Abstract
David Bentley Hart's You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature is a fascinating and insightful short book on metaphysics. Unlike many accounts of ‘metaphysics’ in contemporary Christian theology which focus primarily on the theological doctrines of God and creation or the particular scholastic formulations, Hart's book is concerned with the very structure of reality and the place of consciousness within it. At the core of Hart's metaphysical explorations in this book is the explication of the theory of transcendental perfections—such as Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, universal properties that are coextensive with Being which ultimately have their origin in God. Hart argues that this theory is not exclusively Christian, but could also be shared by ‘a Jew, Muslim, virtuous pagan, Hindu, Sikh, or any other adherent to the most venerable classical metaphysical claims’ (pp. 57–58). According to Hart, in an unfallen world, ‘we would never have to choose between the good and the beautiful, the beautiful and the true, the true and the good’, as we would have ‘only one order of desire, the rational soul's longing for God, a single pure movement of the mind and heart toward the one true terminus of every rational and virtuous longing’ (p. 58). But in the fallen world in which we find ourselves, we are confronted by ‘conflicting transcendental vocations’ and as such we need to ‘determine which of the transcendental perfections we should assign the highest station in the hierarchy of values’ as we comport ourselves ethically as moral agents in a postlapsarian order (pp. 58–59).
In spite of the postlapsarian ‘conflict’ between transcendental vocations, Hart insists that, even in a fallen state, ‘the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, Being and Unity—or however one might arrange the transcendental taxonomy—constitute the transcendental horizon of consciousness in its every rational movement’ (p. 38). According to Hart, each and every mental act of intentional consciousness is motivated by ‘the irrepressible transcendental desire’ for the supernatural unity of the transcendental perfections in God (p. 97). For Hart, underlying our intentional comprehension of various finite objects—objects that can be universally predicated with truth, goodness, and beauty—is a desire to grasp God who is infinite Truth, infinite Goodness, infinite Beauty and indeed infinite Being: ‘The mind attends to any object only to the degree that it is prompted to do so by a prior interest in Being as such’ (p. 26). Human mental acts are thus ‘animated by a prior preoccupation of the mind and will with ultimate transcendental indices of identity, meaning, value, and desirability, such as the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and Being itself in its unity’ (p. 27).
For Hart, (our knowledge of) the ‘natural’ is always transcendentally conditioned by (our knowledge of—and desire for) the ‘supernatural’: ‘But for a tacit rational grasp of the supernatural, as the most original movement of our nature, we would be incapable of any explicit rational grasp of the natural’ (p. 98). To this extent, there is some kind of twofold transcendental argument at work in Hart's thesis. Our conscious experience and cognition of the finite world is transcendentally—in a post-Kantian phenomenological sense—motivated, structured, and conditioned by an a priori preoccupation with the transcendental properties of all things which find their ultimate source in God, for all the finite beings in the world are transcendentally—in a broadly pre-Kantian metaphysical sense—grounded, structured, and conditioned by the transcendental perfections of God who is the Being of all beings. Hart's twofold—phenomenological and metaphysical—argument is ‘transcendental’ not simply because it pertains to the necessary conditions for our experience of reality: that our a priori longing for God (who is the source and unity of transcendental perfections) is the necessary ‘transcendental’ condition of our phenomenological experience in the ordo cognoscendi, just as God is the necessary ‘transcendental’ metaphysical ground of all reality in the ordo essendi. Hart's argument can also be said to be ‘transcendental’ because what it uncovers is, according to Hart, simply obvious: ‘This is obvious. No finite terminus of desire could draw the rational will to itself were it not set off against the encompassing infinite horizon of Being in its transcendental perfections … This is obvious from the most minimal conditions of experience’ (pp. 98–99; cf. pp. 26–27).
While one may perhaps question how ‘obvious’ this insight really is, as noted above, Hart argues that the metaphysics of transcendental perfections is not exclusively intuited and held by Christianity but is also shared by many other faiths. Nonetheless, the Christian doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity are important for Hart's account of the intelligibility of Being and the transcendental properties. To summarize in five steps the theological vision breathtakingly expounded in Hart's powerful concluding chapter entitled ‘The Chiasmus’:
The ‘transcendental’ rational desire to know the transcendental properties of Being (‘transcendentally’) presupposes the ultimate coincidence or formal unity between Being and knowing: that ‘Being must be intelligible, or even intelligibility itself’ (p. 101). The unity of Being and knowing or the intelligibility of Being itself is supremely articulated in the Christian conception of the divine Logos as the perfect image and manifestation of the invisible God: ‘the Logos is the eternal reality of God's manifestation of his own essence to himself, and therefore the eternal act whereby God is God … God is then an infinite act of intelligibility who knows himself in and through the manifestation of himself to himself’ (pp. 103–104). Just as intelligibility is not a principle secondary to God but is itself eternally and essentially God—the divine Logos being the self-manifesting Person of the Trinity, God's act of creation, salvation, and divinization is ‘not merely a secondary effect of the eternal divine taxis’. God's processions ad intra and operations ad extra are one and the same for God because God in Godself is supremely simple and ‘infinitely actual’. As such, ‘[God's] ‘election’ of himself in the Son in the Spirit's light is always also the eternal reality of his election of himself in all that is contained in the Logos, including the entirety of creation and history’. Thus, Hart argues that ‘Our being in God and God's being in us are both also and more originally God's being as God’ (p. 105). As ‘spiritual creatures, whose very existence as spirit can be nothing other than an insatiable intentionality toward the whole of divine being’ (p. 119), human beings exist ‘having been ever called to seek the unity of the Logos and the Father—of intelligibility and Being’ (p. 109). The ‘transcendental’ desire of human consciousness is fundamentally an outworking of what Hart, following Gregory of Nyssa, calls God's Trinitarian ‘circle of glory’ (pp. 103, 108–109, 118): ‘The creature's ascent to God is already situated within God's eternal return to himself … both in the exitus and reditus of creation and in the Trinitarian processions’ (p. 109). This is why Hart argues that ‘we are gods’: ‘Created spirits exist because they are, from everlasting, gods in God’ (p. 105; cf. p. 32).
This is of course an extremely simplified summary of Hart's sophisticated speculative vision. However, from this we can see how the unity of the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ is not only key to Hart's assertion of the ultimate and original union of creation with God, but also to his philosophical-theological approach. Just as the phenomenological analysis of our ‘natural’ experience and comprehension of things is intrinsically intertwined with our speculative metaphysical intuitions about the ‘supernatural’ (in the sense of being transphenomenal) structures of Being, for Hart, the phenomenological and metaphysical insights of ‘natural’ philosophy are also intrinsically bound up with ‘supernatural’ revealed doctrines such as the Trinity.
While Hart's account of the metaphysics of the transcendental perfections is powerful and compelling, those who do not share his commitment to the unity of ‘natural’ philosophical reasoning and ‘supernatural’ revelation may question whether metaphysics is overly determinative for Hart's approach to theology. Amidst his metaphysical explication of the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity, Hart boldly states that the metaphysical picture of a ‘strictly Reformed theology’ or a ‘manualist “two-tier” Thomism’ is ‘so contrary to everything proper to the narrative of divine incarnation and creaturely divinization that it is immeasurably more irreconcilable with any truth revealed in Christ than is the metaphysics of classical Vedanta’ (pp. 110–11). This is obviously a provocative statement—as is Hart's passing remark that his theological outlook could be called ‘Vedantic Christianity’ (p. xvii). It does, however, highlight how Hart's approach in this book seems to see the message of Christianity as primarily concerned with a speculative metaphysical vision of the unity of God and creature formally articulated in the hypostatic union, as opposed to confessions regarding the identity of Jesus Christ.
Although one may wonder whether metaphysics, so to speak, does ‘too much theological work’ for Hart, his focus on metaphysics should by no means be seen as a weakness. As noted at the outset of this review, Hart's book is not simply concerned with the relation between God and creation or between supernature and nature—as often found in contemporary theological renditions of ‘metaphysics’. Rather, Hart's engagement with metaphysics is an expansive one which extends not only to ethics and aesthetics but also to the philosophy of mind and phenomenology (as discussed above), as well as politics—with occasional critical remarks on nationalist conservative politics scattered throughout the book (e.g., pp. 45–46). However, in light of its subtitle On Nature and Supernature, as well as the opening introductory critical remarks on the resurgence of ‘manualist “two-tier” Thomism’ among ‘certain traditionalist Catholic sects’ (p. xii), the reader might expect a more focused treatment of the relation between the natural and supernatural in this book. Although we do find an in-depth analysis of natural human desire for the supernatural in the book's first two chapters (with detailed references to primary texts by Aquinas and Cusanus), the rest of the book has a somewhat different focus and approach: chapters 3 and 4 are concerned respectively with aesthetics and ethics instead (with no endnotes or references provided), while the fifth chapter is primarily concerned with Cyril O’Regan's reading of Hegel and Gnosticism before the book concludes with the aforementioned closing speculative tour de force on the metaphysical implications of Trinitarian theology.
The reader attracted to this book on the basis of its subtitle may be left wanting to learn more of Hart's critique and diagnosis of the recent renewed interest in the ‘two-tier’ Thomism of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (a strong supporter of the far-right movement Action Française as well as the Vichy regime), its connections to the concurrent upsurge of nationalist conservative politics in the US (as intimated in the introduction, pp. xi–xiii), and how the ‘two-tier’ understanding of nature and supernature may underlie certain ethical commitments, political sensibilities or ‘some odd perversity of [particular] national temperament[s]’ (p. xii). But, overall, Hart's compelling explication of the metaphysics of transcendental properties in this short book not only uncovers new ground for conversations between Christianity and other religions. It also illuminates the connections between Christian metaphysics and Christian ethics and aesthetics as well as the unique contributions Christian theological doctrine makes to the study of metaphysics. In addition to unpacking some of the fundamental metaphysical implications of Christian theology, Hart's You Are Gods presents a number of compelling reflections and sophisticated insights on some of the perennial philosophical questions concerning the structure of reality and the nature of consciousness. It is a timely intervention in a timeless conversation.