Ecce Mater

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Below is a piece that I wrote for this occasion a few years back. I'm reposting it mostly because I won't have time to write anything new and I don't want the feast to go unnoticed.

Mater Dolorosa, ora pro nobis

[Today] the Church celebrate[s] the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. It is under this title that Mary was designated patroness of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, so I was able to celebrate the feast consistently during my time at Notre Dame (the Holy Cross priests put on a very nice mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart). I came to identify more and more with this feast and decided that under this title I would have my own devotion to Mary. In short, this feast is particularly meaningful for my spirituality. The Mater Dolorosa has been the primary image I've had of Mary for some time now.

The image of the sorrowful Mary is drawn from passages such as Luke 2:35, wherein Simeon meets the mother and her child at the Temple, and prophesies that the boy would be a sign of opposition causing the rise and fall of many in Israel; and that even Mary's heart will be pierced by a sword. The one who was not to bring peace, but the sword (Matt 10:33-35) did not even spare his mother from its edge. The heart that treasured all of the things of Christ (Luke 2:51) would be split open. Simeon, guided by the Spirit (Luke 2:25) reveals to Mary her own share in Israel's Tribulation.

There is then, of course, John 19: which depicts Mary at the foot of the cross. Here the "beloved disciple" takes the place of Jesus Himself in the familial bond with his mother. Mary, unlike the Eleven (or Ten, if the "beloved" is identified as John), remains with her son as He hangs in agony from a tree, undergoing in Himself the climactic judgment of God upon Israel. The depths of this, I surely cannot fathom. Whereas Hagar exclaimed "Let me not see the child die!" as she turned from the starving Ishmael (Gen 21:16), Mary does not take her eyes off of her dying son, even when He gives up His spirit.

I believe it is here, at the Cross, that Mary shows her true colors. It is where she is at her "most Biblical," in my opinion. In a conversation with a Methodist friend a few weeks ago, I was reminded that the Gospels are not exactly brimming with explicit, dogmatic pronunciations about the Holy Mother of God. There are even passages that seem to cast Mary to the margins: for instance, Matt 12:48 depicts Jesus calling Mary's status as family into question. Who is my mother, he asks (fourth commandment, anyone?!). Yet in John's Gospel, it is at the foot of the cross that Christ confirms Mary as his true mother precisely when He presents her as the mother of His beloved disciple (John 19:25).

I recently read Jon Levenson's fantastic book The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son. In the last chapter, "The Revisioning of God in the Image of Abraham," Levenson describes beautifully how the Gospels pick up on the ancient Canaanite myths of gods sacrificing their sons and receving them back again; though filtered, as it were, through long-standing Jewish tradition and specifically the famous story of the "binding" of Isaac. John 3:16 recalls the Canaanite trope, but refashioned in the image of Abraham. For as with Abraham, the sacrifice of the beloved son is not a matter of military conquest or survival, but a matter of love:

Here, as in Rom 8:32, the underlying identification of Jesus as the son of God has brought about a refashioning of God in the image of the father who gives his son in sacrifice. The father's gift to God has been transformed into the gift of God the Father.[1]

This got me thinking: it seems that in many ways, the Gospel vision of Mary could be seen as fashioned in the image of Abraham as well. The parallels are by no means perfect, but they are intriguing. Both Abraham and Mary receive promises from God about the miraculous conception of their children in seemingly impossible circumstances. Mary is a virgin, Abraham is a geezer, and Sarah is aged and barren. Both promises speak of the future glory of their children: kings of people will come from Abraham by Sarah (Gen 17:6, 16) and the one born of Mary will be given the throne of David and rule over the house of Jacob with an unending kingdom (Luke 1:32-33). Abraham's reaction of utter disbelief ("Will a child be born to a man one hundred years old ? Andwill Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?"- Gen 17:17) is mirrored by Mary's more moderate response: "How can this be, for I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:34). In either case, the chosen figures are called to trust in the unimaginable power of God: "Is anything beyond YHWH?"(Gen 18:14); "Nothing will be impossible with God" (Luke 1:37). And both characters come to embody the response of total trust that God will fulfill His promises: Abraham's "Here I am" (Gen 22:1) and Mary's "Behold, the bondslave of the Lord..." (Luke 1:38).

If such parallels point to a common trope, then it follows that Mary's experience at the cross can be read in terms of Abraham's call to offer his "beloved son" as a sacrifice. In Genesis, God has attempted a new means of spreading His primal blessing to the world of His creation: election. Abraham was chosen as the vehicle of God's blessing to all of the nations. In a very real sense, God has taken a risk: the blessing of all of creation depends upon the faithfulness of Abraham to his God. In this context, the story of the aqedah or binding of Isaac becomes the supreme test of Abraham's covenant-fidelity (Gen 22:1). God is commanding Abraham to bleed and burn the "only" son whom God has promised as the future of Abraham's line and glory. To both slaughter his child and believe that the promise will come true nonetheless requires the boundless faith in nothing less than this: that nothing, absolutely nothing, is beyond the power of YHWH. Abraham thus proves his faith to God, proves that he is "in awe of God" (Gen 22:12), by raising his hand against his son and truly offering him as a sacrifice; and God is able to save the child's life, returning him to his father "resurrected," as it were. God then emphatically reaffirms that he has made the right choice with this man, and reestablishes him as the vessel of blessing and future glory (Gen 22:16-18).

What then of Mary's faithfulness to the promises given her? Much like in Abraham's case, the situation presented by God is practically unthinkable. God had assured Mary that her only, beloved son would reign on the throne of Israel and His Kingdom would never fall. Yet this same son hangs before her with flesh beatern and torn, dying the death of a criminal alongside criminals. It is almost a sick joke on God's part: the throne he promised turns out to be a cross and the crown that was to be Jesus' is laced with thorns. The INRI rests above his head in the ultimate irony. If Mary is then to watch her son die and still believe that God will make good on His promise, she can do nothing short of believing this: that nothing is impossible for God.

We might then see Mary's place at the crucifixion as a trial similar to that of the aqedah, in which she too is faced with the sacrifice of her only son and must not "withold"Him from God (Gen 22:12), but rather give Him up (as God Himself does). Granted, in contrast to the story of Abraham, Mary is not actually performing the sacrifice of her child. There was little Mary could have done about the crucifixion. And yet, the scene can still be described as a testing of Mary's faithfulness to God's promise and His plan for her. This, it seems, is what Simeon meant when he told her that her heart would be pierced: the passage speaks of the sword as an instrument of judgment or testing, something that reveals what is truly in the heart. In seeing her only son suffer and die, God is testing her heart as if dissecting it with a sword. Christ taught that He would not be ashamed of those who were not ashamed of Him when he came in His Glory (Luke 9:26); the Apostles were ashamed and abandoned him. Yet Mary was not ashamed. Christ taught that only those who do the will of God are His brothers and His mother; His so-called brothers hid themselves from His face like Adam and Eve hid from the face of God (Gen 3:8). Yet Mary remained face-to-face with Him and thereby enacted her trust that God was not mistaken about her son. Mary's presence signaled her trust that, against all appearances, the cross did not prove Jesus' kingship impossible. She thereby, like Abraham, enacted her faithfulness, fulfilling the pledge of trust she made when God's promise was proclaimed to her. In a very real sense, she does the will of God for her: and it is thus only at the cross that Mary proves herself to be the mother of Christ.

Yet Abraham was stopped short of killing his son. His faith only had to stretch so far. Mary's, on the other hand, was called to prove itself even in the face of her son's death! He not only suffered humiliation and defeat, but succumbed to death! How great her trust had to be! And miraculously, it is rewarded: just as Abraham received His son back and his vocation as the vehicle of blessing was reaffirmed, so too does Mary receive her son back to life anew. Resurrected, the promise of God is fulfilled when Christ ascends to the throne of God.

The sorrows of Mary's passion, I believe, are therefore of great import. I think it is in this sense that we are called to a Marian spirituality in the Church: a call that is at the same time the fulfillment of that covenant-faith, that reckless trust in God, that began with Abraham. Through Mary's faithfulness, the blessings of Christ extend to the whole world. We as members of the new covenant are called to enact the same radical fidelity to the promises God has given us. We are, in this sense, called to live our lives from the Cross. Even our theology is meant to be, in this sense, Marian in nature. Henri de Lubac describes all theology as Theologia a Cruce: theology from the cross: "For it is the Cross which disperses the cloud which until then is hiding the truth."[2] The space which we are called to occupy is that of Mary at the foot of the cross, in her sorrow. For that is simply to embody the kind of faithfulness that God the Father Himself lived out in sacrificing His Son for the love of the world. Here, Mary is transparent to God: she is the way to imitating Him. And if we can embody that nearly senseless trust in God, we will receive the Son back again, resurrected and fulfilling the promises that God has made to all Christians. As the "beloved disciple" can be seen as the ideal disciple of Christ, John is showing us precisely where we are to receive Mary as our mother.

Our Lady of Sorrows represents for me a Mariology that is truly Scriptural and, well, truly true.

May she pray for us all, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ...

Pax Christi,

---

[1] Jon Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993); p.225

[2] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sr. Elizabeth Englund, OCD (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988); p.179

Empire Strikes Back

It seems there's not a single uncontroversial bone in Milbank's body. His recent piece over on the ABC Religion and Ethics site ("Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Islam") has caused quite a stir in the blogosphere and, in a rare feat of ecumenism, he's managed to unite theologians of all stripes in a common outrage. Here Milbank's cultural prejudices are on full display and they all but beg for the critical lashing they've received on the blogs.

The entire piece strikes me as odd: Milbank aligning Christianity with the Enlightenment under any pretext? Parsing mystical Islam and political Islam in the puzzling way he does, when elsewhere he insists that to view any religion as less than a "social project" is to concede too much ground to modern liberalism? But of course the real beef concerns the optimistic view of western colonialism that seems to shine through. After chastising those who ignore the violent and repressive streak in political Islam, he concludes:

The proper response to our present, seemingly incommensurable tensions is not to gloss over or seek to rehabilitate the past in such a dishonest way, but to analyse why exactly Islam has largely taken such a dangerous, non-mystical and often political direction in recent times.

This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires (as a consequence of the European wars) and the subsequent failure of Third World national development projects, with the connivance of neo-colonial, purely economic exploitation of poorer countries.

Political Islam offers itself as a new international, but non-colonial, vehicle for Third World identity. Unfortunately, it also perpetuates over-simplistic accounts of the imperial past and fosters a spirit of resentful rather than self-sustaining and creative response to the ravages of Western capitalism.

This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of Milbank's prudence. The postmodern side of him has always stressed that there only are particular narratives and traditions. Yet he is surprisingly comfortable with overly-generalized concepts ("the East," "the West," etc.) that appear more at home in reductive sociological discourse than in theology; the kinds of concepts post-colonial scholars both have in their cross-hairs and, ironically, employ all of the time. These few paragraphs put the question in stark relief: to what extent does Milbank exhibit dangerous colonialist tendencies?

First the "good news." The majority of the essay is chock-full of the kinds of qualifications I'm not used to seeing in Milbank's work: he has at least tried to make his sweeping claims less sweeping, avoiding "monolithic" characterization and citing "significant minorities." And as Skholiast has noted, Milbank is not arguing that the Western colonial empires should never have fallen; but, if we are to read him with a dash of charity, he seems to think that things would have been better for everybody had the empires collapsed more gradually. And he does get some points for explicitly denouncing the economic exploitation of "neo-colonialism." It would be a leap indeed to claim that Milbank is calling for a new era of empire.

But here's the "bad news." Milbank's emphasis is troubling to say the least. Where he explicitly mentions imperialism elsewhere, he almost always adopts a suspiciously apologetic tone: he is far more worried about empire not getting its proper due from overzealous post-colonial types than he is about, say, denouncing the hell out of its manifest sins. The brand of colonialism associated with modern capitalism gets plenty of negative attention, but his rhetoric makes it sound as though he longs for the traditional colonial powers. Of course the history of empire is a complicated affair, but isn't all of this about as helpful as saying Stalin wasn't that bad compared to Hitler? Milbank also prefers the rather cavalier idiom of providence when describing "the West" and its cultural formations; an idiom that all Christians should find themselves hesitant to invoke when judging an institution or a history so burdened with its crimes.

Adam Kotsko's criticisms are on target, I think. Adam brings up three compelling counterpoints to challenge the wisdom of Milbank's judgments. Tim McGee's comments are also helpful. In particular Tim reminds us why we shouldn't be terribly surprised by this kind of thing: when one looks at some of his earlier political writings, things start to look bleak for Milbank. One can trace this attitude back to his 1990 essay, "The End of Dialogue," republished in the collection The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene: Cascade, 2009). Tim was a classmate of mine in J. Kameron Carter's course on Radical Orthodoxy and post-colonialism, in which we were exposed to the scaffolding of Carter's critique of Milbank. I've expressed reservations about Carter's approach, mostly due to what I perceive to be an uncritical appropriation of genealogy (ala Foucault) in service of his deconstructive reading. The hermeneutical principles that Carter offered pose problems not only for basic Christian doctrinal commitments, but also for any privileged perspective of critique supposedly immune from the same kind of deconstruction (the will-to-power does not discriminate). This also brought with it an inadequate view of the relation between theory and praxis: such that Milbank could "say" everything right "up-here" while nonetheless reducing all of his correct dogma and metaphysics to tools of an independent will-to-power "down here" (as will-to-re-colonize). Long story short, I believe the class fostered an environment in which minds were already and too easily made-up. Students often felt safe to offer rather bold and dismissive claims, comfortably abstracted from close textual analysis. My first impression of the experience was not unlike watching a farcical witch hunt: "We did do the nose...but he is a witch!!!" However I am grateful to Carter for forcing me to reflect on Milbank's attitude toward empire. One of Carter's most illuminating points is that colonialism arose with and depended upon a particular theological discourse. One need only to look at the writings of John Major or Gines de Sepulveda to find a perverse theological justification for the enslavement of the Indies (a justification against which Montesino, las Casas, and the other Dominicans of Hispaniola had to fight so ardently). It is to Christianity's potential for such abuse, and its actual abuse in history, that Milbank seems so dangerously inattentive.

In "The End of Dialogue," Milbank stresses the essential nature of Christianity's "ecclesial project," uniquely understanding itself as an international society with "deterritorializing" effects for the men, women, and children that it accepts as equal members (286). However, he also claims that "all the major religions are associated in one way or another with the 'imperial,' nomadic ventures of the Indo-European peoples" (288). Imperialism is, like the kind of universalization associated with the Christian polis, a deterritorializing phenomenon. While Milbank notes that empires tend to enshrine power "in the natural order, or in principles" and thereby create a more effective and stable brand of tyranny, he nonetheless stresses that "most empires are ambiguous rather than sheerly deplorable" (288). He also includes an odd and manifestly reductive genealogy of the fundamental difference that makes "the West" and "the East" culturally incommensurable (all in three pages!). This of course translates into two different views of religio-political power and thus two different kinds of empire: because the East has an essentially arbitrary understanding of divine and regal power, it has no resources within itself to regulate or redeem its imperial strain; but for the West, justice and the Good "are themselves the vehicles of Western imperialism." And while the latter may occasionally don the mask of domination, at the very least the Western type can (theoretically) produce an internal cultural critique (295). Hence, the antidote to the Western abuse of power can only come from within Western culture itself. Further, because the idea of an "essential Christianity" free from all cultural attachments is a myth, a non-Western cultural expression of Christianity "is just nonsensical" (292). This seems to account for both why Milbank would be relatively disinclined to listen to voices outside of the West and why it seems unavoidable for him that conversion to the Gospel will necessitate conversion to a particularly Western cultural formation. In this piece, then, one can see the foundation of Milbank's "East-West" dichotomy in "Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Islam," which somehow takes precedent over the more conventional Milbankian dichotomy of "Christianity-Modernity"

Following Tim's insight, one can also trace some of Milbank's points back to his 2002 essay, "Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror" (also republished in The Future of Love). Here again he calls out the capitalistic neo-colonialism of Britain and the US, but he can't resist contrasting this to the relative virtues of the old empires. For some reason the problem with the new colonialism that demands our attention is the uniformity it imposes. At least the "older European imperialism held the other at a subordinated distance, permitting its otherness..." -thank God for that-"even while subordinating it for the sake of an exploitation of natural and human resources." He's also concerned to note the nuances overlooked by "pseudo-left-wing American 'postcolonial' discourses"(226). I have little doubt the pseudo-left-wingers miss all kinds of nuances, but is it really necessary to apologize for traditional imperialism in order to get the point across?

This same essay provides some clues to Milbank's take on Islam. In the course of just a few pages, Milbank manages to present the Cartesian turn to the subject, "the idea of knowledge as detached representation of spatialized objects," and Milbank's greatest enemy- the univocity of being- as Oriental ideas derived from Avicenna. Medieval Islam was the "crucible" in which "protomodern ideas concerning subjectivity were forged and then handed over to the West." A "common culture of mystical philosophy and theology, focused around analogy and ontological participation- which has also tended to favor social participation- was rendered impossible" (230). To put it bluntly, the central ideas of modernity and the downfall of analogy were conditions contracted from the East. As was, it turns out, the arbitrary conception of absolute power that Milbank identified as a characteristic feature of Eastern understanding in "The End of Dialogue"(linking the absolute will of the Caliph and the will of Allah in Sunni Islam). He contrasts this with a "shared mystical outlook" in Shi'ite and Sufistic alternatives; explaining why he judges that Islam needs to go in a mystical direction if it wants to avoid extremism. Apart from eventually adopting the germ of modernity from Oriental thought, the West gets away pretty unscathed in this story; contributing to the impression that Milbank has a stake in narrating a purified history of Western culture (even in its empires).

As I've mentioned, I think there are problems going the route initially suggested by Carter, because a critique based on will-to-power just opens a pandora's box of other problems while risking some pretty serious hermeneutical mistakes. One need not open that box to effectively critique this aspect of Milbank's thought. I find Oliver Davies' criticisms the most illuminating thus far ("Revelation and the Politics of Culture: A Critical Assessment of the Theology of John Milbank" in Radical Orthodoxy?-A Catholic Enquiry, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming (Burlington: Ashgate, 2000)). Davies challenges Milbank's internal consistency: in effect, Milbank leaves himself open to the kind of tendency I've been talking about by not being Radically Orthodox enough. Uncritically adopting too much from 20th century postmodernism, Milbank (to use his own characterizations) lets in too much paganism and too much heresy. Davies notes that in his early work Milbank actually champions certain postmodern dogmas as the delayed realizations of Christian Revelation; including the redefinition of truth as persuasive power and a deep commitment to narrative incommensurability (so deep that he finds himself incommensurable with MacIntyre towards the end of TST). Davies argues that these two commitments in particular conflict with the narration of Milbank's "ontology of peace." "Incommensurability licenses a polemical and oppositional view of narrativity, setting the Christian story over and against alternative narratives." In short, Milbank severely limits the ways in which any narrative can express itself peacefully as the space in which all narratives find their fulfillment. It seems any narrative claiming the kind of privilege that Christianity does would have to appear imperialistic. Further, when Christianity must subsist as an exercise of persuasiveness, it becomes difficult to distinguish between Gospel and ideology; that is, "if conversion is the sole or chief criterion." "And how are we to judge whether conversion is deeper than the rehearsal of a narrative which in some societies has been a near universal form of cultural practice?" Rhetoric and persuasion, even masquerading as peaceful, can serve as the consummate manifestations of privilege and power (116). Davies concludes the point nicely:

Although there are also important rhetorics of asceticism, liberation and detachment within our society, the uncritical alignment of Chrsitianity and ideology through the epistemology of bare-fisted rhetoric will inevitably pose the question of whether the uncritical alliance of Christianity and "radical incommensurability" might not result precisely from a failure to interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of Radical Orthodoxy in the light of the non-coercive and empowering dispositions of the Gospel (116-117).

I find this approach helpful because it does not grant that Milbank checks-out on the level of theory and only fails on the detached level of praxis. It has the benefit of linking practical consequences to apparent inconsistencies in his philosophical appropriation.

Just my two cents. Would love to hear what people think.

Pax Christi,