Truth and Politics: A Theological Comparison of Joseph Ratzinger and John Milbank

Milbank on Truth as Created

3 Milbank on Truth as Created For Vico, as stated in the introduction, truth is convertible with factum. According to Milbank, this claim is in accordance with Christianity. Consequently, he defends Vico’s assertion that truth is created both by human beings and by God, internally and externally. Milbank furthers the concept that truth is created by, in place of an analogy of being, developing an analogy of creation. Out of this analogy of creation, Milbank describes a correspondence theory of truth and explains how truth is illuminated and mediated. Correspondence and the Analogy of Creation In this chapter we will examine how Milbank confirms Vico’s concept of truth by first determining how Milbank perceives truth in its final divine state as convertible with the made. Then we will look at Milbank’s description of how one corresponds to this truth. As with Vico, Milbank’s view of this relationship is fundamentally based 107 on an analogy of creation, in which humans analogously participates in the inner divine creation, rather than an analogy of being. Milbank’s Defense of Vico in Divine Truth as Created For Vico, according to Milbank, divine truth is a socially created reality since God is a triune communion of persons. In clarifying this position of Vico, Milbank explains that the knowing of God involves an “internal creation”1 that is the “generation of the Son.”2 The Son as the Word generated by the Father “is then said to be the supreme locus of verum-factum, because it comprehends all actual and possible truth.”3 As Milbank points out, consequently Vico in “the first chapter of De Antiquissima, De Vero et Facto, presents the generation of the second person of the Trinity as the most perfect paradigm of verumfactum .”4 Furthermore the verum-factum principle is the first truth “of all being”5 divine or created. As interpreted by Milbank, Vico’s verum-factum principle subverts the Platonic understanding of truth in which, “in its Christianized version, there is a prior truth in God, preceding all images and works, and human understanding, forced through its material involvement to express itself in words and images participates in the original through a dim recall of the purity of truth.”6 According to this Christianized version of Platonic thought, truth, in the form of divine ideas in God, has precedence over what is made. In contrast, according to Vico, explains Milbank, “this picture is precisely reversed: the perfection of divine understanding consists 1. Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, vol. 2, Language, Law and History (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1992), 83. 2. Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, vol. 1, The Early Metaphysics (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 83–84. 3. Ibid., 84. 4. Ibid., 117. 5. Ibid., 77. 6. Ibid., 113. TRUTH AND POLITICS 108 in its character as a completed work, a perfect spiritual artifact; the imperfection of human understanding consists in its relatively theoretical and less perfectly constructive and practical character.”7 By being in an eternal dialectal relationship with “the infinite factum”8 divine truth is, for Vico, created. According to Milbank, by placing truth and the made in a dialectical relationship in which neither has precedence over the other, Vico’s schema “upsets two usual assumptions of traditional thought.”9 First, “it relies on the view that God is primordially creative, creative in his very being, and not merely in relation to an external Creation.”10 This means that in God ideas (verum) and what is made (factum) equally constitute the being of God. Making and creating, is not, therefore, a reality external to God, as in “traditional thought,” but constitutes his nature. Second, explains Milbank, Vico’s schema “denies that the ideas of making, of representation, and imaging, are necessarily connected with the corporeal or mind-body world, although for human beings this is, contingently, the case.”11 Since making is constitutive of God, who is pure spirit, making is not necessarily connected to physical realities. This means that “all reality,” whether of God or external to God, “is made or created, and for this reason is convertible with ‘truth,’ which as a ‘transcendental’ can also be predicated of everything.”12 According to Vico’s dynamic conception of truth, in which making is not only an external activity of God but is also an internal divine activity, truth does not have precedence over...