Lawler on Hart

I apologize for my prolonged absence.  The semester has gotten really busy, and I’ve owed other people what writing I could manage in my spare time.  You’ll eventually see the fruits of my labors here (a review of this book ), here , and perhaps elsewhere.

What’s kept me busiest is a new course on Science and Politics, for the sake of which I am reacquainting myself with Francis Bacon after a very long absence.  Once we’ve finished laying the Baconian foundations of modernity, I’m going to immerse my students in some contemporary material by authors like Yuval Levin and Peter Lawler.

In the meantime, I will urge upon you my friend Peter Lawler’s review of D.B. Hart’s apparently very good book .  Lawler has certainly persuaded me that Hart’s book is worth reading, but—more to the point—his brilliant gem of a review is a very nice introduction to his approach to the questions he and Hart address (and that we should address if we know what’s good for us).

Here’s the conclusion:

Hart says in one place that the genius of Christianity lies in its extremism. Christians contrast the intractable selfishness, cruelty, violence, and melancholic hopelessness of our merely biological natures with the unconditioned personal love that can govern our divinized nature. Hart sometimes seems to say that Aristotle was right, in his time, about our ultimate enslavement to an impersonal logos that negates every aspiration for personal significance; then, Christ transformed us—changing our natures. But surely Christians believe that, from the beginning, the world and each of us was a divine gift. And, from the beginning, human experience was, finally, that logos is only present in persons. Only persons are open to the truth about being and human being. The Christian insight opened our eyes more fully to what we can see for ourselves about the ground for personal freedom in being itself. The personal logos affirmed by the church fathers was always more true than the impersonal logos affirmed by Aristotle and Darwin.

That’s why we can say with some confidence that both Nietzsche and Hart exaggerate by describing persons today as Last Men or beings without human content or nothing —emotionally puerile and flat-souled mere consumers. And that’s why we can be more hopeful about the political and cultural future of the human person than Hart seems to be. That our world is inescapably Christian or post-Christian is more good news than not about our inescapably human future. We know we are all equally not nothing, and it’s not in our power to negate that truth. Still, we can and will, as Hart rightly shows, make ourselves (and others) miserable trying.