
notion of gift. He states that “economic value should only be ethical value, while inversely
ethical value should be seen as emerging from the supply and demand of intrinsic gifts.”77
Likewise, “the point for socialism,” he writes, “is not (at least primarily) to ‘limit’ the market,
but rather to reconstrue exchange according to the protocols of a universal gift-exchange” such
that “in every negotiated transaction, something other than profit and loss must be at issue”;
namely, “justice, a truly shared benefit and a bonding as well as a division of exchange.”78 The
gift exchange facilitated through the sphere of association, far from extrinsic to the “free” pursuit
of economic goals, is the precondition for genuine economic and political freedom from the start.
Sacramental Economics
Milbank also argues for a political-economic order that acknowledges the sacramentality of
economic production and exchange, and in this connection criticizes an illegitimate “abstraction”
from materiality and concrete relationships.79 Several of his basic political-economic principles
reflect this concern, such as his advocacy of the widespread distribution of real property, starting
with land.80 He also favours “local production of locally suitable things linked to local skills,”
with import and export of goods only where absolutely necessary, and in those cases by fair
trade.81 While he is emphatic that no community should, contrary to fact, attempt to isolate itself,
77
78
79
Milbank does note that abstraction per se is not wrong. His notion of representation by participatory identity
involves an “abstraction” of form that nonetheless maintains continuity with the represented thing; abstraction and
imitation here go together, as when the Few are symbolically necessary to the very constitution of the people as a
people. It is abstraction by substitution and alienation that he opposes. See Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 143.
80
81
Ibid., 251. “Things like the economy of fair-trade food-items may not sound dramatic or decisive and indeed
they remain pathetically marginal and often compromised, but nevertheless the extension of such gift-exchange bit-
53
and can thus be taken as amenable to some aspects of globalization, he clearly assigns a priority
to the local and the concrete, as well as the need to care first for the natural and cultural
environment with which one has been gifted.
Milbank’s general criticism of capitalism is that it “makes the prime purpose of society as a
whole, and also of individuals in particular, to be one of accumulation of abstract wealth, or of
power-to-do-things in general, and rigorously subordinates any desire to do anything concrete in
particular, including the formation of social relationships.”82 He particularly sees the removal of
restrictions of the movements of international finance, beginning in the 1980s, as facilitating this
rule of abstraction and aiming to replace the concrete relationships in which gifts are inseparable
from persons. This ideology, however, is rooted in the foundations of neoclassical economics,
whose model of homo economicus tends only to consider economic agents as exercising
“rational choice” in terms of the calculation of marginal utility, and in regard to goods
consumable by the solitary individual. Usually ignored are relational goods—family, friends and
community, and goods that can only be enjoyed in these contexts, not amenable to simple
rational calculation.83 Such abstraction also involves the sundering of inherent significance from
material things as signifiers, allowing them to become mere objects, or commodities.84 This too
by-bit is the sure way forward rather than revolution, government action alone, or else capitalistic solutions.” Ibid.,
252.
82
83
Milbank, “Blue Labour,” 8. This notion of rational choice also leads one to see why statism and free market
ideology share a common presupposition: Milbank writes that “the central theory of neoclassicism is that when the
individual calculators of utility are acting rationally, then markets will achieve perfect equilibrium … To the degree
that they fail to act rationally, then the state can make adjustments. This much is common to marginalists of both the
right and the left—the difference arises in terms of how far it is supposed that the conditions for perfect market
operation arise automatically through market processes themselves and how far they have to be engineered by the
state. Thus both the invisible hand of ‘providence’ and the visible hand of the state is deemed by this outlook to be
seeking the same goal of perfect rational equilibrium that coordinates egoistic wishes, without any mutual agreement
as to the common good.” Ibid., 8-9.
84
“The dominance of abstraction is rooted in tearing material things apart into a sign-aspect on the one hand
and an object-aspect on the other”; this allows material things to be treated simply as objects to be manipulated
54
is only really applicable for certain kinds of goods; it does not work for those like artistic works
and performances whose value cannot be measured in abstract categories. Even money itself,
though its nature clearly involves necessary abstraction, need not be seen “as something one
should try to accumulate in its own right”; it can instead be regarded “as an instrument of
exchange that measures economic comparative value in accord with moral value.”85 This is
because in Milbank’s framework the desire for social recognition, not material wealth, is
anthropologically basic, and money is merely a medium of such sociality. “Producers of well-
designed things do not just contract with consumers,” for “the latter give them effectively
counter-gifts of sustenance in return for the gifts of intrinsically good things, even though this is
mediated by money.”86 He connects his advocacy of professional associations both with the gift
and with his rejection of the rule of abstraction. Someone who self-consciously identifies with an
honourable profession is much less likely to be concerned primarily with wealth or social
prestige in abstract terms. Such a person in a way becomes the very gifts she bestows in the
performing of her work, such that her very identity becomes bound up with this generosity.
Society as a whole will then treat her not as a mere means whereby it can receive a certain
product or service, but as one who gives in the mode of her profession, and in exchange it will
give her what she needs “in terms of instruments, prestige, material well-being and leisure in
order to be a giver in this specific mode.”87
without consideration of their significance. It allows humans to be bodies without souls, simply sources of labour
supply.” Milbank, “Real Third Way,” 59.
85
Ibid.
86
87
Milbank, “Politics,” in Being Reconciled, 184. Emphasis added. He argues further that what is needed is
“some sense that that which is produced is primarily a gift to the community which will relate to community values
in crucially important ways. Thus every member of a group of producers or retailers or traders should first be
initiated into a certain mystique of his calling—a certain professional pride in a mode of operation and an upshot
which harmonizes with the semi-ineffable meaning of his whole society. Here once again, the dimension of time
would be restored, since every initiate would cease to value (in herself and others) the mere amassing of abstract
55
Milbank argues for the necessity of an economy that allows for “an exchange of gifts in the
sense of both talents and valued objects that blend material benefit with sacramental
significance.”88 The sacramentality of objects protects them from commodification, from
becoming mere “things” abstracted from the concreteness of the persons who create and
exchange them as gifts. He writes that
If all objects are sacred then, as for primitives, they possess a kind of animated force. …
Objects of their equivalents must return to their first owners or primal origins because they
have in some sense personality. … Humans identify themselves through the production and
exchange of things … So inversely things are imbued with the story of human comings and
goings. Objects naturally carry memories and share stories; only commodified ones do not
… Every thing is sacramental; everything tells of the glory of Christ.89
This requires “a re-subordination of money transaction to a new mode of universal gift-
exchange,”90 akin to pre-modern societies in which “the economic was planted upwards in the
heavenly soil of social gift-exchange, itself rooted in celestial sanctions of cosmic reciprocity and
divine grace.”91 For Milbank, the abstract and impersonal, characteristic of the joint capitalist-
statist regime, need to be embedded in the concrete and social. And it is Christianity that “poses
a counter-universal to the universality of the abstract”92 through the Eucharistic gift exchange
that is universal precisely in its concreteness.
It is important to note that despite stressing the significance of gift for political-economic
life to such an extent, Milbank does not simply oppose gift to contract, or say that the former
should replace the latter. Indeed, he is just as opposed to the notion of the “pure,” unilateral gift
as he is to “pure” contract without gift, and instead of either he urges a relative integration of the
wealth, and instead would conceive of herself as inheriting, developing and passing on a particular strange skill
requiring certain ‘gifts’ for its best exercise.” Ibid., 185-86.
88
89
Ibid., 258.
90
Ibid., 253.
91
92
Milbank, “Transcendality,” in Future of Love, 361.
56
two. “Giving is … only really free and liberal where it respects and helps further to create
reciprocal norms,” while “contract is only really fair where there is a judged equivalence of
objects and also a free mutual promotion by donation of the welfare of the exchanging parties.”93
Despite favouring guilds and other elements that have something in common with medieval
feudalism, Milbank critiques it for actually falling short of certain elements of Aristotelian
distributive justice, namely “in equity, in principles of just distribution, and in ability to meet
contingent, individual needs.”94 A money-based economy can potentially remedy some of these
flaws, and he holds that the Christian project searches for a “middle” that incorporates gift
exchange with a market based on these principles of distributive justice, by which we judge the
appropriateness and value of potential gifts, according to the recipient in his or her specificity.95
Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that the social implications of Milbank’s exchange-based
theology of gift begin in the life of the Church as a paradigmatically perfect gift-exchanging
community centred in the Eucharist. This pattern of gift exchange can spread into the wider
society through a socialism rooted in civil society associations in which concrete relationships
are central. The political-economic meaning of gift cannot then be manifested either in capitalist
modes of exchange or in state-provided welfare that is given in only one direction.
93
Milbank, “Liberality,” in ibid., 258.
94
Milbank, “Transcendality,” in ibid., 360.
95
Ibid.
CHAPTER 3
THE ONTOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF GIFT AS EXCHANGE
We have seen that the distinguishing feature of Milbank’s theology of gift is its being bound
up in exchange, and thus its refusal to be a merely one-way gift without return. In this chapter I
bring Milbank’s framework into conversation with alternative perspectives in order to explore
the function of exchange and the return gift within it. First, I explore the argument that his
concept of ontological participation as methexis is incompatible with the inherent goodness of
creation. I argue that it is precisely the centrality of gift exchange in his notion of participation
that frees the latter from this difficulty and grounds an affirmation of created goodness as
“excess.” Second, I introduce an alternative theology of gift articulated by theologian Kathryn
Tanner, for whom a human return gift to God is desirable but not necessary. I highlight the lack
of a necessary return in her paradigm in order to elucidate its positive function in Milbank’s
understanding, and to argue that her focus on the “penultimate” human situation helps balance
Milbank’s focus on our “ultimate” ontological state.
Good without (Being) God?
Is an ontology of participation in the sense of methexis, which has such strong roots in the
Platonic tradition, compatible with Judeo-Christian affirmations of the goodness of material
creation? This question has been asked by numerous theologians, especially those within the
Reformed tradition, which has often advocated a more biblically-based, less metaphysically
speculative theology. In what follows I explore two such critiques. While their concern may
initially seem to have little to do with Milbank’s understanding of gift and his argument for a
58
necessary return, I contend that the “gift” character of his ontology is precisely what allows it to
integrate an affirmation of creation’s intrinsic goodness into its participatory framework.
Theologian Michael Horton, adapting a typology used by Paul Tillich, differentiates
ontologies of “overcoming estrangement” from those of “meeting a stranger.”1 He places
Milbank’s ontology into the former category, which he also labels “hyperimmanence,” along
with methexis as understood in the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions as a whole. For this sort
of ontology, Horton argues, “we come to ourselves when we come to God,” since the source of
human alienation from God is our own inability to see what is always-already the case.2 The
notion of God as “supreme being,” he writes, implies a scale-of-being ontology according to
which “everything else is a corrupt or illusory emanation from the ‘one which is.’”3 He regards
this model, even when incorporated into explicitly Christian theologies that affirm the God of
revelation, as undermining both the Creator-creature distinction and the inherent goodness of
creation. In a sense it understands creation as too close to God, since it does not seem to
postulate an absolute ontological distinction between God and creation, but one more of degree
or quantity. On the other hand, it “simultaneously downgrades creation as a falling away from
being in its very essence.”4 Although Horton notes Milbank’s insistence that his concept of
creation’s relation to God is analogical, he suggests that his account is “a form of univocity after
1
Michael S. Horton, “Participation and Covenant,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition:
Creation, Covenant and Participation, ed. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2005), 110. He also articulates a third type, which he labels “a stranger we never meet” or
“hypertranscendence,” which is concerned to preserve the alterity of God at all costs, such that God is entirely
beyond being and never becomes “present” to us. He associates this position with Heidegger and even more with
Derrida and Levinas.
2
Ibid., 111.
3
Ibid., 117, here quoting Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 55.
4
59
all,” because of what he perceives as the lack of a firm Creator-creature distinction and a
resulting version of an ontological monism.5
Horton instead favours an ontology of “meeting a stranger,” which he associates with
covenantal rather than ontological union, and with divine descent rather than human ascent.
Biblical faith, Horton argues, spoke of creation ex nihilo instead of emanation, introducing “the
notion of a creation that is neither divine nor demonic but is affirmed in all of its difference,
finitude, and materiality.”6 Creation is thereby good without being God, and indeed good
precisely in all of those aspects that differentiate it from God. Despite this goodness, creation is
also fallen into sin, yet good and evil are here not a matter of ontic structures but of a broken
covenant. In a covenantal model, in contrast to Milbank’s approach, “divine presence and
absence are ethical and relational rather than ontological categories.”7 Reconciliation thus
involves not the ontological ascent of human deification, but the divine descent of the covenant
realized ultimately in the incarnation. The latter is the supreme act of divine accommodation that
preserves the distinction of God and creature (along the lines of the Chalcedon’s confession of
Christ’s two distinct natures) while bringing God and humankind into the covenantal, ethical sort
of union illustrated by the marital imagery prominent throughout Scripture. Horton summarizes
the difference between the two paradigms thus: “The one paradigm promises enlightenment and
an elevation of nature beyond itself; the other promises a rescue extra nos and a liberation of
nature from its bondage to sin and death.”8
5
Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007),
164. “[Radical Orthodoxy] seems to represent a different kind of univocity than nominalism, but a univocity just the
same, since created being participates ontologically in uncreated being as such.” Ibid., 205.
6
Horton, “Participation,” 119.
7
Ibid., 120.
8
Horton, Covenant and Salvation, 155.
60
Another prominent Reformed theologian, James K. A. Smith, articulates a somewhat less
sweeping and more nuanced set of critiques of Milbank’s ontology that nonetheless complements
Horton’s concerns. His first main criticism is that Milbank’s attempt to articulate an ontology
that is (in Milbank’s own words) simultaneously “incarnate” and “Platonic” is in fact impossible,
as the notion of methexis is by definition opposed to the Christian affirmation of created
embodiment. On one hand, he appreciatively notes Milbank’s insistence on the inescapability of
material and linguistic mediation of spiritual realities, in particular his emphasis that human
cognition is discursive, not immediate as much of Plato’s corpus suggests. Yet Smith maintains
that even the theurgic strand of Neoplatonism to which Milbank appeals, while in certain
respects more amenable to Christian thought, understands the goodness of material mediation as
only instrumental and remedial in light of our unfortunately embodied state. That is, “one does
not need a ladder to walk to school, but if one finds oneself in a deep pit, a ladder becomes both
a good and a necessary thing for attaining school attendance.”9 Further, Smith contends that
Milbank undermines material and hermeneutic mediation in his notion of the beatific vision,
which is more “traditionally” Platonic in its apparent insinuation that this vision will be
disembodied and non-discursive.10 Smith argues that a properly Christian ontology regards
materiality as good both at its origin and in perpetuity (including in the eschaton), rather than
merely provisionally.
Smith’s second, related criticism is that Milbank’s ontology is implicitly occasionalist,
thereby undermining both the wisdom of the Creator and the integrity of creation. As Smith puts
his key question, “how can we affirm both the radical dependence of the creation on the Creator
9
James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2004), 201.
10
Ibid., 203, referring to a brief comment in John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, Radical
Orthodoxy (Routledge: London, 2001), 37.
61
and also the goodness of the creation as created?”11 He argues that Milbank’s ontology—and that
of Radical Orthodoxy as a whole—sacrifices the latter to honour the former. It “can slide toward
an occasionalism that requires the incessant activity of the Creator to uphold what would seem to
be a deficient creation—a tendency to emphasize the creature’s participation in the divine to the
extent that it seems the divine does everything.”12 Following Leibniz, Smith argues that
regarding creation as in need of supplementation by God’s direct action at every point does not
honour God, but rather calls God’s wisdom into question for being unable to create a relatively
self-sustaining world. “It is by affirming the integrity of creation as a relatively independent
structure that we do justice to the Creator,” with the confession of creation’s integrity as a kind
of doxology to God.13 While Smith’s notion of such a “relatively independent” structure is
indebted to the Neo-Calvinist tradition of Abraham Kuyper, one can also interpret this particular
critique of Milbank as overlapping with more traditionally Thomistic concerns about the
integrity of “nature” vis-à-vis the supernatural.14
Milbank on the Paradox of Divine “Excess”
It is not difficult to find passages in Milbank’s corpus that seem to confirm these critics’
suspicions that he lacks a sense in which creation is good precisely as created. He often argues
that creation has no goodness or even existence apart from an ultimate identity with God,
seemingly the exact position Horton and Smith critique. When he asserts that “at bottom created
11
Ibid., 204.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., 219. Emphasis added.
14
Such concerns are more often addressed as criticisms of de Lubac’s understanding of the desiderium
naturale, with Milbank’s thesis considered as a further radicalization that lacks even de Lubac’s limited concessions
to the notion of a relatively autonomous nature. For an criticism along these lines, see Reinhard Hütter, “Desiderium
Naturale Visionis Dei—Est autem duplex hominis beatitudo sive felicitas: Some Observations about Lawrence
Feingold’s and John Milbank’s Recent Interventions in the Debate over the Natural Desire to See God,” Nova et
vetera (English edition) 5 (2007): 81-132.
62
things are God in some sense and God is in some sense created,” the Creator-creature distinction
seems to be all but jettisoned.15 His view of all beings as “suspended” from the divine source and
thereby part of the same ontological continuum appears to have a curious relationship with his
stress on the need to incorporate difference peacefully. In one sense, his ontology hereby
integrates even the most radical otherness, since no part of creation exists outside this nexus. Yet
in another sense, it seems to allow for no ultimate otherness at all, since no element of creation is
finally detachable from any other or from God.
I suggest that Milbank’s ontology has the resources to escape this dilemma, however,
because of the way it is rooted in the gift exchange of God’s Triune life. Milbank insists on
upholding what he admits is the paradoxical coincidence of divine simplicity and Trinitarian
relationality. On one hand, God is the perfection of being, lacking nothing that could ever be
added, and therefore unchanging. On the other hand, the relations between the three Persons
consist in a never-ending, reciprocal giving and receiving. This dynamic is an “exchange” in the
fullest sense, since the Persons are subsistent relations whose identities can in no sense be
abstracted from the back-and-forth of mutually bestowed gifts. The paradox is that although God
is the fullness of eternal perfection, a perpetual newness is always being introduced into God’s
life through this Trinitarian exchange, even apart from creation. While God can never lack, there
is always an excessive “more” because the Persons are always giving and receiving themselves
anew. This excess is particularly associated with the Holy Spirit, whom Milbank identifies as the
“second difference,” the first difference being that between Father and Son. While the first
difference articulates the content of God, the second is the interpretation of that articulation, a
15
Milbank, “Sophiology.” 33.
63
response that “is ‘excessive’ in relation to the expression” of the first.16 The divine being is thus
not an undifferentiated, eternally self-identical monad, but a Trinitarian harmony in which
difference, newness and surprise are equally ultimate with sameness and unity. Put otherwise,
God does not “possess” being or any of its attributes apart from ceaselessly giving and receiving
them. Even within God’s eternal being, then, this centrality of gift undercuts Horton’s
association of it with a Plotinian valorization of the self-same “One” that is beyond all
(ex)change.
In itself, this insight does not address the Creator-creature distinction, because the
differences within the Trinity involve the uniquely subsistent relations of the divine Persons, and
the question at hand is whether creation can be affirmed precisely as different from God, as non-
divine. If being were conceived univocally, as Horton thinks Milbank still implicitly does, then
Trinitarian difference would ground neither the integrity of creation’s difference from God nor
creatures’ differences from one another. In a univocal ontology created differences would have
to be either rendered akin to the differences within the Triune Godhead or dismissed as outside
of being altogether. Both solutions would indeed downgrade what is properly creaturely. But
Milbank’s analogy of being allows differences to be themselves conceived differently, that is,
analogically. Just as there are many sorts of differences within creation, even while they all exist
within participatory relations, so—at a much more ultimate level—are Trinitarian and created
differences distinct. We might say that the creaturely analogue to the Trinitarian difference
already true of God is difference from God—or as Milbank puts it, God is “that in himself which
goes outside God.”17 So while in one sense creation is identical with God—insofar as all beings
16
Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism,” in Future of Love, 274. See also Milbank’s essay “The
Second Difference” in Word Made Strange, 171-93.
17
Milbank, “Sophiology,” 62. Emphasis added.
64
only exist by participating in God’s ultimate being—this is paradoxically an identity with the
God who is already difference, indeed already excess. Vis-à-vis the Father and Son, the Spirit is
“the further difference that always escapes,” and it is this “escape” that opens God’s life to
creation.18 And whereas the divine Persons—as eternally co-existent—are the source of this
excess, creation is originally a product of it, and in no way its own source. Unlike the opposition
Horton and Smith draw between the concepts of emanation and creation ex nihilo, Milbank
seems to regard both as alternate ways of expressing creation’s ceaseless dependence on God.
Creation’s continuing ontological dependence on its Creator is of a qualitatively different
intensity than that of, say, a sculpture on its human artist. He thus speaks of creation
“continuously generated ex nihilo in time,”19 existing at every moment only as a gift and never
through its own resources.
Milbank sees creation and materiality not as privations or as the result of a fall from divine
perfection, but as positive and good in their own right, even though what is their “own” is only
such by participation. Just as the otherness and newness in God’s own being connote not lack but
excess, so creation’s otherness from God is the outflowing of this positive excess. Though
creation’s goodness is necessarily rooted in God’s, it also has a sort of distinct existence in
excess of God. This excessive distinctness should be interpreted in light of Milbank’s concept of
poesis. The meaning of human cultural products is largely determined apart from their creators’
intentions, so they exceed the latter and stand in a sense “over against” them. Yet this
phenomenon is not originally human. Its human manifestation is but an analogical representation
of the poetic excess of Word (as utterance) and Spirit (as interpretation) within God’s own being.
So even though creation’s being is continuously dependent on God in a fashion far surpassing
18
19
65
the dependence of human products, it too has a positive function vis-à-vis its Creator. Thus, I
contend that Milbank’s account refutes the notion that all participatory ontologies regard
creatureliness and materiality as intrinsically privatory. His framework provides a clear
differentiation between the positive excess of creation and the privatory nothingness of sin and
evil. Whereas created difference is an excessive, analogical continuation of the peacefulness of
God’s own life, Milbank conceives sin as violent rupture. Horton’s view that Milbank’s position
entails that “we come to ourselves when we come to God” is certainly correct, but rather than
confusing the integrity of the self with that of God (or vice versa), this position simply entails
that the truth and goodness of our own selves are analogically aligned with their transcendental
ground in God. Worshipping and serving God correspond to the fulfillment of the self—a very
Augustinian notion—rather than its alienation. False ways of rooting our self-identity, on the
other hand, have no ontological purchase, which is what grounds their “falsity” to begin with.
Creation’s intrinsic goodness is thus the source of its ability to offer a return gift to God. It is
not redundantly providing God with something God already has. Because it exceeds God and in
a sense stands over against God, it does have something “new” to offer God that God would not
have apart from it. Of course, there is no creation—whether in active or receptive mode—that is
not in some way moved and enveloped by the Word and Spirit, who are the means whereby
creation is incorporated into the Trinitarian gift exchange. But far from implying that creatures
contribute nothing of their own, this entails an ultimate grounding for the excessive quality of
their own offerings. Since God is already excess, their own excess is the sort of “thing” that has a
place in God’s life and thus in being itself. Conversely, the refusal to return the divine gift, to
participate actively in the divine-human and intra-creaturely gift exchange, is contrary to
creation’s very being, and strictly speaking impossible.

66
Further, once the difference of creation from God is affirmed as a positive good, the
differences within creation itself can be affirmed as an aspect of this positive good. Because the
vertical and horizontal aspects of mediation are inseparable—nature intrinsically participates in
both grace and culture, each by means of the other—any creature’s positive difference from God
is mediated by the same creature’s positive difference from other creatures (and vice versa).20
This horizontal positive difference is central to the social meaning Milbank attributes to his
ontology, namely the facilitation of peaceful rather than oppositional relationships between
people in all their mutual particularity. Much more on this will follow in the next chapter.
Kathryn Tanner: Gift without Necessary Return
In order to grasp the role of return and exchange in Milbank’s gift paradigm more
thoroughly, it is helpful to explore an alternative theology and ontology of gift. Contemporary
American theologian Kathryn Tanner has set forth a theology of gift that is similarly rooted in a
Trinitarian and participatory ontology, and which upholds the possibility and desirability of a
human return gift to God. Yet she defines the divine gift in such a way that its very meaning
hinges on its not requiring a return gift, and thus the non-necessity of divine-human exchange.
What follows is an exposition of Tanner’s framework, after which I bring it into conversation
with Milbank’s and argue that their articulations may be more mutually complementary than it
first appears.21
20
The subject of nature’s participation in culture relates to Smith’s critique of Milbank’s insinuation that
materiality and its entailments are only (and regrettably) instrumentally necessary, and will be eliminated in the
beatific vision. The topics of finitude and eschatology will be explored much more in the next chapter. It is worth
noting here simply that whatever the Platonic background of some of the concepts Milbank utilizes, he
unquestionably does not regard embodiment as the result of a fall, but—as already indicated—as part of the positive
excess of creation as a whole.
21
Tanner writes out of the Reformed tradition as do Horton and Smith, but in her case a more Barthian and less
conservative or “confessional” variant of it, and she diverges from it much more frequently.
67
At the heart of Tanner’s systematic theology, is “the sense of God as the giver of all good
gifts, their fount, luminous source, fecund treasury and store house.”22 God’s intention in
creation is to communicate the divine gifts to what is other than God, and since God is the
fullness of being in every respect, these gifts are nothing other than God’s own self in Word and
Spirit. This communication of gifts is thus not primarily the transmission of mere objects from
God to creature, or the gift of created goods, but the union between God and the creature. “Unity
with God,” she writes, “is the means of gift-giving to what is other than God.”23
Tanner articulates two interconnected principles central to her theological framework. The
first is a “non-competitive” relationship between God and creatures, while the second is a
“radical interpretation” of divine transcendence, with the second as the precondition of the first.24
She states that her notion of non-competition, which she believes is likely given clearest
expression in Aquinas, is akin to Rahner’s thesis that genuine creaturely reality and radical
dependence on God “vary in direct and not in inverse proportion.”25 God is the giver of all that
the creature is, even at its most active, enabling a relationship between “total giver” and “total
gift” that allows no place for competition. Like Milbank, then, her broadly Thomistic ontology
leads her to a notion of active reception. As she puts it, “the creature’s receiving from God does
not then require its passivity in the world: God’s activity as the giver of ourselves need not come
at the expense of our activity,” since “the creature receives from God its very activity as a
good.”26 This is possible because God and creatures are on different levels of being and different
planes of causality. This is precisely the meaning of God’s transcendence: “God is not a kind of
22
Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress
Press, 2001), 1.
23
Ibid., 9.
24
Ibid., 2.
25
Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. W. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1979), 79, quoted in
ibid., 3.
26
Ibid., 4.
68
thing among other kinds of things.”27 She extracts from this a non-sacrificial view of giving: God
does not lose, alienate or sacrifice any “part” of the divine self in giving outside this self, just as
the sun “remains resplendent however much it illuminates others.”28 Neither does the creature
sacrifice itself in serving God or other creatures, since no aspect of its being is its “own” apart
from God. As she puts it, “We are our own and have for our own only as what we are and have
remain God’s own.”29
According to Tanner, God is always giving gifts to us at every moment, but their proper
reception is not inevitable, unlike in God’s Triune life of subsistent relations in which gift
and reception necessarily coincide. The simple fact that the human is not God implies a
certain externality in the God-human relationship, which means that divine gifts can be
blocked by human sin—even in the supremely personal relationship God had with Israel as
covenant partner in the Old Testament.30 In the incarnation, however, the Person of Christ is
the divine image, and so can never lose it. Because Jesus’ human nature only has its
existence through its unity with the hypostasis of the Word, his humanity is brought into the
same intimate relations with Father and Spirit as the second person of the Trinity.31 In turn,
“what the humanity of Christ has is transferred to us … in virtue of our shared humanity,”
such that “the Word has become in a sense proper to us.”32 And the very humanity of
Christ’s that we share is that which is entirely shaped and permeated by the Spirit, so that
“we can have the Spirit that forms Christ’s humanity according to the divine image as our
27
Ibid.
28
Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 27.
29
Ibid., 81.
30
Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 46.
31
Ibid., 47.
32
Tanner, Christ the Key, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 36, 74.
69
own too, with the same sort of consequences.”33 Though God’s self-gift of grace does
intrinsically transform us, all its manifestations as created gifts are entirely animated by the
Spirit, so that we never come to “possess” such gifts as an inherent part of ourselves. The
power by which we do good works always remains God’s power.34
One of the most significant and creative aspects of Tanner’s theology is her sharp rejection
of an Aristotelian notion of human “nature” whose proper finality can be attained by its own
resources.35 Articulating sentiments not unlike those of Milbank, she writes that
Our created nature is inadequate not simply for the enjoyment of the good of God’s own life,
which is God’s ultimate end in creating us, but for our own properly human fulfillment.
Because we have been created to have such a close relationship with the very goodness of
God, with a nature that requires attachment to God to be what it is supposed to be, grace is
necessary to complete our nature, to add to it what it requires for its own excellent
operations and well-being. Receiving God’s grace becomes a requirement for simply being a
human being fully alive and flourishing.36
Based on these considerations, Tanner defines human nature such that its very meaning is a lack
of definition, an unlimited openness or plasticity that allows it to receive itself from outside it. “If
humans are to be radically reworked through attachment to God,” she argues, “then what is of
interest about human nature is its plasticity, its susceptibility to being shaped or molded by
outside influences generally.”37 Humans most fully image or participate in God not on the basis
of our own nature, but through our union with Christ who is the “image of God” in the fullest
sense, a union she identifies with grace.38
33
Ibid., 36.
34
Ibid., 83-84.
35
Thus she criticizes all parties in the 20th century Catholic debate over the “natural desire” for the beatific
vision for assuming an Aristotelian theory of nature-based finalities involving innate tendencies towards some end.
See ibid., 110-26, esp. 123-25.
36
Ibid., 60.
37
Ibid., 40-41.
38
Ibid., 58. She does also affirm a “weaker” form of human participation, involving the mere fact of being a
creature and thereby imaging God’s Word or Wisdom, the pattern of the world. All creation is an image in this
sense.
70
The aspect of gift Tanner emphasizes most intensely is its unconditionality. God’s gifts are
not conditional either on the deserts of their recipients or on any sort of payment by those
recipients. Their only purpose is to benefit us in our need. She argues that there is an “inevitable
reception” of at least some of God’s gifts—our simple existence clearly one of them—but that
sin frequently blocks them insofar as it prevents their proper reception.39 Because of our union
with Christ, however, we nonetheless have the gifts even when we refuse them; we are “joined to
God whether we like it or not.”40 She extends the traditional Protestant contrast between
justification and sanctification even further than usually employed by arguing that the
justification of all humans is already complete in the person and work of Christ, apart from and
prior to the Spirit-led but human act of faith and other works of discipleship, all of which she
considers aspects of sanctification.41 Insofar as even the simple act of faith is something we “do,”
it must be distinguished from God’s gifts in Christ and the Spirit to which faith is a response, if
divine-human non-competition is to be protected.42
39
Tanner, Economy, 66.
40
Tanner, Christ the Key, 74, cf. Tanner, Economy, 66-67.
41
Tanner, Christ the Key, 86-87. The very section in which she discusses justification and sanctification,
however, itself contains conflicting statements on these matters. For example, she writes that “Christ can be attached
to us [which she identifies with justification] … whether or not that attachment shows itself in the changed human
dispositions and actions that are its effects [which she identifies with sanctification].” Tanner, Christ the Key, 88.
She speaks confusingly of sanctification as an “effect” of justification that nevertheless may not “show itself.” She
seems to link the two extremely closely on the next page when she bluntly states that each “cannot exist without the
other” (ibid., 89), however here she seems to mean that justification cannot exist without our receiving the Spirit as a
power to draw on, regardless of whether we ever actually do draw on it—the latter of which is the meaning she
usually gives to sanctification. In sum, her statements here are in some ways inconsistent, but most of the time she
seems to make the justification-sanctification distinction based on “the difference between what we do and what
God does” (ibid., 95), with sanctification, even if empowered by the Spirit, firmly on the “what we do” side.
42
Ibid., 95-96. Despite her stress on the gift’s unconditionality, Tanner insists that this does not mean it is an-
economic, and here she keenly differentiates herself from Derrida’s and Marion’s projects of isolating a pure,
disinterested gift. The very notion of “purely disinterested gifts,” she argues, is but the corollary of “purely
interested exchanges,” both defined by what they are not and thereby incapable of informing the practice of the
other. In her view, motives in gift-giving are irrelevant, and gift is unconditional even with regard to the level of
(dis)interestedness in a given case. All that matters is the “structural character of the social relations” involved—
namely, the distribution of gifts in a way that meets the needs of their recipients and is without any requirements in
either deserts or payment. Ibid., 62.
71
Tanner affirms that in some sense a human return gift to God is possible and even desirable,
even though it is never necessary for the reception of the gift. She admits that “to a certain extent
it just does not make sense to talk of our making a return to God,” since God already has
everything we might give back.43 Nevertheless, God intends for us to make a return to God by
means of our gifts to others, even though God gives and will continue giving even if this does
not take place; “God gives unconditionally but God also does so for the sake of a return.”44 God
does not “seek to give unilaterally, to be the only real giver,” but gives so that we might in turn
be givers.45 Tanner’s favoured expression for the role of human beings is “ministers of
beneficence,” distributors of God’s gifts to the world.46 “Through Christ,” she writes, “human
beings have a crucial mediatorial role to play in God’s gift-giving ends for one another and for
the whole world,” the cosmos in all its dimensions.47 In explicitly Eucharistic terms, she argues
that “far from forbidding a return, God graciously accepts back the gifts of that proper response”
that we make through our own giving, and returns them again to us transformed for our eternal
sustenance.48 But while a return gift to God in this sense is not prohibited, and indeed is God’s
intention for us, Tanner emphasizes that it is not a condition for God’s giving, and that it is
possible to receive without giving in return.
43
Ibid., 67-68.
44
Kathryn Tanner, “Theology at the Limits of Phenomenology,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc
Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 221.
45
46
Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 79-80. She takes this phrase from B. A. Gerrish, himself
interpreting John Calvin.
47
Ibid., 37. Humans are “the administrative center of cosmic-wide service” and distribution of God’s gifts.
Ibid., 61.
48
Tanner, Economy, 72-73. She also writes that insofar as we are united to Christ and receive the Spirit, we are
“incorporated into the dynamic trinitarian outflow of God’s own life for the world,” which involves continual cycles
of return or “ascent” to God in worship and “descent” to the world in service, and whose centre is the Eucharist,
which “repeats in miniature the whole movement of ascent and descent.” Tanner, Christ the Key, 200, 205.
72
The implications of Tanner’s paradigm for her ecclesiology are also important to note, as
they suggest a similarity but also a key contrast with Milbank. For Tanner, divine transcendence
desacralizes all immanent social orders that would claim inevitability or demand total allegiance.
Existing social orders and patterns of life are human constructions from top to bottom.49 They are
conventional arrangements that are always susceptible to continual judgment, interpretation and
critique as one determines how God is currently at work. Since God’s transcendence implies that
God is never identified with an institution— including the Church—obedience to God is always
immediate, never mediated through any stable human construction.50 Christian social practices
should not be oriented towards consensus even within the Church, but like all healthy human
cultures should consist in a “genuine community of argument.”51 Divine transcendence means
that a basis of unity should be found not in any “human account” of God—even as expressed in
creeds and ritual or liturgical acts—but only in openness to discerning how God’s free grace is
moving at the moment.52 God’s absolute transcendence and otherness, beyond all distinctions of
identity with or difference from creation, allow us to respect the otherness of other creatures
rather than attempting to assimilate them to our particular norms.53 The ideal community is to be
what she calls a “community of mutual benefit,” in which all mutually give in the unconditional,
non-competitive way she describes, such that there is effectively never any loss.54
49
Ibid., 82-90.
50
Ibid., 102, 118.
51
Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology, Guides to Theological Inquiry
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 123.
52
Ibid., 126.
53
Kathryn Tanner, The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1992), 215-16.
54
73
Bringing Tanner into Conversation with Milbank
The key difference between Milbank and Tanner lies in the question not of the possibility of
a human return gift to God—both affirm this—but of its necessity. As we have seen, the primary
characteristic of the divine gift Tanner highlights is its unconditionality. Although God’s will is
that the gift be returned in some sense, and it is given with this intended goal, it is given and can
be received regardless of whether this return ever takes place. According to her, this sort of
unconditionality is precisely the essence of gift and divine grace, over against the requirements
of contractual relations and, particularly in light of the Protestant tradition out of which she
writes, the danger of “works righteousness.” Her concept of the gift can thus be deemed
“contrastive,” in that it is specifically defined in contrast to an arrangement predicated upon a
return.
Conversely, Milbank’s theological ontology leads him to reject any concept of gift that
defines it in contrast to what is not gift, such as contracts or meritorious works. This is grounded
in his insistence that there is nothing that exists that is not gift, since being itself is gift. His
notion of “active reception,” though its point is very similar to Tanner’s principle of “non-
competition,” is another way of describing this non-contrastive gift. In the eternal exchange that
is the Trinity, each Person equally acts and receives, or gives and is given. And it is this
Trinitarian exchange of gifts into which we are (by grace) drawn insofar as we exist at all. The
gift exchange between Creator and creatures is not separate from the intra-Triune exchange, but
is its translation into the created world. Just as activity and receptivity perfectly coincide in
God’s own life, so do the movements of divine descent in and to creation and creation’s ascent
back to God. And just as the Trinitarian exchange involves the perpetual newness of excess, so
the divine-creaturely exchange involves the incorporation of creation’s excess into God’s
74
immanent life. Our existence, even at its most active, is then identical with our receiving it as a
gift that is bestowed through divine descent. Conversely, our reception of the gift of our
existence is also, by the power of the Spirit, our returning ascent to God. To the extent that we
refuse to receive and thus to return this gift, we refuse ourselves, a refusal that has no ground in
being because its only end is nothingness. For Milbank, there is literally nothing with which to
contrast gift.
Milbank’s ontology of gift leads him to differ from Tanner particularly in the sense in which
God’s gifts relate to human activity. This difference can be especially seen in how each construes
the relationship between grace and human free will in salvation. We have seen how Tanner
argues that justification has already been achieved for all humankind in Christ, such that we are
“joined to God whether we like it or not.” Human reception of and response to God’s gift in
Christ—including even the act of faith, contrary to traditional Protestant understanding—belong
entirely to sanctification. Justification is everything God does and gives, while sanctification is
everything we do and give in response. This sharp bifurcation of divine and human activity
results from her attempt to safeguard the unconditionality of gift by denying that even faith is a
condition of its reception. In a sense, she not only separates what is divine from what is human,
but potentially puts them in opposition, if indeed we are united with God “whether we like it or
not.”
Milbank would likely view Tanner’s position as a move beyond not only the Thomistic
sense of influentia but even what he deems the corrupted form of concursus. Since he regards
our very being as already a divine gift in the fullest sense, this gift coincides—rather than
contrasts—with what is most proper to ourselves, in our mind, will, and so on. As a privation, sin
does not change the essential nature of these characteristics but hinders them from performing
75
their proper functions. Since the divine gift is thus already entirely intrinsic, the need is for the
renewal of our already gifted selves rather than for a further extrinsic gift. This does not lessen
the need for the gift of grace—Milbank is emphatically not a Pelagian confident in the adequacy
of natural human powers—but rather indicates the all-embracing character of his concept of
grace. In his framework, what Tanner labels justification and sanctification both equally involve
divine and human activity. Differentiating God’s activity simply involves identifying God as our
origin and source who in no way relies on us but on whom we are perpetually dependent.
A similar dynamic is at work when comparing how Tanner and Milbank each relate the
divine and human roles in relation to the nature of the Church. Tanner rejects the notion that a
Christian community can be unified on the basis of any “human account” of God, even if this be
Scripture, the Church’s ancient creeds, or a shared sacramental or liturgical framework.
Although she criticizes Derrida and other contemporary thinkers for whom a “pure” gift would
require entirely disinterested motives,55 she upholds the criterion whereby a genuine gift must be
given out of freedom in contrast to obligation. In this light she emphasizes God’s freedom to
give and to act in ways that transcend and escape human expectations and any aforementioned
human “accounts.” Discernment as to how God is currently moving is then the only basis of
unity, and because members of the Church will inevitably differ in judgment, the Church must
not attempt to be anything other than a “community of argument” with all the conflict that might
entail. Any insistence on conformity to a human standard—even one of belief—would violate
the sense in which God’s transcendence relativizes all human structures and organizations.
Here too, Milbank would emphasize that the divine gift coincides with human activity,
including the way human beings structure their communal lives and worship God. That a given
55
Tanner, Christ the Key, 62.
76
entity is entirely human does not mean—as the Christological pattern shows—that it is merely
human. His central objection to Scotism and nominalism is that by “unhooking” human life from
ontological participation in God and affirming a sense in which creation “is” in the same
(univocal) way that God “is,” a falsely “secular” sphere is carved out in which God is evacuated
from human life. He would undoubtedly place Tanner’s framework in the same errant trajectory,
insofar as she seemingly construes the divine gift as unconditional at the cost of its being
intrinsically transformative.
Yet while Milbank and Tanner appear to take opposite sides on these questions, I suggest
that their positions are in fact relatively complementary if it is understood that they are speaking
in different registers. When Milbank denies that the divine gift can be refused, and affirms the
inevitability of its return, he means that there can be no final, ultimate refusal of this gift, and
that there will necessarily be an ultimate return. When Tanner affirms that the divine gift is given
and received regardless of whether it is returned, she is speaking in penultimate terms. She is
asserting the unconditional character of the gift in the face of our current state of frequent
rebellion and ingratitude. Likewise, when she characterizes the Church as a community of
argument without a source of unity other than the sovereign Spirit that blows where it wills, she
is asserting the error of valorizing any human entity as stable and beyond further interpretation or
development (an emphasis with which Milbank emphatically agrees). She is arguing that what is
really penultimate must not be considered ultimate. When Milbank, by contrast, speaks of the
Church in terms of “absolute consensus” and harmony, he is not describing the concrete situation
of the institutional Church, but the Church’s ultimate ontological state, which is anticipated now
but will be fully manifest only in the eschaton.

77
Both the ultimate and penultimate perspectives need to be considered in a theology of gift.
Attending to the penultimate tends to highlight the excessive and unmerited nature of the divine
gift vis-à-vis the current human situation. While necessary and true, making this the exclusive
focus can contribute to a sense in which serving God involves an ultimate heteronomy between
the divine and human, a self-alienation of what is most creaturely. Attending more to the
ultimate, as Milbank does, leads to an emphasis that our self-fulfillment corresponds to its end in
God, and that the divine gift is intrinsically renewing and transformative of every aspect of
creation. Yet if an excessive heteronomy haunts the other tendency, there is a danger here of an
illegitimate autonomy. This could manifest itself in a notion that because the gift is intrinsic, we
somehow “possess” it and that whatever we do with it is therefore sanctified. There is real need
to insist on the imperfect nature of the current human state, and the fact that we await in hope the
full realization of what, in a sense, is true already. Tanner’s focus on the gift’s unconditionality
can thus be an important counter-balance to Milbank’s stress on its necessary return. The next
chapter will expand on the need to incorporate a stronger affirmation of penultimate goods into
Milbank’s ontology, as this issue comes to the fore in his social and political thought.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that Milbank’s ontology of gift achieves two significant benchmarks.
First, the ontological status it assigns to the excess of newness and difference, through the
Trinitarian gift exchange and the analogical divine-human exchange, allows a positive
affirmation of created goodness. The concerns of theologians who fear its Platonic influences
overwhelm its Christian basis should thus be assuaged. Second, the non-contrastive nature of gift
grounds a strong sense in which our proper ends as creatures and our fulfillment in God are
78
identical, allowing for a very “integrated” concept of human life. Despite these achivements,
Milbank’s approach should be complemented by one such as Tanner’s that emphasizes the
significance of gift even in our current state of often privative inhumanity, and focuses on our
penultimate rather than only our ultimate state.

CHAPTER 4
PENULTIMATE GOODS, COMMUNITIES, AND JUSTICE
The second chapter explored how Milbank’s ontology of gift entails a certain social order,
one that takes its shape from the gift-exchanging community of the Church and spreads into
society through a socialism rooted in civil society associations. This chapter will examine
Milbank’s social framework, building on a point expressed at the close of the last chapter
concerning his seeming lack of attention to the penultimate, as opposed to ultimate, state of
Church and world. I argue that many of his arguments about the nature of both ecclesia and polis
betray a lack of proper attention to the penultimate goods of finitude, yet his concept of a
necessary return gift implies a way of valuing these penultimate goods after all. This chapter
consists of three sections. In the first I present the basic ecclesiological problem: Milbank’s
minimization of creaturely finitude in favour of a kind of “eternal present” and its effect on our
spiritual formation. In the second section I explore how these characteristics lead to a political
ontology attending almost entirely to a model of organic community that neglects questions of
individual and systemic justice. Finally, I argue that Milbank’s gift paradigm can nonetheless be
modified to counteract these narrowly communitarian aspects of his thought, and so contribute to
a more balanced and realistic social-political vision.
Finitude, Formation, and Penultimate Goods
In the last chapter I argued that because Milbank’s version of participation is rooted in
Trinitarian gift exchange, he avoids the conflation of material creation with evil about which
critics of participatory ontologies often worry. Creation can be seen as positive excess, and
through the Spirit it thereby returns the divine gift in a way that introduces a paradoxical
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newness into the divine being. But while Milbank does not conflate evil with creation or
embodiment per se, I contend that he implicitly regards our current state of finitude—being
subject to the limitations of space and time—as itself a kind of evil.
Milbank’s evil-finitude conflation results from the way he opposes all extrincism in favour
of an intrinsic, non-contrastive view of the divine gift. Finite limitations necessarily involve
relatively extrinsic relations. One can only occupy one space at a particular time, meaning that
one thereby stands “over against” all other spaces. Likewise, the very meaning of the temporal
“past” and “future” is established through their otherness to the present (even though the present
is always fleeting and its content changing). Yet Milbank often seems to endorse an ethical
pattern whose ideal, as much as possible, is to carry on as if these finite limits did not exist. I
have noted his claim that “Christianity should not draw boundaries” because, he reasons, the
Church is a universal entity that does not stand spatially over against any other.1 There is “nulla
humanitas extra ecclesiam,” since everything “outside” the Church is not really existent at all,
but privatory of existence. And he chiefly characterizes this privation as violence that stands in
contrast to the ontological peacefulness rooted in God’s Triune life. The nature of this violence is
detailed in his critique of pacifism. He argues that the mere spectatorship of violence is at least as
violent as the physical action itself insofar as the former entails a self-possessed sealing oneself
off from the action, a placing oneself as subject clearly “over against”—extrinsic to—the scene
that one is thereby objectifying.2 In regard to this situation he argues that
The positive assertion of private autonomy is judged to be just as evil as its evidently evil
and perverse enjoyment of heteronomous interferences … Such autonomy is exposed by
privation theory as deprivation of our participation in being as gift: in this way privation
theory attacks as evil not just exterior and visible destruction, but also interior and invisible
1
2
Milbank, “Violence,” in Being Reconciled, 33-34.
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self-assertion. The latter is here diagnosed as also evil; but this means as also secretly
violent: a violence against Being, an attempted and illusory violence against God.3
Autonomy and self-assertion are here regarded as inherently at odds with every creature’s
subsistence by the gift of participation alone. Even as matters of interior disposition, they qualify
as evil, and because they are evil, they are violent just as much as their physical expressions.4
Milbank understands violence and evil in light of his anti-individualist conviction about the
interrelatedness of creation. He criticizes pacifism for the presumption that individuals or
individual groups acting on their own can be non-violent despite the violence around them.
Because “once there is violence, we are all inevitably violent,”5 violence is universally
inescapable, and peace can only attain a similar universality in the eschaton (or in the
anticipation of the latter in the peaceful society of the ecclesia). In light of Milbank’s apparent
association of simple objectification with violence and evil, I believe Nico Vorster is correct
when he observes that Milbank seemingly regards “the notions of autonomy, sovereignty and
contractual relations as inherently ‘violent’, because all of these concepts make use of
distinctions between a subject and object, an I and thou, a self and an other.”6 Milbank associates
all of these distinctions with the extrincism he links to merely unilateral giving, as opposed to the
Trinitarian gift exchange in which subjectivity and objectivity coincide. He thus sets every form
of autonomy, self-possession, and subject-object binary against his understanding of the sorts of
relationships the Christian narrative would have us cultivate.
3
4
For Milbank, evil and violence are inseparable, such that evil is inherently violent and violence is inherently
evil. He regards sin, evil, and violence as mutually convertible “anti-transcendentals,” distinct yet inseparable
precisely in their foreignness to the goodness of creation. Ibid., 27-28.
5
Ibid., 42.
6
Nico Vorster, “The Secular and the Sacred in the Thinking of John Milbank: A Critical Evaluation,” Journal
for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 11, no. 32 (2012): 111. Emphasis in original. As explored in chapter 2,
Milbank does believe that contractual relationships have a place and must not be set in sharp contrast to gift
exchange. But as I argue below, this sentiment represents more of a concession to necessary evil in his thought than
an affirmation of a positive purpose for contracts, autonomy, or sovereignty.
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Milbank thus appears to oppose any boundary-making whatever. With his broad notion of
violence, his view that only the violent cannot be integrated into his ontology of peace transforms
into the view that finitude itself seems to be outside the scope of peace. Vorster argues that this
very comprehensive use of the term “violence,” and the fact that Milbank never provides a more
narrow definition, is what allows him to make his sharp bifurcation between an ontology of
peace and one of violence.7 He juxtaposes the world at large, characterized by violence, with the
peace of the Church conceived as a mystical, ontological union—not, it must be noted, the
Church’s empirical, institutional manifestations, which are often far from peaceful. Thus, even
though his ontology allows a positive meaning for creation and materiality in themselves, it does
not do the same for the finite boundaries within which creation actually exists.
I suggest that there is a real sense in which finite limitations are relativized by New
Testament faith. For example, if “all things were created through [Christ] and for him” and “in
him all things hold together” (Col 1:16, 17), then the very architecture of created reality seems to
find its beginning, centre and goal in Christ. Jesus of Nazareth’s occupation of a particular space
and time and his concrete activity therein are ontologically determinative for creation at even the
greatest spatial and temporal removal, because space and time are themselves located “in
Christ.” Paul speaks of an even more intense sort of organic unity in the case of the Church;
Christ, he says, is “the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its
joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God” (Col 2:19). It is through the power
of the Spirit—as a “pledge” of the eschatological consummation (2 Cor 1:22; Eph 1:14)—that
Christ’s real presence with the Church at all times is possible. And it is this Spirit who joins us
together as members of Christ’s Body, creating a single living organism out of many individuals
7
Ibid., 122.
83
(1 Cor 12:12ff.) into which we wish the entire world to be gathered. Milbank is thus absolutely
correct in stressing the intrinsic and participatory nature of the divine-human and intra-human
relations, and the fact that both the “past” and “future” of the salvific economy are never merely
such, because they are “made present” in the life of the Church. Although finite limits are by no
means vacuous—salvation is accomplished precisely within them—their incorporation into
God’s life, through the Word and Spirit, allows them to share in the infinite and universal.
Indeed, and in further defence of Milbank, I maintain that there is a proper sense in which
Christian theology regards finitude as an imperfect (though by no means evil) state. According to
the New Testament, the relativization of finitude that is already a reality will take on further
dimensions in the eschatological “new heaven and new earth” (Rev 21:1). The fully
consummated eschatological state will involve something like a union of finitude and infinity—
not an abolition of finitude, but a transcending of it nonetheless. The accounts of Christ’s
resurrected body, a prolepsis of the resurrection of all, dramatically illustrate this union in its
consummated eschatological form. His body was just as tangible as before—he ate (Luke 24:42)
could be touched (John 20:27), and could be recognized as the physical continuation of the same
Jesus who had walked the earth before. Yet his risen body was not subject to finite limits in the
same way, demonstrated by his ability to appear behind locked doors (John 20:19) and appear
and disappear without a trace. This strongly implies that the resurrection—Christ’s and ours—
involves a transcendence of the bounds of finitude, though—paradoxically—a preservation and
fulfillment of materiality and embodiment. It also suggests that if our resurrected, trans-finite
identities are the fulfillment of our current ones, and our future state will thus be superior to our
present, then there is at least one sense in which our finitely bounded state is an imperfect one.
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However, it seems that Milbank’s rejection of boundaries leads him to assume as normative
for human life a kind of “eternal present” and consequently to neglect the historical, concrete
dimensions of the divine economy of salvation. This tendency is evident in what appears to be
both an under-realized and over-realized eschatology. According to the self-admitted “primacy
of ecclesiology” over Christology in his thought,8 Christ’s Person and work are only really given
content, finality, and efficacy through the poesis of the Church’s continual, non-identically
repeated enactments throughout history. There are no borders separating Christ from the Church,
not only in his activity but even his personal identity. Milbank thus concedes no real sense in
which Christ’s work is a “finished” accomplishment to which we can turn in faith. Yet if this
seems to indicate an eschatological under-realization, Milbank’s idealistic concept of the Church
also appears dramatically over-realized. In questioning Milbank’s supposed faithfulness to
Augustine’s framework of the two cities, Hans Boersma argues that it is guilty of a very un-
Augustinian equation of the city of God with the Church, leading to “an overrealized eschatology
that fails to recognize the Church's tentative hold on the kingdom of God.”9 The Church in its
eschatological consummation may be without boundaries, but to assert this of the Church on its
earthly pilgrimage is, as Boersma notes, either to eviscerate the Church’s particular character (if
it is simply identical with the world) or to invite a sectarian withdrawal from the rest of society
(if the rest of the world is to be regarded as “nihil” vis-à-vis the Church).10
Milbank’s refusal of boundaries and objectification as violent also seems to be what leads
him to reject the notion that divine law ever stands over against us as an extrinsic entity, in
8
Milbank, “Name of Jesus,” in Word Made Strange, 165.
9
Hans Boersma, “On the Rejection of Boundaries: Radical Orthodoxy’s Appropriation of St. Augustine,” Pro
Ecclesia 15 (2006), 426. See also Hans Boersma, “Being Reconciled: Atonement as the Ecclesio-Christological
Practice of Forgiveness in John Milbank,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant
and Participation, ed. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 199.
10
Boersma, “On the Rejection,” 432.
85
favour of what he refers to as “antinomian” ethics.11 In some sense, for him all proper law is
“natural law,” although here it is the explicitly theological that corresponds to the natural,
whereas all “positive” law—even a traditional concept of God’s commands— is dismissed as
reflecting extrinsic relations of violent power. Theonomy and autonomy are here aligned—in
fact, are virtually equated—against every kind of heteronomy. Milbank’s wholesale rejection of
the latter suggests that despite his overtly anti-Kantian assumptions, in this emphasis he is not as
far removed from Kant as one might suppose, insofar as he seeks to carve out a sphere of action
for the totally free and unencumbered will.12
Because Milbank rejects the notion that any law stands over against us, his account of
human sin and our resulting need to be formed spiritually through ecclesial practices is quite
lacking. Medi Ann Volpe, while finding much good in aspects of Milbank’s framework—
particularly his concept of active reception—argues that he does not address the problem of sin
adequately in this account. As she puts it, “his account of active reception implies that the
indwelling of the Holy Spirit ought naturally to produce Christian action” because he does not
separate our “inner” reception of the gift of the Spirit from our “outward” enactment of the
Spirit’s fruits. Yet, she goes on, “the image of such a free-flowing grace seems curiously at odds
with New Testament and late-antique descriptions of the constant struggle against sin.”13 As she
elaborates:
11
Milbank, “Can Morality,” in Word Made Strange, 219.
12
Leora Batnitsky argues that “despite his arguments against Kant, Milbank’s utopian conception of Christian
peace is predicated on the same dichotomy between a non-coercive morality (what Milbank calls Christian peace)
and the violent substructure that supports that morality (what Kant calls public-juridical law and Milbank calls
‘secular reason’), upon which Kant’s vision is predicated.” Leora Batnitsky, “Love and Law: John Milbank and
Hermann Cohen on the Ethical Possibilities of Secular Society,” in Secular Theology: American Radical
Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (London: Routledge, 2001), 81.
13
Medi Ann Volpe, Rethinking Christian Identity: Modern Theology and Christian Formation, Challenges in
Contemporary Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 130.
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Milbank describes a state of relationship between the individual and God that looks more
like an eschatological picture of humanity restored than a still-fallen Christian struggling to
overcome sinfulness, living between the “already” of the crucifixion and resurrection and
the “not-yet” of the final restoration. Without including a robust doctrine of continuing
human corruption, Milbank cannot give a complete account of Christian performance. While
it may be the case that ideally the access to God is as straightforward as Milbank implies, the
ideal only corresponds with the actual in Eden or the eschaton.14
Milbank is not wrong in his overall account, Volpe argues, but not right enough, because “he
gives no account of the formation that might produce individuals attentive to God and thus open
to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”15
In refusing virtually any sense in which the Church exists in grateful response to the
accomplished reality of the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection, and in holding that the
Church enacts a quasi-spontaneous life of peace in the Spirit, without need to be conformed by
certain practices to anything he classifies as “law,” Milbank is effectively identifying the Church
with both Christ’s first coming and the effects of his second. The Church itself seems to become
quasi-divine, and the particularity of Christ is obfuscated. As Justin Holcomb argues, Radical
Orthodoxy (including Milbank) “strongly emphasizes what is universal, general, and speculative
at the expense of affirming and defending the particularity of divine redemption in Christ.” It
stresses ontological participation, but neglects the truth that “creation’s participation in the divine
has its center of gravity in Christ.”16 Whatever the merits of Milbank’s general critique of
extrincism, then, his alternative needs to accommodate better the particularity of Christ’s first
and second comings as standing to some degree “over against” the Church. Although one of the
main points of Milbank’s consistent intrincism is to critique any extrinsic bifurcation between
14
Ibid., 137.
15
Ibid., 130.
16
Justin S. Holcomb, “Being Bound to God: Participation and Covenant Revisited,” in Radical Orthodoxy and
the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant and Participation, ed. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 250. Emphasis in original.
87
grace and law, it seems that just such a gift-law division follows given his concept of grace that
excludes all law. This creates a real danger that the gift of grace could be considered “proper” to
the Church—akin to a possession—since there is no need for any further formation, and thus no
role for divine law as the agent of such formation. While Milbank would clearly reject this
conclusion, he does not provide a sufficient account of why it would not follow.
In his defence, Milbank sometimes does affirm a strong “already-not yet” dynamic and a
corresponding sense in which boundary-making has a certain necessity in this age, even for the
Church. This is again seen especially in his discussion of violence. Whereas he regards violence
as inevitable insofar as it is simple objectification, he sees some forms of it as better than others.
“Violence enacted in the name of a substantive telos,” he argues, “can more plausibly pose as
essentially educational” than the violence exerted by political and economic liberalism. He
applauds Augustine’s defence of the need, in certain circumstances, for measures of coercion by
the Church as well as the state, because
Freedom of the will in itself is not the goal, and sometimes people can be temporarily blind
and will only be prevented from permanent self-damage when they are forced into some
course of action, or prevented from another. Such coercive action remains in itself
dangerous, as it risks promoting resentment, but this risk is offset by the possibility that the
recipient can later come to understand and retrospectively consent to the means taken. Such
action may not be ‘peaceable’, yet can still be ‘redeemed’ by retrospective acceptance, and
so contribute to the final goal of peace.17
“Anyone professing to be shocked” by such a notion, Milbank argues elsewhere, is “naively
unreflective about what in reality he already accepts (for example in the secular schooling of the
young) and is thinking in over-individualistic and over-voluntaristic terms that are ontologically
impossible.”18 This “violence” of education in truth, then—the central meaning of his concept of
hierarchy—is necessary in the present age when truth is not universally and comprehensively
17
18
Milbank, “Violence,” in Being Reconciled, 38. Emphasis in original.
88
known. Still, he argues that more than Augustine we should recognize the “tragic character” of
this resignation to a certain violence, no matter how “retrospectively” justifiable it may be.19
Eschatological peace can be “obscurely anticipated in time,” not by isolated individuals but in
the community of the Church.20 As a result, the relative externality of law, hierarchy, and
violence may be provisionally necessary, but for Milbank this does not appear far removed from
their being necessary evils.
And it is this ultimately negative judgment about law and everything relatively extrinsic,
despite Milbank’s qualifications, that I judge most problematic. Rather than opposing gift to law,
Milbank would be better advised to follow much of the Jewish and Christian traditions in
understanding divine law as itself an incomparable gift. The first Psalm opens with a description
of one whose “delight is in the law of the LORD” (Ps 1:2), not of one who submits to the law as a
necessary but unfortunate measure. Jesus declares his fulfillment rather than abolition of the law,
and the preservation of its smallest detail “until heaven and earth pass away” (Matt 5:17-18).
And while it is true that a “new” covenant has been inaugurated in Christ and through the Spirit,
in which the divine law has been written on our hearts and we have been given a closer, more
“internal” way of knowing God (Jer 31:31-34; Heb 8:8-12), its eschatological consummation is
still forthcoming.21 The continued fact of sin—even if it is an ontological privation—means we
still need to be conformed to God’s law. For those of New Testament faith it is the “law of
Christ,” to be fulfilled as we “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2), yet this law remains
extrinsic to us in a sense. Paul can only associate such burden-bearing with the person of Christ
19
20
Milbank, “Violence,” in Being Reconciled, 42. Emphasis added.
21
The thus far incomplete realization of these verses is particularly evident in the declaration that “no longer
shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me” (Jer
31:34). Insofar as the Church still needs teachers and instructors, they serve as an “extrinsic” counterpoint to the
“intrinsic” nature of the new covenant relationship already established.
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because he is aware of the concrete, identifiable pattern of Christ’s earthly mission. Though the
Church is to identify with and non-identically repeat this pattern, it can only do so because the
pattern has definiteness even apart from the Church’s success or failure in this task.
Thus, it is necessary to reconcile Milbank’s insight that perfect peace will only exist beyond
finitude with a way of valuing relative, penultimate creaturely flourishing within finite bounds.
What is needed is not a notion that finite boundaries could ever (even hypothetically) exist
outside of God’s ultimately gracious purpose—such as the “pure nature” hypothesis—but a
positive affirmation of the purpose of such boundaries in light of their participation in grace.
Though they will be transcended in our eschatological state, they are not necessary evils but
positive—though penultimate—goods in the present. In the third section below I argue that such
a perspective can actually find support in other resources within Milbank’s ontology of gift.
Communities, Politics, and Justice
Milbank’s undermining of the goodness of finitude, I maintain, leads to a valorization of a
certain form of organic human community and a concomitant neglect of both individual and
systemic justice. His model of community is evident in both his ecclesiology and the civil society
associations he advocates as part of a socialist Christendom. In the case of the Church, as we
have seen, he emphasizes its ultimate ontological identity rather than its penultimate, concrete
state as it is composed by fallible humans who still need to be spiritually formed. Thus, he sees
the Church as a community of “absolute consensus,” in which differences are peacefully
reconciled because they are incorporated into a harmonious unity. Because ecclesial structures
and disciplines are in a certain way extrinsic to members of the community, he seems to regard
them as necessary evils, rather than positive though penultimate gifts from God. And because he
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regards the Church as the only public and authentic polis, he deems this model of community to
be the only sort of community there is. It thus seems that he encourages small-scale civil society
associations precisely because he regards them as least in need of centralized structures that
would stand over against their members as extrinsic entities. Just as he juxtaposes a “charismatic
ethic” or an “ethic of gift” to an ethic based on law in his ecclesiology, he believes that these
small-scale associations can facilitate the exchange of gifts in a fashion unattainable when either
large-scale business interests or heavy-handed governments have too much power.
Milbank admits that his sort of ecclesial community has a certain lack of concreteness when
compared with other political visions. He states that “the Church has far less definite ideas than
the polis concerning the kinds of individuals it desires to produce, and the kinds of roles it wishes
to foster, precisely because its ‘aim’ is sociality and conviviality itself, a telos which subverts
teleology.”22 He is here distinguishing the politics of the Church from the role of the polis as
conceived according to the secular theory he rejects. Even though he advocates many sorts of
associations and institutions in civil society, he argues that all of these bodies should have some
institutional connection to the Church itself. The boundaries between the Church and the state
should become “extremely hazy,” with civil society associations as the means whereby the
Church gradually assumes control over services and responsibilities currently provided by the
state.23 Thus, by his own admission he does not believe there should be a place for a political
order that does have more concrete goals than the Church’s enactment of “sociality and
conviviality itself.” The resulting vagueness is evident in his list of seven political-economic
proposals, outlined in the second chapter above. He is addressing the contemporary English
situation—and to a lesser extent, the developed West as a whole— but taken together, these
22
Milbank, “The Name of Jesus,” in Word Made Strange, 154.
23
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proposals all seem curiously removed from the globalized and, to a great extent, urbanized
contemporary world. They amount to a plea for a return to a way of life in which local, face-to-
face encounters and relationships were at the centre of civic and business life, later to be
supplanted by the twin forces of the centralized, bureaucratic state and global financial markets.
Many of his points advocating an increased stress on the local community and civil society have
merit, despite the overly nostalgic and romantic spin he gives them, and he is certainly not alone
today in making them. What is more jarring is that he articulates very little in the way of
practical, incremental means of moving the current political-economic order closer to his very
different vision. Yet far from rejecting any participation in statecraft along Anabaptist lines,
Milbank has actively contributed to public policy debates in Britain. So on one hand, he defends
the importance of statecraft because he maintains that all areas of human life participate in the
gift of grace. But on the other, he can give very little concrete direction because he places more
emphasis on an ideal, quasi-eternal vision than the current circumstances of time and place.
Borrowing terminology from Christopher Insole and many others, we might say that
Milbank promotes the political relevance of “thick” rather than “thin” communities.24 There are
many degrees in each of these terms, but thicker communities are generally those whose
members have a strong personal stake in each other, such as families, many religious
congregations and close-knit voluntary associations, and often (at furthest remove)
neighbourhoods, small towns, and rural communities. Thinner communities, best exemplified by
large cities, involve much greater personal anonymity and more “space” for individuals to define
themselves and act outside of cultural norms. Although Milbank denies that his social thought is
“communitarian,” the strong primacy he gives to think communities and his repeated criticisms
Christopher J. Insole, “Against Radical Orthodoxy: The Dangers of Overcoming Political Liberalism,”
24
Modern Theology 20 (2004): 229-31.

92
of the tradition of political liberalism seem to place him squarely in the communitarian
category.25 Communitarians stress that individuals are inseparable even from their thick
communities, and that the integrity of the latter must be protected in all public policy. This
ideology is often contrasted with liberalism, which most stresses the rights of individuals to
economic and personal freedom, and tends to advocate a public, political sphere that is thin in the
sense explained. The characteristics most often associated with a liberal framework are precisely
those Milbank rejects with the most vehemence, as explored in chapter 2. He opposes the notion
of individual rights in favour of the “right order” of organic communities. He rejects the idea that
“freedom” in itself should constitute a political aim, arguing for a freedom that only has meaning
within pursuit of a substantive telos. He opposes the ideal of egalitarian democracy, instead
defending the need for a monarchic “one” and an aristocratic “few” to balance out the opinions
of the masses. But most notable is his conviction that a genuine community is by definition one
of consensus and agreement in matters of ultimate importance (certainly including narrowly
“religious” ones), which seems to militate against any pluralism of religions and ideologies.
It is easy to understand why a framework rooted in gift exchange values thick community in
this way: this sort of community is precisely the context in which exchanges of gifts usually take
place. And we normally think that we have more of a “personal” stake in the gifts that we
exchange than in typically more detached, impersonal contractual transactions. Given that
Milbank’s theological ontology emphasizes that our very selves are gifts, it makes sense that he
valorizes these more personal relationships in which we invest our whole selves, not only those
25
Milbank rejects this label, as we saw in chapter 2, because he understands communitarians to defend the
“absolute self-sufficiency” of organic communities, and thus the inability of these communities ever to “exchange”
with strangers or accommodate any “newness.” Indeed, insofar as he stresses that the Church is universal and
beyond all boundaries, many varieties of communitarianism are undoubtedly antithetical to his thought. But because
he deems this universality to be mediated and extended through the very “thick” associations that he advocates, it
should not be controversial to consider his framework broadly communitarian.
93
parts of us that we bring to bear in business contracts or elsewhere in the “public” sphere.
However, thick communities have just as many downsides as thin ones, as is argued by Insole:
Thicker communities have a strong sense of belonging and participation, which is

engendered by a powerful mutual imitation, common ideals and an exclusive sense of the
“outside” and the strangeness of outsiders; so such a community will be less tolerant of
certain forms of dissent, plurality, withdrawal and diversity, and will tend to construct its
own coherence by building uncharitable models of non-conforming individuals or
“outsiders”. Remove this cohesive imitation and these common ideals and one has a society
which is more tolerant of the dissident and the outsider, but only because it cares less, and
the sense of belonging and unity has depleted.26
Insole thus argues for the necessity of balancing both sorts of communities. Whatever their
configuration, all communities exist in the same imperfect state as everything else that is human,
and cannot be regarded as salvific in themselves. Further, “given the pervasive … human
condition, there are certain tendencies which can be mapped conceptually and a priori, which tell
us that where there is a thick/thin sense of community certain possibilities are stronger
(belonging and unity/choice and mobility) and other dangers more immanent (scapegoating,
judgement and immobility/loneliness and anxiety).”27 It may be true that perfect, eschatological
community will be the thick variety governed by gift exchange in the fullest sense, but prior to
that it would seem that both varieties must have a significant place.
Along these lines, several other critics have argued that Milbank’s vision of community falls
short because it is much too limited in light of the many complex needs of human life. Jonathan
Chaplin, for instance, argues that a general invocation of “‘universal gift’ is not yet specific
enough to allow an adequate elaboration of the many diverse kinds of community that humans
26
Ibid., 229-30.
27
Ibid., 230-31.
94
need.”28 According to him, Milbank’s view that different sorts of social institutions and
communities do not have determinate borders but exist in a kind of flux—just as all created
entities subsist in the flux of participation—loses sight of a certain principle diversely upheld in
traditional Thomist and Calvinist social theories. This principle stipulates that “many human
communities have a discernible structural purpose specifying their identity, an internally
operative telos arising from enduring imperatives, inclinations, or needs rooted in our created
social potentials.” While not denying that all communities are radically dependent on God, this
principle entails that “such communities nevertheless enjoy relative independence by virtue of
their stable, creationally grounded purposes.”29 For Chaplin, discernment of the respective
purposes of such diverse communities, supervised by a political community dedicated to
safeguarding the common good among its many stakeholders, is necessary for the realization of
public justice. The Church alone (or, for that matter, civil society associations that take the
Church’s model as their own) is insufficient for this purpose.30
One of the principal results of Milbank’s exclusive stress on organic community is that he
inevitably does neglect questions of justice, both those that are individual and those systemic in
nature. As chapter 2 discussed, Milbank regards both the modern “right” and modern “left” (in
Anglo-American terms) as secretly collusive insofar as they both minimize the centrality of the
Church and civil society. Both are variants of the liberalism that he opposes to his
communitarian Christian socialism. In fact, I suggest that we can characterize all varieties of the
28
Jonathan Chaplin, “Suspended Communities or Covenanted Communities? Reformed Reflections on the
Social Thought of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant and
Participation, ed. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 178.
29
Ibid., 177-78. Interestingly, Chaplin believes that Milbank’s advocacy of (a self-canceling form of) social
hierarchy approximates his own concept of “the internal structural telos of a community,” despite the insufficient
specificity of his framework as a whole. Ibid., 179.
30
Boersma also argues that Milbank’s subsumption of politics into the Church is another un-Augustinian
move. Boersma holds that Augustine grants polities outside the Church a certain relative autonomy, albeit one
whose goods are subordinate to those of the heavenly city. Boersma, “On the Rejection,” 439.
95
liberal tradition, in both “right” and “left” emphases, as rejecting the notion that the integrity of
“thicker” communities overrides the need to intervene in their affairs in order to correct
fundamental injustices. The liberal tradition has a keen sense of the injustices that can result
when purportedly organic communities are immune from critique and intervention from without,
even though it diverges on the way to rectify these potential or actual injustices. One liberal
strand focuses on the inherent rights of individuals as individuals—not community members—
and aims to protect the freedom to shape one’s individual destiny as much as possible. Of course,
this includes the freedom to reject any given community. Another strand strives to introduce a
greater degree of justice into the systemic, structural circumstances that exceed the wherewithal
of thicker communities to address. It emphasizes that individuals and communities cannot
participate in the wider society unless there is relative equality of opportunity—economic and
otherwise—within this society. Thus, it maintains that a social safety net cannot be provided
solely through families, churches and voluntary associations, as is Milbank’s vision. Because
radical inequality is an injustice, not merely a failure of charity, it demands political and legal
intervention, even though this is a more impersonal (or “thinner”) solution than Milbank’s
alternative.
Just as Milbank does not sufficiently attend to the Church’s penultimate state of
imperfection, he does not adequately consider that the imperfect state of humankind can lead any
community or association into corruption and injustice, and that a system of checks and balances
is therefore necessary. If both thick and thin sorts of community are necessary in light of the
complexities of human life, then Milbank’s framework must allow a greater role for both
individual and systemic justice. In the next section I argue not only that this is possible, but that
Milbank’s ontology of gift already has the resources to suggest this adjustment.
96
The Gift of Penultimate Boundaries
I contend that if Milbank’s ontology of gift exchange is given a somewhat different
emphasis than Milbank himself provides, it can give greater place to the penultimate goodness of
finitude and its corollaries in both the ecclesia and the wider polis. Milbank recognizes creation’s
inherent value as an analogue of the excessive otherness and newness that characterize God’s
own gift-exchanging life. At the same time, we have seen that he considers the Church—and
through it, all creation—according to its ultimate ontological state, the state in which it will make
its ultimate return gift to God. He is much less focused on the penultimate, imperfect state of the
ecclesia and the cosmos, in which God’s gifts have not yet been fully returned. The issue, as
identified by Volpe, is thus how one arrives at the ultimate from the penultimate; that is, the
problem of formation and growth. It is Milbank’s consistent intrincism that allows him to regard
creation’s very being as a gift of grace, without the need to contrast grace with “nature.” But by
emphatically rejecting the need for any further extrinsic gift, he is left to regard the ultimate
perfection of creation as arising purely intrinsically. At the same time, he conflates finitude itself
with evil. He thus runs into the obvious problem that the transcendence of finite limits occurring
in human poesis is only relative in degree. Its absolute achievement—and our concomitant
perfection—is an eschatological act that will be initiated by God alone, even as we will be
intrinsically transformed in the course of the same act. We would never reach a perfect state—
and be able to return the divine gift—if a further extrinsic gift from God were excluded.
It thus seems that insofar as Milbank stresses the intrinsic quality of the human return gift to
God—that is, it is not primarily a matter of juridical imputation or substitution—he needs a
relatively extrinsic means of facilitating the necessary inner transformation. We only attain
growth and maturity through education, admonition, and adherence to various sorts of “law” that
97
are given to us from without. The intrinsic thus depends on the extrinsic. Though our
eschatological destiny is infinite, we only become able to live in a way that anticipates this
destiny by attending to what is very much temporal and spatial, and thus “over against” us in a
certain sense. In the context of the Church, this means attending to the “already” character of
Christ’s first coming and the “not yet” character of his second. Though the Church has a certain
ontological union with Christ, we are continually obliged to fulfill the “law of Christ” (Gal 6:2).
As long as we are not yet perfected there is a legitimate sense in which this law remains extrinsic
to us as a further divine gift, a means of forming us so that we are able to return the gift that is
our very existence. It is Milbank’s own stress on the inevitable creaturely return gift to God—the
fulfillment of the cosmic exchange—that necessitates a means of forming us so that we are
ultimately able to make this return. This means of formation is thus a penultimately extrinsic and
one-way gift whose goal is our ultimate intrinsic return gift.
Because Milbank frames his broader social-political thought as his ecclesiology “writ large,”
the former shares the latter’s problem of his conflation of finite boundaries with evil. This
conflation leads to his notion that communities should ideally function as if there were no such
boundaries, and to his exclusive valorization of those communities that seem most boundary-free
and organic, namely small-scale civic associations. Once again, aspects of Milbank’s vision can
be defended. In the eschaton, human community will be just as organic and charismatic as
Milbank holds. There will be no more purely contractual relationships detached from gift
exchange. Nor will there be any need for a state to enact laws either protecting individuals from
violations of their rights or mitigating past social injustices. Community will be of the thick
rather than thin variety, since it will be bound by the Spirit alone, not by formal regulations. It is
98
thus reasonable to regard thicker communities as in some way anticipatory of the beatific state in
a fashion that thinner ones are not, and therein more “perfect.”
Yet just as Milbank’s ontology requires extrinsic means of intrinsic formation, I contend that
his ontology recommends a more positive appraisal of individual and structural justice than he
himself provides. Primarily contractual relations—whether between governments and citizens or
in business transactions—certainly seem to be necessary in human life, despite falling short of
the eschatological gift exchange anticipated in the Church. Just as the penultimate goodness of
boundaries allows us as immature beings to be formed into more mature ones, the relatively
extrinsic quality of law and contract helps protect us against the injustices caused by human
immaturity. For example, human sin always renders our economic transactions susceptible to
fraud and other forms of deceit. Only if their terms are articulated in the form of contract,
enforceable by law, are we protected in a way that enables us to participate confidently in
economic life. Further, because the problem of sin is not only individual but social and structural,
it cannot be overcome without addressing the most global and structural contexts. As Catholic
ethicist David Hollenbach argues, gift and charity do not, in themselves, challenge oppressive
structures in the same way or have the same obligatory force as justice. Genuine love requires
equality and mutuality between persons, and focusing only on love and gift can sometimes lead
people to surrender to injustice and to tolerate systemic inequality.31 Hollenbach argues for an
ethic “based on love as equal regard expressed in justice.”32 Thus, we need not oppose this kind
of justice to gift and charity; the pursuit of justice can be means of serving a broader ethic
31
David Hollenbach, “Caritas in Veritate: The Meaning of Love and Urgent Challenges of Justice,” Journal of
Catholic Social Thought 8 (2011): 174.
32
Ibid., 177.
99
centred in gift, since only in a reasonably just social order do we have the freedom, dignity, and
security necessary to give and receive in meaningful relationships.
Nevertheless, one can retain Milbank’s focus on the centrality of gift-exchanging
community—centred in the Church—even while granting a greater role to the administration of
justice from “without.” We can follow Milbank in holding that the “balance” of our social order
has tipped too far to the side of law and contract—and the impersonal, disinterested relations
they entail—as opposed to the more personal, interested relationships characteristic of local
communities and associations. Yet clearly gift-exchanging relationships are only possible in
varying degrees; transactions among neighbours at the local farmer’s market will always have
more of this character than, say, the importing of a rare, necessary resource from an enterprise in
another country, which will have more of a contractual, impersonal character. A broad adoption
of Milbank’s framework need not deny these necessary differentiations. Recall his insistence that
space is “complex” rather than “simple,” that communities and institutions are not self-contained
but are always engaging and overlapping with others, both more local and more global.
Regardless of the degree to which gift exchange can directly occur in a particular business or
institution, such an entity can expand, restrict or otherwise adapt itself so as to achieve the
maximum prevalence of gift-based relationships in some sphere. 33 Different intensities of gift
exchange are thus appropriate at different levels of social life. Corporate and state bureaucracy
and the mechanisms of capital markets are often beneficial, but the purpose of governmental and
business organizations at the “higher” levels can and must be structured so as to enable
33
One might think that profit-making firms, particularly larger ones, would balk at a focus on cultivating
relationships that may not initially seem related to increasing profit. But this would be to ignore the role of “social
capital,” much discussed in the last few decades, according to which cultivating trust–both within firms and between
firms and their customers or clients—leads to stable social networks that benefit all. The natural pull of “customer
loyalty” is strongest at the local level where the greatest personal connections are formed. There is thus a real
business case to be made for some of Milbank’s ideas. For more discussion see Bruni and Zamagni, Civil Economy,
87.
100
gratuitous relationships at their own appropriate levels, akin to the principle of subsidiarity in
Catholic social thought. The dispersal of power and responsibility among communities and
stakeholders must be as widespread as possible, yet within the framework of justice guaranteed
by law. So although different types of social bodies will need to incorporate the priority of gift in
different ways, it would seem the logic of gift can find a place in all types of entities.
In this light, Milbank’s advocacy of a form of Christendom and rejection of a “secular,”
religiously neutral public sphere can be preserved to a degree. The state should have an interest
in a robust civil society in which individuals are formed in virtues such as honesty and
compassion by religious communities grounded in substantive values. A society populated by
those without these virtues would lack trust, and this would prevent any of its institutions—
including the legal and political—from functioning efficiently and justly. As long as individual
rights are protected and social opportunity is facilitated, the Church can aim to spread its
corporate life into the wider polis without any danger of totalitarianism. Just as Milbank echoes
de Lubac’s rejection of a separation between purely “natural” and “supernatural” ends, so all
institutions can ultimately be ordered to the same supernatural reality—the cosmic gift exchange
that is our incorporation into God’s own life, as it is sacramentally made present in the
Eucharistic, ecclesial community.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that there is a central problem in Milbank’s ecclesial and
social-political unfolding of his theological ontology, yet also a way of addressing this problem
that is itself informed by his ontology. Although Milbank consistently upholds the integrity of
material creation, he frequently undercuts the penultimate goodness of the finite boundaries
101
within which creation finds itself. As a result, he almost always speaks of the Church as an
eternally present ontological entity, and thereby neglects its members’ need to be spiritually
formed in time and space. And because his social and political thought is entirely dependent on
his ecclesiology, he articulates an exclusively organic model of human community whose right
functioning is due to intrinsic, not extrinsic factors. This leaves no room either for asserting the
rights of individuals over against their communities or for questioning whether the structural
circumstances of the broader social order are just to begin with. However, these problems can be
quelled by reflections on Milbank’s own ontology of gift. His emphasis that creation will
ultimately return the gift of its existence to God requires a penultimately extrinsic “one-way” gift
allowing it to be intrinsically formed so as to be capable of such a return. In the Church’s own
life, this entails a greater emphasis that grace is mediated through the “law” that is the concrete
person and work of Christ. In the broader polis, Milbank’s paradigm must be integrated with a
greater appreciation for the necessary protection of individual rights and structural justice, even
as the goal of social policy can remain the facilitation of gift-exchanging communities.
CONCLUSION
Based on this thesis’ exploration of various dimensions of Milbank’s ontology of gift, I have
argued that his principal contribution to contemporary theology involves the social meaning of
the Gospel. Christian discourse around what is most “particular” to the faith—salvation, grace,
the self-giving love of the cross—has often been placed in a separate compartment from
discourse about social and political life, the latter frequently associated with a relatively
autonomous realm of secularity and natural law. Yet if grace is not solely or even primarily a
means of individual salvation—of either the “healing” or “elevating” type—but is identical with
the very giftedness that actually makes us creatures, then it has necessary and intrinsic relevance
for every dimension of life. To speak of salvation is to speak of creation come into its own, and
to talk of creation and human life is to refer precisely to the sphere of grace.
The divine gift is ultimately inseparable from its creaturely return, even if, as Milbank needs
to emphasize more, it penultimately anticipates this return. As a return gift in its essence,
authentically human life always consists of “active reception.” On the paradigm of the
incarnation, truly human life is never “merely” human but has its source and end in God, just as
God’s own life is one of ever-excessive liberality, our own existence part of this excess. And
given that the relatively “horizontal” relationships between created beings participate in the
“vertical” exchange between God and creation, the social dimensions of our existence make
present the mystery of this cosmic exchange in an especially intense way. Social life, even in
politics and economic transactions, can never take the form of merely “quid pro quo” or “an eye
for an eye” relations, even if concepts such as these sometimes serve a pragmatic, provisional
purpose. A theological ontology of cosmic gift exchange demands, in the terminology of chapter
103
4, that even the “thinnest” sorts of institutions and communities orient themselves toward the
facilitation of “thick,” gift-exchanging community.
Milbank is not alone in advocating the social, political and economic relevance of gift. The
recent (2009) papal social encyclical, Caritas in veritate, states that “economic, social and
political development, if it is to be authentically human, needs to make room for the principle of
gratuitousness as an expression of fraternity” and “the principle of gratuitousness and the logic
of gift … can and must find their place within normal economic activity.”1 Pope Benedict XVI,
like Milbank, argues that this logic of gift can best be served in “a broad new composite reality
embracing the private and public spheres,” through various associations and enterprises similar
to those Milbank commends.2 This broad sphere of gift is neither closed off to strangers nor at a
centralized, bureaucratic remove from concrete relationships. The cultivation of such a sphere is
precisely what allows these relationships to flourish and true exchanges of ourselves to take
place. As Milbank stresses, the ultimate meaning of being is rooted in the relationships of self-
giving and self-receiving that constitute God’s Triune life. And our reception of our own selves
from God is our giving of these same selves back to God—mediated horizontally by our
relationships of gift exchange with each other. As this thesis has argued, adjustments must be
made to Milbank’s framework to accommodate the penultimate importance of relatively
extrinsic finite boundaries. But as a whole, his theological ontology clearly articulates the
intrinsically social meaning of the gift of grace and our calling to embody the logic of this gift in
every aspect of our lives in the world.
1
Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate (June 29, 2009), accessed Jul. 1, 2014,
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-
veritate_en.html, §34, §39. Emphasis in original.
2
Ibid., §46.
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________. The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009.
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________. “The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority.” New Blackfriars 85
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John Milbank S Theological Ontology of Gift

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John Milbank S Theological Ontology of Gift

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John Milbank’s Theological Ontology of Gift

and its Social-Political Meaning

divine-creaturely “exchange.” Further, he establishes that insofar as all intra-human gift

exchange participates ontologically in this cosmic exchange, human social life—including

the political-economic order—must be structured to facilitate the sorts of relationships in

Chapter 1: Milbank’s Theological Ontology of Gift 8

Chapter 2: The Social Meaning of Milbank’s Ontology of Gift 32

Chapter 3: The Ontological Significance of Gift as Exchange 57

Chapter 4: Penultimate Goods, Communities, and Justice 79

which exchanges tend to be contractual and emphatically not gift-based.

and to enlarge the influence of these spheres.4

an-economic and non-coincidental with the transcendental of “being” as expressed in classical

fulfillment of a contract, and bound up in concrete relationships that necessarily involve

exchange and reciprocity. Gift-giving is frequently deemed essential to these relationships, a

relationships without being sullied by them?

Christian theology—interpreted in an Augustinian, neo-Platonic cast—can overcome what it

exchange in concrete human experience. His understanding of divine-human gift exchange is

Thesis and Outline

including the political-economic order—must be structured to facilitate the sorts of relationships

human situation in which not all gifts are properly returned.

analogical, and participatory ontology of “active reception,” in which creation’s reception of

giftedness mediated through the “horizontal” exchanges of human poesis.

relationships between rulers and ruled and in economic transactions.

Chapter 4 explores concerns with Milbank’s social-political development of his ontology as

MILBANK’S THEOLOGICAL ONTOLOGY OF GIFT

Participation and Active Reception

their own identities by conflict with and at the expense of others.

Insofar as our existence as creatures is contingent on what transcends us—God’s creative

(methexis) in God’s own being.

being is independent of the derivative being of creation—Milbank is in no sense a process

thought more in terms of mathematics—infinitely more of the same—than of levels of depth, in

conflict and power struggles.

really go beyond particular acts to the continual existence of particular beings.

continuously generated ex nihilo in time,” through the active participation of creatures

divine love so that negativity was consumed by positive excess.19

Nature as Excessive Gift

is a brick wall that we might inadvertently run into.”24

of a gift never being (actively) received.27 He interprets Bruaire’s insights as a furthering of de

this linguistic construction of reality is poesis—creativity as expressed in all manner of

also beyond our capabilities and expectations. Milbank writes that

creation illustrates the extent of participation in Milbank’s ontology. Vertical participation is

inseparable from horizontal participation; creaturely participation in God occurs by means of

“superaddition” is illustrated in a number of analogies Milbank adduces, several of them taken

Gift as Unilateral Exchange

Despite all the complexities in Milbank’s theo-ontological framework, his characterization

Critiquing a common “communitarian” position, he states that “every community exchanges

discussed in the next chapter.

the sense of an equally ultimate exchange.

This unilateral and hierarchical pattern is also crucial in understanding Milbank’s

Incarnation, Church, and World as Sites of Gift Exchange

some sense be always-already anticipated by creation.64

invoked by Aquinas. Further,

actively in the relationship.

THE SOCIAL MEANING OF MILBANK’S ONTOLOGY OF GIFT

framework—an integration of democracy and hierarchy in his notion of political representation

and a sacramental conception of economic production and exchange—most clearly demonstrate

its connection with his ontology of gift.

The Church as Cosmopolis of Universal Gift Exchange

sufficiency to real community,” he writes, “the communitarians overestimate it, precisely

in an inclusive, non-self-referential way. It is unique in its incorporation of otherness; it does not

musical harmony.9 Milbank states that

existence of humanity as such: nulla humanitas extra ecclesiam.”19

through trust” or “just solidarity through trust.”22 He admits that