John Milbank's work is familiar to the assiduous reader of New Blackfriars, who will recall his two-part study of William Warburton, as well as his more recent essays ‘On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism’ and ‘Religion, Culture and Anarchy: the attack on the Amoldian vision’. Although not incorporated materially into Theology and Social Theory, these essays open up related lines of investigation, and, having read them, one might not find his massive book so intimidating. It may be said, at least, that one might have been prepared for this venture into a post-Nietzschean theology which is also profoundly (Anglican) Catholic—an unlikely conjunction, one might have thought.

The book’s dense scholarship and theoretical complexity are formidable, but, fortunately, in the title, the epigraph and the table of contents, we are offered three clues to the brilliantly simple thesis which it takes all the learning and argument in the rest of the book to expound and substantiate.

A book entitled Theology and Social Theory in a series containing titles such as Theology and Philosophy, Theology and Politics and the like, would naturally be expected to bring together in a mutually illuminating way what everyone is likely to think of as two radically different disciplines, each with its own autonomous method and distinctive discourse—‘naturally’, that is to say, in the cultural environment of carefully protected academic specialisms which we inhabit and which the author means to disrupt. Theologians, peering through the machicolations of faith-engaging scholarship, would learn from sociologists about the ways in which ideas are shaped by social processes.

The journey towards Milbank’s representation of Augustine’s Civitas Dei calls for an epic heroism, as it passes through woods dense with philosophical thought and over chasms of vertiginous intellectual argument. Dante, then, provides a description of one’s experience of reading Theology and Social Theory. But more significantly, he provides us with a key to its method. Milbank’s polemic is aimed at modernity, the invention of the secular story and modem political theology’s collusion with it. This modernity or secularity arose following late-mediaeval/Renaissance self-awareness. Assisted by postmodern strategies of reading, Milbank allegorizes secular discourses, deconstructs their secularism and reveals their dependence upon metaphysical and theological assumptions. By doing this he therefore embraces secular discourse (whose inception and invention ‘began at least in the eleventh century’ [p.432]) within a theological metanarrative. And that is why Dante is significant; John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory is a contemporary Commedia. This does not necessarily condemn it as a piece of late twentieth century nostalgia, a fin de siècle pre-Raphaelitism. But it means that the teleological goal of Theology and Social Theory is the recovery of a pre-modem (but not antique) theological perspective. Or, put in another (albeit Dantesque) way: this book provides a new allegorical depiction of the operation of charity [pp.425-6]. Such a reading of the book has several important corollaries, binding upon both John Milbank and his readers.

Theology and Social Theory is a book that prompts conversation on almost every page - conversation of both the ‘yes, and..and the ‘yes, but . kind, as well as something like a ‘no, but. . .’ on occasion. An adequate review would have to be a kind of gloss, a talmudic margin. It is no small tribute to Milbank that this work is so hard to discuss briefly. What follows is not a review, but a few fragments of this reader’s side of the conversation, assembled round a focal area of unease within an overall admiration for the learning and boldness of the enterprise. My title will hint at something of my discomfort: is Milbank’s commitment to history and narrative, to time as the medium of benign creativity and non-competitive difference, fully realised in his exposition? Does he ‘save time’ in a theological sense or only in the colloquial one of getting more expeditiously to his goal than the circumstances might seem to warrant?

The project of reconstructing a Christian ontology by retelling the story of the Christian Church’s origins, so as to display it as the history that makes sense of all histories, is heralded as one of the indispensable moments in the rehabilitation of a properly theological critique of secular order (e.g. p.381). ‘The metanarrative. . . is the genesis of the Church’ (p.387). This is an intriguing and exhilarating prospect; I am not sure if it has been carried through. Christian universalism is opposed to the ‘orders’ of non-Christian antiquity—the Roman sacralisation of dominion, with its programmatic refusal of a properly common good, and the Jewish commitment to law as the defining structure of a common good, at least for one specific community.

I finished this breath-taking book lost in admiration for the breadth of intellectual culture that lies behind it; for its situating of different enquiries—theological, philosophical, sociological—in illuminating inter-relation; for the masterly way in which it weaves together negative analysis and positive proposal so as to commend Christian faith as the only world-view, and recipe for social living, truly worth having. That a British author, writing at the end of the twentieth century, could take on, in profoundly informed fashion, every major proponent of autonomous thought and religiously emancipated social action (‘secular reason’), from the Athenian enlightenment to the Parisian nouveaux philosophes, all with a view to showing the inadequacy—not simply de facto but de jure—of their projects, and, correlatively the sole adequacy of a religious, and more specifically a Christian, alternative in both theory and practice; this is, evidently, a publishing event of considerable magnitude. Moreover, the subtlety and sophistication of Milbank’s criticisms of a range of secular constructs for both thought and social action so broad as to include virtually the entire contemporary intelligentsia of Western Europe and North America, will require a response of equal incisiveness from the inhabitants of these systems, and, as such, makes his book an event in intellectual history as well. That his critique of secular rationality in its various guises is mounted in the name of Christian orthodoxy and Catholic tradition can, it seems, only gladden the heart of a Catholic believer, a priest, a Dominican.. . In the hour of Catholic Christianity’s desperate intellectual need (a glance at the pages of the Times Literary Supplement is enough to show the disappearance of Christian orthodoxy, as a source of meaning and truth, from high culture in Britain), God has, apparently, visited his people.

Sociology is a necessary evil on the academic landscape. It is the discipline we all like to hate. Somehow, sociology fits everywhere and yet belongs nowhere in particular. It does not have the finesse of philosophy, the vision of theology or the grace of classics, but as a mongrel child of the Enlightenment it plays about with their deepest insights. Sociology reflects modernity, but in a way that confirms an instinctive dislike of its basis. In the academic game of musical chairs, sociology is left standing, when the waltz ceases, and other disciplines sit awaiting the next score. Yet behind this facade of dislike, an odder and deeper crisis confronts sociology.

In the past two decades, philosophy, literary studies, history and classics have all become entwined in sociology which stands at the analytical crossroads directing a busy traffic in concepts up the high road of modernity. But as its rhetoric becomes woven into the humanities, the distinctive voice of sociology has become muted. Critical theory, embracing linguistics, post-structuralism, phenomenology and post-modernism, to name a few, now have squatter’s rights within sociological theory. Textual exegesis forms the basis of much critical philosophy which sociology has to recognise, but is uncertain how to use. Whereas Dilthey laid the philosophical basis for the autonomy of the cultural sciences against the clutches of the natural sciences, an equivalent exercise has yet to be undertaken for sociology in relation to the competing demands of other disciplines also to speak of culture. Despite their sophistication, modern philosophers such as Rorty, MacIntyre, Derrida and Levinas yield slight sociological insights. There are two sides to the analytical coins to be spent in the cultural marketplace. Sociology makes its own purchases, and these are not the debased offerings of the ‘thick’, incapable of reading the classical texts of philosophy in all their nuances. Too often one gets thick philosophical works with a very thin amount of sociology sandwiched in the centre. Anyhow, sociology has its own problems in dealing with culture.

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 exists, finitely, not in time, but as time, taken in the mode of gift and promise? Not as a peace we must slowly construct, piecemeal, imbibing our hard-learned lessons, but as a peace already given, superabundantly, in the breaking of bread by the risen Lord, which assembles the harmony of peoples then and at every subsequent eucharist. But neither as a peace already realized, which might excuse our labour. 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 source. This is not an ideal presence real or imagined, but something more like an ‘ideal transmission’ through time, and despite its ravages. Fortunately the Church is first and foremost neither a programme, nor a ‘real’ society, but instead an enacted, serious fiction. Only in its eucharistic centring is it enabled to sustain a ritual distance from itself, to preserve itself, as the body of Christ under judgement by the body of Christ, which after all, it can only receive. In a sense, this ritual distance of the Church from itself defines the Church, or rather deflects it from any definition of what it is. In its truth it is not, but has been and will be. (Here I am much indebted to Kieran Flanagan for pointing out that my book omitted the ritual dimension).