Really a placeholder for a proper consideration of John Milbank, Radical Orthodox theologian, and his alleged badness. I was listening the other day to a podcast of Milbank and Catherine Pickstock giving a quick radio-friendly outline of their ideas. Milbank at one point decried the “evangelical” tendency to eschew the parish in favour of “networks of bodybuilders and skateboarders and…God knows what”.

The point as I understood it seemed at first sight roughly Badiouian: the network “of bodybuilders” is identified by a predicate, ditto the network “of skateboarders”, and this is bad ecclesiology inasmuch as what Milbank called “the cosmic church” is necessarily not an identitarian grouping (compare Bonhoeffer on the Nazis’ “Aryan laws”). The church as the body of Christ is a generic set, a set which no predicate identifies.

But a generic set is necessarily infinite, since for every finite set it is possible to construct a predicate that exhaustively identifies its members. Now, a parish is a locale, a bounded bit of terrain. Topologically, this doesn’t matter: if you imagine a map projected onto an infinitely plastic rubber sheet, a “parish” marked out on that map can be as big or as small as you like. But actual parishes do in fact take up a certain fixed amount of space, and accommodate a finite number of bodies. So the part of the “cosmic Church” that is gathered together within a parish is a finite part of an infinite set.

The question is then whether this finite selection - I use the word advisedly - of the faithful is really any better or worse an image of the generic set of which it is a part than the evangelical “network” of pigeon fanciers, or foot fetishists, or God knows what. What makes it better for Milbank is, I suspect, not the relative arbitrariness of the selection criterion (happening to live in a certain place, within a set of bounds that are themselves ultimately arbitrary), but the involvement of a specific value of “terrain”, or place, that he supposes is obviated when you start to construct “networks” (or, you know, rhizomes) that cut across multiple discrete locales.

What’s missing from this opposition between the non-local “network” assembled on the basis of an identifying predicate, and the local “parish” which is made up of people who just happen to live in the same neighbourhood (um, like that’s actually how it works…just look at the variation in house prices between the neighbourhoods of schools with significantly different rankings in the league tables…)? The answer is the non-local (or trans-local) set that is not bounded by a simple identitarian category, the set that includes body builders and foot fetishists (and “God knows what”) and that remains open to extension in a purely aleatory fashion…