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

Milbank on Truth as Illuminated and Mediated

4 Milbank on Truth as Illuminated and Mediated In the previous chapter, we saw that Milbank, building upon his interpretation of Vico, relies on an analogy of creation as the fundamental explanation for human correspondence to truth. In this chapter, we will focus on how he furthers his appropriation of Vico by focusing on Milbank’s more explicit theological treatments of truth as grounded in an analogy of creation. This will be done by determining how, for Milbank, truth is illuminated and mediated. I will begin with truth as illuminated. Truth as Illuminated In furthering Vico’s axiom that truth is convertible with factum Milbank maintains that humanity creates truth only by being illuminated by faith within the literary republic of the city of God. Consequently, for Milbank, creative correspondence to truth occurs exclusively in the light of faith, under which humankind is to shape 145 and transform the world. Outside of faith, humanity is in total darkness, a condition that makes it impossible for it to create truth. I will demonstrate this view of Milbank by beginning with his dissertation, and then by showing how he further develops his interpretation of Vico on truth as illuminated. Vico and Illumination According to the hylozoism of Vico, as explained in the previous chapter, creation is made up of metaphysical points that operate by a divine conatus principle.1 This principle is a “tensional force”2 between everything since, in accordance with Heraclitus’s view, “things are constantly changing (universal flux).”3 In accordance with this approach to reality, in the fifth century bce, Cratylus of Athens, as stated previously, further developed this concept by claiming that since everything is in flux, therefore there can be no knowledge of the world.4 In agreement with Cratylus, Vico maintains that humanity can have no knowledge of the world of nature. His reasoning stems from the verum-factum premise. According to this premise, one only knows what one makes. Therefore, God only knows the natural world since he made it, and humanity is limited to knowing the civil world that it creates linguistically, socially, and politically.5 1. Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, vol. 1, The Early Metaphysics (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 209. 2. Ibid. 3. Daniel W. Graham, “Heraclitus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/heraclitus/. 4. Robert Audi, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 322. 5. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), no. 349, 374, 376, pgs. 93, 104, 105; Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, trans. Jason Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chap. 1, 1, 28, pgs. 27–29. TRUTH AND POLITICS 146 Even though Vico, in agreement with Cratylus, denies humans knowledge of the natural world, he does hold that they can know the world they create, and that this world is in accordance with final truth as long as it is created under light of God’s truth. Vico, argues Milbank, is able to hold this, since for him the ultimate location of conatus is God.6 Therefore, writes Milbank, Because all things stem from God, he alone determines their precise reality in the moment of their origination which is also the moment of their infinite coordination with everything else. Things are “fully true,” and “fully made” from the perspective of an infinite inauguration. Thus we can only grasp what little we know and make of the reality of things if our minds are in some unfathomable fashion illumined by the lux metaphysica of God’s creative knowledge.7 This means that only if humanity is illumined by God can it create and know truth. So far it is not clear whether this divine light refers to a light given only in faith, or if this is a light all of humanity can participate in regardless of faith. However, upon closer examination of Milbank’s dissertation, it becomes evident that he interprets Vico as maintaining the former. This is because, according to Milbank, Vico asserts that only in the “Judeo-Christian tradition” do humans make truth in participation of their creator, in whom truth is convertible with the made8 Vico defines humanity’s making truth, in imitation of its creator, as taking place within a linguistic city of God. This city...