Katie, who just gave some penetrating critiques of John Milbank’s recent essay, “Stephen Fry and the unsexing of sex,” has suggested that I weave my comments on that same essay into a short post of their own. So here is something to that effect.
What I wanted to point out was Milbank’s essay’s implicit imperialism–the same imperialism, I would say, that is operating in his two previous pieces on the ABC Religion & Ethics website, “Christianity, the Enlightenment and Islam,” and “Power is necessary for peace: In defence of Constantine.” Other bloggers–Adam Kotsko and J. Kameron Carter come to mind–have noted this triumphalist tendency in his recent articles. First, my take on these earlier pieces:
The Islam essay is something like a hybrid between the Clash of Civilizations and Benedict XVI’s now infamous Regensburg address, with a dash of Bernard Lewis thrown in. In short: Islam, while it does have monotheism, fell off the train when it failed to internalize the concept of reason that Christianity embodies so well. To the extent that it is not “a church,” Islam is in trouble, for all manner of irrationalities–massacres left and right, a curious Qur’anic “fundamentalism,” a lack of proper education about other religions (but also an allergy to the secularizing tendencies of “liberalism,” which Milbank appreciates)–have arisen. Since Islam lacks the logos that Christianity intrinsically has, its present decline is no shock, given “the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires” that kept it going for so long. You take away their breath, and they return to dust.
The essay in defence of Constantine, while no match for Eusebius of Caesarea’s Tricennial Orations, continues in the same imperialist line. True charity, Milbank argues, is only possible with power; otherwise, it’s a mere “impotent aspiration.” In place of sustained argument, the essay quickly turns to polemicizing, tarring the anabaptists with the pseudo-historical brushes of “Marcionism,” “Gnosticism,” and “Iconoclasticism.” (But don’t worry–some of his best friends…) Orthodoxy, on the other hand, takes the hard but noble path of recognizing that “because God creates us as hybrid material-spiritual creatures, the church includes certain physical spaces that one may have physically to defend.” Orthodoxy does tough love, not sentimental delusion. To disavow violence–not unlimited, effusive violence, but controlled, rational, perhaps even instructive violence reluctantly but firmly undertaken for the purpose of ordering the teeming hordes–to disavow this kind of violence in defense of these spaces is, it turns out, to deny the sacramentality of reality and to indulge in pietistic hang-wringing (or a heretical circle-jerk, if you like).
In either case, the colonial empires and “Constantinianism” are endorsed because they are seen to bring order to the irrational/selfish/incompetent/intellectually impoverished other, in much the same way that the logos does in early Christian thought. Both essays are, in my opinion, hypermasculine (it’s not called the logos spermatikos for nothing, folks!), and it’s against that background that I read Milbank’s latest essay on sex, which appeared about two weeks after that on Constantine.
The Stephen Fry article looks to me like an extension into the sexual realm of the project already underway in Milbank’s more political essays. It extols the idea of the heterosexual male (since, as Erin pointed out, real women are not engaged), who, because he is willing (or perhaps just enabled by his own superior nature) to undertake the “most unselfish” of all things (begetting and raising of children), somehow brings order, civility, and God to what would otherwise be a sprawling mess of gay and womanish “egotistical passion” (maybe “impotent aspiration,” too). Now that’s a logos!
The heterosexual male, like the colonizer and like Christianity, is naturally self-sacrificial, strong, noble, and committed to getting the job done even if that means rolling up his sleeves and plunging into material messiness that Gnostics, gays, and other world-deniers would like to avoid. In fact, the colonized are halfway thankful for it, conscious as they are of their own intrinsic disorder: “No-one has written more effectively than gay men themselves about how the wrong kind of gay culture of cultic secrecy and elite licence can reinforce a corruptly patriarchal British establishment.” Heterosexuality is a kind of benevolent but potent colonialism–sort of like C.S. Lewis’s Aslan. It’s not safe, but it is good. (Safe for whom?)
I want to make one more observation before I end this already rambling post. I’ve been trying to counter Milbank by distilling the problematic logic that I think is operating in all three of the essays in question, but distilling logics is also one of his main ways of writing (as it probably is for most theologians proper). There’s nothing wrong with that unless you consistently allow it to get in the way of the data that don’t fit your scheme, and here’s where I think he falls short. He identifies the logic of Gnosticism, of Marcionism, of Iconoclasticism, of gay sex, of straight sex, of Islam, of Christianity, and once these logics are out, they act as self-fulfilling prophecies. (This is quite a feat, by the way, since scholars on my side of the pond are still trying to figure out whether Gnosticism even ever existed.) Bridget rightly noted in the post below that Milbank does nuance his condemnation of the “logic” of homosexuality by acknowledging a few positive instances of gay sex, but I am not so sure that the nuancing is genuine. The essay is front-loaded with anecdotes of the worst kind of gay sex, so the positive kinds are necessarily introduced only as exceptions that prove the rule. Sure, some gays are not narcissistic, but in their goodness they subvert the very logic of their own gayness and are thus just heterosexuals, albeit heterosexuals in drag.
Here is where I should probably add a conclusion and more quotations from the essays themselves, but this is as far as I’ve thought, and so far I think I’m right.
Megan McCabe
Julia
Erin Kidd
Bridget
Elizabeth
Katie Grimes
Beth
Nichole M. Flores Henry
Sonja
Women of Wit
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1. I just thought of another way to interpret his phrase “lamentably premature collapse” (which he uses to describe the end of European colonization) in a way that also connects up with his sex article.
it is quite phallic, no? like the man lost his erection before finishing the deed of bringing sexual order to an insufficiently masculinized world by inseminating the woman?
Yes, I thought of this as well, the first time around. But it’s good enough for me that we both thought of it
2. de-colonization is like “pulling out too soon”
3. “the lamentably premature collapse” which foreclosed the possibility of insemination
4. I wish I would have thought of that in time for our first post! ha!
5. and rather than describing my critiques as “penetrating,” i’d like to think it would be more accurate to describe them as “anti-penetrating”
Oops. Gender trouble indeed!
I don’t know about blog etiquette, but I want to mention that Adam Kotsko and Kim Fabricius also both have brand new posts on Milbank up at their respective blogs. Respectively:
http://itself.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/on-milbank-lets-not-and-say-we-did/#comments
http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2010/11/evening-with-cardinal-milbank.html
Well, Sonja, since you didn’t cite him, here are some of my personal favorites:
“What the West needs to do, I maintain, is to encourage the growth of more mystical forms of Islam, which are also the forms that stress a religious mode of organisation that is not directly a political one, or even necessarily a legal one. What is needed, in other words, is for Islam to evolve toward an ecclesial or “church-like” mode of organisation.”
Sooo…the proper course of action is for Europeans to make Islam (which is, mysteriously, categorized as “non-Western”…I’m sure that goes over really well with the 1.4-7 million Muslims living in America) change so as to become more like Christianity? Do we need to parse out the ways in which this is completely out of line?
“Yet in important ways Christianity has more in common with the Enlightenment legacy than it has with Islam. Both see the role of reason as central and both favour tolerance and open debate, whereas Islam, on the whole, is more equivocal about these values.
In a sense, this is not surprising because both Christianity and the Enlightenment are Western phenomena. ”
Does anyone else remember the part where most of Greek classical literature was preserved by Islamic scholars through the Middle Ages, to be discovered and re-appropriated as the “foundation of Western civilization” during the Renaissance? Or was that another of the “scholarly inaccurate” details that I picked up in my (gasp) religious studies classes? (Actually, that’s kind of a real question–I’m only 90% sure I’m right on this one.)
“As Augustine argued in Book V of The City of God, the gospel transcends and fulfils, yet does not abolish, the political level of the Old Testament, just as charity fulfils and surpasses yet does not abolish the need to pass laws and administer justice.”
This may well be an accurate reading of Augustine (I, um, don’t know), but can we please, please, for the sake of inter-religious dialog and the peace of mind of poor Hebrew Bible scholars everywhere, cut it out with the “OT = law, NT= justice” dichotomy?
Nice ones. The plea for Islam to go back to being “mystical” is cute. The second one you highlighted is almost beyond words
“Yet in important ways Christianity has more in common with the Enlightenment legacy than it has with Islam. Both see the role of reason as central and both favour tolerance and open debate, whereas Islam, on the whole, is more equivocal about these values.
In a sense, this is not surprising because both Christianity and the Enlightenment are Western phenomena.”
Uh, Christianity *when* and *where*?? And Islam *when* and *where*? I can think of a whole boatload of people (Donatist martyrs, anyone? “pagans” under Constantine?) who would be surprised to learn that the Christianity that killed them favored tolerance and open debate.
Also notice the unmistakable racism; the claim isn’t even that the Enlightenment arose from Christianity, but that Christianity and the Enlightenment arose from “the West,” which is why they are automatically superior to Islam.
“it’s not called the logos spermatikos for nothing, folks!”
That’s a keeper.
One of the things that genuinely worries me about Milbank is his need to make Others exotic and thus dangerous, something which reinforces the imperialistic tendency you pointed out, Sonja.
It’s that Other promiscuous gay subculture which exemplifies the sexual problematic. It’s that Islamic Other which highlights a lack of rationality. It’s that Anabaptist Other which shows a lack of willingness to engage the gray realities of this world. It’s never the heterosexual male who uses porn (as 40 million American men regularly do), commits adultery, and blames the decline of marriage on others. It’s never the ecclesiastic male who refuses to engage in rational dialogue on important issues regarding the Church and its place in culture. It’s never the Christian moral realist who may not have the courage to look at or promote decisive action in gray issues in areas other than just war. It’s these latter three which are needed to promote again the Christendom for which Milbank is longing.
For all his uses and inversions of sexy cultural theory, Milbank would be better off getting his good ideas across by stopping his demonizations of others and seeing how these are projections pertaining to both his privileged masculine vantage and his utopian dreams.
I found this post and the one below on Milbank interesting. I’ve been reading a book by Steven Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction, and there’s a chapter on the erotic and radical orthodoxy mentioning Milbank (pp. 139-40)….
“Milbank argues that sexual difference cannot be completely disolved away. Men and women do have distinctive biological and bodily structures, which affect how they experience the world. The difficulty is in spelling out what this means. Milbank certainly wants to avoid the sexism which identifies men with control and independence, and women with submission and passivity. However, he does state that some generalizations can be made: ‘men are more nomadic, direct, abstractive and forceful, women are more settled, subtle, particularizing and beautiful — though both sexes are equally innovative, legislative, commanding and conservative within these different modes’ (BR, p. 207).
Despite his intentions, we have to ask whether Milbank’s desire to have some structure to human identity betrays him into the hands of a traditional sexist steriotype. Pitting abstraction against what is settled and particular can sound unnervingly like the old patriarchial idea that men represent reason, while women are tied to the passions and the body.”
I think he’s really giving Milbank the benefit of the doubt.
I think that’s a good summary of his thought. Before these three essays, I do remember that one of the major theology blogs had noted some remark Milbank had made about not wanting to deny that there was something special about heterosexual marriage, or something of that sort.
Thank you, too, Crystal, for the helpful reference. What do you think of the book overall?
I like the book and it’s a helpful overview for someone like me who probably won’t read all the primary radical orthodoxy texts. Steven Shakespeare (The Inclusive God: Reclaiming Theology for an Inclusive Church) is pretty much the opposite of radical orthodoxy, which is why I chose his book, but I think the criticisms in the book are are fair.
Thanks for the reference! Maybe I will have time to check it out this Xmas break.
[...] know much about the British economy (those of you who do, please contribute), because I think my earlier critique of his thought still holds true for this new essay, and most of all because I’m in the middle [...]
[...] not really. But I did just find a cool line in a book that meshes nicely with my old post on Milbank and Islam. From Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions: Or, How [...]