In the Aftermath. Provocations and Laments

250 Pages·2008·1.43 MB·English

by  David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart
For my father and mother, Robert and Marianne Hart, Gentlefolk of the Great
State of Maryland
State of Maryland
INTRODUCTION ix
1. Christ and Nothing (No Other God) 1
2. Notes on John Paul II's Pontificate, 2001 20
3. A Most Partial Historian: On Maurice Cowling's Religion and
Public Doctrine in Modern England 24
4. Sheer Extravagant Violence: Gogol's Taras Bulba 37
5. Religion in America: Ancient and Modern 43
6. When the Going Was Bad: On Evelyn Waugh's
Travel Writings 63
7. Freedom and Decency 69
8. The Pornography Culture 83
9. The Laughter of the Philosophers 92
lo. Tremors of Doubt lob
11. Tsunami and Theodicy 111
12. Where Was God? An Interview with David Bentley Hart by The
Christian Century 118
13. Roland Redivivus 124
14. The Soul of a Controversy 130
15. Beyond Disbelief: On Alister McGratlfs The Twilight of Atheism
133
16. The Anti-Theology of the Body 139
17. Ecumenical War Councils: On Webster and Cole's The Virtue of War
148
18. The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok: On the Theology of Robert
Jenson 156
19. Infinite Lit: On William Lynch's Christ and Apollo 170
20. Theology as Knowledge 176
21. On the Trail of the Snark with Daniel Dennett 182
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 203
11 of the pieces assembled in this volume have been published previously,
in journals or newspapers, though for the most part in slightly different forms
than appear here. I have only two excuses for issuing them anew. The first is
simply that a number of persons have suggested I do so. The second is that a
collection of this sort allows me to restore several of these essays to something
nearer the versions I originally wrote, as well as to make a few small alterations.
Magazine and newspaper editors are of necessity concerned for the length of
what they publish, and on more than one occasion I have had to accommodate an
editor by abbreviating the text I had initially submitted. And sometimes I have
succumbed to second thoughts, and moderated some of my more irresponsible
rhetoric, and now in retrospect regret having done so. Editors, moreover, will
insist on making small changes in what one writes, even when no particular
improvement is discernible as a result. In truth, though, I have had small cause
for complaint. Most of my editors have left my texts almost entirely intact, and
have asked for only small revisions, if any (no doubt they know I will become
unreasonable if asked to consent to anything larger). Still, to my mind the correct
or definitive text is always the one stored in my hard drive, which is not
necessarily the one that appeared in print; and so, in every case where there is a
divergence between the two, it is the former I have included here (though with,
as I have said, some slight amendments).
The articles I have published in the past several years are, broadly speaking,
of two kinds: those written for publications with wide reader ships, and those
written for academic guild periodicals. All the pieces reproduced here belong to
the former category. A collection of essays of the other sort is in the works, but
that will be a very different kind of book Here I want - at least, in part - to
entertain. This is not to say that the pieces gathered here are not serious in their
arguments; quite the contrary: in many ways, it is far easier to make ambitious
arguments in articles for magazines, where one is at liberty to address the sort of
large cultural, religious, or philosophical issues that one usually cannot in the
narrower confines of academic journals. I mean only that, in these articles, I
have given my natural inclinations towards satire and towards wantonly
profligate turns of phrase far freer rein than academic writing permits. I hope
most of my readers will not find these aspects of my "authorial voice"
insufferable; I even hope they will take some pleasure in my prose (though
perhaps that is most likely only if it is taken in measured doses). I have, at any
rate, attempted to include only pieces that strike me as having some intrinsic
interest, both in form and in content. This is true even of those written putatively
as reviews of other men's books (of which there are a good number here); mere
occasional reviews I would not think of including in a collection of this sort, but
I have often chosen to review a book solely as a pretext for writing a small essay
of my own, more in conversation with the book under examination than as a
critical appraisal of that book
One feature of my style for which I am not inclined to feel penitent, but for
which reason tells me I ought to offer some apology, is an occasional want of
restraint, most particularly in my expressions of distaste for an idea or for the
mind that produced it. This is all attributable, I expect, to those tendencies as a
writer of which I have just spoken. My only defense - apart from confessing my
sense that imperturbably mild manners often make for boring copy - is that I
have never intentionally used language I thought disproportionately fierce in
regard to any proposition or any thinker, and that in reviewing these essays I
cannot honestly find an instance of invective I particularly regret. Perhaps the
most savage personal remarks I have ever committed to print are those I made
regarding the bioethicist Joseph Fletcher in the article entitled "The Anti-
Theology of the Body," and they astonished even me by their vehemence when I
read them again in preparing this volume; I did not, however, alter them, or even
soften them to the degree that the editors of The New Atlantis did when the
article originally appeared, for the simple rea son that they still do not seem
unwarranted to me given the altogether loathsome nature of Fletcher's ideas, and
the scandal that so many of our tenured intellectuals do not recoil from those
ideas with the horror and revulsion they merit. I do not know if I believe that any
quantity of abuse heaped upon persons like Fletcher is truly excessive, except in
tactical terms: If one wants to convince others of the justness of one's views of
anything, perhaps one ought to proceed in as moderate and cautious a manner as
one can. But, then again, perhaps one occasionally should not; some ideas are
simply evil, and the persons who conceive them somewhat depraved, and there
may be something rather disgraceful in an unwillingness to say so.
At other times, of course, an idea or thinker is not evil or depraved, but
merely silly or sanctimonious; and in these cases also a certain robustness in
one's rhetoric is not necessarily a discreditable thing. The final essay in this
collection is the most relentlessly satirical, I think it fair to say, and is directed at
a philosopher - Daniel Dennett - who, whatever his faults, could never be
indicted of the sort of moral idiocy that permeated Fletcher's work. In matters
historical, religious, and even philosophical, Dennett is clearly something of an
ignoramus; and he has always been a bad philosopher, however much he may be
adored by journalists and book reviewers and his ideological comrades; and,
since his work now belongs to that parasitic subcategory of analytic philosophy
that serves simply as a sort of adjunct to the hard sciences, he no longer really
writes philosophy anyway. All of that would be quite pardonable, though, were
it not for the self-importance, condescension, and imperiousness of his writings
on the relation between scientific reason and religious belief. Ignorance and
defective logic become truly offensive only when combined with invincible and
self-deluding arrogance. Moreover, whereas most of Dennett's books have
something to commend them - many are quite informative on recent
developments in evolutionary theory, for instance - the book I address in the
article included here, Breaking the Spell, could scarcely be more vapid in its
content or reprehensible in its tone. It is no worse, admittedly, than the books of
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens (though Hitchens, even
if he cannot think his way to the end of a simple syllogism, can write fairly well,
as Dennett most emphatically cannot); but the arguments of a philosopher - even
a bad philosopher - must be held to a higher standard. Of course, the truth is that
the entire tribe of the "New Atheists" is a dis appointment. A reflective and
brilliant atheist is a man much to be admired, if he truly demonstrates an
understanding of what it is he is rejecting; and an atheist genuinely willing to
accept the full implications of his convictions (Nietzsche being a nonpareil
example) should not be reviled for those convictions. But it seems obvious that
among the innumerable evidences of late modern culture's lack of spiritual
depths one must include its manifest impotence to produce profound atheists.
Instead, the best it seems we can hope for today are dreary purveyors of
historical illiteracy, theatrical indignation, subfusc moralizing, and the sort of
logical confusions that Richard Dawkins has brought to a level of almost
transcendent perfection.
In any event, I am allowing myself to drift beyond the proper boundaries of