[PT 11.

1 (2010) 126-135] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X

doi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.126 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

Without Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth:

15 Verdicts on Žižek’s Response

John Milbank
The University of Nottingham
New Lenton
Nottingham NG7 2RD
UK
john.milbank@nottingham.ac.uk

Abstract
This is a response to Slavoj Žižek, which carries the debate between us for-
ward. This debate is published as The Monstrosity of Christ edited by Creston
Davis and published by MIT Press, 2009.

Keywords: Catholic, Chesterton, Hegel, Protestant, scientism, Slavoj Žižek.

Žižek and I, whatever he may suggest, do not seriously disagree about

the reading of Hegel and Lacan; that is not what is at issue between us.
He tries, for example, to say that I do not fully allow that for Hegel the
final synthesis involves a complete release of contingent difference, but
I make it clear that I agree with him about this. As to Chesterton’s views
on magic, elves and miracles, I leave it to the reader to check who is
right.
Much of his response to me consists in a simple dogmatic reiteration
of the claim that an “Hegelian” (Protestant, gnostic and atheist) reading
of Christianity is clearly the “true” one. None of my Catholic arguments
against this conclusion are really dealt with.
Žižek’s response nonetheless tends to confirm my claim that the really
serious issue in the West still lies between Catholic and Protestant and not
between Right and Left. He repeats the standard view that monotheism
tends to disenchant and Christian monotheism disenchants absolutely. I
submit that this uncritically accepts a Protestant “whiggery” concerning
a supposedly necessary development. Contrast this with the Catholic
Charles Taylor’s attempt in A Secular Age to show that secularization
was a contingent accident in the Latin West and happened because of a
gradual decision that the more “pagan” and “festive” elements in Catholic

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 Milbank  Without Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth 127

Christianity were alien to its true spirit which was taken to be disciplinary
and organizational. (There is a big debt to both Foucault and Ivan Illich
here.)1 Yet in the early modern period it became clear that such an attitude
was far better expressed by a revived Stoicism; its Christian character is
therefore highly debatable.
Moreover, he also confirms my thesis that without a realist belief in
a transcendent God and heaven, the ontological ground for hope for a
transformed human future is removed. This is shown in the fact that the
consequence of removing the dramatic character of Orthodox Christian-
ity—whereby one really proceeds from cross to resurrection, from sorrow
to joy, from tragedy to resolution, from death to life—is that the signifi-
cance of human historicity is abolished also. Hence Žižek in his own way
proclaims an Hegelian “end of history” by saying that the hell of human
history cannot be transformed, but can nevertheless be seen from an alto-
gether different and “rosier” perspective which does not remove, entirely
overlaps with, and yet does not touch, its crucified aspect.
This means, as Žižek now nearly admits, that what the materialist
offers is a mode of religious consolation, an opiate for the masses, and
no hope of real striving for human transformation. His Hegelianism is
not Marxism and is symptomatic of a new twenty-first-century situation
in which atheism (and scientism) tend to define the left and ensure its
pessimistic, misanthropic and essentially conservative character in our
times. The Catholic Christian will refuse this mode of pietism, which
is the reverse of everything that the boundlessly mirthful and optimistic
Chesterton ever stood for.
This new defining secularity of the left (from liberal left to far-left) also
tends to abandon philosophically agnostic finitism of a Kantian variety.
The infinite can now be known, but the infinite is material, as Žižek
suggests, following Quentin Meillassoux.2 But the idea that all religious
thinkers are still stuck in the twentieth-century finitist moment is false:
Ratzinger’s Regensburg address was also an attempt to escape the merely
agnostic piety of the finite. He suggests there that we can have faith that
reason, through the exercise of faith, can reach the infinite, which is itself
infinitely rational (the second person of the Trinity, the divine Logos).
Obviously the materialist will respond that we can dispense with faith.
But to this the theologian will respond in turn that, without religious faith,
the materialist must in the end deny the reality of reason—or else the
primacy of matter. For he faces an aporetic fork: if being is prior to reason,
then reason, in knowing being, loses itself as epiphenomenal (Laruelle),

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
2. Quentin Meillassoux, Après la Finitude (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006).

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128 Political Theology

but if being coincides with the comprehensible, then it would seem that
matter is really ideas or numbers (Badiou). Only theology allows one to
have both matter and reason, both mysterious solidity and the apparent
presence of spirit. Only theology, as Chesterton suggested, allows us to
return to the reality of the everyday world. So some religious people in the
twenty-first century, myself included, are not (as was admittedly prevalent
in the twentieth) defending the sacrality of the finite on its own, but the
mediating opening of the finite (matter and spirit) to the transcendent
infinite in which being and intellect coincide without priority. (And actu-
ally I think Tarkovsky’s iconic cinematic technique also opened up this
self-transformative passage.)
The scientism of the new (essentially apolitical) secularist left is also
in evidence in Žižek’s celebration of the alliance between the perspectives
of psychoanalysis and developments of “brain-machine interface” which
allow a kind of immediate “thought control” of objects external to the
human body—even though in reality a series of (now effortless) physical
mediations are taking place. Supposedly this gets rid of the “dualism of
the soul and body” and replaces it with a soulless object and partial object
fused into one spontaneous material process. In reality, of course, this is
just a confirmation and extension of Cartesian duality, which Lacan explicitly
espoused (indeed it was the fundamental basis of all his thinking). Soul/
body duality was qualified because the soul was (prior to Descartes) taken
to be the form of the body, without which the body would not exist, but
would only be formless matter. The Cartesian self-referential “subject,”
however, truly is lodged within the body by accident. This means that
the body no more belongs to the subject than does material extension in
general and it is indeed just a portion of that extension. Hence the mind
now knows all of material reality by a kind of direct intuition, without the
mediation of body whose reflexive sensation was seen by Aristotle (and
again by Merleau-Ponty) as belonging neither to the objective nor the
subjective sphere and at the same time to both. On this understanding
Cartesianism obliterates the body, and brain-machine interfacing contin-
ues this impulse—although in reality any remote control I might achieve
of objects remains parasitic on my historically and epistemologically prior
“handling” of objects, since I must still think the world and myself in
it through my bodily presence to it. (This holds, even if one can try to
claim that this mode of bodily presence is somehow self-deluded.) So
even where the subject is materialized and the mind is reduced to brain as
far as possible, the “magic” of this interfacing still resides in the direct cor-
relation of a moment of consciousness with a material event. This dualism
(contra Žižek) is incorrigible, and yet an admission of bodily mediation
allows us to see how the “reflexivity” of consciousness is somehow (albeit

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 Milbank  Without Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth 129

obscurely) linked to a reflexivity (“self-touching”) that arises within the

material continuum itself. As in other instances, the materialist refusal of
hylomorphism lands up engendering a theory that is actually less material-
ist than hylomorphism’s integral dualism.
Žižek’s claim “not to be postmodern” looks therefore increasingly
baffling. Just like the postmodernists he proclaims that political hope is
impossible; that there are incommensurable ways of looking at things; that
subject and object, appearance and reality, inner and outer are collapsing
into each other with a kind of ontologically disclosive effect that should
be perversely embraced. Unsurprisingly, then, he criticizes Terry Eagle-
ton whose genuine political radicalism reaches increasingly for a Catholic
grounding. Eagleton is attacked for holding to an “ethics of moderation,”
yet without this Žižek is reduced to putting forward irresolvable ethical
aporias all too reminiscent of those of Derrida. The ethical, he declares, is
rooted in an obstinate insistence upon a particular need, desire or equiva-
lence: hence there is no difference in principle between Michael Kohl-
haas’s obsessive and ruinous quest for justice in one particular instance
and a symbolic act of political resistance which promotes lasting change.
Surely Eagleton’s Aristotelian stance is right here: prudence senses when
an act can acquire a wider, symbolic resonance. Even if a revolutionary
act is not envisaged in this way at the outset, then it is only persisted in
or advocated as a general practice (like the refusal of segregation in the
pre-civil rights South) when it is realized that it has, indeed, acquired this
wider resonance. But Kohlhaas (a kind of insane Kantian, anticipating the
ethically pietist subversion of the message of Martin Luther, his counterfoil
in Kleist’s story) is not interested in communal (Aristotelian or Hegelian)
Sittlichkeit, only in his own personal and also resentful relationship to the
formal moral law.
And Eagleton is also right to say that love is the inner essence of the
Jewish law. If we are not even, according to Christ, to hate or lust in our
hearts, then this is much more a call to us to live fully in the public light
of day without nocturnal reserve, than it is to do with inner self-cleansing.
Of course Žižek is right to add that Paul condemns even the very form
of law as such and this does indeed reveal the ambiguity of all law as
command and prohibition. But this basically means that command and
prohibition lean towards the sinister and not to the Right unless they are
subordinated to a desire to do good for its own sake­—and not even for the
sake of inhibiting evil. In this sense Hegel was quite right to talk of an
ethical existence that is fully allied to “life” before the institution of the
law.
One can agree with Žižek that Christ’s “excessive” (and sometimes
mutually contradictory) commandments demand a non-identical repeti-

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130 Political Theology

tion and not a literal following. They suggest, beyond Aristotle, that the
“middle” to be ideally striven for is not a “balance,” but a paradoxical both-
at-once which we cannot pre-invent but only alight upon (if we have the
moral luck by grace) in specific circumstances. Sometimes, for example,
we shall discover a way to be at once innocent and cunning or at once
spontaneous and reflective—as Žižek himself suggests. But we should not
suppose that all the injunctions apply simultaneity: now I say to you, says
Jesus in Luke, is the time to go and buy a sword. It is clear that for Jesus,
as for the Bible in general, peace is eschatological, but that there is an
ambiguous passage through violence on the way to it. To imagine that the
violence also is eschatological—though always “for now,” since there is no
“end” for Žižek—is as bad as the pacifist imagining that we can formally
and privately live out the eschatological peace in the historical present.
One can also agree that Jesus in a sense only adds “himself ” to the Old
Testament—and that this does indeed betoken an ethic of “naive” self-
expression, if we are to follow Christ’s example, However, if (to follow
the Schillerian paradigm) there is only “sublime” subjective naiveté,
supposedly free of all calculating interest (but also, beyond Kant, of all
reflexive self-sacrificial deliberation), then is one not indeed trapped in the
Lacanian duality in Encore between desire and love—which Žižek clearly
admits to be there, since he endorses as perversely desirable my scenario
of a chastened love pursued in a grim tenement under a desire-banning
(and so creating) socialist dictatorship. This duality arises because one can
naively insist upon and enjoy one’s “impossible” desire, while never truly
meeting the other through this desire. Instead, one can only meet the
other authentically in “love,” insofar as one tries (futilely, of course, in the
end for Lacan/Žižek) to satisfy his desires—whatever they may be. Žižek’s
citings of Agota Kristof ’s novels make this point crystal clear. Even if the
“naive” protagonists are satisfying often perverse desires through their
acts of love, the structural duality still remains. And this means that Žižek
is after all like Levinas—something already signalled by his endorsement of
a bypassing of the body. For if there is no possible reciprocity of desire,
then the ethical act must consist in one-way gestures of “cold” solidarity
is response to lonely erotic needs. But that is exactly what Levinas in effect
says—the ethical act is never one of establishing a relationship but of
self-effacement before the other. And how, for Levinas, are we supposed
to acknowledge the other concretely (short of an infinite relay passage
from one “non-appearing” other to the next one), save by satisfying their
isolated egotistic needs—which, in Totality and Infinity, he also celebrates
in passages too frequently glossed over. He would never have referred,
like Žižek, to “helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity,”
but that is in effect what he thought, since any palpable presence for him

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 Milbank  Without Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth 131

mires us in mere technocratic, totalizing mastery. A shared Cartesianism

drives Lacan and Levinas at a deep level to similar ethical conclusions. By
contrast, naive spontaneity, if it is ever to enter into reciprocal relation-
ships (and so joy) requires also the leaven of “beautiful” sentimentality
(not of course a pejorative term in Schiller’s era). My spontaneous desire
must try to mediate itself with the other’s (“beautifully”) appearing desire.
For only so can my desire be in some measure fulfilled; only so indeed can
my desire have anything more than an illusory object. And if I am only
spontaneous in the pursuit of illusions, then my spontaneity also is an
illusion; in reality I am gulled. To be naive would then mean merely to be
deceived and not (as Schiller saw it) to grasp the sublimely fundamental.
What is interesting about Schiller is the Romantic pressure he puts on
the Kantian duality and hierarchy of sublime/unilateral versus beauti-
ful/reciprocal (because harmonious). But Žižek is fully and uncritically
paid up to just this duality (along with nearly all his secular philosophical
contemporaries).
Of course Lacanian psychoanalysis, and even psychoanalysis in general,
claims to have “shown” that objects of desire are illusory. But in principle,
since the desirable is both subjectively judged to be there and withheld
from our presence, this could never be shown by any supposedly “critical”
discourse. It follows that psychoanalysis is but the confessional box of
atheism. And surprisingly, for a radical practice, it has to be paid for—
revealing its historical alignment with sophistry rather than philosophy.
Moreover, what one pays for is only a raking-over of what one already
possesses—one’s own past; for if the orientation of desire is illusory, then
salvation can only reside in adjusting one’s attitude to this past which is
given and unchangeable. Of course real hope is here precluded. But what
comes free, by contrast, is Catholic priestly council which suggests instead
that real personal change is possible because one can act out of future
aspiration towards goals that are real (“already there,” since underwrit-
ten by eternity) and therefore that one can actually remake one’s past by
continuing to write the story (in word and action) in which it is situated.
Psychoanalysis by contrast must subordinate narrative to fixed, unalter-
able synchronic paradigms.
If the world is not aimed at heaven, then there is every reason to believe
that the hell of this world is all there is—as Žižek does, though he adds
that it can be a kind of mixture of perverse fun and chilly welfarism (or
both at once in a Stalinist theme park). This renders the hope of utopia or
even progress without ontological ground. Now when one tries to unlink
the hope of earthly progress from the hope of heaven, this usually results
in an exaltation of sacrifice much more moralistic than anything advocated
by religion. Individuals are to be sacrificed to human others still to come.

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132 Political Theology

Žižek clearly seeks to avoid this outcome, but he can only do so at a cost.
This cost is double: first of all, as we have seen, he effectively gives up
on the hope for transformative change—but instead proposes a kind of
religiously cultic relationship (the rose) to quotidian reality (the cross).
And secondly he suggests that the good secular death becomes indifferent
to renunciation, “sacrificing sacrifice itself.” But if this meta-sacrifice is
truly a negation of the negation such that there is no real sacrifice at all,
then life itself is devalued, then there never was any life or value. Atheism
is caught in the double bind of either moralistic piety or nihilism. And
in any case Žižek continues to endorse celebrations of the other person’s
sacrificial death when this is seen as fomenting a new social process. He
considers it inevitable that any ideological gain involves there being such
a sacrificial victim. As against such a perspective, one point of the doctrine
of resurrection is that, while the need for the voluntary sacrifice of some
for others is not denied, hope does not stop with the social result in time of
this sacrifice, but aspires forward to the return of all eternally. In this way
alone the ultimate value of the personal can be upheld, without endorsing
an individualism indifferent to social relationship.
If Žižek’s ethics are at once perversely amoral and over-altruistic,
then his politics are at once totalitarian and liberal. In a very unHegelian
fashion, he endorses the Kantian sense of the “public” realm as lying in
the direct conversation between the individual and the sovereign centre,
representing the “universal.” This nominalist space between the many
ones, and the “big One” which is the whole, of course refuses all substan-
tive truths of universals upheld by particular traditions or fidelities (as
with Badiou who does not, as some misreadings suppose, identify “truth
processes” with respresentive subtractions—Žižek, sometimes on his
own admission, is far more secular here than the French philosopher)
which Kant consigned to the “private” sphere. This renders the public
space, as Žižek says, “atheist.” I can negatively agree with this: there can
be no Habermasian “procedurally neutral” public space as between secu-
larity and religions—the very neutrality is godless, and it can only allow a
formal emptiness to prevail. Something always rules, and what this rule
contests is space as well as time. What Catholic Christianity proposes
socio-politically is another mode of public space—since it refuses the
all important modern distinctions between the individual, the social, the
economic and the political or even between civil society and the political.
Politics, like ontology, for a Catholic outlook concerns the metaxu and
therefore a host of mediating institutions amongst which sovereignty is
dispersed and who negotiate their constitutional bounds with each other:
economic corporations, producer co-operatives, universities, religious
orders, trade guilds, village councils and so forth. Because this public

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 Milbank  Without Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth 133

space is a sacred space—in fact the body of Christ—a shared vision

permits a dispersal of power and creatively various pursuits of this vision.
By contrast, the formalism of atheist space must inevitably combine
individual loneliness with absolute policing of every aspect of behaviour
in order to avoid anarchy. Because, in truth, we have only really had a
dominantly atheist space in the West since the 1980s (though the 1960s
helped crucially to lead to this), we are only now fully seeing that it does
indeed have these absolutely alienating and authoritarian implications—
even in the case of the liberal version of secular order. At the same time,
however, a true Augustinian legacy (perverted in the West after roughly
900) continues to recognize that the properly “political” sphere of coer-
cion, warfare and punishment, on account of its imperfect means and
goals (short of true reconciliation), is relatively “secular” and outside the
body of Christ, even if it must be ultimately judged by its serving of the
ends of true eschatological peace. In this double way precisely a Christian
order (and maybe that alone) upholds both constitutional plurality and
the relative independence of the secular realm. By comparison an atheist
public space must logically remove all intermediary associations—so
abolishing real democratic participation—and ironically sacralize secular
space and time themselves: in terms of cults of sacrifice and/or a suppos-
edly liberating nullity. It is for this reason that Christianity is only politi-
cally radical when, contra Žižek, it resists the subsumption of the Church
into the political state—for the Church proposes social consensus and
reconciliation in and through diversity in a manner that exceeds the just
purposes of any possible mere politics. To suggest the opposite leads in
the end to conservative conclusions, as the example of Žižek (whose intel-
lectual rigour in the end exposes this all the more clearly) makes appar-
ent. Hence it is simply bizarre to lament the betrayal of some fantasized
original “apocalyptic” Christian community at the hands of the organized
Church. To the contrary, the evidence suggests that the latter was there
from the very outset, just as later history attests that it did not “uphold the
existing order” but drastically transformed it in a process that continues
to this day—inventing, for example, “welfare institutions” (hospitals,
orphanages, almshouses, etc.) and promoting a plethora of voluntary
associations in a manner foreign either to classical antiquity or to Islam.
The Kantian notion of an unmediated relation between individual and
law/state is grounded at the metaphysical level in what I would call “the
monopolization of mystery.” This is the view, beloved of Žižek, that mono-
theism ensures that there is only “one big mystery,” thereby disenchanting
the world by allowing that the world in its totality is a bizarrely singular
exception. But, to the contrary, if the one big mystery were in rivalry with
lesser mysteries: angels, spirits, fairies, ghosts, daemons, miracles—that

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134 Political Theology

is to say, all the “phantasmic,” which may be real if we allow that the
phantasm of the human mind itself and the phenomena given to it are no
illusions—then it would be like a kind of idol. Aquinas insisted that God’s
greatness was done more honour if we allowed that he could distribute his
causal power to the greatest possible extent. He realized that this tended
to prove, rather than to detract from, his omnipotence. In a similar fashion,
one could say that God’s widest possible distribution of his mystery tends
to prove his absolute mysteriousness. And this means that God is not—
unless he were himself another pagan god—in rivalry even with the pagan
gods. It is for this reason that the incorporation of “pagan” elements into
Catholicism, or the stress upon themes of cosmic and sacramental media-
tion that are present in the Bible themselves, are not a betrayal of mono-
theism, but to the contrary a sophisticated understanding of it. Conversely,
modes of monotheism like (the worst forms of) Calvinism and Wahabism
are really like fanatical pagan cults of a single deity. Indeed, that is exactly
why they tend to foment military and terroristic violence.
For where the paradoxical “between” is denied either in the cosmos or
the social order, a hypostatized unity gives licence both to the tedium of
isolation and the daemonic power of the arbitrary.
Even though the Church is more socially ultimate than the political
State, this does not mean that Ratzinger betrays the Church notion by
suggesting that those truly seeking God will be saved. This was already
affirmed by the Church Fathers, including Augustine. The point is not
at all that the primacy of community is here bypassed, but rather that the
aspiration towards God is one and the same with an aspiration towards that
true human community which is the Church (as again Augustine claimed).
Indeed the Church is regarded by Christianity as primarily an eternal,
heavenly reality, which is merely on pilgrimage here on earth. With respect
to limbo, Ratzinger simply builds upon medieval views which allowed
that the innocent, by very virtue of their innocence, would fully enjoy the
beatific vision. This applied already in that epoch to “the holy innocents”
massacred by King Herod; what Ratzinger now suggests is that innocent
babies do not need either baptism by water or the baptism of martyrs by
blood to enter the full presence of God—this can be linked to the fact that
a better reading of Augustine (whose implications he himself did not logi-
cally adhere to) shows that inherited original sin is only “assumed” by a
consenting act of will, even if an inherited corrupted habit always ensures
this. But that really does let innocent babies and children (to some degree)
off the hook: to see them as “unfallen” is entirely Christian, as Thomas
Traherne realized in the seventeenth century. Ratzinger is merely modi-
fying the Latin Christian legacy with more Eastern perspectives which
have always tended to doctrines of eventual universal salvation. And this

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 Milbank  Without Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth 135

can only be welcomed, for as Charles Taylor convincingly suggests, in

the wake of the great French historian Jean Delumeau, the too-prevalent
medieval Latin regime of fearful discipline is closely linked to an extreme
insistence on the terrors of hell (and increasingly, in the later Middle Ages,
on the damnability of sexual sins). This is an important part of the pattern
whereby Latin Christendom perversely helped to create a mode of dis-
ciplinary religion that would eventually be rejected as well as ethically
perpetuated—so inventing the secular (which is not there as some sort of
remaining residue once religiosity is “subtracted”; as myself and Charles
Taylor have both argued).
I agree with Žižek that the “limbo” status of the supposed purely
“natural” man who loses his merely civilly guaranteed rights not to be
tortured etc. in places like Guantanamo Bay holds no obscure emanci-
patory potential, as Agamben imagines. However, the human foetus is
not in any limbo position; rather, it is in a position of growth, which is
entirely different. Human beings at whatever stage of their growth should
not (save for extraordinary reasons) be killed. This is precisely because
they are growing towards a personal flourishing which we normally deem
to be the supremely good thing in time. Protests against abortion or the
instrumentalizing of the human body for experimentations of all kinds
are simply insistences that the iconic sacrality of the human body at any
stage of its existence can alone sustain the sense of a person as more than a
detached subjective observer or else an object amongst other objects. If this
personal existence is an illusion, or if its full flourishing is not objectively
desirable, then the routine exploitation of embryos or killing of foetuses
justifiable—but then so too would be the whimsicallycruel treatment of
all human adults and children.
But love—against Žižek—is not a whim, even though it cannot be com-
manded (yet has been).

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