By Cynthia R. Nielsen
“The Thomistic Telescope: Truth and Identity” by John Milbank
University of Dallas, Aquinas Lecture , January 27, A.D. 2006(transcribed with tolerable accuracy by Jonathan McIntosh)
This lecture is concerned with the relationship between truth and identity. The question of truth is deeply related to the question of identity and stability. If we think of truth as saying ‘what is the case,’ as in ‘it is true that there is a cat perched on the window sill,’ then the cat has to stay still long enough for us to verify this, and it has to be distinctly recognizable as a cat, too fast a flash of mere fur would undue everything. We can invent something stable for ourselves by making it sufficiently rigid and treating it in the same way, much like a table. Then it seems we can be sure of saying some true things about these sure things. But then we can wonder if these stable things are really the way they appear, securely shaped and colored, and definable. The more radical course is to invent something more abstract, like the number one. This seems more certain and controllable. But then we realize we can only define ‘one’ in relation to something like ‘two’. This no longer seems like the pure one that can’t be multiplied or divided. In this way the most fundamental, self-identical thing turns out to be elusive and inaccessible. It would have to be immune to participation and multiplication. But the one’s we know about can be multiplied and divided.
Then we are inclined to resort to a further abstraction, turning from arithmetic and algebra to logic. Whatever the self-identical is, we know it can’t be both one and non-one. This gives us the law of excluded middle or non-contradiction. No single thing can be and not be what it is at the same time and in the same respect. If this were possible, then even tautologies would not be true.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, just this law has been seen as the foundation of all logic, and so of all truthful discourse. Here we have at least a form of truth. Modern thought, starting long ago with certain medieval currents, has sought to build on this formality towards a secure epistemology and even an ontology. But here a doubt must always persist as to whether one can cross the chasm between logical possibility and given actuality. Is anything more than a thin formal truth available to us? Can we get beyond the banal truths of logic? For the ancients and much of the middle ages, things were otherwise. The law of excluded middle ruled actuality because it was taken that there were real stable realities out there in the world. Aristotle in his Metaphys: said that without stable substances the law of non-con cannot hold. One can at the very least mean that W/o stable substances or forms out there in the world, the law of non-con cannot be applied to a deprived reality which would then be somehow really contradictory.
I suspect, however, that Aristotle’s doctrine of act over possibility means that more radically he thinks that only the actuality of ontological substance makes it true in the realm of logic which ponders possibilities that the law of non-contradiction really does hold. At the very least, one can see that if this law applies only in the realm of logic, one has a very meager doctrine of truth. It certainly will not allow that things insofar as they are as somehow true, as Aquinas holds in his doctrine of the convertibility of transcendents, it will not allow us to make statements about how things are or as they appear to us to be. So can we be assured that there are real actual, self-identical items in the world?
Plato seems to have half-agreed with skeptics like Protagoras. The material world was in itself in a temporal flux. If it exhibited relative stabilities that we can rely upon, this was because it participated in eternal, immutable archetypes of everything. Trees in the formal eidos of trees, just acts in the eidos of justice. Aristotle by contrast thought the eidei were perfectly stable within the material, temporal world itself, without any participation in transcendent forms. These two different views of the forms were then synthesized in different ways by later commentators on Aristotle, by the neo-platonists, and then by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers. To say that the world contained eidei, and the participation in those supreme eide that were the divine ideas, was to say that even if the world does not itself think (and most people affirmed even the idea of a thinking world in the case of the celestial realm beyond the lunar orbit) it is nonetheless composed of thoughts or the reflections of thoughts that are meanings. Things are incarnate meanings. Beings themselves are therefore also truths, because they exist as manifesting themselves in ordered patterns, related to ends they seek, and the ordered proportions and relations they enter into with other beings. There is an ordained proportion between the way things exist and our knowledge of things. We’re not like visitors to this solar system from some strange galaxy, as cosmic ethnographers, making observations and taking little notes that reality never intended us to be capable of making. For Platonic/Aristotelian tradition, forms exist in things so that they might be known. Knowledge is not a mirror of things, not a representation of them, but rather a process whereby forms migrate from matter to a higher mode of being which is intellectual existence. An act of thinking for Aristotle was identical to the realization of an objective eidos as a thought, even if a thought is not quite so good in terms of its existentiality, it is higher in terms of its formality.
Inversely, to have a thought and to realize an eidos further fulfills an unfolding of an active capacity of thinking itself. Thought for this model was not possible on account of the accident of mirroring, based on the example of the eye mirroring light, what Rorty called the mirror of nature. Rather, thought was believed to be possible on account of an archain ontological proportion or ordering which Aquinas call convenience, a proportion between things as existing and things as known.
Realism and nominalism.
Already in the Middle Ages, beginning as early as the 12th century with people like Roger Bacon, etc., this way of looking at things started to seem unsatisfactory. On traditional model, it appears that one can only teach someone to know by having one attend to one’s inner light, which intuits and judges by nature without any other reason. One could not under this jurisdiction teach a fundamental method which says to accept only the transparently clear and what can be measured and proved and shown to work in a repeated fashion. So in a long process culminating in 17th century, there is a method that says knowledge is not a matter of mystical communion with being, and a strange realization of the purposes of being, but instead was logical certainty, representational measure (accurate like a camera), and technological experimentation. Often these recommendations were accompanied by a new kind of theology, beginning with nominalism. This theology said in effect that God has laid down the world with an order that is radically contingent, according to decrees of his free will. This order does not necessarily reflect the divine ideas, and it embodies no relative necessities of essences. For this reason our mind’s do not operate by gathering the ways in which the world symbolizes and participates in God, nor by abstracting out an unfolding pure essence. Instead we are to observe God’s gift of creation in a detached manner, now more like investigations of this planet from another galaxy. We respond to the divine freedom with free usage of the world for pragmatic ends that we invent and contract with others to observe, a movement toward political liberalism.
What was seen as especially mysterious and unnecessarily obscure in the older view was the idea of universal ends. Surely besides trees one does not need to suppose that there is a real eidos of tree, even if it exists only qua universal in our mind. Isn’t our idea of a tree, after all, just a generalization of a tree that serves as a sign? This getting-rid-of universal essences is known as nominalism or termism. Universals are simply conventional names or terms, not naturally subsisting realities. However, we have already seen that the eidei were seen as the guarantors of truth, and the operators of the law of non-contradiction. How can one now have truth w/o them?
First of all, the entire Platonic-Aristotelian tradition that had always hesitated between, trying to include both stable substances residing in a stable eidos on one hand, or in an individual substance on the other, be this material or angelic, the nominalists now chose exclusively the latter fork, arguing that the sameness of an individual tree, belonging to a particular species, was much more secure than some vague essence of treeness. In the second place, they tended to declare (esp. Ockham) that actually universal essences as much as flux violate the principle of non-contradiction. For traditional realists, the tree as individual tree always shows something universal, not in any one aspect, but en toto, and not in terms of a parceled out share, because there is no self-standing essences out there in the world apart from individual trees. Concomitantly, the universal form tree in mind as universal also is the fulfilled comprehended individual tree or set of trees. Either way, the universal and its opposite individual seem to coincide. Nominalism was a strategy for a purged Aristotelianism, fully following through as it supposed from the law of non-contradiction.
Ockham and others also suggested that notions of participation and analogy of attribution also violated the law of non-contradiction. Something cannot both be like and unlike some higher thing, not simply in some isolatable aspect, for then one could parcel out analogy between univocity and equivocity, but truly as its whole self.
Something similar again applied to the nominalists with ideas of real relation. Something cannot be intrinsically and not just externally and accidentally related to something else without it seeming that it must be itself as not itself. One can notice here how close real relations and a notion of universals are to each other. A real relation implies something in common between two things, rendering them what they are. Inversely, if trees embody a universal form of treeness, even though this form does not stand like a totem in the middle of the forest, like a mutant golden fir, then it means that something like the hidden relational community between all the trees. Likewise, the really universal tree in the mind only exists as the really relational intention of all particular trees.
Universals, analogical participation, and real relations—these were the three essential components of the realist idea that the world holds together as a kind of archain harmony ordained by God. In God, the source of this harmony, order was at once actuality and knowledge. Creation echoes this by a reciprocal interplay between being and knowing, and it was that that literally was thought to sustain the world in being. Aquinas is quite clear that world couldn’t exist without spirits, without the government exercised by angelic and human spirits. Being urged towards knowing, knowing could be distilled from being, but knowing always must return to the surface of harmony and potential for knowing that finite being contains, and that could be encompassed only by God’s infinitude. Such an outlook in effect claims that, as Balthazar put it, that only the awareness that we participate in the divine understanding, which always understands more of the creation than we do, ensures that we do not think of our thoughts of things as merely solipsistic elaborations of our own being, without any real intentional reference.
As we have seen, this theme of cosmic harmony was once viewed as guaranteeing the operation of law of non-contradiction, and so the presence of identity, and therefore the possibility of truth. Now the nominalist in effect declared that this was, after all, a half-pagan myth of ungraspable and mysterious fluctions. Far from guaranteeing truth, it violated the law of non-contradiction itself. They therefore proclaimed the disenchantment in the name of logic, evidence, experiment, human political freedom and divine freedom and priority of divine will, which was self-giving.
If two accounts of truth were at stake here, so also were two accounts of Christianity. For the older, realistic account, in actuality there is no bare being. Actual being is accompanied always by value, shows itself always as meaningful truth, just as it always communicates itself as goodness. As Balthazar also says in his Theologique vol. 1, for Aquinas and others, truth was more than mere representation of being, because it was also being manifesting itself as beauty; likewise the good was more than mere selfish desire, because it was an aiming at the beautiful that is the objectively lovable itself. Balthazar thus rightly draws the crucial yet latent character of the older vision. Beauty as taking care of herself was little mentioned simply because beauty was so fundamentally presupposed, the link between being, truth, and goodness, a link that Aquinas describes this as convenientia. In the realist vision, being as value was free gift, but also a gift of a reciprocal exchange of gifts between being and knowing, knowing and willing. Truth was what being and knowing offered each other and what knowing and willing (desiring and knowing) offered each other.
In the new nominalist account, by contrast, the only being that can truly be known is represented being, which is the bare facts of individual possession of a being as self-identical. One is one, and all alone, and ever more shall be so. Finite things can now be considered in logical abstraction from their createdness, simply as existing. Already beging with Scotus and extended by Ockham, this bare minimal logical conception of being nevertheless informs a new minimalist ontology. Each thing existing fully possesses its own being. If it did not, if it borrowed its existence from a supreme esse whom it resembled, as it was for Aquinas, then as being it would also apparently not be. And as being finite, its actual existence that it possesses would also be infinite. Already Scotus declared that the analogy of attribution and participation seemed to violated non-contradiction. The result was that for Scotus, while God as infinite creates finite beings in respect to their particularity and caused occurrence, he did not as for Aquinas create general abstracted being in the mode of finite ens commune as such. Being here was no longer intrinsically and ineluctably a gift, and being as finite being no longer reflected the divine infinite harmony, which ensured that it was always an exchange of reciprocity.
However, this did not mean that gift was abandoned. Modern Franciscan theologians characteristically argued that this allowed the gift to be de-ontologized. Since being is not the gift, finite being is pure free gift, beyond any supposed existential necessities. Reciprocity is lost, but this is not to be regretted. Instead the divine gift to us is purely gratuitous and does not return to God by way of a created reflection of the divine order. Likewise, since the created return is in no way naturally elicited, humans make an entirely free response from within a freedom more ontologically outside divine determination than it was for Aquinas.
Meanwhile within the created order, reciprocity and teleology is replaced by formal contract and a moral law valuing primarily free personhood—the road to John Locke (and indeed to George Bush) is opened up. The debates about truth which concern the question whether identity resides in the individual only or also in the essence, is also a debate about the gift. Does the gift arise as free and unilateral beyond being, or does being without the gift lose the reciprocal dimension of the gift, the dimension of gift exchange with complements free unitlaterality? Just as essence for Aristotle and Aquinas compliments the self-standing individual (essences having to do with exchange and relation) the debates about truth then are simultaneously debates about the nature of goodness and the nature of charity (a debate that the new pope touches on in his first encyclical). Those who find essences, analogy, and real relations contradictory will most likely find the idea of a free gift that expects or hopes for a return to be also contradictory, as likewise violating the law of non-contradiction.
Names against nominalism
So which side is right? Perhaps this is the most fundamental debate within western culture. We can call the Scotist and Nominalist way that of modern Christianity, and say that it’s in large part responsible for modernity as such. However, modern Christianity and modernity have increasingly run into conceptual problems. These are primarily problems within nominalism itself. All its key strategies eventually turn south. This may be summarized in three difference instances.
First of all, the idea that a universal is a sign. As John Andileus (sp?) has shown, building on the labors of Jacques Maritain, the idea in Thomists in the Baroque era, especially those in the school of Quenburrow (?) in Portugal and supremely in the Portugese theologian John Quanzo (or John of St. Thomas) produced an effective counter-repasse (?). Not only is the universal a sign, but a thought as such is in its character and as a word, following Thomas, is a kind of sign. A first encounter with one’s first tree would already think it under the sign tree without explicit reference to other trees. One would only see it as an individual tree through the inchoate recognition that there might be other trees of different shapes and sizes that were still trees. Because we only grasp the individual tree by a sign of tree in general, the relation of tree to sign of tree must be a real relation and not simply a kind of relation that we fantasize for ourselves in our mind. We cannot think of a tree without its sign and then merely bring the two together as we please. No, since the tree is only invoked through the sign at all, the sign must be really and not accidentally related to the tree. This circumstance does not then apply only to our concept of the tree, but also to our percept and to our imaginary image of the tree. Hence, whereas the nominalists said that the concept is only a sign, the Quoinerists (?Baroque Portuguese Thomists?) said that even a percept and mental image is a sign. It followed then that if even the rawest material of all thinking still involves this sign relation, then it can never be a question of only a sign nor a merely stipulated relation. If a percept or an image is itself a sign, even if only of one item, it is already a faint adumbration of the concept. Consequently, a concept is a more abstract and reflexive sign, is also indispensable for a more fully developed knowledge even of individuals, and is therefore never a mere sign only.
Nominalism’s very names therefore are names on its tombstone. We cannot therefore attain proper description before attaching names of a general type. It’s not true that we begin with individuals and then move to generalization.
Second instance, the elusive individual. Let us look at problems which emerge with the idea of individual substance. Ockham thought that he had reduced the list of categories to substance and quality. However, if there exist only individuals, the notion of qualities attaching to individuals, and the often accompanying idea that we only perceive individual in terms of those qualities (rather than seeing things through accidents, as per Aquinas), seems problematic. Just what is this mysterious attachment? It seems just as occultly synthetic as essence, real relations, and analogy. Qualities ought simply to be the individual substances or else other individual substances accidentally attaching to it (i.e. the substance?) like limpets to a rock.
In consequence, in the early 20th century, Frege and Russel attempted to carry through the nominalist program still further to iron-out this inconsistency by reducing every is of predication to the is of pure identity. ‘X is Y’ as in ‘this apple is red’ is comprehensible as ‘x equals y’ where ‘equals’ means identity. There must be no obscure or impenetrable attachments. However, as the American Catholic philosopher Autis-Hill (?) has shown, this radical program is unsustainable. One cannot reduce all qualitative aspects under which individual things appear to us simply to the things themselves in their bare extensional existence. We can’t say we just have a totally individual red apple and not an apple that is showing itself partly through redness. For the apple tree comes to assign (?) creaking, resisting, growing, concealing, and so on. If we try to identity all these things we would produce nonsense. Why? The referent, the tree, is only available to us through a multiple senses or aspects in which attending to we also intend. The collapse of the attempt to reduce quality to equality within individual substance entails also the problematization of the very nominalist notion of the individual substance as such. Just as that seeming ally of nominalism, the sign, leads us back to universal and real relations, so also, as phenomenology realizes, its other seeming ally, the individual substance, proves intrinsically to be multiple and self-concealing, like the back of a tree that always remains no matter how many times we run around it. Instead of it being the case that there are only atomic things, it turns out that there are instead multiple qualities since the tree has no monopoly on signs. Just how it is that we perceive through all this fury but one tree is the mysterious thing. For Aquinas, we perceive an essence through accidents. The mind constructs a kind of analogous holding-together that enables it to intentionally reach the real tree. Once nominalism self-deconstructs, it seems that the analogy lies not only between things, but somehow within things as before them, allowing them to be. Even individual things are a bundle of analogical things. Another way of putting this: there can be no access to ontology without a complex phenomenological detour. The problem of aspects seems to ruin individual substance and to disclose the analogical infinity of the particular thing in a way that older realism had not seen.
The collapse of nominalism, therefore, does not simply take us back to the older realism without any changes. It’s actually the same with signs. Quanzo (?) already saw that if thoughts are signs, then the signs of culture are lived thoughts and real relations. Beyond Aquinas, as Maritain already suggested, Quanzo started seeing human historical culture as essential to the unfolding of our thought and participation in the divine logos. Philipp Rosemann has powerfully argued that there is much more historicism in Aquinas than we usually think. Dealy (?) plausibly argues that C S Pierce linked signs and real universals in a fashion like Quanzo, and that his claim to kinship with Scotus rather than Aquinas was mistaken. Pierce added to the counter-nominalist reaction the point that if a universal as real is still a sign, then it is only partial, and so aspectual in relation to the thing, and has to be interpreted by a formally third position which abducts to an absent indicated reality. Although Aquinas also knew that one can never survey the relation between thought and thing, since we only ever know things through thoughts, Pierce adds again a more temporal dimension. Not only does the eidos arrive in the mind like an event, it must always be interpreted through a hermeneutical process that runs to infinity. What guides this interpretation? It can only be for Pierce the will toward more realizations of the good in the world which yet assumes that this unfolds further a real ontological bond between the sign universal and the absent original which it conveys to us. In a comparable fashion, Balthazar rightly suggested that already for Aquinas truth was not just Greek aletheia, a disclosedness of being, but also Hebrew annet, truth as bond or fidelity or troth—one gets to truth by plighting one’s troth to being. But the semiotic perspective accentuates this plighting as a renewal through variation of ontological vows through the course of historical time. Truth, as event echoes onwards and never quite in time, fully occurs.
So signs and aspects have started to undo nominalism and to insinuate a reborn and extended realism, a kind of Thomistic telescope, the same organon, only drawn out allowing us to see further and more clearly.
Suggesting a third new lens for the telescope and this has to do with the question of numbers and sense. As Claire Autis Hill reminds us, Frege saw a way out of his reduction of predication to equality via Cantor’s (?) mathematical set theory. Thing and quality could be identified insofar as a qualified thing is one example of a single set of kinds of things. The red apple is identical with the apple if it falls within the set of all apples. One could say that in order to handle qualities, nominalism must turn to sets rather than essences. More suspiciously, sets are the minimum obeisance nominalism is forced to render to essence. Already, it had emerged with Cantor that sets are afflicted with paradoxes, rather like the third man argument that is supposed to afflict Plato’s forms (which it doesn’t). The most famous example of this paradox, though by no means the only one, is Bertrand Russel’s paradox: the set of all apples is clearly not itself an apple, otherwise it could not claim to contain all apples (in a way that is less clear for the Platonic form of apple). The set of all sets not containing themselves can’t be an example of what it contains, otherwise it cannot be exhaustive and fulfill the very condition of being a set. On the other hand, if it is not contained by what it contains, it is itself an example of a set not containing itself as a member. An ineluctable contradictory conclusion ensues: this set includes itself as an example of itself precisely because it does not do so. These paradoxes only intrude when one invokes the infinite—all sets, etc. Graham Priest argues that diagonalization, the paradox whereby that which is inside a set exceeds it (diagonalizes out of it) has always lurked whenever it is seen that the finite can be infinitesimally fractionalized (?)–whenever one thinks of a finite thing as actually containing infinite divisions within itself. Hence the infinite presumed set of divisions inside a grain of sand exceeds the grain. More subtly, inside the tree is an organic series with infinite potential that could exceed the whole tree like a cancer. Likewise, we cannot say which hybrid of the infinite subset of types of apples will ultimately mutate into another kind of fruit altogether. Much more profoundly, for Aquinas, the accident of participated infinite esse exceeds the finite essence of the creature, as shown by Marion. Being diagonalizes out of createdness.
Now it seems that realism has failed to secure identity, and therefore truth, but nominalism has failed just as dismally. Neither essences nor supposed atomic individuals submit to the law of non-contradiction after all. The world is radically paradoxcial. Interestingly, analytic philosophy has shown this every bit as much as Derrida. Must we be skeptics? If so, how is that there appears to be a relative stability and identity amongst things? As Plato indicated in Theatetus, the idea that there is only flux and appearance must itself appear in the flux, and therefore seems to identify a contradictory stable flux and true appearing of this unstable flux to knowledge. Today, with supposed redundancy theories of truth, one can’t really cross out truth or deny the interval between being and truth which being opens up, in favor of a reduction of knowledge to one more ontic event. Indeed, we are only in contact with being because of mediation. We know something is there only to the measure that it resists our knowledge, and we also know that there is more to be known, like the back of the tree. We can only speak of being because it gives itself as true and yet in this showing also presents a certain palpable reserve. Although being and truth are totally joined together, being always opens up a distinction between the two. Thereby giving truth, being also gives a gap between truth and being that is the never closed future horizon for understanding.
Either the relatively stable identities of eidei are true realities, or else the one paradoxicaly stable form of truth is the form of truth of formless flux, which finally lacks identity, because it shows and reserves an ironic lack of reserve, the concealed as unconcealed nullity. In neither instance can we appeal to the absolute sway of the law of non-contradiction.
Identity beyond non-contradiction
It seems then that the Thomistic telescope must incorporate the insights of Nicholas Cusa following those of Meister Eickhart. Cusa sought to salvage the Proclean/Dionysian tradition that had been associated with Dominican order (to which Aquinas belonged) by admitting that universals, real relations, and participation violated the law of non-contradiction. He also tended to see universals as signs opening endless perspects or aspects in a rather Renaissance kind of way. Likewise, finite truth was for him also a continuous task—a human-artisanal construction, since he also effectively stole from the nominalists the theme of finite human sub-creation. For Ockham finite spirits like God cannot in principle cause finite being to be, since being is a bare univocal existential that can be posited outside divine creation. But in Cusa’s writings, for humans to create is to receive something and surprise themselves, since humans only share to a limited degree in the divine capacity to absolutely originate. So the theme of co-creativity is restored to a participatory context, and part of that restoration involves the notion that the maker is surprised by what he makes without commanding it in advance. This finally can only be understood as a participation in the paternal divine utterance of the eternal logos, since the father is never without the logos and is in a sense surprised by the son and understands by this surprise.
And while for Cusa we can only create triangles or spoons, we only create these as essences, but must thereafter observe the infinite unfolding constraints and possibilities of triangles and spoons which as our own fabricated offspring endlessly take us by surprise and cannot be lawlessly manipulated at our pleasure. Just as makers of computers couldn’t anticipate what they would do to us. Just as when we divide or modify things in nature we can’t really change essences. Can change trees but can’t get rid of the idea of tree that has appeared to us through an integrity only through real trees growing. The point that even artificial things exhibit essence was elaborated in the seventeenth-century by Rob Cudriff, who noticed that even an invented thing like a clock or watch contains certain regular relational schesis (?) and has a certain regular nature because it is a contrivance of mind, even if that mind cannot fathom all the implications of its regularity.
This is another refutation of nominalism—the idea that there can be a pure construction entirely within our control made out of entirely disparate brute elements. No, the most basic elements contain the direst mysteries and the most inescapable ambuscades (?). In sign and aspect, number and poeisis, Cusa like Pascal later on, recognized the impinging of the infinite that is the heart of the finite. Truth for him, as for the tradition, is the identical, the known aleid (?). Only the finite identical is subject to non-contradiction, since as bounded it cannot violate its own bounds. In the infinite, Cusa argues, this does not apply. Here the minimum is also the maximum. Here, since the infinite God is all things, including all opposites, and yet he is simple as well as infinite, he must be at the same moment and in the same respects be these opposites otherwise his simplicity would be violated. However, since the finite is itself invaded and upheld by the presence of the infinite, contradiction collapses identity here also. The point is the circumference of the circle and its center. The tendency towards the infinitely small is also the tendency towards the infinitely great, and so forth.
As for the Catholic-Platonic-Aristotelian tradition in general, so for Cusa finitude is in flux and can only borrow relative stabilities of essence and individual substance from the infinite divine ideas uttered in the logos. However, he adds to this that participation in perfect identity is also participation in perfect non-identity. So the ultimate ontological scenario can always be envisaged this other-way-around. Only when apparent finite identities collapse in the unbounded is there a stable reality, paradoxically. And then these two metaphysical schemas can be combined. Only when the one is itself other to the one and so is many, is it also the one returning to itself as origin. Trinitarian theology allows Cusa to put this in more dynamic terms. The actively possible one is the generation of the actual many. The Holy Spirit displays this reciprocal bond where absolute becoming and absolute unchanging being are further coinciding opposites.
On this understanding, therefore, finitude reveals itself as a contradictory mystery. Only two rival truths are now possible, even if they could appear alarmingly akin to each other. There is first of all the truth of non-truth of nihilism that will require a mode of faith in nothingness if it is to evade the recursivity of the truth of non-truth. Secondly, as an alternative there is the at-once conjectured and experienced truth of transcendent metaphysics or theology. This alone now offers us the truth of truth, of a fully ontological truth. (This is the heart of radical orthodoxy—only theology saves us from skepticism without surrendering to foundationalist or humanistic finalities.) For the latter position, the theological one, every creature exists by diagonalizing out of its finitude through participation in being. Humanity is the site of conscious awareness of this exit. The human being can be the living, self-aware diagonal, or else can perversely choose to suppress this contradictory reality. Humanity is the infinite plus one, beyond yet not beyond even the infinite extensions of the universe.
Truth, then, as was said at the outset, requires identity, but this, as it turns out, can only be found in incomprehensible infinite non-identity in which the finite world incomprehensibly participates. This infinite non-identity is itself the Trinitarian play between the infinite charos (?) of the one and the equally infinite apeiron of the complicated and so simple and ordered many expressed in the logos. This play spins off from both as a rising unity, without surpassing them, in the form of the Holy Spirit which is at once the bond of desire and the freedom of charity. Truth in the creation reflects this infinite exchange and is only ever present insofar as we catch a glimpse of that reflection. Truth in creation is to a degree present in the constitutive relational interplay between individuals and universals and between being as substantial and being as intellectual. This interplay runs also, as we can now see thanks to the Thomistic telescope, along the temporal axis between nature and culture and between essence and event, sign and number, substance and aspect.
Dr. Rosemann’s Response
It is clear from Professor Milbank’s talk why Radical Orthodoxy either is or quickly is becoming one of the most powerful and influential movements in contemporary Christian thought. The reason is that RO is aiming at the whole. Reflect on the different names Milbank mentioned or alluded to: Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Cantor, Pierce, etc. What these names stand for are the different fields or branches of knowledge that RO touches on in its theses. RO refers, of course, abundantly to theology while at the same time belonging to the philosophical tradition. This is very appealing because too often does philosophy and even theology content itself with minute investigations of very limited aspects of reality that at the end of the day remain insignificant and boring. What we want to know about, for example, is not the meaning of one particular term but the meaning of it all, ultimately, and RO is attempting to answer this question, not only the meaning of it all but also the meaning of infinity as it is reflected in all of metaphysics and even in contemporary mathematical theory, so Milbank is able to use mathematical metaphors (diagonalization, etc.).
Something else that is attractive about RO is that it is an un-modern movement, a collaborative project. Look at its publications. Milbank is not the only one belonging to this loose collaboration of people. There are colleagues interested in theology, economics, literature, etc. It has to be this way because and individual is not able to cover all these areas. Milbank proposes a large, comprehensive, sometimes daring synthesis that creates questions of detail that collaborates and co-workers have to work out. This is unmodern, involving not an isolated individual subject trying to grasp it all, but rather a project that is much more communitarian.
What is at stake in RO is, really, everything, such that even political questions are at stake because there are practical consequences. Most importantly what is at stake is the relationship between nature and super-nature, between creation and the creator. Milbank used different kinds of terminology to frame this problem, but one importance set is the notion of the gift which is very important in postmodern debates. What kind of gift is the creation? Creation has to be a gift because God was in no way obliged to give us creation. But what kind of gift is it? Is it the kind that is given anonymously? Gifts are not autonomous and so can’t be used autonomously. Or is creation like a gift in which the giver is identifiable. Does this gift have a reciprocity built in, one that upon closer scrutiny yields up the mystery of its donor?
The second kind of gift does have a problem. Did God give us creation in order to be recognized? Does God need to be recognized? If we read the creation in this way, is God perhaps intelligible? This is why in Christian intellectual history there have been movements that have rejected this reciprocal view of gift, such as the Nominalists. The Nominalists argue that God gave us this gift in such a way that it is not possible by reading the book metaphysically to return to God.
Milbank rejects this, but in his own version of the reciprocal gift he incorporates an important insight of Nominalism, namely that the distance between the one who gives you this gift and the one who receives this gift must be recognized, has to be built into the gift. Milbank does this by saying, Yes, there are signs of the giver in the gift but they are paradoxical, they present themselves in the form of mysteries, in form of the incomprehensible. Therefore, Milbank is trying to overcome the contradiction between these conceptions of the gift and incorporate perhaps an insight of nominalism into his overall synthesis.
One has to ask the question. Rosemann is interested in Nominalism in a way that will recognize its historical truth. Nominalism arose in the fourteenth-century not because some thinkers were intent on destroying the truth. There had to be a motive. Why were thinkers rejecting the Thomistic or Christian-Aristotelian synthesis of the thirteenth-century? Because they thought it led to serious theological problems. Aristotelianism at the end of the thirteenth-century met with a series of condemnations, and those condemnations forced thinkers to reevaluate the intellectual situation, and it was on this basis that nominalism arose with its rigid distinction between God’s absolute power, which we don’t know, and God’s ordained power or God as he creates the world around us in such a way that it is not possible to make inferences from this creation back to God. We need to acknowledge the historical truth of nominalism, which Milbank has done in his paper.
One aspect that is the most important in Nominalism. The bridge between the created order and God—how is the gap bridged? What is the essence of the relationship between the created and the creator? Is it a metaphysical relationship, such that in order to discover God I analyze the structures of creation and make philosophical inferences that show that ultimately the created must have an origin that is God? This is a metaphysical relationship. Nominalism says you can’t do this because God’s gift is absolutely gratuitous and such inferences are impossible.
What then is the way back from creation to creator? The answer is that it is personal. God must reveal himself as person, and the appropriate response on our part is not to understand God as being, an abstract metaphysical entity. Heidegger says that if God is being, then you can’t pray or dance to him. Is it not important, then, to acknowledge this insight of Nominalism? The ultimate response of creation to the creator has to be a personal one, and the initiative in which God invites creation to respond to him has to be a personal initiative and cannot be captured in metaphysical categories.
Milbank’s response to Rosemann
Milbank agrees with what Rosemann is saying in regard to Nominalism, but it is also crucial to ask why it happened, and Milbank attempted to develop that argument in his paper and to suggest that some of the radicalism in Eckhart and Cusa, the extreme playing in paradoxes in the relationship of God to the world, is very much the result of trying to hold on to the tradition in the face of the nominalist critique, which in a way is saying that Aquinas in part is trying to offer us a rationalist theology, but if we really go down that rationalist route, some of the conceptuality it uses doesn’t apparently makes sense, and so it is at this point that you are driven into something more paradoxical, more mystical, without losing the technically, but also you are driven into something more humanistic. You are driven to say things like, reading the world as a gift as a sort of mystery, is something you have to explore more openly in sort of poetic discourses. It is not an accident then that later Christian writers who are true to the mainline of the tradition, like Hamann or Coleridge, are much more literary in character, right up to Claudel (?) and Pegis (?). Rosemann is right in that Milbank is trying to synthesize the idea that the gift is purely gratuitous and one-way with the idea that it is also in a way reciprocal. The key to this is that if you have a really radical gift, like creation which posits something, then there is a sense in which it has to give a return or the possibility of a return. A really radical gift just can’t exist except as gift, i.e. as a kind of acknowledgement of itself as a gift. So this does try to incorporate the nominalist insight, if one is thinking of this as having to do with the absolute power and mystery of God [as per Nominalism]. Milbank’s concern, however, is that the nominalist insight doesn’t always do that, but sometimes thinks of God too much in terms of efficient causality instead of in terms of gift, whose model would then be borrowed from the terms of this world. So, for example, in Ockham, his so-called semi-Pelagianism indicates a way in which he is incapable of realizing that when you are comparing divine with human input, it is not a zero-sum game, but is rather in other terms (i.e. gift). Milbank wonders whether the specter of the nominalists is a matter of not having a metaphysics at all [as per Rosemann’s characterization of what Nominalism is saying]. Sometimes it seems like they have a very thin kind of metaphysics. It is very important that if you are thinking of the gift as enigmatic and not obviously there, especially because we are fallen creatures and in the face of evil, that it is only finally deciphered in personal existence. If you [Rosemann?] are saying we need to connect analogy more powerfully with Christology, Milbank agrees. But then Aquinas is a much more christologically-centered writer than he has been taken as. A later writer like Bayrool (?) whose metaphysics is focused on Christ and spirituality and participation in Christ, Milbank is very sympathetic to that and doesn’t want to see the personal and metaphysical as necessarily opposites. The way in which Aquinas can think of God as “to be” rather than simply as the “one,” is in part because he thinks of God as personal and therefore as actual.