“John Milbank, Vladimir Soloviev, and the Human Rights Debate” by Randall A. Poole

Church of the Transfiguration, Kizhi Pogost in the Republic of Karelia, Russia, Laban66 (CC BY-SA 3.0)

At least since the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, human rights have been contested and debated: are they real, and if so in what are they real? What is their ground or foundation? The first forceful critic was the Catholic Church. For Catholic and other conservative religious thinkers like Edmund Burke, the French Revolution’s militant dechristianization and rapid descent into terror were the logical consequence of its secular conception of human rights, not to mention the atheism of leading philosophes such as Condorcet, one of the main theorists of the revolutionary rights of man. Very soon another, quite different critique emerged: utilitarianism, famously expressed in Jeremy Bentham’s quip that human rights are “nonsense upon stilts.” By the last third of the nineteenth century, ideas of human dignity, equality, and rights withered under various anti-human ideologies such as social Darwinism and “scientific racism.” As these ideologies turned violent, what followed was the era of militarism and imperialism, communism and fascism, and world war and genocide.

By the late 1930s, in the midst of Europe’s long civil war, human rights began to be revived, and on renewed philosophical foundations. In March 1937 Pope Pius XI issued two encyclicals, Mit brennender Sorge (On the Church and the German Reich) and Divini Redemptoris (On Atheistic Communism), which deployed the idea of human rights against their respective targets: Nazism and Communism. The year before, the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, in his treatise Integral Humanism, had laid out his philosophy of personalism, which holds that persons are the very center of reality: its ontological center since persons are the highest form of reality, its axiological center since persons are the supreme value in reality, and its epistemological center since through persons reality is intelligible. Maritain took Pius XI’s encyclicals as authorization to turn personalism into a powerful theory of human rights, decisively breaking with the Church’s historical position. In 1942 he published The Rights of Man and Natural Law, which set him on the path to become, in Samuel Moyn’s estimation, “the premier postwar philosopher of human rights” (87, 90). Twenty years later, the Second Vatican Council made human dignity and human rights the foundation of Catholic social teaching. In the decades since, the Church has recommitted itself time and again to its personalist conception and defense of human dignity and human rights, most recently in Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica humanitas (On Safeguarding the Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence).

John Milbank’s Critique of Human Rights

Despite the Vatican’s endorsement, religious critiques of human rights enjoy a certain currency today. Some prominent critics include the late Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, Nigel Biggar, and John Milbank. Among their main criticisms are that human rights are secular and therefore indifferent or in opposition to truth, which is to be found in theism; that human rights promote relativism, subjectivism, egoism, and even nihilism; that their individualism inhibits community and the cultivation of virtue; and that they are, in short, a product of “liberalism,” a stand-in term for everything wrong with modernity. Milbank’s critique of liberalism as developed before 2012 has been aptly described by Aristotle Papanikolaou (88-89, 137-146) Let me focus here on Milbank’s critique as laid out in his 2012 programmatic essay, “Against Human Rights: Liberty in the Western Tradition.”

The fundamental contrast in the article is between subjective rights, which Milbank equates with human rights, and objectivist conceptions of justice as right order, including natural law and divine government. He says that notions of justice and right order are what really safeguard the values of the West, whereas human rights erode such values. In fact, Milbank argues that “a foundation of politics in human rights is indissolubly linked with an augmentation of arbitrary will,” the result being “a logical slide of liberalism into a nihilism of the enthroned will” (210). For him, subjective right is a type of Nietzschean will to power. But unless you redefine the term, subjective right does not mean a subject’s right to exercise absolute will or power; it means precisely the limitation of such power and protection from it. That is the heart of liberalism, which in political theory refers to the constitutional limitation of state power through respect for natural or human rights, upheld by the rule of law and civil society. But for Milbank, there is in principle no difference between absolutism and liberalism. As he writes, the state’s “absoluteness exists in order to underwrite the equal absoluteness of the inviolable will of the ‘self-owning’ and property-owning individual” (206). The final liberal equivalency is with totalitarianism: “the more that doctrines of human rights are seen as the normative basis of all politics, then the more they covertly encourage a slide of neoliberalism towards a fully-fledged totalitarian capitalism” (207).

Milbank contends that the decisive shift from objective ius, justice as right order, to subjective ius happened not with Thomas Hobbes, as Leo Strauss thought, but more than three centuries earlier, with William of Ockham (1287–1347). In this, Milbank follows the French legal philosopher and historian Michel Villey (1914–1988). They trace the idea of modern subjective right to the Franciscan “tendency to divide will from reason and so to inaugurate a doctrine of surd choice, independent of the lure of truth” (224). The eventual result of such sundering is a “fully-fledged” voluntarism, nominalism, and individualism. Milbank refers to the Franciscan master Peter John Olivi (1248–1298), who predates Ockham and whose position, in Milbank’s interpretation, “demonstrated already the dangerous contradiction lurking in any notion of absolutely inviolable subjective rights: namely that, since they are based upon the indefeasible right of the will, this right, taken in abstraction, can always be appealed to in order to override and abolish any specific customary right whatsoever” (224).

Relying on Villey, Milbank says that the “buried foundation” of human rights “lies in a questionable theological voluntarism and a questionably atomizing metaphysic” (229). It is fairly plausible that one source of one modern meaning of subjective right (if we grant that it has such a meaning) can be found in thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Franciscan theology. But it is astonishing that Milbank equates human rights with that one meaning and, on that basis, rejects them as a whole. According to him, human rights are a product of liberal individualism, which is “in reality a dethronement of a true Western valuing of the individual, derived from the Judaic and Christian (and to a degree Islamic) valuing of ‘the person’” (207). Here, then, is Milbank’s core thesis: human rights, collapsed into one modern meaning of subjective right, actually threaten the human person, whose defense is to be sought in pre-modern traditions of objective right and justice, in Christendom, and in the free associations and semi-autonomous corporate bodies of medieval society. He declares: “I would submit therefore, that promotion of personhood and free association is essential to the defence and revival of the Western legacy and that the promotion of human rights will, by comparison, tend to hasten its collapse” (209).

The Rich History of the Idea of Natural or Human Rights

The idea of natural or human rights is much broader than subjective right, in the meaning that Milbank gives to it, and they have a much longer and richer history than a particular intellectual current that begins with Franciscan nominalism-voluntarism. Human rights are the rights of the person, which is precisely what Milbank extols as central to the Western legacy. They are the product not only of modern liberal individualism, but of a much longer tradition of personalism, taken in the general sense of respect for the sacredness of the human person or, in other words, for human dignity.

There is now a large and impressive literature conceptualizing and detailing the history of human rights. Milbank discusses some of this literature, focusing in particular on Nicholas Wolterstorff and Brian Tierney. They are leading figures in what he calls the “American Christian liberal camp,” in which he also includes John Witte, longtime director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory’s Law School. According to Milbank, the camp has tried to show that “the idea of subjective right is truly well-grounded in the Medieval, Patristic, Biblical and even, to a degree, ancient Roman legacy,” much earlier than Villey places it (209). Milbank thinks that Wolterstorff, Tierney, and Witte, among other scholars, are reading subjective ius and its pernicious liberalism back into history and thereby undermining the age-old traditions of objective ius. Worse, they are trying to Christianize human rights, beyond the aberrant Franciscan founding that Villey and Milbank want to pinpoint.

Brian Tierney, who died in 2019, was among the great historians of the idea of natural rights, especially in their medieval development. He was English, but had a distinguished American academic career (mainly at Cornell), which is why Milbank includes him in the “American Christian liberal camp.” Milbank alleges that Tierney was involved in “common Christian-American doublethink” because “in the end he wants to say that ‘human rights’ . . . are compatible with Catholic natural law theory” (220), when he should know that they are merely instruments for the isolated subject’s assertion of its arbitrary will and power. For example, Tierney argued, “The first natural rights theories were not based on an apotheosis of simple greed or self-serving egotism; rather they derived from a view of individual human persons as free, endowed with reason, capable of moral discernment, and from a consideration of the ties of justice and charity that bound individuals to one another” (77). If today human rights are sometimes made to serve “simple greed or self-serving egotism,” then Tierney’s research makes clear that the solution is not to reject them as such, but rather to return to their roots in respect for the person and the (objective) “ties of justice and charity” that form human communities.

When they speak of “subjective rights,” Tierney, Wolterstorff, Witte, and other historians in their “camp” are not using the term in Milbank’s sense, but in its long-established meaning. Subjective rights are subjective because they belong to persons who are subjects (and not merely objects) possessing various powers or faculties, but who are also subjects of power, from which they need to be protected. Simply put, subjects have rights because they are persons. Their rights are grounded not in their arbitrary will but in their will together with other distinctive human qualities such as reason and conscience. Subjects, as persons, are not isolated individuals but belong to, and are formed by, various communities and wholes. Their rights are subjective and objective in complex and intertwined ways. But they are not “subjective” in the way that Milbank uses the term.

Milbank on Maritain

Milbank notes that Villey himself recognized, after Jacques Maritain, a personalist conception of human rights in Thomas Aquinas, who thus was, as Milbank puts it, “already ‘modern’ in a non-liberal sense which pointed towards a later increased recognition of the rights of subjects as objectively justifiable according to their social fittingness rather than a right of entitlement accruing to an absolute subjective will” (218). As I indicated earlier, the Thomistic philosopher Maritain was a central figure in the personalist reconceptualization of human rights in the 1940s. Milbank is highly critical of him, referring to the alleged “considerable incoherence” of his “pseudo-synthesis” of human rights and natural law, with overtones of cosmic right order. He says of Maritain, “if a subjective right belongs to right order and imposes upon us a genuine ethical imperative, then it cannot be grounded in indefeasible circumstances of the isolated human will” (230). But certainly that is not Maritain’s grounding. Let me quote one noteworthy passage from The Rights of Man and Natural Law: “The worth of the person, his liberty, his rights arise from the order of naturally sacred things which bear upon them the imprint of the Father of Being and which have in him the goal of their movement. A person possesses absolute dignity because he is in direct relationship with the Absolute, in which alone he can find his complete fulfillment” (6). In short, “the person is a spiritual whole made for the Absolute” (42). One might think that “the order of naturally sacred things” might impress Milbank as a commendable invocation of objective ius. It does not.

In connection with Maritain, Milbank refers to the work of the intellectual historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn (see Witte, ch. 24), mentioned earlier in this essay. Moyn has highlighted Christian personalism as the philosophical framework for the rebirth of human rights in the decade before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As part of the historical context Moyn mentions the “émigré Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, who brought to the West an old Russian tradition of religious personalism” (87). Maritain befriended Berdyaev after the Russian philosopher moved to Paris in 1925, and they, together with Emmanuel Mounier, became leaders of the interwar personalist movement. From Berdyaev, other Russian émigrés, and his own Russian-born wife Raissa (Oumançoff), Maritain learned about pre-revolutionary Russian idealism and religious philosophy, which, remarkably, had produced a robust and theoretically sophisticated defense of human dignity and human rights decades before Maritain, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Second Vatican Council.

From Milbank to Soloviev: Human Dignity and the Kingdom of God

Milbank has drawn upon and extolled Russian religious philosophy, particularly in his essay, “Sophiology and Theurgy: the New Theological Horizon,” writing, “it seems to me that the scope, ambition and modernity of Russian theology is greater than that of their Latin contemporaries. They tended to start at the point where de Lubac and von Balthasar, to name only the most considerable names in the West, only finally arrived” (47). Part of the “scope, ambition and modernity” of Russian religious-philosophical thought is precisely its personalist defense of human rights, but Milbank has left this aside. Rather, he has tried to align other aspects of Russian theology, such as the concept of sobornost’, with his postliberal political theology and critique of universal human rights. He and other religious critics of human rights (not least Patriarch Kirill of Moscow) have much to learn from Russian religious philosophy. They might well start with Russia’s greatest religious philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), in particular with his magnum opus from 1897, Justification of the Good, one of the great modern works of moral philosophy.

The treatise is a powerful and systematic defense of human dignity, which Soloviev treats as the foundation of rights. Today, that foundation is widely recognized, but not by Milbank, who wishes to disassociate them. For example, the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) specifies that human rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.” This connection was not a common one in the late nineteenth century, though Immanuel Kant had established it a century earlier. Soloviev worked to restore and develop it. In 1896, a year before the first edition of Justification of the Good, he penned an entry on lichnost’ or personhood for the Brogauz-Efron encyclopedia. In it he wrote succinctly, “Human personhood has in principle an unconditional dignity, upon which are based its inviolable rights” (quoted by Wortman, 109). But if human dignity is the source of human rights, what are the sources of human dignity? This is a weighty philosophical problem, and Soloviev’s attention to it is an important part of his intellectual legacy.

In Justification of the Good, he defines human dignity as the intrinsic and infinite worth of being human and located its source in the human potential for the good, in the human capacity for perfectibility toward it. In a creative and powerful interpretation of the “image and likeness” verses in the Hebrew bible (Genesis 1:26, 9:6), Soloviev defines human dignity as consisting in our consciousness of absolute perfection (the image of God) and in our capacity for perfectibility (the likeness of God) (145, 152). This “double infinity” belongs to every person. “It is in this,” he writes, “that the absolute significance, dignity, and worth of human personhood consist, and this is the basis of its inalienable rights” (176). The telos of human perfectibility is deification or theosis, as he makes clear in another significant formulation: “The absolute value of man is based . . . upon the possibility inherent in his reason and his will of infinitely approaching perfection or, according to the patristic expression, the possibility of becoming divine (theosis)” (296).

Soloviev developed the idea of theosis into the central concept of his religious philosophy: Bogochelovechestvo (translated as Godmanhood or divine humanity), his term for the free human realization of the divine idea or principle in ourselves and in the world. In Justification of the Good, he tends to refer to it just as the kingdom of God, conceived as a joint divine-human project. The very concept of the “justification of the good” is infinite human perfectibility or progress toward the divine ideal, such progress taking place through history and in society. In his words, “the purpose of historical doing is precisely the final justification of the good given in our true consciousness and our good will” (147).

Soloviev stressed that the kingdom of God cannot be expected by the immediate action of God, for “God has never acted immediately” (149)—a striking expression of the need for free human participation in God’s work. “In man’s consciousness and his freedom lies the inner possibility for each human being to stand in an independent relation to God,” Soloviev continues, “and therefore to be God’s direct end [tsel’], to be a citizen possessed of full rights in the kingdom of ends” (150). The “kingdom of ends” is a very significant reference in this context. It is Kant’s ideal of a moral community whose members recognize each other as ends-in-themselves, who are inwardly and freely governed by the pure laws of virtue, and whose will, therefore, approximates “holiness.” Soloviev embraced Kant’s ideal as his own (see my essay, “Kant and the Kingdom of Ends in Russian Religious Thought”). Both philosophers conceived it as a type of perfected universal church, the penultimate stage of human progress before the advent of the kingdom of God. Soloviev called it “free theocracy.” Its achievement rests on prior stages.

The most basic of these is the state under the rule of law, respecting and enforcing human rights. Soloviev’s position is that “rights are nothing more than the expression of what is right” (317)—in other words, subjective rights derive from objective right. His conception of objective right is itself human dignity and perfectibility toward the divine or absolute ideal. This ideal, however, must be freely and inwardly recognized, i.e., it is a matter of freedom of conscience. Soloviev had no doubt that Christian theism was the truth of reality, but he also consistently maintained that truth, especially this truth, had to be freely recognized. “The demand for moral perfection as an inner state presupposes free or voluntary fulfilment,” he affirms (320). This is a subtle and intricate connection: human dignity consists in self-determination by and perfectibility toward the absolute ideal, but this process, which is essential to personhood, requires that the ideal be inwardly and freely recognized; otherwise the ideal cannot be self-determining and it cannot drive inner perfectibility. That is why freedom of conscience is the first and most sacred right: it goes to the heart of personhood and human dignity. Soloviev had a profound grasp of this inner connection, which runs throughout Justification of the Good.

Soloviev thought it perfectly obvious that human progress, as the gradual external realization of the inner capacity for perfectibility, was impossible without a stable, secure, and well-ordered society, since the latter is the condition of civilized life and therefore of all higher human development. His logic is straightforward: “The moral principle demands, then, that men should freely seek perfection. To this end the existence of society is necessary.” But society, he says, cannot exist if anyone who wishes can rob, maim, and murder. Law forcibly prevents this and so “is a necessary condition of moral perfection; as such it is demanded by the moral principle itself, though it is not a direct expression or it” (322). To extend his logic: he thought that law, in a sense, makes people equal in a way that they are not in the state of nature or in unlawful societies, where brute strength and force dominate. By equalizing human relations, law enables people to develop as persons. It is an essential spiritualizing force.

Soloviev did not restrict the lawful, rights-based state to the negative functions of providing safety and security. He thought it had positive tasks as well, in accordance with his basic position, which he articulated as follows: “Every person in virtue of his absolute moral worth has an inalienable right to exist and to strive for perfection” (327–28). The state was obliged to facilitate this striving by materially providing for what Soloviev called the right to a dignified or worthy human existence (296-298, 306). Toward the end of his treatise he summarizes his social philosophy by saying that the state has two chief tasks, conservative and progressive: “to preserve the foundations of social life apart from which humanity could not exist, and to improve the conditions of its existence by furthering the free development of all human powers which are to be the instrument of the future perfection, and apart from which the Kingdom of God could not be realized in humanity” (392).

* * * * *

Today’s religious critics charge that human rights are often praised as the pinnacle of human moral achievement. Soloviev, and Kant before him, made clear that the pinnacle is not human rights. It is the kingdom of ends, in preparation for the advent of the kingdom of God. But they recognized that human rights are the necessary foundation. Today’s religious critics, in undermining human rights, are jeopardizing not only progress toward the kingdom of ends, but very much else. That is perhaps the most important reason why Soloviev’s is the much sounder position in the human rights debate.

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Recommended Citation

Poole, Randall A. “John Milbank, Vladimir Soloviev, and the Human Rights Debate.” Canopy Forum, November 13, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/11/13/john-milbank-vladimir-soloviev-and-the-human-rights-debate/

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