I'm quite glued to your work, but I have to admit I find the language frequently difficult. Your wording is fiercely accurate, precise, and intentional. I just don't usually have the words you casually use committed to memory. My education and obsession with video games as child have failed me.
Btw, I quite enjoyed your talks on Gospel Conversations in Australia that were posted to YouTube recently. It's good to know that there is beautiful theology out there, instead of the banal and childish drivel I hear from most American churchgoers.
Grew up RC, identified as vaguely Protestant for years (unaware of EO), left seminary feeling more RC. Discovered DBH, and I'm SO done with RC and P. Life's too short for Levering, Stump, Trads, et al. Freedom.
The two EO parishes I’ve attended have been overrun with disciples of Jay Dyer, Peter Heers, and perhaps if I’m lucky Ancient Faith radio listeners. You think you are going to get Bulgakov but instead you get fundies with beards and incense. I far prefer the local RCC parish I’ve been attending that welcomes LGBT parishioners, has centering prayer on the 1st/3rd Saturday every month, and a reading group discussing the Bhagavad Gita.
I hear you. That and my soulless suburban location have prevented me from giving it a try, even though I'm only 45 minutes from at Vladimir's seminary.
The priests I met were more subtle, one in particular who sadly left the area for a professorship in Scandinavia was a pleasure to briefly meet. The parishioners left me cold - one parish totally overrun, the other much nicer parish with mainly elderly folks and one young couple, the male partner being one of the people who explicitly recommended Dyer as an exponent of orthodoxy, philosophy, church history, and theology. It was too much. The Catholics have seemed outwardly normal so far.
Well, much of the magisterium quite liked him. One of the oddities of good Catholics like Levering is that they tend to defend an understanding of Catholic teaching that the Catholic church itself does not insist upon.
I read TAA with quite a bit of interest — if I had encountered your arguments earlier, it might have saved me from a couple decades of reactionary atheism. I am neither philosopher nor theologian, so I would appreciate if you or someone else in the comments could survey my provisional understanding and correct any misapprehensions.
History, if it is to be something other than an end-less sequence (endless as in without telos, one damn thing after another) needs to have its appearances saved by some rational account. The appearances themselves are rather discouraging: error, contingency, arbitrariness, Cleopatra’s nose, etc. In response to this challenge, one can either wax imperturbably ahistorical or wane into an irrational metaphysical empiricism. One might be tempted to invoke the Holy Spirit to save the appearances, but at each juncture it becomes very difficult to demonstrate that one is not merely invoking a phantom epicycle — which is not to deny the reality of providence, but merely point to the inadequacy of our historically-enmeshed perspectives (as well as the frequently ad hoc nature of such invocations). Besides, what the book terms the “phylogenetic” explanation is always waiting in the wings to laugh our stories off the stage and deliver the envoi, which, if we have not reasoned aright, is a seemingly inescapable nihilism.
I might not be correct here, but hovering behind the book seems to be an acknowledgment that a Hegelian approach to history might plausibly be invoked as the necessary rational account — but that Hegel’s own conclusions, besides being unpalatable, correspond neither to Christianity’s originating impetus nor to its eschatological horizon. Christian tradition, then, does not develop in a manner that can be exhaustively explained in a purely dialectical fashion — this doesn’t mean, of course, that its development is entirely irrational, only that a Hegel-inspired account, in trying to do too much, inevitably falls short shy of the eschaton — and in its failure might drag us into total skepticism, if we’ve been credulous enough to make it the bearer of our hope.
Our hope, ultimately, is Christ in both his historical personhood and transcendent divinity. His initiating apocalyptic irruption into history orients our hopes toward their only possible fulfillment — though what we might dare hope is also something that has needed the elaboration of history to express itself properly. True doctrine is never irrational, but it also doesn’t hand over history complete, transparent, and wrapped in a metaphysical bow. We might keep shaking the box but an angel with banderole unfurled will always preempt us: “Do not open till eschaton!” And we keep dreaming amongst ourselves, as reasonably as we might, about what glories await.
Whew, that’s a relief. I’m also glad that your arguments do not merely repackage “the familiar notion that there is a fundamental intuition or non-conceptualizable religious experience that is the real core of everything toward which Christians have been striving.” Important as those experiences are, their lack of conceptualization can be frustrating for those of us who might want something a little more definite to say about our hopes — as definite, at least, as a productively vague creedal statement that can be both assented to and elaborated upon. Also, those of us who are sorely deficient in that “oceanic feeling” are relieved to still be invited to the feast, even though our mystical intuition may be lacking. Then again, if we all had the temperament of Traherne, wouldn’t most theological argumentation simply evaporate?
Incidentally, I read a John Milbank's tweet today (very succinct because of the limited wordcount on X), which seems quite relevant to Levering's case: "Sustaining passion without prejudice is hard. Therefore hard for humans to be rounded people."
But this is true for most of us really, bar the true saints of scholarship. I have had my fair share of manning ideological barricades and I have no doubt that I will not come to even a semblance of true objectivity in this life.
David, I apologize for veering off topic, but I'd like to ask you for your thoughts regarding the tragic events unfolding in Palestine and Israel. My heart is in agony. Apparently over 6000 bombs and counting have been dropped on Gaza as retaliation for the massacre perpetrated against Israel by a faction of Hamas. It goes without saying that one life lost is one too many.
I don't think I can say anything more than you just have. I hate Israel's Gaza policy, I hate Hamas, and I hate watching as countless innocents--children especially--are made the victims of all of it.
I feel you. I feel as if I’m going insane at times, as the US beats the war drums for Israel, whose inhuman occupation is clearly the root of the problem. One thing both idiot sides of our idiot government can agree on is the relative worthlessness of Palestinian life.
Even though a Christian (a near permanently exhausted and demoralised RC to be precise!) I've generally shared your scepticism until recently, when encounters with the UK Catholic Worker movement and the Quakers have made me think again (not that they are representative, I readily concede).
One thing I have always found strange about the Christian tradition is the idea that spirits such as angels and demons are bodiless (obviously, this is not what scripture conveys, nor is it universally believed, but it is certainly the dominant view). Do you believe that such a thing as disembodied spirits is even possible? After all, if "matter" is just embodied spirit, and bodies are the medium through which spirits communicate with each other and thus become not merely empty abstract "I"s but actual contingent persons with content/histories/relationships, then what kind of life could a "disembodied" spirit possibly live? Wouldn't any communication with other finite creatures, and therefore any real existence at all, be impossible?
And if it is the case that a disembodied spirit is impossible, then when you talk about the existence of fairies, angels, spirits, principalities, etc., what mode(s) of physical/embodied existence do you imagine they possess? Perhaps something like the risen body of Christ?
The idea of angels as wholly incorporeal is a late and contested notion in the tradition. In late antiquity, neither Jews nor Christians (nor pagans, for that matter) believed in disembodied spirits. Only God was thought to be beyond all embodiment. Aquinas’s angels are a late aberration.
I hope that one day you will write an article on the subject of angels, preferably not only on the history of doctrinal development but also on your personal angelology based on your encyclopaedical knowledge of many religious traditions.
I would not even entertain the idea that you don't believe in angels. You value beauty in all its forms and a world without angels would be a dreary place.
I didn't mean to imply that it was ALWAYS the dominant view, only that it is currently the dominant view.
Regardless, if fairies/angels etc. have a corporeality that is far "higher" than ours (that is, if they have a physical existence similar to the resurrected Christ) then how can some of these spirits, namely Paul's principalities/powers/demons, be Fallen? Isn't the "flesh," this present corporeal nature, simply a result of the Fall, and so shouldn't all Fallen beings inhabit this mode of corporeality?
Paul would still have regarded human beings and angels as belonging to distinct spheres of being by nature—earthly and heavenly. Only the former is capable of mortality (flesh and blood).
Wait, he takes issue with the banal & trivial observation (not even a “claim,” really, since it is almost self-evident) that the Church has at times proved corrupt & divisive?
Well apparently I didn’t say it in an appropriately pious way, smothered in assurances that, even so, it has always been the pure and immaculate bride of Christ. Yada, as they say, yada.
It’s the same “we never change, but when we do we won’t call it change. Development is a less ugly word”. Even pope Francis (who emphasizes development and doctrinal correction more than any other pope I’m aware of) can sometimes fall back into that same tendency.
You know, if I enjoyed the privilege of declaring doctrine ex meipso, non ex consensu ecclesiae, I would abuse it so frightfully. You have to credit the modern popes with restraint.
Ok fair. If I were burdened with such a task I would start by declaring the existence of nature spirits dogmatic truth and open a commission on deified animals capacity for speech in the eschaton lol
I can't imagine how intellectually taxing it must be to be a Catholic traditionalist. It's enough for me to worry about whether God exists; I think an emotional need to believe the Catholic Church possessed an unchanged deposit of faith guarded by an infallible magisterium would break my mind.
It is mean-spirited of me, but boy do I like to see you set the record straight like this. Exhilaratingly grumpy. That last paragraph, ooph. If he isn't seeing stars after that then he isn't paying attention. But not paying attention seems to be the problem here, so he's probably fine. More's the pity.
As a longtime admirer of your work, I have one humble plea. Write an article or articles on marketing! Completely unrelated to most of your work, but I've been trying to integrate a lot of your work into the philosophical assumptions of modernity and how they are applied in the world of markets / marketing.
Yeah, but you know what my spin would be: nihilism...capitalism fabricating desire in order to tantalize, sate, and then surpass them with new desires...the machine of production and consumption...
I'm quite glued to your work, but I have to admit I find the language frequently difficult. Your wording is fiercely accurate, precise, and intentional. I just don't usually have the words you casually use committed to memory. My education and obsession with video games as child have failed me.
Btw, I quite enjoyed your talks on Gospel Conversations in Australia that were posted to YouTube recently. It's good to know that there is beautiful theology out there, instead of the banal and childish drivel I hear from most American churchgoers.
Grew up RC, identified as vaguely Protestant for years (unaware of EO), left seminary feeling more RC. Discovered DBH, and I'm SO done with RC and P. Life's too short for Levering, Stump, Trads, et al. Freedom.
The two EO parishes I’ve attended have been overrun with disciples of Jay Dyer, Peter Heers, and perhaps if I’m lucky Ancient Faith radio listeners. You think you are going to get Bulgakov but instead you get fundies with beards and incense. I far prefer the local RCC parish I’ve been attending that welcomes LGBT parishioners, has centering prayer on the 1st/3rd Saturday every month, and a reading group discussing the Bhagavad Gita.
I hear you. That and my soulless suburban location have prevented me from giving it a try, even though I'm only 45 minutes from at Vladimir's seminary.
It’s a hit-and-miss sort of thing.
The priests I met were more subtle, one in particular who sadly left the area for a professorship in Scandinavia was a pleasure to briefly meet. The parishioners left me cold - one parish totally overrun, the other much nicer parish with mainly elderly folks and one young couple, the male partner being one of the people who explicitly recommended Dyer as an exponent of orthodoxy, philosophy, church history, and theology. It was too much. The Catholics have seemed outwardly normal so far.
Couldn’t agree more
Feser, Rooney...snore
It makes me miss David Burrell all the more keenly.
Well, much of the magisterium quite liked him. One of the oddities of good Catholics like Levering is that they tend to defend an understanding of Catholic teaching that the Catholic church itself does not insist upon.
I read TAA with quite a bit of interest — if I had encountered your arguments earlier, it might have saved me from a couple decades of reactionary atheism. I am neither philosopher nor theologian, so I would appreciate if you or someone else in the comments could survey my provisional understanding and correct any misapprehensions.
History, if it is to be something other than an end-less sequence (endless as in without telos, one damn thing after another) needs to have its appearances saved by some rational account. The appearances themselves are rather discouraging: error, contingency, arbitrariness, Cleopatra’s nose, etc. In response to this challenge, one can either wax imperturbably ahistorical or wane into an irrational metaphysical empiricism. One might be tempted to invoke the Holy Spirit to save the appearances, but at each juncture it becomes very difficult to demonstrate that one is not merely invoking a phantom epicycle — which is not to deny the reality of providence, but merely point to the inadequacy of our historically-enmeshed perspectives (as well as the frequently ad hoc nature of such invocations). Besides, what the book terms the “phylogenetic” explanation is always waiting in the wings to laugh our stories off the stage and deliver the envoi, which, if we have not reasoned aright, is a seemingly inescapable nihilism.
I might not be correct here, but hovering behind the book seems to be an acknowledgment that a Hegelian approach to history might plausibly be invoked as the necessary rational account — but that Hegel’s own conclusions, besides being unpalatable, correspond neither to Christianity’s originating impetus nor to its eschatological horizon. Christian tradition, then, does not develop in a manner that can be exhaustively explained in a purely dialectical fashion — this doesn’t mean, of course, that its development is entirely irrational, only that a Hegel-inspired account, in trying to do too much, inevitably falls short shy of the eschaton — and in its failure might drag us into total skepticism, if we’ve been credulous enough to make it the bearer of our hope.
Our hope, ultimately, is Christ in both his historical personhood and transcendent divinity. His initiating apocalyptic irruption into history orients our hopes toward their only possible fulfillment — though what we might dare hope is also something that has needed the elaboration of history to express itself properly. True doctrine is never irrational, but it also doesn’t hand over history complete, transparent, and wrapped in a metaphysical bow. We might keep shaking the box but an angel with banderole unfurled will always preempt us: “Do not open till eschaton!” And we keep dreaming amongst ourselves, as reasonably as we might, about what glories await.
That’s a pretty thorough and accurate precis.
Whew, that’s a relief. I’m also glad that your arguments do not merely repackage “the familiar notion that there is a fundamental intuition or non-conceptualizable religious experience that is the real core of everything toward which Christians have been striving.” Important as those experiences are, their lack of conceptualization can be frustrating for those of us who might want something a little more definite to say about our hopes — as definite, at least, as a productively vague creedal statement that can be both assented to and elaborated upon. Also, those of us who are sorely deficient in that “oceanic feeling” are relieved to still be invited to the feast, even though our mystical intuition may be lacking. Then again, if we all had the temperament of Traherne, wouldn’t most theological argumentation simply evaporate?
Incidentally, I read a John Milbank's tweet today (very succinct because of the limited wordcount on X), which seems quite relevant to Levering's case: "Sustaining passion without prejudice is hard. Therefore hard for humans to be rounded people."
But this is true for most of us really, bar the true saints of scholarship. I have had my fair share of manning ideological barricades and I have no doubt that I will not come to even a semblance of true objectivity in this life.
David, I apologize for veering off topic, but I'd like to ask you for your thoughts regarding the tragic events unfolding in Palestine and Israel. My heart is in agony. Apparently over 6000 bombs and counting have been dropped on Gaza as retaliation for the massacre perpetrated against Israel by a faction of Hamas. It goes without saying that one life lost is one too many.
I don't think I can say anything more than you just have. I hate Israel's Gaza policy, I hate Hamas, and I hate watching as countless innocents--children especially--are made the victims of all of it.
I feel you. I feel as if I’m going insane at times, as the US beats the war drums for Israel, whose inhuman occupation is clearly the root of the problem. One thing both idiot sides of our idiot government can agree on is the relative worthlessness of Palestinian life.
Only recently (was prompted to search in light of recent atrocities) came across the UK's Sabeel-Kairos group: https://www.sabeel-kairos.org.uk/category/about-us/about-sabeel-kairos/ Details of similar US-based group, here (you may already be aware of them; if so, sorry): https://www.fosna.org/
Even though a Christian (a near permanently exhausted and demoralised RC to be precise!) I've generally shared your scepticism until recently, when encounters with the UK Catholic Worker movement and the Quakers have made me think again (not that they are representative, I readily concede).
Why are you going insane?
Dr. Hart,
One thing I have always found strange about the Christian tradition is the idea that spirits such as angels and demons are bodiless (obviously, this is not what scripture conveys, nor is it universally believed, but it is certainly the dominant view). Do you believe that such a thing as disembodied spirits is even possible? After all, if "matter" is just embodied spirit, and bodies are the medium through which spirits communicate with each other and thus become not merely empty abstract "I"s but actual contingent persons with content/histories/relationships, then what kind of life could a "disembodied" spirit possibly live? Wouldn't any communication with other finite creatures, and therefore any real existence at all, be impossible?
And if it is the case that a disembodied spirit is impossible, then when you talk about the existence of fairies, angels, spirits, principalities, etc., what mode(s) of physical/embodied existence do you imagine they possess? Perhaps something like the risen body of Christ?
The idea of angels as wholly incorporeal is a late and contested notion in the tradition. In late antiquity, neither Jews nor Christians (nor pagans, for that matter) believed in disembodied spirits. Only God was thought to be beyond all embodiment. Aquinas’s angels are a late aberration.
I hope that one day you will write an article on the subject of angels, preferably not only on the history of doctrinal development but also on your personal angelology based on your encyclopaedical knowledge of many religious traditions.
I would not even entertain the idea that you don't believe in angels. You value beauty in all its forms and a world without angels would be a dreary place.
I didn't mean to imply that it was ALWAYS the dominant view, only that it is currently the dominant view.
Regardless, if fairies/angels etc. have a corporeality that is far "higher" than ours (that is, if they have a physical existence similar to the resurrected Christ) then how can some of these spirits, namely Paul's principalities/powers/demons, be Fallen? Isn't the "flesh," this present corporeal nature, simply a result of the Fall, and so shouldn't all Fallen beings inhabit this mode of corporeality?
Paul would still have regarded human beings and angels as belonging to distinct spheres of being by nature—earthly and heavenly. Only the former is capable of mortality (flesh and blood).
Wait, he takes issue with the banal & trivial observation (not even a “claim,” really, since it is almost self-evident) that the Church has at times proved corrupt & divisive?
Well apparently I didn’t say it in an appropriately pious way, smothered in assurances that, even so, it has always been the pure and immaculate bride of Christ. Yada, as they say, yada.
It’s the same “we never change, but when we do we won’t call it change. Development is a less ugly word”. Even pope Francis (who emphasizes development and doctrinal correction more than any other pope I’m aware of) can sometimes fall back into that same tendency.
When the president does it, it's not illegal. When the pope does it, it's not change.
Come on David, the pope simply elaborates on what mother magisterium has already herself affirmed lol. She even kinda knew it already *mysteriously*
You know, if I enjoyed the privilege of declaring doctrine ex meipso, non ex consensu ecclesiae, I would abuse it so frightfully. You have to credit the modern popes with restraint.
Ok fair. If I were burdened with such a task I would start by declaring the existence of nature spirits dogmatic truth and open a commission on deified animals capacity for speech in the eschaton lol
I just had some sort of CCD flashback. I may need to go lie down.
I can't imagine how intellectually taxing it must be to be a Catholic traditionalist. It's enough for me to worry about whether God exists; I think an emotional need to believe the Catholic Church possessed an unchanged deposit of faith guarded by an infallible magisterium would break my mind.
Trust me, it used to stress me out to no end
It is mean-spirited of me, but boy do I like to see you set the record straight like this. Exhilaratingly grumpy. That last paragraph, ooph. If he isn't seeing stars after that then he isn't paying attention. But not paying attention seems to be the problem here, so he's probably fine. More's the pity.
I love Matt. I just want him to wake up.
Love the book!
You say things I've always intuitively felt.
As a longtime admirer of your work, I have one humble plea. Write an article or articles on marketing! Completely unrelated to most of your work, but I've been trying to integrate a lot of your work into the philosophical assumptions of modernity and how they are applied in the world of markets / marketing.
Hmmmm. I’d have to think about that one.
Please do not write an article on marketing.
Yeah, but you know what my spin would be: nihilism...capitalism fabricating desire in order to tantalize, sate, and then surpass them with new desires...the machine of production and consumption...
Right, but all that is obvious … It’s like arguing that Liberace was too flamboyant.
Yet, as part of the machine of information-consumption, I MUST GENERATE CONTENT!!! Else I shall perish for want of supply-side efficiency.
David Bentley ChatGPT.
Yes please lol
I'm going to be posting a piece on LinkedIn tomorrow on it. Would love your feedback. Could I send the link in the comments section?