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.
November 3rd, 2009 | 2:17 pm
Every feature of the personal liberation praised by our new atheists and our liberal intellectual sophisticates first came into the world in Christian communities.
The first analysis of the stars, constellations, sun and moon, planetary orbits, comets, and so forth came from astrology. We still use a lot of the terminology from that development. It does not follow that astrology is necessary or at this point even desirable for the practice of astronomy…
November 3rd, 2009 | 2:25 pm
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November 3rd, 2009 | 2:43 pm
My line on this, Ray, is that definitely the attempt to secularize and politicize caritas has been a huge failure, and that the real challenge facing people who like the idea of a secular humanist regime concerns the viability of political liberty even as a concept once the link between Christianity and public policy and public life has been broken and repudiated. Look at what has happened to John Gray over the past ten years; claims in the thread on my post below that Eastern peoples have grounded social order without leaning on religion might cause us to reflect on what it was that upset the classical liberals about what they often called ‘oriental despotism’. If we’re less upset about living lives dominated or defined by those things today, secular humanists here in the West really have some explaining to do about why this doesn’t at least point to a big problem.
November 3rd, 2009 | 3:24 pm
The thing is, James, I don’t see the same kind of failure you do. Just talking about basic violence… well, Steven Pinker does it best: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
“The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century… From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.”
I don’t see religion as being a dominant factor there; indeed I don’t see how it could be.
I’d also point out that the ‘Orient’ is not homogeneous; not all regimes in Asia are ‘despotic’, though few are particularly religious…
November 3rd, 2009 | 4:24 pm
“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.”
I think that your illusion to it not representing the whole truth and thus being compromised is lacking clarification. just because something is incomplete doesnt mean it is necessarily compromised because of that fact. The real reason that is compromised (rather than necessarily being compromised) is because it does represent the ennobling truth which you allude to. Perhaps as Hume would dislike the cause is greater than the effect? almost to the point of being so far disconnected from the effect as to make one dissociate between the two? I think that is really why you are accuse of calling humeans immoral. They think clear and distinct cause and effect (or convention) leads to morality. Your thesis goes beyond that and makes their argument weak.
November 3rd, 2009 | 5:25 pm
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November 3rd, 2009 | 7:24 pm
Just to clarify, I wasn’t really addressing my own ideas (let alone Mormons in general). My own criticism was that it seemed an odd way to attack New Atheists. I think the issue of BGE 186 is also a good one, but one I didn’t address that much beyond thinking it was unfair to characterize the New Atheists as fitting Nietzsche’s criticism. I recognize that’s a double-edged critique, since there is often a knee jerk view among general Christians (among whom I consider Mormons) that Nietzsche just isn’t describing Christianity. I think that’s dangerous in that we often then neglect the important criticisms figures make by pretending it doesn’t really apply to us. (I rather like Benson’s Graven Ideologies here in some ways – even though he’s doing a sophisticated version of the same reasoning. But at least he’s grappling with the question.
The issue of what grounds morality is complex. I just don’t think it fair to suggest in a Straussian way effectively a view of the masses needing religion (and not even any particular religion – just religion). That is, especially for a Christian believer, a very double edged sword that perhaps ironically buys into the very New Atheist arguments it is attempting to undermine.
November 3rd, 2009 | 9:32 pm
“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.”
This is the whole truth, this is the cosmic order!
November 3rd, 2009 | 10:59 pm
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November 4th, 2009 | 11:35 am
Thanks to all, especially to the Metaphysical Mormon for the clarification. I’m definitely not in the Straussian religion–any religion–camp as an indispensable or at least really useful ground for popular morality. I’m trying to think about Christianity in its distinctiveness not only as a ground for morality but for insight into the truth about who we are. I have to admit to seeing nothing new about the New Atheists, although I understand why Hart is so ticked off with, say, Hitchens’ claim that religion spoils everything and is the source of nothing real or good. Somebody might say that, finally, Hitchens and Strauss don’t disagree on Christianity all that much, although Strauss would call Hitchens too Christian despite himself.
November 4th, 2009 | 1:07 pm
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November 4th, 2009 | 1:23 pm
“The pre-Christian world was cruel and capricious.”
What nonsensical propaganda. Such a statement is evidence that one has not given serious study to the pre-Christian world.
November 5th, 2009 | 12:23 pm
[...] Peter Lawler [...]
November 5th, 2009 | 2:45 pm
James, do tell what has been happening with John Gray the last decade.
Peter, great stuff. The Christian commuter’s friend Mars Hill Audio Journal has a fine interview with D.B. Hart in the latest issue that has also picqued my interest in his book. But given that I might not read it, and given common courtesy to Hart, it would be nice if you could be clear about whether those interesting formulations of Hell and of “what is called the after-life” are more yours than they are his.
Two things that for me, must qualify Hart’s contention that we were polis/tribe and nature/death defined “nobodies” before Christianity.
First, the basic argument against historicism, coupled with my abiding sense of our dim but real kinship with ancient peoples, which we can sense in Homer (and other pagan sagas), or even in the reports of modern anthropologists and missionaries about the remaining very tribe-bound peoples of this and the last century. I’m with someone like Chantal Delsol who stresses the gap between the self-understanding of people in wholistic societies, and of people given the modern/European (and yet with Christian and Greek roots) model of the law-choosing “subject,” but I always feel there is a danger of overestimating the extent of non-individualistic consciousness in folks brought up in premodern and wholistic societies. Christ’s coming is “good news” because it confirms already existing universal human hopes that seemed to be continually dashed by experiences in the tribe, by perhaps not-so-rare experiences with Herodotus-like efforts to see beyond the tribe/group, and even with the genuinely rare philosophic efforts to see beyond the human plight to nature and being simply.
Second, I do have a pet theory about democracy, derived from Plato(and Tocqueville), that points to SOME of what Hart would apparently regard as Christianity-created tendencies as also originating in the democratic conception of pure freedom. This conception, while shown by Plato to be logically incoherent, is regarded by him as a political/pyschological error that humans are perennially attracted to. Without perhaps Christ, the democratic desire/error leads to tyranny, although following a number of cultural Christian influences, an extended republic and other features of modern political science become possible, and these are perhaps capable of perpetually correcting against this tyrant-ward direction. In any case, the tendencies I am referring to are: a love of private freedom, a demand for equal political and moral recognition, aka the “love of equality.” These tendencies do not simply push for things like free-speech, but at their most radical, Plato shows us they push towards relativism, pacifism, Cultural Revolution-style equality b/t young and old, students and teachers, and perhaps even towards feminism and abolitionism.
So I would want us to think a great deal about how this “democratic” (think Tocqueville’s not unambiguously positive sense of the term) seed present in every human heart, is first watered incoherently by the polis, and then later on watered coherently by Christianity, so that the merely human conception of freedom gets entangled with Christian culture, even prior to thinking about Modernity and all it does to both of these conceptions of human dignity beyond the collectivity.
I would thus want D.B. Hart to read Plato in this way, and a contemporary thinker like Robert Kraynak, to see why certain developments might have to be regarded as belonging more to perennial-autonomy-grounded-”democratic” instincts than to Christian-anthropology-grounded-”democratic” instincts.
November 6th, 2009 | 2:20 am
“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.”
So little support in pre-Xianity, but Christianity simply is the reason for transformation? Nietszche calls it ressentiment born of slavery. Scheler answers this issue, but I’m not entirely convinced by the case. Bob Cheeks is correct that this is the “whole truth” but from what did it take root or from what did it gain illumination. Wholly divine and human–hypostatic union–but not merely hyle and morphe. Jesus Christ no doubt speaks of divinized human beings. But wasn’t there something “natural” after all? I think of the arguments in book 1 of the Republic where justice seems to not be specific to one’s own city–let alone household. Polemarchus’ helping friends and hurting enemies itself becomes a contradiction with no seeming resolution. Then Thrasymachus enters the discussion–Justice is the advantage of the stronger.
DB Hart rightly points to the inadequacy of Christian political regimes to live up to Xian principles, and he seems to see this coincidence as lamentable. He notes the just chastening that Xinaity has always offered, but perhaps its a simple Lilliputian tie up of Gulliver. I’m reminded of Burke’s defense of political parties, and the problem of the good man who (while good in his own individual actions and opinions) allows others to do evil–I suppose Machiavelli too made such a critique. However, didn’t Augustine justify a degree of persecution (albeit with Xian mildness) because it worked. And how does this comport with what Mr. Cheeks rightly confirms as being the truth.
Without lapsing into Averroism, I just don’t think it can be resolved. So God bless DB Hart for stating the truth, but I can’t help but ask–somewhat shamefacedly–to what end?
Can Xinaity remain as a way of life in accordance with the truth of who we are if it is must remain an impossibility in order to remain itself–like Rene Girard seems to think it must be/
November 6th, 2009 | 3:10 am
Regarding the above, I should say that Christ “bespeaks” of a divinized human being.
November 6th, 2009 | 9:34 am
[...] Peter Lawler on post-Christianity and DB Hart [...]
November 8th, 2009 | 12:19 pm
Carl, I agree that Hart goes too far, as I want to get around to explaining. John, your final question is on the money, and that’s why I think Hart, despite himself, gives aid and comfort to those who see Christianity was the great derailment.
November 10th, 2009 | 8:28 pm
John: I don’t think your question is quite right. I think what you meant to say is not whether it can but whether it should… I think that it can only if it is in our self interest to do so (which only remains through Averroism). Basically what I mean by that and what I think you meant by that is the mimetic character that Averroism represents SHOULD remain true. For without the philosopher being able to reach the truth then there truly is no end for showing it other than through religion or philosophy. He stated it because he assumes only philosophers or religious people are going to read his book (probably true).
November 12th, 2009 | 10:22 am
I fail to see the progress of peoples much ballyhooed about by modern and post modern philosophers and pundits. Labels have changed but not realities. What, other than the labels, distinguished Czarist Russia with nobles and serfs from the USSR’s all powerful dictator and politburo? Or today’s version for that matter?
The process of selection might have changed but the roles of the elite and the effect this had on everyone else remained essentially the same.
Ditto with slavery and serfdom. Are we so sure African slavery has been abolished? Not in Darfur it hasn’t. Not when sex traders the world over continue to sell children into perpetual servitude. And while we will not call those on the government dole serfs, what are they if not people utterly dependent on their masters’ whim and provide in exchange not a tax but a vote every 2 years to keep the powers placated? Anyone else notice the odd doings in New Orleans when it was deemed essential that the original population return to their ‘proper’ place?
Let us watch the preening feminists brow beat the only men willing to listen politely and mind their manners: white Christian gentlemen. Who else listens to them or defers to their sensibilities? Certainly not the Muslim world, the Indian or Chinese or Asia cultures. Certainly not Latin and South Americans, or the Black cultures the world over…. sure they’ll begrudgingly grant them ‘rights’ but in the end most men continue to lord over women and Western feminists are powerless to stop these thugs. When have Western feminists ever complained about what their sisters face beyond the confines of the ‘west’?
So….so they heap scorn and vitriol on the only men they know they’re safe with: those Western Christian gentlemen who won’t beat them, abuse them or simply terrorize them with brute force. What have they changed, really? They’re still expecting to be put on pedistles, and treated like ladies. If they wanted equality with men, they’d not complain when treated like men.
Changing the labels means nothing. Call oneself a “progressive” but what are you for? Destruction of the here and now in deference for some faith in a utopia to rise from the ashes. Nowhere has ‘progressive’ policies borne fruit. So what ARE they really?
Call oneself a ‘dissenter’ and crow about how Catholic you are while denying this doctrine and that dogma. What are you if not simply a heretic? We pride ourselves on progress but all we’ve succeeded in doing for the most part is changing the labels and a few processes for selection of the elite and governance of the rest of us?
November 12th, 2009 | 10:23 am
Oops, that last post was mine, John J, not the original “John” sorry for any confusion.
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