4 posts tagged “david bentley hart”

It's amazing how big the world can still be. Becoming Orthodox has opened me to a near-inexhaustible library of astounding and propounding -- and indeed holy -- literature, both ancient and contemporary (seeing as how the contemporary is also ancient, given its infinite source), as well as in book and blog form. A great example would be Fr. John Tobias' review of David Bentley Hart's new book, Atheist Delusions, a book I have been so eager to read that I'm contemplating pushing back my next summer reading book back a slot. Few, if any, match Hart's eloquence in writing and wit, but Fr. Tobias doesn't leave his readers wanting.

Consider the following passage, in which Fr. Tobias clarifies Hart's thesis, for anyone who may have thought Atheist Delusions could or should be boiled down to "a sure bet in a back alley cockfight with the "new atheists." 

His proposition was that the Christian Church brought about a profound revolution, whose effects permeated the world of human society. It established what is facilely known as "Christendom" (West and East): everyone knows that, but Hart proves that what we like to think of as "the West" is fundamentally this very Christendom – despite the current and odious attempt to establish a secular singular Europe. All the liberal things we are justly proud of are in fact Christian inventions; to name just a few: things like hospitals, effective medicine, justice for the powerless, "healthcare and welfare," the prohibition of gladiatorial combat, the eradication of slavery, the full involvement of women in religion (suggesting that the male priesthood contradicts the full participation of women in Orthodoxy is as lamentable as supposing that female motherhood diminishes the participation of males in parenthood, or that female wifehood prohibits the full range of male sexuality).

That last point sounds abrupt in a bozart age when "full participation" has been jingo-ized into hieretical affirmative action. But Christianity was the first to involve all adherents – rich or poor, slave or free, men or women, Greek, Roman and Jew – cramming them all into one single Liturgy and Sacrament, the same font and cup, the same nave. The question of "why can't I be the celebrant?" was never related to St. Paul's "in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free."

The Christian Revolution went deeper than political enfranchisement, thank God. And thus, all the conservative things, too, that we cherish are at least fulfilled in Christianity, if not inaugurated at the Cross and Pentecost. Truth and the infinite, the beautiful and the good were wrested out of the heave-ho tides of cultural philosophies and political cults. They were solidified, even "realized" (if one wants to sound hackneyed) in the Holy Tradition catapulted by the Third Person and the Apostles. 

He has a good deal more to say on that subject and others, touching on even the recent (and suddenly receded) wave of hero worship around our new president. I found this part particularly enjoyable and insightful:

I am glad this book came along when it did, because I was down in the dumps about history and all that – contemporary history, that is, like right now. I wasn't so sad about Obama winning, nor was I very glad. I saw the hoopla all last year, and what brought me by the lee was not that the country is turning socialist (which it's not), or that the masses adulating Obama were like the despotic pep rallies of the Thirties (which they are not). Obama's rallies were more like revival meetings (very familiar to me) and nothing at all like an Amway or Falangista gathering, or any other such synaxis of troglodytes.

But Obama's revival meetings, like all revival meetings, are bound to grow cold and clammy at the press of real tomorrow. Time itself proves too great a challenge for all Protestant endeavors, especially including the fervent myths choreographed by the Democratic Party.

That is not the cause of my diffuse woe. There is nothing new about Democratic disillusionment (for therapy, they should read about Claudius' disillusionment with the Senate). I grieve, rather, for the ongoing illusionment of the Republicans and all who are "right." The divide between authentic conversativism – the sort envisioned by Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot and the Inklings, Richard Weaver and the Agrarians – and the current dreck of right-wing, neo-cheney-con, evangelo-babbulo palinitism is getting more like the gulf between Lazarus and rich man … that is, after the tables were turned. I grieve that Chesterton and Belloc would be certainly damned as socialists and communists by His Cigarness, the Grand Poobah, and His Minister of Michael Scott Impersonation, Dreck of Fox. Already, "distributism" is thrown here and there as a curseword. I would worry for GK and Hillaire more were it not for the sorry fact that they are not read, if they are known at all.

The whole piece, while admittedly I don't quite grasp it all, is quite intriguing, and makes me only more eager to read Hart's book. Can The Brothers Karamozov really stand to be pushed back?

Today at the sojourn service, the sermon spoke to me somehow better and clearer than ever. I generally have had trouble following or drawing much from the teaching there, but this morning was different. Here are some notes I made, and thoughts I had while making them:

Romans 6:15-23
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

 I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We cannot "simply" believe. I've struggled with this lately -- seeing my faith produce works. While we are saved by God's grace alone, to live the same as we did under law demonstrates nothing of the faith that grace bore. "Even the demons believe...and shudder"

Freedom in grace is freedom to follow and serve the Father -- the new creation in us seeks above all the pleasure of its Creator.

Of course, we are inclined (especially today) to think of freedom wholly in terms of arbitrary or pathetic volition, a potency made actual every time one chooses a particular course of action out from a variety of other possibilities. And obviously, for finite intellects and wills, this is the minimal form that liberty must assume; but it is also, just as obviously, a form of subordination and confinement. All possible choices are external to the will that chooses; they shape it from without, defining it even before it has chosen. Moreover, these possibilities are exclusive of one another: one makes a possible course of action real by rendering other courses of action impossible. And, as we all know, one can choose foolishly, or maliciously, or with a divided will. Freedom, so understood, would consist in no more than a certain kind of largely vacuous and limited potentiality dependent upon other limited and limiting potentialities.
A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness. The will that chooses poorly, then -- through ignorance, maleficence, or corrupt desire -- has not thereby become freer, but has further enslaved itself to those forces that prevent it from achieving its full expression. And it is this richer understanding of human freedom that provides us some analogy to the freedom of God. For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary "choice" -- as among possibilities that somehow exceed his "present" actuality -- would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature or hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures. To be "capable" of evil -- to be able to do evil or to be affected by an encounter with it -- would in fact be an incapacity in God; and to require evil to bring about his good ends would make him less than the God he is. The object of God's will in his own infinite goodness, and it is an object perfectly realized, and so he is free. (David B. Hart, from The Doors of the Sea)

As fledglings in the divine nature, imputed in us by the law of God's grace, we no longer are mastered by the law of sin. We are no longer leashed by pride, the measure of our own glory, the limitations of our intellect and our physiology, the permeation of ennui, and the lust to dominate. We are no longer bound by that which has held us fast in sludge and mire, in listlessness, and has darkened our minds by the illusion of our own grandeur. Instead, we are freed to exult in One who is greater in every measure, who relieves us of aspirations which had hitherto been whetted upon our own dull luster, and could be gaged only by the reach of our libidos. Now we are freed to acknowledge the Other, God in Christ, whose glory is all and in all.

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. Colossians 2:13-15

    "The natural world overwhelms us with its splendor, its beauty, its immensities and fragilities, its incalculable diversity, its endless combinations of the colossal and the delicate, sweetness and glory, minute intricacies and immeasurable grandeurs. It is easy, and among the most spontaneous movements of flowered meadows, the emerald light of the deep forest, the soft, immaculate blue of distant mountains, the shining volubility of the sunlit sea, the pale, cold glitter of the stars. This is a perfectly wise and even holy impulse.
    "But, at the same time, all the splendid loveliness of the natural world is everywhere attended -- and, indeed, preserved -- by death. All life feeds on life, each creature must yield its place in time to another, and at the heart of nature is a perpetual struggle to survive and increase at the expense of other beings. It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creative and devouring all things with a terrible and impassive majesty. Nature squanders us with such magnificent prodigality that it is hard not to think that something enduringly hideous and abysmal must abide in the depths of life. Considered 'from below,' from within the system of nature, the force that drives and animates and shapes the whole of the organic world seems to achieve an almost perfectly transparent epitome of itself in those lavishly floriferous but parasitic vines that -- urges always upward by a blind, thrusting, idiotic heliotropism -- climb toward the light of the sun by constantly struggling out of the shadows in their thirst for the light, extending one tenuous tendril after another toward the sun to swell and slowly suffocate the boughs they entwine, until they burgeon forth at the last in such gorgeous and copious flowers that one might forget what had to perish to make such a triumph of beauty possible."
   
From The Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart

Taken from The Doors of the Sea by David Bentley Hart

III.
We are inclined (especially today) to think of freedom wholly in terms of arbitrary or pathetic volition, a potency made actual every time one chooses a particular course of action out from a variety of other possibilities. And obviously, for finite intellects and wills, this is the minimal form that liberty must assume; but it is also, just as obviously, a form of subordination and confinement. All possible choices are external to the will that chooses; they shape it from without, defining it even before it has chosen. Moreover, these possibilities are exclusive of one another: one makes a possible course of action real by rendering other courses of action impossible. And, as we all know, one can choose foolishly, or maliciously, or with a divided will. Freedom, so understood, would consist in no more than a certain kind of largely vacuous and limited potentiality dependent upon other limited and limiting potentialities.
A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness. The will that chooses poorly, then -- through ignorance, maleficence, or corrupt desire -- has not thereby become freer, but has further enslaved itself to those forces that prevent it from achieving its full expression. And it is this richer understanding of human freedom that provides us some analogy to the freedom of God. For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary "choice" -- as among possibilities that some how exceed his "present actuality -- would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is th impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature or hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures. To be "capable" of evil -- to be able to do evil or to be affected by an encounter with it -- would in fact be an incapacity in God; and to require evil to bring about his good ends would make him less the God he is. The object of God's will is his own infinite goodness, and it is an object perfectly realized, and so he is free.
This is a claim not only doctrinal but blatantly metaphysical, but this is no cause for tentativeness. Not only are the speculative concerns of developed Christian philosophy already substantially present in the Hellenistic metaphysical motifs and assumptions that permeate the New Testament (deny these though some might), but classical Christian metaphysics, as elaborated from the patristic through the high medieval periods, is a logically necessary consequence of the gospel. both insofar as it unfolds the inevitable ontological implications of of Christian doctrines concerning the Trinity and creation ex nihilo; and insofar also as Christianity's evangelical vocation requires believers to be able to articulate the inherent rationality of their faith. And high among Christian tradition's most venerable and most indispensable metaphysical commitments is the definition of evil as a steresis agathou or privatio boni, a privation of the good, a purely parasitic corruption of created reality, possessing no essence or nature of its own. "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5); and as he is the source of all things, the fountainhead of being, everything that exists partakes of his goodness and is therefore, in its essence, entirely good.
Evil is born of the will; it consists not in some other separate thing standing alongside the things of creation, but is only a shadow, a turning of the hearts and minds of rational creatures away from the light of God back toward the nothingness from which all things are called. This is not to say that evil is then somehow illusory; it is only to say that evil, rather than being a discrete substance, is instead a kind of ontological wasting disease. Born of nothingness, seated in the rational will that unites material and spiritual creation, it breeds a contagion of nothingness throughout the created order. Death works its ruin in all things, all minds are darkened, all desires are invaded by selfishness, weakness, rapacity, and the libido dominadi -- the lust to dominate -- and thus tend away from the beauty of God indwelling his creatures and toward the deformity of nonbeing. To say otherwise would involve either denying God's transcendence (by suggesting he is not the source of all being) or denying his goodness (by suggesting that good and evil alike participate in the being that flows from him, and that his nature must therefore be beyond the distinction between them).
Hence evil can have no proper role to play in God's determination of himself or purpose for his creatures, even if by economy God can bring good from evil; it can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God's or creation's goodness; it has no "contribution" to make. Being infinitely sufficient in himself, God has no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest his glory and his creatures, or to join them perfectly to himself, or to elevate their minds to the highest possible vision of the riches of his nature. This is why it is misleading even to say ... that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. There is a precedent for such a view in Catholic tradition, admittedly -- even Aquinas seems perhaps to grant that it might be so -- but the idea is incoherent. It would entail the conclusion either that there are certain ends that God can accomplish in his creatures only by way of evil (which grants evil substance and makes God its cause) or that God chooses to reward transgression with greater blessing as a demonstration of his sovereignty (which means that he is unjust or that his righteousness is divided against itself or that his original prohibition of sin was a kind of lie; and perhaps also means that evil is something real that he confronts and to which he reacts like a finite subject). No less metaphysically confused -- though immeasurably more disconcerting -- is the suggestion ... that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes, which is false for much the same reasons. (And, surely, one should really say that it is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God's true nature.)
Intimately associated with the doctrine of the privatio boni is the equally necessary doctrine of divine apatheia or impassibility, the teaching that God is, in his nature, impervious to any external force of change -- any pathos or affect -- and is free of all reactive or changing emotions. This teaching has never, it must be stressed, denied the full reality of Christ's suffering on the cross: inasmuch there is but one Person or hypostasis in Christ, God the Word has experienced pain and death in their fullest depth. The teaching merely affirms two logically necessary truths. First, that susceptibility to suffering (which is a limitation, not a capacity) is a natural property of Christ's humanity, not his divinity, which fact does not in any fashion endanger the unity of Christ (since it is not one's "nature" that is the subject of any experience, but one's person, and so logically it is indeed the divine Word who suffered). And, second, that the experience of the cross does not alter or "improve" or "add" to the infinite God: he did not need to learn to love us, and suffering and death are privations of reality, not "new realities" of which God needs to be "apprised."
Some theologians ... have wished at times to reject apatheia as an alien import from Greek metaphysics. But it is not, I would assert, a negotiable doctrine: the very rationality of the gospel requires it. This is not to ignore the anxiety that the word "impassibility" can occasion; for some, it seems to suggest a God who is "unfeeling" (in the colloquial sense) and therefore "uncaring." And obviously it is difficult for us to avoid imagining God in terms of finite psychological subjectivity, and so thinking of him as someone who "experiences" a reality set over against him, and therefore knows things by way of contrasts and limits. When we allow this habit of thought to become something like an intellectual conviction, however, we become guilty of both an infantile anthropomorphism and a philosophical catachresis. This is especially true when we think of God as requiring "passions" to love us, as loving us "responsively," as indeed "needing" us. No doubt such language gives us a sense of our own significance, and certainly it accords with our own experiences of love; but it also effectively denies the transcendence of God and the plenitude of his charity. In fact, it dissembles the very nature of love; for love is not -- in its inmost essence -- a reaction. In God, who is its transcendent origin and end, it is the one infinite and changeless act of being that meas all else actual, and is purely positive, sufficient in itself, and without any need of contrariety to be fully vital and creative. As Trinity, god always already possesses the fullness of charity in himself -- difference and regard, feasting and fellowship, perfect delight and perfect rest -- and has no need of any external  pathos to waken or fecundate his love. We are not necessary to him: he is not nourished by our sacrifices or ennobled by our virtues, any more than he is diminished by our sins and sufferings. This is a truth that may not aggrandize us, but it does, more wonderfully, glorify us: for it means that, though he had no need of us, still he loved us when we were not [lovable]. And this is why love, in its divine depth, is apatheia.
The failure to embrace the idea of divine impassibility becomes especially disastrous for Christians when it causes them to think of the crucifixion as an event in the genesis of God's personality, a trial through which he passed as our fellow sufferer so that he could achieve in himself the perfection of self-abandoning love.  At its most vulgar, this way of thinking implies that God took our suffering into himself as something that changed or enlarged his knowledge of us, and it implies also that on the cross he had to learn the extent of our suffering: now, perhaps, he understands what we must endure. This is simply nonsense. It is a logical absurdity simultaneously to assert that God is the source of all that is and that God can "become" something more or other than he previously was. To suggest that God becomes the God he is by suffering passions, according to encounters with other tragic realities (even if he creates those realities), is to trade in mythology, to preach a finite God, one who is no doubt a "supreme being" but not the source of all being. And if God's love were in any sense shaped by sin, suffering, and death, then sin, suffering, and death would always be in some sense features of who he is. This not only means that evil would be a distinct reality over against God, and God's love something inherently deficient and reactive; it also means that evil would be somehow a part of God, and that goodness would require evil to be good. Such a God could not be love, even if in some sense he should prove to be "loving." Nor would he be the [source of] good as such, nor being as such. He, like us, would be a synthesis of death and life.