Now, he’s writing books with the atheist philosopher Slavoj Zizek (see my discussion at the Guardian) and supporting the expression of Radical Orthodoxy’s ideas in British politics. Today at The Immanent Frame, I talk with Milbank about what he really makes of atheists doing theology and the prospects for a society framed in theological terms.

NS: You write of Slavoj ?i?ek, “In an important sense, he bears a theological witness.” How can a self-described atheist bear a theological witness?JM: In Dostovevsky’s novel The Devils, one character, Kirillov, speaks of both the necessity to believe in God as the reality of infinite goodness and the impossibility of doing so. His resolution of this dilemma is deliberate, meaningless suicide on the grounds that, in an atheistic world, he himself is now God, as possessor of a sovereign will, and that suicide is the highest demonstration of this will. ?i?ek tries to escape this dilemma in another way—by pointing to the figure of Christ, whom tradition has taken to be the incarnation of God in a single human life. Although, for ?i?ek, God is only present in incarnate guise and otherwise does not exist at all, he still insists that outside this Christian legacy we would not have had the sense of an absolute demand, exceeding all human law and custom. Indeed, the notion of incarnation sustains for ?i?ek the idea that this absolute demand, which orients our humanity, is more than human, even though it comes, he says, from “nowhere.”

[…]

NS: Do you see your participation in this dialogue as evangelization? What do you hope to accomplish?

JM: Yes. Victory.

Read the rest.

In John Adams’s presentation of the last days of the Manhattan Project, he asks us to think endlessly through moments which proved themselves precisely impervious to thought. The best scenes show Robert Oppenheimer and his wife rapt in dances of poetry—Baudelaire and, best of all, John Donne’s three-person’d God. We are given to believe that they are possessed of the history in the process of possessing them, but I find that impossible to accept. The poetry is not the encounter, but the game. Or rather, the banality—as Hannah Arendt used the word when accounting for the monstrosities of the German side.

There is a photograph in the program book that, I think, captures what the opera didn’t. Two young men stand in the test tower next to the Gadget, the thing soon to produce the world’s first atomic blast. One, a physicist named Boyce McDaniel, leans back against the makeshift railing with ease. There he is, right beside the wirey thing, and he’s wearing a striped shirt. Stripes! Would you wear stripes to operatic history? When this Boyce hummed to himself, leaning there, whatever he was thinking, I doubt it sounded much like John Adams.

I love the bomb. I really do and always have. As a kid I spent hours reading and rereading the entry about it in the World Book. I read Paul Tibbets’s memoirs about dropping the first one on Hiroshima, and once I got to sit in the bomb bay of the Enola Gay, the plane he did it in. That love fell in the space where it shouldn’t, the same space that makes good poetry and good science alike so dangerous, where tortured ethics and bruised conscience haven’t come yet, but fascination has. Monstrous I was. How is it that we can love, or even lean on a balcony beside, the very thing that so hurts us?

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

In the September 29 New Yorker, Louis Menand has a piece on the literary critic Lionel Trilling aptly titled, “Regrets Only.” In particular Menand brings out Trilling’s ambivalence about his own success. “I have one of the great reputations in the academic world,” he could write in his journal.

It is the thing I have most wanted from childhood—although of course in much greater degree—and now that I seem to have it I have no understanding whatever of its basis.

And also: “The thought makes me retch.”

What Menand goes on to present is mainly the portrait of a man over-analyzed and chronically unsatisfied. But Trilling’s paper trail speaks from the contradictions in any reach for fame, sainthood, or even plain personhood.

When you think you are a saint, say the medieval manuals on holiness, is exactly when you are not. Avila, Augustine, and à Kempis agree on this point. Certainly Lisieux, their more recent inheritor. The only possibility of being a saint, say the saints, is believing as thoroughly as possible that you are not one. Mother Teresa (taking her name from Avila and Liseux) knew this plenty well. She lived in a world of darkness, of distance from God, and of longing. As a result, she spent her life being saintly.

With the Reformation, Martin Luther introduced the possibility that one might know one’s own sainthood—by conviction, by confidence in faith, comes rescue. But with this comes also the certainty of sinfulness. Protestant conviction means the conviction that one will not see one’s true self until the end of days. To be fully is to know one’s true being is still to come.

In its perverse ways, this same paradox unfolds in the madness of modern celebrity. The people we admire and long to be so often dissolve themselves in drugs and suicide and any available excess. On the one hand they seem unable to believe, without such things, that they are what they’re supposed to be. On the other, it is through these habits that they reach the extraordinary in our eyes. As a rule, they cannot see what we see in them.

(I just met a man named Joseph in the subway station. He sits in a wheelchair and draws pictures of UFOs blowing up subway cars. Medium: black marker and colored pencil. I asked why he drew that. He said he used to draw other things—landscapes and so forth—but when he draws UFOs, people actually buy them. Sure enough, a fashionable girl heading on the L train to Williamsburg bought the one he’d just finished.)

The rest of us “ordinary” people are no exception. You could say: we know not what we are. In all the things we do, we know not what we do—how our motions ripple out into the world and into time. Famous people, who see reflections of themselves constantly, glimpse what the rest of us can happily or unhappily ignore: we are each many things at once, many drops, many ripples, and many tides. To be someone, from one perspective, means being someone else from another.

But despite the horrid memories that these words evoke, something else lurks at the bottom of most of the pages. There are little boxes with tiny text. Some mention the features and benefits of Cable pianos. Others simply offer moral, upbuilding quotations from notable people. It is as if righteousness were so appealing to the people of 1922 that there was no better way to attract their attention.

Take the box under “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” a song written by a white man about slaves wailing over the death of the person who claimed to own them:

Courtesy is the eye which overlooks your friend’s broken gateway, but sees the rose which blossoms in his garden.

Today I had lunch with a friend sorely concerned about the direction of the social order and the family and so on. Afterward, looking around the city, it was hard to blame him. Especially as far as little things go, which hint toward things more troubling. Hearing guards at the magnificent 42nd Street library saying bad words nonchalantly to each other while checking the bags of tourists; similarly bad words scrawled along the pedestrian path on the Williamsburg Bridge, which always has families walking on it; a condom lying in the stairwell of my apartment building. When one turns off the blinders that one develops living in New York, these things really can add up. What kind of world are we creating? Certainly not one that says, as The Cable Company does:

Music washes away from the soul the dust of every-day life.

The beautiful is nothing else than the visible from of the good.—Plato.

Be not simply good—be good for something.—Thoreau.

Soldiers remember—”He that ruleth his spirit” is greater “than he that taketh a city.”—<em>Prov. 16: 32</em>.

These are fabulous. I could go on forever. There are many more. And of course, stuff like this is mixed in:

Economy in buying a piano consists in getting the best instrument that can be made for the price you pay. You expect to receive the full equivalent of your money. That principle is the basis of our selling policy.

Today, rather than upbuilding quotations, advertisers attract our attention with boobies and innuendos. (The demise of this form of advertising, which treats the buyer as a rational, essentially decent person and replaces “him” with a base, id-driven subconscious, is the subject of part one of Adam Curtis’s documentary The Century of the Self.) I am tempted to agree with my friend—the world has gone to, dare I say on what has always been a blog you can bring the whole family to, shit.

But every time I go back to my favorite Stephen Foster songs in there, I’ll remember, “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground.” Those were days when, in this same country as mine, people couldn’t stand to share a drinking fountain. It is an odd kind of decency, a broken gateway that’s hard to ignore on the way to the blossoming rose.

Human societies seem to work this way. Where there’s righteousness, there’s a cruelty it ignores. And where there’s filth, at least we have music to wash our souls of it.

The theory of double truth, to speak historically, was a heresy in medieval Christian Europe. Often synonymous with “Latin Averroism” (after Ibn Rushd, or Averroes, the Arab philosopher), it grew out of the thirteenth century’s encounter with Islamic philosophy, and through it, ancient Greek thought. After several centuries of possessing only the barest scraps of Plato and Aristotle, Christiandom had gone its own way, ceasing to address questions the ancients’ ideas raised. So when Aristotle’s Metaphysics suddenly appeared, and “the interpreter” Averroes insists that his system means that the universe is eternal and souls are not, some valiant thinkers decided they had little choice but to agree. Among these were Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. They did so knowing, however, that Catholic dogma forbids such conclusions, and in those days there was no arguing with Catholic dogma. The only choice was to accept both truths, the dogmatic and the philosophical, at once.

In 1277, the bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, condemned those who “hold that something is
true according to philosophy but not according to the Catholic faith, as if there are two contrary truths, and as if in contradiction to the truth of Sacred Scripture there is a truth in the doctrines of the accursed pagans.” Both Siger and Boethius lost their teaching posts. The following decade, Siger was supposedly murdered by a secretary with a pen. Neither admitted to practicing the theory of double truth, and constantly sought to reconcile or explain the inconsistencies between philosophy and sacred doctrine. But the condemnation stuck. Still, for reasons we don’t quite understand, Dante depicts Siger in heaven with Thomas Aquinas (who opposed him in life) singing his praises.

Nobody quite admits to believing the theory, even those who are perpetually drawn to it. Somewhere, there has to be a resolution to the apparent contradiction—a single truth beneath the appearance of two. Trusting in that, what seems like a contradiction is really a paradox.

The theory is no stranger to Jewish thought. The Talmud tells of Elisha ben Abuyah, a brilliant scholar who was seduced by the Hellenic culture and ideas that surrounded him. There are stories of Elisha as both a great sage and a rather insane heretic. Apparently, he was both. Attested to in the books carried by Jews everywhere the diaspora took them, he became an icon of the problem of identity or assimilation. Rabbis argued about whether he ever made it to heaven. Just as Dante did with Siger, some thought he deserved a special place there. Others declared him an outcast, or, as the twentieth century rabbi Milton Steinberg would depict him, as a leaf driven to fall from his tree. For short, the rabbis in the Talmud call Elisha ???—the “other.”

It was another Jew who truly carried the theory of double truth into the twentieth century, and in doing made it politically aware. Leo Strauss, a German-born philosopher, re-read double truths in great thinkers of history like Plato and Maimonides. Such men, in order to accomplish their political goals and avoid the persecution of power, had to tell two truths. They taught an exoteric one, safe and acceptable to the world, believable enough, and good for ordinary society. But within it they hid an esoteric teaching, one that paid no homage to the gods of the world. Both teachings were true, and needed to be said. Ordinary folks needed the exoteric to live by, and philosophers needed the esoteric to understand.

It reminds me of an altar in a Catholic church I once visited in Guatemala. The first time I went, I sat in the pews in silence. Nobody was there. It was an ordinary, Spanish-style church. The second time, it was morning, and people were coming in for their prayers. I saw them, one by one, go behind the altar. Finally I went back myself and saw that it was covered in feathers and candle wax and symbols of a different religion entirely.

At the University of Chicago, Strauss built himself a following, and some of his students went on to become prominent neoconservatives—notably Bush’s deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. Adam Curtis’s gripping documentary, The Power of Nightmares, argues that neoconservatives used evangelical Christianity as the exoteric guise behind their esoteric greedy nihilism.

George Orwell famously associated double truth—”doublethink”—with the dystopic world of his 1984. Promulgating double truth—indeed, filling the world with righteous paradoxes—becomes the policy of totalitarianism. Blur people’s ability to see contradiction, and they will believe anything. They will become utterly subservient to power.

Then again, another anti-totalitarian novelist celebrates the theory. Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, which closed the deal on his Nobel Prize, tells of a man named Ka caught in the bloody, black-or-white mix of Turkish political culture. As a poet from Istanbul, he cannot escape being a member of the secular bourgeoisie, which controls the army and the revolutionary legacy of Ataturk. Nevertheless, he becomes intrigued by the world of provincial Islamists, who carry hopes for a revolution of their own under the banner of ancient religion. What distinguishes Ka in the novel’s world is his desire for both, for the double truth. He falls in love with each, separate and together. And it does him in. Turkey has become a place where the theory of double truth is especially and undoubtedly dangerous.

That is the thing about double truth. It is dangerous. On a number of fronts, I am deeply drawn to it, inhabiting contradictions, playing many roles, and trusting each as real. And for the moment I can write about these sensations here and there, a few people read them, and not much happens. But times can change quickly. When they do, in one way or another, the rules concerning double truth change too. What makes a paradox and what makes a contradiction gets mixed up. Pamuk’s Ka gets trouble for double truth among Turks, but in Europe Pamuk gets the Nobel. To Christians the Trinity is a paradox, while for Muslims it is a foolish contradiction. The difference can be deadly.

The appeal of double truth, however, has persisted throughout history in whatever forms it can safely find. It must. Within it probably lies, in fact, a single truth, a cohesive reason why people are drawn to opposing things. In simplest terms: We people are complex, and we do not fit into our own logics. Our worlds are not satisfied with single truths, though they might hold one’s attention for a little while. Now, a cycle. The single truth that explains double truth will fail to satisfy. It is the illusion, and double truth the truth.