Episode 05: Alison Milbank

Interview Date: 1 February 2020. Interviewer: Dr Jason Clark. Research and questions by Dr Jason Clark.

A British Anglican Priest and literary scholar specialising in religion and culture, Dr Alison Milbank is Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Nottingham, and Canon Theologian of Southwell Minster. Professor Milbank's research and teaching focuses on the relation of religion and culture in the post-Enlightenment period, with particular interest in non-realist literary and artistic expression. Her magnum opus, God & The Gothic: Religion, Romance, & Reality in the English Literary Tradition was published in 2019. She is currently undertaking research on specifically Anglican developments towards a theology of nature from the seventeenth to twentieth century.

Alison Milbank - Timed Interview Summary

0:00 - 14:99

Introduction to Alison’s life and work and the mapping out of her specific academic interests (amongst many) in the Gothic fantasy, theology (with a focus upon Anglican Social Theology) and religion (with a focus on the Anglican Parish System). Alison Milbank grew up in the naval and industrial city of Portsmouth, “a Northern town on the South Coast” in an Anglican household and from the age of two and a half is taken to choral matins. Love of literature derives very early from the “lost Anglicanism” of the Book of Common Prayer and the Psalms. Family moves to experience the High Church liturgy at St Mary, Portsea which deepens the sense that religion is concrete, ordinary and part of life whilst transporting you beyond yourself to encounter God.

Parents have very different backgrounds. Mother from Anglo-Irish gentry, but father is son of newsagent, and family atmosphere is very genteel within a working-class area. Alison experiences the Anglo Catholic Christian Socialist tradition in Portsmouth, stretching back to Father Dolling at St Agatha’s, Landport in the nineteenth century. Family class disparities apparent to her as a child and she is aware of their complexity. Aware of mother’s sense of exclusion from the world of her antecedents in Ireland, which had been rich and privileged. Remembers visits to her maternal grandmother in a “treasure house” with Victorian clocks and furniture and other wealthy relatives in London. Remembers the wonder of a world that opens out geographically and historically. Father was a brilliant at mathematics and should have gone to university but left school at fourteen. He would have made an excellent priest and died too young. Mother is very protective because Alison had meningitis as a child. During her childhood Portsmouth is still a bombed “Gothic” city, still recovering from the devastation of the Second World War and coming to terms with a decline from its naval and dockyard past.

15:00 – 36:35

Interest in reading commences early from cheap editions of the classics, but she is also exposed to expensive, illustrated accounts, such as the Arabian Nights. Could be frightened by the images. Sees clear links between her mother’s sense of exclusion from the Anglo-Irish gentry and her interest in Gothic fantasy. She defines Gothic literature as texts which invoke fear and deal with both incarceration and escape and the diachronic relationship of the past to the present, in which a female heroine is the uncoverer of truth and inheritor of tradition. The Gothic fantasy “makes things strange”, and its relevance shifts according to the cultural moment. The current fascination with vampires or Harry Potter and the continued popularity of Chesterton, Tolkien and Lewis is evidence of a dissatisfaction with non-transcendental materialism. In Tolkien it’s the form and style which does the theological work – the world of Middle Earth is beautiful, melancholic, transient and not fully explicable. It is important in evangelism to give people the sense that there is a depth to reality before you can preach the Gospel. Tolkien wanted to write a mythology for England.  The importance of nourishing stories which feed our morality. Chesterton’s use of the inexplicable within the ordinary in the Father Brown stories.  This is what fantasy does – Middle Earth makes our world strange to be received back as something Divine. Something that the British are very good at in their writing for children.

36:36 - 44:29

Religious and academic journeys. Cambridge University and an academic crisis, owing to an administrative mix up, which prevents transition to a doctoral study.  Marries the theologian Jon Milbank. Takes a PGCE up to the birth of her first child and this leads to a sense of a calling to the priesthood. Finally get to undertake a PhD on the Victorian Gothic. Thinks a doctorate is often linked to one’s own childhood and sense of oneself. Becomes interested in Dante. Campaigns for the ordination of women. Trains for ordination in the UK, but passage is complicated by move to the US, where she starts again, but then returns to UK. Is finally ordained in the UK 

44:30 - 1:10:39

Consideration of the various strands of 19th and 20th century Christian socialism. F.D. Maurice important to the development of Anglican social theology. Careful to note that his Trinitarianism is not applied as a modern social trinity.  Later forms are those of Stewart Headlam and the Guild of St Matthew, Percy Dearmer, Conrad Noel and the Christian Socialist League and Catholic Crusade, Scott-Holland and the Christian Social Union, guild socialism, Catholic distributism (an economic theory advanced by the writers G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc), Maurice Reckitt and the Christendom Group, the Moot, and post-war in the 1970s Kenneth Leech and the Jubilee Group. F. D. Maurice wants to say that there is a divine constitution in creation, without suggesting that it should reflect a simple political or economic system.  Maurice’s understanding of theosis: we share in the life of God as creatures. When human relations are generative, just, loving and good they share in the Divine constitution. Maurice had a considerable influence on many people including the poet Tennyson and the housing reformer and co-founder of the National Trust, Octavia Hill.  There is an enormous confidence of the Church’s ability to go out into and influence every part of the world. It is a sacramental theology. Mission should not be thought of as a “geographical” move from here to there, since the Kingdom of God is to be uncovered wherever one is.   

1:10:40 – 1:20:59

For the Parish. Form and content in Christian practice.  The danger of doing things in modern evangelization that are culturally relevant without an alertness to what other unhealthy values are being smuggled in. Alison’s approach to literature and religion is to look at the stylistics because meanings are as much in how you say something as what you say.  A headteacher wishing to introduce strong discipline will not slouch around in a pair of jeans. In her role as canon theologian she always thinks through a medium which will embody a teaching for a congregation. A consideration of Fresh Expressions in the Church of England and the church more broadly. The need to be “porous”, using Charles Taylor’s term, and not closed off as a “buffered” self. The church as a community of reconciliation and mutual forgiveness. 

1:21:00 – 1:24:52

Alison’s work as a canon theologian. Responsible for adult education, organising conferences, in change of libraries, in charge of children’s work, performs marriages and baptisms. Also Head of Department and Professor of Theology at the University of Nottingham. The duality of being a priest and an academic tutor since academics do not proselytize.

1:24:53 – 1:28:03

Discussion of the gaps in current spiritual formation in Britain. People are not given enough to feed on or explore from the riches of Christian belief: art, music, literature, ethics and theology. There needs to be more sense of God’s beauty and mystery.