Being, Consciousness, Bliss [Review]

Astonishingly, given the somewhat deceptive (or perhaps inept) marketing of the book, this was David Bentley Hart's best book to date, which is saying something monumental. What neither the title, nor the jacket cover, nor even the blurb reviews reveal is that the book is primarily a relentless, blistering attack on the superstitions and credulous fideisms of materialism. Over and against this decrepit and impoverished philosophy of reality, and in response to its inept attempts to demystify the world, Hart turns to the common deposit of theistic metaphysical tradition for the arresting and compelling antidote. 

In the mystery of being, in the mystery of consciousness, and in the manner that they blissfully coinhere as a surfeit of physical reality, the Supernatural, the Absolute, the Good, Beauty -- in a word -- God is immediately present to us in every moment. Yet we dull and numb ourselves to this reality in innumerable ways, but especially through the barbarisms of the 'mechanical philosophy' that we have inherited from 'the Enlightenment'. 

As for the attempts of naturalism to sweep away such an obvious reality, Hart is insistent all such attempts are pitifully incoherent and suffer massive -- almost certainly insuperable -- explanatory deficiencies. While the traditional metaphysical arguments for God -- arguing from contingency to a necessary and absolute ground of being, for example -- are comparatively sublime with scarcely any of the objections lodged against them being worth serious consideration.

According to Hart, most materialistic attempts to deal with the question of being either try to dismiss the central question -- namely "why is there something rather than nothing?" -- as a fallacy of grammar or as ultimately unintelligible (it clearly is not), or to posit that the sum total of contingent, physical reality might somehow (magically and irrationally) add up to the source of its own being, and not itself be contingent. And that's when they're not being really sloppy, confusing cosmology for metaphysics and making simplistic category errors such as mistaking a quantum vaccuum for 'nothing.'

Similarly impotent are the physicalist accounts of consciousness, which Hart sees as an undeniably immaterial datum, and the most primordial one of them all, present to each of us in every moment and upon which all other realities that we perceive are dependent. Hart claims there is an infinite qualitative abyss between the neurochemical events which consciousness is dependent upon and consciousness as experienced, such that no number of purely quantitative mechanical steps could ever give rise to this peculiar and fortuitous subjective interiority, which each of us owes all our knowledge, experience, and awareness to. Hart writes:

Most attempts to provide an answer [to the question of consciousness] without straying beyond the boundaries of materialist orthodoxy are ultimately little more than vague appeals to the power of cumulative complexity: somehow, the argument goes, a sufficient number of neurological systems and subsystems operating in connection with one another will at some point naturally produce unified, self-reflective, and intentional consciousness, or at least (as strange as this may sound) the illusion of such consciousness. This is probably just another version of the pleonastic fallacy, another hopeless attempt to overcome a qualitative difference by way of an indeterminably large number of gradual quantitative steps. Even if it is not, it remains a supposition almost cruelly resistant to scientific investigation or demonstration, simply because consciousness as an actual phenomenon is entirely confined to the experience of a particular mind, a particular subject.

With this being the case, materialist accounts of consciousness reek of magical thinking. Even if we grant that one day neurobiology will exhaustively map every aspect of the brain, science will have not come a step closer to puncturing through the veil and entering into the content and interiority of the purely subjective conscious mind. One can only deny that such an immaterial, or supernatural, reality exists -- if one can at all -- by sacrificing reason itself on the alter of materialism in a self-immolating act. A high price to pay, indeed, if one is to prize 'reason' and 'empiricism' above all else, as so many scientistic materialists putatively do. 

Just as impossible to account for on materialistic terms is the innate human longing for the Good and the concomitant abhorrence of evil, which materialists must deny as being in any sense 'real' in favor of them being illusions in a deterministic universe (though few of them seem willing to fully come to terms with this logical inevitability). If you can't but do what you are bound by the laws of physics to do -- as you are no more than matter in motion -- no materialistic morality can ever amount to anything more than nonsense. As Hart puts it:

A naturalist morality is a manifest absurdity, something rather on the order of a square circle, and it requires almost heroic contortions of logic to make the notion seem credible. Fortunately, the human will to believe is indefatigable.

Attempts to ground morality in evolutionary incentives (once materialism has cleared the hurdle of being and consciousness, which it necessarily can not do) are ultimately tragically resistant to empirical verification, and must always remain just-so fables. This doesn't mean that it's completely false that certain evolutionarily advantageous 'moral' traits are preserved and passed along via natural selection acting on genetic material, but this hardly is an account of the actual nature of human morality as it exists. From a materialist perspective what would be called 'moral' can't be other than that which is evolutionarily advantageous, and our genetic so-called 'self-interest' (wherever it comes from, and whatever it is exactly), is tied to the interest of, for example, our tribe. Hence a degree of selflessness and cooperation (at least within the tribe, though usually not between tribes) is more likely to ensure the passing on of our genetic material. This hardly explains the origin of the moral impulse, however, rather only its transmission within the species. And even then, only to an incomplete degree, when we consider the many ways that the moral impulse far exceeds, and often contradicts, the dictates of evolutionary incentives. The evolutionary explanations of this phenomenon are quite clearly ludicrous attempts to force the data into a conceptual scheme which has no room for it. 

Central to Hart's argument is the claim that most of the contemporary debates surrounding God do not have as their subject the God of traditional theistic metaphysics, but rather some particularly potent cosmic demiurge, or watchmaker god, or an especially large and benevolent gentleman who is perhaps the first of a long series of causes, but not Being as such which gratuitously donates being to beings. Not the God who is utterly transcendent and fully imminent, filling all things, yet beyond all things. Not the fullness of actuality, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. etc. Once such a confusion is eliminated, and the content of the concept of God is understood as it has widely and traditionally understood by the venerable contemplative theistic traditions, most of the contemporary debates melt away into utter irrelevance.

Hart covers a great deal more than I've hinted at here: teleology and intentionality in consciousness as necessary elements of reality, and without which we can't begin to reason; the self-defeating and demonstrably false assertion of scientific empiricism having an exclusive claim to genuine knowledge; qualia as a datum inexplicable by naturalism; the materialist failure to dispel with free will; the manner in which being, consciousness, and bliss interrelate and are not only metaphysical explanations of God, but also phenomenological explanations of the human encounter with God; the absolute poverty of materialistic aesthetic accounts; mystical experience visa vis contemplative prayer and asceticism as the only 'empirical' means for investigating 'the God claim'. Just to name a few. 

Rising above the nature of the current debate on such issues -- both sides of which usually share covertly atheistic presuppositions -- Hart's lucid argumentation, acerbic wit, and stellar prose masterfully combine to produce one of the most stunning, potent, holistic, and engaging arguments for belief in God and against materialism that I've ever read.

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P.S. In one of the blurb reviews advertising the book, Hart was said to have been advocating an 'ecumenical theism'. Happily, that's not exactly accurate. To an Orthodox -- or any religious particularist, really, but especially to Orthodox -- such language can sound like syncrenistic sloppiness, if not heresy. Hart makes clear in the introduction that in attempting to define 'God' as precisely as possible, and in accordance with the overlapping metaphysical wisdom of all the venerable theistic traditions, he isn't advocating a milquetoast relativism or against particularism, and certainly not denying the truth of the full revelation of God in Christ. Rather, he is only attempting to provide clarity to an essentially philosophical debate that is desperately in need of it. He is quick to note that, such philosophical knowledge about God, is not the same as union with God or knowledge of God, in accordance with Orthodox teaching.

Christ and Nihil

"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - Matt. 6:24

"Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God." - James 4:4

"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou were cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth." - Rev. 3:15-16

When it comes to God and his Kingdom, there is no halfway allegiance. There is allegiance and defiance; fidelity and apostasy; communion and exile. The verses above are just a small sampling of a consistent theme that runs throughout the New Testament: the Incarnation of the Word of God inaugurates the Kingdom of God on Earth, and this Kingdom stands victorious over and against the kingdom of the "god of this world" (2 Cor. 4:4), i.e. Satan.

Because God alone -- and participation in His life, the life of the Holy Trinity -- constitutes true being, rejection of this life in favor of kingdom of this world that is passing away, constitutes a turning inward to the Self and self-will, and therefore toward nothingness and non-being. Toward the nihil.

In his short text Nihilism -- which was to be but one chapter in his unfinished magnum opus THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE KINGDOM OF MAN -- Fr. Seraphim Rose seizes on this fundamental truth and uses it as a matrix for analyzing the condition of the modern world. If rejection of Christ is ultimately a single phenomena, then that phenomena lies behind, underneath, and within every species of unbelief and idolatry. There should be a discernible continuity that unites all who stand opposed to God, whether they know it or not and despite any apparent differences.

If this is true, then the same force that gives life to Liberalism, Humanism, Scientism, Realism, New-Age spiritualisms, and compromised and worldly Christianities is the same force that gave us Nazism and Bolshevism. The differences between these various phenomena must be a quantitative rather than qualitative one; a difference of degree rather than of kind. And Fr. Serpahim traces the contours of this modern dialectic with acute precision.

While Fr. Seraphim keenly analyzes the specific instances of the various manifestations of nihilism in the modern world -- in areas of philosophy, politics, religion, and art -- the basic argument is echoed with characteristic verve and brilliance by David Bentley Hart in his magnificent essay Christ and Nothing, which concludes this way:

But we Christians — while not ignoring how appalling such a condition is — should yet rejoice that modernity offers no religious comforts to those who would seek them. In this time of waiting, in this age marked only by the absence of faith in Christ, it is well that the modern soul should lack repose, piety, peace, or nobility, and should find the world outside the Church barren of spiritual rapture or mystery, and should discover no beautiful or terrible or merciful gods upon which to cast itself. With Christ came judgment into the world, a light of discrimination from which there is neither retreat nor sanctuary. And this means that, as a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve Him whom Christ has revealed or to serve nothing — the nothing. No third way lies open for us now, because — as all of us now know, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not — all things have been made subject to Him, all the thrones and dominions of the high places have been put beneath His feet, until the very end of the world, and — simply said — there is no other god.

Let us then cast ourselves upon the only God Who Is, Christ our true God, and pray that He would have mercy upon us.

Natural Law and Same-sex Marriage

Douglas Wilson and Andrew Sullivan had a debate on gay marriage last night. I assume that video and audio will be coming soon. I disagree with central aspects of Peter Leithart's take on it, even without having seen the debate yet. Primarily I disagree with Leithart's bizarre assertion that "the only arguments [Christians] have are theological ones." What is Marriage by Robert P. George and friends is sufficient on its own to put that notion to bed.

Given a previous and subsequent post, it's clear Leithart has David Bentley Hart's most recent piece -- on the futility of natural law arguments in the public square -- in the front of his mind, here. Which would be fine, except Leithart seems to be taking Hart's perfectly cogent argument and distorting it for strange ends. When two parties share basic metaphysical assumptions (as Wilson and Sullivan do, putatively), Hart's argument is largely inapplicable to that particular situation. Hart never suggests that natural law reasoning can claim no valid purchase between and among fellow Christians, who are committed to certain shared assumptions and principles. His point is about the inability of natural law reasoning to cut across -- and demand fealty from -- those who operate outside those fundamental presuppositions. This in addition to the idea that such arguments -- even if they may be valid in individual circumstances, as here -- when their total force is pitted against certain monstrous cultural currents, they will prove ultimately impotent.

While waiting for the actual debate footage to roll out, I read Douglas Wilson's prepared comments, which seem pretty devastating for Sullivan. Though George and friends are more precise, and though they marshal a wider array of strong arguments, Doug's rhetorical flair serves him well here. Both George and Wilson contend that marriage revisionists (or SSM advocates) are left with no cogent grounds for rejecting polygamy, given their stated case in favor of SSM. That Sullivan believes “monogamy is central to all marriage”, and yet is indignant that others believe the same about sexual complementarity, is stunning hypocrisy and utterly arbitrary. “My arbitrary discrimination against consenting adults who are in love and who want to get 'married' is OK, but yours isn't!” This is Andrew Sullivan. And Wilson teases this hypocrisy out brilliantly.

Polygamy actually has a much more robust track record of being accepted and codified by many societies throughout history, so it's much more difficult to make the case -- from a detached anthropological vantage -- that monogamy is inherent to what marriage is than it is for sexual complementarity. And the Biblical record (taken apart from Holy Tradition, which neither party here has high regard for) is infinitely more amenable to polygamy than it is to homosexual marriage. (Although, with the light of the Church, both are equally out of bounds.)

With that said, this only shows that Andrew Sullivan and most marriage revisionists are inconsistent in their reasoning and application of their principles. This doesn't cut to the heart of the matter, like What is Marriage? does. WIM goes on to deal with the consistent, principled libertarian who says "yes, polygamy is fine too", or "get the state out of marriage altogether" and shows why they're wrong as well. Such is the nature of live debates, I suppose. That is: relatively limited and inadequate. Still, I'm glad the issue is being debated seriously in public forums by personalities of stature.

The Face of God -- Pagan Antiquity and Christianity

Icon of the Resurrection of Our Lord

Over at On Behalf of All, Vincent Martini recently posted on the topic of the resurrection of Christ and the charge by skeptics that this event is a myth that was borrowed and re-imagined from pagan mystery cults. Drawing heavily on N.T. Wright's scholarship in The Resurrection of the Son of God, Vincent points out that the "dying and rising" gods of said cults were gods whose "resurrections" are cyclical  and are linked to the perpetual cycles of life and death within nature. Appeasing these gods or attempting to commune with them had the chief purpose of ensuring a prosperous harvest. As Martini and Wright both point out, this is somewhat a far cry from the resurrection of the Incarnate Son of God, the 2nd person of the Trinity, who conquers death itself and in whom the Kingdom of God is made manifest on the Earth.

Skeptics are quite fond of pointing out the similarities between Christianity and certain mystery cults of antiquity, in order to insinuate that the similarities are (somehow) evidence of Christianity being some sort of fraud or myth. But these similarities are often cherrypicked from a wide range of beliefs and cults, omitting all those which bear no resemblance, and focusing on anything that has even a superficial resemblance. The result is usually a drastic exaggeration of the actual parallels and overlap.

In addition, there is often a historical confusion over which direction the influence is running in. Many ancient religions and cults were influenced by the spread of Christianity, and adopted elements into themselves. Shoddy amateur scholarship that pollutes the internet is prone to see any similarity and falsely infer that the influence necessarily ran in the other direction, since paganism in general preceded Christianity.

With all that said, to the extent that there is some legitimate overlap between certain elements of Christian worship, piety, and devotion and that of certain pagan cults, this is hardly surprising and is no challenge to the truth of Christianity.

In the February 2013 issue of First Things, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart addresses this topic from this angle.[1] Granting that there are more substantial similarities than some Christians usually feel comfortable admitting -- sacramental initiation rites which are supposed to conquer the power of death, for example -- Hart notes that it's a false inference from these facts to the story of Christ being false or somehow stolen from the pagan religions.

There was a brief period in the early heady days of anthropology of religion when James Frazer was still in fashion, during which it was regarded by many as something of a scandal that so many seemingly common elements could be found in both Christianity of the early centuries and many of the pagan devotions of late antiquity. To this day in fact, there are Christians who become terribly anxious at the suggestion that the early Church, in many places, had something of the form of an Asiatic or Hellenistic mystery cult, or that other sects that offered salvation with a savior deity cherished some of the same religious aspirations of Christianity.

Really, though, there is nothing alarming or even surprising in the discovery that the gospel spoke to religious hopes that existed outside its corporate boundaries, or that early Christian devotion should have been expressed in forms not wholly alien to the culture and language of its time.

On the contrary, we confess that Christ came "in the fullness of time" (Gal. 4:4), so it makes sense that his coming into the world would constitute the fulfillment of certain religious longings of the world which was, after all, created through Him. Longing such as as the desire to see the "face of God", as expressed -- among other places -- in Apuleius' The Golden Ass. Hart notes that these religious expectations are both fulfilled and overturned in Christ. The face of God is revealed, but it's revealed in a scandalous form: that of a crucified Jewish peasant.

My main interest in the discussion is to affirm that these two apologetic approaches are compatible, rather than mutually exclusive. Provided that the apologist is careful not to blithely dismiss all similarities while accurately articulating the great, significant divergence that does in fact occur with the advent of Christianity.


[1] - This article is behind a paywall. Hart has a similar piece from 2011 that is available for free here.

The Church as Hermeneutic

Because the matter of ecclesiology -- that is the question of "What/Who is the Church?" -- was the primary catalyst for my conversion to Orthodoxy, and because my chief witness as an Orthodox Christian is likely to be to groups of friends and family who are evangelical Protestants (or lapsed ones), I've been reflecting on the issue some more. Having found what I view to be the answer to the question, the issue of how to share that answer becomes a matter that requires cultivating a loving, charitable disposition through much thought and prayer. This issue becomes especially acute in the midst of the Holiday season.

It also requires a strengthening of my own understanding. This being the case, I recently read the book The Non-Orthodox and the essay The Church is Visible and One, both by Patrick Barnes. Both cite, and extensively quote, various Orthodox sources -- Patristic and contemporary -- as well as some Protestant voices, such as T.F. Torrance. I also recently re-watched the stellar lecture by David Bentley Hart on The Intersection of Scripture and Theology (below), which on one level functions as a crypto-Orthodox apologia for the Patristic view of Scripture. A topic which inevitably ties back into ecclesiology.

One key takeaway from Hart's lecture is that, contra modern sensibilities, historical-critical methods of reading Scripture -- as valuable as they often are -- in no sense supersede or make invalid the ways the Church has traditionally read and understood Scripture. He specifically is talking about how the early Fathers read much of the Old Testament allegorically (which isn't always to say non-literally, as Hart explains). This is a narrower point that opens into the broader idea that because Scripture can be read and interpreted many ways, and often in contradictory and irreconcilable ways, an authority is needed. A Church who is united in matters of Truth needs a mechanism for settling disputes in how Scripture is understood and taught, as well as in many other matters. The mechanism the Apostles established in Acts 15, and passed down to their followers, was the conciliar model of Church authority. The convening of Church councils, within which the Holy Spirit is judging and guiding authoritatively (Acts 15:28).

While it is a popular (and true, so far as it goes) postmodern paradigm that no text has an inherent, self-disclosing meaning, and that every act of reading is already an act of interpretation, this truth -- along with either an explicit or effective belief in sola scriptura -- is too often used to lend purchase to a broad relativism. A hermeneutic buffet from which we all necessarily must partake. From which we must make interpretive choices which are not inherently superior to another hermeneutical lens, provided both are equally internally consistent. In response to a naive belief in a text that is fully self-disclosing of meaning, we have a reactionary belief in a divided -- not merely 'diverse and not divided', as I incorrectly speculated on in the past -- Church, which can and must permit mutually exclusive and contradictory understandings of Scripture, because there is no governing authority to which to turn. The situation yields as many interpretations as there are interpreters. A distant cry from the New Testament promise that the Holy Spirit would lead the Church "into all truth" (John 16:13) [emphasis mine].

And, where there is broad agreement among evangelicals on their (small number) of central non-negotiables, such as a proper Christology and Trinitarianism, this consensus was very much forged in the fires of the early Church's creedal formulas and the subsequent cleaving to them by the historical Church. That is, it's a product not of strict scriptural exegesis alone (though of course the orthodox position is eminently and uniquely scriptural), but of the conciliar authority of the Church.

Given all this, the Church's self-understanding as professed in the Creed isn't much in question. As Protestant scholar T.F. Torrance says:

[F]or Nicene ecclesiology the focus of attention was on the incorporation of believers into the Body of Christ on the ground of reconciliation with God which He had accomplished in and through His bodily death and resurrection. That is to say, it was precisely the visible, empirical Church in space and time that was held to be the Body of Christ.

The 12th article of the Creed ("I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church") was referring to this one, visible, concrete, historical entity.

So while my understanding continues to develop and cohere, and as I endeavor to make my life a living testament to the riches and truths uniquely found in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, the living Body of Christ, the question of how to effectively witness is a sensitive one. Certainly the guiding principle must always to be to speak the truth in love, and to humbly recognize that the Grace bestowed to the Church is meant for all men equally. Something that is much easier to say, and to understand intellectually, than to actually live out. Pride is the quintessential sin, after all.

I suspect my spiritual Father would advise me that the period of one's catechesis isn't chiefly a time to focus on witnessing in any direct way, since I am still very much a humble beginner whose focus should be on my own drawing nearer to God and spiritual development. A process that acts as its own witness and testimony. Something I very much would take to heart, if he were to advise me thus. Though sharing my experience and fielding questions on these issues, especially with the holidays approaching, is unavoidable, as I'm sure Father Josiah would acknowledge. May the author of all truth, our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, grant us wisdom and the contrite heart of a servant with which to share it.

Journey to Orthodoxy (part 4)

The previous post in this series highlighted some areas where foundational shifts of perspective took place as I approached Orthodoxy from an evangelical background. The main ones were: (1) how authority in the church is derived, established and passed down (2) understanding of the sacraments, (3) the way the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity intensely shape the focus and the form of the worship of the Orthodox church, and (4) that worship and communion is what human beings were created for.

These realizations fueled others (and each other), which led to a deeper, more full appreciation of other issues, and then ultimately fed back into the primary, fundamental convictions -- who God is, what and who humanity and the Church are, and how they all relate -- again. I discovered the Orthodox faith to be a rich, intricate, and beautiful tapestry woven from these threads.

Initially I was going to explore this infinite inexhaustibility of Orthodoxy in writing, but as a lot of it is too much for words, or certainly beyond anything that I have to contribute, I have decided to defer some of that for now. Instead I would like to take a brief look at my first concrete experiences with the Orthodox Church.

With my interest in the Orthodox Faith piqued, and undergoing a sort of intellectual transformation, I knew attending Orthodox services was the next step. Many of the Church Fathers stress the centrality of the liturgy as a defining witness of what the Church believes and how she lives. St. John Chrysostom says that the best catechism is faithful, mindful attendance of divine services. Having listened to many episodes of Ancient Faith radio programming, one notices how often Orthodox will answer questions or address issues by saying, "Well, at such-and-such part of the liturgy we pray these words.." or "This hymn is sung during such-and-such a period the liturgical calendar for this reason.." And it is a common aphorism, accepted by the Orthodox Church that "we believe what we pray and we pray what we believe". With all this in mind, I set out to attend divine liturgy at an Orthodox parish.

The first I attended was the closest Orthodox parish to my home, St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in Upland, California. On their website it said that 'Matins' began at 9 AM and liturgy at 10 AM. Not being sure exactly what Matins was, I figured I'd attend both. It was a small, ethnic parish and arriving at 9 AM, there was only the priest, the chanters (two of them) and one member of the laity (though many other parishioners arrived later in the hour). Immediately I realized (I'm a very attentive sort) that the liturgy was almost entirely in some form of Arabic. There were candles, an iconostasis, incense, much crossing of one's self, and other elements of worship foreign to my experience, but the service was beautiful and ancient and I felt strongly compelled to find an Orthodox church with (at least predominantly) English services.

A kind family at St. George recommended St. Andrew Orthodox Church in Riverside, which they said performed services in English. It was a bit of a drive, but I figured it was worth it. St. Andrew's temple (I later learned) is only about a year old, and is a magnificent, beautiful building, built in traditional Byzantine style of architecture.

While I had been among the first to arrive at St. George (and so saw no one else as they entered), this wasn't the case at St. Andrew. As I was entering the narthex of the church (the Western portion which is where the main entrance is), the first thing that struck me were the presence of icons and candles, and parishioners venerating the icons, lighting candles and praying. Looking beyond the narthex into the nave of the Church, there were icons in many places -- on the iconostasis, on the pillars, on the walls, inside the central dome, and on the walls and ceiling of the sanctuary. There seemed to be an open-air area of confession off to the side where parishioners were confessing before the priest. At St. George there was just the one priest and some altar boys, while at St. Andrew there was a priest and many deacons or assistant priests performing the liturgy. There was also full choir that sang hymns and prayers, in concert with the presbyters and deacons. Something else that caught my attention was a relative dearth of chairs and that during most of the service -- practically all of it -- the parishioners stand.

Having my senses overwhelmed in such a manner, with such unfamiliar sites, sounds and smells, it was difficult to process everything that occurred. But the beauty -- and therefore truth -- of it all struck me as unmistakable.

Something I kind of passed over without comment in the previous posts was that in my reading I had, in an intellectual way, come to a greater understanding of beauty and its theological significance. Largely -- but not solely -- due to David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Here was a Church that seemed to take what was -- for me, at the time -- mere ideas and manifest them in a living reality.

But venerating icons? The intercessions of the Saints? Mary, the Theotokos? All of these things -- though I was aware of some of the history behind them -- are not just doctrines that the Orthodox Church affirms, but are actual significant elements of their liturgical worship, and elements that were utterly foreign to me, coming from the background that I had. These were stumbling blocks for myself and -- as many programs on Ancient Faith radio attest to -- for most Protestant converts to Orthodoxy. However, as I had already become somewhat inclined to accept the Orthodox Church as the true New Testament church, persisting throughout history and with us still today, I endeavored to approach these matters with a humble heart and the spirit of a learner, operating on the assumption that there must be much that I did not understand. Part of me instinctively recoiled at some of this, but I was eager to learn more. In the next installment we will look at these matters more closely, from the perspective of the Orthodox Church, and we'll examine the scriptural basis for these doctrines and practices as well as their theological significance.

Theology's Debt to Nietzsche

I intend nothing facetious in saying Nietzsche has bequeathed Christian thought a most beautiful gift, a needed amanesis of itself -- of its strangeness. His critique is a great camera obscura that brings into vivid and concentrated focus the aesthetic scandal of Christianity's origins, the great offense this new faith gave the gods of antiquity, and everything about it pagan wisdom could neither comprehend nor abide: a God who goes about in the dust of exodus for love of a race intransigent in its particularity; who apparels himself in common human nature, in the form of a servant; who brings good news to those who suffer and victory to those who are nothing; who dies like a slave and outcast without resistance; who penetrates to the very depths of hell in pursuit of those he loves; and who persists even after death not as a hero lifted up to Olympian glories, but in the company of peasants, breaking bread with them and offering them the solace of his wounds.

- David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

Indeed. The one thing Christianity can't be -- which its modern detractors often take it to be -- is "old hat"; some slightly modified system of existing morality; a metaphysical or mythological re-run. Just as a matter of historical fact, Christianity is not those things, as Nietzsche understood. It is not in smooth continuity with what came before, but represents a massive upheaval, both in what it preached and in its effect on the world. And being so many centuries removed from the event of Christ in history the scandalous nature of it is difficult to grasp for us moderns, but Nietzsche reached back into the depths of time and was able to captured a glimpse of this notion at a time when it was being forgotten in "post-Christian" Europe.

Of course, Nietzsche understood the scandal of Christ and Christianity and despised them for what they actually were -- a radical evangel of peace amongst a sea of terrible ”majestic” violences -- but this seems preferable to despising Christianity for being something it isn't, as most do. As C.S. Lewis said "Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it."

Oino-theology

This post is an extension of my previous post, picking up where it left off. The very next passage in The Beauty of the Infinite elaborates on the idea that Christianity, properly understood, is not a retreat -- spiritual or physical -- to some far-off world, but is rather a joyful celebration and affirmation of God's good creation, made possible by the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. While Nietzsche sees in the Dionysian the joyful embrace of life -- in all its terrible, majestic power and splendor -- that Christianity rejects, Hart wishes to instead pit Dionysus against The Crucified using a typology of wine, and the riposte is brilliant.

"Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day I drink it new in the Kingdom of God" (Mark 14:25; cf. Matt. 26-29; Luke 22:18)—wine clearly appears here as the perfect and concrete emblem of the beauty of creation and the joy of dwelling at peace in the midst of others: not the wine of Dionysus, which makes fellowship impossible, promising only intoxication, brute absorption into the turba, anonymity, and violence, but the wine of the wedding feast of Cana, or of the wedding feast of the Lamb. The wine of Dionysus is no doubt the coarsest vintage, intended to blind with drunkenness […] the wine repeatedly associated with madness, anthropophagy, slaughter, warfare, and rapine. The wine of Scripture on the other hand, is first and foremost a divine blessing and image of God’s bounty (Gen. 27:28; Dt. 7:13; 11:14; Ps. 104:15; Prov. 3:10; Isa. 25:6; 65:8; Jer. 31:12; Joel 2:19-24; 3:18; Amos 9:13-14; Zech. 9:17) and an appropriate thank offering by which to declare Israel’s love for God (Ex. 29.40; Lev 23:13; Num. 15:5-10; 18:12; 28:14; Deut. 14:23); it is the wine that cheers the hearts of men (Judg. 9:13); the sign of God’s renewed covenant with his people (Is. 55:1-3); the drink of lovers (Song 5.1) and the very symbol of love (7:2, 9), whose absence is the eventide of all joy (Isa. 24:11); it is moreover the wine of Agape and the feast of fellowship, in which Christ first vouchsafed a sign of his divinity, in a place of rejoicing, at Cana—a wine of the highest quality—when the kingdom showed itself “out of season.” Of course Nietszche was a teetotaler and could judge the merit of neither vintage, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that his attempts at oino-theology should betray a somewhat pedestrian palate. (pp. 108-109)*

Just like Hart to punctuate an insightful, eloquent theological discourse with a devastating polemical right hook!  Vintage Hart, if you'll excuse the pun.

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*This is a shortened version of the passage, in order to make it blog-friendly, but if you're so inclined you can read the full version at Google Books.

Christian Otherworldliness

A common critique of Christians and Christianity by secular critics today is that the Christian focus on the significance of another world -- a spiritual world and/or future world, fundamentally 'apart' from this reality -- causes Christians to withdraw from the world; to disdain the world; to -- if not celebrate -- at least downplay the significance of decay, destruction, and death; to defer responsibility and actions in the troubled world around them. The critique finds its most robust, vibrant articulation in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and he isn't entirely wrong. There are certainly some bitter fruits associated with just such a Christian Otherworldliness, to the extent that it exists. The question becomes whether it in fact exists and to what extent, and whether it is a particularly Christian Otherworldliness that is really at issue, or otherworldliness as such which just happens to have a Christian variant.

Re-visiting David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite, this passage stuck out to me, in which Hart addresses the issue, and traces the true genesis of this otherworldliness to pre-Christian sources, which in turn infected elements of Christianity, but which was never proper to its essence.

[H]owever just [Nietzsche's] condemnation of pious otherworldliness  may be -- and the church has seen no end of it -- it is the unambiguous renunciation of gnosticism, and not the paradoxical renunciation of classical Christianity, that would correspond most nearly to his account. Indeed, no one familiar with late antiquity and the world in which the gospel was first preached can be unaware that a prevailing spirit of otherworldliness had long been moving inexorably through the empire: not only gnosticism, but every variety of etherealizing devotion, mystery religions, Eastern esoterica, mystical Platonisms, and the occult; the contempt for the flesh expressed by Valentinus, Ammonias Saccas, Plotinus, the Mithraic mysteries, or even the sanctimoniously ungroomed Emperor Julian was more bitterly world-weary than any of the exorbitant expressions of spirituality to which the church fell prey.

One may agree with Nietzsche that this atmosphere of acosmic and incorporeal religiosity defames the world, and one may acknowledge that it infected every institution and spiritual aspiration of its age, including those of the church; but one should also recognize it as first and foremost a pagan phenomenon. [...] Christianity suffered from this contagion in some considerable measure. [...] But it was also into this crepuscular world of transcendental longings, of a pagan order grown weary of the burden of itself, that the Christian faith came as an evangel promising newness of life, and that in all abundance, preaching creation, divine incarnation, resurrection of the flesh, and the ultimate restoration of heavens and earth; a faith, moreover, whose symbols were not occult sigils, or bull's blood, or the brackish water and coarse fare of the ascetic age, but the cardinal signs of fellowship, feasting, and joy: bread and wine.

[...]

And surely there is something almost tediously wrong in asserting Christ's crucifixion has ever figured in Christian tradition as a repudiation, rather than ultimately an affirmation, of the fleshly life Christ was forced to relinquish (pp. 106-107)

The Christian faith, uniquely, provides the resources for "renarrating the cosmos from the ground up", and affirming the goodness of creation -- in all of its glorious materiality -- while also providing a metaphysical account of evil. Hart continues:

The orthodox doctrine of creation out of nothingness, and its attendant doctrine of the goodness of creation, led the church (more radically than even Neoplatonism) to deny evil any ascription of true being, to define it not as an essence or positive force but as mere negation, reaction, a privation of the good, a perversity of the will, an appetite for nonbeing -- but no thing among things: all things had to be affirmed, with an equal emphasis, as God's good creation. (pp. 106-107)

One take-away from all this, on a meta level, is that we need to avoid being so reactionary that we immediately reject everything critics of the faith have to say out of hand; we need to recognize the nuggets of truth that may be contained therein, but to shed the full light of truth on them, separating the wheat from the chaff. In this case, Nietzsche and his modern ideological descendents are right to be wary of otherworldliness, but the solution is not to turn away from Christ and the orthodox Christian tradition, but toward them.

'The Devil & Pierre Gernet' by David Bentley Hart - Review

I believe C.S. Lewis once defended his turn to fiction by noting that fiction is a much more compelling and subversive means by which to affect and influence an audience's thinking, as opposed to overt theological reflection. David Bentley Hart seems to be taking a similar tack.

As an avid fan of Hart's non-fiction work, I was extremely curious how his foray into fiction would turn out. Based on some of his imaginative and creative essays at First Things, along with the ingenuity as a wordsmith that is on display in his theological writing and other works, I was expecting great things and wasn't disappointed.

The titular novella is the piece in this volume that is the most quintessentially Hartian, I would say. Employing heavy chunks of dialogue -- as he does through much of this collection, but especially here -- Hart cleverly places concepts, intentions and values in the mouth of his devil which he finds to be in some manner distasteful or false, but which can nonetheless be defended eloquently and rationally. Hart's prose is often opulent, but it was particularly florid and decadent in this piece, serving to accentuate the fantastic conceit of having a devil as long-time friend, as well as all the trappings of high culture. Along with Hart's devil, the character of Pierre Gernet is also highly memorable because of the vivid portrayal of his pure soul, his poetry, his tragic end and the supernatural significance of the events surrounding it.

The House of Apollo is another fascinating tale that features Julian the Apostate as a central character. The piece depicts Julian's impotent attempts to restore the pagan gods of antiquity to their former glory, after "the Galileans" and their God had already driven them out and displaced them. True to form, Hart (as a classicist) doesn't go for any derisive, cheap apologetic shots but candidly (and fantastically) portrays a world in which the old gods were in their twilight.

In A Voice from The Emerald World Hart is at his most human and profound, exploring the dynamics of a family coping with grief. The emotional center of the piece is a touching, haunting relationship between a father and his son who has behavioral and social abnormalities. Together they regularly retreat to their fabulous bamboo garden which is their Emerald World. As a father of a child who has behaviors which are on the "autism spectrum", this story resonated in a very intimate way. At first, the occurrence of a seemingly abstract, egg-headed theological argument seems out of place in the narrative (though it's quite entertaining), but by the time the story reaches its conclusion, the theological implications of the earlier argument are decidedly immediate and real and not at all abstract.

Like Inception -- the 2010 film by Christopher Nolan -- the central conceptual conceit of Hart's next story The Ivory Gate (which he wrote in 1985) is a multi-tiered oneiric (one of dozens of words I learned while reading this volume) dreamscape, which the main character describes from memory. Unlike Nolan's film, Hart's conceit isn't primarily employed as an action set piece, but as a multi-layered emotional and experiential world which depicts the way in which our dreams aren't necessarily solely pale reflections of our waking life, but that the influence can run in the other direction as well. The way in which our dreams can coax us out of, or into, new understandings and depths, and the way that, since our reality is fundamentally anthropogenic, dreams are, in a sense, just as 'real' as anything else. None of those observations sound particularly original, at least as rendered by me, but the particulars of the story are what make it enjoyable and intriguing.

Finally, The Other is a short and oblique look at intense longing.

There is always a temptation to seek out some common thread or theme in a short story collection, and Hart reveals in an introductory apologia what it is for us: "I had originally intended to make the subtitle of this volume Elaborately Artificial Stories, since I have chosen five stories which are willfully extravagant in form and content, rather than any of the drier, more 'realistic' stories I have also written." There you have it. Though I would add that one other common thread is, of course, the voice of the author. Sometimes breaking through in quite overt ways, usually from the voice of characters, many ideas and subjects of Hart's other works make appearances. One character proclaims a familiar disdain for (or perhaps pity of) materialists; there is at least one mention of the basilica and its effects, which featured prominently in a recent essay on religion in America by Hart; he has previously written an essay on Julian the Apostate; the denunciation of the pitiless, calloused theology of certain forms of Christianity, which he has renounced elsewhere etc. Within the context of these stories, though, all of his ideas seem fresh and are given a new texture, depth and life, which lends credence to his claim that God is no more likely (and, indeed, perhaps less likely) to be encountered in theology than in poetry and fiction.

Beauty, Postmodernism, and Christianity

While the ground sought by modernity proved to be elusive, thereby yielding the postmodern critique of modernity, the Christian claim to reality welcomes the postmodern critique. Not so that our particular metanarrative can sit comfortably alongside other metanarratives and live in harmony with them, but because our metanarrative is comparatively so robust, so compelling, so sensible and necessary in the light of all relevant experiential and evidential data -- in other words so beautiful. Strict relativism is an illegitimate position to deduce from the premises of postmodernity; the fact that there exist a plethora of metanarratives -- none of which can be its own objectively justified grounding -- does not mean that all metanarratives are of equal value or quality, or that one can't be present which is the metanarrative that supersedes and subsumes all other metanarratives. Christian truth, properly understood, always has been a rhetoric which presents itself aesthetically, first and foremost. The truth of Christianity can't be divorced from its beauty.

None of this is a concession that the object of Christian worship, the Triune God of the Bible, is anything (or really Anyone) less than absolute Truth, only that He can't be conclusively shown to be such in the interaction between finite minds (some currently imbued with the Holy Spirit and some not). Instead it's to say that the vibrancy and beauty of the Christian metanarrative, and the relative impoverishment of all others, is a signpost that points to the probable Truth of the Christian claim. Or, more precisely, that its truth and beauty have a dialectic relationship which testifies to its supremacy over all other metanarratives. Claims that some other rhetoric has comparable or greater force I dismiss, not out of hand, but out of the knowledge obtained in my investigation of the matter. If there really is no Capital-T Truth, then beauty will ultimately only be in the eye of the beholder, of course, and then those alternate claims are just as valid as mine; but if Truth is out there, then that Truth will be Beauty itself, and it becomes possible for one rhetoric to rise above and absorb all others into itself. The postmodern turn in philosophy doesn't answer the question of whether Truth is out there, but only says that there is no dispassionate, objective position we can occupy to access this knowledge and demonstrate that we have done so. The latter postulate is what seems to be forgotten often.

Incidentally, even some highly influential non-theist thinkers such as Hegel -- and some contemporary Hegelians, such as Slavoj Zizek -- seem to accept the supremacy of Christian rhetoric. While they don't make the move that I do here -- claiming that the nonpareil beauty of the Christian rhetoric is an overwhelming testament to its Truth -- they do affirm its beauty and its potency as a means for understanding the world.

As I've hinted at, modernity need not remain entirely silent on this issue; the popularized version of the postmodern triumph in epistemology and philosophy is a catastrophist model, meaning that it envisions postmodernity counteracting modernity and overturning it; in reality the postmodern project was really inaugurated within modernity all along, and postmodernity is really just its consummation. With this in mind, the internal coherence of the Christian story can still be examined by traditionally modern methods, and how well (or poorly) it fairs under such scrutiny will testify for (or against) its Beauty, which in turn will comment on its claim to Truth. If it patently fails, for example, this would obviously severely cripple its aesthetic appeal; conversely, if it stands up as well as can be expected, this fact either acts as an element of the rhetoric of the Christian story itself, or at least something that acts as an adjacent support structure for it.

With this position laid out, the only task that remains is actually presenting the rhetoric in question. Though it's of course too large a task for this trifle of a post, or for any individual, I can at least point you to the location of the current development of that rhetoric, which is Christ's church on Earth, inhabited and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The church, the Body of Christ, is a furthering of the rhetoric which begins with the loving God of creation making Man in His image for His pleasure, and then reconciling the fallen world to Himself through Christ, the second person of the Trinity. This is, of course, a terribly inadequate thumbnail sketch of the totality of the staggering beauty of Christian rhetoric, which can only be fully appreciated by partaking in that rhetoric, but can also be seen (to some degree) from the outside, if approached humbly, thoughtfully, and prayerfully.

My (self-imposed) task here wasn't to demonstrate the beauty of the rhetoric itself -- though I do earnestly implore anyone reading to investigate the matter for themselves -- but only to make the case that, within a postmodern framework, Beauty becomes a primary concern which can present a more powerful and potent case for one metanarrative's supremacy over others, which in turn can become an argument for its Truth.

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This post was inspired entirely by David Bentley Hart's Beauty of the Infinite. I make no claims to originality, but my thoughts on this subject were flitting through my head and asking to be transcribed in my own words.

The Top 10 Things of 2011

Keeping in the spirit of this blog -- in which I write about my haphazard interests as inspiration strikes -- I decided to simply do a "Top 10 Stuff of the Year" list, rather than a Top 10 books, films, or albums list. Another reason to approach it this way is that I haven't seen 10 films I loved, or liked 10 albums that much this year. Part of that is me just not keeping up, but another part of it is that it has been a somewhat lackluster year in film and music, for example, not withstanding some stellar stand-outs. This also frees me up to highlight things that didn't necessarily arrive this year, but which I discovered or appreciated this year. Many of these things I've already blogged about, and so I'll mostly just quickly describe what was great about each thing and link to other more in-depth posts. Without further ado:

The Top 10 Things of 2011

10. Lakers Meltdown

Though I don't expend much energy following sports these days, as an avid, lifetime Laker-hater, I felt compelled to include their getting swept earlier this year in the playoffs in the top 10. Not only did the Mavericks sweep them, they did so in spectacular fashion, blowing them out by 36 in the fourth game, sending the Lakers into a pathetic temper tantrum. Kobe humbled, Phil Jackson sent into retirement, the dynasty very likely reconciled to at least a near-future of mediocrity; the sound of that legacy crashing with a thud is sweet, joyful music to my ears.

9. Drive

Though the thrills are somewhat tawdry and cheap, this stylish flick by Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the better of its kind that I've seen in recent memory. Ryan Gosling plays a part-time mechanic, part-time Hollywood stunt driver, and part-time robbery getaway driver that gets embroiled in a situation with a host of shady characters which explodes into violence. There's not a whole lot to the film, especially with Gosling's playing it in such a stoic fashion, but what it lacks in depth it makes up for in flair and pizzazz.

8.  The Republican Primary Campaign 

This is something I imagine 99% of the populous won't understand -- and I fully sympathize with your antipathy or apathy, whatever the case may be, I assure you -- but as a political junkie I have enjoyed following the campaign. Whatever it says about me, I religiously watched every televised debate but watched almost no other television this year -- you might have noticed the conspicuous lack of anything television related on this list. From Cain's downfall to Perry's flub to Newt's late rise to Romney's steady presence it has been interesting and disheartening, compelling and disappointing.

7. The Expired Dictator

While I think the Obama administration has been a travesty, at least he gave the go ahead to kill Osama bin Laden. It's hardly a feat deserving of much credit -- any president that didn't sign off on it would be incompetent -- but he is a Democrat and conceivably could have backed off on the War on Terror altogether, but he didn't, so that's at least worth a small amount of recognition. Gaddafi and Kim Jung-Il also met their demise this year. Of course, the rate at which evil replaces evil in this world is often astonishing, so these developments may not have any significant, lasting impact, but the passing of these wicked men is something to be thankful for.

6. Google (Google+, Google Currents, Google Music etc.)

I'm not really much of a tech guy, and while I'm sure there were probably much more significant developments in the tech world, I mostly enjoyed the rolling out of these excellent Google products. I just finally got a smartphone this year, so these products having Android apps to go with them made Google a noteworthy contributor to my universe this year. Google Music? Upload your entire MP3 library and have it accessible from any browser anywhere. Delightful. Google+? The best social-networking experience available (though it still doesn't have enough of an active user base to be the runaway best, it is the most enjoyable to use). Google Currents? A slick, aesthetically and functionally pleasing way to read online news, blogs, articles, and essays. Total cost? $0. The technological age has a lot to be said for it, and Google is near the top of that list for me.

5.  The Attributes of God by Shai Linne

Highly related to entry number three, Shai Linne's Holy Hip-Hop album The Attributes of God was released in November of this year, and is by far the best rap album that I have heard this year. Titled and patterned after the book by A.W. Pink, The Attributes of God is an album-length meditation on just that: the attributes of God. His goodness, faithfulness, justice, wrath, love and grace, to name a few. Each attribute is addressed in a separate track (though there is some cross-pollination, of course). Shai Linne spits creative, incisive reformed theology of such high quality it's somewhat unfair to classify the album as "just" a hip-hop album. It's a legitimate theological treatise and an intense act of worship. Provocative, wise, and relentlessly christcentric, the album was unlike anything I had ever heard (though it led me to Lampmode's back catalog, where there were other similar gems). To add to the revelation that the album was, even aside from the content, the beats and rhymes themselves are more impressive than anything the secular rap world currently has to offer, and it isn't even really close.

4. Tim Tebow 

Try as I might, I was unable to resist the magnetism of the Tim Tebow phenomenon. A strange confluence of events on and off the football field led to one phenomenal football story as Tebow led the Broncos to a 6-1 streak while winning in bizarre, seemingly miraculous fashion week after week, and praising Jesus while doing it. How could this story not send me into fits of rapturous ecstasy, especially when Tebow's humble glorifying of the Creator of the universe actually raised the ire of critics? What's not to love here?

3.  Holy Hip Hop / Lyrical Theology / Reformed Rap

I've said almost all that I can say on this topic in my previous post. To summarize: I discovered Lampmode records -- most notably the rappers Shai Linne, Timothy Brindle, and Evangel -- along with the whole Holy Hip-Hop movement this year, opening up a new dimension of hip-hop to me, as well as providing a tool for spiritual education and edification. Not only are these guys making extremely intelligent, Christ-centered, theological music, but they're doing it with a very high level of skill, making the exact kind of hip-hop music that I enjoy. Hallelujah!

2. David Bentley Hart's Writings

If I make a similar list to this in years to come, I expect this to be a mainstay right near the top (especially with him having at least two big projects coming up soon). The Eastern Orthodox theologian's massive erudition as it relates to history, culture, language, and religion, and his penchant for being a delightfully acerbic polemicist are some of the reasons he's my favorite living writer. Not content to merely excoriate Christianity's facile critics and make significant contributions to high theology, he also displays a great amount of literary creativity, humor, and wit in many columns which may fully blossom in his upcoming short story collection.

1. The Tree of Life

I've written more about this film than any other subject this year, so I'll spare you too many more adjectives of adulation. But the gulf that separates The Tree of Life from every other film released this year is titanic. The scope and ambition of the film is gargantuan as it tackles the subjects of the universe, humanity, death, sin, family, existence, and God deftly and without pretension. Through the prism of the life of one family, as remembered by one man, the mystery of the exquisite savagery, grace, and beauty of the universe is explored and unraveled. I will be marveling at this work of art for some time to come.

David Bentley Hart's Translation of the New Testament (and other news)

About 4 months ago I posted an inquiry on Google+ (which, as it happens, I enthusiastically support as the premiere social network) to Giles Anderson of The Anderson Literary Agency, which represents David Bentley Hart, as to whether he had any information on what his next project would be. A few months later Anderson informed me that they would have an announcement concerning the details of his next project shortly. Hart had mentioned that he had written (or was writing) a novella with the character of the Devil appearing in it. I was expecting Anderson's announcement to be with regard to this novella.

In the meantime, a collection of short stories by Hart titled The Devil and Pierre Gernet appeared on Amazon along with pre-order information. There was no announcement from Anderson or his agency, so I assumed this was an outside project for Hart. Due to arrive sometime in February, the prospect of David Bentley Hart's imagination and erudition being applied to a proper work of fiction was cause for legitimate excitement.

Then, a few days ago, Anderson messaged me on Google+ with what appeared to be an excerpt of an email from Anderson to Yale University Press regarding Hart's next project. Here is what he sent:

"Author of Atheist Delusions and recent winner of the Michael Ramsey Prize David Bentley Hart's THE NEW TESTAMENT: A New Translation, a version that promises to awaken readers to the mysteries and ambiguities in the original text, to Jennifer Banks at Yale University Press, by Giles Anderson at Anderson Literary Agency."

For Hart enthusiasts, such as myself, that is one colossal, exhilirating announcement! Coming, as it does, on the heels of another translation by a public Christian intellectual -- N.T. Wright -- it also could mark the beginning of a contemporary trend of sorts.

In addition to both these bits of news, Hart recently contributed a piece to The New Criterion's "Future Tense" series with an exquisite, brilliant essay on religion in America, in addition to an excoriating article at First Thing's online dismantling "the Oxfordian hypothesis", which is the basis for the seemingly ridiculous film Anonymous.

All of this following the demise of his regular On the Square column and a few months of troubling silence. I have both been edified and left in a state of great anticipation.

The End of an Era

For the last year or two Fridays have been my most anticipated day of the week, not because they signify the beginning of another weekend but because David Bentley Hart's web column always arrives on Friday (though it usually only does so bi-weekly). It was just announced that his most recent piece -- an excellent précis on the limits of Method as such, especially with regard to modern scientific method and those who refuse to acknowledge its limits -- will also be his final web column at First Things. 

This terrible news was immediately softened by the happy news that he will now be a regular contributor to the print edition of the magazine, with an article on the last page of every edition, where he used to only be published in the magazine occasionally (seemingly about half the time). Presumably, and hopefully, the print column will be of greater length than his web column, given the greater infrequency of publishing.

In any case, the final piece really is quite fine work. Hart reminds us that the hard won precision and clarity of certain methods come at a price:

[M]ethod always remains only a perspective, however powerful it may be: a willful blindness to many things for the sake of seeing a few things with a special clarity.

He goes on to take the naïvely confident materialist -- who imagines that the triumph of modern science can discount, or even comment on, the existence of formal and final causes -- to task:

Even so, it would be worse than naïve to imagine that the sciences have thereby proved the nonexistence of final and formal causes. In fact, by bracketing such causes out of consideration, scientific method also rendered itself incapable of pronouncing upon any reality such causes might or might not explain. Now, of course, the typical reply to this observation (from the aforementioned Daniel Dennett, for instance) is to say, with some indignation, that modern science has in fact demonstrated the utter superfluity of final and formal causal explanations, because the sciences have shown that they do not need finality or formality to understand the processes they investigate.

That, however, is an empty tautology: Of course modern scientific method discovers the kind of reality it is specifically designed to discover; and even in cases where it finds its explanatory reserves overly taxed, it must presume that in future some sort of “mechanical” cause will be found to restore the balance, and so issue itself a promissory note to that effect. But, again, this may mean that it must also overlook realities that actually lie very near at hand, either quite open to investigation if another method could be found, or so obviously beyond investigation as to mark out the limits of scientific method with particular clarity.

After a long string of satirical or otherwise half-serious columns, Hart's final web column is a return to material that he is best known for, which I think is appropriate. I do hope, however, that the end of the web column is not the end of the satirical, whimsical, mercurial Hart, which his web column gave us access to. Much of that work is utterly brilliant in its own right and deserves the widest platform possible. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor and Travel

After ideological opponents Christopher Hitchens and David Bentley Hart both recently eulogized Patrick Leigh Fermor (here and here, respectively) with high praise for his writing, I became determined to get a hold some of his work. This lead me to purchase Words of Mercury for my Kindle, which is an assortment of Paddy's [1] writings, taken from various sources, including excerpts from all of his other works. It sounded like it would function as a perfect introduction to his work.

Not being inclined to travel much myself, and never having enjoyed it much when I have, Travel Writing isn't a genre that I'm naturally drawn to, though I'm delighted by high-caliber prose wherever it may be found. Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor confirms what I already knew to be true: I'd much rather read splendid writings about someone else's adventures abroad than seek out my own. This is probably one part deficiency of character and one part simple preference, but reading Paddy's colorful accounts of his strange and eclectic travels make any travelling I've done -- and any I could conceivably undertake -- seem dull, drab and lifeless in comparison. Not exactly the best impetus to start travelling.

Most of the writings in this volume center around events in his life from the 30s and 40s, though some of the accounts were written from memory much later. Paddy traveled throughout Europe and especially the Mediterranean, and had encounters with the most compelling people and cultures. From blindly stumbling upon a remote cave along the coast of the Black Sea, filled with fishermen who he spends the night conversing, drinking, singing and dancing with, to an account of his year-long stay in a monastery in Normandy, to his recounting of his famed role in the abduction of a Nazi general on the island of Crete during the war, his adventures couldn't be more diverse and vibrant, and the prose itself is just as delightful and lively. [2]

While I thoroughly enjoyed the way in which Paddy's work transported me to other places, times and to encounters with different people, I still find myself disinclined to transport myself to other places. Not only would my adventures not be able to measure up, but I feel that travel in 2011 just isn't quite what it was (or had the capability to be) in the 1940s. Those remote corners of the globe are not so remote now, and many of the peoples he encountered, who had remained fascinatingly insulated from modernity, have since been molested by it. Excuses aside, though, I'm simply not an adventurer and am content with these vicarious excursions to far reaches of the globe and distant lands, with the likes of Patrick Leigh Fermor guiding me. 

[1] The informal name used for Leigh Fermor by the editors of Words of Mercury. 

[2] A few examples of the prose, as clipped by me, can be found here, here, here, here and here.

David Foster Wallace on Abortion

If you recall the recent grammatical dust-up between David Bentley Hart and a few blogging descriptivists, Hart addressed the issue in his bi-weekly column yesterday. For some reason one of the editors at First Things included a link to David Foster Wallace's superb essay on American usage, which I promptly re-read. As riveting as grammar and usage wars are, this post addresses a short aside in Wallace's essay that has nothing to do with those topics.

Here is the excerpt (which seems to have been excised from the version of the essay on Harpers' site. I got this from the version in Consider the Lobster):

In this reviewer's opinion, the only really coherent position on the abortion issue is one that is both Pro-life and Pro-choice.

Given our best present medical and philosophical understandings of what makes something not just a living organism but a person, there is no way to establish at just what point during gestation a fertilized ovum becomes a human being. This conundrum, together with the basically inarguable soundness of the principle “When in irresolvable doubt about whether something is a human being or not, it is better not to kill it,” appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Life.

At the same time, however, the principle “When in irresolvable doubt about something, I have neither the legal nor the moral right to tell another person what to do about it, especially if that person feels that s/he is not in doubt” is an unassailable part of the Democratic pact we Americans all make with one another, a pact in which each adult citizen gets to be an autonomous moral agent; and this principle appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Choice.

For someone immersed in the culture of liberal academia, it's admirable that Wallace even allows himself to reason his way to this moderate position. However, he can't quite bring himself to go all the way, possibly for fear that his exquisite reasoning has lead him to a standard, conservative, privileged, white, American, male position on an issue that liberal academic circles would be especially prone to suspecting such biases for being the true source of the conclusion, rather than the flawless reason. Indeed, a subsequent passage indicates that just such an insecurity is very likely in play in Wallace's thought.

The point is that the appropriate, logical conclusion of the two Principles that Wallace has formulated is that abortion is wrong because the first Principle overrides the second. The right to life trumps the right to 'choose', and Wallace states no reason these two principles should carry identical weight, which is what he must demonstrate to conclude that an exactly centrist position is best. Additionally, the second Principle is grounded in some "irresolvable doubt" that Wallace has quietly smuggled in. Whence such doubt? The first Principle was formulated with "inarguable soundness." Presumably the doubt comes in because of the second Principle, but the second Principle can't be formulated apart from an extant doubt. Thus the second principle is circular and the real logical conclusion, when these two principles collide, is a Pro-life one.

Not to mention that this Pro-life conclusion is arrived at even while accepting Wallace's claim that a) the origin of human-being-ness question is inadjudicable and b) that the crux of the issue is human-being-ness. Neither of which are compelled by evidence. If we state the principle that destroying a unique, innocent, human life -- all of which a just-conceived embryo is necessarily -- is wrong, then issues of personhood or human-being-ness are superceded. Which only strengthens the argument for a Pro-life conclusion, which is already firmly established by the two principles.

Wallace is one hundred times more intelligent than I am, but I have the occasionally-useful advantage of never having been within 100 yards of a liberal arts or humanities department, and am entirely immune to the unfortunate political correctness that it breeds.

Interestingly, later in the essay Wallace shows that he is acutely aware of just such instances of being technically, indisputably correct about something (just as his argument in favor of Pro-life would be, were he to follow it through), but having the PC, liberal academic machinery rear its ugly head forces him to yield some ground. Not going so far as to admit he's wrong, but that he was perhaps clumsy or insensitive. All this, however, took place over the comparatively emotionally dry topic of the English language:

A vividly concrete illustration here concerns the Official Complaint a black undergraduate filed against this rev. after one of my little in camera spiels described on pages 53-54. The complainant was (I opine) wrong, but she was not crazy or stupid; and I was able later to see that I did bear some responsibility for the whole nasty administrative swivet. My culpability lay in gross rhetorical naivete. I'd seen my speech's primary Appeal as Logical: The aim was to make a conspicuously blunt, honest argument for SWE's [Standard Written English] utility. It wasn't pretty, maybe, but it was true, plus so manifestly bullshit-free that I think I anticipated not just acquiescence but gratitude for my candor. [44] The problem I failed to see, of course, lay not with the argument per se but with the person making it — namely me, a Privileged WASP Male in a position of power, thus someone whose statements about the primacy and utility of the Privileged WASP Male dialect appeared not candid/hortatory/ authoritative/true but elitist/high-handed/ authoritarian/racist. Rhetoric-wise what happened was that I allowed the substance and style of my Logical Appeal to completely torpedo my Ethical Appeal: What the student heard was just another PWM rationalizing why his Group and his English were top dog and ought "logically" to stay that way (plus, worse, trying to use his academic power over her to coerce her assent [45] ).

If for any reason you happen to find yourself sharing this particular student's perceptions and reaction, [46] I would ask that you bracket your feelings long enough to recognize that the PWM instructor's very modern rhetorical dilemma in that office was really no different from the dilemma faced by a male who makes a Pro-Life argument, or an atheist who argues against Creation Science, or a Caucasian who opposes Affirmative Action, or an African American who decries Racial Profiling, or anyone over eighteen who tries to make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc. The dilemma has nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far — any opponent with sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the arguments and pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a single, terribly familiar rejoinder: "Of course you'd say that"; "Easy for you to say"; "What right do you have ...?"

It should be obvious how such an environment could lead one to temper his position considerably on the much more emotionally charged issue of abortion, even when possessing the indisputable truth that is uncomfortable for many in liberal academia  -- especially females -- to hear or deal with.

Christocentric Weltanschauung (Don't Worry, I Define It)

 In reading Angus Menuge's excellent essay on the Christocentric 'Weltanschauung' (which is defined as a comprehensive view of reality, or a worldview) of John Warwick Montgomery, in the collection of essays on Montgomery titled Tough-Minded Christianity, I was reminded of a line of argument contained in David Bentley Hart's stellar Beauty of the Infinite.

Menuge describes Montgomery's view as building upon Luther's "bottom up" approach to theology, as contrasted to some theologians' -- like Aquinas's -- "top down" approach. Luther thought it was most productive to begin theology with the life of Christ and work your way 'up' from there, where Aquinas' natural theology uses reason to discern divine attributes and he proceeds to work his way 'down' from there. While both end up in the same place, so to speak, where you start does make a difference and Menuge -- visa vis Montgomery -- goes on to demonstrate why the "bottom up", Christ-first approach is ultimately the more fruitful.

In tracing the development of Montgomery's thought, Menuge quotes Luther's commentary on Galatians:

[Paul] wants to teach us the Christian religion, which does not begin at the very top, as all other religions do, but at the very bottom ... [If] you would think or treat of your salvation, you must stop speculating about the majesty of God; you must forget all thoughts of good works, tradition, philosophy, and even the divine Law. Hasten to the stable and the lap of the mother and apprehend this infant Son of the Virgin. Look at Him being born, nursed, and growing up, walking among men, teaching, dying, returning from the dead, and being exalted above all the heavens.

This quote, and the further development of the idea, brought to mind David Bentley Hart. Hart (as we will see shortly) seems to come to a very similar conclusion to Luther on this point, though by different means. Hart's thought originates in Eastern Orthodox tradition and develops through various epochs of secular and  Christian philosophy (Late Antiquity, Medieval, Modernity, Late-Modernity, Postmodernity), cataloging the ultimate triumph of rhetoric over dialectic and surfaces over essences. The point he arrives at is that Christian thought is, and ever has been, a truth that is best understood as a kind of rhetoric, as contained in the aesthetic, surface plane of reality, rather than in the rational 'ground' or 'foundation' that modernity sought (which is compatible with the postmodern critique of modernity). Namely, that Christian thought begins with -- or at least centers on -- the rhetoric of the form of Christ, with 'form' meaning the totality of Christ's works; the incarnation, his life, his actions, his miracles, his character, his interactions, his words, his death, resurrection and ascension. From there the 'argument' that Christianity puts forth is a further development of that rhetoric, in the form of the Church on Earth, and the Holy Spirit working through it. In The Beauty of the Infinite, Hart's magnum opus, Hart says:

What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of 'rational' arguments that (suppressing certain of their premises) force assent from others by leaving them, like the interlocutors of Socrates, at a loss for words; rather, it stands before the world principally with the story it tells concerning God and creation, the form of Christ, the loveliness of the practice of Christian charity and the rhetorical richness of its idiom. Making its appeal first to the eye and heart, as the only way it may 'command' assent, the church cannot separate truth from rhetoric, or from beauty.

This conclusion seems to mirror that of the Christocentric Weltanshauung of Menuge-Montgomery-Luther, though with a different intellectual pedigree.

None of which is to suggest that Hart, Luther, Montgomery or Menuge reject the value or the just role of reason in evaluating truth claims, only that they all seem to suggest that at the heart of the Christian claim about reality is a story, or a rhetoric, rather than an 'argument'. Other arguments can be marshaled to defend the truth of the story, but the story -- especially the element of the story concerning Christ -- comes first, and there is no argument stronger than the story itself.