David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought

0:04Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatis .org. For full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithT Tyler .com Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm very pleased to be chatting with David Bentley Hart. How to describe David Bentley Hart? Well the person I know whom I consider to be the best read is David Gordon and David Gordon thinks that David Bentley Hart is the best read person he knows.

0:45David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic and theologian, he has authored over 1 ,000 essays, reviews and papers, not to mention 19 books, including a very well -known translation of the New Testament. The topics he writes on include Christian metaphysics, Orthodox Christianity, philosophy of mind, Indian and East Asian religions, Asian languages, classics, literature, music, and more. David, welcome. Thank you. Now I have to live up to that introduction. If you could explain to me as simply as possible, in which ways is Orthodox Christianity not so very millenarian?

1:26Well, it depends on what you mean by millenarian. I'd have to ask you to be a bit more. Say the Protestant 17th century sense that the world is on the verge of a very radical transformation that will herald in some completely new age and we all should be prepared for it. Yeah, Well, in one sense, it's been the case of Christianity from the first century that it's always existed in a kind of time between times, right? There's always this sense of being in history, but always expecting an imminent interruption of history. But Orthodoxy's been around for a while. Well, it's part of an indirated culture of grounded originally in the Eastern Greco -Roman world and has a huge apparatus of philosophy and theology, and I think just over the centuries has learned to be patient.

2:24The notion, the sort of Protestant Millenarianism you speak of always seems to have been born an out of historical crisis. In a sense, you know, the rise of the nation state, the fragmentation of the Western Church, it's always as much an effective history as a flight from history, whereas I think it fair to say that orthodoxy is sort of created for itself a kind of parallel world just outside the flow of history. It puts much more of an emphasis on the spiritual life, mysticism, that sort of thing. And as such, where's it still uses the language, your recognizable language of the imminent return of Christ, it's not at the center of the spiritual life.

3:11And how does that theological patience shape the policies of Orthodox Christian nations and regions? How does that matter? Well, it's been both good and bad, to be honest. I mean, at its best orthodoxy has cultivated a spiritual life that nourished millions and that puts an emphasis upon moral obligation to others and the life of charity and the ascetical virtues of Christianity this self -denial. At its worst, however, it's often been in accommodation with historical forces that are antithetical to the gospel too. I mean, it's often been the case in orthodoxy has been so. Let's say disenchanted with the millenarian expectation that it's become a prop of the state.

4:08And you can see today in Russia in which you have a church institution. This isn't to speak of the faithful themselves, but the institutional authority of the state of the institution rather of the church, more or less being nothing but a propaganda wing of an authoritarian and terrorist government. So it's, you know, it's had both its good and its bad consequences over the centuries. At its best, as I say, it encourages a true spiritual life that can teach one to be detached from ambitions and expectations and the sort of violent projects of the ego, but at its worst it can become a passive participant in precisely those sorts of projects and those sorts of evils.

4:59How would you say your study of Heidegger has deepened your understanding of Christian orthodoxy? A Heidegger? Well. Heidegger, right? Yeah. Who do you understand quite well? Well, he's one of them. Yeah, I'm the philosopher's over it. Well now there you're dealing, I have to admit this question comes a little out of left field, but with me, I never know which aspect to buy worse. Someone might be interested in a given moment, but with Heidegger, it's very ambiguous figure, of course. But he certainly was putting aside his own incredible moral defects for those who don't know. He was a member for a while of the Nazi party as much out of cowardice as anything else.

5:37but I think out of early on at least some degree of sympathy. But when he wasn't being evil, he was he was a very reflective philosopher on how we have arrived at what he considered an age of nihilism, of sort of an age of that values the will to power, the will to power of a physical environment above all other things without any sense of the mystery of being, the piety of not trying to grasp and control and reduce all of reality to instrumentality and utility. And he tells a very powerful story about the genealogy of Western nihilism, how we arrived at what he calls the age of technology in which everything is simply a project of the will and the whole of the world is nothing but a reserve of resources to be exploited for the purpose of acquisition and for the purposes of the will.

6:37Now, I don't agree with the whole story, but as I say, it makes one think about the genealogy of the way we see the world and see the world as desacralized and disenchanted. And that much of the appeal of, I suppose, Eastern orthodoxy to me in my youth was precisely that it was Christian tradition that emphasized precisely the sense of cosmic mystery of Christ and the cosmic mystery of the revelation of God in all things. And there's put this great emphasis on the notion that the heart of Christian thought is the idea of deification, of union with God, of a whole creation renewed in some unimaginable way so that a very popular image goes so that the whole universe is like a burning bush, you know, shining with the glory of God but not consumed.

7:29It's, you know, so I would say that if there is any connection there and since no one's ever asked me this before, I'm not sure there is, but if there is, then, you know, that you can see how someone who takes seriously the genealogy of nihilism that someone like Heidegger unfolds, fold might be drawn to a very robust, among Christian traditions, a very robust depiction of a kind of glorified reality in which the entire cosmos participates in the sacred mystery. You mentioned questions out of left field, who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970? Merv Retamond, or, well, I see, there would also be Don Buford sometimes played left, trying remember Paul Blair was in center still.

8:20And that was the last year that Frank Robinson was in right field. So if my memory is correct, it was usually Merv Ratteman or maybe the young Don Bale was up then. I'm getting old now. Do you know? I think of it as Buford, you know Blair in center Robinson in right, but I'm not entirely sure either. Well, I think in left field, Earl Weaver was one of the first really to platoon players and sometimes Buford actually play the infield. He was a much more versatile player. But yeah, I think Rathman was still on the team too. So let's say you're trying to explain to a Catholic in metaphysical terms where orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism, not the history, not different views on the papacy, but fundamental underlying conceptual differences on metaphysics.

9:07And as few dimensions as possible, where do you see that difference. In as few dimensions as possible. Well, for one thing, there's no history of the notion of inherited guilt. The whole idea of sin is very different. It's, you know, sin that were sort of born into a state of alienation from God and from the world and from our neighbor as a common Christian idea. But in the West, mostly just as a result of certain translation issues, but also because of the very powerful influence of the Lady Gustin on the development of Western theology, there came that somehow one is born in a state of guilt, which to be honest, was often considered repugnant in the East.

9:52Also, there was no theology then of predestination. This is often also regarded as a—and there was in Western Catholicism, albeit, it's a doctrine without a strict definition. It remains on the books, but it unlike Calvinism, Roman Catholicism doesn't insist that it knows what predestination means. But the real big difference, I suppose then the greatest difference would be the theology of grace. I mean that in the West it became more and more the case that grace was sort of treated as antithetical to nature. Grace was a principle over a gazed nature. It was, it was, if we're given according to a kind of purely predilective predestining will of God, whereas these that kind of opposition between grace and nature simply never took root.

10:44Grace was just a word for the way God deals with creatures, and it was seen as more continuous with nature that we're always already naturally oriented to union with God and that it's an unnatural impediment that separates us from God rather than a failure to receive a super elevating grace. Grace is how I put it this. In Western tradition, Grace became a very extraordinary gift, whereas in the East it remained an ordinary reality from which we were extraordinarily separated by a tragic history that had to be overcome. them. Does the relative lack of counterpoint in Eastern Orthodox church music correspond to anything theological or is that just historical accident?

11:28What depends on which church it all about, a contra -pond, a polyphonic music actually has a very rich history in the western, in the Russian, in the Slavic tradition, especially from the time of Bortiansky and others onward. I don't think so now. Those sorts of differences, as those sorts of accidental differences, there are the things that Orthodox polemicists like to focus on. Every little difference becomes a difference of incredible magnitude for those who are looking for reasons to dislike the other camp. But no, I don't think there's any significant theological difference there. And the Slavic tradition, as I say, is highly contrappontal.

12:08You know, rock mononols, church music. Sure. How does the Orthodox church in America avoid simply becoming an American religion, one of many others. So far it seems to be failing to do that. What's the reason for that failure? Why isn't it strong enough? For any number of reasons one, there's been a huge influx of former evangelicals into American orthodoxy, but the problem is, as orthodoxy doesn't have, most of the communion, unlike the Catholic church, doesn't have a protocol for receiving converts that's very clear. I mean, they just, so he'd come to the liturgy, ask questions, and after a year or so, your, your, your, your Christmas, or something.

12:51And the result is, is that many who come into the church come with presuppositions, forms, and very radically different tradition. I mean, fundamentalist, evangelicalism is a much narrower understanding of, you know, how much speculation is possible. They're not really prepared to look at a 2000 year history and see all the varieties. You know, this is the patristic period, and here's the scholastic, and the Russian religious philosophers of the 19th century were very different, and you know, able to recognize that a huge variety of views is, instead they tend to think in terms of a faith statement of the sort that an evangelical church.

13:32And to be honest, that's become such a dominant faction and so much American orthodoxy, that much of American orthodoxy is intellectually and temperamentally and socially and culturally just American evangelicalism plus saints and incense. And so I would say that I don't think the only way in which the orthodox communities have successfully resisted, this is also the degrees to which many of them have remained riddouts of ethnic identity. And that's not much better that too. So I would say on the whole, the jury is still out. I think orthodoxy in America may very well just be another American religion at the end of the day.

14:15Another generation or two and it won't be any, the only distinctions will be in liturgical form. If one draws a line down the middle of Europe with orthodoxy to the right of that line, And those nations seem to be much less democratic or democratic for shorter periods of time. Is there something causal going on there or is that just historical accident? Well, I mean, I don't know if orthodoxy as such is the issue, but I mean the history of those nations radically different in any number of ways. Some of them, in the case of most of the Slavic nations, have simply retained habits of governance and habits of social organization that go back to a very pre -democratic past.

15:02I don't know if there's any causal relationship between the kind of Christianity, because, of course, Western democratic institutions tended to go ahead and had with some degree of layacization, some degree of secularization. I mean, for the whole point of the French Revolution would be the overthrow of the LCM regime, which is both state and church, dealing with a kind of absoluteist, Gullican church, in a sense, that's a wing of government. So my suspicion is this is mostly historical accident, the cultural tendencies toward reaction in the East or mostly I just have to do with the material conditions and the political histories and the relative material isolation from the huge period of Western European expansion expansion of wealth, expansion of power, and ferment of social change and new ideas.

16:02It was simply the case that after the Middle Ages, early modernity, Western Europe was the center of economic and political power in the Western world. Well, say Poland, Slovenia, Czechia, which has a lot of Catholicism in their backgrounds, they seem to be converging on Western norms, living standards much more than say the EU members to the East, Bulgaria, Romania. Well, there are certain advantages to begin with too, but yeah, I mean better relations. Again, I don't think it has any particular, because it, to be honest, I mean, Polish Catholicism is basically culturally very much like Slavic orthodoxy.

16:49I mean, there you're going to find that culturally Catholicism and orthodoxy are closer to one another in many ways than Catholicism and the East is with Catholicism in the West. I'm trying to draw causal ties between what are very complex social histories. I just think is a mistake. There's no way of saying one way or the other. I mean Greek democracy flourished in the modern age for a while, after the Revolue, after Greek independence in the early 19th century, and Greece remains Orthodox too. And it's even more than Poland is committed to a kind of, a set of real democratic norms. In Poland, there are stronger reactionary forces at present than there are in Greece.

17:39What do you think of the Book of Mormon and what is it about the Bible that so lent itself to this new spin -off or startup? The book and I have no opinions about whatsoever. It's kind of silly. It's where it comes across to me, but I've only read it once. and the Bible, if you say the Bible, lends itself to spin off. So I mean, any religion that has tendencies towards the collapse of the difference and significance between history and eternity, it is always likely to inspire new historical projects that consider themselves. I mean, after all, this is something of the Abrahamic religions, is that they're sort of supercessionist in the way they proceed.

18:25I mean, even even within the history of Judaism before Christianity, it's one covenant superseding another than Christians claim that they've superseded the covenant in some sense. And then Islam is a supersession of the revelation with yet another revelation. So this seems to be just part and parcel of the whole Western Abrahamic or the whole Abrahamic religious tradition. So I suppose I would say that Mormonism is just another for example of the kind of new revelation, the claim of a new revelation. This is a general question I have about the roles of reason and faith in theological argument.

19:06So when I hear members of the Orthodox Church criticize, say, the papacy in ex -Cathedra doctrine, what they say makes perfect sense to me. They deploy reason, they have arguments of reason against the doctrine. But in other contexts, religions, including orthodoxy, they're quite willing to invoke faith. And so we have faith in whatever. So is it reason or is it faith that determines when an argument from reason or an argument from faith is appropriate? Reason. Reason. So reasons the bottom line. It has to be because even if you choose faith, you're choosing to believe something for reasons, even if you're not able to name those reasons yourself, some sort of compelling rational intuition has worked upon you to say, well, I believe I can trust this source.

19:52more than that source. So you may say that, oh, I'm having faith in what it's telling me, but you're having faith in that rather than something else because at some level, maybe a tacit level that you'd have a hard time laying out, you've somehow reached the judgment, and then it would have to be a rational judgment if your faith is of any meaning, that you trust this rather than that. So I would say that, but you know, what is faith? I mean, When you create a sort of division between faith and reason, you're assuming that faith is taking things simply on the authority of another blindly. But that's never actually bit in the definition that any religion, whether you're talking in the Western, when you're talking about peace, peace, and Greek, or shradda in Sanskrit, or any number of other words for faith, it usually means a kind of rational commitment to a certain path for which you have reasons, but those reasons in themselves don't necessarily arrive at a QED, but that as you advance on this path more, you're hoping at least things become clearer and clearer and you understand better whether you really believe it or not, but you have to commit yourself to the path in order to find a way.

21:06You know, the American philosopher William James spoke of the will to believe and he's often misunderstood as if all he was saying was It's okay to choose arbitrarily to believe something. That's not what he said. What he said was when you, you know, it says if you're in the fog saying you encounter two paths and you have a sense that one is more likely to lead to safety and the other to the edge of a cliff. You take that path but you don't take it so credulously that you'll walk off the edge of a cliff if you come to the cliff that the that the act of faith is a way of engaging the mind, engaging reason, so it can explore.

21:47If you don't start with some sort of trust, some sort of possibility of discovering the truth, then you never will seek the truth to begin with. But that's that search requires a kind of combination of a degree of rational judgment and a degree of trust. And you hope that the two prove to be in harmony. If If they're not though, if you reach a point where your faith and your reason come into conflict, then trust your reason. Always trust your reason, because otherwise faith is just epistemic nihilism. Nehilism, sorry, pronouncing the word both ways today is just, it's meaningless. It's just a brute exertion of the will at which point it's subrational and becomes contemptible.

22:31Always trust reason. but make sure that reason is tempered, not it's not petty rationalism, but it's a reason that really can see things in broad perspective and understand in a variety of modalities, don't treat reason as if it's a math equation. So given that perspective, does it ever make sense to think about the deity in probabilistic or Bayesian terms? Because it's sounding almost Bayesian to me. Well, the chance that the God exists to 73%. Well, you're actually God's faith is the question of existence of God. I mean, that's not what I was talking about. When I talk about faith, I meant a path towards the sacred.

23:14There, first of all, it's to define what the word existence means because God would not exist in the way that an individual entity, a finite entity exists. Right. So any, any, any rational arguments you have about God are based on usually a kind of modal metaphysics of the absolute, the contingent or so on and so forth. And, and there, I think reason should be fully engaged. The question is within a tradition, that's when things become a bit more stochastic. It's like, you know, does this, I can start, if I don't start from the premise that when I speak of God, that there's an absolute source and end to all things, then I'm not really interested in the question of religion at all.

24:02But if I believe that may be true, if I have a sense of it or if reason tells me it's so, that it doesn't make sense to believe in a pure physicalism or materialism, then where faith is engaged is in trying to make rational judgments about who can point you towards a deeper understanding and relationship. I don't think that's Bayesian so much as it's not a leap of faith in the vulgar sense, but it is a venture of faith in the sense that you can't start with perfect wisdom and knowledge. You are making rational judgments. And again, rationality is not a single univocal sort of thing. You can also have to do with intuitions, like moral intuitions.

24:49If you come up against a doctrine or a teaching or something that is repugnant to your moral reasoning, then that is significant. It would be deplorable of you to choose to believe it despite the councils of your moral reasoning unless you had really good reasons to think you'd been mistaken. Does the concept of reincarnation make theological sense to you? sure within the systems in which systems you're talking about, put a barva in Buddhism isn't about the reincarnation of a psychological ego. It has to do with an uncontrollable set of karmic consequences that lead to new phenomenal arising. So there you're dealing with one notion, the versions that you find in Vedanta and Bhakti and other things that we call Hinduism or also in Sikhism or Jainism, in which the Jiva, something that is kind of soul passes over, even that's not psychological Self that's that but nonetheless that that's a more substantial sense of the meaning of reincarnation Within those systems.

25:59Yeah, they make perfect sense But again people tend to to think they know what these terms mean and when And when you actually look at the traditions, they have to be qualified and modified and explained at length because you can't step out of an entire world of presuppositions and beliefs and concepts and just take one thing like that, put them off, again becoming image. I'm just choosing to use the Buddhist term. And think you understand what's going on is if you could just transpose it into say, I'm a Presbyterian, and I know what this means because you can't do that. What do you think of the testimonies of what are called near death experiences?

26:44Many of those testimonies coming from Christians, of course. Well, I don't know. Some of them, I think, are quite compelling. Especially the ones that involve being able to reconstruct facts about the surrounding the moment you've got death that you shouldn't have been able to know, like, who was out in the hallway, you know, things I, you can't, you can't completely deny it. But I, at the same time, I think also that you're dealing with a moment of transition in which it's very hard to separate the psychological from the objective. So I wouldn't dismiss them. Many of them, as I say, are quite compelling, but how much you can learn from them.

27:32It seems like a lot more testimony than say from the apostles or in the four gospels that if we wait testimony, one is led in many different directions, including, of course, the book of Mormon. Yeah. Well, I mean, who's test? Oh, come on. I mean, the book of Mormon is supposedly read off from these golden plates that Joseph Smith will show and able to read with magical spectacles plates that no else ever. So, you know, that's that's very much a kind of story. If you want to believe it, you can. But that's not, you know, that's not and you can say the same about everyone's testimony. I mean, I just the judgments you have to make at times just no one's testimony should be taken as an absolute authority.

28:18No one's because no one is free from psychological limitations. So even if fear she is perfectly sincere. That in itself doesn't prove anything, but you can make judgments on character, you can make judgments about coherence. At least, are again a relative judgments. They're not absolute. I think that when the story becomes, I don't know why you keep bringing a Mormonism. I mean, I have absolutely no connection. I've never written about it. By only connection, I've met a few nice Mormons. I've read the Book of Mormon once. I didn't find it particularly well written, but neither for that matter is most of the New Testament.

28:55And I think it's based on historical claims that are objectively false. So, you know, that they're these ancient civilizations and the Americas that just didn't exist. But I think the story of the Genesis of the Book of Mormon is a bit more incredible than say somebody in the first century writing down what his theology is based on, As in the case of Paul, obviously a person who got who, whose life was turned upside down by some kind of experience, he maybe he was a psychotic, I don't know. But you know, it doesn't seem that way when you read him, he's that there's some, there's some powerful spiritual apprehension that he is discovering about the love of God and the grace of God and that over many decades of self -sacrificing life leading ultimately to his death, he lays that out.

29:52Well, that's compelling to me in a way that other sorts of claims that seem more incredible aren't. In the United States, has progressive politics become the new version of a secular Christianity? Well, I don't know. I mean, I may some in some cases, yeah, in some cases not. I mean, it depends on what you're talking about in particular. I think that we have learned both on the, I think in America, but also in the West as such, just to a pathological degree in America, on both right and left, we've learned to start all of our conversations from a position of moral absolutism. I don't know if this has always been the case.

30:35I mean, there have been apocalyptic moments in American history before. I mean, we had a civil war, for instance, but at the present, it seems like both extremes speak in such strident tones of moral indignation that it is tempting to think that they're speaking out of a dogmatic impulse rather than a rational one. That there is a kind of religious intonation in the worst sense in our politics on all sides. Is the future of Christianity as an institution brighter or darker than it was say 20 years ago. Well, 20, I mean, 30 years ago, how about 100 years ago? A generation ago. I don't know. I mean, what would be brighter and darker?

31:20I mean, for me, what would be good? What would be bad? There are people I know, in fact, people near here in Notre Dame who are all terrifically intent on trying to revive a dying Christendom because they think that would be the revival of Christianity in the West, and they allied themselves to these reactionary figures like Victor Orban, whereas I, my idea, my ideal of what would be a brighter future for Christianity would be the final eclipse of that kind of conflation of Christianity with the interests of a particular civilization or culture and nation. I believe that's a profiteous corruption.