Hart of Darkness

A Review of "Tradition and Apocalypse"

Shaphan the scribe shewed the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest hath delivered me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king.

And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes. (2 Kings 22:10-11)

It seems that the only thing I have in common with David Bentley Hart is the ability to see through John Henry Newman’s “Development of Doctrine” magic trick (I wrote an exposition on Newman). For an entirely different purpose and project, Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse, released a few years ago, was an effective dragging, a paunchy Achilles before the walls of Notre Dame pulling the collective corpse of respectable bowtied Principled Conservative theologians. This review will give a brief sketch of Hart’s work, what it successfully accomplishes as destruction (Hart is a wild boar unleashed in the Lord’s vineyard), and why Hart’s verbose belching demands a better answer, his seething moral indignation to the contrary

To start, this book is very simple and has a very clear set of arguments. The first, and least contentious, is that “Traditionalism” is a very modern invention. Actual tradition, for everyone since forever, is marked with a dogmatic slumber about its own surroundings and doings. There are variety of beliefs, customs, notions, orientations, and so on that are fuzzy and unclear. They are just what they are. Things are done because that has always been the way they have been done, with little historical consciousness. Traditionalists, in contrast, attempt to justify, rationalize, explain, and explore all of these intricacies. They often come apart at the seams in reckoning inconsistences and aberrations, resulting in fideism or mental gymnastics. Sometimes they just have to ignore reality, as many academic theologians are instructed to avoid Early Christian studies lest they lose their faith or their mind.

Unfortunately for Christian theologians, who want to systematize and dogmatize, they have to face the past. Christianity is focused on a very particular series of historical events that claim absolute and universal significance for all Human beings throughout time and space. Audacious as it is ludicrous, the Christian gambles the total meaning of ultimate reality on what occurred in the minor province of Judea in the Roman Empire two thousand years. If Christians want to remain Christians in the pursuit of their theology, then they have to face the very exclusive, and very particularist (the New Testament lacks the time-out-mind haziness of myth), claims of the Bible. To even to begin to accomplish this task, however, one must have an adequate definition of what history is and how to comprehend two thousand years of it in constituting truth and dogma for Christians (or anyone else) today.

History, therefore, requires an understanding of “causality” and its application. For Hart, it is important to distinguish the ancient and medieval sense of “cause,” with an an awareness of formal structure and end, from the soulless mechanized action and reaction, through a near infinite chain, that shapes modern hard sciences. History is not a series of billiard balls banging one after another, but have logical correlations and a telos to which they are all driven (and which, ultimately, gives them significance). Without the “abiding presence” of a “final cause” for historical research, history is an endless and overwhelming flood of facts, a river that splits into smaller and smaller tributaries for the analyst, ultimately destroying any notion that history would ever provide its own significance, let alone a system to organize the relationship between significance events. Unlike modern sciences, ancients and medieval philosopersh understood that any account of cause must take into account these schemas of interpretation that make sense of, and intertwined with, the shape of the world. Hart rejects all dualisms between materialism and mind, as if our categories have no real significance for the way things really are. Therefore, the effort to understand Christian belief and dogma, what is eternal from what is mere accident, requires an understanding on Christian history and its ultimate end.

Hart then gives a reconstruction of two major figures that attempted to pioneer a way forward, of extracting Christian Dogma from Christian History. The first was Newman, whose Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was the first attempt at “Traditonalism,” to combine historical consciousness with magisterial dogmatism. As someone well versed in the English tradition of patristics, as well as the German boom of Higher Criticism, Newman was quite clear that appeals to consensus of the Fathers was useless. There was no single unbroken tradition of Christian doctrine that persisted through the ages against innovators. But Newman could not answer these challenges without resorting to vague metaphors. His preference was, befitting his era, organic imagery, with dogmas like seeds or growing animals. Like every living thing, much changes but the identity persists, though how to understand this shared unity of existence is hard to explain. Much of what Newman does, as Hart rightly understands, is vague mysticism and appeals to the self-evident victory of Catholicism. This is tautological and results in a claim trying to justify as a foundation for itself. Unlike an infinite regress of turtles all the way down, this is one turtle claiming to sit upon himself. But, at the least, Newman took this challenge seriously when many Catholics simply dismissed these problems as infidel.

By the time of Maurice Blondel, Hart’s second pioneer, Catholicism was suffering the shocks of Modernism. In Histoire et Dogma, Blondel sought to set out a means to avoid arbitrary fideism in whatever the magisterium says, without giving into the skeptical acid bath of the Higher Critics. Blondel hoped to show how dogma is distinct from historical change, but intertwined within it, a truth shining out through the historical wreckage of power politics, subterfuge, compromise, and deception. Dogma alone could judge the value of history, but dogma only appeared in and through historical contingency. But this solution, in Hart’s retelling, ends in the same place as Newman. This self-sustaining turtle now takes the form of a mobius strip, two distinct lines blurring back into each other, ultimately requiring Blondel to claim a fully historically conscious magisterium that could authoritatively settle disputes on what was true dogma from false heresy. It did not mean arbitrary authority, but it is hard to see how magisterial decisions did not have force simply because they are from the magisterium. This form of circular reasoning is odious to Hart, but mostly frustrating because neither Newman nor Blondel opened with their conclusion that dogma is separated from error or accident because the magisterium says it is so (however that power, precisely comes about). The end result is a sigh:

Ultimately, Newman’s treatise proved, if it proved anything at all, that any attempt to demonstrate from the historical evidence that the development of ‘orthodox’ Christian doctrine has been a process of disclosure—the progressive explication of a content latent in the faith from its inception—is simply hopeless.

Tradition, that reliance on history to undergird dogma without fideistic declarations of truth and error, seems to be a dead end. At least, it is a dead end in the way that everyone else has been trying so far. The problem for Newman and Blondel was that they only dealt with the Past and Present, but not with an awareness of the Future as an invisible, incomplete, horizon which works backwards to impact our judgements today. The Future is what might reopen a recovery of living Tradition:

It is the nimbus of the unseen that shines all around the seen, a boundless excess of meaning that lies beyond the scope of every formulation of the faith, an open distance that at once frustrates and continuously urges devotion and reflection toward a final rest.

One can already hear legs shifting, throats clearing, repressed groans, among many other agitated tics. The “Future” is somehow to determine the significance of the Past and construct a notion of Tradition? That is even more woolly and mystical than Newman’s organicism or Blondel’s erudite mobius strip. But the real cash-out of the “Future” orientation of Tradition for Hart is its humility. He does not deny his approach is any less mystical or dependent on faith, that is all a given in any theological project. Rather, he concerned to do away with triumphalism and dogma-tism that often accompanies Traditionalism. The only way to dodge either a false reconstruction of the Past and total relativism towards it is to somehow gain a sense of teleological humility about the development of doctrine. The end-horizon is an ever moving, ever encompassing, space that not only absorbs the Present, but reorients (and reinterprets) the Past. Tradition, therefore, is not a staid conservative act of repetition. Rather, Tradition is simultaneous destructive and creation, sweeping away broken interpretations and introducing novel ones that best make sense of what we have always tried and wanted to believe. Tradition is, therefore, transformation.

Thus Hart advocates for this progressive understanding of the end-horizon:

Each such synthesis is still a creative act, a feat of reinterpretation and reinvention. Whatever it preserves from the past it must also revise. This means that it relies on a standard in addition to the testimony of the past—which, after all, consists in all those streams of belief and practice that have come into conflict and thereby called forth a doctrinal formulation in the first place. It relies, rather, on what the testimony of the past was pointing toward, an as yet still future fullness of meaning that casts a light of discrimination backward over all the forces that have brought the tradition to this or that moment of crisis. How otherwise could one judge?

This is perhaps the most important, methodological, passage in the book, with its last question as its cornerstone. Judgement is, precisely, the issue, but that will return further down.

If the above is Hart’s method, he gives it a test run in reassessing the phenomenon of Arianism. Often treated as the ur-heresy of all heresies, Arianism supposedly was a malicious and seductive break from the unstained tradition of the Catholic Church that almost plunged the world into darkness. In Hart’s estimation, with a clear command of more recent literature on the subject, Arianism was rather conservative. Based on the fragments of what remained, Arius was fairly “austere” and “unimaginative” in his teaching, but it had been a steady stream during the centuries leading up to this moment. Hart then gives a basic, and fairly standard, genealogy of how Arianism reflected ideas of Theos Deuteros, a second (somehow inferior but divine) God, which Philo, an Alexandrian Jew, had made central to his teaching. Philo influenced the Christians of Alexandria, shaping the thought of Clement, passed to Origen, who passed on this idea through disciples abroad like Gregory Thaumaturgos and disciples local like “Pope” Dionysius of Alexandria. Arius was simply the last in a long chain of those who taught a celestial hierarchy of diminishing returns from the depths of black matter to the One, the source of all being.

Arius the Conservative, even Traditionalist, would not accept that this tradition of celestial hierarchy was inadequate. Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers innovated, but not merely for the sake of a novel or interesting doctrine. Rather, they understood the demand of a living tradition, one that prioritized the heart and soul of Christianity as deification. The Council of Nicaea and the novel terms included in its symbol (such as homoousious, which many historians mocked as fanatical quibbling) were attempts to revive the dynamic pulse of Christian tradition. A celestial tradition, where Christ is the Theos Deuteros, an inferior god that was almost but not quite God, would never allow full participation in divinity. Had not the Scriptures left bread crumbs (e.g. become partakers of the divine nature ala 2 Peter 1:4)? Basil of Caesarea went farther, including the Holy Spirit as equally divine when no verse every explicitly compared God the Father with him. The secret reasoning (which Hart can not say with confidence) was clear: deification required a reworking of both Christology and Pneumatology. To become one with the Father means becoming one with the Son and one in the Spirit meant they, altogether, were the One God. The breeze of the future, unbeknownst to Athanasius, defined the significance of dogma.

This revisionism, a creative yet radical approach to the Tradition, is necessary if Christianity is to survive. Hart gives an example of what progress might look like:

For instance, I could imagine the theology of deification, in casting its ever more penetrating light back upon the sources of the faith, as coming more and more to require a reconsideration on the part of the tradition of how it understands many of its own inherited distinctions between nature and supernature, nature and grace, creation and emanation, divine Spirit and human spirit, creation and incarnation, and so forth, perhaps with the aid of previously unexploited resources like Vedantic metaphysics

It is pretty clear what end-horizon, what spirit, is driving Tradition forward.

Even so, Hart has raised the stakes and made a kind of mockery of the process. Does not the Christian Tradition, the real Tradition in Jesus Christ, teach communism in goods, pacifism, rejection of private property (or at least individual wealth)? One cannot simply gather up the so-called historical Jesus or the historical Apostles because that, in itself, answers nothing. For Hart (obviously familiar with academic literature on the subject), Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who expected an inevitable end of the world (a force that kept early Christians together until it was clear that these millennial expectations were not going to happen). Paul believed Christ is a spiritual champion who raised up soldiers to fight archons, fallen angels, and various other incorporeal forces of darkness in a cosmic war. Paul even took the “Eden myth” (which for Hart was a standard Mesopotamian cosmogony of tribal gods getting outsmarted by their exploited Human creatures) and turned it into the origin of Man’s war against evil spirits.

But the significance of both of these strands, even if Jesus is not coming back to end the world or there are no personal malevolent spirits, is the importance of apocalypse. Only if the Future (as the teleological horizon) breaks into the Present, only if an apocalypse shakes up our sense of the world, can man be free. Only an apocalypse can shock man out of “bare history,” that linear and empty string of insignificant events, and restore to him an awareness of an ultimate destiny. Tradition (Christian or otherwise) alone can accomplish this break in time, the reordering of days and space as sacred, to free men for something else. This opening up of the Present, in light of the Future, thus requires a reinterpretation, even revision, of the Past.

Thus Hart can boldly, and hopefully, claim:

One cannot know the future as an accomplished fact of history, but one can know both the future horizon of the apocalyptic promise (however obscure its eschatological lineaments) as well as the past transmission of that promise, and can learn to hold both together in the simultaneously unitive and disjunctive moment of the present.

In the end, Hart is self-conscious that he has ended up in similar mystical terrain as Newman or Blondel. Temporal metaphors of apocalypse frame a far more simple agnosticism about dogma. But that is an improvement upon the old lapses into authoritarian judgement, whether it be Protestants with the Bible, Catholics with the papal magisterium, or Orthodox (which Hart still claims to be) with the Fathers or the Councils. History is a hall of mirrors that provides no clear, decisive, paths forward. Only at the end, only when the horizon of the Future closes, will a single interpretive system unfold. But until then, epistemologically, man still sees through a glass darkly. In the mean time, this progressive breath of fresh air will allow Tradition to shake off such evil an irrational dogmas like an eternal hell or original sin for new vantages. At the end of the book, Hart offers some suggestions, such as the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara as offering a needed monistic emphasis on the unity of grace and nature that would help the wonderful theology of Maximus the Confessor to develop in new fruitful ways. Perhaps the “ultimate horizon of Christian tradition may well be the ultimate horizon of countless other traditions as well.”

Hart is a great sulfurous palette cleanse, like a daub of wasabi to open the sinuses. Despite his comically stale venom for the so-called Integralist Fascism of toothless establishment jesters like Adrien Vermeule (who is far more wicked in counter-conspiracy work with Obamunist goon Cass Sunstein than his Catholic Empire fantasy babble), Hart has hit the right note to take on his hated Traditionalists. All the efforts to “become deep in history” have failed to establish any historically attuned sense of faith. Even worse, the expectation that an authoritative magisterium will settle the matter has been a disaster for Catholic Traditionalists who are being systematically reduced to inept impotence by Pope Francis. In one particularly nasty footnote, Hart opines on why the Traditionalists hate Francis:

It is all too obvious that what they find most insufferable about him is his commitment to understanding the demands of the Gospel rather than to shoring up the ramparts of the early modern institutions of the Roman communion; what offends them is his Christianity.

The snide moralizing aside, Hart has not only harsh words for your run of the mill, literally-who, Trad. He is a menace to all bow-tied Principled Conservative advocates of Tradition. His main enemies are usually found in the conference circuit or cocktail parties. From many anecdotes, Hart really despises those who claim Tradition to believe in evil things. In one footnote, Hart was aghast that one of his critics, who wrote a negative review of That All Shall Be Saved, privately told him that he would like to believe universalism. Alas, divine revelation (viz. Bible and/or Tradition) informed him otherwise. For Hart, this claim was a confession that Satan was more righteous than God, that Lucifer had a greater moral compass than the Lord of Battles.

Of course, that is why Hart can say, fairly forthrightly, that Marcion had a better grasp on the Bible than Thomas or Luther. While the latter believed in original sin/guilt and eternal hell, Marcion and other Gnostics, despite their “puerile dualism,” had a greater sense of the New Testament’s moral and metaphysical considerations. Even ancient heretics thought genocides and eternally roasting babies was evil. What can a Traditionalist say, who agrees in all basic moral principles with Hart (reluctantly or reservedly)? It’s not true, but I wish (or hope) it is true is an admission of defeat, something Hart took several victory laps with as his apology for Universalism made its splash. Hart has to be wrong just because he is, even as this book serves as an either/or to Hindooize Christianity or see it fall into ultimate irrelevance (something happening, at rapid pace, demographically). Tradition will win, even Hart’s manufactured “Christ of Tradition,” and the barbarians defeated.

But the barbarian must take the stage and unsheathe the sword.

The entirety of Hart’s end-horizon breaking in, the flatus of Hart’s Future, depend on his imperious, impeccable, obvious, sneering moral judgements that beset the reader at every turn. The belief in eternal hell is “degrading, obscene, cruel, psychotic, and (in fact) unscriptural,” and thankfully no one really believes it, lest one “invite psychosis” or “accomplish the total destruction of one’s own moral intelligence.” Similarly, a proscription of various insane doctrines similarly smoke out the psychotics:

Even ideas as preposterous and alien to the actual teachings of scripture as predestination ‘prior to foreseen merits’ (ante praevisa merita), or penal substitutionary atonement, or limited atonement, or extrinsic or merely forensic justification, or the impotence of human good works in salvation, or the reality of a hell of eternal conscious torment, or an absolute partition between grace and nature, or inherited guilt – ideas, in short, that could not be true in any possible world.”

These are mental evils, but they are not true “heresies,” opprobrium that belongs only to the “moral departure from the explicit teachings of Christ.” Most American Christians are, in fact, heretics because they have supported the death penalty, believe in keeping personal wealth, possess a “libertarian social theory,” and continue to support President Donald Trump. If they were really Christians, they would embrace the anarchistic communism of Jesus. But unfortunately, the perverse anti-Tradition, has produced the evils of Imperial Christianity and contemporary Western religion:

Modern Western culture’s comfortable bourgeois cult of civic respectability and personal prosperity, or to the free-market capitalist orthodoxies and ridiculous gun-obsessions and barbarous nation-worship of the ‘Christianity’ indigenous to contemporary America (even among many Catholics and Orthodox).

It is hard to take this bluster seriously. It is stale and empty, political moralizing of Chapo Trap House in the nursing home with Upanishads as wall paper. Behind the invective and denunciations from the well of common sentiment is simply an enraged drunkard, spurned too many times, looking for any nervous fence-rider to grab and take out into the alley for a beating. There is nothing behind this contempt than the murderous fever of one who takes a dip into the Ganges toilet. It is inane hectoring, but it is still superior to the Catholic who wish he could be a universalist because of its honesty. Hart is what he is, a pompous orientalized windbag, but one that at least knows what he wants (namely monism).

But the real question remains: “How otherwise could one judge?” Like a cross for a vampire, the answer is simply the Bible. Howler! Fool! But that was precisely the story of King Josiah and the rediscovery of the Law. I am sure Hart believes (because he lives in The Hive) that the whole story was cooked up royal propaganda, that there was no law to rediscover. Instead, this was the evolution of Canaanite polytheism and “shamanic spiritualities” into the “mono-Yahwism” of the prophets. But before taking another swing from the paint-thinner of suspicion, how is a restoration of the Law even plausible if polytheism was normative throughout Israel? It does not matter because the deck is already loaded. Even if the Mosaic covenant on Mt Sinai was real and historical, it would not matter because the Law (and the God who gave the Law) is a moral monstrosity.

Bite the bullet and pay obeisance to the theocrat of Geneva. The raging of Hart are no different than the raging of Christopher Hitchens, both utterly detest and hate the God of the Bible. The value of Christianity, for Hart, is the Bible as a kind of launchpad for greater spiritual thoughts, to selectively pick and prune until one ends up with the perennial stitch-work of spirituality (like McDonald’s, where various franchises have unique local options to reflect local identity and experience). In contrast, the Bible is canon, it is the defining evaluation of all other preliminary judgements. Such a claim does not require infallible interpretation, or an infinite regress of interpreters. Rather, the Bible is the Word of God, the touchstone, the inscripturated Spirit that revives the bones of the saints. It does contain, within itself, a means to interpret the entire world, Past and Present and Future. It is, as the great satan Calvin put it, a pair of spectacles through which all may be known that man may know about things in Heaven and on Earth. The Bible is how one may judge, it offers the totality of historical significance (even the reign of Constantine and the rise of America) in its panoply of symbols.

The problem with Hart, as it was with Newman, is that the Bible is insufficient, absurd, evil, and insane. Instead, a vain agnosticism is preferable. Hart is more forthright about this judgement in his clunky and tortuous pseudo-dialog All Things are Full of Gods. Explaining himself in his introduction, Hart’s view is not only found in the transgender Psyche (the appearance of a woman speaking with the voice of man), but also the skeptical Phaesty. While Hart gives a map of philosophy of mind, which ultimately defeats the gnu-atheist god of mechanical craft, the end really reveals the stalemate. Phaesty will not quite admit defeat, but he does confess that he cannot believe in ‘God’ because of all the horrors in the world. Psyche, who had mannishly seized a rose to begin the dialog, confesses “she” does not have all the answers either. There has to be something at the End that can explain all the gulags and gas-chambers along the way. The simple rose, which reveals the spiritually infused material world that all minds can access to some degree or another, testifies to subliminal glory. But neither can really square this circle and they agree to disagree.

Hart is not even sure of the Hindu cosmology of Samsara and nearly infinite worlds of birth-death-rebirth. That too has a lot of carnage, even if preferable to an endless infernal torture chamber. Instead, what makes the most sense to Hart, the man of both revelation and reason, is some form of monism (perhaps the “qualified non-dualism” of his beloved Ramunaja), one that sees mankind lifted up and assumed into divinity with his personhood retained. But that is a desire that is stripped bare before the harsh winds of the Future. What if the Eschaton is not limousine liberal communism of an academic, but the Lord Jesus who not only shed his own blood to redeem the cosmos for his elect, but shed the blood of the wicked in the wine-press of God’s wrath. The God who showered mercy upon the nations is the God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart to shine forth his glory to the same. This alone gives the basis for judgement, even if its conclusions are denounced as insane, psychotic, and so on.

God is a moral monster, so what? He is the source of righteousness and his Law has been declared. It is time to rend clothes and put the Tradition of the gods to death.