At the heart of Milbank’s response to Zizek is the insistence that Christianity is fundamentally paradoxical, but not fundamentally dialectical.  For Milbank, the latter partakes of the ontology of violence that he sniffs out beneath classical, modern, and postmodern systems.  In Zizek’s case, it’s fairly overt, and overtly Hegelian.

Milbank argues that the logic of Trinitarian theology is different: “for the most classical Christian perspective, as developed from Gregory of Nyssa through Augustine to Aquinas, the Father in his absolute plenitude as arche nevertheless can never even be considered ‘in himself’ as the first ‘moment,’ since this origin is entirely exhausted in the filial image which it expresses.  This does not, however, mean that it is abolished or negated in what it expresses, since the paradoxical logic of substantive relation also operates with absolute symmetry the other way around: the Son, as expressed image, is only that which he images or expresses.  It is perhaps no accident that it was an orthodox Anglican clergyman who invented looking-glass logic: for the logic of the Trinity suggests that the Father is only his image in a mirror, and yet that this image is indeed a ‘mirror image’ - in itself entirely transparent and containing only its reflected source.”

Milbank goes on to say that the Spirit confirms “that the ecstatic passage between Father and Son is indeed a love between two and not simply an impersonal ‘flash’ of passage or fusion.  But this means that love between two can be confirmed only by seeing that love is contagious beyond the mere claustrophobia of the dyad.  For this paradoxical logic, the third is only the two, but the two is only the passage to the third.  Therefore the third is a remaining and not a vanishing mediator.  The third is the between that always allowed the passage from the one to the two, or the same to the different, even though it is the ‘product’ of the one and the two, the same and the different.”  Thus, “the Spirit lies analogically between identity and difference, yet it allows the univocal and the equivocal their place, since it is itself entirely the upshot of the interplay between them.”

This also means, Milbank says, that the Triune life is not an agon but a dance: “No more Olympus, no more Olympiad; but Parnassus persists, now the Muses peacefully triumph over the gods themselves.”   Trinity “does not favor a solemn, serious, and tragicTeutonic shadowing of real history” but instead “frivolously invokes a lost or hidden realm of fantastic pure play,” a play that erupts into history at the incarnation.  Zizek is too serious, and cannot see that Christianity is “much more lightheartedly concerned with God’s self-joying and the human joy that arises to think that there is indeed first of all and finally such joy, even if it is for us now in time almost totally concealed.”

That “is only” seems excessive; the Athanasian creed repeatedly states an “is not” between Father and Son.  But I think that Milbank acknowledges that here, in his insistence that while the Father is His image, yet the image is truly Image of the Father.