[The Montana Professor 20.1, Fall 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
David Bentley Hart
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009
272 pp., $28.00 hc
Matt C. Paulson
Student
UC-Berkley Graduate Theological Union
Five or so years ago, the world of academic theology was somewhat startled by the publication of David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite, a book which essays a sustained demolition of the "violent" (anti-)metaphysics of postmodern thought within the broader context of a systematic, robustly realist articulation of the Christian faith. In the intervening years, Hart has attained to a certain idiosyncratic celebrity amongst his peers. On the one hand, his positively redoubtable intellect is recognized by all. His knowledge of the Western intellectual tradition is enviably broad and deep; he inevitably offers penetrating insights on whatever topic he happens to address; he is possessed of a vocabulary that is, perhaps in the exact sense of the word, nonpareil; and his nascent oeuvre (best summarized in his now classic essay "Christ and Nothing," but most fully set forth in the above mentioned tome) evinces the sort of creativity, coherence, verve, and focus which suggests that, should he choose to develop his "dogmatic minora" into full-scale systematics, it would quite probably come to be regarded by posterity as one of the towering achievements of 21st century theology. On the other hand, however, he has garnered a number of criticisms, at least some of which are warranted. He at times has a grating tendency to wander around, rather than get to, the point; while his prose often reaches to vertiginous levels of aesthetic grandeur, it sometimes devolves into the cloyingly florid; not infrequently, his gifted capacity for rhetoric lapses into a blunt vitriol, which quite exceeds the limits of appropriate candor when he encounters thinkers with whom he strongly disagrees; and, finally, while he has proven himself quite capable of indwelling the internal logic of the most abstruse reaches of human thought, it is sometimes questionable whether he does justice to the vision of reality descried by the authors he chooses for interlocutors in the course of articulating his own.
I was relieved to discover that, in his latest work, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, Hart does not content himself to volley on opposite sides of a rectangular premise with the advocates of the "New Atheism." Indeed, interaction with this latter intellectual movement is largely confined to the first chapter of the book, wherein Hart allows himself a few indulgences in the sort of acerbic wit mentioned above, e.g.:
The journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic, has just issued God Is Not Great, a book that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method.... And one hardly need mention the extraordinary sales achieved by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, already a major film and surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate. (4)
Yet, alongside a few instances of more substantive (though equally dismissive) interaction with Dennett's Breaking the Spell and Sam Harris' The End of Faith (6ff.), Hart spends precious little time dealing with the "New Atheism." Rather, as soon becomes apparent, his goal is (thankfully) more ambitious. If Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite can be characterized as an excessively ornate yet arrestingly profound arabesque that has been erected upon the foundation of the ontological implications of the Christ-event and set against the face of postmodernism, his Atheist Delusions can be regarded as a (relatively) disciplined, laconic, and poignant challenge to modernism from the vantage point of the historical fact of the "Christian interruption" of Western civilization.
The argument of Hart's Atheist Delusions consists of four "movements." In the first, "Faith, Reason and Freedom: A View from the Present," he divides his time between a brief dismissal of the "New Atheist" movement (which oscillates between rhetorical flourish and substantive critique) and a critical assessment of modernity's conception of "freedom," and it is the latter of these which proves most central to his narrative. According to Hart, modernity's conception of freedom is nihilistic, and he intends this term in a literal rather than derogatory sense, viz., "an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible," and which offers "no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves" and our world whatever we wish (21). In consequence, our ethics "tends to be something of continuous improvisation or bricolage," and we "select the standards or values we find appealing from a larger market of moral options and then try to arrange them into some sort of tasteful harmony" (23). Hart contrasts this with the notion of liberty countenanced by antiquity, both Christian and pagan, according to which "we are free when we achieve that end toward which our inmost nature is oriented from the first moment of existence," and anything that "separates us from that end—even if it comes from our own wills—is a form of bondage" (24). In short, modernity would have us believe that it has liberated us from servitude and from a bondage to the constraints attending the Christian narrative in particular, and the "New Atheism" is but an obnoxious manifestation of this broader presumption. To this, however, Hart would question how free we really are, and whether we truly understand what it is that we imagine ourselves to have been liberated from.
The second movement, "The Mythology of the Secular Age: Modernity's Rewriting of the Christian Past", begins with a lengthy refutation of "a simple but thoroughly enchanting tale."
Once upon a time...Western humanity was the cosseted and incurious ward of Mother Church; during this, the age of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity labored in brutish subjugation to dogma, superstition, and the unholy alliance of church and state. Withering blasts of fanaticism and fideism had long since scorched away the last remnants of classical learning.... All was darkness. Then, in the wake of the "wars of religion" that had torn Christendom apart, came the full flowering of the Enlightenment and with it the reign of reason and progress, the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new and revolutionary sense of human dignity.... The story of the travails of Galileo almost invariably occupies an honored place in this narrative, as exemplary of the natural relation between "faith" and "reason" and as an exquisite epitome of scientific reason's mighty struggle during the early modern period to free itself from the tyranny of religion. This is...a simple and enchanting tale, easily followed and utterly captivating in its explanatory tidiness; its sole defect is that it happens to be false in every identifiable detail. (34)
Hart then, quite effectively, sets out to demonstrate the tale's falsity.
To be clear, though, Hart does not in these chapters attempt to vindicate the institutional Christianity of the early and middle ages against every charge of criminality, and he is quite candid before his audience with regard to the shortcomings of the Church, when and as they occurred. In point of fact, the book as a whole cannot in any real sense be construed as an apologia for the veracity of the Christian faith, and it exhibits an admirable degree of disinterested objectivity. The more general conclusions of this section of the book are rather uncontroversial, e.g., that "humans often disappoint"; that the wildly exaggerated shortcomings of institutional Christianity in the past would more rightly be seen as a violation, rather than expression, of its most basic principles; that, in fact, modern science developed and flourished under the aegis of the Christian vision of reality; and so on. More provocatively, however, Hart argues that the most foreboding lessons to be learned from the history of Christian Europe are to be found in those instances wherein the proclivities attending human being's employment of "unfettered" reason, realized most especially in "secular power" and the "nation-state," managed to become sufficiently free of the ethical restraints provided by Christianity to pursue their own ends, and this not only with regard to the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, but, with regard also to less obvious examples, such as the persecution of witches in the early modern period.
The section ends, however, with an interrogation of modernity's understanding of the relationship between faith and reason, and Hart is especially concerned to demonstrate that modernity's acceptance of a reductive materialism ought not be regarded as owing anything more to the former than the latter.
Above all, I am anxious to grant no credence whatsoever to the special mythology of "the Enlightenment." Nothing strikes me as more tiresomely vapid than the notion that there is some sort of inherent opposition...between faith and reason, or that the modern period is marked by its unique devotion to the latter. One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both.... All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one's first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit.... What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments (some of which—"blood and soil," the "master race," the "socialist Utopia"—produce prodigies of evil precisely to the degree that they are "rationally" pursued). (101)
Hart identifies the third and longest movement of his argument, "Revolution: The Christian Invention of the Human," as the "heart" of the book. The section offers a series of reflections on the social transformations attending Christianity's rise in the Roman Empire of the first five centuries, and while Hart's meditations have a tendency to wander, a clear narrative emerges in the end. This narrative can be summarized according to two claims: first, that the Christian Gospel effected a complete inversion of the moral ethos of Greco-Roman culture; and, second, that this ethical awakening was the consequence of the new vision of reality intimated by the Christ-event.
The first of these claims is clearly the more important for the argument of the book. Today we take for granted the absolute value of every human life and the equality of all human beings. Hart wishes to point out, however, that such moral sentiments as these are historical contingencies, that they can in no way be regarded as an inevitable issue of "human progress," and that they would certainly not have become the common property of Western civilization had Christianity not slowly, relentlessly, and "insidiously" overturned their preceding moral sentiments in the first place. Hart believes that Nietzsche was correct to see Christianity as implying a "transvaluation of all values," and he constantly points to the indignant reactions towards the proto-egalitarian social vision implied by the Gospel from the likes of Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian "the apostate" to buttress his argument.
If we find ourselves occasionally shocked by how casually ancient men and women destroyed or ignored lives we would think ineffably precious, we would do well to reflect that theirs was—in purely pragmatic terms—a more "natural" disposition toward reality. It required an extraordinary moment of awakening in a few privileged souls, and then centuries of the relentless and total immersion of culture in the Christian story, to make even the best of us conscious of...the moral claim of all other persons upon us.... In light of Christianity's absolute law of charity, we came to see what formerly we could not: the autistic or Down syndrome or otherwise disabled child..., the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. To reject, turn away from, or kill any or all of them would be, in a very real sense, the most purely practical of impulses. To be able, however, to see in them not only something of worth but indeed something potentially godlike, to be cherished and adored, is the rarest and most ennoblingly unrealistic capacity ever bred within human souls. (213ff.)
Hart's second claim is that this novel conception of human being is inextricably linked to the (equally novel) conception of reality which attends the Christian story, i.e., the metaphysical implications of the Gospel. According to Hart, both the philosophies and religions of pagan antiquity were never able wholly to rise above a basic pessimism—a vision of the cosmos as overwhelmed by occult forces and of humankind as quite bound by fate. The Christ-event, however, intimated a new metaphysics, and the development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine in the first five centuries of the Church consisted of its clarification and articulation. God is now understood not as a static and unitary locus of the sort of perfection which entails cosmic detachment; rather, God's being is defined by a dynamic, ecstatic, inter-personal communion. For this reason, the physical cosmos can be recognized as something good, an authentic expression of divine beauty and goodness whose creation is essentially congruent with the superabundant joy and fecundity that is eternally realized within the divine life. Because divine transcendence is thus seen to coincide with, rather than oppose, divine immanence, the radical and immediate presence of God to all of created reality can be affirmed without hesitation. In consequence, the otherworldly love manifested in the Incarnation, life, and crucifixion of the Son of God can be recognized as having its antecedent within the divine life itself, and the joy of the resurrection, for its part, unreservedly declares that the telos of all human life (and that of the cosmos as well) is nothing less than deification, i.e., joyful participation in the Trinitarian life of God. In short, according to the Gospel, both God and human being have been paradoxically yet definitively revealed to human being in the single face of Jesus of Nazareth, and the moral triumphs that Christianity has imparted to Western civilization arose quite naturally from its attempt to discern the contour and content of this visage.
The next and final section of the book, "Reaction and Retreat: Modernity and the Eclipse of the Human," questions whether Western civilization will be able to retain the uniquely humane moral sensibilities inspired by the Gospel while rejecting its broader vision of reality, for, "what it is for us to be human—what, that is, our aesthetic and moral imaginations are capable of—is determined by the encompassing narrative of reality we inhabit" (239). And, if "freedom of the will is our supreme value" then "it is for all intents and purposes our god. And certain kinds of god (as our pagan forebears understood) expect to be fed" (227). To be clear, Hart does not claim that brutality and decadent vapidity are the ineluctable cultural consequents of a post-Christian humanity. Citing, however, certain evidences from the 19th and 20th centuries—such as the cultural stagnation of post-Christian Europe, the martial atrocities of explicitly secular governments, and certain of the inhumane, reductively utilitarian medical practices and scientific experiments of which the program of "the progress of the race" has availed itself—he wishes to remind us that these are very real possibilities.
The book ends with a rather bleak assessment of Christianity's viability in the wake of Christendom's collapse. On the one hand, the Church finds itself in a situation somewhat analogous to that of the neo-pagan emperor Julian in the Fourth Century, and Hart is as uncertain that it will prove equal to the challenge it has been confronted with as was Nietzsche that "the last men" would attain to any sort of greatness in light of the spiritual and moral vacuum that inevitably opens upon the "twilight of the gods." On the other hand, however, Hart believes that "should certainly be no cause of despair for Christians" since "they must believe their faith to be not only a cultural logic but a cosmic truth, which can never finally be defeated", and he points to the monastic movement of the post-Nicaean church, with its "rebellion against its own success" and "repudiation of any value born from the fallen world that might displace love from the center of Christian faith" (241), as a possible source of inspiration for the future of Christianity.
In general, I think it safe to say that Hart's Atheist Delusions proves itself to be a worthwhile read. The writing style is clear and entertaining and the argument speaks intelligently and directly to our cultural moment. And, as a student of historical and systematic theology, I appreciated three aspects of his argument in particular: his refutation of the caricature of Christian history that has become prevalent in contemporary intellectual and popular culture; his terse yet competent articulation of the Christian vision of reality and the positively novel ambitions of the morality it inspired; and, his episodic yet substantive criticisms of a widespread philosophical materialism that is perhaps more sure of itself than either its premises, or human experience, would allow. What I found most valuable, however, was a basic insight that runs throughout the book, and which we would do well to take notice of, viz., the radical degree to which a society's ethical, cultural, and philosophical vision is historically contingent—that is, not only malleable, but fragile as well.
That said, my reaction to Hart's book was not wholly positive, and I mention especially in this regard his rather reductive treatment of "modernity." To be sure, I share many of his reservations regarding the philosophical underpinnings that have come to characterize the intellectual culture of modernity, and I for one do not believe his trepidations concerning the possibilities open to a civilization that erects itself upon its (modernity's) premises to be wholly exaggerated. Even so, I think it would be wrong to reduce the intellectual aspirations of modernity to some wholly unrestrained (and therefore nihilistic) conception of freedom. For, perhaps more than anything else, what characterizes modernity is a certain epistemic crisis—a crisis that was in some ways foreshadowed by the Protestant Reformation even before it occasioned Descartes' attempt to erect an assured philosophical program upon the foundation of the cogito, and which can therefore be regarded as proper to the possibilities and limitations of the Christian Faith itself.
At issue here is the very nature of faith, and on this point I believe that the critics of religion have a point that warrants consideration. On the one hand, there is surely something to be said for the patristic and mediaeval notion that faith has the ability to perfect our rational capacities, and to allow one to attain to a degree of existential harmony that surely would be lacking were its practice to be discarded. Perhaps it is because I am a person of faith, and have witnessed its (really, quite remarkable) effects in my own life and the lives of so many people I personally know, that I will forever be incapable of viewing the religious tendencies of human being as inherently noxious. And, here, I am speaking not simply of faith's ability to nourish hope, but also of its tendency to deepen and refashion our most basic insights and intuitions, to render the totality of our variegated experience of reality somehow congruent therewith, and, in consequence, to allow one's life to attain to a sort of wonderful coherence and integrity.
That said, it is also characteristic of faith that it sometimes demands obstinacy when confronted with doubt. In this regard, two instances in illustration suffice: first, the momentous shift that occurred in Roman Catholicism's stance toward modernity between Pope Pius X's Pascendi dominici gregis and the Second Vatican Council; and, second, the volatile tension that accompanies the Anglican Communion as it now confronts the issue of homosexuality. The first of these examples would seem to indicate that, at times, faith recognizes the need at least partially to capitulate to that which it had previously resisted, and the second vividly demonstrates the manner in which such a transition can prove tumultuous. Yet, this would perhaps occasion no surprise for us were we to recognize that modernity—whatever its shortcomings—has provided the gift of epistemic circumspection not only to the West in general, but to Christian theology in particular. We can no longer, for example, simply accept the exhortations against homosexuality that appear in the first chapter of Romans without considering also that feeling of dehumanizing, shamed rejection that accompanies someone who has been stigmatized by society for no other reason than that it is quite incapable of comprehending his or her sexual orientation. We can no longer take at face value the apparent view of women espoused in certain of the epistles of St. Paul (e.g., 1 Cor. 11:6-10). And, finally, even the most orthodox of Christian theologians no longer feels the threat of being charged with formal heterodoxy for entertaining (as does Hart) the notion, e.g., that the "Gospel of John is a composite text, admittedly, probably incorporating earlier Gnostic or semi-Gnostic texts within itself, and so it is difficult to pronounce upon it as a whole" (137)—a claim that is as obvious or innocuous to contemporary biblical scholarship as it would have been scandalous to pre-modern theology.
I would suggest that we can no longer do these things not simply because modernity has left us with a wildly unrestrained notion of freedom, nor still because the workings of the Christian tradition upon the recalcitrant fabric of human history inevitably occasions it. Rather, it seems to me quite obviously the case that modernity has awakened in Western civilization a moral and intellectual consciousness that would not have arisen had it (modernity) not dared to posit a universally significant question mark at the foundations of human knowledge in general and of faith in particular. At least in the Christian tradition, it has been characteristic of faith to point to a line drawn in the sand, and to tell us that our eternal salvation is radically dependent upon which side of it we happen to align ourselves; modernity, however, has more than a few times forced Christian theology to reconsider not only its capacity to discern the contour of that line, but the integrity of the ground upon which it has been drawn as well. Thus, while I agree with Hart that the premises of modernity warrant rigorous interrogation and that its most basic aspirations can quite often find unexpected satisfaction by recourse to the offerings of faith, I believe he would do well to give modernity its due, and, rather than simply dismiss it, to engage it at precisely that level wherein its intellectual challenge to Christianity has perennially validated itself—the question of certainty.
[The Montana Professor 20.1, Fall 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]