Disaster Area — CASE 27

CASE magazine Number 27 is out, and is all about thinking about Natural Disasters. There’s a great feature article from my friend Dr Matheson Russell on thinking theologically about “natural evil”. Matheson argues that we need a conception of God’s “responsibility” for creation that allows space for the real independence of creation: creation is not simply an extension of God. And we need a concept of God’s “sovereignty” which is actually more like sovereignty and less like micro management.

In the same issue, there is also a great piece by Dani Scarratt on the Lisbon earthquake, as well as other good stuff. I also have a review of David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea. Many readers (I’m not sure I have “many” readers actually!) will have read this book, but I’d be interested to hear what you think of my review, or indeed of Matheson’s article. I’m not convinced we’ve got everything sorted out on this front; but I do think that something important has been “seen” on the topic of God’s providence and sovereignty in recent years, and I think we need more work on it that doesn’t just pretend the issues away.

Also, subscribe to CASE! It’s not expensive, and it’s home-grown, good apologetics stuff. I think it’s worth supporting.

David Bentley Hart shows his true colours — orange, black and white

In the most recent edition of First Things, David Bentley Hart has a wonderful article on the metaphysics of baseball. I say wonderful, because I’m not sure what else to call it. You would think that an argument for seeing baseball as a perfect reflection of eternal forms would be a joke. You’d think so, right? Here’s Hart:

My hope, when all is said and done, is that [America] will be remembered chiefly as the people who invented—who devised and thereby also, for the first time, discovered—the perfect game, the very Platonic ideal of organized sport, the “moving image of eternity” in athletics. I think that would be a grand posterity. I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but, until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas; but, throughout most of the history of the race, no culture was able to produce more than a shadowy sketch of whatever glorious mystery prompted those nameless longings.

Hart goes on to show the superiority of baseball over any variation of what he scathingly dismisses as the “oblong game” (e.g. rugby), arguing that the shape, dimensions, patterns, complexity, and boundlessness of his game echo the very frame of eternity, giving significance and pathos (ah, the penny drops) to his suffering as a supporter of the Baltimore Orioles.

David Bentley Hart on the sadness of paganism

Another highlight from Hart’s book, Atheist Delusions, is his discussion of how Christianity brought a message of joy and life to a world shaped by a profound sense of melancholy, what Hart calls paganism’s “glorious sadness”.

“[T]he Christianity of the early centuries did not invade a world of noonday joy, vitality, mirth, and cheerful earthiness, and darken it with malicious slanders of the senses, or chill it with a severe and bloodless otherworldliness. Rather, it entered into a twilight world of pervasive spiritual despondency and religious yearning, not as a cult of cosmic renunciation (pagan religious and philosophical culture required no tutelage in that) but as a religion of glad tidings, of new life, and that in all abundance. It was pagan society that had become ever more otherworldly and joyless, ever wearier of the burden of itself, and ever more resentful of the soul’s incarceration in the closed system of a universe governed by fate. It was pagan society that seemed unable to conceive of any spiritual aspiration higher than escape—higher, that is, than the emancipation of a few select spirits from the toils of an otherwise irredeemable world—and that could imagine no philosophical virtue more impressive than resignation to the impossibility of escape. The church, by contrast, was obliged to preach a gospel of salvation that somehow embraced the entire created order.” (143–44)

“Pervasive spiritual despondency and religious yearning”—sounds like Nick Cave. Bring on the glad tidings!

David Bentley Hart on modernity and freedom

One of the central theses of Hart’s book Atheist Delusions is that our age is marked by a belief that there is nothing which legitimately informs or shapes individual autonomy. The freely self-determining individual is literally the highest good in existence. As Hart is at pains to point out, however, this has very little to do with “reason”.

The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its “originary” myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free… and the Enlightenment language of an “age of reason” was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of “irrational” belief. But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to “my truth” than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead. The myth of “enlightenment” served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom—conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will—is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth. (105)

David Bentley Hart on witches and science

I have been reading David Bentley Hart’s new tirade against the “New Atheists”, titled Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale, 2009). It’s very interesting (and frequently highly amusing). Here’s a fascinating bit about witchcraft:

In truth, the rise of modern science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world. There is nothing especially outrageous in such a claim. After all, magic is essentially a species of materialism; if it envokes any agencies beyond the visible sphere, they are not supernatural—in the theological sense of “transcendent”—but at most preternatural: they are merely, that is to say, subtler, more potent aspects of the physical cosmos. Hermetic magic and modern science (in its most Baconian form at least) are both concerned with hidden forces within the material order, forces that are largely impersonal and morally neutral, which one can learn to manipulate, and which may be turned to ends fair or foul; both, that is to say, are concerned with domination of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature to humanity, and the constant increase of human power. Hence, there was not really any late modern triumph of science over magic, so much as there was a natural dissolution of the latter into the former, as the power of science to accomplish what magic could only adumbrate became progressively more obvious. Or, rather, “magic” and “science” in the modern period are distinguishable only retrospectively, according to relative degress of efficacy. There never was, however, an antagonism between the two: metaphysically, morally, and conceptually, they belonged to a single continuum. (82)

David Bentley Hart on A. N. Wilson

David Bentley Hart’s new collection of essays, In the Aftermath: provocations and laments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), is terrific. There are essays here I’ve read before and enjoyed, such as the magnificent “Christ and Nothing” and the deeply challenging, but helpful, Tsunami and Theodicy, which is also available here at First Things—perhaps especially worth a read for Australians at the moment.

There are also some great moments I hadn’t come across yet, such as the following brilliant description of A. N. Wilson:

In The Daily Telegraph not long ago, A. N. Wilson produced one of those short but seemingly interminable opinion columns at which he so often excels, this one putatively in praise of the present Archbishop of Canterbury. The panegyric, however, was somewhat overwhelmed by the comical dolorousness of the prose. No fewer than sixteen-hundred times (at least, if the impression lingering in my memory is to be believed), Wilson departed from his theme to inform us that we are living in the waning days of the Christian religion, that it will not be long before the last church is closed, and that hence we may not see the likes of the good Archbishop very often again. Surely, I thought as I was reading, this is a man in whom parochialism has metastasized into a psychosis. Here we are living in an age when Christianity is spreading more rapidly and more widely than at any other point in the two millenia of its history—throughout the global South and East—and yet, because the Church languishes in the senile cultures of a small geological apophysis (with a few appertinent isles) at the western edge of continental Asia, Wilson concludes that the faith is in its death throes. Of course, being morbidly tiresome is part of Wilson’s special post-Christian style: the air of weary, sage solemnity and flaccid resignation, the boring declarations of religious disenchantment, the bleak glimpses he affords us into the empty closets of his soul, the oracular intimations of the fate he has suffered for all of us in advance. But sometimes one really must wonder how he can remain so blissfully unaware that the great spiritual drama he is intent upon living out in print is roughly a century out of date (as far as I can tell, his heroic dash towards our common future is just now bringing him up hard on the heels of Havelock Ellis). (“Beyond Disbelief”, p.134).

Hart on the appeal of Christianity

From the introduction to The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003):

Christian theology has no stake in the myth of disinterested rationality: the church has no arguments for its faith more convincing than the form of Christ; enjoined by Christ to preach the gospel, Christians must proclaim, exhort, bear witness, persuade — before other forms of reason can be marshaled… Christian thought must remain immovably fixed alongside Christ, in his irreducible particularity, and precisely insofar as the temper of “postmodernism” runs against confidence in universal truths of reason, postmodern theory confirms theology in its original condition: that of a story, thoroughly dependent upon a sequence of historical events to which the only access is the report and practice of believers, a story whose truthfulness may be urged — even enacted — but never proved simply by the processes of scrupulous dialectic. What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of “rational” arguments that (suppressing certain of their premises) force assent from others by leaving them, like the interlocutors of Socrates, at a loss for words; rather, it stands before the world principally with the story it tells concerning God and creation, the form of Christ, the loveliness of the practice of Christian charity — and the rhetorical richness of its idiom. Making its appeal first to the eye and heart, as the only way it may “command” assent, the church cannot separate truth from rhetoric, or from beauty.

Political Cases

In considering the recent Federal election in Australia, I wrote an article on the nature of political representation (unsurprisingly, heavily reliant on O’Donovan), which is published in the most recent CASE magazine, and is available on the web, thanks to their generosity, here. If you haven’t seen CASE, take a look: there’s lots of really interesting stuff. In particular, in the latest edition there is a fascinating article by Mike Thompson titled, “Should Western Christians Support the Promotion of Democracy as a Foreign Policy Objective?” In beginning his answer, Mike writes, “Perhaps one task of the Christian church in any age is to interrogate the horizon of obviousness…” I think this is a wonderful, and true, phrase.

And to keep us thinking about political representation, here is another great quote from David Bentley Hart:

…all of us I think, in those secret corners of our souls where we are all monarchists, can appreciate a good despot, if he is sufficiently dashing and mysterious, and able to strike an attractive balance between capricious wrath and serene benevolence. (David Bentley Hart, “Christ and Nothing”, First Things, October 2003).

Hart on Christ and Pilate

Describing the scene of Jesus’ trial before Pilate, David Bentley Hart offers this interesting comment:

It is worth asking ourselves what this tableau, viewed from the vantage of pagan antiquity, would have meant. A man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial of no name or estate, a slave of the empire, beaten, robed in purple, crowned with thorns, insanely invoking an otherworldly kingdom and some esoteric truth, unaware of either his absurdity or his judge’s eminence. Who could have doubted where, between these two, the truth of things was to be found? But the Gospel is written in the light of the resurrection, which reverses the meaning of this scene entirely. If God’s truth is in fact to be found where Christ stands, the mockery visited on him redounds instead upon the emperor, all of whose regal finery, when set beside the majesty of the servile shape in which God reveals Himself, shows itself to be just so many rags and briars. (David Bentley Hart “Christ and Nothing”, First Things, October 2003)

As the apostle says, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Cor. 1:20)

Hart on the church’s challenge

I have recently been reading a bit of David Bentley Hart’s work. It is fascinating, funny, and brilliant. Here’s a snapshot from his essay, “Christ and Nothing”:

 

How, though, to make war on nothingness, on the abyss itself, denuded of its mythic allure? It seems to me much easier to convince a man that he is in thrall to demons and offer him manumission than to convince him that he is a slave to himself and prisoner to his own will. Here is a god more elusive, protean, and indomitable than either Apollo or Dionysus; and whether he manifests himself in some demonic titanism of the will, like the mass delirium of the Third Reich, or simply in the mesmeric banality of consumer culture, his throne has been set in the very hearts of those he enslaves. And it is this god, I think, against whom the First Commandment calls us now to struggle…

Modern persons will never find rest for their restless hearts without Christ, for modern culture is nothing but the wasteland from which the gods have departed, and so this restlessness has become its own deity; and, deprived of the shelter of the sacred and the consoling myths of sacrifice, the modern person must wander or drift, vainly attempting one or another accommodation with death, never escaping anxiety or ennui, and driven as a result to a ceaseless labor of distraction, or acquisition, or willful idiocy. And, where it works its sublimest magic, our culture of empty spectacle can so stupefy the intellect as to blind it to its own disquiet, and induce a spiritual torpor more deplorable than mere despair.

If you’d like to read some of Hart’s work, D. W. Congdon has posted links to all his essays in First Things here.