135 Comments

Never clicked a notification so fast..

Expand full comment
Apr 23, 2022Liked by David Bentley Hart

“This latest book [You Are Gods] continues the trajectory away from historical Christianity evident in Hart’s recent work.” - Ed Feser

If one ventures over to Feser’s blog to peruse the comments on his post about his review, one finds many similar comments from readers regarding Hart’s deplorable and pitiful departure away from orthodox Christianity, in contrast to all his earlier works, where he was a staunch orthodox apologist for the Faith. One can find similar remarks made by McClymond in his interviews where he speaks against universalism.

To which I say...wtf are they talking about? Have they even read any of Hart’s books? This is such an annoying and idiotic criticism because Hart talks at length of Gregory of Nyssa’s universalism and monism in The Beauty of the Infinite, which was his first book from 20 years ago!

For example, “Gregory's universalism, though, is a subordinate issue; what is of interest here is the light it casts on Gregory's larger vision. That is to say, Gregory's understanding of the infinite never dissolves into abstraction: infinity is God alone, in his fullness, in whom all richness, beauty, motion, and life already dwell, without violence, negation, diremption, or the sacrifice of the particular.”

The Experience of God from a decade ago speaks much of Vedanta; and Atheist Delusions, from 2009, Hart’s most popular “orthodox” book that gained him praise from all manner of fundamentalists, evangelicals, and apologists, has several pages devoted to universalism, including this particular line:

“The threat of eternal torment is an appeal solely to spiritual and emotional terror, and to the degree that Christians employed it as an inducement to faith, their arguments were clearly somewhat vulgar. The doctrine of hell, understood in a purely literal sense, as a place of eternally unremitting divine wrath, is an idea that would seem to reduce Christianity’s larger claims regarding the justice, mercy, and love of God to nonsense.”

Hence, all these remarks that these critics make, where they praise Hart’s earlier works but rebuke his latest ones, are revealing of one of three possibilities: either 1) they’re intentionally lying and misrepresenting Hart’s views or 2) they’re lying that they ever read his earlier books or 3) they’re too stupid to have understood what it is they read.

Expand full comment
author

No need to choose among those three options. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Expand full comment

On panpsychism, which introductory texts do you best recommend? I of course believe everything is imbued with soul and mind, but I’m not in step with the current academic discussions on it: I believe it because that’s a view of the world that makes me want to be alive rather than not. I’ve read Kripal’s The Flip, which talks over this in a broad intro sort of fashion and with a focus on the sciences; what next?

Expand full comment

I second this question and also would love a good overview of idealism. I have heard of Ewing's book on this but wanted to reach out and see if there was something better.

Expand full comment
founding

What was once viewed as pretty marginal has become increasingly popular even among relatively orthodox philosophers of mind. Goff's Galileo's Error might be thought to approach the issue from within current orthodoxy.

https://smile.amazon.com/Galileos-Error-Foundations-Science-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B07KNVQ6H5/ref=sr_1_1?crid=33FF3KV81VKV8&keywords=galileo%27s+error&qid=1650291348&sprefix=galileo%27s+e%2Caps%2C194&sr=8-1

I found myself persuaded that panpsychism was perhaps right, and certainly interesting and important, by reading Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot:

https://smile.amazon.com/Unsnarling-World-Knot-Consciousness-Freedom-Mind-Body/dp/1556357559/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3LHG0D7MU0MM1&keywords=unsnarling+the+world-knot&qid=1650291423&sprefix=unsnarling%2Caps%2C172&sr=8-1

Expand full comment

So long as Feser's quarry is new atheism, his mode of argumentation is compelling and largely satisfying, but this open letter response puts it beyond doubt that his preferred critical moves simply won't work when his target is infinitely more subtle and nuanced than anything that school of thought produced.

Expand full comment
Apr 18, 2022·edited Apr 18, 2022

Bracing. Let the false myth that Thomism has the logical upper hand die a much-deserved death.

Would you agree that the relation between nature and grace that you outline here maps onto Maximus' distinction between the logos physeos and the tropos hyparxeos? This is how Maximus writes of miracles, after all, such as that of Christ walking on water—as a modal change in a constant nature, not an abrogation of that nature.

For myself, I prefer the rich metaphorical langauge of the Upanishads (which I have picked up recently for the first time, inspired by your own references to Vedantic tradition) : "Like oil in sesame seeds, like butter in cream, like water in springs, like fire in a firestick" so dwells the Lord in the depths of consciousness. As you seem to be saying, it turns out that upon close inspection this language of 'realization' is not finally inconsistent with the vast implications of Christian theosis.

Expand full comment
author

Yes to all of that.

Expand full comment

>>a concern for distinctively Christian orthodoxy isn’t really what drives Hart in the first place

This is the heart (see, I can do it, too) of the matter, & what really gets people like Feser's knickers in a twist. I'd expect no less from someone who has argued that Islam is inherently violent.

Expand full comment
author

While penning a 450 page treatise advocating capital punishment. I really don’t get it.

Expand full comment
deletedApr 21, 2022·edited Apr 21, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
author
Apr 21, 2022·edited Apr 24, 2022Author

Careful in citing hadiths. They are often of dubious value.

That said, yes, Islam is not a pacifist creed and its origins involve numerous battlefields. That is not unique to Islam among the great faiths. But that is different from saying that Islam is inherently violent, which is just a slander by someone with no sense of historical perspective..

Expand full comment

The Hebrew Bible is not in the least averse to the use of violence, either, nor does Judaism lack its numerous battlefields. Or consider the Gita. Many creeds are not averse to violence. The point is that there is a reason Feser singles out Islam.

Expand full comment
deletedApr 21, 2022·edited Apr 21, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

There are infact numerous verses in the Quran that explicitly prohibit violence, and no amount of out of context statements can possibly undermine that fact. But, keeping that aside, what always strikes me as rather ironic about alot of Christians is that they would go to any length in defending the actual meaning of Christ's words against all literal misinterpretations, but it's suddenly a huge problem if someone were to extend the same level of charity to other (not just Islamic) religious texts. Atleast try to be consistent.

Expand full comment
deletedApr 25, 2022·edited Apr 25, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
author
Apr 25, 2022·edited Apr 25, 2022Author

Actually, quite a lot of the violence in the OT is merely violence, but that's not worth discussing.

Expand full comment

Not being one that has been trained in formal theology, philosophy, or logic, this is, nonetheless, my attempt at summarizing why a theist monism / “pantheism” is ultimately correct:

If God “dreams” forth all potentialities, and indeed “exists” as all potentialities, then all actualities that materially exist are thereby not God. But since God is Absolute - the Ground of all being - then all existing things must actually participate within God, for to do otherwise would be to exist outside of God, and thus rival God.

So God is the ground, source, subsistence, and destination of all things. Since God is Absolute, all that is contingent is Not-God, and thus all things must contingently exist. Said another way, all Not-Gods need to manifestly exist in temporality, because the only thing that can ultimately exist in teleology is God. Hence, all things that are not God in His infinite grounding and fullness - all imaginable realities - must manifestly exist to become God, and what intelligible, finite, material, temporal, experiential history is, is the story of God calling forth “God” from nothingness.

Is this in anyway near to the idea of theosis, or is my attempt here a tautological error, or just incoherent nonsense?

Expand full comment
author

You are not far from the Kingdom.

Not nonsense at all. Very well reasoned. Apparently your professed lack of formal training merely illustrates that formal training is often not important.

Expand full comment

Thanks! My career and education path were in STEM and Business, but as I approach my 40s, my intellectual passions are far more drawn to speculative theology now, so it’s nice to know that I’m not too far off the mark here, as a non-specialist layman in these fields.

Expand full comment

If what you're saying is true, Gregor Samsa was born a potential beetle.

Expand full comment
author
Apr 25, 2022·edited Apr 25, 2022Author

Actually, not necessarily. It would mean either that his humanity had a coleopteral potency or that his humanity was annihilated. He might have remained psychologically continuous. I’m glad you raised this crucial issue.

Expand full comment

From Laudato Si: “The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face. The ideal is not only to pass from the exterior to the interior to discover the action of God in the soul, but also to discover God in all things” (#233). The text then quotes Ali al-Khawas in connecting the interior experience of God and the creatures of the world, before moving onto St. Bonaventure, John of the Cross, and the even the experience of the Sacraments and the sacramental imagination as signs of a universe utterly permeated with God.

Now, Laudato Si is not yet widely accepted among a certain sect of US Catholics (to put it mildly), but pantheism, panentheism, however you wish to describe, is deeply within Catholic orthodoxy. Moreover, as you point out, Aquinas' embrace of Aristotelianism (via Muslim philosophers) caused not a minor stir among Catholic "orthodoxy" in his day.

Expand full comment
author

The Catholic reactionary fringe (which, sadly, is getting to be so broad that it is beginning to be more than a fringe) picks and chooses which encyclicals to treat as "official church teaching" and which to regard as expressions of a pope's personal convictions and nothing more.

Expand full comment

I hope this isn't a bother. But once you become aware of all this, you begin to see it everywhere. In the second reading from the office of readings today, from Blessed Isaac of Stella:

"From a sermon by Blessed Isaac of Stella, abbot

(Sermo 42: PL 194, 1831-1832)

Firstborn of many brothers

Just as the head and body of a man form one single man, so the Son of the Virgin and those he has chosen to be his members form a single man and the one Son of Man. Christ is whole and entire, head and body, say the Scriptures, since all the members form one body, which with its head is one Son of Man, and he with the Son of God is one Son of God, who himself with God is one God. Therefore the whole body with its head is Son of Man, Son of God, and God. This is the explanation of the Lord’s words: Father, I desire that as you and I are one, so they may be one with us.

And so, according to this well-known reading of Scripture, neither the body without the head, nor the head without the body, nor the head and body without God make the whole Christ. When all are united with God they become one God. The Son of God is one with God by nature; the Son of Man is one with him in his person; we, his body, are one with him sacramentally. Consequently those who by faith are spiritual members of Christ can truly say that they are what he is: the Son of God and God himself. But what Christ is by his nature we are as his partners; what he is of himself in all fullness, we are as participants. Finally, what the Son of God is by generation, his members are by adoption, according to the text: As sons you have received the Spirit of adoption, enabling you to cry, Abba, Father."

Expand full comment

Okay one more, from Gaudium et Spes (again not one of the fringe's favorite): "For since Christ died for everyone, and since all are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery."

All are called to the same destiny, which is divine. Not a usb port for grace, to use Feser's metaphor, a possible software update for divinity, but the purpose for which all are created.

What is so threatening about a universal calling to union with God?

Expand full comment
author

The manualists would say that this may be true, but only within the order of providence, according to which God has offered sufficient but not efficacious grace. Thus, though grace is technically universal, it is impossible for any but the predilectively elect to be saved. Since, however, sufficient grace has been made available, and even though God has infallibly "permissively decreed" that everyone else will be damned, that damnation is perfectly just.

I'm not making that up. At this point, diabolism begins looking morally sane.

Expand full comment
founding

Agreeing with DBH here and recalling Aristotle: Distinguishing respects is not the same as distinguishing tout court. One can distinguish respects that themselves do not belong to the same genus, in which case their difference is external or nominal, and the difference is not a true one, whereas if one distinguishes within a genus, we get internal or real differences because the difference is one within a higher commonality. Only what shares a higher genus is truly different. One must always ponder whether the respects distinguished by the Scholastics are internal or external, and if external they are arbitrary in respect of the thing being distinguished. Many of these external respects are introduced for ideological reasons within theological battles, and are not grounded in rem, in the being of what is being discussed. I can distinguish with respect to cheese the respect in which it is loved by rats, and the respect in which it is divisible into sets of four, but neither of these respects get us closer to understanding cheese in terms of its substance and its accidents, i.e. its being. And while each of these respects is a different one, neither derives its legitimacy from a prior comprehension of the kind of thing cheese is. So they are externally, "subjectively," motivated, and have no place in the comprehension of the matter under discussion.

In sum: the theological distinctions DBH refers to above must be examined in terms of whether they are external or internal, and all indications suggest the former, making them ideological artifacts rather than binding ontological realities.

There is a logic to drawing distinctions, an onto-logic that one must heed if one's thinking is not to go off the rails.

Expand full comment
author

External through and through.

Expand full comment

This is a very helpful distinction, and clarifies much of Catholic theology within this tradition that is utter baffling to me as well. Many thanks for sharing.

Expand full comment

Ugh.... this is just such a frustrating review by Ed. Even read Torrell on this. Furthermore, he just ignored any discussion of Aquinas' treatment of happiness or the nature of the will and intellect.

But the big issue here is that "Thomism" is not the thought of Aquinas and all the Thomistic schools actively distort Aquinas' thought. All of them have agendas (although perhaps the transcendental Thomists can be excused).

Again, I appreciate your references to Ibn Sina. Aristotle is always important for Aquinas, but the importance of Ibn Sina simply cannot be overstated (not just in the early works either when the explicit references are more numerous such as in the Sentences and De Ente). Most people's understanding of Aquinas (Feser) is not nearly Platonic enough - although for some reason when I tell this to people they get quite upset (no Dominican I know would be caught dead making such a claim). In fact there is actually a direct lineage from Aquinas - from Ibn Sina, Dionysius, the Liber De Causis, and the Arabic Plotinus materials - to Plotinus.

Expand full comment
author

Precisely. But Thomism of the strict observance is no more Platonic than analytic Thomism.

Expand full comment

Ugh... analytic Thomism... the horror...

Expand full comment
author

Lasciate ogni speranza…

Expand full comment
founding

Lol. Herbert McCabe is actually pretty awesome and is worth looking into - not for a world-view but for the nitty-gritty details upon which a *coherent and true* world-view would have to rest.

Expand full comment
founding

I mean we can't let crisp clean logical distinctions get lost in a cloud of verbiage, can we? Precisely upon these rode the crux of DBH's objections to the blurry distinctions that distinguished nothing in particular which the doughty Feser mobilized against You Are Gods. As if the "analogical interval" were not a *very fine, very precise distinction!* This is the only lance I'll break for analytic Thomism.

Expand full comment
founding

Still, I think you will find the (true!) tradition you speak of more manifest in Albert the Great, Dietrich of Freiburg and Meister Eckhart than in Thomas himself. I personally am of the view that Thomas near the end of his life felt the need to expunge the Platonism of Liber de causis and the Theology of Aristotle (i.e. Plotinus and Proclus) from Aristotle once it became clear that it was too closely allied with Averroes and Siger de Brabant, so-called "radial Aristotelianism" whose Aristotelianism made a mockery of the teaching of the Eucharist, and also made it problematic to assert that souls could burn in hell for all eternity. [Score one for Aristotle!] By turning against the Platonic Aristotle he was strategically saving Aristotle for the Western Church, and he learned well from Albert the Great that Aristotle was essential to the level of civilization the West could achieve in the face of the higher levels attained in the Islamic world. But the price to pay was the very Platonist elements you put your finger on.

Expand full comment
author

I fear you may be right. And yet the Compendium is very Platonic on crucial issues and it’s very late. You should write up your argument at length.

Expand full comment

Commentary on the Liber De Causis (1271) and Divine Names (post 1268 probably) as well...

Expand full comment

An when we read Aquinas' "histories" of philosophy it is pretty clear that he does not regard himself as "an Aristotelian" but as the inheritor of a great classical tradition founded by Plato and Aristotle, who are then followed by their disciples.

Expand full comment

In suggesting that DBH rejcts orthodox Christianity, Feser hasn't adequately taken into account sections 23 and 24 of "The Chiasmus"

Expand full comment

Concerning deification, does something like the following sound at all right? In the Beatific Vision, every human being will follow Christ in being a hypostatic union of human and divine natures, except that, instead of the second person of the Trinity, the persons with those two natures will be us.

Expand full comment
author

That's the standard account.

Expand full comment
Apr 18, 2022·edited Apr 18, 2022

Where in 'the tradition' is the best place to find an expression of the standard account?

Expand full comment
author

The Cappadocians, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus, John Damascene

Expand full comment

You two are adorable

Expand full comment
author

I think you mean to say, “You are too adorable.”

Expand full comment

That was a fun read. As an aside, Thomas Aquinas must be distinguished from neo-Thomism, which is often a cartoonish caricature of what he actually taught. There is much more to Thomas than meets the eye for anyone who cares to grasp his teachings more fully. DBH has a much better understanding of Thomas than most Thomists.

"Today, I have been blessed to come into the presence of the great Christian saint, Thomas Aquinas. I beg all Christian faithful to try to serve their neighbors by tuning their minds to the spirit of his teaching." - 14th Dalai Lama, the tomb of St. Thomas Aquinas, Tolouse, France, Nov. 8, 1993.

Expand full comment
author
Apr 18, 2022·edited Apr 18, 2022Author

Yes, Thomism--when the word is used precisely--is a school of modern thought born in the 16th century. Thomas was a 13th century thinker whose categories of reasoning were very pre-modern. Lonergan's first book--on causality in Thomas--was maybe the first devastating hammer-blow to the pretensions of Thomism to speak for Thomas.

Expand full comment

You cooked him 😭

Expand full comment

How can grace perfect nature without human nature being intrinsically directed to the supernatural? This very language of grace perfecting nature seems to insinuate that nature stands in need of being perfected to bring it to its completion. As such human nature just could never be a pure nature.

Expand full comment
author

I would give you the manualist answer, but it’s degrading to repeat it.

Expand full comment