Customer Reviews

The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural

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Each chapter of John Milbank's magnum opus (to date), Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Political Profiles), had to be sent to a different academic specialist for peer review prior to publishing. In other words, you need about a dozen Ph.D.'s simply in order to adequately evaluate his arguments in that single book. In addition to his absurd grasp of virtually everything that's mattered to Western thought since at least the Council of Nicea, the man's language can be too terse to make diving into his work a worthwhile option for most people.

Another inaccessible academic going for tenure- who cares? I do. His work represents the most compelling construal of the gospel I've ever run into outside of the first four books of the New Testament and some of Paul's writings. For Milbank, reality's lowest common denominator is me and you giving to each other because giving is the most appropriate thing for beings like us to do. The implications: we are gifts and gift-giving ought to characterize everything we do, from business to politics to self-understanding and how we think about God. Redefinition of the current politico-economic system based on the idea of the gift? He's all for it and he thinks the Church should lead the way.

How did Milbank come up with this? He understands the fundamental human activity to be participation in the Eucharist- we receive Christ and we give back our offerings (money, praise, presence, hopefully a life that doesn't absolutely suck). To be fair, he owes a lot of this to his first doctoral student- Catherine Pickstock, but at the end of the day it's ideas that matter and he's the one getting these ideas out with the most consistency and applying them to current situations in ways that actually matter.

So if you want to be a theology nerd go read Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Political Profiles), and good luck with your career as a barrista. If you just want to find an accessible entry point to some of the best theology going in your lifetime Milbank's little book on De Lubac is the best intro to either thinker that I've found. Milbank finds an intellectual father in De Lubac and shows us how the best in De Lubac is one in the same with Milbank's own project. More central to this little book than the idea of the gift is the notion that the super-natural is an integral part of human experience and existence here and now. In other words, transcendent reality is not the equivalent of extra credit on the exam of life, it's a proper part of the course. Where modern thought has cordoned us and our world off from the supernatural, Milbank, De Lubac, and the Catholic reimagining of reality that is Vatican II wish to reopen our eyes to the transcendence that has always been here.

In sum, this book is a brief and accessibly-written introduction to one of the most compelling contemporary presentations of the gospel.

*** Note: I found a brief interview where Milbank discusses DeLubac's thought and hits many of the same themes found in The Suspended Middle. I posted the link here but Amazon took it down because they lack an understanding of their social responsibility commensurate with their central role in how we access books. The video can be accessed via search engines that (gasp!) have URLs external to Amazon.com

John Milbank has his own imprint at Routledge and yet he published this book, The Suspended Middle, with Eerdmans, an American publishing house with decidedly evangelic ties and desires, though increasingly academic in production (e.g. The Beauty of the Infinite). This fact made me come to the book with an unfortunately critical eye and his insult to Balthasar did not help the case.

I have a lot of issues with the book, not the least of which include its size. It is making a very large argument that needs many pages, many notations, possibly many volumes, and yet it only fills a small 108 pages. Whenever something needs to be cited or expanded and the intuitive is expounded incessantly.

Another issue is the continuing claim that Surnaturel is 'arguably' the most important theological text of the 20th Century. That is the argument of the book. Why are you qualifying the statement (multiple times) that summarizes the task you are attempting?

Milbank seems to commit the greatest sin of interpretation: eisegesis. De Lubac is so important because he makes an argument in one small text that Milbank agrees with and so he reads it into the rest of de Lubac's ouevre and the rest of intellectual history. If this book is so important, so influential, why does it take a British theologian to publish a gloss of a French Jesuit that doesn't do grace to either?

My criticisms aside, he makes some compelling statements of theology that I could agree with but it just leaves one wanting more, a tighter argument, an extended elaboration, an honest address of the author's personal stake in the argument. If de Lubac is not how Milbank reads him, I fear that Milbank's entire current project concerning the gift falls a part.