john milbank, scholasticism, modernism and modernity

SCHOLASTICISM, MODERNISMAND MODERNITY

JOHN MILBANK

As Rowan Williams notes in his introduction to Grace and Necessity:Reflections on Art and Love, (London: Continuum, 2005), Jacques Maritain isa 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 inthe museum of “Maritainian Thomism” (largely located, like all suchintellectual sepulchres, in the United States of America). For regarded asthe author of an adequate Thomistic system, he appears to fall far short ofwhat today would be required. Compared with Étienne Gilson, he did notso adequately grasp how early modern neo-Thomism had contaminatedthe thought of the medieval master with elements derived from Scotismand nominalism which tended to render it more essentialistic and ratio-nalistic in character. Again, unlike Gilson, as Williams also points out, hewas reluctant to accept the argument of Henri de Lubac and many othersthat there was no natura pura to be found in Thomas. Nor did he ascribeso fully as Gilson to a notion of “Christian philosophy” which correctlyrecognised that there was little attempt to develop a presuppositionlessmetaphysics in the Middle Ages and usefully suggested that philosophyhas never been done in a cultural and religious vacuum, independently ofconcerns for human spiritual formation. He also wasted much ink ondeveloping a sterile contrast between a natural and a supernaturallyorientated mysticism and failed to realise that Blondel’s negative demon-stration of a need for a supernatural completing of the natural exigenciesof reason was essentially in keeping with the thought of Aquinas as wellas Augustine. Fully in the traditions of a modern rationalist metaphysics

John MilbankDepartment of Theology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD,UK

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

© 2006 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

focussed primarily upon being rather than upon God, he regarded thesheerly logical principles of sufficient reason and excluded middle as theassumptions from which an ontology must be built. Finally, he did notgrasp the priority of analogy of attribution over analogy of proper pro-portionality in Aquinas and made overdrawn and ahistorical contrastsbetween a neoplatonic and a Christian apophasis.

In short, as Williams again suggests, the adjective “neo-scholastic” wouldseem properly to apply to Maritain, and he can by no means be entirelyexonerated 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 otherrecent thinkers (including Karol Wojtyla) who do not fall squarely within thecamp of neo-scholasticism. It is by no means the whole story, because, onfurther investigation, Maritain appears as a figure caught somewhere in themiddle of French pre-war debates, rather than as an extreme conservative.With regard to the controversy over grace and nature, he did not exhibit thesheer intransigence of a Garrigou-Lagrange, notably agreeing with de Lubacthat there is no natural sinlessness of angels in Aquinas. Moreover, the verytitle of his key political book, Integral Humanism, reveals an essentialconcurrence with the nouvelle théologie that there can only be a full humanitywhen it is an engraced humanity. It is equally significant that his majorphilosophical statement, Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge, isclearly not a treatise in metaphysics or philosophical theology alone. On thecontrary, it is in fact an attempt to exhibit the deeper continuum between theknowledge available to the purely natural intellect and the heightenedinsight available to the engraced intellect.

And while it would be fair to say that this work shows a neoscholasticbias towards the priority of the problem of knowledge—a bias whichensures that it is not so far removed from Descartes and Kant as itimagines—the specific mode of this focus allows one to prise Maritain’saccount of knowledge away from a neoscholastic metaphysics that showsan inadequate grasp of participation in esse and the way that this upsetsimmanent hierarchies of essence. For Maritain’s account of human under-standing is the most subtle part of his philosophy and the part where heshows the greatest loyalty to the authentic Thomas. Indeed one can say thatwhereas Gilson focussed on the real distinction of esse and essentia inAquinas’s De Ente et Essentia, he relatively neglected the account in thesame work of “intentional being”, the life of the mind, which is so centralfor Maritain.

By concentrating on this category, Maritain in practice tended to upsetany neat division between philosophia prima and sacra doctrina, because the“intentionality” of the mind is in Augustine and Aquinas bound up withthe recognition of the role of an internally emanative “inner word” in theact of understanding performed by a spiritual creature, a role that is only

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perfected in the generation of the divine Word within the Trinity. Hence forall its formal assumptions, Distinguish to Unite has validly suggested toone contemporary Dominican Thomist, Olivier-Thomas Venard (in his LaLangue de l’ineffable, building on the important work of the Maritainianphilosopher Yves Floucat), the uncovering of a metaphysics in Aquinas thatlies deeper even than the metaphysics of esse: namely a metaphysics ofparticipation in the Trinitarian generation of the living Word of under-standing, and the procession of Spiritual desire. (The key to this, as PierreRousselot already saw, is the astonishing passage about a hierarchy ofevermore 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), thismodern bias is in reality overcome because he has ceased to ask “how canwe know?” but instead asks “what is knowledge?” as the factor thatcharacterises peculiarly human existence. And his answer here, afterAquinas, is that knowledge pertains not to information, nor to represen-tation, but rather to a particular state of being in which a creature, whileremaining entirely within herself, is nonetheless so directly present toanother creature that she in some sense becomes this other, while inversely,the other that was once materially embodied, embarks within the mind ofthe knower upon a new purely intellectual existence. Yet the Aristotelianrisks 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 isboth expressive and intentional. To become and to absorb the other creaturemeans to become other to myself through the inner elaboration of a concept(the verbum mentis which is also the verbum cordis elicited by desire). Andself is once more withdrawn from otherness (ensuring a mutual protectionof integrity) insofar as this concept is not simply identical with the thingknown in its aspect as species, but is also a mental sign which intentionallypoints back towards the other’s fully substantial reality (form/mattercompound; self-standing angelic intellectuality) that remains radically exte-rior and yet in a sort of “participatory continuity” (as Williams puts it) orconvenientia (as Aquinas terms it) with its conceptual realisation in themind. Here Maritain pits an older Augustinian and realist account ofintentionality against Husserl, arguing cogently that the latter’s idealism isthe 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, Maritaindoes not fall into the trap (arguably not avoided by Gilson) of over-reactingagainst idealism by insisting on a priority of “fact” or “existence” that caneven be extended to God himself. (Such a move is in fact more Scotist thanThomist in character.) Instead, he is repeatedly clear that Thomas’s alwayscentral concern to uphold divine simplicity entails the utter coincidence of

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being and intelligence in the divine nature. As Rousselot had alreadyrealised (despite Maritain’s reservations about his work), this means that ina certain sense the divine esse is more primarily intelligere, since intellectualbeing (relational and co-penetrating) is the highest mode of being. When itcomes to the created order, the co-incidence of extension of course lapses:not all that exists is intelligent. Moreover, even angels are not instantiatedby their own intelligence and human spiritual creatures are not primarilyinstantiated as intelligent: it is not thinking that keeps the blood pumpinground our bodies. Nevertheless, even amongst human creatures, intelligentbeing remains the highest kind of being, even though it does not ensuresubsistent 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 therelational substantiality of the Trinitarian persons (that sense in which thepersons are radically “exterior” to each other, though not in any degreeindependent of each other) than human spiritual existence can do. Just forthis reason, human intelligence is always called back to intentional refer-ence and also to a conversio ad phantasmata which conjoins imaginativeimage to ethereal concept. Only through this reference to material andsubstantive being through awareness of sensory accidents does the under-standing fully achieve its own proper existential status and only throughthis reference does it encounter the fact that there is being as such, asexhibited in this or that. Hence, as the contemporary German Catholicphilosopher (now working in the University of Dallas) Phillip Rosemannhas 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 essecoincides with the completion of the understanding in imaginative andsensory intuition wherein the accidental (the ephemeral properties ofthings known to sensation) proves to be more disclosive of ultimate essethan our rational inference to the substantive. The most utterly general isonly shown in the most utterly particular because the most utterly general,namely esse, exceeds the contrast between the general and the particular, forboth equally “are”.

On the other hand for Aquinas, in line with Aristotle and Augustine, thehuman intellect in the inner word more fully develops the reality of givenmaterial 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 formerto the latter which has its ultimate ground in the derivation of everythingfrom the divine mind. It is for this reason that a concept is more adequatelyintentional, the more it has been developed along the lines of the mind’sown intrinsic inspiration.

It is something like this schema which Maritain dubs “critical realism”. Itimplies neither idealism, nor “realism” in the usual reactive modern sense.

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What it achieves, supremely, is the holding of a balance between existentialcontingency on the one hand, and a sense of the complex and mysteriouslyordered inter-relationality of things on the other. The latter is allowed forprecisely by the intellectualist element, because “intentional existence”concerns the unconcealment of a dimension where things and people onlyexist at all through ceaseless and entangled mutual reference. As Rousselotindicated, one can desire the other while still holding her at an extrinsicdistance or else by projectively absorbing her, but one cannot understandthe other to any proper degree without sustaining a relation to the other asother by which one is in some sense bound. Knowledge may be moreinterior than the will, yet it carves out a wound of exteriority within theseemingly 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 becauseit breaks with nineteenth-century idealism and empiricism which wereboth variants on the “representationalist” paradigm of epistemology. Thusone can relate Maritain’s thought not just to Thomistic tradition, but alsoto Bergson, pragmatism and phenomenology. It was significantly Bergsonwhose lectures first saved the young Maritain from suicidal despair and onecan note an affinity between Bergson’s refusal of the notion of knowledgeas 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, aftera full absorption of the implications of photography: superficially, thisturned pictorial art away from trying to rival its instant mimesis; moreprofoundly 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 photographicpioneers realised, photography merely records and preserves nature’s“self-painting”. Image is thereby newly seen to be not secondary butprimal, and not only a reflection in space but always also a new event intime—less an echo or a copy than the self-doubling arrival of the real asmysterious 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 beyondboth idealism and empiricism: the very motion of things must, in orderto ensure its coherent continuity, constantly double-back upon itself in anon-identical repetition. The human mind is but the site of a partialentry into this scenario, where what we commonly suppose through oursensorily mediated experience to be laid out in a causal sequence and anexterior array of mutually exclusive items, is more fundamentally dis-closed as the ineffable durée of intertangled simultaneity. Here alone can



any “meaning” arise, since this involves the articulation of “one” thingin terms of others.

It was hearing about the intuition of durée that ensured that Jacques andRaissa Maritain were able to uphold their love-pact unto life rather thanunto death. For both, this revealed that there was “meaning” not resolvableinto functional purpose and the arbitrary blows of efficient causality. At thesame time, Jacques Maritain, once Raissa had introduced him to St.Thomas, came to argue that the intuition of being as the “for itself” ofmeaning should not be simply identified with the apprehension of genuinetime, but was rather even more fundamental. Time in its inter-tangled flowis indeed a mystery, but it remains a mystery of finitude. And since the flowis finite we do not need to set it dualistically over-against the externalitiesof clock-time. Time is at once a matter of mutually external instants and aflow that denies their pure externality or instantaneity. Williams very wellpoints out how Maritain eventually sees the aesthetic corollary of this: themetaphorical presence of one thing in another alien thing has to be relatedback to the distinctness of temporal and spatial finite realities if art is toexceed dream. This can be taken as a qualification of modernism in its moreextreme surrealist reaches, and the same qualification was made by OlivierMessiaen in his musical theory and practice—again through an explicitfusion of Bergson with Aquinas. (One can also note how the Bergsonianlegacy in Maritain allows one to see more parallels between him andMaurice Blondel than might at first be supposed, or he himself might havereadily allowed.)

Maritain’s contribution here remains important. Against Heidegger (ashe 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 rigorousontology, but is rather a still subtle confinement of Being itself to theontic—to existence that contingently comes to be and passes away.Perhaps one might doubt more than Maritain whether pure reason alonecan arrive at the identification of Being with God (though he says rela-tively little about this), yet one can at least claim that only theologyallows the most radical securing of the ontological difference. Moreover,in speaking of an “intuition” of esse that is finally to be identified withGod, 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 thepresence of Being in beings is something that reason can only infer. Butwhile, 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 theend Gilson also affirmed something similar. For do we not directly expe-rience in every existing essence a “surplus” of being which is at once thesheer fact of being and the open active potential of this existing par-ticularity itself? Again Williams wonderfully explicates Maritain’s aes-

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thetic extension of such an insight whereby, as the French philosopherexplicitly declares, it is art that most of all engages with the way thingsas themselves give more than themselves.

This can be connected with Rosemann’s new realisation (as stated also insomewhat similar terms, in my own and Catherine Pickstock’s Truth inAquinas) that for Aquinas it is precisely the resort of the mind to sensoryintuition that brings it nearest to the grasp of the excess of esse over essentiaand so remotely to the divine esse which is at one with a purely intuitiveintelligence. Revealed knowledge of the expression of this understanding inthe divine Verbum further allows us also to see how artistic productiveunfolding of the intrinsic surplus in things also belongs to the mostfundamental initial intuition of esse which is Godhead. But this “unfolding”applies to the generation of the inner word in every human act ofunderstanding. 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 abstractconcept, albeit it may be in initially “mythical” terms. And even theintuition as such (as applies also to God) must be inwardly expressed, sinceknowledge always involves relational distance as well as proximity. For thisdouble reason, as Venard stresses (and makes fundamental in his ownphilosophical theology), for Maritain the intuition of being is also concep-tually uttered as an inner word. Furthermore, this very uttering involves initself a redoubled intuition of the superabundant meaningfulness andintellectual character of being as such, whereby the “extra” that is con-stituent of things now appears as the signifying extra of thing-as-sign andnot merely as the existential extra of thing as concrete item. Once more,Williams develops throughout his short book the aesthetic corollary of thisin Maritain, whereby the work of art emerges as a somehow “required”extra thing that is also an overplus of meaning emergent only with andthrough the existential extension of “thinghood”.

For all the above reasons one needs a nuanced approach to Maritain: attimes his relative rationalism lags behind Gilson; yet at other times heexceeds this in the direction of a mystical intellectualism that cries out forthat appreciation of the neoplatonic element in Aquinas to which he wasscarcely alert at all.

A similar ambivalence hovers over Maritain’s citation of certain neo-scholastics. In contrast to Gilson and still more his philosophical historiansuccessors (Courtine, de Libera, Marion, Boulnois and Schmutz), Maritainfailed to see that they inserted a divine cause within an ontological field ina way that Aquinas entirely avoided. On the other hand, Maritain did notfavour the worst culprit in this regard, namely Suarez, but rather Cajetanand John of St. Thomas. In the case of the latter one has a complex and verygifted thinker who tended to synthesise a Baroque Thomism with elementsmore faithful to Aquinas himself. And in both cases one has figures who to



some degree incorporated elements of humanist concern—with languageand history—into the scholastic legacy. And these elements were of courseof great interest to Maritain. That remarkable maverick amongst contem-porary Maritainians, John N. Deely, who has sought to connect Thomismwith the thought of Peirce, has pointed out how crucial for Maritain wereJohn of St. Thomas’s reflections on the sign. From these, Maritain borrowedan extension of Aquinas’s reflections on the necessity for an inner word forthought, into a grasp of the necessity of the material sign (including thelinguistic sign) itself for the thinking process.

Hence it was Maritain, not Gilson, who carried out the linguistic turnwithin Thomism (indeed Gilson adamantly refused it). Here also heappears as specifically “modernist”. And for all the deficiencies (as com-pared with Gilson) of his grasp of the ontological difference, there are stillelements in his thought, as I have just tried to indicate, that point the wayto a linking of the linguistic turn with “the return of being”. In this respecthe can properly be compared with Heidegger.

The comparison also extends to their reflections upon art. One mightperhaps say that it is in the work of art that Maritain sees the most acutemeeting of an existential excess over essence with the excess of the signover any supposedly fully grasped concept. As Rowan Williams more thanonce points out, Maritain declared (again somewhat like Heidegger) that“poetry was ontology”. What did he mean? Williams indicates that hemeant that a poem must apprehend the real in the most attentive mannerpossible and do so by concentration on something particular. For this toprovide an “ontology” suggests an extraordinary disclosure of Being inbeings—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 thehorizon of the event as not subordinate to any merely immanent andtotalising ontology.

So in terms of his focus on Maritain’s poetics, and insistence on its linksto his metaphysics as such, one can see a kinship between Rowan Williams’own theology and that of other recent thinkers who have stressed the latentinterest in the category of event in Aquinas, pointing out how this comesto a head in his Christology (where Christ’s single divine esse means that,as historical event, he “diagonalises out” of the normal essentia plus esseconstitution of all finite ontology!) and how this may allow one to put himinto a cautious conversation with Hegel and post-Hegelian philosophies ofart, 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 andPickstock’s construals of Aquinas, which are indebted to Corbin at severalpoints. It is not an accident that Williams also, after Gillian Rose, is sointerested in Hegel; I think that this interest is remotely echoed in thecurrent book, but in a distinctly disciplined fashion that never hereendorses the more “gnostic” elements in Hegel (as Desmond and O’Regan

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describe them after Eric Voegelin) concerning an ontologically inevitableFall 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 attemptedby the communio group and ones which are also more concerned with a(highly critical) engagement with post-Cartesian thought. Clearly Williamsis heavily influenced by von Balthasar. But one senses that he finds inMaritain an interaction with both philosophy and modernity that is notalways so marked in the case of the Swiss theologian. In the realm ofaesthetics, as Williams indicates, this means that he has a far greaterconcern than Balthasar with the making process rather than simply with thepoetic upshot and its reception. What fascinates Williams in the FrenchPhilosopher is the questioning of the ontological status of the artwork, andof the role of the artist as artist and what this tells us about being andknowledge more widely. He suggests that it is just this dual focus whichrendered Maritain uniquely of interest to practising artists, so much so thatit is as if his artistic theory entered into the very fabric of certain twentieth-century material productions themselves. Hence the book is constructed asa meditation on the resonance of Maritain’s poetics in the artistic practicesof Eric Gill, David Jones and Flannery O’Connor.

A dialectics is then implied here: can an ontology of the artwork and thepoem which is a theory of poesis as ontology be itself extended by theworks of art inspired by it? Williams concludes that Jones and O’Connorimprove upon Maritain’s theory, but he is fully aware that the very successof 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 ontologyto which mere theory cannot have advance access.

Williams’ elected task is carried out in sparkling fashion, if at times onecould wish that his editors had encouraged him to adapt his essentially oraldiscourse more to a written mode. It is also the case that the beguilingintimacy of Williams’ tone sometimes obscures as much as reveals theintellectual originality and conceptual rigour of what he has to say. Fun-damental innovations in philosophical theology are thrown off in the mostcasual way, almost as asides. One would not want to lose such effectivecharm, but at times one suspects that Williams’ many admirers have littlesense 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 theAnglican church has at depth to do with a faint inkling of something alien:of a very Catholic, Celtic and European mind, only compromising withEnglish empiricism out of pedagogic indulgence.

Such a mind is very much at evidence in the current book. Williams isdirectly concerned here with European modernism and its relation toEuropean Catholicism. Hence he traces the way in which Maritain, as a



Thomist, echoed the modernist refusal of a romantic concern with expres-sive subjectivity and the communication of private emotions. The bringingabout of the work of art itself in its unique integrity was instead whatmattered. At the same time, classicism is not returned to, because the workof 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 furtherrealisation of what already exists in a new and surprising form. Maritainwas able to link these principles up with Aquinas’s understanding ofbeauty as respectively the integrity of the individual thing, its formalproportion and its radiantly clear showing forth to the mind of somethingin excess of even its own instance. To this, as Williams rightly emphasises,Maritain added an equally modernist concern with a poetic sensitivity tohidden and remote (often dream-like) connections and resonances.

As Williams suggests, he here extended into a poetics scholastic theoriesof human understanding. Just as, for Aquinas, a formal concept continuesin another mode the vital existence of a materially instantiated form, sonow, for Maritain, a formed work of art (which is form as sign as well asform forming this particular piece of matter) somehow perpetuates andnewly discloses the sources of its inspiration. In the same way thatWilliams talks about how art most of all shows how things are “more thanthemselves”, so also he talks (on almost every other page) about how thework of art “participates” in its antecedents and both realises and disclosescomplex and hidden webs of “participation”. In speaking of intra-finite“horizontal” participation, he seems both to recall the poetics of OwenBarfield and W. H. Auden (so some concealed Anglican influence here!) andto exhibit again affinities with the emphases of William Desmond orMilbank/Pickstock and Graham Ward. Also, recent work on Aquinas byGilbert Narcisse and others has shown how “vertical” participation andanalogy in his theology are echoed in horizontal structures of an ineffableconvenientia, including those that pertain between being and knowing.Williams himself connects horizontal to vertical participation in one of hisstrokes of sheer throwaway originality and brilliance: if we were tosuppose that “making other” were confined within finite immanence, then,he suggests, being as a whole would be an inert self-identity not subject toartistic disclosure. The atheistic or pantheistic supposition might allow artwithin 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 implicationsof art and poetry, Williams avers, we have to allow that finite reality as suchcan become endlessly other to itself in a kind of finality beyond finality thatimplies, indeed, a “first mover”.

If modernism was also newly concerned with the relation of life to artand 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 betweenars and prudentia. The artist is not as such an ethical doer, but is concerned

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with the integrity of the artwork: this can involve a “moral” self-disciplining and self-restraint, but is relatively independent of the artist’sethical relations in the public order. On the other hand, the finished workof art belongs in an ethical social universe and subserves prudentialpurposes. As Williams suggests, it was mainly this latter aspect which EricGill took from Maritain, insisting on the public usefulness and edificationoffered by genuine fabrication. Quite clearly, Gill failed to appreciate themore modernist aspect of the French philosopher’s aesthetics, whereby artexceeds the decorative and the functional in its disclosive capacity. Gill’serstwhile disciple David Jones however, as Williams contends, fully appre-ciated this—linking the non-mimetic character of modern art with thetransubstantiated elements of the Mass which are in strange guise the bodyand blood of Christ, and do not merely depict or indicate them. Jones’spoetry of complex invocation and allusion, and his painting with itsincreasingly intersecting and overlapping lines and forms, realises far morefully than Gill’s hieratic sculpting Maritain’s concern with the exposure andre-articulation of “hidden connections”.

At the same time, Jones for Williams advances beyond Maritain. He seesthat all of human culture involves the “gratuity” of art, and that this senseof engraced newness is not alien to ethical prudence, but rather intrinsic toa sense of a charitable ethics as exceeding prudence (here one might addthat this lies nearer than Maritain to an appreciation of our natural desiringorientation to the supernatural). Williams then makes the transition toFlannery O’Connor by suggesting that the narrative dimension of ethicsreveals a work of poesis that always accompanies the work of praxis.

Jones’s long, broken epics already in part disclose such a dimension, butWilliams finds it more acutely present in O’Connor’s fictions. What thelatter took from Maritain was again a sense of the integrity of the work ofart achieved initially (if not at all ultimately) for its own sake. In the caseof fiction, this means the withdrawal of the intrusive and seeminglyomnipotent narrator. It should rather seem as if the characters “writethemselves”, while the voice of the narrator must itself be alienated into thevery fabric of the fiction as that of another character (or characters) withinthe plot. At the same time, O’Connor offers something other than eitherMaritain or Jones: a sense of the extremity of the drama of salvation, of thetragic proximity of redemption to damnation. This is because of her acutesense that grace is more than simply a possible gratuity; rather, without thisgratuity, the merely self-enclosed realm of human possibility will prove tobe demonic. At the same time, within the apparently secure and necessarycompromises of our world, the offer of grace may appear as a terrible threatof destruction and may indeed entail this in some measure. One mightrecall 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



describes how in O’Connor’s fiction people may be offered grace in themode 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 betempted to despair and yet this alone in a secular world may suggest to usthe élan towards transcendence. One figure for this in O’Connor is thereciprocal echo between suicidal drowning and baptism, and one isreminded 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 anextension of Maritain is not without strain. I suspect that Williams wouldconcede this, but even so, one wonders whether he is precisely right to saythat O’Connor’s recognition that one “might” live within pure naturereveals 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 demoniccharacter of the attempt to live as if there were a pure nature suggests thatin modern extremity we see that the real choice lies only between Christand the devil—however difficult it may be sometimes to know which iswhich. Surely if Maritain was uneasy about the foregrounding of suchambivalence in Bernanos and about his “manicheanism”, which stressedthe either/or over the both/and, he would have had just the same sort ofreservations about O’Connor, as Williams indeed half-implies.

The larger point here is that most of twentieth-century Catholic fictionseems to exhibit more suspicion about natura pura than Williams clearlyallows. Its bleak and yet irradiated vision is like that of Bresson’s film AuHazard Balthasar: a human world without grace is also totally denatured,such that even human affections are completely betrayed, yet at the sametime, against such a secular background, the patience of God’s abandoneddomesticated animal creatures, in this case of the donkey Balthasar,conveys to the viewer a trace of that orientation to the supernatural whichis explicitly human and abides even in the natural world which humanbeings have touched.

To this, certainly, one might protest that O’Connor is “neo-scholastic”precisely in her sense of the radically interruptive and discontinuouscharacter of grace. This is a valid point, but does not negate the fact thatthere is for her no really neutral “natural” background against which suchinterruption takes place. Nevertheless, one could say that her fiction fails toexhibit strongly the other implication of our universally human orientationto one single supernatural end, namely the inextinguishable trace ofgoodness in all human being, where the transcendental goodness of beingas such is doubled by the lure of this mode of being beyond itself to unitywith God. One can also wonder somewhat about the notion of a “futurelesslove”, because presumably a future defined only in terms of this-worldlysuccess 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

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love is a process, must not love always have a future which opens uplimitless and unexpected possibilities?

One perhaps finds more of the sense of an ineliminable goodness inbeing and an ineliminable hope even for this world in Chesterton andTolkien, who interestingly exhibit another mode of development of aCatholic and even a Thomistic aesthetic. Often Chesterton’s paradoxesbenignly indicate how attempts to deny God and exalt humanity or natureare always grotesquely also the opposite. It is just for this reason thatChesterton, unlike modernism (or arguably as another mode of it) tendedto work with and not against popular culture, idioms and genres, in partto the end of their subversion, but in part also to the end of their realfulfilment. (In this respect he was followed by Greene and Waugh as wellas by C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Tolkien.) And perhaps the comicelement in O’Connor stems from precisely a pushing of this mode ofChestertonian paradox to the most grotesque possible extreme.

Yet by and large her fiction seems to lie, like much of twentieth-centuryCatholic fiction, within the trajectory stemming from Leon Bloy andCharles Péguy (also Maritain’s mentors) which has tended to ask (GrahamGreene is an acute example) whether, in the face of bourgeois indifference,damnation does not lie closer to redemption than lukewarmness andscientific neutrality. At its most extreme this tradition has asked whether itis possible to risk one’s own damnation for the sake of others, although thisis rightly diagnosed as the most subtle of all the devil’s wiles by Bernanosin the utterly terrifying Sous le Soleil de Satan. If this novel disturbedMaritain, its verdict is nonetheless an authentically Augustinian andThomistic one, as against certain decadent pietistic extremities. Here, atleast, it is seen that the need of human nature as nature for supernaturalgrace cannot denature us, but must fulfil even our animal concern forself-protection.

But perhaps the main concern of the thoughtful reader after completingthis really excellent book (which itself is more than it seems) will be: isWilliams entirely fair to Gill?—a question already raised by John Hughes(author of a forthcoming book on theology, art and work in the newBlackwell Illuminations series) and one which turns out to have wideramifications which are linked to the “Chestertonian” issues that I have justtried to raise.

On one level Williams is entirely fair. Yes, Gill’s work is aestheticallylimited and lacks symbolic resonance. Yes, his practice like his theory tendsto reduce art to function and propaganda. However, this can still leave onewith certain qualms. Most crudely and basically this concerns the politicalissue: Gill rather than the others followed and extended Maritain’s desireto link true art to true political practice which (before Maritain felldisastrously in love with the Constitution of the United States) involved adistributist/corporatist social order. More than perhaps anyone else save



Dorothy Day, Gill tried actually to put Catholic social teaching into practiceand part of this involved a concern for the democratisation of art involvingall “makers” and not just “artists”. To be sure, Gill failed fully to see whatan artist was in any case. Yet by comparison, Jones at least in the practicalcourse of his life veered away from this concern with the artistry of all. Notjust that, but if we are to excoriate, along with Williams, Gill’s partial Sovietsympathies, what are we to say to Jones’s sometime Nazi ones, howeverlater by him disowned and deplored? Or what are we to say about thelimits of O’Connor’s conservative Southern Agrarianism (for all its affinitiesin some ways with the more liberal English Catholic distributism)? Or evento Maritain’s initial refusal totally to denounce Pétain and ally himself withde Gaulle? (In contrast with Bernanos, whose questionable urgings towardsright-wing theocracy nonetheless allowed him to see totalitarianism forwhat it was, and again, unlike Maritain, to realise that liberal democracywould eventually show itself to be a variant of it—as we now see all tooclearly.) Would it here be entirely outrageous to suggest that the modernistfocus on aesthetic self-sacrifice for the sake of the realised work of art,when extended by Jones into a general cultural theory, could indeedencourage a temporary falling for the wiles of Hitler’s “aesthetic state”?The Anathemata, after all, does not at all moments escape a dubiousaestheticisation of war.

What I am indicating here is the possible dangers of the modernist cultof the work of art as its own world, which involves the abnegation of thesubjectivity of the artist. And at this point there follows a more nuancedquestion about the relation of modernism to romanticism, and whether thetradition which Williams traces adequately understood this. First of all, isit so clear that modernism breaks with romantic subjectivism? After all,German romantic irony (in Frederick Schlegel and others) already impliedthe original expressiveness of the creative self only in the ironic withdrawalof the artist from commitment to this expression. Certainly modernisminvolves usually a more serious and absolute commitment to the reality ofthe artwork, but nevertheless the model of self-sacrifice for the sake of theintegrity of the work of art can be seen as an extreme continuation throughinversion of the romantic paradigm and a new presentation of the heroicstatus of the artist. The concern with originality and with art as revelationis still present and is even accentuated.

This is not at all to say that there is anything automatically “wrong” withsuch features. But where they might become questionable is when, after all,they perpetuate the romantic removal of art to the realm of the private andesoteric. If one only focuses on the unique integrity of the artwork, then thecharacteristic pre-modern public occasionality of the work of art is lost sightof. Sometimes, indeed, modernism sought to fuse art and life together oncemore, but usually in the mode of construing art as extraordinary ecstaticritual (Bataille, Malraux, etc.).

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In this context, is there not more to be said for Gill’s concern, afterWilliam Morris, with the primacy of the decorative and the embellishing ofthe social than Williams here allows? Certainly he failed to appreciate thechallenge 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” asmodernism. This reaction, which one can trace from Ruskin, amongstothers, sought to recover the public and ethical dimension of art (whilecertainly 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 strongones, the rural wilderness with inhabited worked-on countryside—theLake District with the Cotswolds (or Dorset, Shropshire and the EastMidlands—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 thatof William Wordsworth).

But there is another point here, which Gill himself failed fully toappreciate. 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 (onereason, incidentally, why, as Alison Milbank has pointed out, modernism soloved 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 thework of art a new meaning that was not there previously, then, certainlyone has ironically achieved a yet more considerable purely personalexpression. Hence Ulysses, The Waste-Land and the Anathemata are in onesense public and impersonal works about collective history and not per-sonal reminiscence. Yet in another sense they express very idiosyncratic andindividual expressions of that history and offer themselves as esotericconsolations for the lack of a real shared symbolic universe.

By contrast one could say that Gill, like Chesterton (or with much moresubtle brilliance Rudyard Kipling in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards andFairies) was trying in his art and practice to shape at least some publicmeaningful space available to the many. And Chesterton, I think, beyondGill, grasped the point that a truly public and in diverse senses occasional or“tensed” art cannot negate all subjective expression. This is precisely becauseart 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 forexample, refused to some extent the mimesis of the latter, but not the mimesisof the former. Poesis indeed accompanies all of praxis: it is involved in all ourhandling of matter and all our speaking, as Jones realised. It is architectureand house-decoration and gardening and tribute and commemorativeportraiture and love-letters and hymns to the gods before it is novels and



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 assuch—even if the “surplus” of fiction is never really absent.

If the made belongs firstly to life itself and is not fiction, then thesubjective maker cannot be ironically concealed. The subject is here morepresent than for modernism, whether this be the private subjectivity of thelover writing the love-poem to a specific recipient, or yet again the morerepresentative subjectivity of the painter of a civic portrait or the collectivesubjectivity of a worshipping body. (It is not an accident that Messiaenwrote scarcely any real liturgical as opposed to religious music.) Indeed inpostmodern aesthetics the subject (strange to say) actually returns, albeit ina problematic, self-estranged mode. For if, as Philippe Lacoue-Labartheindicates, 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 postmodernismsomewhat contests the modernist claim concerning the “new world”opened up by the artwork: every work of art is not really fully original andso it is, after all (Lacoue-Labarthe again) always an “imitation”, albeit anon-identical one. Both these postmodern considerations tend to return artmore to a public, temporal world, however problematically, and imply forartistic practice playful variants upon mimesis, the teleologically directedplot and the conversation between writer and reader (or artist and spec-tator) simply because subjective occasional expression and realist imitationcan never really be abolished by apparent impersonality and vaunted pureabstraction. One could argue, for example, that the attempt in O’Connor toget rid of the omniscient controlling narrator only embeds this figure all themore, and all the more misleadingly. However “naturally compelling” thefiction that emerges, it still represents a vantage point and the character-filled presence of the author in her living attempt to persuade us. Realsituated rhetoric is ontologically prior to fiction, even though it alwaysenters upon its devices. Therefore the most apparently pure fiction (likeMadame Bovary) remains a concealed rhetorical address.

All this, however, is not intended crudely as some sort of critique ofMaritain, Jones and O’Connor. Rather, I would now like to suggest thattheir points of view are by no means straightforwardly modernist, as Ithink Williams would allow, for he is speaking after all of a theologicalengagement with, and critique of, modernism. A pure version of the latterwould be more exemplified by Mallarmé, who sought to locate in the poemitself all the valences of erstwhile transcendence, such that it is now anepiphany of absence. But for Maritain, as Williams points out, the poem isstill mimetic, still continues in some fashion to repeat, differently, itsinspiring occasion or occasions (whether or not this is still Aristotle’smimesis). And if the poem also participates vertically, then of course it is apartial “making present”, more in the mode of post WW II French poets

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like Yves Bonnefoy and Philippe Jacottet who are so concerned with sacredpresence in landscape and located commemorations of vanished realpersons, things and events.

And surely, however influenced he was by various modernist currents,David Jones was characteristically British—like Paul Nash in relation tosurrealism, Graham Sutherland in relation to cubism, Ivon Hitchens inrelation to expressionism, Peter Lanyon in relation to American abstractexpressionism—in qualifying the extremity of foreign trends towards for-malism, subjectivism and abstraction with a continuing commitment to adegree of figuration, realist depiction, delight in drawing technique andsubtle colouration, all combined with Samuel Palmer or John Sell Cotman’smystical sense of a hidden presence in the natural landscape (which hadalready caused Cotman in the nineteenth-century to “abstract”.) To electonce more watercolour as one’s habitual mode is scarcely a modernistgesture, since its transparency and evocative lucidity tends to qualify anysense that the work of art is merely a thing in itself. Even the abstractsculptures of Barbara Hepworth seem designed to fit within a certainlandscape and to resonate with its surface lines, yet Williams does not inthis book really recognise the significance of this specifically British modeof flowing “superficiality”. For him, the iconic surface of Jones’s paintings,their refusal of depth, is of one piece with their modernist escape fromsubjective perspective and external reference; yet one would more expectthe 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 betweenGill and Jones’s preference for the flat surface, exemplified also in theirlines 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 theheavenly, a certain self-contained epiphany. Just as the bringing of skyforwards while leaving it as sky in fact conserves an unmodernist hierar-chy, so likewise the endless overscribble of complex figures implies areferential writing that returns the work in unmodernist and historicistfashion to both natural and cultural time, rather than absorbing that timewithin the literary work after the fashion of Joyce—as figured by theperhaps over-jarring device of seeing the Odyssey resumed in a singleday’s unthreatening peregrinations around Dublin. (The recent Coen broth-ers’ movie O Brother where art thou?, set in an O’Connor-like grotesquelyviolent American south, surely updates Homer’s voyage more appropri-ately, while one could argue that Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two Birdsachieved more successfully than his fellow Irishman a satiric and ironicevoking of myth that still allowed to myth its uncanny pre-humanness,rather than attempting—via a misreading of Vico—to reduce it to “being



about” human self-making. Such a reduction effectively dissolves myth,along with that very making process itself, into banal affirmations of thelife-process.)

The pure modernist drive to the self-epiphany of the artwork itself as thepresence of fictional “absence” is also the drive to pure abstraction—something which, as Paul Virilio has argued, is at once impossible ofrealisation (every abstraction also imitates) and wilfully murderous inrelation to the natural and the human world. But Jones’s very Britishpractice veers entirely away from this, and arguably this veering away isnot a matter of insular philistinism, but rather of an insular treasuring ofthe ethical exigencies of the Western Christian humanist legacy.

Of course there is no timeless Christian poetic. The latter can beexpressed in relation to romantic, arts and crafts, modernist or post-modernist idioms. Yet through all these one can trace a certain consistencyin the Christian poetic qualification of contemporary artistic fashions: fromClare and Coleridge through Hopkins and Ruskin, Gill and Chesterton toJones, Eliot and Tolkien and then R. S. Thomas and Geoffrey Hill, to cite aBritish lineage amongst other European ones. All doing indeed involvesgratuitous making, as Williams stresses (and I myself emphasised inTheology and Social Theory). Yet equally, all transitive making involves arelatively intransitive doing in a Thomist (rather than Aristotelian) sensethat we are involved in attentive exchanges with other persons whom wehave not made. In Leaf by Niggle, Tolkien allegorically dramatised just thismutual co-operation between artistic making and prudential exchangingand even indicated how these processes themselves must eschatologically“exchange” their respective places. As Jones affirmed, the social itself mustbe a constant gratuitous work of art; but equally art must be a giftexchanged between persons whose gratuitous arrival in space and time issomething 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 seeksto achieve the work and not her own self-expression, yet as Williams fullyrecognises in his final chapter (which in many ways admits beyondmodernism the need for a “subjective” dimension), it is also the case thatthe poet—as indeed every person—only realises herself through these actsof external construction. Hence in them she does indeed realise self-expression, albeit of a provisional kind, such that she must at once giveherself to the work and yet stand back from it—not with ironic reserve butin apophatic hesitation as regards both “who she really is” and what thework has really disclosed about reality.

The limit of romanticism would be to celebrate the pathos of the fleetingmoment or emotion and the limit of arts and crafts to confine art to theethically decorative. But the limit of modernism would be to erect a newcult of the work of art as the Bergsonian timeless expression of the inner

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duration of time itself, sundered from the array of singular events andpassing contingencies. This is but the elite esoteric reversal of the morehabitual modern tendency to locate all beatitude, goodness and identitywithin finitude alone. Postmodernism, from Lacan onwards, has exposedthe delusion of both the modern and the modernist programme: at theheart of all seeming limit lies the infinite abyss; at the heart of all identityan aching lack, while duration which undoes successive time is itselfmerely a dark heart of absence that the delusory time of the everydayalways in turn undoes in every next moment. The constitutive absence ofdesire turns out to be as ineliminable as the apparent subject and cannot beappeased by any “disinterested” and unerotic aesthetic delight, such as theyoung still lingeringly Catholic Joyce falsely projected in his still uncon-sciously Kantian—and so “modern”—construal of Thomistic aesthetics (inPortrait of the Artist as a Young Man).

In this context, as Williams indicates, along with the tradition which heso effectively re-invokes, the only alternative to a postmodern despair,which is at one with surrender to a dire and unfunny playfulness, is to readboth our subjective hunger and the surplus we discern in things as signsof a vertical participation in the infinite meaning of the inner divine art orLogos, a meaning which they can only echo in those modes of horizontalparticipation which art most acutely re-invokes.

But this means that the “fine arts” are only valid when they seethemselves as intensifying this art which is proper to humanity as such.Jones is factually wrong (as Williams fails to observe) when he claims to seean unnoticed disjuncture in Maritain between art as a practice and pru-dence as an attitude. For in the Middle Ages (after Aristotle) ars was avirtue which governed facere in parallel with the virtue of prudentia whichgoverned agere. Hence it was a skill of producing proportionate thingseverywhere exercised (for example in all speaking of words) as well as,according to Jones’s new insight, an ever-renewed production of thegratuitous. In this light one can see that it is important, with Gill, not to losesight of the danger of adding to scholastic philosophy a “poetics” and an“aesthetic”. For there was a certain medieval advantage in not recognisingany special domain of fine art, nor any special region of understandingdubbed the “aesthetic”. The advantage is that one can allow ars to besilently operating everywhere, in democratic ubiquity and with a self-forgetting absorption of all artifice and fiction within the overarchingdivine/human work of liturgical praise. Equally, one can allow that beautywhich “looks after herself” silently mediates between the will, the under-standing and material things in a way that disallows the tyranny of eitherdesire, logic or the sheerly and inertly given. Just because there was noaesthetics in Aquinas’s theological philosophy, the aesthetic is thereineverywhere present (as all the most serious and acute Thomistic scholarsnow recognise).



Yet Williams, in the wake of Maritain and Jones, rightly indicates theinsufficiency 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 andmaterially-based signs. If such a recognition involves also a theory of thefine arts, it more fundamentally involves seeing how the medieval ubiquityof ars applies also or even especially to the “base” arts of craft taken in thewidest sense. Likewise the latency of fundamental beauty in Aquinasmeant that it was also for him a blind spot: one could even say thatAquinas probably supposed his own theology to have more to do withabstract reason than was really the case. This blindness invited a laterrationalistic reduction by nominalism and neo-scholasticism of the Patristiclegacy in which he stood, and to resist this one indeed requires a moreexplicit aesthetics, conjoined to a more explicit poetics (though one whichfully preserves a Thomist sense of the beautiful as a transcendental and notas a post-Kantian regional dimension of reality).

I have stressed a great deal the way in which making is not primarilyfictioning, since I think Williams underrates this point, and this is why heunderrates Gill. Nevertheless, for art (even craft and decoration) to presentthe surplus in things is also, as Maurice Blanchot suggested, to re-presenta 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 eventfulstory which can be held in abeyance, be somewhat confined to itself (likethe Cheshire cat’s grin in Alice in Wonderland), such that not everythingwithin it necessarily leads to any subsequent consequences. The road to thereal, to the other and to God does therefore truly run through the detourof the fictional, as Williams correctly implies.

This road is in one sense a way of “consolation” because (despite the post1960s British Middle Class Christian consensus against consolation whichWilliams somewhat uncritically echoes) all art offers a certain alleviation ofsorrow and despair by locating us for a while within “another” world thatalso conveys to us a certain presence “with” us of the author. Boethius(building on the Proclean exaltation of the imagination) offered philosophyas “consolation” precisely because he somewhat allegorised or fictionalisedphilosophy as such, and indeed saw her as a personified other whofictionally visited him. Certainly one can say, with Williams, that theconsolation of fiction is “false” in the end if it does not point beyond itselfand if it intends to gloss over or deny the horrors of reality. On the otherhand, if an aspect of this horror is precisely that it cannot be immediatelyovercome by an intervening transcendent power, then the imagination of“something else” (which may even be the intuition of hidden parallelcreated realities—what for British tradition is the realm of the faerie), isindeed our only recourse. The post-romantic religious gesture must mean

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(as Williams indicates, following O’Connor) that one accords this imagininga disclosive power. But this follows because we cannot directly receive thefinal 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”. Forthe realm of the fictional and the realm of the consoling (not the falselyconsoling) precisely coincide.

And many have remarked how the overwhelming effect of David Jones’slong poems is one of a soothing consolation in the face of the unbearablehorrors of history and of modernity. Just because he looked these horrors inthe face and refused all false consolation, what else could Jones thepsychically wounded soldier do but console himself and others in picturesand 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 anecessary escapism or else it is an intimation through a necessary fiction ofsomething they really did after all receive.

But here we can finally rejoin Williams. Where fiction participates in thedivine making of the Mass (as it did for Jones) then, indeed, there is a truepossibility of hope, and just for this reason it is possible to receive the fullterror of this world without flinching. Indeed it is only if one catches anintuitive glimpse of the plenitude of meaning that the terrible itself canhave any meaning as the absence of meaning, and persist in its reality ofterror beyond the passing illusion of sentiment thrown up by humananimal reflexes. In this way the modern Catholic novelists were right to seethat recognition of the infernal abyss lies perilously close to our capture bythe transcendent heights. It took a true making and a true fictioning toarrive 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 AlisonMilbank.



john milbank, scholasticism, modernism and modernity

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