Don’t you love it when academics get caught up in the point they are trying to make and get carried away with their language.  Modern beauty after Kant is a “raped” beauty?  Come on, Milbank, no one falls for that kind of emotive language any more.  And, taking disinterestedly from beauty is not exactly in the same league as rape, now, is it?

Though I don’t agree with most of what Milbank says about beauty, I would agree with him on a few issues: the need to bridge the artificial divide between beauty and the sublime imposed by Burke, Kant, and subsequently many others; the simultaneity of objectivity and subjectivity in the experience of beauty; the excess of meaning in the experience of beauty.  He doesn’t exactly write in a clear way, to me, though.