Only God could join us to God Catholic Outlook – Catholic Outlook

In 2010, a friend sent me a link to an essay by David Bentley Hart, a takedown of the so-called New Atheists. Hart caricatures Christopher Hitchenss arguments in God Is Not Great as syllogisms whose major premise has been omitted:

Major Premise: [omitted]Minor Premise: Timothy Dwight opposed smallpox vaccinations.Conclusion: There is no God.

But it was Harts conclusion that really won me over: The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. Here is a hint of the independence of thought that Harts readers prize: an Orthodox theologian laments atheisms decline from Nietzsches intellectual courage into historical errors, sententious moralism, glib sophistry.

I later reviewed a few of Harts books for various outlets, which eventually resulted in an email from him in 2016, and we have been corresponding ever since (as I note below, within a few weeks he was sending me ridiculous claims like Entwistle, Townshend, and Moon were each immeasurably better musicians than any member of the Stones). I just texted David to ask how he first became aware of me, whether from one of my reviews of his work or something else, and he said, Probably reading you in the New Yorker or somewhere, I dont exactly recall. I knew of you before any review from you. Recently, for no reason at all, we decided to record the following conversation held over Zoom. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Michael Robbins

David Bentley Hart: We should clarify whats going on here: that its entirely a conversation, not an interview, right? So, reciprocal disclosuresif I say anything embarrassing, youre morally obliged to say something humiliating about yourself.

Michael Robbins: Well, I dont recall that in our preliminary

DBH: I think that was in the contract. I think you havent checked the fine print. But, anywayso you are Michael Robbins, the esteemed poet, whose most recent book, Walkman, has been praised, but not given the awards it deserves by the philistines. And Im David Bentley Hart.

MR: And you are the author, most recently, of You Are Gods, Tradition and Apocalypse, and the Gnostic fantasy Kenogaia, which did win an awardwhich is not to say that you have won all the awards you deserve.

DBH: Well, yes, for Roland in Moonlight alone, which is my other recent book.

MR: Yes, I dont have a hard copy of that one here with me.

DBH: I have the three volumes of poetry that youve published, and with my typical genius in organizing books, because they just keep mounting up by several thousands, I dont know where your books are. I went looking for them last night, and to be honest I couldnt find them.

MR: It is a problem I fully understand. There are books that Ive ended up buying three times because I thought that I had lost a copy of it.

DBH: I think weve all had that experience; or youve just simply forgotten that you owned a copy. As I grow older and more forgetful, I forget that I just bought a copy last month. So tell me

MR: Well, before we get started with your question, I just want to point out that we began our correspondence, however many years ago now, with a dispute over the relative greatness of the Who and the Rolling Stonesyou a Whovian and I with sympathy for the devil. And I think both of us came to a greater appreciation of the others favorite band.

DBH: Yeah, yeah, well, actually, the Who were never my favorite band. Im afraid that Im that most sublunary of creatures

MR: The Beatles.

DBH: The Beatles, yeah, were always my favorite. Im a sucker for melody, and since they could generate melodies at a rate that Schubert couldnt have kept up withthat and chord progressions. I mean those chord progressions, getting richer and richer and richer. But I loved all of the British invasion bands as a kid. Still youre right, I had soured a bit on the Rolling Stones, mostly, I think, because they went on and on and on, past their great period, and this cast an unflattering light back upon their great period.

But I wanted to ask you what everyones been asking you since Walkman came out, and weve talked a bit about it. Of course, the cover and the title lead one to expect yet another iteration of the inimitable Robbins voice, which in the past I would have characterized asI dont knowmilitantly sardonic, terse, sarcasticbut formally very precise, using a certain sort of formal mastery in order to contain a fairly disruptive irony. In any case, the words that spring to ones lips immediately are not tender, lyrical. To be honest, I have to say, if I were asked for my normal reaction to your first two volumes of verse, it would be something like a bitter appreciative laugh.

But Walkman isnt formally rigidits formally accomplished, but in a more sprung way. Im not saying its sprung rhythm all the way through, but it is basically the case that its not in strict meter. Theres just a sort of lilting cadence through all the long poemsand most of the poems in the book are long. But also, I have to admit, I had not been prepared for the vulnerable Michael Robbins. Theres a quiet lyricism that goes with the rhythm of the verse and the images, without being lush and opulent in the way I would be, in my late-nineteenth-century perversity. But it has some lovely imagesI mean, somehow you make a Kinkos late at night, with cashiered copying machines, seem oddly atmospheric and invitingand the melancholy and the almost confessional tone running through it remain for me the most interesting changes. I was just hoping you might talk about that for a bit, because theres something going on there and I dont know if itll show up again in your next collection or not.

MR: Well, Ive actually been writing new poems fairly inspired by one of my favorite contemporary works, Chelsey Minniss Baby, I Dont Care.

DBH: Somehow I would expect you to like that.

MR: When Ive been asked this previously, I always say that I didnt want to stagnate, I got bored with what I was doing, and thats all true enough, but thats also an evasion of the question

DBH: I dont think, if that were all it were, you would just naturally switch to reflective melancholy, giving this sense of something wounded. Im not trying to overburden this with descriptions, but I mean it cant just be that you were trying out a new style.

MR: Right. Well, the impetus was reading James Schuyler. I read all of Schuyler while I was at a loss about where to go from the second book. And as I say in Walkman, the title poem, Schuyler was too tender / for me then, but now / he is just tender enough. And theres something about growing older. I was still in my thirties when I wrote Alien vs. Predator, and a couple of those poems are from my twenties. And growing older sucks

DBH: Yes, indeed.

MR: So lately Ive begun thinking about age, as Ive gotten back into Keats and Blake and Wordsworth, who were loves of my youth. When I was writing the poems in Alien vs. Predator, I was much more likely to be reading John Donne or Marvell, and not necessarily their very earnest poems, but their wittier, catchier poems. And I think about the change you refer to a little bit as the difference between Donne and Wordsworth, the difference between a sort of formal display of wit, not personalyou know, you dont get a sense of who John Donne is in his daily life. Whereas reading The Prelude or Tintern AbbeyWordsworth was twenty-eight when he wrote Tintern Abbey, but Wordsworth also turned fifty when he was around twenty-five. And then my anger at the ecological crisis, the crisis of capitalist society, it was easier to take a sardonic stance with that anger in my twenties and thirties. As I age, as the angel watches the past pile up before it as its blown into the future, it gets harder and harder to maintain a stance of militant humor rather than of militant despair. I wanted to write something that captured my increasing lack of hope. I guess you can do that in a nihilistic death-metal way, like the band Cattle Decapitation, or you can do it in a sort of Wordsworthian way.

My image of European civilization now is the old man standing on his porch yelling all the time at the kids, because all he remembers now is that hes angry about something.DBH: Theres an elegiac, not a polemical, tone in the bookits neither satire nor savage commentary, that is, but its definitely elegiac. It has a plangency to it. As you say, its partly your age, and youve mentioned going back to Wordsworth and Keats. We think of the Romantics as writing young mens poetry, but the truth is its also the poetry of reflective middle age. As you begin to grow old, you go back to it, and it has a completely different meaning for you now. And I too have been reading reams of Wordsworth and Keats in recent years, and both German and English Romanticism more and more, which I used to keep a certain distance from, to be honest, because I was corrupted by T. S. Eliot when I was young. And I shouldnt have been, because his critical essays say some incredibly stupid things about poets who arent either Metaphysicals or Moderns.

MR: I think thats right, and, you know, how could Keats write poems of reflective middle age? Well, partly because European civilization was in its reflective middle age at that time, and its now

DBH: in its gibbering senescence. In fact, my image of it now is the old man standing on his porch yelling all the time at the kids, because all he remembers now is that hes angry about something.

MR: Well, perhaps that provides a segue to my first question for you. I have, I think, identified three themes that are common to your latest work, Roland in Moonlight, You Are Gods, That All Shall Be Saved, and Tradition and Apocalypse. I would identify them as your preoccupations, and I wonder what you think or have to say about it. In descending order of complexity: first, the idea that thou art that, or that Atman is Brahman, which I take it for you is simply a way of expressing in a different conceptual grammar the proposition that you are gods. Second, the idea that it is logically impossible for persons ultimately to reject God, so far as it is constitutive of the rational will to seek him as its ultimate end. And third, how shall I put it? The increasing divergence between what Frederick Douglass called the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ. Which is to say, if you were a Martian, and you came down to the United States and you wanted to deduce from the statements and behavior of its adherents, without access to the scriptures, what Christianity was, what the gospels taught, I think you would have to conclude that Jesus spent most of his time denouncing homosexuality, insisting on the inviolability of gender, counseling the acquisition of wealth, and railing against immigrants.

DBH: Youve left out guns. Its a curious thing, of course. Lets start there, then, rather than with the more metaphysically abstruse issues. So, every age of Christendom has been something of a jarring contradiction to the language of Christianity, as preserved in Scripture and liturgy; but I honestly believe that America uniquely is the land where Christianity went to die, and that the proof that it died here is that it could be so easily supplanted by a completely different religion called Christianity, and yet no one noticed the absurdity of it.

MR: Frederick Douglass noticed. John Brown noticed.

DBH: No, right, I mean right now. I dont mean that no one ever noticed, or that there are no Christians here. I always get attacked for thisHes saying there are no American Christians. No, theres no American Christianity. The Christians that are here, the ones who are still practicing actual Christianity, have their Christianity from elsewhere. But I mean whats native to America, the American religion, to use Harold Blooms phraseand he was actually quite good on that. He didnt get all of it right, but he was right in recognizing that the American Evangelical religion is simply not the thing called Christianity, either faithfully or unfaithfully, throughout Christian history.

If you were to go online and look at the sermons of, say, someone like Reverend Jeffress, one of the most popular Evangelical figures today, assuming you were that Martian you mentioned, and you took him as your guide to Christianity, and you listened faithfully to his sermons over a course of many months, you would come away believing that Christianity is a religion of salvation, freely given no matter what; but then otherwise its a creed about patriotism, about libertarian rightsmostly gun ownership, private propertyand a rather militant distaste for Muslims (which slips out from time to time), and generally the virtues of great wealth and military power. And that would be the whole religion. It would not be clear, either visually or from the content of what you were hearing, that the flag thats always right there next to the lectern or the pulpit and the cross in the backwell, it would be very difficult to discern which of those was meant to be the holy symbol of the faith.

As I say, Christians have always betrayed Christianity, and they have always misunderstood it. Theyve always in a casual way assumed that it was meant to affirm whatever it was they wanted to be valued. But I dont think that theres ever been another culture that could so sublimely corrupt and so sublimely efface the original Gospel and replace it with something elsewith a counterfeit thats not just a dissemblance, but almost a polar oppositein the way that American religious culture did. I dont know what else to say about America. Were the most religious country in the developed world, supposedly, but its definitely not Christianity that forms our religious consciousness.

MR: Yeah, thats the thing. From the time of Constantinopleahem, from the time of Constantine

DBH: The time of Constantine is, in fact, the time of Constantinople.

MR: Im dealing with my cat as we talk. From the time of Constantine, there has been an official religion called Christianity that one would would hesitate to fully identify with the Christianity of of the Gospels. But there is something new

DBH: At least there was a continuity. Just read some of the Church fathers who preached in Constantinople: you read John Chrysostom, for instance, and Bakunin seems like a tepid conservative. They were still very much proclaiming the Gospel of the poor. Christians are supposed to be looking after the poor; in fact, you have no right to the wealth you possess. It is an abomination that you claim this for yourself just because you got there first. Rhetoric of that sort. You find this language in Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, and two of those were Patriarchs of Constantinople speaking to an imperial audience, as well as to the larger crowd. And right through the Middle Ages you can see that even when the values of the faith were corrupted or betrayed or somehow twisted in a way that would allow for, say, the execution of heretics, the actual knowledge of the content of the Gospel was not lost. I mean, it was still there. You know, St. Francis doesnt have to go looking for some lost truth. Hes still using the language that he hears in the liturgy and in readings and sermons. Thats something thats qualitatively very different from what we are talking about. Its as if, as soon as Europeans reached these shores, there was the possibility of reinventing the faith in this utterly odd, Orphic wayantinomian in some ways, and very legalistic in others.

The Great Awakening, you know, is a very curious phenomenon, one in which a new fervency is taking shape; but you can already see within the actual religious phenomena of the time an odd movement away from the moral core of the faith. Yet even that doesnt explain to me modern American Evangelicalism. And what I find especially curious is that its not just Evangelicalism we mean; theres something about America that has the power to transform everything. Orthodoxy in Americawhen I converted more than thirty-five years ago, when I joined the OCAwas still immersed in a Russo-Parisian, urbane, very cosmopolitan sort of cultureI mean, Schmemann and Meyendorff and figures like that. Its now been absolutely colonized by former Evangelicals, who didnt actually cease being Evangelicals in order to becoming Orthodox. Instead, they brought the ethos, the narrowness, the strange legalism and aridity of Evangelicalism into Orthodoxy; and the Orthodox, not being very good at knowing what the hell is going on around them as a rule, just let them pour in. And American Catholicism, too. I mean, rad-trad Catholicism may seem to be an emanation of the culture of Francos Spain, and you can see its roots in the European far Right; but here it has an especially American ferocity and fundamentalist tenor about it.

Were a special people, were a people apart.

MR: You probably dont want to get into the abstruse reactionary Catholic interpretations of Thomas that you refute in You Are Gods.

DBH: Well, maybe I do. I actually didnt want this to be a theological conversation predominantly, but I am willing to talk about that, because thats interesting.

MR: Well, I talk about poetry all the time.

DBH: This is like, you know, Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot having dinner together. Eliot wanted to talk about Duck Soup and Groucho wanted to talk about The Waste Land. People make you talk about the things that they associate with youalthough Im going to point out that, of my published work, theology is only about 30 percent.

MR: I know, and Roland in Moonlight is a good entry point to some other issues I want to discuss. But I do want to say that I just reread Perry Miller on Jonathan Edwards, and I know that were not to take Millers account without a grain of salt, but it is just a masterful account of the milieu in which these ideas had their germination that weve been discussing. One of his great points is that the opponents of Edwards were as motivated as they were by anything by the desire to consolidate their business and land holdings.

DBH: This is true, and its always been the case. I mean, its the reason, you know, neither Gregory nor John stayed in the patriarchal see of Constantinople very long; its not a new phenomenon. There comes a point where even a Byzantine princess says, Is he talking about me? I think I just realized hes talking about me.

MR: Yeah, the history of the meddlesome priests. By the way, partly out of a cheeky desire to nettle you, I try as often as possible to point out your resemblance to certain aspects of the thought of Karl Barth. Obviously not American, but as recently as Barth, we hear again and again an emphasis on the striking breaches of the contemporary (and not only the contemporary) industrial and commercial and economic order. Hes talking about the Gospel, obviously, and he says, again, Above all we must take up again the question of [Jesus] relationship to the economic order and how he radically calls it in question. Thats just gone out the window.

DBH: Oh, well, I mean the curious thing, of course, is that Christian socialism was the default position of the more orthodox wings of Christian thought for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ive been attacked for talking about Christian socialism by people in this country, like the Pakaluks, whonever mind, Im trying to avoid personal abuse, especially when it involves fish in barrels. Literally, though, one of them wrote, No Christian can be a socialist. Its a good thing that Jesus was a Jew, because hed have been kicked out of the Church, apparently.

MR: Bonhoeffer, Thomas Mertonhow many people have said that in order to be a Christian, you have to be a socialist, or in fact a communist?

DBH: C.S. Lewis said it, for Gods sake. These people, you know, Americans who think they understand the InklingsIve actually had someone, I wont say wholets just say he was a younger fellow at the architectural school at Notre Damewho was shocked when I mentioned the somewhat radical politics of Tolkien and Lewis. Fellows like that love the Inklings, but they dont seem to understand, you know, that Tolkien was radically anti-capitalist, anti-industrialist. He praised people who wanted to blow up power plants for destroying the environment, thought that if you cut down trees you probably go to hell, described himself as an anarchist-monarchistmeaning he wanted a king, but with absolutely no power. He wanted a purely symbolic government that was powerless, so that otherwise society would function as a kind of radical subsidiarity. If you were actually to play that out, his politics seem pretty close to Kropotkins. And then C. S. Lewis just came out and said, you know, a Christian social order would be a socialist one. On politics, he would criticize both sides of government, but its well known that he he was very much in favor of the postwar British settlement that created the National Health Service, that provided milk subsidies, free glasses, and dentistry for children; he was on board with that as being a deep expression of an established Christian nations conscience. And hes in a long tradition there. You know, Charles Gore, the greatest Anglo-Catholic theologian of the turn of the century, and all the other Christian socialists at that time, they were basically in the mainstream of Christian social thought. Its that British Christian socialist tradition that probably had the greatest influence on me. But it never even occurred to me that this could possibly be controversial, at least in terms of the claim that it is grounded in Christian principles. That just seems so starkly obvious. And of course, it doesnt even fit within the the normal spectrum of what we in America call conservative or liberal. Ruskin, who was sort of the father of it in many ways, was also a Tory and a Royalist. R. H. Tawney, probably the greatest economic mind of that tradition in Britain, said that in many ways he was conservative; he wanted to conserve things that were small and fragile, and conserve community by looking after the least of these, remembering that were all one family.

Bonhoeffer, Thomas Mertonhow many people have said that in order to be a Christian, you have to be a socialist, or in fact a communist?MR: Yeah. Well, that tradition can and does veer into a kind of eco-fascism.

DBH: Oh, yeah, sure, if it becomes a matter of preserving the fragile and the local by denying the universal; but none of them was guilty of that, and certainly not Tawney. Theres a person who would do everything he couldwho foughtto see refugees welcomed into British society and protected. But this is always the danger, right? I mean socialism can be, in fact, so detached from our notion of right and left that it can be appropriated, obviously, as we know, by nationalist movements and eco-fascist movements.

MR: All this is why I rest on the anarcho-communist left, what Lenin denounced as the infantile disorder of left communism. But we should move on. I do want to mention Blake, whom we were talking about the other day, for whom the one worshipped by the names divine of Jesus and Jehovah is Satan. Obviously, you know, as a metaphor here.

DBH: Well, you know, truly, Satan, thou art but a dunce.

MR: But I said to someone just recently, you know, if the 80 percent of evangelicalsIm sorry, 80 percent of white Evangelicals

DBH: Thats another thing about American Christianity. Its the most segregated version of Christianity in the world.

MR: If the 80 percent of white Evangelicals who voted for Trump in the last, I think the last two electionsif they are Christians, then I must be a Satanist.

DBH: I would hesitate there, however. Dont go saying that too much. Someone might be listening. Hell try to convince you that well, you might as well go all inin for a penny, in for a pound.

MR: Yeah, well, I listen to a lot of black metal, so Im inured to Satanism.

DBH: And I listen to too much Wagner.

MR: Lets talk about Blake. I dont remember who it was who said if William Blake was a Christian, no other man ever was. And that was not intended to impugn his Christianity, but to express what Kierkegaard called the difficulty of being a Christian in Christendom.

DBH: No, I think Blake was very much, obviously, an idiosyncratic Christian, and hes been appropriated alsoI knew Harold Bloom, by the way

MR: Yeah, I noticed youre cited in his last books a few times.

DBH: Yeah, right, he mentions me a few times. Thats the fruit of the conversations we had about the New Testament. He was actually quite pleased to learn that the Apostle Paul really was not opposed to works of love as the way of sanctification. And there are other things about my translation of the New Testament he liked. Obviously it would appeal to him, because I keep bringing out all the archons and powers on high, and pointing out that Second Temple Judaisms angelology is crucial to understanding certain passages. But one of the last conversations we had was about Blake. And he asked at one point, Do you think Blake would be closer to a Christian of the first century? He was concerned for the poor, he cared about little children, he had a fierce sense of justice. He denounced any religion that is the religion of powerful and the hypocritical. Bloom was very interested in this question, because, of course, Blake was part of his, you know, his Gnostic pantheon for years and years. And in the conversations we had at the end, he was more and more open to thinking that maybe, actually, there was an aboriginal Christianity that he had misunderstood. He was very open-minded, I have to say, for a guy who published these gigantic books making huge claims all the time; he didnt seem to have any problem saying, Oh, I may have been wrong about that.

MR: You know, he was important to me as a young man. He became progressively less so over time, and then I found myself by the end absolutely opposed to to his thought.

DBH: He did help free me from the spell of T. S. Eliot, from the critical writings. He was the one who, when I was young, made me go back to the Romantics and see that there was a lot of absurdity in Eliot.

MR: Yeah, I took the opposite course. I began in the Romantics with Bloom, migrated to Eliot and the Metaphysicals, and then rejected both Bloom and Eliot. Theyre both so annoying. But I held on to the poets. Ive come back to the Romantics after a long time away, partly because my friend Anahid Nersessian recently published a tremendous book, Keatss Odes, and made me revisit a poet whom I hadnt thought about in twenty years.

But I wanted to say that Bloom wrote in some ways a very bad book called The Shadow of a Great Rock. Its great as a commonplace book of passages from the King James, comparing them to Geneva and to Tyndale. His generalizations are as sweeping as ever. But he gives really short shrift to the New Testamentand hes a Gnostic Jew, you know, who can blame him. But he simply has no patience for Paul, he basically accepts Nietzsches view of Paul. He doesnt seem to have read even E. P. Sanders.

DBH: Thats what I mean, thats what I found interesting about these last conversations. He got in touch with me after hed read the New Testament translation to talk about just that. The last time we corresponded was the night he died, actually, or the night before; I dont know if he died the next morning. But he had read That All Shall Be Saved. I couldnt believe it; I mean, why would that be of interest to him? He said he found it very moving, but he did not agree with it. Well, why would you agree, why would you have any opinion? You know, you dont have to say what is or is not plausible within the context of Christianity. And I was really fascinated by that. I wanted to know what he thought, but then he said, Im not feeling well today, so we will have to revisit it in future.

MR: And, well, if you were right, then you can talk to him about it at some point.

DBH: Thats true. In fact, I fully expect that.

MR: But Blooms lack of concern about the Christian afterlife brings me to a very broad thing that I wanted to say. I wonder if there is a tension between the claims of the Christian faith and the broader theistic tradition, say, of Brahman or of the One, or what have you. And it hinges of course on the person of Christ. Youve been accused of pantheism. Youve been accused of not even being a Christian of late by various

DBH: Yeah, I know. What I think most funny is when it comes from Evangelicals, because Im always wondering exactly where they are getting their doctrinal authority from. Because if they think what they believe could just be taken from Scripturein fact, where are they getting their authority for believing that Scripture is revelation?

MR: And people have said similar things to me, and my response is always: thats fine. Im happy not to be a Christian, you know, Ill just be a follower of the Way. But there is a sticking point, where I hit a kind of apophatic wall, which is that if, as Ive certainly confessed many times in my life, Yeshua of Nazareth was God, then it becomes difficult to square the truth claims of Christianity with those of, say, Islam or Judaism or Hinduism, which I do believe are no less valid.

DBH: Were now getting into territory that can easily become a three-hour disquisition on on all sorts of things. I have also of late tried to convince people that the concept of religions, in the plural, is a modern anthropological concept that would not have been intelligible in either antiquity or the Middle Ages. Even in Thomas Aquinas religio is a singular, its a virtue that everyone practices; were all involved in the same practice, with obviously varying degrees of knowledge and varying degrees of a hope of salvation. So the first thing you have to do is step back from the modern context in which weve created this artificial category, you know. What would have been called cultus in the past have become something like separate propositional systems.

MR: So let me just see if Ive got this right. So the idea of the one true faith would not even be legible in the earlier conceptual grammar.

DBH: One true religion wouldnt have been, and even one true faith would have been problematic. Better to say faith with greater or lesser degrees of illumination. And not always in a purely consistent way. For Thomas Aquinas its clear that on certain aspects of the doctrine of God a Muslim like Ibn Sina might have got things right more than any of his contemporaries in the Christian world, and he has no problem saying this. You know, go and read Nicholas of Cusa on the true faith, and see what you discover; and read that alongside his Cribratio Alkorani, in which hes trying to discover how much revealed truth or wisdom and spiritual nourishment can be found in the Quran for Christians.

MR: Let me just point out that you have a chapter on Nicholas in You Are Gods.

DBH: Well, Nicholas is very important for me in a number of ways. There its because hes a phenomenological genius regarding the nature of rational desire, and why its only end can be infinite.

But you mentioned pantheism, which is one of those meaningless words, really, because you can interpret it in any way.

MR: Jonathan Edwards was accused of the same. Im just bringing all my Protestant heroes into this conversation.

DBH: Well, the problem with Jonathan Edwards is hes a metaphysical genius, but he preached a really abysmal faith; there you want to free his metaphysics

MR: Well stipulate that the Calvinist doctrine is barbaric in several respects.

DBH: Too many people remember him only as the preacher of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, but the metaphysical system is extraordinary. It has traces of Cambridge Platonism in it, but not, it seems, through direct acquaintance; and Gregory of Nyssa, but I dont know how

MR: Theres no way he read Gregory of Nyssa, but hes there. And he got it from John Locke, as far as I can tell!

DBH: This is one of those curious facts of history. And he was, of course, a native genius. I mean, you just have to accept the fact that he just had a brilliant mind.

But anyway, there are ways of talking about the uniqueness of Jesus that make it a kind of catastrophic uniqueness. Thats my problem with the early Barth, the dialectical period, especially the first edition of Der Rmerbrief. There the uniqueness is so catastrophic that it doesnt have any analogical continuity in nature, history, or anything else. Its incoherent, its philosophically meaningless, for reasons that you can extrapolate from those places in You Are Gods where Im talking to Thomists about their understanding of nature and supernature. That is, you could from that extrapolate many of the same conclusions regarding the way grace and nature are configured in the Reformed tradition and in Barths early period, and through much of his work. And theres a whole school now that seems to have sprung out of Boston College of these young guys calling themselves Neo-Chalcedoninians; some very, very intelligent and gifted scholars, among them a fellow named Jordan Wood whos a very fine Maximus scholar. But the actual system, to my mind, is just as philosophically incoherent, again because theres this catastrophic uniqueness to the hypostasization of Christ. Anyway, the problems with it philosophically are so insurmountable, and theologically too, that its simply a dead end as a project.

It also comes with a sort of rejection of the analogical. You mentioned Brahman-Atman. Obviously, the sort of monism to which Im drawn is a metaphysical monism of a more Neoplatonic or Vedantic sort; so lets talk about that. Whats it saying? Thou art that. Not, that is, that your finite psychological personality is God; in fact, thats explicitly denied. What it says is that within you dwells, at the ground of your ability to be a person at all, sakshin, the perfect subject, but one who acts as well, who is atman, which literally means, like all words for spirit, breath, the wind. Like pneuma and pnoe in Greek, or neshama, nephesh, ruach in the Hebrew. And were told that Gods neshama, his breath or spirit, is what brings life to to Adam, right? Well, lets say on the one hand, then, that its true that, not in our empirical ego, not in our subjective psychology, but at the ground of our beings is that atman, that neshama, that pneuma breathed into us by Godthat spark, the Fnklein of Meister Eckhartand that to varying degrees the individual empirical selves that we are are transparent to or opaque to that ground. A holy person, a sannyasin or someone who is a saint, is someone in whom that divine image shines forth with peculiar clarity, right? Well, if theres onelets say just one for nowperson in whom that transparency is so perfect that there is nothing between the selfthe psychological personality, the finite empirical subject, the human being, the human natureand that divine ground, then thats God incarnate. But whats interesting about that is, on the one hand, its unique; but its a uniqueness of degree, because its also universal in its embrace, for whats true of him is true of us in nuce or in imperfect form. And thats why, you know, most of Christian doctrinal history has encompassed the notion that the purpose of the incarnation is the deification of human beings. Maximus actually speaks, just like Gregory of Nazianzus before him, of our becoming the equals of God, equals of Christ, and even becoming uncreated. So the very uniqueness of Christ becomes also the universal truth, the universal destiny of human beings. Well, if you start from that as your understanding of Christology, and you accept an analogical ontologyone that doesnt involve this catastrophist notion that in order to affirm the uniqueness of Christ you have to say that in Christ absolute contraries are united in some way, which somehow the dynamism of personality has the power to confect, and that this also determines who God is, and God becomes who he is, and his determination towards the man Jesus, and all this other rubbish from twentieth-century Lutheran thought and other sourcesand instead you realize that whats really splendid and magnificent about this more original understanding of deification is that Gods incarnation in Christ is also going on in everyone, everywhere, at all times, then that seems naturally to lead to a sort of universalization of the claims you can make for the faith. The beliefs of all the traditions as imperfect but nonetheless real participations in this union of creatures and God.

Gods incarnation in Christ is also going on in everyone, everywhere, at all times.MR: Theres the formulation thats always cited, its in Irenaeus, but I dont know if he was the first to formulate it, that the patristic tradition is concerned to show that God became a human so that humans could become God.

DBH: Well, in fact, all of Christian doctrinal historyduring, that is, what the Orthodox would consider the conciliar period, which ends with the Seventh Councilis premised entirely on that. That is the ground of all Christian doctrine. Again, Ive been attacked for pointing out what is simply historical fact about the Council of Nicaea: that the Nicene doctrine was arrived at not based on a long dogmatic tradition, which made its theology obviously more authoritative than the theology of those it was struggling against. Quite the opposite, in fact. At least, it was much more a creative and hermeneutical retrieval of the past and also a synthesis. But what gave it its strength was that it was the only adequate way of expressing a Trinitarian theologyand then a Christology, in the following councilsthat answered the aporias of the Arians, or the Eunomians, and then in time the various Christological factions or parties who were struggling with one another and against Nicaea. This was what carried the dayits only God who could join us to God.

MR: You bring that out very well in in Tradition and Apocalypse, that theres no way you can get to Nicaea directly from the New Testament. You do need that hermeneutical work.

DBH: The word homoousios isnt in the New Testament, but it is a brilliant theoretical formula for trying to express something that comes to the fore in say John chapter 20 or in other places in the New Testament; and its also part of the logic of the notion that in Christ humanity is really joined to God, not just to an intermediary.

MR: And I want to emphasize that when you speak of traditions as imperfect reflections, you include Christianity itself as also an imperfect reflection. Youre not doing the Catholic thing where you say, well, Christ participates mysteriously in other faiths.

DBH: No, quite the opposite. Im saying absolutely nothing of the sort. I am saying that doctrinal claims about Christ are not exclusive claims in the way that theyre understood to be. Whether I fully understand them in the way that Im expected to understand them is a different question, to be discussed sub rosa rather than in a public forum like this, for the simple reason that anything I would say without taking the time to sit down and write it down very carefullywell, actually, that doesnt work either. Id still get attacked for that. So I guess I might as well say anything. Hail Athena.

MR: I have been accused of practicing cafeteria Christianity, you know, picking and choosing.

DBH: Who doesnt?

MR: The truth is that there is no other way of practicing any faith.

See original here:
Only God could join us to God Catholic Outlook - Catholic Outlook