Religions, Milbank (Beyond Secular Order) argues, do not necessary aim for the ultimate. “Many human religions relate themselves, both theoretically and practically, to a cosmic level which they talce to be less than ultimate - often marked by a mythically narrated violent ‘brealc’ which leaves a reserved space of mystery that is sometimes occupied by a posited but unlmown ‘high god’” (11).
This limitation of religion opens up an opportunity for “philosophy” to claim the ground of ultimacy as its own: “While philosophy usually remained linked to modes of ritual and ascesis, it nevertheless tended (especially to begin with) to reserve ‘being’ as a contemplated reality beyond and above ‘practice’. Insofar as
it did so, however, this ‘being’ tended to be construed in immanentist terms, since the removal of ancient reserve initially coincided with a new boldness of myth itself that tended to identify the ‘high’ with the ‘all’ through concepts of the Macranthropos (or cosmic man- evidenced in ancient India, the ancient Near East and in ancient Greece) which allowed the transition from myth to philosophy - or from the rule of synecdoche and metonymy to that of a univocalist monism - to occur” (11).
As philosophy separated itself from studies of nature and physics, and claimed to be the wisdom of metaphysics and being, it became more mythological: “the more a level of transcendence that only an element of reconstrued original myth could invoke in terms of an independent ‘activity’ was appealed to - as by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and to a degree also by the Upanishadsand the traditions of the Vedanta.”
This involved a reversal of the original aim of philosophy: “original philosophy was a monistic revolt against myth (whose impulse is sustained by Stoicism, with the same disconnect between normal ethical action and the indifference of being, to which one must just be resigned) whereas later more humanistic and political philosophies were ‘conservative’ hybrids of philosophy and mythology” (12).
