body of death – Forging Ploughshares

The Irreligious Arc of David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart’s recent Valentine’s Day revelation (in his Substack) of being temperamentally irreligious, not disposed to belief in his own resurrection (though he is convinced of Christ’s), and his lack of personal spiritual devotion, contained doubts and expressions of disbelief with which I am personally well-acquainted, but I suppose I have never taken my own proclivities as seriously as Hart does his. In fact, I have never considered either my capacity for belief nor my tendency toward doubt to be of primary importance. Belief is no great accomplishment, and to think it is, is precisely the problem in imagining doubt is determinative of moral engagement. Hart’s “dishonesty,” as he terms it, is not really his keeping his irreligious tendencies a secret (“no natural aptitude for religious sentiment, enthusiasm, devotion, or ritual observance”) but his abandonment of any hope in making a difference by forsaking the church and Christian identity. This failure is no revelation, however, as its unfolding is evident in the arc of his work and thought.

Given Hart’s Confessions, How Can it Be That All Shall Be Saved?

It is focus on personal salvation, going to heaven (missing hell) when you die, that Hart supposedly traded for a more expansive universal salvation in That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven Hell and Universal Salvation. He was so insistent on universal salvation, that he considered “hopeful universalism” a “timid” form of faith, and his more robust dogmatic universalism the only honest option. He can know universal salvation is the case, and hope need not enter into it.

But what can this mean for one who cannot “conceive of any kind of postmortem existence” and for whom life after death is perceived as “banal, tedious, or horrific” and who seems to prefer personal annihilation (Hart says he “could unresentfully cease upon the midnight without pain, knowing that afterward no one would bother me”)? He concludes, “Never having been fully convinced that existence is much of a blessing, I cannot think of nonexistence as obviously a curse.” Everyone may miss hell, only to go to the grave and obliteration, but what about the universal salvation upon which he was so insistent?

He abandoned hope for knowledge it seems, only to play his own game of “oddly unregenerate ‘rational’ fundamentalism” (of the sort he attributes to William Lane Craig). In light of his revelations about near total lack of belief in resurrection (which is Christian salvation), this turns out to have been mere posturing and formal argumentation (my original critique here). Hart’s tone, his entertaining arrogance, is not a side-light of his work but is gained from a perspective in which formal argumentation replaces real-world engagement in combating evil and living out the Christian life. While one might be certain of formal statements about God and salvation, does this form of certainty give rise to ethical behavior, to resistance to evil, to assuming personal responsibility, or does it in fact have the opposite effect? (Hart confesses, he has little to no interest in the church or in the practice of Christianity, which is the place of moral engagement in combating evil.)

The Problem of Evil Looms Too Large

Among Hart’s revelations is that he finds the problem of evil irresolvable and therefore admits a sort of defeat. “I have never, moreover, been able to get very far past the problem of evil when it chooses to spring up in the road before me like the Lord in the path of Moses on the way back to Egypt; nothing the staretz Zosima says provides an adequate response to Vanya’s ‘rebellion’.”

Hart has long resisted any notion of a theodicy. A position I appreciated enough that I used his Doors of the Sea in the classroom, but even then I detected he was making a weak case for the problem of evil, inasmuch as it never touched upon God. In order for God to not be implicated in the problem of evil, Hart calls upon divine apatheia, which is beyond comprehension. A book devoted to disclaiming theodicy, reverses course in the case of God so as to provide Him, if no one else, a way out through God’s transcendence. God is beyond evil and the world, and Christ does not enter into the equation (which, as I understand it, is God’s real-world answer to the problem of evil). For Hart, the Cross, rather than being an unfolding defeat of evil (as an ongoing battle) is “a triumph of divine apatheia” (p. 81).

Hart’s confident universalism and divine apatheia function in much the same way. Formal cause is protected in both instances, by dismissing the contingencies of evil as entering into the equation. He never explains the how of universal salvation, but affirms it as a formal necessity, and by the same token evil is not explained and yet God is formally free of evil. This is accomplished not by focusing on what is knowable about God in Christ, but by trusting primarily in what is apophatic, ahistorical, and ultimately unknowable. One might speak of this trust as “certain” as part of a formal argument but it is a certainty that has nothing to do with the real world-defeat of evil found in the historical Jesus. In Christ, God does not wash his hands of evil, but directly engages it.

The fault is not in the logic of the argument but the limited perspective. His dogmatic universalism plays the role of a theodicy, in that it relieves him of any personal responsibility of organized resistance to evil. Then he can paint the bleakest picture of evil, and resist any possible explanation, including the explanation that Christ is defeating evil.

I too would resist a theodicy, other than that God in Christ is defeating evil, but this is not a formal argument and does not explain evil, and it falls short of the sort of formal certainty upon which Hart depends. In fact, this may be unsatisfactory for one who demands certainty and makes no room for hope. Belief in Christ does not function as a formal argument or theory, rather there is real world resistance and hope of defeat of evil in the eschaton.

There is no Hope in the Church

Of his books, the one I appreciated most, may have been the one in which he drops the mode of formal argument. Hart painted a bleak picture of the church in Tradition and Apocalypse, suggesting there is no relation between the church of the apostolic era and the institution that took its place. The latter, he claims completely contradicts the former. There is no continuity, no “organic vitality,” no “living idea” which can possibly connect them (pp. 826-829). In this book however, the entire argument depends on the apocalyptic hope of the title bringing the kingdom to a future perfection (see my previous discussion, here).

What he did not tell us at that time, is that he has given up on the church. “I find myself now barely able to abide most hymnody, litanies, the psalter, or even (I am ashamed to say) sacrament.” His identity is no longer that of a Christian: “Most important of all, it seems to me, is the absence of any interest in ‘Christian identity’ on the part of someone with my irreligious tendencies.” Apart from apocalyptic hope, which he has apparently abandoned, this reduces Tradition and Apocalypse to a negative history without apocalyptic possibilities.

In the book Hart did not attempt to address the gaps he notes, which make later forms of the faith a contradiction of the Christianity of the New Testament and the early church. He admitted, he is offering no practical solutions and no program of action. It is now clear that he needed no answer, no program of action, because he does not identify with any church, including the Orthodox Church. He has no interest in “Christian identity” or identity with any church, most especially the Orthodox Church (he describes his particular dislike of Orthodoxy), which in his public persona he never abandoned.

I concluded a review of his book with this statement: “Mine is a more peaceful and anti-institutional inclination (while recognizing none have escaped Christendom and its seeming necessities). I presume we really should attempt to reduplicate the economy, the nonviolence, and the disempowerment of the first church and the first Christians so as to put in place the lived reality of the peace of Christ. I presume it is not enough to name the failures, without specifying their nature and striving to rid ourselves of the specific forms of violence, the oppression and contradictions which have negated and continue to negate the gospel preached by Jesus and the Apostles. Specifying the nature of this failure comes with the practical necessity of doing something about it; an imperative of which Hart remains free.”

I wonder how many have been pressed into service of institutional Christianity following Hart’s public example, not realizing his true, secular stance?

Empty Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism

Hart also confesses that he finds the Japanese Tea Ceremony preferrable to celebration of the Eucharist, and would make the Tea Ceremony the center of any religion he invented. His glorification of the East and especially of Japan, already betrayed orientalist notions (as explained by Edward Said), which scholars of Japan recognize as part of the nationalist mythologizing (Nihonjinron), to which non-Japanese are peculiarly susceptible. The irony is that the Tea Ceremony has been traced, some argue, to an imitation of the communion service, which is Said’s point: Orientalism is primarily a reification of the East undertaken by the West.

The significance of Hart’s focus on Vedantic religion and privileging of the East, and raising it to religious significance, is the end-point of his gnostic Neo-Platonism, favoring formal and rational arguments. He had previously rejected the bodily – enfleshed resurrection, arguing that Paul was a dualist, holding to a Platonist split between flesh and spirit, arguing that resurrected bodies have no flesh and that the writers of the New Testament were, indeed, denigrating the flesh and did not hold to the notion that flesh was a designation for the “sinful nature.” [1] It is no surprise he has now gone a step further, not only relinquishing the importance of the enfleshing work of Christ in the body, but giving up even on the vague survival (spiritual resurrection) he formerly espoused.

As I previously pointed out (here), Hart is wrong in presuming that it is Protestants who have innovated the notion that Jesus was raised and ascended in a fleshly body (it is the overwhelming position of the early Church) and he is wrong in presuming that Paul’s contrast between spirit and soul (in I Cor. 15) is typical of the ancients. But Hart is bent upon making his Platonism Christian by reading the New Testament in the context of contemporaneous thought, presuming Paul and John are mostly reflecting and not critiquing the received understanding found in Plato and the Gnostics.

Hart has long argued for a standard rationality, inclusive of Christianity which, as with his own thought, does not challenge the pagan worldview. He presumes there is a given understanding (knowledge of God as creator and law giver) available to all persons (whose capacity for reason remains largely intact in spite of sin) and that salvation does not pertain to epistemology. For him, flesh means being mortal and not sinful. As he puts it, “In the New Testament, ‘flesh’ does not mean ‘sinful nature or ‘humanity under judgment’ or even ‘fallen flesh.’ It just means ‘flesh,’ in the bluntly physical sense. . ..” This means death is a natural outworking of creation, and salvation is deliverance from what God calls good (a “shedding of flesh”).

However, when Paul describes the “body of death” and connects it to the working of the flesh, he certainly does not mean that this flows naturally from what God has created or that sin is an inevitable result of creation. In presuming Paul is just an extension of his time (more of the same), Hart misses the deep nature of the Pauline critique of human wisdom and he falls into the very dualism constitutive of this wisdom.

Conclusion

The justice enacted in Christ, deals in the realm of human history and human experience, and allows for human understanding of the finite kind and not the transcendent reason of formal argumentation (Hart’s focus). Christians might refer to certainty, but it is a certainty in progress, working itself out in history, and engaged not in terms of an absolute philosophical certainty but the “hopeful” certainty of faith. The former need not take into account the realm of evil or the contingencies of history. The latter, is a humble “hopeful” certainty which deals in the reality of human perspective and the existential fact of suffering and evil. It is not clear Hart has shifted or abandoned a belief he might have once had, rather it is doubtful that he ever adhered to a humble, hopeful, faith centered on the historical work of Christ. His recent confessions indicate the end point of the trajectory traceable throughout the course of his work.

[1] David Bentley Hart, “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients,” in Church Life Journal (July 26, 2018), https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/

Philosophy with Paul and Freud

Before laying out the philosophical possibilities of Paul and Freud, it should be noted that both provide a peculiar impetus for engaging in philosophical discourse: people are sick and philosophy is a means of aiding the diagnosis. Philosophy is not a realm apart from what it means to be human but is a concentrated articulation of this predicament. The reason for taking up philosophy with Freud and Paul is not the reason with which philosophy tends to justify itself – as a quest for ultimate reality, the articulation of what is ontologically the case. Philosophy puts on display the failures we all experience but it also provides an alternative means of understanding the needed cure. So, the point of delving into philosophy in this instance (which is not every instance), is primarily theological. Philosophy provides alternative access, a well-articulated demonstration, a clear presentation of the human disease addressed by the Great Physician.

The Apostle and the founder of psychoanalysis describe the human subject as consisting of three registers, which are simultaneously interdependent and antagonistic, and these registers not only pertain to the (sick) individual but describe the three possibilities of philosophy. This philosophy in three parts revolves around three facets or three surfaces created by language functioning as prime reality. Philosophy, like the human subject, consists of language as a medium, language as providing an object, or language as a mode of negation. Paul refers to these three parts as the ego, the law, and the body of death, and Freud references the same basic parts as the ego, the superego, and the id (or it). The English word “ego” is a transliteration of the Greek word Paul deploys to refer to himself, and he situates this “I” as an effect of its relation to law and death (thus he will speak of the dissolution of the “I” as a cure).

Freud, in his final period, arrives at his three-part construct with his recognition that Eros (sex, life, pleasure) is inadequate to explain the sickness of the subject, so he posits Thanatos or death as a second instinct, and with his positing of this death instinct he arrives at the tripartite subject. This would amount not only to a new topography of the Subject but a different understanding of the energetics at work in the Subject. No longer did Freud see mankind as controlled by one goal, rather man seemed bound towards death in and through the detour that is life. It was not that death as a force (independent of man) overwhelms man, but that man stands opposed to himself and brings about his own destruction. He takes death up into himself, all the time imagining that it is the means to secure or save the self (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 54). Jacques Lacan will note that with this positing of a second instinct, all of Freudian theory can be translated from the biological into a linguistic realm. He pictures the three parts of the subject as three sides of a primordial or founding linguistic construct (a lie). In this sense (and Lacan notes as much), it is a spreading out of the Pauline category of law, and the human problem with the law, to include language per se.

How we read Paul in regard to the law will determine the role accorded to language and philosophy. If we read Paul and the New Testament as primarily concerned with reconciling us to the law, this is an indicator of the philosophical stance that will result. It is no accident that it is Anselm, who posits the definitive nature of the law in our approach to God and in the meaning of the atonement, while at the same time incorporating Platonic philosophy into theology. The point is not to blame Anselm but to point to his founding of scholasticism (the fusion of theology with Greek thought) as the end point of a process in which language per se (in the law, in his description of the subject, in his description of reality) becomes primary. Thus, the philosophical/theological task is, like the job of every good lawyer, to describe/prescribe the law of the Father (Anselm pictures it as a zero-sum game in which there is a precise logic at work). This is the Aristotelian Philosopher king sort of philosophy in which there is an unquestioning wisdom attached to this order of knowing, not perhaps so much in the details as in its very authoritative status as an order of wisdom.

In this understanding, determining reality and how it is to be negotiated is the joint undertaking of philosophy and theology as both are engaged in the same discourse (law, logic). The law of the Father gives us metaphysics, Newtonian science, and consists of a singular (conscious) surface which prevails from Plato to Descartes. Anselm’s law of the cross is precisely a philosophical, legal, requirement and his approach to God is through a linguistic formula (the ontological argument). Everything is ontological, or in Freudian terms “phallocentric,” so that theology is an extension of philosophy (ontotheology) as language puts all things in our grasp. The law is the logos is the Logos without interruption.

On the other hand, if we recognize that Paul is actually suggesting that the law is in no way normative or even regulative but is, in fact, enmeshed in contradiction (due to sin), our philosophical stance will be a turn from metaphysics (concerned as it is, primarily, with how to describe a harmonious reality). Now we have to do with a discontinuity, a questioning of the law, and a turn to the human subject. Paul describes two contradictory laws at work in the mind and body and we are, according to Paul, ruled by a law that, by definition, we do not know. Sin has deceived us with regard to the law and we do not any longer have control or understand what law is at work within us. Now our concern is not so much with keeping the law, describing the law, extending the law, but there is a questioning of the law.

With the passage through Luther and the philosophic shift from Kant to Hegel, philosophy as psychology comes to this second element of the subject. Prior to Kant it was just a matter of looking into the mirror of nature and allowing Being to disclose itself but now the categories of perception receiving the phenomena of the world are removed from the thing in itself (the noumena). Just as Kant notes that Descartes’ “I think” in no way discloses “the thing that thinks,” he notes that there is a necessary obscuring in perception of the reality which stands behind it. It is not that perception is an illusion but it contains apriori categories (the ontic) which do not coincide with the ontological. This difference is illustrated in a series of unresolvable antinomies: time and space are limited by a perceived beginning and yet are infinite and necessary categories; the world is composed of simple parts and yet these simple parts are nowhere in existence; spontaneity is part of the causality of the universe and yet the world takes place solely in accord with the laws of nature and without spontaneity; there belongs to the world a being that is absolutely necessary and yet this being nowhere exists. Where pre-Kantian philosophy would mark this up to the illusion of false appearances, which it is the task of philosophy to get beyond, Kant does not denounce this appearance of reality as secondary but he raises the question as to the very possibility of appearances.

With Hegel there is the presumption that the Kantian antinomies are not mere gaps in understanding but pertain to reality. Reality itself is incomplete, built on antagonism, and dependent on death and absence. God himself, in Hegel’s taking up of Luther, is made complete only in his dying on the cross. Sin and salvation, or good and evil (among other contrasting pairs), have the same ontological ground (to which there is no alternative), so the same structure and categories inform each. The goal is not to overcome the gaps or difference (to defeat evil) but to conceive the gaps, which seem to keep the subject from arriving at full self-identity, as the origin of the Subject (and thus to reorient the Subject).

Philosophy up to Hegel is seeking to harmonize reality, presuming that the gaps or antinomies can be explained or covered over. Kant posits the impossibility of this overcoming while Hegel begins with the necessity of this difference. Hegel too is presuming a comprehensive program for philosophy, but he presumes it is just a matter of counting in the antinomies, gaps, death, and nothing, as not only part of reality but productive of reality. The antagonism at the heart of identity through difference, the dialectic, is at the very center of the negative force generating reality.

In Lacanian terms, we pass from the masculine identity with the law to a feminine questioning of the law. The masculine-superego-metaphysical attempt to say it all is ruled out of court as the thing that thinks – the subject herself – eludes us. Thinking of Richard Rorty, nature turns out to be a mirror that excludes us from its reflection. The history of philosophy might be mostly reduced to one long gaze in the mirror, and with post-Kantian philosophy the mirror comes up for examination. The philosophic mirror stage was a long time in coming but now the phenomena of knowing becomes the primary concern as “taking a look” turns out to be inadequate.

Between this masculine, superego, law-based register and the feminine, ego, contradictory and inaccessible law-based register there stands the id or the real or the third phase in philosophy. Here the focus is upon what underlies the difference between the masculine and feminine – the pure absence or nothing. The Freudian, Lacanian place in philosophy would assign this idic or real the primary role. If there is a positive unfolding of nous or spirit in Hegel, here there is no question that primacy is given to death and the power of death taken up in the negating power of a lie. Thus, this third phase is the necessary pointer to that which lies beyond the subject and the powers of philosophy. The atheism of Lacan and Žižek is a full-blown Pauline sort of recognition of the necessity of suspending the law and the God associated with this sinful orientation. The punishing effects of the sinful orientation to the law, or the disease of being caught up in the antagonism of dialectic, is the domain of this idic third phase in philosophy. Here philosophy becomes most theological as this diagnosis of the human condition is the proper realm of theology – a realm relinquished by theology and which thus made room for and gave rise to psychoanalysis.

I do not mean to suggest these three possibilities are exhaustive of the relation between theology and philosophy. This clears the ground though, for a different sort of exchange, neither masculine nor feminine nor idic, between philosophy and theology. This fourth way begins where Romans 7 and where Žižek and Lacan leave off, in that it proposes a dissolution of the real and a suspension of the power of death as the controlling third term in the subject and in philosophy.