John Milbank, Scholasticism, Modernism And Modernity

Modern Theology 22:4 October 2006 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

SCHOLASTICISM, MODERNISM AND MODERNITY JOHN MILBANK As Rowan Williams notes in his introduction to Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love, (London: Continuum, 2005), Jacques Maritain is a central figure in the history of Christian culture in the previous century, whose star nonetheless fell in the years following the Second World War.1 Today, his reputation is on the whole ill-served by his being exhibited in the museum of “Maritainian Thomism” (largely located, like all such intellectual sepulchres, in the United States of America). For regarded as the author of an adequate Thomistic system, he appears to fall far short of what today would be required. Compared with Étienne Gilson, he did not so adequately grasp how early modern neo-Thomism had contaminated the thought of the medieval master with elements derived from Scotism and nominalism which tended to render it more essentialistic and rationalistic in character. Again, unlike Gilson, as Williams also points out, he was reluctant to accept the argument of Henri de Lubac and many others that there was no natura pura to be found in Thomas. Nor did he ascribe so fully as Gilson to a notion of “Christian philosophy” which correctly recognised that there was little attempt to develop a presuppositionless metaphysics in the Middle Ages and usefully suggested that philosophy has never been done in a cultural and religious vacuum, independently of concerns for human spiritual formation. He also wasted much ink on developing a sterile contrast between a natural and a supernaturally orientated mysticism and failed to realise that Blondel’s negative demonstration of a need for a supernatural completing of the natural exigencies of reason was essentially in keeping with the thought of Aquinas as well as Augustine. Fully in the traditions of a modern rationalist metaphysics

John Milbank Department of Theology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

652 John Milbank focussed primarily upon being rather than upon God, he regarded the sheerly logical principles of sufficient reason and excluded middle as the assumptions from which an ontology must be built. Finally, he did not grasp the priority of analogy of attribution over analogy of proper proportionality in Aquinas and made overdrawn and ahistorical contrasts between a neoplatonic and a Christian apophasis. In short, as Williams again suggests, the adjective “neo-scholastic” would seem properly to apply to Maritain, and he can by no means be entirely exonerated of the charge of “onto-theology”. Yet were this the whole story he would be unlikely to attract the attention, as he does in this book, of a theologian of Williams’ perspicacity, nor of other recent thinkers (including Karol Wojtyla) who do not fall squarely within the camp of neo-scholasticism. It is by no means the whole story, because, on further investigation, Maritain appears as a figure caught somewhere in the middle of French pre-war debates, rather than as an extreme conservative. With regard to the controversy over grace and nature, he did not exhibit the sheer intransigence of a Garrigou-Lagrange, notably agreeing with de Lubac that there is no natural sinlessness of angels in Aquinas. Moreover, the very title of his key political book, Integral Humanism, reveals an essential concurrence with the nouvelle théologie that there can only be a full humanity when it is an engraced humanity. It is equally significant that his major philosophical statement, Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge, is clearly not a treatise in metaphysics or philosophical theology alone. On the contrary, it is in fact an attempt to exhibit the deeper continuum between the knowledge available to the purely natural intellect and the heightened insight available to the engraced intellect. And while it would be fair to say that this work shows a neoscholastic bias towards the priority of the problem of knowledge—a bias which ensures that it is not so far removed from Descartes and Kant as it imagines—the specific mode of this focus allows one to prise Maritain’s account of knowledge away from a neoscholastic metaphysics that shows an inadequate grasp of participation in esse and the way that this upsets immanent hierarchies of essence. For Maritain’s account of human understanding is the most subtle part of his philosophy and the part where he shows the greatest loyalty to the authentic Thomas. Indeed one can say that whereas Gilson focussed on the real distinction of esse and essentia in Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia, he relatively neglected the account in the same work of “intentional being”, the life of the mind, which is so central for Maritain. By concentrating on this category, Maritain in practice tended to upset any neat division between philosophia prima and sacra doctrina, because the “intentionality” of the mind is in Augustine and Aquinas bound up with the recognition of the role of an internally emanative “inner word” in the act of understanding performed by a spiritual creature, a role that is only © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 653 perfected in the generation of the divine Word within the Trinity. Hence for all its formal assumptions, Distinguish to Unite has validly suggested to one contemporary Dominican Thomist, Olivier-Thomas Venard (in his La Langue de l’ineffable, building on the important work of the Maritainian philosopher Yves Floucat), the uncovering of a metaphysics in Aquinas that lies deeper even than the metaphysics of esse: namely a metaphysics of participation in the Trinitarian generation of the living Word of understanding, and the procession of Spiritual desire. (The key to this, as Pierre Rousselot already saw, is the astonishing passage about a hierarchy of evermore inwardly-realised emanations at SCG 4.11.) So despite the residue of a continued modern prioritisation of the “knowledge problem” in Maritain over questions of our existential situation (as recovered and radicalised by Kierkegaard and Heidegger), this modern bias is in reality overcome because he has ceased to ask “how can we know?” but instead asks “what is knowledge?” as the factor that characterises peculiarly human existence. And his answer here, after Aquinas, is that knowledge pertains not to information, nor to representation, but rather to a particular state of being in which a creature, while remaining entirely within herself, is nonetheless so directly present to another creature that she in some sense becomes this other, while inversely, the other that was once materially embodied, embarks within the mind of the knower upon a new purely intellectual existence. Yet the Aristotelian risks of a sheer abolition of alterity (“the soul is in a manner all things”) are, for Maritain, in Aquinas qualified by the stress that intellectual existence is both expressive and intentional. To become and to absorb the other creature means to become other to myself through the inner elaboration of a concept (the verbum mentis which is also the verbum cordis elicited by desire). And self is once more withdrawn from otherness (ensuring a mutual protection of integrity) insofar as this concept is not simply identical with the thing known in its aspect as species, but is also a mental sign which intentionally points back towards the other’s fully substantial reality (form/matter compound; self-standing angelic intellectuality) that remains radically exterior and yet in a sort of “participatory continuity” (as Williams puts it) or convenientia (as Aquinas terms it) with its conceptual realisation in the mind. Here Maritain pits an older Augustinian and realist account of intentionality against Husserl, arguing cogently that the latter’s idealism is the result of his failing to accept a true ontology of mind which refuses any “outsideness” of intellection to beings and to Being. By developing this genuinely Thomistic account of knowledge, Maritain does not fall into the trap (arguably not avoided by Gilson) of over-reacting against idealism by insisting on a priority of “fact” or “existence” that can even be extended to God himself. (Such a move is in fact more Scotist than Thomist in character.) Instead, he is repeatedly clear that Thomas’s always central concern to uphold divine simplicity entails the utter coincidence of © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

654 John Milbank being and intelligence in the divine nature. As Rousselot had already realised (despite Maritain’s reservations about his work), this means that in a certain sense the divine esse is more primarily intelligere, since intellectual being (relational and co-penetrating) is the highest mode of being. When it comes to the created order, the co-incidence of extension of course lapses: not all that exists is intelligent. Moreover, even angels are not instantiated by their own intelligence and human spiritual creatures are not primarily instantiated as intelligent: it is not thinking that keeps the blood pumping round our bodies. Nevertheless, even amongst human creatures, intelligent being remains the highest kind of being, even though it does not ensure subsistent being. Now Aquinas sustains a balance in this non-coincidence of the substantive and the highest within the sub-angelic order. In one sense, for him, materialised forms exhibit more of the substantiality of God and even the relational substantiality of the Trinitarian persons (that sense in which the persons are radically “exterior” to each other, though not in any degree independent of each other) than human spiritual existence can do. Just for this reason, human intelligence is always called back to intentional reference and also to a conversio ad phantasmata which conjoins imaginative image to ethereal concept. Only through this reference to material and substantive being through awareness of sensory accidents does the understanding fully achieve its own proper existential status and only through this reference does it encounter the fact that there is being as such, as exhibited in this or that. Hence, as the contemporary German Catholic philosopher (now working in the University of Dallas) Phillip Rosemann has argued in his crucial little book on Aquinas’s entire system in French, Omne Ens est Aliquid, for Aquinas the point of initial awareness of esse coincides with the completion of the understanding in imaginative and sensory intuition wherein the accidental (the ephemeral properties of things known to sensation) proves to be more disclosive of ultimate esse than our rational inference to the substantive. The most utterly general is only shown in the most utterly particular because the most utterly general, namely esse, exceeds the contrast between the general and the particular, for both equally “are”. On the other hand for Aquinas, in line with Aristotle and Augustine, the human intellect in the inner word more fully develops the reality of given material things, in a fashion that also develops the life of the mind itself, because this is a further explication of the inherent ordering of the former to the latter which has its ultimate ground in the derivation of everything from the divine mind. It is for this reason that a concept is more adequately intentional, the more it has been developed along the lines of the mind’s own intrinsic inspiration. It is something like this schema which Maritain dubs “critical realism”. It implies neither idealism, nor “realism” in the usual reactive modern sense. © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 655 What it achieves, supremely, is the holding of a balance between existential contingency on the one hand, and a sense of the complex and mysteriously ordered inter-relationality of things on the other. The latter is allowed for precisely by the intellectualist element, because “intentional existence” concerns the unconcealment of a dimension where things and people only exist at all through ceaseless and entangled mutual reference. As Rousselot indicated, one can desire the other while still holding her at an extrinsic distance or else by projectively absorbing her, but one cannot understand the other to any proper degree without sustaining a relation to the other as other by which one is in some sense bound. Knowledge may be more interior than the will, yet it carves out a wound of exteriority within the seemingly inviolate space of the interior itself. It is clear that Maritain’s critical realism is for this reason a characteristically early twentieth-century philosophy: it is indeed, as Williams indicates, regarding Maritain’s aesthetics, “modernist” in character, just because it breaks with nineteenth-century idealism and empiricism which were both variants on the “representationalist” paradigm of epistemology. Thus one can relate Maritain’s thought not just to Thomistic tradition, but also to Bergson, pragmatism and phenomenology. It was significantly Bergson whose lectures first saved the young Maritain from suicidal despair and one can note an affinity between Bergson’s refusal of the notion of knowledge as the mirror of reality and the Aristotelian model of knowledge by identity. Modernism (of which Bergson was by far the most representative philosopher) was in a sense born, both as theory and as artistic practice, after a full absorption of the implications of photography: superficially, this turned pictorial art away from trying to rival its instant mimesis; more profoundly it was realised that the photographic image itself is not a copy, but rather the continued instantiation in another medium of an “original” self-imaging that is inseparable from the real as such—as the photographic pioneers realised, photography merely records and preserves nature’s “self-painting”. Image is thereby newly seen to be not secondary but primal, and not only a reflection in space but always also a new event in time—less an echo or a copy than the self-doubling arrival of the real as mysterious symbol. For what exactly (as Paul Claudel—himself an obsessive photographer—asked, regarding the photograph) does this “captured” moment of flown time continue to signify? This is just how Bergson reconceives human understanding beyond both idealism and empiricism: the very motion of things must, in order to ensure its coherent continuity, constantly double-back upon itself in a non-identical repetition. The human mind is but the site of a partial entry into this scenario, where what we commonly suppose through our sensorily mediated experience to be laid out in a causal sequence and an exterior array of mutually exclusive items, is more fundamentally disclosed as the ineffable durée of intertangled simultaneity. Here alone can © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

656 John Milbank any “meaning” arise, since this involves the articulation of “one” thing in terms of others. It was hearing about the intuition of durée that ensured that Jacques and Raissa Maritain were able to uphold their love-pact unto life rather than unto death. For both, this revealed that there was “meaning” not resolvable into functional purpose and the arbitrary blows of efficient causality. At the same time, Jacques Maritain, once Raissa had introduced him to St. Thomas, came to argue that the intuition of being as the “for itself” of meaning should not be simply identified with the apprehension of genuine time, but was rather even more fundamental. Time in its inter-tangled flow is indeed a mystery, but it remains a mystery of finitude. And since the flow is finite we do not need to set it dualistically over-against the externalities of clock-time. Time is at once a matter of mutually external instants and a flow that denies their pure externality or instantaneity. Williams very well points out how Maritain eventually sees the aesthetic corollary of this: the metaphorical presence of one thing in another alien thing has to be related back to the distinctness of temporal and spatial finite realities if art is to exceed dream. This can be taken as a qualification of modernism in its more extreme surrealist reaches, and the same qualification was made by Olivier Messiaen in his musical theory and practice—again through an explicit fusion of Bergson with Aquinas. (One can also note how the Bergsonian legacy in Maritain allows one to see more parallels between him and Maurice Blondel than might at first be supposed, or he himself might have readily allowed.) Maritain’s contribution here remains important. Against Heidegger (as he says) as well as against Bergson, he is indicating that the identification of being with time is not a secure conclusion of a more rigorous ontology, but is rather a still subtle confinement of Being itself to the ontic—to existence that contingently comes to be and passes away. Perhaps one might doubt more than Maritain whether pure reason alone can arrive at the identification of Being with God (though he says relatively little about this), yet one can at least claim that only theology allows the most radical securing of the ontological difference. Moreover, in speaking of an “intuition” of esse that is finally to be identified with God, Maritain in effect conjoins a phenomenological moment to his theological metaphysics. This was what caused Gilson to protest at his mingling of metaphysics with mysticism in forsaking the view that the presence of Being in beings is something that reason can only infer. But while, indeed, Maritain adds an explicit “intuition of being” to Aquinas, it is possible to argue that it is latent in the latter’s texts and that in the end Gilson also affirmed something similar. For do we not directly experience in every existing essence a “surplus” of being which is at once the sheer fact of being and the open active potential of this existing particularity itself? Again Williams wonderfully explicates Maritain’s aes© 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 657 thetic extension of such an insight whereby, as the French philosopher explicitly declares, it is art that most of all engages with the way things as themselves give more than themselves. This can be connected with Rosemann’s new realisation (as stated also in somewhat similar terms, in my own and Catherine Pickstock’s Truth in Aquinas) that for Aquinas it is precisely the resort of the mind to sensory intuition that brings it nearest to the grasp of the excess of esse over essentia and so remotely to the divine esse which is at one with a purely intuitive intelligence. Revealed knowledge of the expression of this understanding in the divine Verbum further allows us also to see how artistic productive unfolding of the intrinsic surplus in things also belongs to the most fundamental initial intuition of esse which is Godhead. But this “unfolding” applies to the generation of the inner word in every human act of understanding. Just because, for humans, unlike God, there can be no “pure” intuition that coincides with reflective judgement, Maritain concluded that the intuition of being is always already expressed as an abstract concept, albeit it may be in initially “mythical” terms. And even the intuition as such (as applies also to God) must be inwardly expressed, since knowledge always involves relational distance as well as proximity. For this double reason, as Venard stresses (and makes fundamental in his own philosophical theology), for Maritain the intuition of being is also conceptually uttered as an inner word. Furthermore, this very uttering involves in itself a redoubled intuition of the superabundant meaningfulness and intellectual character of being as such, whereby the “extra” that is constituent of things now appears as the signifying extra of thing-as-sign and not merely as the existential extra of thing as concrete item. Once more, Williams develops throughout his short book the aesthetic corollary of this in Maritain, whereby the work of art emerges as a somehow “required” extra thing that is also an overplus of meaning emergent only with and through the existential extension of “thinghood”. For all the above reasons one needs a nuanced approach to Maritain: at times his relative rationalism lags behind Gilson; yet at other times he exceeds this in the direction of a mystical intellectualism that cries out for that appreciation of the neoplatonic element in Aquinas to which he was scarcely alert at all. A similar ambivalence hovers over Maritain’s citation of certain neoscholastics. In contrast to Gilson and still more his philosophical historian successors (Courtine, de Libera, Marion, Boulnois and Schmutz), Maritain failed to see that they inserted a divine cause within an ontological field in a way that Aquinas entirely avoided. On the other hand, Maritain did not favour the worst culprit in this regard, namely Suarez, but rather Cajetan and John of St. Thomas. In the case of the latter one has a complex and very gifted thinker who tended to synthesise a Baroque Thomism with elements more faithful to Aquinas himself. And in both cases one has figures who to © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

658 John Milbank some degree incorporated elements of humanist concern—with language and history—into the scholastic legacy. And these elements were of course of great interest to Maritain. That remarkable maverick amongst contemporary Maritainians, John N. Deely, who has sought to connect Thomism with the thought of Peirce, has pointed out how crucial for Maritain were John of St. Thomas’s reflections on the sign. From these, Maritain borrowed an extension of Aquinas’s reflections on the necessity for an inner word for thought, into a grasp of the necessity of the material sign (including the linguistic sign) itself for the thinking process. Hence it was Maritain, not Gilson, who carried out the linguistic turn within Thomism (indeed Gilson adamantly refused it). Here also he appears as specifically “modernist”. And for all the deficiencies (as compared with Gilson) of his grasp of the ontological difference, there are still elements in his thought, as I have just tried to indicate, that point the way to a linking of the linguistic turn with “the return of being”. In this respect he can properly be compared with Heidegger. The comparison also extends to their reflections upon art. One might perhaps say that it is in the work of art that Maritain sees the most acute meeting of an existential excess over essence with the excess of the sign over any supposedly fully grasped concept. As Rowan Williams more than once points out, Maritain declared (again somewhat like Heidegger) that “poetry was ontology”. What did he mean? Williams indicates that he meant that a poem must apprehend the real in the most attentive manner possible and do so by concentration on something particular. For this to provide an “ontology” suggests an extraordinary disclosure of Being in beings—a disclosure in excess of the general categorisation of beings itself. In this way the linking of being with the sign and the artwork opens up the horizon of the event as not subordinate to any merely immanent and totalising ontology. So in terms of his focus on Maritain’s poetics, and insistence on its links to his metaphysics as such, one can see a kinship between Rowan Williams’ own theology and that of other recent thinkers who have stressed the latent interest in the category of event in Aquinas, pointing out how this comes to a head in his Christology (where Christ’s single divine esse means that, as historical event, he “diagonalises out” of the normal essentia plus esse constitution of all finite ontology!) and how this may allow one to put him into a cautious conversation with Hegel and post-Hegelian philosophies of art, language and time. I am thinking of Michel Corbin, of Phillip Rosemann, of William Desmond, of O-T Venard OP and of my own and Pickstock’s construals of Aquinas, which are indebted to Corbin at several points. It is not an accident that Williams also, after Gillian Rose, is so interested in Hegel; I think that this interest is remotely echoed in the current book, but in a distinctly disciplined fashion that never here endorses the more “gnostic” elements in Hegel (as Desmond and O’Regan © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 659 describe them after Eric Voegelin) concerning an ontologically inevitable Fall and a self-alienation within the godhead. These affinities situate Williams amongst emerging theological perspectives which try to tackle metaphysical issues in a way not fully attempted by the communio group and ones which are also more concerned with a (highly critical) engagement with post-Cartesian thought. Clearly Williams is heavily influenced by von Balthasar. But one senses that he finds in Maritain an interaction with both philosophy and modernity that is not always so marked in the case of the Swiss theologian. In the realm of aesthetics, as Williams indicates, this means that he has a far greater concern than Balthasar with the making process rather than simply with the poetic upshot and its reception. What fascinates Williams in the French Philosopher is the questioning of the ontological status of the artwork, and of the role of the artist as artist and what this tells us about being and knowledge more widely. He suggests that it is just this dual focus which rendered Maritain uniquely of interest to practising artists, so much so that it is as if his artistic theory entered into the very fabric of certain twentiethcentury material productions themselves. Hence the book is constructed as a meditation on the resonance of Maritain’s poetics in the artistic practices of Eric Gill, David Jones and Flannery O’Connor. A dialectics is then implied here: can an ontology of the artwork and the poem which is a theory of poesis as ontology be itself extended by the works of art inspired by it? Williams concludes that Jones and O’Connor improve upon Maritain’s theory, but he is fully aware that the very success of their critique is a confirmation of a key aspect of the original thesis: namely that the work of art can provide an excessive disclosure of ontology to which mere theory cannot have advance access. Williams’ elected task is carried out in sparkling fashion, if at times one could wish that his editors had encouraged him to adapt his essentially oral discourse more to a written mode. It is also the case that the beguiling intimacy of Williams’ tone sometimes obscures as much as reveals the intellectual originality and conceptual rigour of what he has to say. Fundamental innovations in philosophical theology are thrown off in the most casual way, almost as asides. One would not want to lose such effective charm, but at times one suspects that Williams’ many admirers have little sense of what he is really saying, nor the way in which it is (fortunately) far removed from the usual norms of British theology and philosophy. Perhaps the inchoate anger directed at Williams from certain quarters of the Anglican church has at depth to do with a faint inkling of something alien: of a very Catholic, Celtic and European mind, only compromising with English empiricism out of pedagogic indulgence. Such a mind is very much at evidence in the current book. Williams is directly concerned here with European modernism and its relation to European Catholicism. Hence he traces the way in which Maritain, as a © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

660 John Milbank Thomist, echoed the modernist refusal of a romantic concern with expressive subjectivity and the communication of private emotions. The bringing about of the work of art itself in its unique integrity was instead what mattered. At the same time, classicism is not returned to, because the work of art should be a uniquely new disclosure. It is not a decorous representation of what already exists but rather (following Bergson) it is the further realisation of what already exists in a new and surprising form. Maritain was able to link these principles up with Aquinas’s understanding of beauty as respectively the integrity of the individual thing, its formal proportion and its radiantly clear showing forth to the mind of something in excess of even its own instance. To this, as Williams rightly emphasises, Maritain added an equally modernist concern with a poetic sensitivity to hidden and remote (often dream-like) connections and resonances. As Williams suggests, he here extended into a poetics scholastic theories of human understanding. Just as, for Aquinas, a formal concept continues in another mode the vital existence of a materially instantiated form, so now, for Maritain, a formed work of art (which is form as sign as well as form forming this particular piece of matter) somehow perpetuates and newly discloses the sources of its inspiration. In the same way that Williams talks about how art most of all shows how things are “more than themselves”, so also he talks (on almost every other page) about how the work of art “participates” in its antecedents and both realises and discloses complex and hidden webs of “participation”. In speaking of intra-finite “horizontal” participation, he seems both to recall the poetics of Owen Barfield and W. H. Auden (so some concealed Anglican influence here!) and to exhibit again affinities with the emphases of William Desmond or Milbank/Pickstock and Graham Ward. Also, recent work on Aquinas by Gilbert Narcisse and others has shown how “vertical” participation and analogy in his theology are echoed in horizontal structures of an ineffable convenientia, including those that pertain between being and knowing. Williams himself connects horizontal to vertical participation in one of his strokes of sheer throwaway originality and brilliance: if we were to suppose that “making other” were confined within finite immanence, then, he suggests, being as a whole would be an inert self-identity not subject to artistic disclosure. The atheistic or pantheistic supposition might allow art within the world, but at its margins art would be as it were cancelled, revealed as a less than serious kind of play. To remain with the implications of art and poetry, Williams avers, we have to allow that finite reality as such can become endlessly other to itself in a kind of finality beyond finality that implies, indeed, a “first mover”. If modernism was also newly concerned with the relation of life to art and with the public role of art, then Maritain took up this theme as well, in the guise of Aquinas’s delineation after Aristotle of the relation between ars and prudentia. The artist is not as such an ethical doer, but is concerned © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 661 with the integrity of the artwork: this can involve a “moral” selfdisciplining and self-restraint, but is relatively independent of the artist’s ethical relations in the public order. On the other hand, the finished work of art belongs in an ethical social universe and subserves prudential purposes. As Williams suggests, it was mainly this latter aspect which Eric Gill took from Maritain, insisting on the public usefulness and edification offered by genuine fabrication. Quite clearly, Gill failed to appreciate the more modernist aspect of the French philosopher’s aesthetics, whereby art exceeds the decorative and the functional in its disclosive capacity. Gill’s erstwhile disciple David Jones however, as Williams contends, fully appreciated this—linking the non-mimetic character of modern art with the transubstantiated elements of the Mass which are in strange guise the body and blood of Christ, and do not merely depict or indicate them. Jones’s poetry of complex invocation and allusion, and his painting with its increasingly intersecting and overlapping lines and forms, realises far more fully than Gill’s hieratic sculpting Maritain’s concern with the exposure and re-articulation of “hidden connections”. At the same time, Jones for Williams advances beyond Maritain. He sees that all of human culture involves the “gratuity” of art, and that this sense of engraced newness is not alien to ethical prudence, but rather intrinsic to a sense of a charitable ethics as exceeding prudence (here one might add that this lies nearer than Maritain to an appreciation of our natural desiring orientation to the supernatural). Williams then makes the transition to Flannery O’Connor by suggesting that the narrative dimension of ethics reveals a work of poesis that always accompanies the work of praxis. Jones’s long, broken epics already in part disclose such a dimension, but Williams finds it more acutely present in O’Connor’s fictions. What the latter took from Maritain was again a sense of the integrity of the work of art achieved initially (if not at all ultimately) for its own sake. In the case of fiction, this means the withdrawal of the intrusive and seemingly omnipotent narrator. It should rather seem as if the characters “write themselves”, while the voice of the narrator must itself be alienated into the very fabric of the fiction as that of another character (or characters) within the plot. At the same time, O’Connor offers something other than either Maritain or Jones: a sense of the extremity of the drama of salvation, of the tragic proximity of redemption to damnation. This is because of her acute sense that grace is more than simply a possible gratuity; rather, without this gratuity, the merely self-enclosed realm of human possibility will prove to be demonic. At the same time, within the apparently secure and necessary compromises of our world, the offer of grace may appear as a terrible threat of destruction and may indeed entail this in some measure. One might recall here the rage of another novelist, George Bernanos, against Maritain: the latter failed to realise that Christ can sometimes appear rather as the “executioner” than the “nursemaid” of the soul. In this context, Williams © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

662 John Milbank describes how in O’Connor’s fiction people may be offered grace in the mode of a love that has “nowhere to go” and so be tempted to refuse it. Inversely, those who find no place in the circle of domestic finitude may be tempted to despair and yet this alone in a secular world may suggest to us the élan towards transcendence. One figure for this in O’Connor is the reciprocal echo between suicidal drowning and baptism, and one is reminded of Bresson’s film of Bernanos’s Mouchette; the small unloved girl, corrupted by lack of love, finally rolls herself into the river. Here, though, it might be argued that the reading of O’Connor as an extension of Maritain is not without strain. I suspect that Williams would concede this, but even so, one wonders whether he is precisely right to say that O’Connor’s recognition that one “might” live within pure nature reveals her to be a “good neo-Thomist”. For whatever her formal ascriptions, it is rather the case that, as with Bernanos, a depiction of the demonic character of the attempt to live as if there were a pure nature suggests that in modern extremity we see that the real choice lies only between Christ and the devil—however difficult it may be sometimes to know which is which. Surely if Maritain was uneasy about the foregrounding of such ambivalence in Bernanos and about his “manicheanism”, which stressed the either/or over the both/and, he would have had just the same sort of reservations about O’Connor, as Williams indeed half-implies. The larger point here is that most of twentieth-century Catholic fiction seems to exhibit more suspicion about natura pura than Williams clearly allows. Its bleak and yet irradiated vision is like that of Bresson’s film Au Hazard Balthasar: a human world without grace is also totally denatured, such that even human affections are completely betrayed, yet at the same time, against such a secular background, the patience of God’s abandoned domesticated animal creatures, in this case of the donkey Balthasar, conveys to the viewer a trace of that orientation to the supernatural which is explicitly human and abides even in the natural world which human beings have touched. To this, certainly, one might protest that O’Connor is “neo-scholastic” precisely in her sense of the radically interruptive and discontinuous character of grace. This is a valid point, but does not negate the fact that there is for her no really neutral “natural” background against which such interruption takes place. Nevertheless, one could say that her fiction fails to exhibit strongly the other implication of our universally human orientation to one single supernatural end, namely the inextinguishable trace of goodness in all human being, where the transcendental goodness of being as such is doubled by the lure of this mode of being beyond itself to unity with God. One can also wonder somewhat about the notion of a “futureless love”, because presumably a future defined only in terms of this-worldly success and natural development is no really desirable future in any case. Does not love itself alone open up the real future of promise? And since © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 663 love is a process, must not love always have a future which opens up limitless and unexpected possibilities? One perhaps finds more of the sense of an ineliminable goodness in being and an ineliminable hope even for this world in Chesterton and Tolkien, who interestingly exhibit another mode of development of a Catholic and even a Thomistic aesthetic. Often Chesterton’s paradoxes benignly indicate how attempts to deny God and exalt humanity or nature are always grotesquely also the opposite. It is just for this reason that Chesterton, unlike modernism (or arguably as another mode of it) tended to work with and not against popular culture, idioms and genres, in part to the end of their subversion, but in part also to the end of their real fulfilment. (In this respect he was followed by Greene and Waugh as well as by C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Tolkien.) And perhaps the comic element in O’Connor stems from precisely a pushing of this mode of Chestertonian paradox to the most grotesque possible extreme. Yet by and large her fiction seems to lie, like much of twentieth-century Catholic fiction, within the trajectory stemming from Leon Bloy and Charles Péguy (also Maritain’s mentors) which has tended to ask (Graham Greene is an acute example) whether, in the face of bourgeois indifference, damnation does not lie closer to redemption than lukewarmness and scientific neutrality. At its most extreme this tradition has asked whether it is possible to risk one’s own damnation for the sake of others, although this is rightly diagnosed as the most subtle of all the devil’s wiles by Bernanos in the utterly terrifying Sous le Soleil de Satan. If this novel disturbed Maritain, its verdict is nonetheless an authentically Augustinian and Thomistic one, as against certain decadent pietistic extremities. Here, at least, it is seen that the need of human nature as nature for supernatural grace cannot denature us, but must fulfil even our animal concern for self-protection. But perhaps the main concern of the thoughtful reader after completing this really excellent book (which itself is more than it seems) will be: is Williams entirely fair to Gill?—a question already raised by John Hughes (author of a forthcoming book on theology, art and work in the new Blackwell Illuminations series) and one which turns out to have wide ramifications which are linked to the “Chestertonian” issues that I have just tried to raise. On one level Williams is entirely fair. Yes, Gill’s work is aesthetically limited and lacks symbolic resonance. Yes, his practice like his theory tends to reduce art to function and propaganda. However, this can still leave one with certain qualms. Most crudely and basically this concerns the political issue: Gill rather than the others followed and extended Maritain’s desire to link true art to true political practice which (before Maritain fell disastrously in love with the Constitution of the United States) involved a distributist/corporatist social order. More than perhaps anyone else save © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

664 John Milbank Dorothy Day, Gill tried actually to put Catholic social teaching into practice and part of this involved a concern for the democratisation of art involving all “makers” and not just “artists”. To be sure, Gill failed fully to see what an artist was in any case. Yet by comparison, Jones at least in the practical course of his life veered away from this concern with the artistry of all. Not just that, but if we are to excoriate, along with Williams, Gill’s partial Soviet sympathies, what are we to say to Jones’s sometime Nazi ones, however later by him disowned and deplored? Or what are we to say about the limits of O’Connor’s conservative Southern Agrarianism (for all its affinities in some ways with the more liberal English Catholic distributism)? Or even to Maritain’s initial refusal totally to denounce Pétain and ally himself with de Gaulle? (In contrast with Bernanos, whose questionable urgings towards right-wing theocracy nonetheless allowed him to see totalitarianism for what it was, and again, unlike Maritain, to realise that liberal democracy would eventually show itself to be a variant of it—as we now see all too clearly.) Would it here be entirely outrageous to suggest that the modernist focus on aesthetic self-sacrifice for the sake of the realised work of art, when extended by Jones into a general cultural theory, could indeed encourage a temporary falling for the wiles of Hitler’s “aesthetic state”? The Anathemata, after all, does not at all moments escape a dubious aestheticisation of war. What I am indicating here is the possible dangers of the modernist cult of the work of art as its own world, which involves the abnegation of the subjectivity of the artist. And at this point there follows a more nuanced question about the relation of modernism to romanticism, and whether the tradition which Williams traces adequately understood this. First of all, is it so clear that modernism breaks with romantic subjectivism? After all, German romantic irony (in Frederick Schlegel and others) already implied the original expressiveness of the creative self only in the ironic withdrawal of the artist from commitment to this expression. Certainly modernism involves usually a more serious and absolute commitment to the reality of the artwork, but nevertheless the model of self-sacrifice for the sake of the integrity of the work of art can be seen as an extreme continuation through inversion of the romantic paradigm and a new presentation of the heroic status of the artist. The concern with originality and with art as revelation is still present and is even accentuated. This is not at all to say that there is anything automatically “wrong” with such features. But where they might become questionable is when, after all, they perpetuate the romantic removal of art to the realm of the private and esoteric. If one only focuses on the unique integrity of the artwork, then the characteristic pre-modern public occasionality of the work of art is lost sight of. Sometimes, indeed, modernism sought to fuse art and life together once more, but usually in the mode of construing art as extraordinary ecstatic ritual (Bataille, Malraux, etc.). © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 665 In this context, is there not more to be said for Gill’s concern, after William Morris, with the primacy of the decorative and the embellishing of the social than Williams here allows? Certainly he failed to appreciate the challenge of modernism, but this does not render him simply oldfashioned. Instead, one could argue that he was the heir of a nineteenthcentury reaction against romanticism that remains just as “modern” as modernism. This reaction, which one can trace from Ruskin, amongst others, sought to recover the public and ethical dimension of art (while certainly not, in Ruskin’s case, neglecting gratuity and aesthetic disclosure) and tended to supplant the sublime with the beautiful, Milton with Dante, the naturally misty with the civically substantive, weak colours with strong ones, the rural wilderness with inhabited worked-on countryside—the Lake District with the Cotswolds (or Dorset, Shropshire and the East Midlands—one thinks here especially of Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb, D. H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney—all somewhat in the tradition of John Clare as sustained by Gerard Manley Hopkins rather than that of William Wordsworth). But there is another point here, which Gill himself failed fully to appreciate. If one is really to criticise romantic subjectivism, then paradoxically this cannot mean the advocacy of a sheerly impersonal “disinterested” sort of art. As we have seen, the idea of self-sacrifice for the artwork (one reason, incidentally, why, as Alison Milbank has pointed out, modernism so loved Frazer’s Fisher-King) is but the inversion of the romantic externalisation of the internal. So if one achieves, for the very first time with the work of art a new meaning that was not there previously, then, certainly one has ironically achieved a yet more considerable purely personal expression. Hence Ulysses, The Waste-Land and the Anathemata are in one sense public and impersonal works about collective history and not personal reminiscence. Yet in another sense they express very idiosyncratic and individual expressions of that history and offer themselves as esoteric consolations for the lack of a real shared symbolic universe. By contrast one could say that Gill, like Chesterton (or with much more subtle brilliance Rudyard Kipling in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies) was trying in his art and practice to shape at least some public meaningful space available to the many. And Chesterton, I think, beyond Gill, grasped the point that a truly public and in diverse senses occasional or “tensed” art cannot negate all subjective expression. This is precisely because art is not in the first place the kind of stuff that might end up in art-galleries. It is also crucially relevant here that factum is not necessarily fictio: Plato for example, refused to some extent the mimesis of the latter, but not the mimesis of the former. Poesis indeed accompanies all of praxis: it is involved in all our handling of matter and all our speaking, as Jones realised. It is architecture and house-decoration and gardening and tribute and commemorative portraiture and love-letters and hymns to the gods before it is novels and © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

666 John Milbank stage plays and contextless sculpture and the re-performance of old operas, etc. Before art is fictional drama it is “liturgy” that coincides with life as such—even if the “surplus” of fiction is never really absent. If the made belongs firstly to life itself and is not fiction, then the subjective maker cannot be ironically concealed. The subject is here more present than for modernism, whether this be the private subjectivity of the lover writing the love-poem to a specific recipient, or yet again the more representative subjectivity of the painter of a civic portrait or the collective subjectivity of a worshipping body. (It is not an accident that Messiaen wrote scarcely any real liturgical as opposed to religious music.) Indeed in postmodern aesthetics the subject (strange to say) actually returns, albeit in a problematic, self-estranged mode. For if, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe indicates, the “work” or text is indeterminate (defeating modernist integrity), then its many meanings are inseparable from many subjective viewpoints, even if these be themselves unstable. Similarly postmodernism somewhat contests the modernist claim concerning the “new world” opened up by the artwork: every work of art is not really fully original and so it is, after all (Lacoue-Labarthe again) always an “imitation”, albeit a non-identical one. Both these postmodern considerations tend to return art more to a public, temporal world, however problematically, and imply for artistic practice playful variants upon mimesis, the teleologically directed plot and the conversation between writer and reader (or artist and spectator) simply because subjective occasional expression and realist imitation can never really be abolished by apparent impersonality and vaunted pure abstraction. One could argue, for example, that the attempt in O’Connor to get rid of the omniscient controlling narrator only embeds this figure all the more, and all the more misleadingly. However “naturally compelling” the fiction that emerges, it still represents a vantage point and the characterfilled presence of the author in her living attempt to persuade us. Real situated rhetoric is ontologically prior to fiction, even though it always enters upon its devices. Therefore the most apparently pure fiction (like Madame Bovary) remains a concealed rhetorical address. All this, however, is not intended crudely as some sort of critique of Maritain, Jones and O’Connor. Rather, I would now like to suggest that their points of view are by no means straightforwardly modernist, as I think Williams would allow, for he is speaking after all of a theological engagement with, and critique of, modernism. A pure version of the latter would be more exemplified by Mallarmé, who sought to locate in the poem itself all the valences of erstwhile transcendence, such that it is now an epiphany of absence. But for Maritain, as Williams points out, the poem is still mimetic, still continues in some fashion to repeat, differently, its inspiring occasion or occasions (whether or not this is still Aristotle’s mimesis). And if the poem also participates vertically, then of course it is a partial “making present”, more in the mode of post WW II French poets © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 667 like Yves Bonnefoy and Philippe Jacottet who are so concerned with sacred presence in landscape and located commemorations of vanished real persons, things and events. And surely, however influenced he was by various modernist currents, David Jones was characteristically British—like Paul Nash in relation to surrealism, Graham Sutherland in relation to cubism, Ivon Hitchens in relation to expressionism, Peter Lanyon in relation to American abstract expressionism—in qualifying the extremity of foreign trends towards formalism, subjectivism and abstraction with a continuing commitment to a degree of figuration, realist depiction, delight in drawing technique and subtle colouration, all combined with Samuel Palmer or John Sell Cotman’s mystical sense of a hidden presence in the natural landscape (which had already caused Cotman in the nineteenth-century to “abstract”.) To elect once more watercolour as one’s habitual mode is scarcely a modernist gesture, since its transparency and evocative lucidity tends to qualify any sense that the work of art is merely a thing in itself. Even the abstract sculptures of Barbara Hepworth seem designed to fit within a certain landscape and to resonate with its surface lines, yet Williams does not in this book really recognise the significance of this specifically British mode of flowing “superficiality”. For him, the iconic surface of Jones’s paintings, their refusal of depth, is of one piece with their modernist escape from subjective perspective and external reference; yet one would more expect the modernist impulse to be realised in a three-dimensional selfcontainment, as Williams himself indicates in talking about Gill’s nonmodernist preference for bas-relief. Is there not rather a continuity between Gill and Jones’s preference for the flat surface, exemplified also in their lines of typeface? In Jones’s case the saturation of the surface by overlapping signs yields a transparency and a “British” (Anglo-Celtic) horizontality that works against that verticality of the paintings (noted by Williams) which brings background forwards and suggests the encroachment of the heavenly, a certain self-contained epiphany. Just as the bringing of sky forwards while leaving it as sky in fact conserves an unmodernist hierarchy, so likewise the endless overscribble of complex figures implies a referential writing that returns the work in unmodernist and historicist fashion to both natural and cultural time, rather than absorbing that time within the literary work after the fashion of Joyce—as figured by the perhaps over-jarring device of seeing the Odyssey resumed in a single day’s unthreatening peregrinations around Dublin. (The recent Coen brothers’ movie O Brother where art thou?, set in an O’Connor-like grotesquely violent American south, surely updates Homer’s voyage more appropriately, while one could argue that Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two Birds achieved more successfully than his fellow Irishman a satiric and ironic evoking of myth that still allowed to myth its uncanny pre-humanness, rather than attempting—via a misreading of Vico—to reduce it to “being © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

668 John Milbank about” human self-making. Such a reduction effectively dissolves myth, along with that very making process itself, into banal affirmations of the life-process.) The pure modernist drive to the self-epiphany of the artwork itself as the presence of fictional “absence” is also the drive to pure abstraction— something which, as Paul Virilio has argued, is at once impossible of realisation (every abstraction also imitates) and wilfully murderous in relation to the natural and the human world. But Jones’s very British practice veers entirely away from this, and arguably this veering away is not a matter of insular philistinism, but rather of an insular treasuring of the ethical exigencies of the Western Christian humanist legacy. Of course there is no timeless Christian poetic. The latter can be expressed in relation to romantic, arts and crafts, modernist or postmodernist idioms. Yet through all these one can trace a certain consistency in the Christian poetic qualification of contemporary artistic fashions: from Clare and Coleridge through Hopkins and Ruskin, Gill and Chesterton to Jones, Eliot and Tolkien and then R. S. Thomas and Geoffrey Hill, to cite a British lineage amongst other European ones. All doing indeed involves gratuitous making, as Williams stresses (and I myself emphasised in Theology and Social Theory). Yet equally, all transitive making involves a relatively intransitive doing in a Thomist (rather than Aristotelian) sense that we are involved in attentive exchanges with other persons whom we have not made. In Leaf by Niggle, Tolkien allegorically dramatised just this mutual co-operation between artistic making and prudential exchanging and even indicated how these processes themselves must eschatologically “exchange” their respective places. As Jones affirmed, the social itself must be a constant gratuitous work of art; but equally art must be a gift exchanged between persons whose gratuitous arrival in space and time is something we attend to rather than construct. If there is socially transcendental verbum, there is also socially transcendental donum. Likewise, for the modern Christian poetic tradition, while the poet seeks to achieve the work and not her own self-expression, yet as Williams fully recognises in his final chapter (which in many ways admits beyond modernism the need for a “subjective” dimension), it is also the case that the poet—as indeed every person—only realises herself through these acts of external construction. Hence in them she does indeed realise selfexpression, albeit of a provisional kind, such that she must at once give herself to the work and yet stand back from it—not with ironic reserve but in apophatic hesitation as regards both “who she really is” and what the work has really disclosed about reality. The limit of romanticism would be to celebrate the pathos of the fleeting moment or emotion and the limit of arts and crafts to confine art to the ethically decorative. But the limit of modernism would be to erect a new cult of the work of art as the Bergsonian timeless expression of the inner © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 669 duration of time itself, sundered from the array of singular events and passing contingencies. This is but the elite esoteric reversal of the more habitual modern tendency to locate all beatitude, goodness and identity within finitude alone. Postmodernism, from Lacan onwards, has exposed the delusion of both the modern and the modernist programme: at the heart of all seeming limit lies the infinite abyss; at the heart of all identity an aching lack, while duration which undoes successive time is itself merely a dark heart of absence that the delusory time of the everyday always in turn undoes in every next moment. The constitutive absence of desire turns out to be as ineliminable as the apparent subject and cannot be appeased by any “disinterested” and unerotic aesthetic delight, such as the young still lingeringly Catholic Joyce falsely projected in his still unconsciously Kantian—and so “modern”—construal of Thomistic aesthetics (in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). In this context, as Williams indicates, along with the tradition which he so effectively re-invokes, the only alternative to a postmodern despair, which is at one with surrender to a dire and unfunny playfulness, is to read both our subjective hunger and the surplus we discern in things as signs of a vertical participation in the infinite meaning of the inner divine art or Logos, a meaning which they can only echo in those modes of horizontal participation which art most acutely re-invokes. But this means that the “fine arts” are only valid when they see themselves as intensifying this art which is proper to humanity as such. Jones is factually wrong (as Williams fails to observe) when he claims to see an unnoticed disjuncture in Maritain between art as a practice and prudence as an attitude. For in the Middle Ages (after Aristotle) ars was a virtue which governed facere in parallel with the virtue of prudentia which governed agere. Hence it was a skill of producing proportionate things everywhere exercised (for example in all speaking of words) as well as, according to Jones’s new insight, an ever-renewed production of the gratuitous. In this light one can see that it is important, with Gill, not to lose sight of the danger of adding to scholastic philosophy a “poetics” and an “aesthetic”. For there was a certain medieval advantage in not recognising any special domain of fine art, nor any special region of understanding dubbed the “aesthetic”. The advantage is that one can allow ars to be silently operating everywhere, in democratic ubiquity and with a selfforgetting absorption of all artifice and fiction within the overarching divine/human work of liturgical praise. Equally, one can allow that beauty which “looks after herself” silently mediates between the will, the understanding and material things in a way that disallows the tyranny of either desire, logic or the sheerly and inertly given. Just because there was no aesthetics in Aquinas’s theological philosophy, the aesthetic is therein everywhere present (as all the most serious and acute Thomistic scholars now recognise). © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

670 John Milbank Yet Williams, in the wake of Maritain and Jones, rightly indicates the insufficiency of such a conclusion—even though it is not exactly wrong. For the Middle Ages did not quite see in theory (as opposed to practice) that all human understanding works though material production and materially-based signs. If such a recognition involves also a theory of the fine arts, it more fundamentally involves seeing how the medieval ubiquity of ars applies also or even especially to the “base” arts of craft taken in the widest sense. Likewise the latency of fundamental beauty in Aquinas meant that it was also for him a blind spot: one could even say that Aquinas probably supposed his own theology to have more to do with abstract reason than was really the case. This blindness invited a later rationalistic reduction by nominalism and neo-scholasticism of the Patristic legacy in which he stood, and to resist this one indeed requires a more explicit aesthetics, conjoined to a more explicit poetics (though one which fully preserves a Thomist sense of the beautiful as a transcendental and not as a post-Kantian regional dimension of reality). I have stressed a great deal the way in which making is not primarily fictioning, since I think Williams underrates this point, and this is why he underrates Gill. Nevertheless, for art (even craft and decoration) to present the surplus in things is also, as Maurice Blanchot suggested, to re-present a fictional supposition that belongs to reality itself. For if nature has already “photographically” taken her own picture, she has also already started to “make herself up”, since every naturally-arising image is also an eventful story which can be held in abeyance, be somewhat confined to itself (like the Cheshire cat’s grin in Alice in Wonderland), such that not everything within it necessarily leads to any subsequent consequences. The road to the real, to the other and to God does therefore truly run through the detour of the fictional, as Williams correctly implies. This road is in one sense a way of “consolation” because (despite the post 1960s British Middle Class Christian consensus against consolation which Williams somewhat uncritically echoes) all art offers a certain alleviation of sorrow and despair by locating us for a while within “another” world that also conveys to us a certain presence “with” us of the author. Boethius (building on the Proclean exaltation of the imagination) offered philosophy as “consolation” precisely because he somewhat allegorised or fictionalised philosophy as such, and indeed saw her as a personified other who fictionally visited him. Certainly one can say, with Williams, that the consolation of fiction is “false” in the end if it does not point beyond itself and if it intends to gloss over or deny the horrors of reality. On the other hand, if an aspect of this horror is precisely that it cannot be immediately overcome by an intervening transcendent power, then the imagination of “something else” (which may even be the intuition of hidden parallel created realities—what for British tradition is the realm of the faerie), is indeed our only recourse. The post-romantic religious gesture must mean © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity 671 (as Williams indicates, following O’Connor) that one accords this imagining a disclosive power. But this follows because we cannot directly receive the final reality of spiritual healing—rather we have to take the detour of “consolation” to the extent that we have to take the detour of “fiction”. For the realm of the fictional and the realm of the consoling (not the falsely consoling) precisely coincide. And many have remarked how the overwhelming effect of David Jones’s long poems is one of a soothing consolation in the face of the unbearable horrors of history and of modernity. Just because he looked these horrors in the face and refused all false consolation, what else could Jones the psychically wounded soldier do but console himself and others in pictures and words? Thus not in normal reality but rather in his poem, In Parenthesis, the dying soldiers meet the Queen of the Woods: this is either a necessary escapism or else it is an intimation through a necessary fiction of something they really did after all receive. But here we can finally rejoin Williams. Where fiction participates in the divine making of the Mass (as it did for Jones) then, indeed, there is a true possibility of hope, and just for this reason it is possible to receive the full terror of this world without flinching. Indeed it is only if one catches an intuitive glimpse of the plenitude of meaning that the terrible itself can have any meaning as the absence of meaning, and persist in its reality of terror beyond the passing illusion of sentiment thrown up by human animal reflexes. In this way the modern Catholic novelists were right to see that recognition of the infernal abyss lies perilously close to our capture by the transcendent heights. It took a true making and a true fictioning to arrive at this truth, which modernity negatively opened again to our view, and which it now requires for its own traumatic healing.

NOTE 1

I am heavily indebted in the writing of this review article to conversations with Alison Milbank.

© 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd