Hart defends himself

David Hart responded to several critiques of his book, The Beauty of the Infinite , in an AAR session this morning. Gerard Loughlin defended Nicholas Lash against Hart’s assaults on his endorsement of a tragic reading of the gospels. Hart responded by saying that he had not misread or misrepresented Lash’s views, and that Lash claims that the resurrection of Jesus says nothing about the question of life after death. Hart affirmed that the resurrection of Jesus has everything to do with life after death, that it is God’s intervention and eruption in history, if that is not what resurrection is then we have no business talking about resurrection at all. It was a very moving, and very Pauline, moment.

Francesca Murphy of Aberdeen also focused on Hart’s view of tragedy, charging him with a misreading of the significance of Attic tragedy, a misreading that reverberates through several dimensions of Hart’s book. Tragedy, she argued, is a sign that even pagan antiquity had deep down a sense of the fallenness of man and man’s own complicity with that fallenness. She also argued, intriguingly, that taking better account of tragedy would help Hart deal with the question of necessity and freedom, which is closer to the heart of his book. Hart opposes an order of necessity that he sees within ancient metaphysics, but Murphy suggested that there are different kinds of necessity. The necessity of a syllogism keeps surprises at bay; but the necessity of drama, as Aristotle knew, is perfectly compatible with the surprise of contingency. By construing necessity in dramatic terms, Hart could have made room for a kind of necessity without locking the world in a metaphysical totality.

In response, Hart conceded the force of the criticism, but went on to argue that the kind of necessity he opposes is one that sets a final limit or horizon on the possibilities of life and humanity. He suggested that philosophy depends for its autonomous existence on this final necessity to which even the gods much finally submit, for if there is an ultimate gratuity then philosophy has to bow before faith. Modern philosophy, he suggested, is the revival of the necessity of ancient philosophy after ancient philosophy was ruined by the Christian metaphysics of gift and gratuity.

Jamie Smith of Calvin College began by saying that Hart is essentially an evangelist, who sees Christianity mainly in rhetorical terms. He made the intriguing point that postmodern rhetoricism finally collapses into a bland form of liberalism: Because rhetoric is an act of violence, one avoids saying anything or at least saying anything with assurance and conviction – which is precisely the resurgence of liberal civility. Hart, in Smith’s reading, was contesting this postmodern form of liberalism, but also opposing the notion that Christian witness is a triumphalist effort to win the argument. Hart advocates a rhetoric of peace. The key character type for Hart is the martyr – who is willing to die for what he says and believes (challenging pomo civility) and yet is not triumphalistically seeking to dominate. Smith also noted Hart’s defense of the objectivity of beauty and challenged Hart to clarify the subjective conditions for the reception of beauty, suggesting in Calvinist vein that Hart has failed to take sufficient account of the “aesthetic effects of sin.” Smith ended his critique by suggesting that Hart had given short shrift to pneumatology – which is the Person who forms the taste necessary for the reception of God’s beauty – and to ecclesiology.

Hart’s response focused on Smith’s suggestions about his notions of rhetoric. He observed that, Smith to the contrary, he does want to win the argument, and thinks the martyrs did as well. His goal was not to reduce dialectic to rhetoric, but to recognize that the two are inextricably combined. But he is all in favor of exposing the logical flaws in various philosophical systems. When that task is done, however, little has been accomplishes, because the key aspect of Christian witness is to point to Christ Himself as the incarnate Beauty that evokes desire. In response to Smith’s suggestion that he had smuggled apologetics and universal reason into his system, Hart argued that he never meant to deny the existence of universal rationality, so long as it’s not construed or defended on Enlightenment grounds. He rather intended his epistemological reflections to highlight the way we come to know the truth, which is always partial and intermittent.

Along the way, Hart described his view of Constantinianism as hovering between “neutrality and nostalgia,” confessed to being an arch-conservative, and said some other things that are not normally heard at AAR.