Holy Texts of Deception: Christian Gnosticism and the Writings of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh

John Milbank, in his important and magisterial study Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), advances the claim that ‘secular reason’ is but a form of Christian deviancy. By secular reason Milbank intends ‘secular social theory’ or sociology. Milbank offers an ‘archaeology’ of secular social theory which is also an archaeology of the secular, since for him ‘the genesis of discourse is intertwined with the genesis of a new practice’. His genetic account of the construction of secular reason traces it first in ‘the discourses of liberalism— “scientific politics” and political economy’, where the human construction of the cultural world is discovered, and where human making is thought to ‘mark out an autonomous human space’, as in Hobbes. The secular is not that which is discovered when the sacred is removed, but that which is first constructed within the space of the sacred. It is Milbank’s contention that, as he puts it, ‘secular discourse does not just “borrow” inherently inappropriate modes of expression from religion as the only discourse to hand ... but is actually constituted in its secularity by “heresy” in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more “neo-pagan” than simply anti-religious’. Thus for Milbank ‘“scientific” social theories are themselves theologies or anti-theologies in disguise’. The Hobbesian construction of man as the maker of society, the myth, as Milbank puts it, of the ‘self-present and self-sufficiently initiating “person” who echoes the pure will of a creator God’, is not, as the idea of ‘voluntarist sovereignty’, simply a notion transferred from the divine to the human, from the sacred to the secular.