The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology by John Milbank

The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology Reviews

• 
  Jacob Aitken

  The best way to describe this book is with the tagline: Milbank's report of Radical Orthodoxy from the front line. We shouldn't confuse this moment of Radical Orthodoxy with the early (and fun) salvos from the 1990s. While the book is subtitled with "politics," it's important to remember that Milbank doesn't divorce politics from ontology--so when he defends some of his political proposals he is defending his ontology.
  
  In short, Milbank is arguing for an anti-state socialism grounded in the ontology of the diffusion of God's being as his gift to creation. More specifically, he defends his reading of Ruskin against British detractors, seeing the latter as tacitly committed to neo-liberalism and market regardless of their political affiliations.
  
  In the first section of the book Milbank’s hero is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In God alone subjectivity and “outness” are finaly co-extensive and yet the differential relation remains irreducible (kindle loc. 464). All knowledge is an anticipatio of “a later concrete discovery.” Conclusion: imagination mediates between reason and understanding “in such a fashion that the ‘resistance’ it receives from external objects has no merely negative value, but can actually act as a spur to a new creative synthesis” (498). “For Coleridge there is always a linguistic exchange that is counter-poised to, and perhaps more fundamental than, the economic exchange, and the first exchange has its ground and fulfillment in Christ, the communicative logos itself (1849).
  
  
  Nominalism and the Market
  
  Milbank suggests that the earlier Christian socialists in Britain opposed the market in a way that did not commit them to Revolutionary violence or socialist calling cards (e.g., egalitarianism, unions, etc). The important point was to find a “pivot” that escapes commodification. This is the sacred. It is validated by modes of religious tradition (loc. 170).
  
  “Thatcher realized, as Arnold and his descendants did not, that to ask what are health, industry, and freedom for is a superfluous luxury in a capitalist system” (834). Wealth and production had always been seen as means to the good life. Now they are the ends themselves. In fact, how can there be ethics at all, as Milbank notes? Ethics in the public realm implies recognizing common goals beyond the maximization of wealth and individual freedom. In fact, if all that matters is my individual choice, as the hippies and libertines said, the only possible result is the market. The market is the most efficient mediator of minimalized choices.
  
  One suspects that one of the problems of secular socialism was its inability to deal with ontological and epistemological concerns. In other words, socialism is a mode of knowledge. He writes, “Revelation is always revelation of a social order, because social relationship is the most fundamental kind of knowledge” (1680).
  
  In some ways the most entertaining part of the book is his response to his critics. Specifically, is the Christian narrative a metanarrative of violence? No. Christianity is an anti-metanarrative since it posits the arrival of a community of reconciliation and an end to fateful logics (2995). It is a Platonic vision of the “Good” as “precisely the harmonious fitting in of all roles and options” (3177).
  
  Can someone who rejects all metaphysics as ontotheology finally avoid a nihilism? Postmodernism errs in seeing the universal as nothing, and if nothing, then death. If not content can ultimately be justified (in terms of a universal), “a ceaseless variety of content is simply tolerated or permitted according to the formal rules of an agonistic game originally played to the advantage of certain identifiable players” (3330). Any newness will be construed as a violence from the outside.
  
  Did Milbank commit the genetic fallacy in TST? Did he say x is wrong because of its pedigree? Not exactly. He notes “since diachrony is also real, and even, to a degree, prevailing, all meaning and all action involve genealogy” (3868).
  
  Milbank has some fun critiques of pluralism. Most adherents to religious pluralism ironically assume confidence in a timeless “logos enjoying time-transcending encounters with an unchanging reality” (5701). In other words, they are assuming the Western discourse. Milbank asserts that linking fashionable causes like ecology and feminism to religious pluralism actually undercuts the former. Religious pluralism moves towards a liberal market and liberal politics, which mitigate against ecology, at least.
  
  Conclusion:
  
  A wonderful book and space forbids dealing with other important claims (like his angelogy). There are some problems, though. Milbank is at his weakest when he deals with Protestant historical theology. Well, he doesn't deal with it at all. He simply "machine guns" assertions.
• 
  Christina “6 word reviewer” Lake

  Chapter 14 worth price of book!