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john milbank Profile picture
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21 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Excellent essay by Pawel Rojek.
He gives a fair account of everything, including my improvised Cambridge paper of Sept 2019. He worries about my (Cusan) suggestion that Trinitarian and other theological concepts break the LNC such that a Trinitarian ontology reveals an experienced world beyond our logical grasp
But when he says that negative theology transgresses the Law of Excluded Middle though not the LNC I’m not sure that’s true if one takes the former in the most rigorous sense?
And how far the notion that theology requires one to exceed the LNC breaks with classical Christian tradition could be subject to debate. Cusa arrives at this position by a rigorous logical elaboration of both Dionysian and Boethian theology/metaphysics.

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More from @johnmilbank3

john milbank Profile picture
21 Apr
The end of the western market state and the start of the era of the Chinese state market?
‘The actual central ground in Britain combines left wi g economics with right wing cultural values. Starmer’s problem is that he is unable to adopt either of these positions, let alone both’.
Gray goes onto point out that Corbyn’s economics was popular, it was his lack of patriotism that was unpopular. And that actually the Tories are finding it easier to veer towards some of that economics (just inventing money) than Labour is, for fear of being seen as irresponsible
Read 6 tweets
john milbank Profile picture
9 Jan
This very short article by Jeremy Cliffe is the best thing I have ever read on Brexit and the EU. It pivots on the contrast between Delors’ and Thatcher’s authentically provincial Christian visions and suggests the battle in Britain between the two is not over.
Thatcher: Protestant believer in the totally free market and absolutely sovereign centralised nation state. Delors: Catholic believer in third way personalism, corporatism and federalism. Individualism versus relational love. Heterodoxy versus Orthodoxy.
The article useful gives the lie to the idea that the Catholic vision of the EU has altogether vanished even though it is weakened. Delors wanted a social dimension to the free market and single currency and yet lexiteers laughably insist the EU is more neoliberal than the U.K.!
Read 12 tweets
john milbank Profile picture
8 Jan
Andy Beckett’s version of ‘Englishness’ sounds just as dreadful as the tabloid version he rightly rejects. Just what is English about this vacuous mixture of ‘diversity’ and commercial music? Nothing. Why not instead recall that Vaughan Williams was a socialist?
Back in profounder contemporary reality we find for example a female black composer identifying with and blending with her own Caribbean legacy a genuine English/British folk tradition. But white liberals sustain Blair’s tawdry obsession with the trashy.
On the other hand Blair’s taking seriously of both crime and patriotism shows that it is just untrue, as Beckett claims, that Labour cannot outplay (for good or ill) the Tories in these areas when they are linked to economic concerns.
Read 4 tweets
john milbank Profile picture
19 Dec 20
When Augustine says ‘Who would dare to believe or assert that it was not in God’s power to ensure that neither Angel nor man would fall?’ this just seems to me like very poor metaphysics. Why did such a profound philosopher lapse already into voluntarism?
For the mystery of evil is the mystery of a defiance of omnipotence itself. Because that is eventually shown to be as impossible as it really is one has to believe in apocatastasis as the Bible teaches. Eriugena had to correct Augustine here.
Augustine’s profound sense of the absolute power of God and his proximity to everything without need of mediation just because if his transcendence eventually and sadly made him forget that God’s will and power is not a maximum degree of merely ontic, finite force.
Read 4 tweets
john milbank Profile picture
26 Nov 20
Despite his dissent from Agamben’s apparent endorsement of conspiracy theories, Zizek here also warns us against Bill Gates etc in general and by implication against how they will exploit Covid. He is right. There is a rational and tempered reason to fear ‘the great re-set’.
Zizek would seem to agree with Agamben that humanitarian aid is inherently dubious because it presumes and upholds ‘sheerly natural’ (‘barely living’) human beings whose removal from civic belonging is largely contrived by humanitarian benefactors in their main economic roles.
They are both right.
Read 6 tweets
john milbank Profile picture
26 Nov 20
Thesis: the two most decisive things in modernity are distorted Augustine: 1. Political Economy is genealogically Jansenist. 2. Legitimation by coordinated individual rights is genealogically Malebranchian. The hidden hand instead of ethics. Occasionalism instead of relationality
Therefore one could say that the main God of modernity was not a deistic God, nor a no-God, but a heterodox Christian ‘God of the gaps’. Secularisation has left us either just with the gaps or with sinister immanent substitutes for an idolised deity.
Recent research would seem to suggest a certain French revolutionary oscillation between Jansenist ideas of the total emergent providential consensus of individual wills that could favour direct democracy and Malebranchian ones of representatives laying down reliable general laws
Read 10 tweets

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