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 ratio-
nalistic 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 demon-
stration 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 pro-
portionality 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 under-
standing 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 under-
standing, 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 situa-
tion (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 represen-
tation, 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 exte-
rior 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 substan-
tive 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 refer-
ence 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 under-
standing 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 characteris-
tically early twentieth-century philosophy: it is indeed, as Williams indi-
cates, 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 phi-
losopher) 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 obses-
sive 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 dis-
closed 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 identifica-
tion 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 rela-
tively 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 theo-
logical metaphysics. This was what caused Gilson to protest at his min-
gling 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 expe-
rience 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 par-
ticularity 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 con-
cluded 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 concep-
tually 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 con-
stituent 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 neo-
scholastics. 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 contem-
porary 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 com-
pared 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 Rose-
mann, 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 perspec-
tives 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 twentieth-
century 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. Fun-
damental 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 expres-

sive 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 represen-
tation 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” self-
disciplining 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 appre-
ciated 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 ascrip-
tions, 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 old-
fashioned. Instead, one could argue that he was the heir of a nineteenth-
century 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 tradi-
tion 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 paradoxi-
cally 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 externali-
sation 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 per-
sonal 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 integ-
rity), then its many meanings are inseparable from many subjective view-
points, 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 spec-
tator) 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 character-
filled 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 for-
malism, 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 self-
containment, as Williams himself indicates in talking about Gill’s non-
modernist 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 overlap-
ping signs yields a transparency and a “British” (Anglo-Celtic) horizontal-
ity 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 hierar-
chy, 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 broth-
ers’ movie O Brother where art thou?, set in an O’Connor-like grotesquely
violent American south, surely updates Homer’s voyage more appropri-
ately, 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 post-
modernist 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 transcen-
dental 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 self-
expression, 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 uncon-
sciously 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 pru-
dence 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 self-
forgetting 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 under-
standing 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 Paren-
thesis, 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