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The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice BY John Milbank
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Stanley Gemmell
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Mar 26, 2009 07:17 PST
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[source URL http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3119 ]
The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice
by John Milbank
Copyright (c) 1999 First Things (March 1999).
If I were to say that the highest imaginable exemplification of the good
consists in dying sacrificially on behalf of an other or others, I
imagine that many people, religious or otherwise, would concur. And in
some recent ethical thinking, this understanding of the highest good has
been given a philosophically systematic and rigorous expression. For
such thinkers as Jan Patocka, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and, to
a certain extent, Jean-Luc Marion, the highest ethical gesture is a
sacrificial self-offering which expects no benefit in return. The good
is, paradigmatically, a purified sacrifice, the purest sacrifice
imaginable.
Anyone who thinks of this pure self-sacrifice more closely must answer
four questions: How is giving to be understood? What is the reality of
death? What is the appropriate concept of the self? What are the
background ontological circumstances against which the sacrificial
gesture would be situated?
Recent ethical thinkers have certain characteristic answers to these
questions. The only real gift, they claim, is one that expects no
counter-gift in return. Unless a gift is in this fashion sacrificial-the
giving up of something-it is argued, a gift reduces to a hidden
contractual agreement, governed by a principle of self-interest; and
actions out of self-interest, as Kant pointed out, are not pure gifts.
Secondly, they hold that death, far from being complicit with evil as
religious traditions have often taken it to be, is the very circumstance
that makes it possible to act ethically at all. This claim further
breaks down into two complementary parts: 1) We are radically and
ultimately vulnerable only because we might die-an immortal would be in
the most crucial aspects invulnerable. Hence it is the fact of death
alone that lends serious gravity to the ethical demand which
vulnerability imposes upon us. 2) At the limit, the ethical agent might
die for the vulnerable other person. This readiness to die alone
guarantees the ultimate disinterest of his ethical gesture, since it
would seem that a good one is prepared to die for cannot be the secret
vehicle of one’s own power or (presently enjoyed) glory. In this sense,
readiness to die precludes the will to power.
Thirdly, in the trend of ethical thinking we are investigating, it is
characteristically assumed that what makes us aware of the self in the
first place is just this double intrusion of death: the cry of the
vulnerable other eliciting our preparedness to negate our own life.
Combine this understanding of self with a common epistemological belief,
and we bring God into the picture. The epistemological belief is that
when something appears to us, when it is present to our consciousness,
we can see only what we understand and are able to grasp; we reduce the
“other” to the sphere of our awareness. If this is the case, then for
the vulnerability of another to place an ethical demand on us greater
than ourselves, the other must be greater than ourselves. Thus, the
demand of the other with a small “o” passes mistily over into the claim
of the other with a big “O,” the demand of transcendence, of deity.
Finally, in the fourth place there is the question of ontology, of just
what kind of world it is in which gift without return and the death of
the other linked to my own death gives rise to subjectivity and ensures
that as subjective beings we are first and foremost ethical
creatures-even before we are erotic creatures or curious creatures.
Recent thought has it that ours is a world in which death, the passing
away of life beyond being into nothingness, is an ultimate horizon. It
is suggested that only within this horizon does ethics acquire an
ultimate seriousness. For if we are all terminally fragile, then our
temporary lives assume an ultimate value, since we can offer our own
lives for the sake of others. A death without return ensures that the
choice of the good exceeds any self-interest, and that the good lies, as
Levinas says, “beyond being [including our own].” With God reduced to a
shadow of the human other, and no longer seen as the source of
compensating heavenly rewards, the ultimate religious and ethical
imperative of pure sacrifice is therefore fulfilled within a secular and
symbolically drained sphere, harboring no illusions. Common to all these
thinkers (with the exception of Marion) is an attempt to make
nothingness or the continuous disappearance of life into the void the
precondition for morality, rather than an obstacle in its path. Death in
its unmitigated reality permits the ethical, while the notion of
resurrection contaminates it with self-interest.
So is it true that death undergirds ethics? I want to argue against
this, instead proposing the opposite position that only with faith in
the resurrection is an ethical life possible. However, I believe that
recent thinkers are rigorously consistent when they argue that
self-sacrifice is supremely good only if death is final and unrewarded.
So in exalting resurrection, I will have also to deny that
self-sacrifice is most paradigmatic of the good. And this is what I
shall now proceed to do, arguing that this idea is incoherent, actually
unethical, and not at all a translation of the essence of monotheistic
tradition as some tend to claim. To make this argument, I will examine
in turn the four components of this ostensibly pure sacrifice: 1) gift
without return or “unilateral” gift; 2) death as grounding the ethical;
3) a subjectivity as constituted through sacrifice and the demand of a
God beyond being; and 4) ontology without resurrection or eschatological
overcoming of death.
The notion that a sacrificial offering without hope of return is the
only true gift suggests that to be ethical is to be prepared to lose
oneself for the other. This is purported to be an improvement over the
ancient Greek idea that to be ethical is to value as the only source of
secure happiness that which cannot be taken away from one, such as, for
example, a simple, ordered, tranquil life, passed mainly in
contemplation and the enjoyment of secure friendship-a life relatively
immune to disaster. I want to argue, on the contrary, that both ideas
are equally solipsistic. The one thing about ourselves we know with
certainty is that we are to die. When we accept this death, or prepare
ourselves, if necessary, actively to appropriate it, we fulfill most
rigorously the Greek demand to value only that which cannot be taken
away from us. We do so, it is true, in a somewhat paradoxical manner;
that which most securely defines us-death-is that which puts an end to
us, while the moral gesture which supposedly establishes our
subjectivity, and so is inalienable, involves our being drawn beyond our
own boundaries. Nevertheless, one might suggest that pure self-sacrifice
strangely turns out to be the securest self-possession, and so one might
wonder whether, after all, there is something stoically solipsistic
about this ethic despite its being founded upon a disinterested regard
for the other.
Let us reflect further upon these claims about self-sacrifice. It is
thought that one can never observe another’s subjectivity, but can only
glimpse a “trace” of it in his or her pain. It would follow from this
notion that one acknowledges the other as other only when one
sacrificially responds to that pain. This means that we only acknowledge
the reality of the other person, and then negatively, when we can no
longer be in communication with him. But a person whom we cannot see or
talk with is an unknown and indefinable other, and therefore only a
generalized other. And here is where the problem sets in.
For a generalized other is a totalized other, an other reduced to
ourselves, since we can only imagine it by projecting our own
subjectivity upon it. To die for any old invisible other is the very
reverse of valuing otherness, because otherness must involve not just
diversity and difference but specific diversity and concrete difference.
All these things have to be visibly or audibly or in some way
sensorially registered.
I am also doubtful about the claim that to gaze upon something is to
reduce it to the terms of our understanding or of publicly available
linguistic categories. Those who hold this view are the victims of a
transcendentalist dimension in phenomenology which, in the tradition of
Kant, reduces what appears to that which our understanding can master.
It strikes me rather that the very specificity of an object, its very
ability to arrest our attention, is constituted by a depth it withholds.
We can never see every aspect of a thing, nor know how it would respond
in every conceivable circumstance; yet without knowing those responses,
we do not know all the different truths they would disclose. If this is
true of objects, then it is all the more true of other human subjects.
We cannot look at anything, especially not at human beings, without
ourselves being regarded in turn from an unknown depth. This depth is
not necessarily contrasted with the surface of the thing, since even
surfaces tend to exceed our categories: we never feel our words exactly
capture a rainbow, for example. So I disagree that what is apparent,
what makes itself present, is thereby reduced to what we understand it
to be.
We have seen that, in much recent ethical thought, a self-sacrifice is
supposed to acknowledge the other through a response to his or her pain,
without reducing that other to our understanding of him or her. And yet
the effect is actually the opposite-self-sacrifice is that which is most
inalienable and so remains within the circle of our self-identity, as
does also the generalized other which can only be a projection of our
self. On the other hand, we have seen that a person with whom we can
interact and whose concrete presence we enjoy is able to be genuinely
other, and in a positive way, rather than just as a victim or as
suffering. In fact, it is only in this positive sense that someone
cannot be reduced to our self.
So, if attention to the other is central for a sense of the ethical, it
would appear that convivial enjoyment of another is more important than
suffering on his behalf. Moreover, if a person can only be known as
other via communication, then I cannot remove myself as a participant in
this situation. The German Roman Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann
has expressed this point very well: giving food to those in need, he
observes, can occur as a one-way gift from those who have to those who
have not, or it can occur in a feast, where all eat together. In the
feast egotism is mitigated, since here one eats only if one eats along
with others; and yet at the same time one does eat, and so selfhood is
not eradicated. This image of the feast suggests for Spaemann that what
is supremely good is the ecstatic-not in the sense of departing from
life, but in the sense of living life as departing from oneself while in
this very departing receiving oneself back again. In other words, beyond
the ancient Greek quest for happiness in security, he proposes living
convivially through generosity to the other and through receiving back
again from the other.
Now all this is of course not to deny that to preserve conviviality, to
preserve the spirit of feasting, one may very often have to make one-way
gestures, without apparent return. Indeed, one can go further to say
that in a corrupt, fallen world, the only way to the recovery of mutual
interaction will pass through sacrifice unto death. But the point is
that this sacrifice is not in itself the good, but rather that which
sustains a road to the good in adverse circumstances. If one values
every single individual as unique and irreplaceable, and if one’s image
of the good is of the widest possible conviviality, then in order fully
to aim for the good, even the sacrificial offering of oneself must
sustain the hope of one’s own ultimate redemption. I myself am unique
and irreplaceable; without oneself, as without anyone, the universe
would have lost something good.
What I am suggesting here, therefore, is that if the fullness of being,
or of convivial interaction, defines our vision of the perfect good,
then giving can be conceived as quintessentially reciprocal; expecting a
gift in return need not necessarily diminish the gratuity of a gift. But
in that case, one might very well protest, what precisely distinguishes
a gift from a contract? Does it not make giving into a sort of informal
and somewhat self-deceptive contractual arrangement, rather like an
exchange of business lunches? Not exactly-giving is more unpredictable.
If we sign a contract we know what we will get back and probably when-we
also take it that what we receive in return is, according to some public
measure, equivalent. But if, for example, at Christmas, we exchange
gifts with a friend, although there is reciprocity involved, there is
also asymmetry: what we receive in return may often surprise us, and
whether it is equivalent will be a matter of fine judgment. Indeed, very
many different modes of equivalence might prove acceptable here.
Furthermore, a return gift may be for a long time delayed, and we will
require no exact guarantee of when it is to be returned-as for example
with an invitation to dinner. When such a gift is returned, it will
certainly in many ways repeat the initial gift-the same hour of the
evening perhaps, the same sitting at a table, the same number of
courses. But it will also be repeated non-identically-the menu will be
different, at least in our culture. Indeed, if one were invited back to
dinner immediately, the very next night, and presented with the same
menu, one would be offered not a gift but an insult.
This suggests that the content of a gift may as much deem “giftness” as
its circumstances (i.e., how free, how unconstrained it is, with what
expectations it is given). Modern thinkers, however, tend to concentrate
wholly on the formal circumstances of the gift, not on what is given.
But suppose a wealthy dying man whom you knew would not live to enjoy a
reciprocal invitation invited you to a meal but presented you with only
a piece of stale bread and butter. Although the formal circumstances are
correct, would you suppose that to be a gift?
My claim here is that asymmetrical reciprocity and non-identical
repetition allow sufficiently for an element of freedom in gift exchange
to distinguish it from contract. Within limits, at least, the recipient
of the initial gift may choose what to give back and when. Certainly, it
remains the case that the initial giver and society in general exert
pressure on the recipient to give back, in the name of justice.
Nevertheless the coercion is mitigated in that if he fails to give back,
any punishment he would receive would also fall outside the fixed
contractuality of law. For a long time he may be punished with more
pressure, more gifts. But eventually the giver will judge that his
generosity should be diverted to other, more promising causes, and then
the defaulter will finally receive the logical consequence of his
refusal: isolation.
At the same time, however, it would be true to say (and I am indebted
here to discussion with Jean-Luc Marion) that the very components of
non-identity and delay in gift exchange involve a certain surplus of
unilateral giving over reciprocity. I do give without the guarantee of
return, and if my gift differs from the return gift, then it would seem
that something unique has passed from me which does not return. Hence
Aquinas insists that gift involves a notion of the unreturnable, even
though he also asserts that the ultimate blessedness of charity involves
reception as well as giving. However, in the first case of the
unreturned gift, one could say that there always remains a hope for a
reciprocal gesture, as there is in an eschatological reserve: there will
always be self-sacrificing in this life, but in hope of the eternal
banquet.
In the second case, of giving something which I do receive back but not
in the same form, there is an element of unilaterality, but this is
connected to the fact that for a gift to remain a gift, it must change
throughout its passage. For as soon as something passes into someone
else’s hands, it is marked by their character, by their usage; it has
become something different in a sense, insofar as the gift-giving
succeeds in establishing understanding between giver and recipient. It
follows that a return gift (which may only be that of gratitude) would
further unfold a mutual understanding, so although the thing which one
receives back is in the most obvious sense different from that which was
first given, in a deeper sense the reciprocal gift returns the same gift
of mutuality that one had first offered. A gift to remain a gift must
continuously alter, and this altering is essential to exchange; but at
the same time, without the exchange of gratitude a gift is unrecognized
and therefore obliterated in its effective actuality.
So far I have argued that exchanging gifts more enshrines the ethical
than does a one-way giving that is indifferent to return. In addition,
however, I want to claim that the sheerly unilateral gift is a barely
coherent notion. In some sense, at least, the free, one-way gift,
although it supposedly defines the good in modern ethical thought, is
impossible and cannot occur. For as many have noted, even to have the
consciousness of being a giver is to reward oneself for giving and to
cancel the gratuity of the gift. We may be genuinely disinterested, but
we cannot escape the fact that if this disinterest is for us a value, we
shall experience our disinterestedness with satisfaction. Since one
would seem to fall prey to the same trap were one even to aspire to
giving, it seems hard to understand how aspiring to self-sacrifice is
any better. Such aspiration is equivalent to an endless deferral of the
gift, except, we are told, at the point where we pass beyond ourselves
in death and cannot receive our own death back again. However, the
formal circumstances of the sacrificial death are not enough to make a
purely one-way gift possible. For the gift to be truly disinterested,
the giver of his own life must not be able even to imagine the future
pleasure of its recipients.
Therefore the true gift would have to be to an absolutely anonymous
other-paradigmatically the enemy, suggests Jean-Luc Marion, echoing the
Gospels. In addition-and again to prevent anticipation of the other’s
satisfaction-the thing given should possess no content outside the
gesture of giving itself; otherwise we could be pleased that the
recipient will at least possess the content we passed along (e.g., “at
least he’ll always have his health”). We have already seen, however,
that removing the question of the appropriate content of the gift leads
to absurd results. Nevertheless, the offering of death would seem to
approach most closely to the contentless gift. For example, one might
ask: In dying, just what did Jesus Christ offer all those infinite
numbers of people unknown to him? However, even if one is prepared to
offer death for unknown others, this still does not establish a one-way
gift. Before dying, the living subject will imagine that somebody
benefits from his death, and will be reimbursed by the knowledge that
his death is significant in some fashion or other. As a result, the
giving ethical subject only becomes purely giving, and therefore
ethical, once he is dead and has ceased to be a subject at all.
It has been seen then that the first and most crucial component of the
notion of pure sacrifice-namely, one-way giving-not only fails to define
the ethical, but is also scarcely coherent. And we have already seen how
the second component, death as condition for the possibility of
morality, fails to grasp the priority of intercommunion in defining the
good. But one should note here, in addition, that if the ethical only
arises in response to that fragility which in extremis is the death of
the other, then the ethical is, ontologically speaking, something merely
secondary and reactive. Far from it appearing to be the case, as some
would wish, that the good lies beyond being, the good would on this
construal rather seem to be distinctly less than being. In other words,
only when being begins to suffer does it instigate the good.
But here one might suggest that a vision of morality as a reaction to
the threat of death is less a transcription of monotheism than a
reversion to the heroic morality of Homeric times. Against this
morality, Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo, insists that warriors who die for
the city out of fear for their own death or the death of others in the
city, or fear of loss of honor, are sacrificially trading a lesser fear
of dying in battle for a greater fear of shame, loss of nobility, and
the loss of the city itself. By contrast, says Socrates, the philosopher
is a person who begins with absolute confidence, with a vision of
eternal truth, goodness, and beauty, and with his own psychic kinship to
these abiding forms. For this reason, the philosopher can act
positively, truly without fear even unto death (avoiding the merely
apparent fearlessness that is in thrall to an even greater fear). He is
good, not primarily as acting, but as knowing, or as receiving and
recognizing the realm of the forms as that which is most real. No
sacrifice is involved here, since the body and lower passions given up
are less intense degrees of being, truth, and goodness; the absolute
degree of these things includes the reality of the lower, and so nothing
is truly lost.
Thus if the good is primary-if as for Platonism and the monotheistic
faiths what is, is good-the good is not first occasioned by death.
The third component of the notion of pure sacrifice is the idea that
subjectivity itself is constituted through the “persecution” of my
consciousness by the demands of the vulnerable other. Here again, I have
already enunciated my main response: this tends to render the personal
impersonal. For if my ethical response to the sorrows of another
precedes my exercise of judgment, I respond in the same way to all
ostensible sorrows, whether authentic or not, self-indulgent or not,
self-caused or not. I would have no means of knowing whether this
persecution was in fact simply a confidence trick on the part of others,
universally pretending sorrow in order to win power over me. If, by
contrast, one is to respond to real historical persons, then one must
first distinguish the legitimacy of their claims, the specificity of
their needs. This being said, it goes without saying that to regard God
as a big Other shadowing the small human other is simply to make an idol
out of generalized and drained subjectivity. Since God is not just
another person, but the fullness of personhood and being in whom we
participate, He is as much not-other-non aliud as Nicholas of Cusa put
it-as other.
This leads naturally to the fourth and final component of the idea of
pure sacrifice: the ontological vision which sees Being without
immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body. Only this vision,
according to our modern thinkers (though not, of course, the Catholic
Marion), ensures that the Jewish and Christian imperative to
self-sacrifice can enjoy a purified fulfillment.
What the modern presentation of this ontology tends to overlook,
however, is its profound link both to the antique pagan polis and to the
modern secular state. We need to comprehend the first link if we are to
understand something of the process by which sacrifice was displaced
from an actual bloody ritual practice to a metaphor for moral action,
such that we can now say “he was very self-sacrificial” and not mean “he
offered his body to Aztec priests.” What, in part, assisted the
transition to metaphor was the way in which the death of the hero for
the city came to be construed by the Greeks and the Romans as equivalent
to ritual sacrifice, and indeed as rendering the hero himself a fit
recipient of sacrifices in turn.
There is a notion here that the hero’s life is subsumed in a greater
social whole, losing himself without return except for posthumous praise
or the celebration of his bravery. The Greeks did not believe the hero
continued to live, save in the rather shadowy intimations of an
afterlife in Hades. But modern secularity gets rid of even such
intimations, and so perfects this pagan logic of sacrificial
obliteration of oneself for some ideal, or for the State, or for both.
Such a logic elevates as supreme the abstract notion of the perpetually
abiding nation-state, outlasting its citizens and being more valued than
the lives of individual humans. Sometimes this last aspect is disguised
in the form of a “sacrifice for future generations,” but since every
generation should logically be subject to the same imperative to
sacrifice for future generations, in no generation will the people
benefit from the sacrifices of those before. Consummation of the
sacrifice, then, is forever postponed.
To espouse these values is essentially to perpetuate the positivist
exaltation of “altruism,” of surrender of self for the future, for
science, for the state. If the ethical imperative is that we should
offer our lives to an other who is present to us only as a trace (as a
sufferer, as we said above) and not in visibility, then, as I have
shown, this other is an anonymous and therefore generalized other. Thus
we live under the ethical sway of a law of abstract otherness, mirroring
in the ethical realm the legal assumptions of the modern liberal state,
which enjoins a merely abstract respect for the rights of the individual
in general with indifference to that individual’s gender, character, or
cultural specificity.
Given the assumptions of such a state two things follow: our
responsibilities tend to become unlimited because we owe our lives
infinitely to every other person; and the ethical good never arrives-we
can never fulfil this impossible responsibility, and no one could ever
legitimately relax and enjoy the benefits of the sacrifices of others.
Thus the only thing that is achieved is the continued carrying out of
self-obliteration. Liberals pretend that continuous self-obliteration is
the demand of the moral law, but in reality it is only the demand of the
liberal state, which cannot put a brake upon sacrifice because it is
unable to promote any positive goals or values that would define true
humanity. It follows that the exaltation of pure self-sacrifice for the
other is secretly the sacrifice of all individuals to the impersonality
of the formal procedural law of state and marketplace. Like the antique
polis, this alone abides, this alone is eternal.
Within the ethical thinking regarding pure sacrifice that I am opposing,
one’s decision to be responsible for this person rather than that
appears to be entirely arbitrary. As Derrida puts it, Why look after
this cat rather than all the other stray cats? However, he is surely
overlooking here the limitations of liberal politics: if to be good was
not, as for liberalism, to exercise a generalized responsibility, but
rather, as for antiquity and the Middle Ages, to perform excellently a
particular social role which helps to achieve, in coordination with
other performed roles, a specific concrete social telos or end, then I
can look after the cat assigned to me in the secure knowledge that other
people are looking after theirs. Moreover, if this telos is taken as
reflecting a transcendent reality, then the individual carrying out his
role provides insight into this transcendent that others can learn from.
We can see from this that while, on the one hand, the logic of pure
sacrifice upholds the law of an impersonal collectivity, on the other
hand it is too individualistic and has no account of the good as
achievable through coordination. For modern ethical thinkers, indeed,
the tension is resolved only through death, when at last that which I
alone can responsibly take on-my own death-is also recognizable as
fulfilling the law of public responsibility. But this is only because,
as we have seen, in fully possessing myself in death, I pass beyond
myself into public, impersonal indifference. By contrast, if we allow
for a good achievable through coordination, it is possible to exalt not
just self-offering, but even a joyful attention to the infinite presence
of a living, visible other above the social whole.
We may be confident that a society based on such coordination would be
made up of an infinite series of joyful relations to each other. But
that is to say that to carry out the ethical project requires a
community collectively aspiring to enact charity. One needs to realize
here that before early modernity, when it was reduced from a moral
imperative to a private task of one-way giving, charity in the Middle
Ages was a reciprocal state of being that persons had to enter into with
familiar others, with adopted kin under God, and with friends with whom
they were conjoined in a common purpose. Charity was not something for
me, privately, to perform, but an entire network of complex reciprocity.
Of course, even a community aspiring to this would be utterly riven by
fractures and failures. Much of the time one would be conscious that
others were failing to perform their role, and failing to exert any sort
of charitable preference. And often, indeed, failures of some would
require sacrifices from others, even unto death. But it is at this point
that faith in resurrection doubly sustains the project of a charitable
society, founded on the widest extension of reciprocity. First of all,
because of this faith, one can have hope for the victims of the failures
of others; and secondly, in the case of necessary self-sacrifice, one
need not surrender oneself to the consuming totality. In either case,
one need not embrace the logic of ultimately necessary self-sacrifice
without return, either of others or of oneself. If this is true, then
only the vision of the eschatological banquet could be an image of the
good, whereas the image of dying for the other-though it is the advent
of the good in fallen time-cannot itself be the final good, without once
more subordinating the person to an impersonal totality, in this case an
abstract moral principle.
If, as in this modern ethical vision, there is no resurrected return,
then we have to accept that there will be, eventually, nothing more to
be said to anyone. But that means that towards all those we have harmed
and wounded and then lost without reconciliation, we can only rehearse
an empty gesture of private, nominal apology. They can never appear to
forgive us, just as those who have injured us and vanished can never
appear to be forgiven.
Without resurrection, there can never be any final reconciliation. But
in the absence of reconciliation, or of hope for that, neither can there
be any morality. For where I cannot be reconciled with the lost one I
have injured, I owe him an infinite debt of mourning and regret. So
great a debt do I in fact owe, that my energies cannot legitimately be
freed up to perform my duties towards the living. But those demands of
the living also are infinite and infinitely legitimate, and so, here
indeed, without resurrection arises an irresolvable problem: I should
not cease mourning and apologizing, and yet I should. Only the hope for
an infinite community of all who have ever lived frees us from this
dilemma, again to do good.
And so we must finally conclude that resurrection, not death, is the
ground of the ethical. They are wrong who claim that in Luke’s Gospel a
promise of eternal reward contaminates an injunction to unilateral
giving. A wider reading of the New Testament, especially John and Paul,
suggests that such injunctions are only a moment of eschatological delay
within a wider promotion of gift-exchange beyond the fetishized limits
upon such exchange imposed by most ancient societies. The name of the
Holy Spirit himself as “gift” is after all bestowed not only to denote a
pure one-way gratuity, but also because the Spirit expresses the
infinitely realized exchange between Father and Son. And if to be
resurrected is to be bodily incorporated into the life of the Trinity,
resurrection is not an extrinsically added reward for successfully
giving without return. Rather, for the Christian, to give is itself to
enter into reciprocity and the hope for infinite reciprocity. And to
offer oneself, if necessary, unto sacrificial death is already to
receive back one’s body from beyond the grave. To give, to be good, is
already to be resurrected.
John Milbank is Francis Gall Professor of Philosophical Theology at the
University of Virginia. His most recent books include The Word Made
Strange, The Mercurial Wood, and Radical Orthodoxy (coeditor).
Temple2 http://www.angelfire.com/il/surlsone
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