Why gift?Footnote ¹ Since discussion of the term ‘gift’ has become almost mantric in its repetition in recent continental and North American theology, it is worth reminding ourselves at the outset why this is, and whether it ought to be so. This preliminary matter, indeed, will exercise me in the first, and longest, of three paragraphs of comment on the fascinating recent work of John Milbank and Kathryn Tanner on this subject. I shall start by providing a brief genealogical account of why it is that this particular obsession has grabbed us theologians of late, and in particular has propelled the recent systematic work of Milbank and Tanner. I shall also say how I construe the commonality of theological interests that these two authors share, despite the equally marked differences of emphasis evidenced in their rhetoric and strategies.

In my second and third paragraphs, thereafter, I shall turn to Milbank and then Tanner in turn, seeking to expose in each case a different weakness or theological lacuna, as I see it, about the way that trinitarian relations are understood in their thought under this guiding category of ‘gift’. My operating hypothesis here, in a theological debate that so far has been markedly silent about gender issues (why? I shall ask), is that problems of difference and sameness – both human and divine – are strongly latent in the debate, and necessarily entangled with the economic questions about rich and poor which seem now to be the main backdrop for the current American discussion about ‘gift’. Here we shall see Milbank and Tanner working along very different paths, despite all that I have just implied about some fundamental theological agreements. Rest assured: my critique will not bludgeon our authors with an artless or dismissive use of the feminist hermeneutic of suspicion. Rather, I shall pick up on Milbank's own revealing new foray into gender theory in the last chapter of Being Reconciled,Footnote ² and probe from there how what he, and Tanner, say about divine, trinitarian ‘gift’ could relate to these intuitions about the gender binary. So much by way of initial overview: now to the individual points.

Why gift?

The origin of this debate (stage 1, let me call it), as is well known, lies in Marcel Mauss's influential anthropological monograph, The Gift,Footnote ³ which attempted, in an era of French political utilitarianism, to resurrect a utopian vision of (supposedly) ‘primitive’ gift-exchange. In this society the competitive individualism of modern capitalism was not the assumed status quo, Mauss claimed, but rather a complex system of codified interactions which together combined, in Mauss's interpretation, to create a society of remarkable cohesiveness.

More a social and political recommendation than an accurate ethnography of Polynesia, Mauss's neo-Durkheimian vision was much later responded to, and criticised, by Jacques Derrida, with a completely different set of interests in mind (stage 2), this time philosophical and theological.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, we could say that at this point in the ‘gift’ genealogy, the continental discussion turned into an apologetic one about the possibility of keeping the notion of the ‘divine’ afloat at all in post-Heideggerian continental philosophy.Footnote ⁵ In Derrida's reading, the elusive idea of ‘pure gift’ – impossible by definition in Mauss's system of repetitive exchange – becomes a code for divine excess, and thus for the apophaticism of endlessly deferred meaning. No gift that hits the timeline, so to speak, can – according to Derrida – fail to be corrupted by Maussian exchange; thus it can only be a final gift – in human terms the unspeakable gift of death – that escapes such besmirchment. ‘Pure’ gift here becomes ineffable, elusive, death-obsessed, eschatological, but nonetheless endlessly alluring, a remaining token of the divine. Jean-Luc Marion's adjustment and critique of Derrida, which has gone through various stages,Footnote ⁶ challenges and recasts Derrida's puzzling – even impossible – notion of ‘pure gift’, replacing it with the idea of the ‘saturated phenomenon’, in which revelation occurs not so much by apophatic elusiveness but by epistemic overload: the given ‘intuition’ in the saturated phenomenon far exceeds what can be conceptualised, and so resummons the divine. So we might say that it is the very category of revelation that is at stake at this stage 2 of the ‘gift’ saga, the possibility that post-modernity – and continental phenomenology – still hides in its pocket the capacity for the recognition of the divine presence whilst avoiding the pitfalls of what Heidegger termed ‘onto-theology’.

With these first two discussions we should now compare stage 3, at which enters John Milbank's robustly theological notion of ‘purified gift exchange’, originally introduced in his 1995 Modern Theology essay, ‘Can a Gift be Given?’Footnote ⁷ Here the interest ostensibly shifts back to Mauss, but now to the possibility of readjusting ‘gift-exchange’ not as self-interested or agonistic manipulation between human parties, but as a circle of delayed, but appropriately human, response to the ultimate, divine Gift (‘asymmetrical reciprocity and non-identical repetition’, as Milbank's tag becomes). Derrida's ‘pure gift’ is declared by Milbank a chimera, a will-o'-the wisp of ‘modernity’; and (with whatever justification – that could be disputed) Marion's alternative is seen by Milbank as too exercised with the same false binary of ineffable purity and tainted manipulation.Footnote ⁸ The divine self-gift is by Milbank now unashamedly asserted in doctrinal, trinitarian terms, and human response dubbed ‘participation’ in it; the primary anxiety about getting theistic discourse off the ground at all in the secularised culture of Northern Europe falls away as if by fiat. If we ask what now drives the debate at this third stage, it is – to be sure – partly Milbank's sheer theological polemicism against his continental interlocutors. But more significant of late, I surmise, is the urgent economic backdrop of global capitalism, and Milbank's ambitious new plans to write a full systematics under the ‘transcendental category’ of ‘gift’ (of which Being Reconciled is the first part) in order to demonstrate the remaining possibility of an alternative Christian socialism.Footnote ⁹ If I am right in this analysis of focal themes in the different stages of the ‘gift’ debate, then Kathryn Tanner's Economy of Grace,Footnote ¹⁰ along with her earlier monograph Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity,Footnote ¹¹ also fit neatly into the same stage 3, in which current world economic travails also dominate the imagination, but in Tanner's case with a very different theological response. Or at least it seems very different from Milbank. Rather than adjusting and ‘purifying’ Mauss's exchange, Tanner declares the whole Maussian analysis, and Milbank's theological reworking of it, as just as much implicated in individualistic agonism and contractualism as is contemporary global capitalism. So what is left as an alternative? Interestingly, Tanner – strongly influenced by a selective reading of Calvin at this point – happily embraces the notion of divine ‘unilateralism’ that Milbank rejects as the false, ‘modern’ idea of ‘pure gift’.Footnote ¹² In sum, whereas Milbank's theological vision is of a circle of divine gift and human, participatory response – thereby creating an alternative social reality to that of capitalism, Tanner's vision is of a ‘unilateral’ and absolutely ‘unconditional’ divine gift by the non-competitive ‘persons’ of the Trinity, which, if duly welcomed, issues forth in a ‘reflected’ human ‘horizontal’ generosity of wealth to those in need: ‘The good is distributed by God, and is to be distributed by us, in imitation of God’.Footnote ¹³

If this somewhat breathless account of the ‘gift’ debate so far is roughly correct, then I immediately have the following questions for Milbank and Tanner. As we have seen, they appear to adopt quite different strategies for combating the ills of competitive capitalism, but for both this is the fundamental economic problem to be addressed. Both also utilise patristic models of trinitarianism (without feeling any apparent need to woo the sceptic into theism by preliminary philosophical routes); both speak of ‘participation’ in the Trinity, rather than social imitation of it – though Tanner's ‘reflection’ model seems very close to mimesis, as we have just seen. And both deny what one might call a substantial notion of evil – Milbank powerfully re-expressing the privatio boni tradition of classical Christian theism, and Tanner vehemently rejecting the need for any idea of divine ‘punishment’ or Christic ‘sacrifice’. The result in both cases is a vision of the world radically and ontologically disposed to reflect the glory of God; we can block the flow of divine Gift, to be sure, but true cooperation and ‘participation’ in this Gift would seemingly inexorably produce a changed world, economically and politically. There is huge optimism here, note, about the power of theological ideas to change political and economic structures, an optimism I would personally question. But from this brief comparison of the two authors I am also led to ask the following leading questions. Are the rhetorical differences between Milbank and Tanner (between ‘purified gift exchange’ on the one hand and ‘unilateral’ gift on the other) in some respects more apparent than real? Is Tanner's rather sharp critique of Milbank's ‘purified’ gift exchange thus a misfire? More probingly, what is achieved, other than a rhetorical flourish in the direction of Mauss and his French detractors, by elevating the category of ‘gift’ over more traditional systematic loci such as ‘grace’, ‘trinity’, ‘faith’, ‘sanctification’, etc.? Once its interesting philosophical and apologetic capacity to sustain the language of theism (stage 2) has ostensibly been pushed to one side by Milbank and Tanner, has ‘gift’ become a mantra that has, after all, lost its meaning in repetition, and is in danger of flattening doctrinal subtleties that the older categories protected? And what is ‘participation’ in the divine gift for our two authors, exactly? It is worth underscoring that ‘participation’ is capable of a variety of renditions, both historically and analytically, the metaphysics of which really do require explication and defence.Footnote ¹⁴ (Yet Tanner's principles of divine ‘non-competition’ and ‘transcendence’ in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity seemingly imply an unwillingness to explain ‘participation’ at all;Footnote ¹⁵ whereas Milbank is also yet to explicate in detail the difference between different sorts of possible ‘participation’ in the divine.)

Finally – and this topic will act as a bridge into my remaining two sections – we should be surprised, I submit, at Milbank's and Tanner's relative lack of attention to the gender evocations of ‘gift’. Mauss, in contrast (stage 1) was quite clear about this matter: women, and more specifically, their sexual favours, are at the heart of an economy of barter and return; whether women achieve actual agency on a par with men in such societies, however, is highly questionable. The point is that economic and gender relations are inextricably entwined, as Mauss acknowledges quite patently;Footnote ¹⁶ yet English-speaking exponents of ‘gift’ theology have been strangely coy or slow to admit this deep sexual subtext to the very origins of the ‘gift’ debate. In contrast, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous have responded to the issue of ‘gift’ in the sharpest terms, recasting it in Freudian and Marxist terms: it is a ‘phallocentric’ society that is here adulated, they say; is it then only love between women which might perhaps escape the trap of subordinate chatteldom that Mauss and his ilk hold out to us?Footnote ¹⁷ Even Derrida is seemingly aware of gender in his own system (stage 2), in a completely different way: his apophatic ‘pure gift’ is notably figured as ‘feminine’/excess at various points in his discourse.Footnote ¹⁸ What was bartered in Mauss's exchange becomes the eschatological key to the divine – a nice transference.

So what then is happening to gender (vis-à-vis the economy, both divine and human) at stage 3? Why has this issue so far been occluded? And what can we learn from its exposure? Let us look briefly and critically at this issue in relation to the recent writing of Milbank and Tanner in turn, because here a real difference between their views is exposed.

Milbank on gender and the trinitarian economy

To be fair, this nexus has not completely escaped Milbank's attention (what does?). As early as his important essay, ‘The Second Difference’, Milbank suggests in a footnote that ‘If sexual difference is taken to be an equal but asymmetric difference’ [then we may see] ‘Trinitarian difference as the ground of sexual difference’.Footnote ¹⁹ He explains that this is why he feels free to follow the early Syriac tradition and refer to the Spirit as ‘feminine’ in this essay, although, as he puts it, ‘This does not, of course, mean that I think she is essentially feminine, any more than the Son and Father are essentially masculine’.Footnote ²⁰ The meaning of the terms ‘essentially feminine/masculine’ is something on which we might want greater clarity, especially when we come to the more explicit discussion of gender in Being Reconciled. Here, in the final chapter, we are told, with reference to Irigaray on the significance of bodily difference, that ‘certain . . . inherited generalizations do hold [about gender] . . . : men are more nomadic, direct, abstractive and forceful, women are more settled, subtle, particularizing and beautiful’.Footnote ²¹ Moving back from here to the crucial opening remarks in Being Reconciled about the divine, trinitarian ‘ground’ of gender ‘difference’, we find that, as in The Word Made Strange, the Spirit is ‘complementary’ to the Son as Word;Footnote ²² she – if it is still she – is also ‘listener’ to the Word, and in a sense buttress against, or overflow from, ‘the closed communion of a dyad’,Footnote ²³ a ‘feminine’ Giver who seemingly complements the prior ‘masculine’ Word. One may readily see, I think, why I suspect Milbank of a continuing fascination with either a Romantic view of the ‘opposite’ sex, so-called, or with Lacanian dualisms such as Irigary presumes. Are they here smuggled into the trinitarian economy and made the divine ‘ground’ of a particular view of sexual difference in the human ‘economy’ of gift, shoring up expectations of silent self-giving from the woman?Footnote ²⁴

If so, I am suspicious of the apparent divergence from Augustine's trinitarian economy that has occurred by a kind of sleight of hand even as his authority is invoked.Footnote ²⁵ No longer is divine ‘Gift’, donum, precisely that which indicates the ‘difference’ (within equality) of the Spirit; instead ‘Gift’ has – seemingly – been arrogated to the whole Trinity. If we probe what ‘difference’ this makes, and especially in relation to gender, is it not implicitly to deflate the important hypostatic differentiation of Spirit as ‘Gift’, and thus to cast the Spirit either as ‘feminine’ adjunct, or as ‘excess’ (the false alternatives of ‘femininity’ in stage 1 and 2 of our contemporary gift saga, note)? In contrast, for Augustine in book 15 of the De Trinitate, the Spirit is specifically and hypostatically Gift and Love – the absolutely non-negotiable point of entry for us humans into the divine life;Footnote ²⁶ and as such the Spirit is the irreducible donum that breaks open, and ever keeps open, the dyad of Father/Son – which could otherwise become the very image of narcissistic patriarchalism. Here is no ‘feminine’ adjunct to an established ‘masculine’ household, but the very possibility and guarantee of divine love as non-narcissistic. At the beginning of Being Reconciled Milbank explicitly confronts this very issue, but then backs away from its apparently radical implications; the ‘closed perfection of the dyad is the ground [of the Spirit]’, he repeats; let there be no ‘figure of amorous promiscuity here’.Footnote ²⁷ In other words, if I read him aright, Milbank again tames (‘feminizes’ and domesticates) the ‘difference’ of the powerful Spirit, constrains the blowing of its wind where it wills, its implicit capacity to upend the settled gender binaries of patriarchalism.Footnote ²⁸

Lest these questions seem far from the dominating crises of global capitalism, let us just remind ourselves that the female poor are invariably doubly subjected. When we gender the persons of the Trinity, however subtly, and implicitly valorize such difference within God (as ‘ground’), we cannot avoid creating a texture of assent to human analogues. How then might the gifting God transform the manifest inequalities of the human gender binary, for Milbank, and so present an image of a truly equal as well as ‘asymmetric’ difference – just as that gifting God also supposedly transforms the inequalities of rich and poor? That is the crucial question I lay before him.

Tanner on trinitarian non-competitiveness and the unilateral Gift

And it is here, finally, that some parallel comments and questions about Tanner's alternative theological strategies may rightly fit. For in strong contrast to Milbank's attempt to ground gender difference in God, Tanner's trinitarianism is notably sanitising of difference of any sort, let alone the difference of gender. The primary model for the Trinity is that of ‘non-competition’; there is no hint of kenotic reflexivity between the divine persons, of mutual relations of submission and response that might subliminally summon gender associations. Indeed, this erasure might cause Milbank to riposte that here we have in Tanner an instance of what he calls ‘transcendental homosexuality’ – a ‘non-narcissistic’ unity beyond gender difference.Footnote ²⁹ But for Tanner, in order to purge not only gender evocations but also all taint of ‘gift exchange’ (and by now we see how these hang together), it is necessary to insist that the non-competitive ‘community’ of the Trinity gives nothing ‘away’ even to each other: nothing is ‘transferred’ and nothing lost.Footnote ³⁰ But the ‘unilateral’ and ‘unconditional’ gift of divine grace to us should result – not in a ‘return’ of any sort – but in an extension of similar linear giving to the poor, in ‘solidarity’. Such giving, says Tanner, should not involve sacrifice or inordinate loss (just as Jesus' death was neither a ‘sacrifice’ nor a ‘punishment’, according to TannerFootnote ³¹), but rather an appropriate redistribution of the gifts of creation: ‘giving should not be at odds with one's continuing to have’.Footnote ³² If this strikes one as an essentially bourgeois solution to the dilemmas of global capitalism, I fear that this may be the result of the determined erasure of the motif of ‘exchange’, and thus of the effective obliteration of distinguishing ‘differences’ of relation both in God (qua persons of the Trinity) and in us (qua even-ing out difference of resources out of ‘our’ plenitude). Where, one might ask, is the radical gospel dispossession demanded of the rich young man, or commended in the widow's mite given precisely ‘out of poverty’?Footnote ³³ Where is the Cappadocian perception that our whole life is ‘indebted’ to God from the outset, and that in giving financially – and to our limit – we receive back far more from the ‘poor’ than we ourselves have given (for we receive Christ in them: see Matt. 25:40)?Footnote ³⁴ The obliteration of ‘exchange’ (indeed of spirals of exchange that ever flow one out of the other) comes, it seems, with theological cost. For all then that I have earlier emphasised the commonalities of interest and theological themes in Milbank's and Tanner's concepts of the ‘gift’, it is in the area of difference – hypostatic differentiation, gender and strategies for the alleviation of the ‘differences’ of rich and poor – that Milbank and Tanner most strikingly diverge. And for all that I have criticised the particular gender differentiation in Milbank's solution, I find myself finally more committed to a critical re-enunciation of his intuition that gender, Trinity and ‘gift’ must be worked out together, than to the flattening strategies of non-competitive ‘sameness’ that seemingly reside at the heart of Tanner's proposal.Footnote ³⁵

For what I would want to argue – and do argue in a forthcoming bookFootnote ³⁶ – is that ‘gender’ in God, if we can so speak at all,Footnote ³⁷ is emphatically not a reinstantiation or ‘ground’ of the world's gender binary; for the specific Gift of the Spirit cracks open the human heart to the breaking of that binary, making ‘gender’ ultimately fluid to the priority of divine desire. Far from being a ‘feminine’ adjunct to a more fundamental ‘masculine’ dyad, the Gift of the Spirit exposes the idolatry of a Father/Son dyad perceived as patriarchal narcissism. In this sense the Spirit refuses patriarchy just as it refuses its own ‘feminised’ subordination to the Father and Son. And that is why ‘difference’ in God is and always must be a difference of three. Part of John Milbank's argument already pushes in this direction.Footnote ³⁸ But by arrogating ‘Gift’ to all three persons of the Trinity, both Milbank and Tanner in different ways occlude this vital specificity of the Spirit (both ontologically and economically): one – Milbank – by reining in the Spirit and so implicitly restabilising the unequal human gender binary, the other – Tanner – by seemingly erasing differences of mutuality from the trinitarian picture altogether.

Difference or sameness, exchange or unilateralism – whether in God, between God and us, between the sexes, or between rich and poor: these finally are the core issues in the ‘gift’ debate, and a decision in the one affects all the others – or so I have here argued. Responses from John Milbank and Kathryn Tanner will be eagerly awaited.