John Milbank
Biographic Data
| ID | 270060 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Milbank |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Milbank |
| SIGNATURE | MILBANK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4270-1633 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 182 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Trinitarian Categories and the Division of Nature in John Scottus Eriugena
Eriugena's rendering of creativity as the central ontological category must be understood in terms of his comprehension of the Trinity in terms of causa sui . Everything participates vertically in the divine self‐creation which is simultaneous with the creation of finite reality. Eriugena refigures the horizontal Aristotelian‐neoplatonic categories in terms of this vertical metaphysics. The apophatic discourse of ‘naming God’ linked to the latter…
The Politics of Virtue
Negation in Poetics and Theology
There is a certain parallel between ‘negative capability’ in poetics and negation in theology. However, the former should be understood after Coleridge, not Keats, as blending empathetic self‐estrangement with expressive subjective involvement. Yet this only makes sense in terms of a participation in the transcendent. Similarly, negation in mystical theology is one moment in oscillation with the cataphatic. Negative theology, so understood, only …
Genealogies of Truth
Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This not only contradicts the Incarnation, but has its own genealogical origins in a dubious loss of Christian philosophy as an integral enterprise. In general, genealogy can be seen as negative or positive. Negative genealogy alternatively traces a break with myth, as with early philosophy, or else, as with Hindu thought, traces a break with the spiritual …
After Science and Religion
The popular field of 'science and religion' is a lively and well-established area. It is however a domain which has long been characterised by certain traits. In the first place, it tends towards an adversarial dialectic in which the separate disciplines, now conjoined, are forever locked in a kind of mortal combat. Secondly, 'science and religion' has a tendency towards disentanglement, where 'science' does one sort of thing and 'religion' anoth…
A Tale of Two Monsters and Four Elements
In the first I shall explore the complex way in which Carl Schmitt’s thought was split three ways: between a Catholic universalism that extends the “law of humanity” to the whole of the globe; a modern defense of the normativity of the absolutely sovereign nation-state; and finally a stress upon the primacy of a more limited civilizational landmass, smaller than that of the whole planet but larger than that of the state. In this third case, it is…
Religious Experience and the Question of Spirit
In Triplicate
The Double Pause of Now Out of the national frying pan, into the global fire. It is already impossible to consider the topic of the future of the United Kingdom after Brexit without taking into account the way in which the Brexit crisis has immediately been overtaken by a worldwide medical catastrophe. The ironies of fate at work here are of course immense, but they are also multiple. In effect Britain's exit from the European Union in practical,…
Reformation 500
In general the effect of the Reformation has been negative, but this is because it but imperfectly overcame the legacy of later medieval philosophy which was both univocalist and nominalist. In consequence it has encouraged some of the negative features of modernity: capitalism, the emergence of the sovereign state, the disenchantment of nature, iconoclasm, literalism and the disparagement of tradition. However, modern Catholicism has not been al…
Writing and the Order of Learning
Theology was traditionally built upon the trivium and the quadrivium of the liberal arts. One ascended from approximate signs of reality to the more autonomous but thinner realm of numbers and then, beyond both, once more through signs, one intimated the higher creative numbers of God. But in modernity, the priority of grammar, whereby meaning is naturally linked to thing, has been destroyed and equally the notion of arithmos as an eidos, mediati…
Criminalising the Client
In 1998, Sweden was the first country in the world to criminalise the purchase of sexual services, but not the sale of sex. The law represented a new prostitution regime that problematised power re
Oikonomia Leaves Home
1. The Political Fourfold Political rule involves four factors: sovereignty, force, persuasion, and administration. Up until modern times, in the history of the West, the first two factors were the most in evidence. Political rule claimed an uneasy monopolization of power in the name of its own legitimacy. This legitimacy could be variously established and justified, but its reality was in the end proved by the exercise of might. At the same time…
Politics of Virtue
Contemporary politics is dominated by a liberal creed that champions ‘negative liberty’ and individual happiness. This creed undergirds positions on both the right and the left – free-market capitalism, state bureaucracy and individualism in social life. The triumph of liberalism has had the effect of subordinating human association and the common good to narrow self-interest and short-term utility. By contrast, post-liberalism promotes individua…
Politics of Virtue
Dignity Rather than Right
Ha existido un matrimonio entre dignidiad y derecho que se ha mostrado más inestable de lo que parecía, sobre todo en el caso de los debates entre la tradición moderna liberal y la tradición católica. Para encontrar una solución, el autor deconstruye la historia del concepto de “dignidad” en las doctrinas de Platón, Aristóteles, Cicerón y Tomás de Aquino, así como su posterior transformación y secularización en la Modernidad. Traza la relación en…
Theurgy and the Soul
Christianity and Platonism in East and West
Beyond Secular Order
Against Human Rights
There is a now longstanding debate concerning the origin of the notion of subjective rights and their definition. Subjective rights as ‘possessive individualism’ should be distinguished from active and claim rights nonetheless objectively grounded. The latter gain ground in the Middle Ages in essential continuity with classical objectivist notions of justice as ‘right order’ that remained influential in practice into the 18th century. The former …
Allegorical reading and the embodiment of the soul in Origen
On “Thomistic Kabbalah”
The Christian Bible was from the outset a dogmatic and Christological conception, which entailed a mystical reading of signs and events, a practise of speculation at once narratological and phenomenological. The trilogy of Olivier‐Thomas Venard OP – Thomas d'Aquin, poète théologien – is proposed as crucial to understanding how Thomas Aquinas preserves the authentic biblical character of Christian theology, proceeding along the diagonal axis of th…
Hume Versus Kant
The sharp separation between religion and reason in public life is not compatible with democracy. For thinkers like Habermas this separation is based upon enlightenment, but in fact it is based only on one version of enlightenment, that of Kant. If we turn instead to Hume, who made feeling, not reason, central for the workings of the human mind, then we discover far more fluidity between religious and other modes of thought and yet at the same ti…
The Monstrosity of Christ
What matters is not so much that Zizek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.--John MilbankTo put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank.--Slavoj ZizekIn th…
The New Divide
Without Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth
This is a response to Slavoj Žižek, which carries the debate between us forward. This debate is published as The Monstrosity of Christ edited by Creston Davis and published by MIT Press, 2009
Theology and Social Theory
"In this acclaimed book, John Milbank suggests that both enterprises are compromised by the theological and anti-theological assumptions built into the social sciences themselves." "This new edition of Theology and Social Theory brings John Milbank's classic work fully into line with his most recent views and is laid out in an easier-to-read format. It features a substantial new preface in which Milbank answers his critics lay defending and furth…
Paul against Biopolitics
As others have argued, modern liberalism can be seen as dominated by the biopolitical. In both the economic and the political realms, this involves a contradictory notion of how the natural gives rise to the cultural and the cultural both suppresses and advances the natural. On either side of this divide, uncontrollable excesses arise, which ensure that this immanentist model is never immune from the return of the theopolitical in a bastardized f…
Stories of Sacrifice
Stories of Sacrifice
The Gift and the Given
Theology and Social Theory
Journal Article Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, by John Milbank. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990, 443 pp. $64.95 Get access Donald A. Nielsen Donald A. Nielsen State University of New York College at Oneonta Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 53, Issue 4, Winter 1992, Pages 468-470, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711451 Published: 01 December 1992
Culture and Justice
Invoking Zygmunt Bauman's acute exposition of a left-critical hesitation between intellectuals as saviours and intellectuals as oppressors, this essay argues that while Bauman reveals this hesitation as crucial and symptomatic, nevertheless he leaves it unresolved. The essay shows how the human nature/ culture distinction (which is also a continuity) is, in fact, constitutive of human culture as such; moreover, the essay argues that this constitu…
The Midwinter Sacrifice
Sacred Triads
In this paper the author endeavours to bring together discussions of Georges Dumezil’s thesis concerning the tripartite structure of Indo‐European mythology with discussions of Trinitarian theology. The claim is, first, that the mythology led to an intrinsically aporetic characterization of the soul as a sphere of ‘self‐government in space’. Second, that Plato, initially, and then much more emphatically Augustine, dissolved this construction and …
A Tale of Two Monsters and Four Elements
In the first I shall explore the complex way in which Carl Schmitt’s thought was split three ways: between a Catholic universalism that extends the “law of humanity” to the whole of the globe; a modern defense of the normativity of the absolutely sovereign nation-state; and finally a stress upon the primacy of a more limited civilizational landmass, smaller than that of the whole planet but larger than that of the state. In this third case, it is…
Oikonomia Leaves Home
1. The Political Fourfold Political rule involves four factors: sovereignty, force, persuasion, and administration. Up until modern times, in the history of the West, the first two factors were the most in evidence. Political rule claimed an uneasy monopolization of power in the name of its own legitimacy. This legitimacy could be variously established and justified, but its reality was in the end proved by the exercise of might. At the same time…
Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 2, Spring 2002
Vico's science of imagination
(1983). Vico's science of imagination. History of European Ideas: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 337-342
Montaigne
Vico
The Body by Love Possessed
The Second Difference
Critical Study
Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: a Study in Theological Ethics , with a new introduction by the author, Trinity University Monograph Series in Religion Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society. Winston
Boehme's mysticism
David Walsh, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfilment: A Stud.)' of Jacob Boehme. Gainesville, University of Florida Humanities Monographs, 53. x + 139 pp
The Name of Jesus
Postmodern Critical Augustinianism‘
Enclaves, or Where is the Church?
It was not the purpose of Theology and Social Theory (whose argument has been so accurately precised by Fergus Kerr) to imagine the Church as Utopia. Nor to discover in its ramified and fissiparous history some single ideal exemplar. For this would have been to envisage the Church in spatial terms—as another place, which we might arrive at, or as this identifiable site, which we can still inhabit. How could either characterize the Church which ex…
Theology and Social Theory
Journal Article Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, by John Milbank. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990, 443 pp. $64.95 Get access Donald A. Nielsen Donald A. Nielsen State University of New York College at Oneonta Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 53, Issue 4, Winter 1992, Pages 468-470, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711451 Published: 01 December 1992
Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic
Stories of Sacrifice
Stories of Sacrifice
Sacred Triads
In this paper the author endeavours to bring together discussions of Georges Dumezil’s thesis concerning the tripartite structure of Indo‐European mythology with discussions of Trinitarian theology. The claim is, first, that the mythology led to an intrinsically aporetic characterization of the soul as a sphere of ‘self‐government in space’. Second, that Plato, initially, and then much more emphatically Augustine, dissolved this construction and …
Radical Orthodoxy
Intensities
Aquinas has mostly been read in the twentieth century in terms of a duality between reason and faith, philosophy and theology. However a careful reading of his texts will not support this position. All knowledge for Aquinas is by participation in the divine mind, analogically mediated, and faith and reason are simply differing degrees of intensity of this mediation. There is for Aquinas no secure ontology outside the orientation to the beatific v…
Truth in Aquinas (Radical Orthodoxy)
The Soul of Reciprocity Part Two
In “The Soul of Reciprocity Part One: Reciprocity Refused”, the case for reciprocity was established in a negative manner. It was shown that its refusal is a crucial aspect of modernity: the result of the interacting influences of modern capitalist economics and an ontotheological outlook that is explicitly modern, not ancient. A disdain for reciprocity thus lies at modernity’s very heart. The soul, which, I argued, it allied to reciprocity, was …
The Soul of Reciprocity Part One
In this first of a two‐part essay, Milbank contends that “Intersubjectivity poses itself both as a problem and as a solution only within the regime of representation that has prevailed since Descartes – although it was foreshadowed by post‐Scottish scholasticism.” The first part, then, is given over to a deconstruction of modern notions of the self in anticipation of the second part, which is a constructive proposal for a recovery of the soul. In…
Christ the Exception
It is now too little discussed, but one key ingredient of 20th century ‘modernism’ has been its reaction to the writing of James Frazer in The Golden Bough. One can think of course of The Waste Land, but also of David Jones’s Anathemata, besides countless other examples. In some of these instances, notably that of Jones, implicit anthropological critiques of religion are turned on their head. Christ as one more sacred king sacrificed becomes inst…
The Midwinter Sacrifice
Radical Orthodoxy
Truth in Aquinas
Provocative and sophisticated, Truth in Aquinas is a fascinating re-evaluation of a key area - truth - in the work of Thomas Aquinas. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock's provocative but strongly argued position is that many of the received views of Aquinas as philosopher and theologian are wrong.This compelling and controversial work builds on the amazing reception of Radical Orthodoxy (Routledge, 1999).
Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 2, Spring 2002
Philosophy (45 works) · Theology (26 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Political science (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (12 works) · History (10 works)