Tag: Neo-Platonism

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/

The Necessity of Nietzsche: An Apocalyptic Philosophy for an Apocalyptic Theology

One’s philosophical orientation and preferences are reflected in their theology and vice versa but it may be that a particular theology inevitably requires or depends upon its philosophical expression, apart from which the theology would not exist. Whether one is Platonic or Aristotelian (in Nietzschean terms they are both fallen post-Socratics) may make a slight theological difference but the presumption is that “ordinary avenues of philosophic reason” are adequate for Augustinian, Thomistic, or certain Protestant theological leanings. One may need to tweak his Plato or Aristotle but the presumption is that the philosophy and theology are more or less interconnected if not exactly interchangeable. There is no questioning of reason, language, or human psychology, at least not enough to bring the enterprise to a halt. Thus, the Augustinian shift is guided by Neo-Platonism (Augustine equates Plato to Moses) in the same way Thomism is Aristotelian (for Thomas, Aristotle is “the philosopher”). Anselm of Canterbury, in both his philosophic arguments and his atonement theory, is the proper father of scholasticism in his pure distillation of a theology guided by Platonic philosophy. Modern philosophy and theology, in its Cartesian presumptions, will follow a predictable, interlocked pattern (Platonic and Anselmian). So too, Nominalism might as well name both a theology and philosophy as the theology is determined by the philosophy.

It is only in recognizing that theology and philosophy became inextricably interwoven in shared presumptions and foundations (summed up in the term “ontotheology”) that Friedrich Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God can be taken as both theological and philosophical. For Nietzsche Christianity was “Platonism for the masses,” so his pronouncement is prophetic (the spirit in which his Zarathustra makes it) of the coming collapse of Western thought and religion. The demise of the God of the philosophers is implied in the demise of the Christian God, but the death of God is not simply a metaphor for Nietzsche. This death simultaneously points to the role of Platonism and Platonic Christianity in its denial or obscuring of the role of death.

The death of God in Christ on the Cross was, for Luther, the point for challenging scholasticism (the fusion of Greek and Christian thought) and what Luther called “the theologians of glory.” Hegel will take up the Lutheran refrain, not simply as a challenge to the Aristotelian God of pure thought, but also as a new founding moment in the understanding of how God and those created in his image must take up death in the founding of an authentic subjectivity. Hegel’s tarrying with the negative is a zeroing in on the Lutheran challenge to the God of the philosophers but it is also a challenge to modern (Cartesian) notions of an ego-based reason and subjectivity. Nietzsche takes the refrain one step further to declare God and the philosophy and morality attached to him as dead. As with Hegel, his is a call for a new form of radical subjectivity.

There is a shared recognition of the orientation to death that is thematic in Hegel and his heirs. Though Nietzsche is often pitted against Hegel – Hegel is philosopher of the system and Nietzsche is anti-system – yet they share reaction to Kant and the uncovering of a new form of subjectivity centered on the exposure of mortality and death. In the end, Hegel and his disciples (Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Žižek) are the arch-conservatives who brilliantly recognize the darkness of nihilism and imagine its mechanisms can only be manipulated (death drive – the real can be toyed with but must ultimately be submitted to) so as to provide a less painful outcome. Nietzsche names the nihilism and calls for a new religious order – a new myth. Where Hegel and his followers will privilege philosophy and presume it takes precedence over religion, Nietzsche shares with Kierkegaardian existentialism and theological apocalypticism the recognition of the need for the breaking in of a new world order.

His depiction of himself as the singular Antichrist, the marker of a new age on the order of B.C. and A.D., may not be accurate in his sense that he was alone but the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, (the French postmodern turn) but also of Martin Heidegger, all take their inspiration, if not their existence, from Nietzsche. He considered himself (as depicted in his autobiographical work Ecce Homo) philosophical dynamite:

I know my lot. One day my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous—to a crisis like none there has been on earth, to the most profound collision of conscience, to a verdict invoked against everything that until then had been believed, demanded, held sacred. I am no man, I am dynamite.

Whether or not he was the match, the fuse, or the beginning of the explosion, (or is he only, as Bertrand Russell portrayed him, a literary figure) there is no question that the modern world begins to come undone in his wake. It is not just his appropriation by the Nazis, but he is linked with a new form of thought – apocalyptic in its import – (an ironic characterization as he sees religious apocalypticism as the problem). It is this apocalyptic element (the world unchained from its Sun and the need for a new religious myth) that distinguishes him from the mainstream of post-Kantian thinkers.  

What he calls “Socratism” is the refusal to deal with human finitude and his return to mythology, his uber man, his will to power, and especially his myth of eternal recurrence are his attempt to recreate the pre-Socratic dynamism. He recognizes that the success of human artifice – the Apollinarian (culture, art, literature, science) is in direct proportion to its direction and control of the Dionysian (passion, tragedy, emotion, revelry). The rise of the Over Men must freely move “beyond good and evil” with its notion of an objective or divine standard. Violence may be a necessity but the goal is that these new heroes, by whatever means, must lead humankind into accepting they are free spirits who can, of themselves, create a new order.

In his return to Dionysus, obscured by Plato, Nietzsche presumes the Platonic project to control the passions through reason is squelching the power of creativity. The Greek tragedian’s full acknowledgement of the Dionysian was an art form that gave inspiration to the shining light of Apollo. Plato’s reason repressed the tragic Dionysian truth (that we live to die) and simultaneously dismantled the Apollonarian manner of dealing with it in human culture.

Plato pictures passion as a black horse, which the charioteer or reason is to subdue by teaming with the white horse (spirit), the very imagery Freud will deploy in his depiction of the tripartite psyche:

…in its [the ego’s] relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who hast to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces (e.g., the superego). The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own.

 Freudian psychoanalysis is founded upon the notion that the ego, as the center of reason, can gain control over the passions of the id. Though Freud grows less confident in his belief that his “new science” can control the unreasonable idic forces, nonetheless his enterprise of psychoanalysis is dedicated to the prospect that the drives can be manipulated if not subdued. Lacan and Žižek, in this sense, are the true arch-conservative Hegelian-Freudian thinkers as the real of death drive is the final power of good and evil. The emptying out of the Cartesian subject in Marx and Freud takes on a laborious technical odor of politics and the clinic, while Nietzsche represents the call for an apocalyptic break beyond good and evil.

In this he represents the break that inspired the last great metaphysician, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger too presumes authentic existence has to confront the negating power of nothingness and death with a new power of freedom.

Anticipation…unlike inauthentic Being-towards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead, anticipation frees itself for accepting this. When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped. Anticipation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached.

Facing the fact of death is transformed by Heidegger into its own metaphysical freedom, which in his taking up of National Socialism demonstrates the bloody aspect of the Nietzschean enterprise he saw Hitler achieving. The Dionysian forces require sacrifice – and as Freud, Lacan and Žižek recognize and Heidegger did not, the rider of the black horse ultimately takes his orders from his mount. I would prefer, if these were the only choices, the more or less self-conscious nihilism of the latter thinkers to Heidegger’s enacted naïve nihilism, which brings us back to Nietzsche’s perception of his project as a resolution to nihilism.

Ironically, Nietzsche located the heart of this nihilism in what he perceived as the apocalyptic approach in Western religion, which set its hope on an ideal world to come or on the otherworldly heavens. For Nietzsche, apocalyptic Christianity was Platonic and he did not know of a Christianity focused on the redemption of this world. But as I have described it (here) this is the very definition of what is now called apocalyptic theology. With its inaugurated this-worldly eschatology, its deceived law of sin and death, and its recognition of God breaking into the world so as to give his own person, in Christ, as the subject of knowledge, apocalyptic theology is now anti-Platonic. Part of this apocalyptic understanding is the recognition that death denied is definitive of sin, and this is the power Christ has come to defeat. The point of this revelation is the realization of freedom from slavery to the controlling principles of the human order. God has invaded the world, not to eventually abandon it, but to reclaim it.

In other words, Nietzsche in his recognition of the pervasive nihilism inherent in Platonic and modern thought, in his focus on the Platonic/Christian obscuring of death, and in his recognition of the need for an apocalyptic break from the prevailing orientation, represents the shift that would give rise to a return to the original New Testament notion of apocalyptic salvation.  

If you would like to learn more register for our upcoming class (June 28th through August 20th), Philosophy for Theology, which will use my book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, as the text.