Theology and Social Theory by John Millbank

I bought a copy of this for a friend for their 40th birthday and thought I'd read along with them! Wow it was hard work. I'm not averse to hard philosophy but this wasn't just hard it was verbose and frequently delighted in being deliberately obscure in order to demonstrate its own intellectual substance.

Sadly such behaviour leaves me thinking that the pleasure of knowledge and the profundity of learning is best demonstrated to others by making hard concepts as simple as possible to understand. The one defense the author might advance is they were writing for a cut throat field of little feudal lords. Fine, but please why stoop to that level.

The book is broken up into 12 chapters and if one wants to get to the nub of it, skip the first 10. Seriously, the rest could have been edited down to 5 concise and clearly explained chapters, instead we get 10 poorly written and wafflingly difficult movements leading us to what is actually important to the author.

It is an interesting subject - there are fascinating things inside about the idea of the secular, the religious feel of nihilism and the development of much of these concepts. I also found Millbank's thesis - about peace and the 'two cities' of Augustinian origin very engaging. Even if I think Augustine's view is lacking, that peace subsumes violence into itself rather than negates it and think the Trinity is a more important mediative operator between the one and the many than Millbank.

Millbank's use of music as a metaphor for harmonious difference is brilliant and insightful and was something I appreciate both for its relative simplicity but also for the melding together of different concepts. It's also interesting to note that Tolkein's Silmarillion starts with a creation story taking up this idea as well...harmonious difference expressed as music. (Yes I know, the music of the spheres etc.).

Millbank is a strong Catholic and so he, perhaps inevitably (although sadly), takes short shrift with protestantism and seeks to demonstrate that only a theology of peace as constituted within Catholicism can be adequately used to counter nihilism (or paganism - the inevitable triumph of chaos). In the end I don't agree with the constitution of his theology of peace - lacking as it is in Trinitarian thinking as well as negating violence wholesale. Nor can I agree with his primacy of Catholicism...

I will read more of his stuff, but I'll be taking a deep breath before I do.