So I was more than a bit astonished to see the web attention given to my previous post on David Bentley Hart’s book. I didn’t know that my “screed” would require James’s spirited defense, and I certainly didn’t know I was accusing metaphysical Mormons or Humeans of being immoral. I thought the point of being a Humean was knowing that morality was merely conventional, and that secular Christianity might hang on as merely custom or prejudice, given that our dependence on such is inevitable. I’m certainly not certain that Nietzsche is right about Christianity; I do think Hart too uncritically agrees with him. So my Hart post below was more an intellectual experiment than anything definitive, and I’m following that experiment with another:
The pre-Christian world was cruel and capricious—Hart reminds us forcefully of the torture and murder it tolerated as a matter of course—precisely because it regarded particular persons as unreal. The truth was best seen by the philosopher who became dead to himself, who resigned himself to the ephemeral insignificance of his particular existence. Christianity was, in a way, the slave revolt Nietzsche described, a “cosmic rebellion” against the enslavement of each of us to natural and political necessity.
Christ freed us from the limitations of our merely biological natures through his perfect reconciliation of the nature of God and the nature of man. He was, the Nicene church fathers concluded, fully God and fully man, and his incarnation and victory over death divinized every man. So he freed each of us for unlimited love for every other person made in God’s image, and he was the foundation for a virtuous way of life based on “a vision of the good without precedent in pagan society.” Charity to all—both to friends and especially strangers—became the virtue most in accord with the truth about who we are. For Hart, the wonder is that anyone could have imagined the ideals of the Christian faith, given that they have so little support in any pre-Christian conception of who we are.
It is barely too strong to say that, according to Hart, Christ freed each of us from being nobody to being somebody—a being of infinite value. None of us has the destiny of being a slave, and death has been overcome for each of us. We are no longer defined by our merely biological natures because our nature is now to be both human and divine. From one view, there is no empirically verifiable evidence that death has been overcome for each particular divinized man. From another, the evidence is the unprecedented virtue flowing from unconditional or unconditioned love—love undistorted by the miserable, selfish perception of mortality— present among the early Christians, and that virtue’s indirect, historical transformation of the broader social and political world. The change in who each of us is caused by Christ deepened human consciousness. It made the inward existence of each us more profound and more mysterious through the presence of divinity in every nook and cranny of our natures.
Every feature of the personal liberation praised by our new atheists and our liberal intellectual sophisticates first came into the world in Christian communities. Even the Stoics didn’t approach the Christians in their indifference to a person’s social station. The Christians were the first to be completely opposed to slavery, for the raising of women to equality in marriage and elsewhere, for faithful loyalty in monogamous marriage, and for the brotherhood of men. For the Christians, the community of love wasn’t some otherworldly hope; it was formed by fulfilling the obligations of divinized beings here and now. Hell didn’t refer to some otherworldly, legalistic punishment but what we experience whenever we reject God’s love and the truth about who we are as persons created in his image . Our divinization through Christ includes what’s called life after death, but we can live lovingly liberated from death even before we die.
So Hart should make more clear than he does that he affirms much of what’s called modern social and political progress in the direction of the liberation of women, the complete abolition of slavery and serfdom, the reduction in the number of lives tied to degrading mere subsistence, the new births of freedom made possible through technology, the erosion of unjust distinctions rooted in conventional hierarchies, and even the affirmation of universal human rights. The modern abolitionists and the fervent partisans of civil rights, Hart repeatedly mentions, were either Christian or consciously inspired by Christianity. Liberty without love, he would add, is an illusion or at least a distortion, but there’s no denying that modern political liberation was often inspired by a love for free beings, as well as love of being a free being.
A big difference, it should go without saying, between Hart and Nietzsche, is that he doesn’t hate the modern world insofar as it is a Christian accomplishment, and there’s ennobling truth in the egalitarianism of our secular Christianity, even if it’s far from the whole truth. The effects Christianity has on political life, Hart shows persuasively, are always incomplete and compromised. That was true of the Roman empire, imperial Christendom, and the British and American empires. The polis or nation or empire can be influenced and chastened by the presence of Christian community, but always against its own grain. Political life, Hart’s view seem to be, is unworthy of divinized beings and part of our true liberation is from its “inherent violence.” For him, it was a tragedy that the church, as an institution, ever played a role in political life or assumed responsibility for national or imperial unity—and so he has little nostalgia for the comprehensive dream that was imperial Christendom. Much of his book is a description of “the history of a constant struggle between the power of the gospel to alter and shape society and the power of the state to absorb every useful institution into itself.” He should have made more clear that the modern separation of the nation from the church—in, for example, the American case—can’t be regarded as some tragedy for the church, as long as the gospel retained some influence in forming free beings. The tragedy, of course, was the nation’s eventual successful liberation from that limiting or chastening influence, a liberation, he should have said,surely least complete in America.
