The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, David Bentley Hart, Yale University Press, 2013,
ISBN-13: 978-0300166842
David Bentley Hart is considered by many philosophers, theologians, and scholars to be the most
prominent of their number, at least among Americans working today on matters relating to God,
creation, existence, and religion. He is known for his many publications on these topics, and his spirited
rebuttal of modern atheism in his book Atheist Delusions (which might as well be titled Contra-Dawkins).
His most recent book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, is said to be his masterpiece.
Hart is described as an Eastern Orthodox scholar – a Christian within a particular tradition that is distinct
from, say Catholicism or Protestantism. He is, however, more than that. He is an ecumenical scholar –
knowledgeable about a great many other religions, and this is the basis on which he approaches the
question of God. The format of the book, as described also in the title, follows the Sanskrit tradition of
satchidananada – known as truth, consciousness, and bliss. Hart is obliged to stretch the definition of
sat to include being; he also asserts through a number of references that all great “theistic traditions”
use the same format in thinking about and understanding God.
Hart’s objective in this book is to define what it is we mean when we talk about God. He asserts that a
good many people have no idea of God’s true nature, and they talk about him blithely as well as
ignorantly. This ignorance can develop into fallacious, misleading, and even dangerous thinking, which
is the sort of thinking atheists rely upon, in Hart’s view. He is particularly scathing of Richard Dawkins
throughout the book:
Or consider Richard Dawkins: he devoted several pages of The God Delusion to a discussion of the
“Five Ways” of Thomas Aquinas but never thought to avail himself of the services of some scholar
of ancient and mediaeval thought who might have explained them to him…As for Dawkins’s own
attempt at an argument against the likelihood of God’s existence, it is so crude and
embarrassingly confused as to be germane to nothing at all, perhaps not even to itself. p. 22
Hart goes in for this sort of vituperative frequently; his supporters refer to it as “wit.” It is a basic
premise of the book that if you are not part of Hart’s way of thinking you are lost to God, because all
great theistic traditions, as he frequently reminds us, think like Hart does. Along with atheists, Hart
castigates their fellow-travelers: materialists, naturalists, and a good many modern philosophers and
academics – anyone who thinks the answers to God’s existence, or our consciousness of God, can
ultimately be discovered by science or found in nature. It is much nicer to talk about materialists, since
scientists like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking can be placed in this category (which Hart does), so
atheists are not allocated any discussion except at the very beginning and end of the book.
While Hart states from the outset that his ambition in the book is to provide a proper definition of God,
this is disingenuous. Hart wishes to wrest away from the atheists their ability to define God in the public
debates over his existence. These debates often are more than contentious; they are unsatisfying
because the two sides are talking at cross-purposes, and Hart is correct in observing that they have very
different definitions of God. But there is more to this simple ambition than Hart lets on. To define God
can be a way to predetermine victory in any discussion about his existence, which is exactly what Hart
presupposes when he says he wants “to provide a proper definition of God.” Second, Hart insists that
his opponents – naturalists and materialists alike – cannot be taken seriously unless they are willing to
fight on Hart’s own football pitch, meaning that they must satisfy his demand that they discuss God in
philosophical terms, which are his terms. All other arguments are “crude and embarrassingly confused,”
to use Hart’s reference to Dawkins.
It is what we might call the Philosopher’s God that Hart is defining and defending. Nor do most modern
philosophers have anything meaningful to say about the Philosopher’s God. Hart is anxious to restore
the discussion to the classical philosophical tropes – those terms and definitions that were used by
philosophers as far back as Plato, and as recently (but probably not much later than) Descartes, Kant,
and Hegel. In that sense, Hart wants to reclaim territory that he feels philosophers lost to scientists and
their materialist/naturalist colleagues in academia, a battle that has been waged since the
Enlightenment.
One strength of this approach is that the discussion remains focused on God and his three attributes of
being, consciousness and bliss. There is hardly any mention of religion proper, Christianity gets only a
few passing references (though great Christian theologians are cited frequently), and Jesus Christ does
not appear at all in this book. This is a strength in that Hart does not muddy the waters by focusing
much on religious thought, practice or observance, which allows him to concentrate strictly on God. He
can freely elaborate therefore on what multiple religious traditions think about God, and he can bring
into play his ecumenical erudition. This is also a weakness, which we will explore toward the end of this
review when we discuss what Hart’s God has to do with Christianity.
Let us first understand the arguments Hart is making about God. He will be quoted at length here partly
because his arguments are sometimes dense, and partly because his prose makes his case more
elegantly than ever I could.
On Being
First, let us read what Hart insists is not God:
God is not, in any of the great theistic traditions, merely some rational agent, external to the
order of the physical universe, who imposes some kind of design upon an otherwise inert and
mindless material order. He is not some discrete being somewhere out there, floating in the
great beyond, who fashions nature in accordance with rational laws upon which he is dependent.
- 95
So much for the American comedian George Carlin’s “bearded man in the sky.” What about God as the
Supreme Being, the true god among a multitude of false gods?
As the great Muslim philosopher Mulla Sadra (b 1572 – 1640) insisted, God is not to be found
within the realm of beings, for he is the being of all realms. Or, as the Anglican E.L. Mascall put it,
God is not “just one item, albeit the supreme one, in a class of being,” but is rather ”the source
from which their being is derived.”…This is not to say, however, that God is somehow the totality
of all beings (which would still be a finite, bounded, composite, and contingent reality). It is to
say rather that he is the indivisible and always transcendent actuality out of which all things
receive their immanent actuality in every possible respect. – 108
If God is not a Supreme Being, how do we perceive him?
God, however, is first glimpsed within nature’s still greater powerlessness – its transitoriness and
contingency and explanatory poverty. He is known or imagined or hoped for as that reality that
lies beyond the awful shadow of potential nothingness that falls across all finite things, the gods
included. – 95
Now we begin to see that, by Hart’s definition, God is not within nature, but outside of it, including the
cosmos. He is not constrained by natural limits, nor is he subject to the “awful shadow” of death that
falls on all animate (and ultimately inanimate) things. Here, then, is Hart’s most concise definition of
God’s relation to Being, and hence to creation:
He is instead the infinite to which nothing can add and from which nothing can subtract, and he
himself is not some object in addition to other objects. He is the source and fullness of all being,
the actuality in which all finite things live, move, and have their being, or in which all things hold
together; and so he is also the reality that is present in all things as the very act of their existence.
God, in short, is not a being but is at once “beyond being” (in the sense that he transcends the
totality of existing things) and also absolute “Being itself” (in the sense that he is the source and
ground of all things). – 115
God is not composite and so is indissoluble, he is infinite and unconditioned and so is not
dependent on anything else, he is eternal and so does not come into being, he is the source of his
own being and hence in him there is no division between what he is and that he is, and so on.
And, as I have said, these affirmations arise chiefly from a sort of deductive negation of all the
obvious conditions of finitude…114
We are assured by Hart in these discussions that all great theistic (he sometimes says religious)
traditions concur with this definition of God. Here is an example of his scholarship and ecumenism at
work – the discussion is about God’s indivisibility and his condition of “simplicity itself.”
We can affirm that God is one, since the infinite unconditioned source of all reality cannot,
obviously be plural. We can affirm that this oneness underlies and sustains all things in their
unity and diversity, and that therefore God is, as Maximus the Confessor (580-662) said, not only
utterly simple but simplicity itself, the very simplicity of the simple, indwelling all things as the
very source of their being, or that, as Sufi tradition says, God as al-Ahad, the One, is also the
transcendent unity of all existence, wahdat al-wujud. We can affirm also that, as the Isha
Upanishad says, God dwells in all as transcending all; or that, as Augustine says, God is at once
both nearer than what is inmost to me and beyond what is highest in me. - 141
God is Being. He is that which, by the nature of his essence, allows all finite things to come into
existence and eventually die off. Over and over, Hart insists that all great theistic traditions believe this.
On the jacket of the book, Rowan Williams, retired Archbishop of Canterbury, says Hart “…sets the
record straight as to what sort of God Christians believe in and why.” Surely the Archbishop of
Canterbury must know these things; it is his job to educate millions of Anglicans in the matter. We will
return later to this question, but let us first see what Hart has to say about God’s other attributes.
Consciousness and Bliss
Hart apologizes for the length of time he spends discussing Being. The next two sections of the book are
much shorter. Hart reviews the progress naturalists and materialists have made in understanding
consciousness. He has a lot to say about the propensity of scholars to want to nail down forever the
true nature of consciousness. Daniel Dennett’s writings come in for criticism, because Dennett suggests
the human brain can ultimately be comprehended as a computer with software embedded that allows
information to be self-referenced, which contributes to self-awareness. Hart doesn’t like the term selfawareness, and he never uses it in his own arguments. Initially, Hart gives a hedged answer on whether
Dennett or other materialists will ever be proven right:
It may well be, in fact, that the widely cherished expectation that neuroscience will one day
discover an explanation of consciousness solely within the brain’s electrochemical processes is no
less enormous a category error than the expectation that physics will one day discover the reason
for the existence of the material universe. 154
As Hart then examines Sam Harris’ writings on Free Will, he becomes more emphatic. He describes the
whole microsecond delay argument that is at the basis of Harris’ work as absurd. Just because the brain
can be shown to flash neurons a microsecond before the conscious mind is aware of an impulse to act,
does not mean free will is compromised. The interval is far too short to have any meaning. This is a
somewhat odd argument, because earlier Hart argues that the interval between being and nothingness
is infinitesimally small, but the chasm is still so great that it can never be bridged (leading to the
conclusion that finite beings such as ourselves can never truly comprehend infinitude).
Hart introduces a technical argument on qualia, which he insists exist (Dennett denies that they do). He
then goes on to conclude:
…we will never be able to examine, from any objective vantage, the simple act of thought in its
proper aspect: the conscious awareness of a subject. …this absolute interiority, full of
numberless incommunicable qualitative sensations and velleities and impossible to disassemble,
reconstruct, or model – is so radically elusive a phenomenon that there seems no hope of
capturing it in any complete scientific account. Those who imagine otherwise simply have not
understood the problem fully. 158
Also,
My claim here is that, whatever we may learn about the brain in the future, it will remain in
principle impossible to produce any entirely mechanistic account of the conscious mind, for a
great many reasons…, and that therefore consciousness is a reality that defeats mechanistic or
materialist thinking. 160
Where this is going is probably easy to guess. God is Consciousness, and as such he grant humans this
gift. His consciousness pervades all of nature and transcends nature at the same time. Mankind can
approach God through a shared consciousness, though our efforts, satisfying to ourselves, will never
fully grasp the true nature of God’s thoughts. In saying this, Hart simply swats away neuroscientists,
atheists, naturalists, materialists and others who look forward to the day when mankind will develop a
complete scientific understanding of consciousness. This is simply another “category error” by those
who are unable, ignorant, or willfully petulant in insisting that man can become like God in this capacity.
The discussion of bliss is somewhat more satisfying, though the reader has to be careful not to overinterpret the word. Hart is not talking about Eastern religions which foster expanded consciousness or
oneness with the universe, sometimes with the help of drugs.
It is bliss that draws us toward and joins us to the being of all things because that bliss is already
one with being and consciousness, in the infinite simplicity of God. The restless heart that seeks
its repose in God (to use the language of Augustine) expresses itself not only in the exultations
and raptures of spiritual experience but also in the plain persistence of awareness. - 248
A spiritual communion with God, which is a common aspect in the Christian tradition among mystics and
eremites, is much more to Hart’s liking than drug-induced hallucination. But his emphasis on the “plain
persistence of awareness” is quite important. Early in the book, Hart makes this claim:
…one may attempt to turn one’s thoughts from the world’s multiplicity and toward that
mysterious unity that quietly persists amid the spectacle of incessant change: that oneness that is
everywhere and nowhere, at once in the world and in one’s consciousness of it, holding all things
together as a coherent totality while also preserving each separate thing in its particularity, and
each part of each thing, and part of that part, and so on ad infinitum. – 93
All humans ought to experience wonderment at the sheer existence of the universe; if they don’t (as
atheists do not, at least in this book), Hart feels sorry for them. More to the point, he does not wish to
talk to them because they are deluded. Their refusal to entertain this wonderment leads to the
catastrophic mistake of not following the rational, logical conclusion that he does – in Hart’s world, any
sane man, in the presence of such wonder, must conclude that a force greater than all others had to
create the universe. There is an aspect of topsy-turvydom going on here: atheists charge believers with
superstition and abandonment of rational, logical thinking. Hart turns this on its head: it is the atheists
who are wallowing in superstition, and have abandoned rationality by refusing to take the logical step
beyond materialism, and beyond the natural world, and come to the ineluctable truth that God is the
creator of all.
There is one other aspect of bliss worth introducing:
“What is a merciful heart?”, asks Isaac of Nineveh (d. c. AD 700): “A heart aflame for all of
creation, for men, birds, beasts, demons, and every created thing: the very thought or sight of
them causes the merciful man’s eyes to overflow with tears…The saint, says Swami Ramdas
(1884-1963), is one whose heart burns for the sufferings of others, whose hands labor for the
relief of others, and who therefore acts from God’s heart and with God’s hands. The most exalted
unity with God is attained, Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, by one whose bliss and
sorrow are found in the bliss and sorrow of others. - 272
This is the concept of bliss as goodness. It is hard to deny that approaching bliss through travails of
others is a potent expression of goodness. When we get into the discussion of atheism, we will see,
though, that Hart denies that atheists can truly experience such goodness.
The Philosopher’s God and Christianity
Let us turn now to where this philosophy of God might lead a Christian. Hart has come under
substantial criticism in the United States and elsewhere for defining God as an entity that has hardly
anything to do with the Bible, and nothing whatever to do with Jesus Christ. Fundamentalists decry the
complete abandonment of the God of Genesis, who walked about the Garden of Eden and made man in
his own image. The Philosopher’s God has nothing to do with that God, and this is a vital matter when it
comes to Christian doctrine. Without the Genesis story, there is no fall from grace for Adam and Eve,
which leads to the doctrine of Original Sin, which leads to the Pauline theology of Christ’s sacrifice on
the cross for all mankind, to expiate once and for all Original Sin, which weighs all men down from birth
and prevents them from approaching God after death. Notwithstanding the fact that many great
Christian thinkers and theologians have viewed the Genesis story as an allegory of man’s fall from full
grace with God, the average Christian tends to view the Genesis story as real. This is what their children
are taught in Bible school, this is how preachers explain Original Sin to their congregations, and this is
certainly how fundamentalists view the scriptures.
Hart’s response to these criticisms is simplistic: if you press any Christian, they will admit that God is a
Spirit. If you are a Catholic and follow the official catechism, that may be true, but even Catholics fall
back on the God of Genesis when they are teaching their children the fundamentals of their religion.
Hart’s defense misses an even greater point: the Philosopher’s God is a sterile and unapproachable
entity. What is there about pure Being that appeals to the human mind and to human emotions? How
can you even pray to such an entity?
Hart suggests that lesser forms of prayer, such as supplication for a favor, are not worthy of a Christian
seeking true communion with God. To do so, a Christian must engage in contemplative prayer, very
much as a monastic would. You free your mind of any thoughts other than on God, the universe,
nature, and the mystery behind creation, and by focusing on Being as the source of all being, you
manufacture for yourself a glimpse – an emotional connection – to the creator. This is better expressed
in Hart’s own words:
Once again: we cannot encounter the world without encountering at the same time the being of
the world, which is a mystery that can never be dispelled by any physical explanation of reality, in
as much as it is a mystery logically prior to and in excess of the physical order.-- 297
The whole of nature is something prepared for us, composed for us, given to us, delivered into
our care by a “supernatural” dispensation. All this being so, one might plausibly say that God –
the infinite wellspring of being, consciousness and bliss that is the source, order, and end of all
reality – is evident everywhere, inescapably presents to us, while autonomous “nature” is
something that has never, even for a moment, come into view. - 298
Every time Hart writes this way, he backs off and qualifies his comments, saying that he is not implying
that true worship or oneness with God is accomplished ultimately through mysticism. Still, you cannot
help noticing that Hart’s struggle in discussing bliss relies on the mystical traditions in Sufi’ism, Islam,
Christianity, Hinduism, and other great religions.
The religious criticism about Hart’s Philosopher’s God is that this God is either offensive, in that he does
not comport with Christian theology, or he is boring, in that all human characteristics of God have been
purged in an attempt to create a God that appeals to all faiths. You get the impression that it is essential
to Hart’s argument that he show the full ecumenical agreement about God as Being, Consciousness, and
Bliss, as some form of proof that his ecumenical definition of God must therefore be true. Clearly many
Christians do not agree with this, notwithstanding what Hart or prominent leaders and scholars such as
the former Archbishop of Canterbury may say.
Hart on Atheism
Hart’s disdain for atheism and atheists is well-known and documented in previous books he has written.
In this book, he takes at times a scalpel, and at times a cudgel, to atheists, and to well-known examples
in particular, like Dawkins, Dennett and Harris.
I have to admit I find it impossible to take atheism very seriously as an intellectual position. As an
emotional commitment or a moral passion – a rejection of barren or odious dogmatisms, an
inability to believe in a good or provident power behind a world in which there is so much
suffering, defiance of “Whatever brute and blackguard made the world,” and so forth – atheism
seems to me an entirely plausible attitude toward the predicaments of finite existence; but as a
metaphysical picture of reality, it strikes me as a rank superstition. I cannot imagine how it is
possible coherently to believe that the material world order is anything but an ontologically
contingent reality, which necessarily depends upon an absolute and transcendent source of
existence. - 294
If one wishes to view the physical universe as the ultimate reality – whether one imagines it as
having no beginning or as having a beginning without cause – then one must also accept that it is
still an entirely contingent reality…It may be an absurd picture of things…but it seems to me to be
an absurdity that one can quite blamelessly embrace so long as one is willing to grasp the nettle
and accept that this just-there-ness is logically indistinguishable from magic. Everybody needs a
little magic in life now and then. – 113
So, atheists cannot make the mental or spiritual leap that Hart does when he accepts that the world is a
contingent reality – something must have come before it to create it – and that therefore God must
exist. In Hart’s thinking, a refusal to make this assumption is cheating, or a form of magic, because he
personally cannot imagine a world which “just is.” Atheists and believers do agree on one thing: that
humans have a compelling need to find a cause before any event. It is how we live our entire lives; it is
how we understand the universe, which has unfolded on a 13 billion year time line of past, present and
future. As humans, the universe to us cries out for an explanation of its existence – it has an
“ontologically contingent reality.”
In Hart’s view, it doesn’t take a leap of faith to accept God as Being and the creator of all that exists,
since nothing would exist without Being. He believes it is inexorable and infallible logic to come to a
belief in the Philosopher’s God. He also insists that naturalism can only take one so far in understanding
the world, and never will there be a situation when the sciences and materialism will be able to solve
the mystery of the origin of the universe or of our consciousness of it.
Many atheists have a belief or hope in the possibility that science ultimately will contribute to a
universally accepted understanding of a non-supernatural origin of the universe, which may include the
concept of something being created from nothing. There is also a belief or hope that human
consciousness will be scientifically understood. Even for those atheists or agnostics who are not certain
of these things, and therefore agree with Hart that we may never know how the universe came about or
why we have consciousness and self-awareness, Hart is both patronizing and insulting by demanding
that they accept his metaphysical picture of reality, and thus abandon their “rank superstition.” To
many people, it is Hart’s metaphysical leap of faith that is illogical. Even Hart calls it acceptance of the
supernatural, a word which Hart loves to define narrowly, but which to most people is synonymous with
belief in devils, ghosts, and magic spells. To atheists and agnostics, logic requires that you do not leap
from rationality to supernatural thinking, but this will never convince Hart, because he promotes a
topsy-turvy world where logic and reason are in the possession only of those who believe in the
Philosopher’s God.
This is especially true of the Philosopher’s God that Hart constructs. Both Christians and non-Christians
have a right to ask an obvious question: how does God as pure Being create the world? Hart is silent on
this important matter, other than to imply that God always existed, and as long as Being existed, things
could come into being (Being, or God, would share a part of himself in allowing lesser and finite things to
have existence). This is a bit like the concept of Will or Spirit that Hegel postulated as the creator,
neither of which satisfactorily described how an amorphous concept can bring reality into being. The
best Hart can do is say that God “always was and will be”, and is therefore not constrained by finitude.
Further, we humans are incapable of comprehending these mysteries, therefore it is best to just accept
his arguments. This is a classic dodge of theists, who create a God, and then tell us we are too limited
and feeble a species to answer any of the serious questions raised about this God. In other words,
That is, if the word “God” has any meaning at all…it must refer to a reality that is logically
necessary and that therefore provides the ultimate explanation of all other realities, without
need of being explained in turn. – 116
How convenient to create a God that supposedly explains all reality, but is not required to explain
anything about himself, much less show himself physically. Through all the elegant language and
scholarly citations Hart has at his disposal, his argument for the Philosopher’s God boils down to this:
“the universe exists, therefore God must exist. And don’t bother asking any tough questions about God,
because he doesn’t have to explain them to you, show you any proof, or relate in any real way to the
human condition.”
Surely, you might say, the last point is wrong. Hart’s God is approachable by humans, through acts of
goodness (bliss), and through contemplative prayer. Unfortunately, that is not true, says Hart. Hart
restricts these qualities only to believers like himself.
Whatever the case, though, it is most definitely true that believers in God have a far easier time
believing that there really is such a thing as goodness, and that moral truth is not just an illusion
generated by biological history, cultural prejudice, or personal psychology. If religious faith is any
aid to moral life, it is so simply in making it possible to persevere in the certitude that real
goodness not only truly exists but can also reveal itself to us. – 255
In Hart’s thinking, Believers in God, like Hart, have in a sense accepted him in their heart, however
logically they go about the process, and therefore they can contemplate and practice goodness as bliss.
Atheists cannot do this because they refuse to make the leap of approaching God through bliss. This is a
sophisticated but nonetheless sad version of the traditional Christian condemnation of atheists – that
they have no morals because they don’t believe in the Ten Commandments. Anytime a Christian makes
such an argument, they are “psychologically projecting,” – they are throwing on to the atheist their own
fear that they will be morally lost if some supernatural or religious authority were not around to teach
them ethics and civilized behavior. Hart is psychologically projecting in this case as well; he is telling us
that his personal experiences of bliss have led him to understand goodness, and without those
experiences, he would be ethically lost, and possibly uncertain of God’s existence.
This is all of a piece of the topsy-turvy world Hart wishes to create. Atheists, for example, often cite the
brutal history of Christianity, and the genocidal practices of the Old Testament God, as proof that
Christianity is hypocritical and does not always practice what is preached from the pulpit. Fine , says
Hart – he returns the accusation against atheists and atheism:
Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy. Perhaps then, it should not be condemned for
its philosophical deficiencies, or even treated as an intellectual posture of any kind, but
recognized as a form of simple devotion, all the more endearing for its mixture of tender
awkwardness and charming pomposity. 305
What makes today’s popular atheism so depressing is neither its conceptual boorishness nor its
self-righteousness but simply its cultural inevitability. It is the final, predictable, and
unsurprisingly vulgar expression of an ideological tradition that has, after many centuries,
become so pervasive and habitual that most of us have no idea how to doubt its premises, or
how to avert its consequences. This is a fairly sad state of affairs, moreover, because those
consequences have at times proved quite terrible. - 307
Good for Hart in recognizing that atheism is a form of therapy. Quite a few atheists seek out
professional therapists to help with the trauma of extricating oneself from a lifetime of force-fed
religious beliefs, and potentially separating oneself permanently from family and friends whom you love.
Most non-believers would be happy if Hart limited his criticisms to their “charming pomposity.” But
Hart goes well beyond this. He wants to tie atheism, naturalism, materialism, and probably a good
many scientists, to the “quite terrible” consequences to civilization of hundreds of years of disbelief in
God.
Hart implicitly accuses atheism of being the philosophical source for the genocide and murders
perpetrated by the Soviet Union and Communist China, both avowedly atheist states. Here again,
projection is at work. Josef Stalin was an atheist, therefore he had no moral compass or sense of sin,
therefore he could commit the most atrocious crimes without any fear of consequences. Hart must be
imagining what it must be like to be Josef Stalin without a belief in God. When, however, does a belief
in God become a guaranteed constraint on government officials? Stalin was, according to his daughter,
a religiously superstitious man. Hitler wrapped the swastika around Christianity very tightly, forcing his
troops to swear loyalty to him in the presence of God. American troops invaded Iraq in 2003 with a
good many armored vehicles displaying either the cross or Christian verses. Most of the American men
who waterboarded and sometimes killed Iraqi prisoners were God-fearing soldiers, doctors, and
psychologists.
No one can win a tit-for-tat battle trying to prove someone else’s religious beliefs, or lack thereof, lead
to atrocities. It is unworthy of Hart to try, and ends the book on a sour note. He seems unable,
however, to suppress his animus against atheists, fellow scholars with whom he disagrees, and quite a
bit of modern science. He also leaves completely unmentioned some serious objections to the
Philosopher’s God, and not just the fact that he negates Christianity and Christian redemption theology.
There is no mention of the anthropomorphic argument – that man invents God. Hart makes one
fleeting, sneering mention of a tendency by naturalists to anthropomorphize God, as if this could ever
fully explain God’s mysterious nature. But in the very next sentence, he talks about God, as he does
throughout the book, as a he. Why is God a male, or even human at all? Hart doesn’t even bother to
give us a fudged explanation, that God is so impossible for humans to comprehend, that we are forced
to use a human pronoun as a matter of convenience. Perhaps he realizes this argument falls apart; if it
is so essential to use he and him when discussing God, doesn’t that tell us we are investing him with
human characteristics? Isn’t that an admission that pure Being is useless as a God to most humans
except those with the intelligence, perception, and sophistication to enter into a blissful communion
through a spiritual trance? Maybe Hart doesn’t want to acknowledge that Ludwig Feuerbach had
anything meaningful to say about God; after all, Feuerbach influenced Marx and Engels, who influenced
Lenin, who installed an atheist state in Russia. Feuerbach is anathema for anyone fighting the 1950s
Cold War, or three centuries of Enlightenment progress, as Hart is prone to do. Ignoring Feuerbach
seems to be the default position for deists.
When all is said and done, you set Hart’s book down with admiration for his prose and scholarly
approach. If you are predisposed to believe in the Philosopher’s God, Hart’s book will convince you. For
all the rest of us, including many fundamentalist Christians, Hart is not capable of changing very many
people’s minds. The Philosopher’s God has always been a cerebral oddity, of interest to theologians,
philosophers, and some church officials. He has never been of interest to the average worshipper,
because he is too remote and lacking in everyday humanity (this includes the contemplative God who
appeals to those few who desire a quasi-mystical communion with God). Part of what has made
Christianity such a force in the world for 2,000 years has been its ability to satisfy the average person’s
desire for an anthropomorphic and externalized God, which Christianity provides in the thoroughly
human personality of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is at least someone the average Christian can talk to, in
their mind, through prayer, which is impossible to do with something as completely de-humanized as
pure Being.
Hart eschews any interest in Jesus Christ, perhaps out of fear that he dare not humanize the
Philosopher’s God of pure Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, or the Philosopher’s God will evaporate into
Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Allah, Buddha, Brahma or some other god that people can identify with in a
human way. The Philosopher’s God therefore remains up on his pedestal, far removed from the
average Christian. Hart has shifted him around a bit, and dressed him in some new clothes, but there he
sits on his pedestal, and he has not moved any closer to ordinary people. Normally, the Philosopher’s
God is too genteel to bring fire and brimstone down upon atheists and non-believers, but in David
Bentley Hart’s book, you get the sense that if he could get away with it, he would condemn all nonbelievers to the hell-fire that is reserved for those who blaspheme, and who dare to question God’s
existence. To those, in other words, who refuse to make the leap with him into accepting that
naturalism can only go so far, and who refuse to adopt the view that some ineffable entity, called pure
Being, created all reality. Such people do not deserve spiritual communion with God, because they have
rejected his existence. This is the implicit threat underlying much of what Hart writes, and to the extent
Hart wants to bring back the Philosopher’s God of old, he has succeeded. Prior to the Enlightenment,
the threat of hell-fire was a potent tool available for use by the clergy, theologians, and even the state.
Abide by our rules, was the implication, and you will gain entry into Heaven. The very last sentences of
Hart’s book say as much, however politely expressed:
Those who have entirely lost the ability to see the transcendent reality that shows itself in all
things, and who refuse to seek it out or even to believe the search a meaningful one, have
confined themselves for now within an illusory world, and wander in a labyrinth of dreams.
Those others, however, who are still able to see the truth that shines in and through and beyond
the world of ordinary experience, and who know that nature is in its every aspect the gift of the
supernatural, and who understand that God is that absolute reality in whom, in every moment,
they live and move and have their being – they are awake.
Garrett Glass
jehoshuathebook.com