Fr. Robert Barron comments on David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God

Fr. Barron comments on who God is and who God is not.  He discusses key points in David Bentley Hart's great new book.

The Awfulness of Ayn Rand...and Malick's Sublime Film on Nature and Grace, 'The Tree of Life'

At the conclusion of his essay on "The Trouble with Ayn Rand," David Bentley Hart recommends skipping the new film version of Atlas Shrugged, the novel of a writer who, like Nietzsche, despised Christian morality and exalted selfishness, who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare, and of whose own novels Hart says that what puts them in a class of their own is how sublimely awful they are.

Even so, the cardboard characters, the ludicrous dialogue, the bloated perorations, the predictable plotting, the lunatic repetitiousness and banality, the shockingly syrupy romance—it all goes to create a uniquely nauseating effect: at once mephitic and cloying, at once sulfur and cotton candy.

Instead, Hart recommends spending our money on the latest work of a real artist with a deeply religious sensibility, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.  You can see the trailer of Malick's movie here:





and here is Fr. Barron's review of the Malick movie:

Mediocrity’s Tribute | First Things

Mediocrity’s Tribute | First Things

The inimitable David Bentley Hart on the film Anonymous, which peddles the preposterous conspiracy theory that Shakespeare was really written by a minor and mediocre aristocrat, the Earl of Oxford. As Hart puts it, "It [the conspiracy theory] was born in 1920, in a book by a demented English Comtean whom Fate, with her unerring sense of poetic justice, had given the name J. Thomas Looney—a man whose ignorance was so profound it verged on a kind of genius." The interesting thing to me is how willing people are to believe any conspiracy theory, no matter how ludicrous and lacking in logic or evidence. Is it because it enables us to feel that we - unlike these other clods - are in the know and so smarter than everyone else?

Giving the Devil His Due

The inimitable David Bentley Hart has some interesting musings about the difficulties of portraying Satan in literature. It is a familiar issue and the problem is summed up by Simone Weil, according to a commenter who quotes her thus:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

The challenge, in other words, is how to be truthful in art without being boring, to show both the exhiliration of Satan's defiant non serviam ("I will not serve") and its ultimately boring, self-absorbed pitifulness.

It was the great challenge Milton faced in Paradise Lost. As Hart aptly notes,

His Satan appears at the beginning of Paradise Lost as a kind of Prometheus, so dauntlessly defiant of heaven’s laws that his damnation seems at first immeasurably more exhilarating than the staid beatitude of Milton’s heaven.

The effect is so startling that many have concurred with Blake’s verdict in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (though usually without Blake’s irony): “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it!” True, as has often been pointed out, our last glimpses of Satan in the epic are in the forms of a toad and a serpent, but that is not how we tend to remember him. All readers of the poem recall his magnificent entrance onto the stage; few recall his final exit.

What makes Hart's piece a particular delight is not these observations, nor the little piece of dialog Hart quotes from Max Beerbohm, which Hart finds hilarious but which to me was, as a teen might say, so funny I forgot to laugh. The post is memorable above all for the author's reflections on the response he got from a friend to the question of how one should portray the prince of darkness, namely as “a merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos.”

Hart notes in a classic assessment of the Donald:

And recalling this exchange brought Donald Trump to mind. You know the fellow: developer, speculator, television personality, hotelier, political dilettante, conspiracy theorist, and grand croupier—the one with that canopy of hennaed hair jutting out over his eyes like a shelf of limestone.

In particular, I recalled how, back in 1993, when Trump decided he wanted to build special limousine parking lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, he had used all his influence to get the state of New Jersey to steal the home of an elderly widow named Vera Coking by declaring “eminent domain” over her property, as well as over a nearby pawn shop and a small family-run Italian restaurant.

She had declined to sell, having lived there for thirty-five years. Moreover, the state offered her only one-fourth what she had been offered for the same house some years before, and Trump could then buy it at a bargain rate. The affair involved the poor woman in an exhausting legal battle, which, happily, she won, with the assistance of the Institute for Justice.

How obvious it seems to me now. Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer.

Read David Bentley Hart's whole essay at First Things - http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/05/a-person-you-flee-at-parties

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Nietzsche and the New Atheists

Here is a review essay by the brilliant Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its fashionable Enemies. As always, his reviews are fun to read, as any highly critical review by an intelligent, witty, scholarly reviewer who actually knows what he is talking about tends to be.

Believe It or Not | First Things

But the last part is of particular interest to me. Nietzsche, after all, was an atheist one cannot but respect. He understood how Christianity revolutionized human sensibility and morality, and he understood that the ethics of love that Christianity inserted into a brutal pagan world would not long survive the faith that animated it. He did not celebrate the "Death of God," but saw how it was also the death of man. Without facing these realities, atheism seems too cheaply bought, a sentimental, sanctimonious appropriation of Christian ethics without its foundation in the death of God on the cross. Nietzsche's madman in The Gay Science who announces the death of God

despairs of the mere atheists—those who merely do not believe—to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become.

Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?

For Nietzsche, therefore, the future that lies before us must be decided, and decided between only two possible paths: a final nihilism, which aspires to nothing beyond the momentary consolations of material contentment, or some great feat of creative will, inspired by a new and truly worldly mythos powerful enough to replace the old and discredited mythos of the Christian revolution (for him, of course, this meant the myth of the Übermensch).

Christianity's revolution in social ethics and culture

Read this book!

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
by David Bentley Hart

The title does not do justice to the book. Hart, a brilliant Eastern Orthodox theologian, treats the popular atheist writers of our day with scathing wit, but the book is really about something far more important. Drawing especially on his deep understanding of the early centuries of the Church and its cultural context, Hart offers an erudite essay that takes on the view--pervasive since the Enlightenment--that Christianity was a violent and irrational interlude between the cultured classical world and a modernity of reason and science.

Hart accepts that Christianity was an interruption, or irruption, but sees it as one that revolutionized our understanding of what it means to be human. It was the most profound revolution in human history. Hart points out that, unlike today's evangelical atheists, Nietzsche hated Christianity for what it actually was, a religion the God of which is Love and which regards charity as the highest virtue. It was unique and subversive in its insistence on God's universal love--beyond ties to place, tribe, nation, or ruler--and the duty of Christians to help the sick, poor, weak and oppressed, to visit prisoners, and to respect the intrinsic dignity and worth of all human life. Its adherents often disappoint, like all other human individuals and institutions in our fallen world. But in developing a (highly sophisticated) understanding of the God-man in which God became human so that humans may become divine, Christians of the early centuries overthrew older views of the infinite distance between God and humanity and the arbitrariness and immorality of the pagan gods. Christians established a world-view that saw the world as law-governed and humans as subject to a natural law "written on their hearts" and--in great contrast to pagan religions--a social ethic. This made scientific discovery--initially largely the work of churchmen and, like Galileo and Newton, devout Christians--a reading of the book of nature that God had written. No longer could we say, except in the depths of despair like the brutally blinded Gloucester in King Lear, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." Christianity is a religion of joy and hope, as opposed to the prevailing pagan sadness and resignation.

So Hart's argument takes us from the pagan world, with its lack of a sense of the arrow of time and hence of the future and of the purpose and direction of life, its moral callousness toward the weak and oppressed, through the Christian revolution in which king and slave, aristocrat and worker, were of equal worth as sharing in the divinity of the God-man. The Church--again unique in its separation of religion from the state--suffers (what Hart sees as) the catastrophe of being adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire. But unlike the pagan cults, the Church retains its subversive aspect. It insists on the submission even of emperors and kings to God.

The long struggle (as well as collusion) between church and state ends in defeat for the Church as Protestant rulers place themselves at the head of their national churches and Catholic states like France and Spain completely subordinate the church to the monarchy--even in Spain's case insisting on the Inquisition as an instrument of "nation-building." The long march of the hypertrophied state culminates in the secularist horrors of the 20th century. Indeed, Hart argues, the modern secular state has a unique penchant or drive to violence on a vast scale that makes the violence attributed (much of it wrongly) to Christianity appear minuscule by comparison.

Hart's view of our present cultural situation is exceedingly--and for a Christian one might say excessively--bleak. He sees a post-Christian world no longer restrained by any conception of the equal dignity and worth of the individual. The moral restraints that are rooted in the Christian social ethic but have no solid basis in secularist ideologies, survive as memories for awhile but then fade. A foretaste of this world appears in the enthusiasm with which progressives and liberals of all kinds took up the eugenics movement in the U.S., which the Nazis adopted and learned from. The twentieth century, with its court-mandated sterilizations, lobotomies, scientific experiments on prisoners and denial of treatment to poor Black men in the interests of science in the U.S. as well as the the unrestrainedly murderous anti-Christian regimes (atheist or neo-pagan) of Russia and Germany, shows us the post-Christian future. It is a world in which the God who is Love is dead, science is freed from moral restraint and humans become objects of manipulation.

Fortunately, there are developments that might make us want to temper such pessimism, not in the sense that Hart is in any way wrong about the dehumanizing implications of a loss of the social ethics and spiritual depth and beauty of Christianity, but in the sense that secularization is not a done deal, not beyond academia and elite opinion anyway. Christianity is growing rapidly in Africa, Asia, and Russia, has not succumbed (except in its liberal forms) to secularization in the U.S. and is on the rise even in London.

But this is a profound and serious book that invites us to confront what is at stake in the secularist trends that the latest, crudest, most vulgar and, well, deluded atheist writers of our day reflect. A beautifully written and well argued essay that takes us well above and beyond the level of the new evangelical atheists.

(Adapted from the review I posted on amazon.com)