Hey John sorry we couldn't meet up for lunch over the break, what if instead I throw a discursive blogpost about David Bentley Hart and some old poetry at you? That's like the same as if you had a conversation with me, right?
The benefit of reading Rod Dreher’s blog, as some of you at least know, is not so much the blog itself but the great variety of reviews, opinion pieces, books old and new, and spiritual meditations for which he serves as a sort of clearinghouse in those too-rare posts which constitute little respites from his primary role as a breathless Cassandra of social decline. He recently put up just such a post that sent me to David Bentley Hart’s insightful July review of Peter Sloterdijk’s newly published collection, After God. Sloterdijk, himself “manifestly incapable of religious belief,” is nonetheless deeply concerned with the festering problem of disenchantment, that devastating and, it is suggested, irrecoverable loss of safe horizons of meaning that once served as points of orientation in the social and spiritual realms. In my little wanderings of philosophical inquiry I find myself apprehensively taken with this same problem, and I found much to ponder in the meeting of these minds.
Hart, whom I admire mainly for possessing perhaps the world’s most prodigious English vocabulary, seems to have set himself a mission in recent years of relentlessly tearing down, most prominently through his theological attacks on the doctrine of eternal Hell, the already far decayed remnants of a Christendom he has seemingly come to see as a parasite on and perversion of Christianity1. This understandably causes some frustration in certain quarters. With faith so embattled, what constructive purpose is Hart serving by piling on with its gleeful critics? Couldn’t—shouldn’t—he be helping? I imagine Hart to be the sort who would bristle at the suggestion that theological inquiry should ‘help’ the church in the way a lot of conservatives want it to; that he clearly believes that he is in fact helping is amply demonstrated in this review. One must conclude that Hart has come to believe, with as much fervor as an academic is capable of feeling, that those who seek to bolster the social order and social doctrines of Christendom are strangling the path that the Gospel must now travel. There is, as his title suggests, no turning back. He writes:
“Epochs of the spirit are not reversible, or even susceptible of recapitulation. This is an Hegelian insight that no one should doubt: great historical and cultural transitions are not merely ruptures, but also moments of critique. The rationality of history lies in the ceaseless triumph of experience over mere theory, and so in the impossibility of any simple return to pre-critical naïvetés … More to the point, every cultural order’s collapse is also the exhaustion of the synthesis that that culture embodied. Innocence yields to disenchantment, and disenchantment cannot revert to innocence.”
History is not cyclical, he says. There will be no Restoration on human terms, nor any ‘pendulum swing back’ that we all long for. The future of Christ’s church will resemble its past and present in—and perhaps only in—ways you and I do not expect, and many things that we have assumed to be non-negotiable may be shown to be just the opposite. This Hegelian viewpoint is at the least obviously not unamenable to Christian theology- Christ wasn’t just another Maccabee, or whatever it was He might have reasonably been expected to be in a cyclical and recapitulating world. Incarnation was the summative moment of critique—that seems like something a Christian has to hold. Yet it’s been superseded—that seems like something you have to hold if you’re writing a sympathetic review for a book called After God. Harmonizing these two views is where Hart gets off attacking Christendom out of love for Christianity.
Now an interruption for us all to read Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’
The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
As an aside, I find the first and last stanzas of this poem to be kind of annoying. I think the overlong establishment of scenery in the first is distracting and the last is quite good, except that it awkwardly turns a poem I always imagine Alasdair MacIntyre reciting in a dusty library all by himself into a love poem. Anyway, the long withdrawing roar is an obvious complement for Nietzsche’s language of the vanished horizon to describe the disenchanted cosmos. Specifically in contrast to the older cyclical language—Sophoclean ebb and flow—of the previous stanza, illustrates exactly the Hegelian turn we’ve been talking about.
One can read from his thoughts on Sloterdijk, and elsewhere, that Hart has sat down on the beach with Matthew Arnold and concluded with him that the tide of faith isn’t coming back. Go down to Dover Beach with Hart and you too will see, he seems to promise, that the problem is just bigger than the neat solutions people come up with. Realistically it’s all going to be lost, and it’s delusional to think that the paradigm can be spared total replacement by tinkering around the edges. Now, you can be like Hart and decide that God wills this loss because Christendom was Really That Bad, but if you don’t take that radical out then I think this is basically the blackpill position for a Christian because it gives cause to despair about the efficacy of anything the church is doing (as if the church didn’t regularly give one ample cause to do so all of its own volition). When Hart does turn to consider the church, he offers perhaps the essay’s most cutting sentence:
“Even the churches, rather than truly organic associations of souls occupying the center of things, are marginal sodalities whose only real purpose is to nurture and control a deep melancholy over the impossibility of the church that was.”
I hate this statement for how eloquently it defies my wish that it not be true. Surely it’s wrong to assert that what’s described is the churches’ “only real purpose,” but as a statement of how believers in the West relate to their churches now, can we deny it? Or, I don’t know, I shouldn’t generalize, but it’s at least an identifiable strain. Peter Hitchens is a real Anglican—in England, no less—and I don’t think that the church is anything at all for him besides what Hart describes2. Here he is, in exactly Hart’s words, lamenting ‘The Church That Was.’ Roger Scruton, from my limited knowledge of him, seems to have been much the same way- it may be the English Anglican Church in fact has no one left but hip, cool septuagenarian progressives and despairing conservatives like Hitchens.
I think that viewing the church mainly as a vector for mournful ruminations and recriminations over the loss of its past glory is an easy position for traditionalists in any denomination to occupy, even unconsciously. There’s nothing wrong—actually there’s a lot right—with wishing that the Anglican bishops had held firm at Lambeth in 1930 or that (and here I make Luke mad if he reads this) the saintly Archbishop of Dakar had carried the day against Pope Paul thirty years later. I wish both of those things, quite keenly, and a lot of other things too. But one mustn’t make a spirituality of wishing such things (and I may be admonishing no one so much as myself with this sentence). One mustn’t retreat into embittered aestheticism, no matter how right one’s liturgical theology is. At least that’s my attempt to read Hart as saying something constructive instead of simply casting rhetorical stones. (If all he wants to do is dyspeptically throw rocks at marginalized traditionalists, he should hang it up and go home because no one’s beating the present pontiff at that particular game.)
But I think Hart does want to do something constructive. I think that in gesturing toward the “drear and naked shingles of the world” where the long, withdrawing roar is loudest, he’s pointing Christians to a place we need to go, a humbling recognition of cosmic loss and its permanence that we need to absorb in order to go forward.
Whither forward, I don’t think Hart knows, but I’m not sure anyone else does either. If I can ever finish John Moriarty’s Dreamtime I may write about the direction I think he’s proposing, but for now I’ve run out of things to say. I hope, John (Ryan too- sorry I didn’t get to see you either), that we can meet and talk before too long. I’ve realized over the past year and a half how much I took a lot of wise people for granted back when I always had ready access to their time and thoughts. I don’t know, leave a comment if you can find any of my half-articulated claims cogent enough to respond to.
Very interesting post. To me it brings to mind the story of the "Grand Inquisitor" by Dostoevsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor . The bravo moment of the story imo is the charge of plagiarism, as the story itself is clearly plagiarism of the events of the Gospel, just with a different time and place. In any event the Gospel of John both relates how Christ slipped away when a group intended to make him king by force, and he also states later that "My kingdom is not of this world."
Jacob, your philosophical reading and knowledge has already far surpassed my own. I have enough knowledge to be generally impressed. I also second "sometimes a grumpy curmudgeon's" amazement at your writing skills. I'm not sure I could write anything helpful to this post without reading Hart, Beach, and more Hegel than the little bit I already have. Biblical and Historical Theology are where I am most well read.
Even though I don't understand as well as I wish, I'm glad to have read this. No, this is no the same as a conversation with you would have been, but it is good. I look forward to having an in person conversation with you the next time you have a chance. Until then, I will continue to pray for you as you navigate the sea of faith.