Transcriptions from the Q&A with David Bentley Hart — Discussing “Roland in Moonlight” from Ta’seel Commons with Hasan Azad and Esmé Partridge

What follows are my own transcriptions from this interview with David Bentley Hart by Hasan Azad and Esmé Partridge (posted on April 8, 2021). It starts and ends with readings by David from his most recent book Roland in Moonlight. Between these readings, the interview moves through the topics given in bold text (with all words transcribed here being from Hart):

How to re-enchant the world…

27:07

Oh that we could all be more like Roland. There are some things that we should not aspire to.

…I don’t know if [re-enchantment] is one of those things that individuals have the capacities to do. I really do think that there are ways of seeing reality that are unfortunately a kind of destiny, a kind of a historical destiny for us—the way that we perceive things, the way we think about them, the sort of communion we are capable of having with them. The obvious roots of return, the obvious avenues of reconciliation with that reality are the same as they have ever been: the arts, religion (not in the dreary sense of conforming oneself simply to a certain canon of dogmas but I mean in the ancient sense of religion as a certain virtue, that is a certain habitus of the mind, a certain willingness to be open to the divine, to what it shows itself in nature). For late modern people, the arts are an absolutely necessary avenue of return. At one time, for all human beings, this was simply the organic expression of our nature. Every culture produced poetry before it produced prose, produced highly abstract painted figures before it produced the ability to sketch out the blueprints of a city. The artistic impulse was—like the capacity for dreaming vidily—something that was spontaneous, organic, inescapable and necessary for us. Now it is a capacity that we have to recover almost willfully.

I think there is a serious, a spiritual, a real moral tutelage in the arts because one has to learn to surrender to another’s vision and a vision that conveys to us more than we can tell ourselves. In the late modern world, religions have become rather positivistic systems of propositions and adherences that …[are] a desperate attempt to recover a sense of the sacred but in the terms of a late modern positivist grammar of proposition [and] tenant. …But that is not the virtue, that is not the habit of mind, the habit of soul that “religio” once was, which was rather a capacity to be seized from without by what shows itself in us and beyond us.

So I think that the way back in for modern persons is necessarily an aesthetic discipline: learning to see with the eye of appreciation and surrender before you begin to encumber it with moral or doctrinal expectations. It’s not surprising to me that the one area where atheism never seems to be able to get a foothold is in the musical world. There have certainly been atheist composers, but they are actually a vanishingly small number. To take probably the best living British composer right now, [Sir James] MacMillan, all of his work is absolutely saturated in his faith and in sacred themes. I don’t think he’d be able to write music on any lesser theme than God. And the arts in general, even when they try to take leave of God, return again and again, like they are probing a wound or a place where a tooth has been lost. …A good example is Philiph Roth. …There is something about attempting to create which always makes one, if not open to, at least obsessively concerned with, the creator of all things, with creation as such, with the mystery of the being of things as an act of creative intentionality. …In the world of the arts, …you can have an artist who has no sense of the transcendent as a real possibility in his own life or her life, and yet you can’t have an art from which the transcendent is absent and that doesn’t invite one to turn towards transcendence.

34:28

Materialist savagery…

35:34

As for materialist savagery, I mean, look, every age has its own special evils, its own special barbarisms. You don’t have to idealize the past to recognize the special evils of a world that really presumes as its tacit metaphysics, as its presupposed picture of reality, a mechanistic [and] materialist model of reality. …We are in the age of technology …in which nature rather than being the upwelling mystery of being has become rather this dead realm of resources waiting [for] our exploitation. Technology is the ultimate realization of the control over fortuity, over reality that’s anumbrated …as the axial age—the moment of the vertical transcendence beginning to chase away the intermediate levels (the spirits and gods). Putting that genealogy to one side, what you can say is that we’ve arrived at a point at which it became possible …that human nature itself could become a technology.

…You don’t really have to make an argument about whether materialist savagery is a proper way of thinking when we saw genetic or eugenic pictures of humanity emerge as soon as it became possible to think of humankind as a technology that should be mastered and improved and that improvement involved the destruction of supposedly defective models which would mean those racially not elect. Or humanity becomes an economic technology. We saw in the worst excesses of communism in the twentieth century—or at least totalitarianisms that called themselves communisms—basing their remit to reinvent the human, to reinvent human society, on its mastery of the technology of homo economicus.

Materialism of the most purely reductive kind, say what you like, make all the disclaimers you wish, is ultimately an invitation to trespass upon the inner precincts of the mystery of the human in a way that previous generations knew not to do. There was always that inviolable inner sanctuary that was the special home of God or the gods or the daemons and of the spirit, the self, the soul that one could not touch. Humanity was not just a technology to be adjusted, rearranged, reconstructed.

The moment that sense of an inviolable sanctity or an inaccessible divine temenos in the human person or in nature or in the created world or in animals, …all sorts of atrocities from cruelty to animals to destruction of the world at large as a standing reserve of neutral dead resources, right up to the holocaust and the gulags, that’s the consequence of a certain ideological and metaphysical revolution: the movement from the mystery of being to the mechanism of nature in the modern sense (physicalism).

Now, again, you don’t have to idealize the past. …That same sense of the sanctity and the  inviolability of the human person and of the mystery of the gods or of God could be allied to fairly cynical authoritarian structures of power that exploited and abused (and still do, in their own way). As I say, every age, every epoch of the spirit so to speak, has its own special evils. The evils of an unguarded and dogmatically confident materialism… again Hiroshima …Nagasaki.

41:16

Consciousness…

41:53

Each philosophical project to come up with a plausible logical causal connection between first person phenomenal intentional mind and third person electrio-chemical and mechanical events has failed, has magnificently collapsed under the burden of its own contradictions and warrantless presuppositions. As sciences that mistake themselves for sciences of consciousness—which are actually just sciences of neurological correlation with cognitional states—have proved (as we could have predicted they must) impotent to give us any insight on this union of the first person and the third person.

More and more you’ve seen philosophy of mind among committed physicalists tend toward two extremes. One is panpsychism. …Understood as a purely materialist system, [it] is based on a kind of fantastic notion of consciousness as a property attendant upon every physical symbol—like simple atoms onward or even at lower levels of reality than atoms, down to Planck scales. …To use the Kantian language, [there is] a pathological side concomitant with the nomological side of nature. Somehow, through cumulative complexity, this becomes greater structures of consciousness or becomes consciousness as we think of it. Whereas I’m sympathetic to certain kinds of panpsychism of the non-materialistic type, the materialist picture simply defers the problem to the Planck scale. You’ve still got this inexplicable union of the nomological and the pathological as well as now an infinitely amplified combination problem of trying to understand how a composite effect or consequence of physical states can lead to a simple state (apprehension or consciousness).

The other extreme is simply to deny that consciousness exists altogether. Total eliminativism says that what we call consciousness is just folk psychology and that one day we will be able to chase away talk of intention and choice and subjectivity and pathos and qualia by understanding first the chemical, biochemical, electrochemical and then understanding the physical laws underlying that so that we could reconstruct the seeming phenomenon of consciousness from basic particles upward.

That’s just stupid. …For fifty years, Daniel Dennett’s been preaching this, and for fifty years he’s failed to make it even logically coherent because he’s always failing [with] the one thing that he’s supposed to be explaining which is the evident fact of first person experience. [But this] is the one thing that he cannot accept because, as sophisticated as he and others like him are in their grasp of the sciences, they’re still fixed in the mechanistic paradigm, the mechanistic metaphysics of the 17th century. And how was that metaphysics fashioned? It was from a metaphysics that excluded mental phenomena like intentionality, teleology, consciousness and just put them in a different realm altogether (that of soul). [They] ultimately tried to drag them back into the mechanistic picture but without any means for doing so because it’s already been expelled from nature. This is not a problem for an ancient Aristotalian or a Platonist for whom the structure of nature is already mind like. It already has an intrinsic teleology. It already has a kind of pathos. In fact, there is quite a lot of panpsychism in the early Aristotle.

…I think the sane conclusion to anyone who has really deeply immersed themselves in the absolute oceans of philosophical and scientific literature on this is that there is no way plausibly, causally, of explaining consciousness in physicalist terms. The eliminativist option is just an insult to our intelligence. So panpsychism is winning the day one way or the other. As long as it’s still framed in physicalist terms, it too is going to fail. Now I also dislike the Cartesian model. I’m a pure idealist. I believe that the ground of all reality is consciousness. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t physical bodies, but whatever there are, whatever unions or dis-unions they are (body, mind, soul), however it works, all of it is reducible to a more original unity, a sort of metaphysical monism of mind. Obviously, I think there is one preeminent mind. …To use the word with dangerous imprecision, everything ultimately is an infinite act of thought.

47:38

Divine feminine…

49:23

We are born out of the world. We are sheltered. We are nourished. The traditional images of the divine feminine again fall into the very traditional paradigms of motherhood and spousal love and all that. …One of the reasons that Sophiology has this rich thematic depth to it …is because it [works against] this tendency to exclude …one half of human experience, of human capacity, of human nature, …whether it is the feminine in all of us or whatever. …In so doing, you create this curiously bifurcated understanding between God and his creatures, God and his creation that is itself already premonitory of an ultimate nihilism.

53:17

…There is a history in the West that tends toward this nihilistic estrangement. First you get the God of absolute will and power who is sort of a cartoon of a king on his throne with absolute privilege and potency. Then that becomes the model of the sovereign self because the self becomes a mirror of the God who is most high so that the pure sovereign God of 16th and 17th century theology becomes also a reflection of the absolute sovereign of the emerging nation state. Then the self becomes an absolute sovereign for whom God becomes a rival.

…I don’t know the degree to which talk about Sophia or the divine femine has the power to disrupt that image, but I certainly hope that it could do some serious work.

54:21

Embodiment…

1:09:58

I’ve written on this before: Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 talking about the spiritual body as opposed to the animal body or the psychical body—a body of ψυχή (psyche) or πνεῦμα (pneuma). The body is still body for Paul. He believes in spirit as a kind of element. In fact, this is common for late antiquity. They think of it as a kind of an ethereal or super-ethereal sort of element that is also somehow the wind. Or it is the subtle part in the wind. Or it is an ichor, a subtle essence in the optic nerve or optic causeways. There is not the firm distinction; there is not a Cartesian distinction. You’ll often hear that Plato was a kind of Cartesian, but that is wrong. There is not a mechanical body in Plato. The body itself is a reflection of an eternal idea, naturally fitted to the expression of a spiritual presence, and it dies the moment that the spirit is not there. The mechanical idea has not [developed]. It is not the Cartesian automaton or the Cartesian puppet waiting for an immaterial puppet master somehow miraculously to take control in the pineal gland.

Embodiment—for Paul flesh and blood will pass away, …Paul is quite explicit about it as “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of Heaven”—but the body remains. You find this both East and West, in the sense of the subtle body or the spiritual body. It is not a rejection of embodiment. In fact, it is understood that communion [and] community for finite spirits is an embodied reality. It is embodiment as such. But it is embodiment within a hierarchy of embodiment. It is embodiment within a spiritual community which is itself the greater body of the Protanthropos, the totus Christus (in Christian thought) or Adam Kadmon’s cosmic expression. And you have this in Islam as well as the origional man or the man from above. …This is nested embodiments within nature, within the world, within the greater body of the one human nature. In Greek, physis is not an abstraction in the way that we use nature now. Like natura, it has that sense of being also birth, of being a line of descent. …Physis can mean literally your origin, your physical origin, your family, your people, your race, the whole human race.

Disembodiment—the notion that we are abstract essences—you don’t even find this in the supposedly gnostic literature. There too there is the very firm identity of a true, a subtle body. [Disembodiment] is very much a modern phenomenon—the notion that the self is so isolated from nature, from reality, so pure in its absolute sovereign selfhood that it is not even really local. It doesn’t exist within the ecology of living selves, within the hierarchy of embodiment. It is a curious picture because it is completely contrary to every moment of actual experience. …It is even true in the psychoanalytic tradition. We have no modern concept of the self that isn’t this strangely abstracted remnant of what a real human being is.

1:14:32

Story of humans all disappearing as we “upload” ourselves…

1:20:14

The story that Hasan [was thinking of is that], at one point in the book, Roland thinks of writing a science fiction story in which algorithms of certain computers have become so sophisticated that they not only pass the Turing test, they succeed in convincing everyone that the computer itself is conscious, so that people begin downloading their minds into it. But actually there is a total affective void on the other side. There is no consciousness there, but no one knows this until they’ve all been downloaded.

…Read “The Invention of Reality” [by Adolfo Bioy Casares in La Invención de Morel], and you’ll get the point that I was making. …[It] is about what appears to be a community of real people, but it is nothing but empty projections left behind by a machine that is still running. It is a brilliant little grim phantasy.

1:21:48

Finding all the great traditions of the world to be full of beauties and profundities and God to show himself in a multitude of ways and places…

1:30:15

Are there there any universalist theologians within the Islamic tradition…

Roland barks at 1:34:04 when he objects to a fine point in David’s summary of N.T. eschatological thought (with David maintaining, despite Roland’s objection, that a Preterist reading is reasonable).

1:36:38

How persons are identities constituted by a whole history of loves and affinities and associations with others…

1:38:26

Since none of us is God, except by participation in the divine presence, that essential structure of what it is to be a person, the depth of the undisclosed …reveals itself in a Logos, which manifests itself, and comes to itself in spirit. …None of us is complete in and of ourselves. Unlike God, since we are finite, changing, synthetic (…neither essence nor existence but the two in dynamic union), that fullness of ourselves, who we are coming to ourselves, is always mediated through and by otherness and others, in language, in community. We cannot come into full expression as human beings, you can’t love, you can’t think except by way of an exteriority that is also a response of intentionality and self out there. …Divine personality—to use that word in a dangerously imprecise way—can be complete in itself and can have the fullness of relation and life in itself if it is infinite. We cannot. We’re neither thinkers nor feelers nor creators nor selves except in and through others, and by that relation we come to be.

1:40:27

1:42:45

Militant compassion as something that dogs embody and something that we need in our lives in the United States (ending in a description of a dog, Laurie, that David had as a child who adopted and nurtured everything)…

it is precisely and solely this full community of persons throughout time that God has elected as his image

From That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart:

In his great treatise On the Making of Humanity, Gregory reads Genesis 1:26–7—the first account of the creation of the race, where humanity is described as being made “in God’s image”—as referring not to the making of Adam as such, but to the conception within the eternal divine counsels of this full community of all of humanity: the whole of the race, comprehended by God’s “foresight” as “in a single body,” which only in its totality truly reflects the divine likeness and the divine beauty. As for the two individuals Adam and Eve, whose making is described in the second creation narrative, they may have been superlatively endowed with the gifts of grace at their origin, but they were themselves still merely the first members of that concrete community that only as a whole can truly reflect the glory of its creator. For now, it is only in the purity of the divine wisdom that this human totality subsists “altogether” (ἀθρόως, athroōs) in its own fullness. It will emerge into historical actuality, in the concrete fullness of its beauty, only at the end of a long temporal “unfolding” or “succession” (ἀκολουθία, akolouthia). Only then, when time and times are done, will a truly redeemed humanity, one that has passed beyond all ages, be recapitulated in Christ. Only then also, in the ultimate solidarity of all humankind, will a being made in the image and likeness of God have truly been created: “Thus ‘Humanity according to the image’ came into being,” writes Gregory, “the entire nature [or race], the Godlike thing. And what thus came into being was, through omnipotent wisdom, not part of the whole, but the entire plenitude of the nature altogether.” It is precisely and solely this full community of persons throughout time that God has elected as his image, truth, glory, and delight. And God will bring this good creation he desires to pass in spite of sin, both within human history and yet over against it.

…For Gregory, moreover, this human totality belongs to Christ from eternity, and can never be alienated from him. According to On the Making of Humanity, that eternal Human Being who lives in God’s counsels was from the first fashioned after the beauty of the Father’s eternal Logos, the eternal Son, and was made for no other end than to become the living body of Christ, who is its only head. It is thus very much the case that, for Gregory, the whole drama of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection was undertaken so that the eternal Son might reclaim those who are his own—which is to say, everyone. By himself entering into the plenitude of humanity as a single man among other men and women, and in thereby assuming humanity’s creaturely finitude and history as his own, Christ reoriented humanity again toward its true end; and, because the human totality is a living unity, the incarnation of the Logos is of effect for the whole. In a short commentary on the language of the eschatological “subordination” of the Son to the Father in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, Gregory even speaks of Christ as having assumed not just human nature in the abstract, but the whole plērōma, which means that his glory has entered into all that is human. Nor could it be otherwise. Such is the indivisible solidarity of humanity, he argues, that the entire body must ultimately be in unity with its head, whether that be the first or the last Adam. Hence Christ’s obedience to the Father even unto death will be made complete only eschatologically, when the whole race, gathered together in him, will be yielded up as one body to the Father, in the Son’s gift of subjection, and God will be all in all. At Easter, Christ’s resurrection inaugurated an akolouthia of resurrection, so to speak, in the one body of the race, an unfolding that cannot now cease (given the unity of human nature) until the last residue of sin—the last shadow of death—has vanished. Gregory finds this confirmed also, according to one of his early treatises (a “Refutation” of the teachings of the theologian Eunomius), in John 20:17: When Christ, says Gregory, goes to his God and Father, to the God and Father of his disciples, he presents all of humanity to God in himself. In his On the Soul and Resurrection, moreover, Gregory reports the teaching of his sister Makrina that, when this is accomplished, all divisions will at last fall away, and there will no longer be any separation between those who dwell within the Temple precincts and those who have been kept outside, for every barrier of sin separating human beings from the mysteries within the veil of the sanctuary will have been torn down; and then there will be a universal feast around God in which no rational creature will be deprived of full participation, and all those who were once excluded on account of sin will enter into the company of the blessed. We see here the exquisite symmetry in Gregory’s reading of scripture’s narrative of creation and redemption, and in his understanding of eternity’s perfect embrace of history: just as the true first creation of humanity (Genesis 1:26–27) was the eternal conception in the divine counsels of the whole race united to him while the second (Genesis 2:7) was the inauguration of a history wholly dependent upon that eternal decree, so the culmination of history (1 Corinthians 15:23) will at the last be, as it were, succeeded by and taken up into this original eternity in its eschatological realization (1 Corinthians 15:24), and the will of God will be perfectly accomplished in the everlasting body of Christ.

For Gregory, then, there can be no true human unity, nor even any perfect unity between God and humanity, except in terms of the concrete solidarity of all persons in that complete community that is, alone, the true image of God. God shall be all in all, argues Gregory in a treatise on infants who die prematurely, not simply by comprising humanity in himself in the abstract, as the universal ideal that he redeems in a few select souls, but by joining each particular person, each unique inflection of the plērōma’s beauty, to himself. Even so, Christ’s assumption and final recapitulation of the human cannot simply be imposed upon the race as a whole, but must effect the conversion of each soul within itself, so that room is truly made for God “in all”; salvation by union with Christ must unfold within human freedom, and so within our capacity to venture away. For Gregory, of course, good classical Christian metaphysician that he was, evil and sin are always accidental conditions of human nature, never intrinsic qualities; all evil is a privation of an original goodness, and so the sinfulness that separates rational creatures from God is only a disease corrupting and disabling the will, robbing it of its true rational freedom, and thus is a disorder that must ultimately be purged from human nature in its entirety, even if needs be by hell. As Gregory argues in On the Making of Humanity, evil is inherently finite—in fact, in a sense, is pure finitude, pure limit—and so builds only toward an ending; evil is a tale that can have only an immanent conclusion; and, in the light of God’s infinity, its proper end will be shown to be nothing but its own disappearance. Once it has been exhausted, when every shadow of wickedness—all chaos, duplicity, and violence—has been outstripped by the infinity of God’s splendor, beauty, radiance, and delight, God’s glory will shine in each creature like the sun in an immaculate mirror, and each soul—born into the freedom of God’s image—will turn of its own nature toward divine love. There is no other place, no other liberty; at the last, to the inevitable God humanity is bound by its freedom. And each person, as God elects him or her from before the ages, is indispensable, for the humanity God eternally wills could never come to fruition in the absence of any member of that body, any facet of that beauty. Apart from the one who is lost, humanity as God wills it could never be complete, nor even exist as the creature fashioned after the divine image; the loss of even one would leave the body of the Logos incomplete, and God’s purpose in creation unaccomplished.

Really, we should probably already know all of this—not for theological reasons, but simply from a sober consideration of any truly coherent account of what it means to be a person. After all, it would be possible for us to be saved as individuals only if it were possible for us to be persons as individuals; and we know we cannot be. And this, in itself, creates any number of problems for the majority view of heaven and hell. I am not even sure that it is really possible to distinguish a single soul in isolation as either saint or sinner in any absolute sense, inasmuch as we are all bound in disobedience (as the Apostle says) precisely by being bound to one another in the sheer contingency of our shared brokenness, and the brokenness of our world, and our responsibility one for another. Consequently, I cannot even say where—at what extremity of pious despair—I could possibly draw a line of demarcation between tolerable and intolerable tales of eternal damnation. Some stories, of course, are obviously too depraved to be credited and may be rejected out of hand: A child who, for instance, is born one day in poverty, close to the sun in lonely lands, suffers from some horrible and quite incurable congenital disease, dies in agony, unbaptized, and then—on some accounts, consecrated by theological tradition—descends to perpetual torment as the just penalty for a guilt inherited from a distant ancestor, or as an epitome of divine sovereignty in election and dereliction, or whatever. Now most of us will recognize this to be a degenerate parody of the gospel, so repugnant to both reason and conscience that—even were it per impossibile true—it would be morally indefensible to believe it. But, then, under what conditions precisely, and at what juncture, does the language of eternal damnation really cease to be scandalous? For me, it never does, and for very simple reasons. Let us presume that that child who dies before reaching the font does not in fact descend into hell, and is not even conveniently wafted away on pearl-pale clouds of divine tenderness into the perfumed limbo of unbaptized babes, but instead (as Gregory of Nyssa believed such a child would do) ascends to eternal bliss, there to grow forever into a deeper communion with God. This is a much cheerier picture of things, I think we can all agree. But let us not stop there. Let us go on to imagine also another child born on the same day, this one in perfect health, who grows into a man of monstrous temperament, cruel, selfish, even murderous, and who eventually dies unrepentant and thereupon descends to an endless hell. Well, no doubt this brute chose to become what he became, to the extent that he was able to do so, conscious of the choices he was making; so maybe he has received no more than he deserves. And yet, even then, I cannot quite forget, or consider it utterly irrelevant, that he was born into a world so thoroughly ruined that a child can be born one day in poverty, suffer from some horrible and incurable congenital disease, die in agony … What precisely did that wicked man, then, ever really know of the Good? And how clearly, and with what rational power over his own will? Certainly he did not know everything, at least not with perfect clarity, nor did he enjoy complete rational discretion or power over his own deeds and desires. Not even a god would be capable of that. This thought alone is enough to convince me of the sheer moral squalor of the traditional doctrine.

Yet this still is not my principal point. I want to say something far more radical, something that I touched upon lightly in my First Meditation above. I want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim, but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that makes us who and what we are.

Note: see this post for a selection of passages from Gregory of Nyssa from which Hart draws these points.

heirs of a culture that sprang from Peter’s tears

“The Face of the Faceless” (chapter 13 in Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, Yale UP, 2009) by David Bentley Hart is a beautiful chapter in a profound book. Read it if you have not. Here’s an extended excerpt:

All four of the canonical Gospels tell the tale of the apostle Peter’s failure on the very eve of Christ’s crucifixion: Peter’s promise that he would never abandon Christ; Christ’s prediction that Peter would in fact deny him that same night, not once but three times, before the cock’s crow; Peter’s cautious venture into the courtyard of the high priest, after Christ’s arrest in the garden, and his confrontation with others present there who thought they recognized him as one of Christ’s disciples; and the fear that prompted Peter to do at the last just as his master had prophesied. John’s Gospel, in some ways the least tender of the four, leaves the story there; but the three synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—go on to relate that, on hearing the cock announce the break of day, Peter remembered Christ’s words to him earlier in the evening and, seized by grief, went apart to weep bitterly.

To us today, this hardly seems an extraordinary detail of the narrative, however moving we may or may not find it; we would expect Peter to weep, and we certainly would expect any narrator to think the event worth recording. But, in some ways, taken in the context of the age in which the Gospels were written, there may well be no stranger or more remarkable moment in the whole of scripture. What is obvious to us—Peter’s wounded soul, the profundity of his devotion to his teacher, the torment of his guilt, the crushing knowledge that Christ’s imminent death forever foreclosed the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal—is obvious in very large part because we are the heirs of a culture that, in a sense, sprang from Peter’s tears. To us, this rather small and ordinary narrative detail is unquestionably an ornament of the story, one that ennobles it, proves its gravity, widens its embrace of our common humanity. In this sense, all of us—even unbelievers—are “Christians” in our moral expectations of the world. To the literate classes of late antiquity, however, this tale of Peter weeping would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man’s sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone’s notice. At most, the grief of a man of Peter’s class might have had a place in comic literature: the querulous complaints of an indolent slave, the self-pitying expostulations of a witless peon, the anguished laments of a cuckolded taverner, and so on. Of course, in a tragic or epic setting a servant’s tears might have been played as accompaniment to his master’s sorrows, rather like the sympathetic whining of a devoted dog. But, when one compares this scene from the Gospels to the sort of emotional portraiture one finds in great Roman writers, comic or serious, one discovers—as the great literary critic Erich Auerbach noted half a century ago—that it is only in Peter that one sees “the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.” 1 Yet Peter remains, for all that, a Galilaean peasant. This is not merely a violation of good taste; it is an act of rebellion.

This is not, obviously, a claim regarding the explicit intent of any of the evangelists. But even Christianity’s most implacable modern critics should be willing to acknowledge that, in these texts and others like them, we see something beginning to emerge from darkness into full visibility, arguably for the first time in our history: the human person as such, invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity, and possessed of an infinite value. It would not even be implausible to argue that our very ability to speak of “persons” as we do is a consequence of the revolution in moral sensibility that Christianity brought about. We, after all, employ this word with a splendidly indiscriminate generosity, applying it without hesitation to everyone, regardless of social station, race, or sex; but originally, at least in some of the most crucial contexts, it had a much more limited application. Specifically, in Roman legal usage, one’s person was one’s status before the law, which was certainly not something invariable from one individual to the next. The original and primary meaning of the Latin word persona was “mask,” and as a legal term its use may well have harked back to the wax funerary effigies by which persons of social consequence were represented after their deaths, and which families of rank were allowed to display as icons of their ancestral pedigrees. Thus, by extension, to have a persona was to have a face before the law—which is to say, to be recognized as one possessing rights and privileges before a court, or as being able to give testimony upon the strength of one’s own word, or simply as owning a respectable social identity, of which jurists must be conscious.

For those of the lowest stations, however—slaves, base-born noncitizens and criminals, the utterly destitute, colonized peoples—legal personality did not really exist, or existed in only the most tenuous of forms. Under the best of the pagan emperors, such as Augustus, certain legal protections were extended to slaves; but, of themselves, slaves had no real rights before the law, and no proper means of appeal against their masters. Moreover, their word was of no account. A slave was so entirely devoid of any “personal” dignity that, when called to testify before a duly appointed court, torture might be applied as a matter of course. For the slave was a man or woman non Habens personam: literally, “not having a persona,” or even “not having a face.” Before the law, he or she was not a person in the fullest and most proper sense. Nor did he or she enjoy any greater visibility—any greater countenance, one might say—before society at large. In a sense, the only face proper to a slave, at least as far as the cultural imagination of the ancient world went, was the brutish and grotesquely leering “slave mask” worn by actors on the comic stage: an exquisitely exact manifestation of how anyone who was another’s property was (naturally) seen.

We today have our bigotries, of course; we can hardly claim to have advanced so far as to know nothing of racism, for instance, or of its most violent expressions; it was not so long ago that blackface and the conventions of the minstrel show were as inoffensive to us as the slave mask was to ancient audiences; and certainly there is no such thing as a society without class hierarchies. All we can claim in our defense is that we have names for the social inequities we see or remember; we are, for the most part, aware—at least, those of us who are not incorrigibly stupid or cruel—that they violate the deepest moral principles we would be afraid not to profess; we are conscious also—the great majority of us, at any rate—that they are historical accidents, which do not reflect the inmost essence of reality or the immemorial decrees of the gods or of nature, and therefore can and should be corrected. But this is only because we live in the long twilight of a civilization formed by beliefs that, however obvious or trite they may seem to us, entered ancient society rather like a meteor from a clear sky. What for us is the quiet, persistent, perennial rebuke of conscience within us was, for ancient peoples, an outlandish decree issuing from a realm outside any world they could conceive. Conscience, after all, at least in regard to its particular contents, is to a great extent a cultural artifact, a historical contingency, and all of us today in the West, to some degree or another, have inherited a conscience formed by Christian moral ideals. For this reason, it is all but impossible for us to recover any real sense of the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at the bizarre prodigality with which the early Christians were willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class and condition, and of either sex.

A few modern men, it is true, have been able to induce a similar dismay in themselves, or have at least succeeded in mimicking it. Nietzsche, for instance, did his very best to share the noble pagan’s revulsion at the sordid social sediments the early church continuously dredged up into its basilicas (though, middle-class pastor’s boy that he was, he never became quite as effortlessly expert in patrician disdain as he imagined he had). But to hear that tone of alarm in its richest, purest, and most spontaneous registers one really has to repair to the pagans themselves: to Celsus, or Eunapius of Sardis, or the emperor Julian. What they saw, as they peered down upon the Christian movement from the high, narrow summit of their society, was not the understandable ebullition of long-suppressed human longings but the very order of the cosmos collapsing at its base, drawing everything down into the general ruin and obscene squalor of a common humanity. How else could they interpret the spectacle but as a kind of monstrous impiety and noisomely wicked degeneracy? In his treatise Against the Galilaeans, Julian complained that the Christians had from the earliest days swelled their ranks with the most vicious, disreputable, and contemptible of persons, while offering only baptism as a remedy for their vileness, as if mere water could cleanse the soul. Eunapius turned away with revulsion from the base gods that the earth was now breeding as a result of Christianity’s subversion of good order: men and women of the most deplorable sort, justly tortured, condemned, and executed for their crimes, but glorified after death as martyrs of the faith, their abominable relics venerated in place of the old gods.

The scandal of the pagans, however, was the glory of the church. Vincent of Lérins, in the early fifth century, celebrated the severe moral tutelage of the monasteries in his native Gaul precisely because it was so corrosive of class consciousness: it taught the sons of the aristocracy humility, he said, and shattered in them the habits of pride, vanity, and luxuriance. It is arguable that, during the second century, the legal and social disadvantages of the lower classes under Rome had grown even more onerous than they had been in previous centuries, and that the prejudices of class had become even more pronounced than they had been in the Hellenistic or earlier Roman world. During this same period, however, Christians not only preached but even occasionally realized, something like a real community of souls, transcendent of all natural or social divisions. Not even the most morally admirable of the pagan philosophical schools, Stoicism, succeeded so strikingly in making a spiritual virtue of indifference to social station. The very law of the church was an inversion of “natural” rank: for Christ had promised that the first would be last and the last first. The Di-dascalia, for instance, prescribed that a bishop ought never to interrupt his service to greet a person of high degree who had just entered the church, lest he—the bishop—be seen to be a respecter of persons; but, on seeing a poor man or woman enter the assembly, that same bishop should do everything in his power to make room for the new arrival, even if he himself should have to sit upon the floor to do so. The same text also makes it clear that the early church might often have arranged its congregations into different groups, distinguished by age, sex, marital status, and so on, simply for propriety’s sake, but that social degree was not the standard by which one’s place was assigned among “the brethren.”2 Men of high attainment—literate, accomplished, propertied, and free—had to crowd in among slaves, laborers, and craftsmen, and count it no disgrace.

I do not wish to exaggerate the virtues of the early Christians on this count. Perfection is not to be found in any human institution, and the church has certainly always been that. Even in the early days of the church, certain social distinctions proved far too redoubtable to exterminate; a Christian slaveholder’s Christian slaves were still slaves, even if they were also their master’s brothers in Christ. And, after Constantine, as the church became that most lamentable of things—a pillar of respectable society—it learned all too easily to tolerate many of the injustices it supposedly condemned. The enfranchised church has never been more than half Christian even at the best of times; often enough, it has been much less than that. Neither, however, should we underestimate how extraordinary the religious ethos of the earliest Christians was in regard to social order, or fail to give them credit for the attempts they did make to efface the distinctions in social dignity which had traditionally separated persons of different rank from one another, but which had been (they believed) abolished in Christ. When all is said and done, the pagan critics of the early church were right to see the new faith as an essentially subversive movement. In fact, they may have been somewhat more perspicacious in this regard than the Christians themselves. Christianity may never have been a revolution in the political sense: it was not a convulsive, violent, or intentionally provocative faction that had some “other vision” of political power to recommend; but neither, for that reason, was the change it brought about something merely local, transient, and finite. The Christian vision of reality was nothing less than—to use the words of Nietzsche—a “transvaluation of all values,” a complete revision of the moral and conceptual categories by which human beings were to understand themselves and one another and their places within the world. It was—again to use Nietzsche’s words, but without his sneer—a “slave revolt in morality.” But it was also, as far as the Christians were concerned, a slave revolt “from above,” if such a thing could be imagined; for it had been accomplished by a savior who had, as Paul said in his Epistle to the Philippians, willingly exchanged the “form of God” for the “form of a slave,” and had thereby overthrown the powers that reigned on high.

Perhaps even more striking than the episode of Peter’s tears—at least, in regard to its cultural setting—is the story of Christ before Pilate. …In the great cosmic hierarchy of rational powers—descending from the Highest God down to the lowliest of slaves—Pilate’s is a particularly exalted place, a little nearer to heaven than to earth, and imbued with something of the splendor of the gods. Christ, by contrast, has no natural claim whatsoever upon Pilate’s clemency, nor any chartered rights upon which he might call; simply said, he has no person before the law. One figure in this picture, then, enjoys perfect sway over life and death, while the other no longer belongs even to himself. And the picture’s asymmetry becomes even starker (and perhaps even more absurd) when Jesus is brought before Pilate for the second time, having been scourged, wrapped in a soldier’s cloak, and crowned with thorns. To the ears of any ancient person, Pilate’s question to his prisoner now—“Where do you come from?”—would almost certainly have sounded like a perfectly pertinent, if obviously sardonic, inquiry into Christ’s pedigrees, and a pointed reminder that, in comparison to Pilate, Christ is no one at all. And Pilate’s still more explicit admonition a moment later—“I have power to crucify you”—would have had something of the ring of a rhetorical coup de grâce. Christ’s claim, on the other hand, that Pilate possesses no powers not given him from above would have sounded like only the comical impudence of a lunatic.

…I have to assume, however, that most of us today simply cannot see Christ and Pilate in this way. We come too late in time to think like ancient men and women, and few of us, I hope, would be so childish as to want to. Try though we might, we shall never really be able to see Christ’s broken, humiliated, and doomed humanity as something self-evidently contemptible and ridiculous; we are instead, in a very real sense, destined to see it as encompassing the very mystery of our own humanity: a sublime fragility, at once tragic and magnificent, pitiable and wonderful. Obviously, of course, many of us are quite capable of looking upon the sufferings of others with indifference or even contempt. But what I mean to say is that even the worst of us, raised in the shadow of Christendom, lacks the ability to ignore those sufferings without prior violence to his or her own conscience. We have lost the capacity for innocent callousness. Living as we do in the long aftermath of a revolution so profound that its effects persist in the deepest reaches of our natures, we cannot simply and guilelessly avert our eyes from the abasement of the victim in order to admire the grandeur of his persecutor; and for just this reason we lack any immediate consciousness of the radical inversion of perspective that has occurred in these pages.

we are in a world of invisible people

E. F. Schumacher in A Guide for the Perplexed:

Inner space is created by the [combined] powers of life, consciousness, and self-awareness; but we have direct and personal experience only of our own “inner space” and the freedom it affords us. The human …in his inner space …can develop a center of strength so that the power of freedom exceeds that of his necessity.

…We do not grasp that we are invisible. We do realize that we are in a world of invisible people. …We need not be surprised that most people throughout most of human history …have always claimed that we can learn to see the invisibility of the persons around us.

closer in a way to the original day of the crucifixion

Working to capture the first step of Charles Taylor’s argument within A Secular Age, James K.A. Smith summarizes five pre-modern ways of understanding (or of inhabiting life) that served for centuries as powerful obstacles to unbelief:

1. Understanding of the individual person as “porous” and subject to the influence of many powerful outside realities (i.e. as vulnerable and existing within an enchanted world).
2. Understanding that every life depends on every other life to maintain a healthy social fabric that sustains us all (i.e. that no one can rise or fall alone).
3. Understanding shared eternal values or an aiming of all human life toward something beyond ordinary human flourishing.
4. Understanding of a higher sense of time that is not merely linear or chronological.
5. Understanding of a porous cosmos that is suspended within its own beyond (i.e. that we inhabit a world that is created and dependent on a reality that is greater than itself).

Here are a few excerpts from Smith. On the 3th understanding:

We miss this if we retroactively impose our “privatized” picture of faith upon abbeys and monasteries and imagine that the monks are devoting themselves to personal pursuits of salvation. The monks pray for the world in the world’s stead. So the social body loves this tension between transcendence and the mundane by a kind of division of labor.

Second, the social body in Christendom has a sense of time that allows even those daily engaged in domestic life to nonetheless pursue rhythms and rituals that inhabit this tension between the pressures of now and the hopes of eternity. Rhythms and seasons create opportunity to live the tension.

On the 4th understanding:

Higher times “introduce ‘warps’ and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering. Events that were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked” (p. 55). This is somewhat akin to Kierkegaard’s account of “contemporaneity” in Philosophical Fragments: “Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than midsummer’s day 1997” (Secular Age, p. 55). Our “encasing” in secular time has changed this, and so we take our experience of time to be “natural” (i.e., not a construal): “We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done” (p. 59). So nothing “higher” impinges upon our calendars — only the tick-tock of chronos, and the self-imposed burdens of our “projects.”

On the 5th understanding:

It’s as if the universe has layers, and we are always folded into the middle. If the premodern self is “porous,” so too is the premodern cosmos.

the natural elements of bread and wine are so affirmed that they acquire personal qualities — the Body and Blood of Christ

By the Metropolitan John Zizioulas (shortened version of a lecture given at the European Orthodox Congress given in October, 1993 that was reprinted here):

Theology and Church life involve a certain conception of the human being: personhood. This term, sanctified through its use in connection with the very being of God and of Christ, is rich in its implications.

The Person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness. The Person is an identity that emerges through relationship (schesis, in the terminology of the Fathers); it is an “I” that can exist only as long as it relates to a “Thou” which affirms its existence and its otherness. If we isolate the “I” from the “Thou,” we lose not only its otherness but also its very being; it simply cannot be without the other. This is what distinguishes the person from the individual.

The Orthodox understanding of the Holy Trinity is the only way to arrive at this concept of Personhood: the Father cannot be conceived for a moment without the Son and the Spirit, and the same applies to the other two Persons in their relation with the Father and with each other. At the same time each of these Persons is so unique that their hypostatic or personal properties are totally incommunicable from one Person to the Other.

Personhood is inconceivable without freedom; it is the freedom of being other. I hesitate to say “different” instead of “other” because “different” can be understood in the sense of qualities (clever, beautiful, holy, etc.), which is not what the person is about. In God all such qualities are common to the each three Persons. Person implies not simply the freedom to have different qualities but mainly the freedom simply to be yourself. This means that a person is not subject to norms and stereotypes and cannot be classified in any way; its uniqueness is absolute. This means that only a person is free in the true sense.

And yet one person is no person; freedom is not freedom from the other but freedom for the other. Freedom becomes identical with love. God is love because He is Trinity. We can love only if we are persons, allowing the other to be truly other and yet be in communion with us. If we love the other not in spite of his or her being different but because they are different from us, or rather other than ourselves, we live in freedom as love and in love as freedom.

The other is a condition of our freedom. Freedom is not from but for something other than ourselves. This makes the person ecstatic, going outside and beyond the boundaries of the self. But this ecstasis is not to be understood as a movement towards the unknown and the infinite; it is a movement of affirmation of the other.

This drive of personhood towards the affirmation of the other is so strong that is not limited to the “other” that already exists but wants to affirm an “other” which is totally free grace of the person. Just as God created the world as free grace, so the person wants to create its own “other.” This is what happens with art: the artist creating a totally other identity as an act of freedom and communion. Living in the Church in communion with the other means, therefore, creating a culture. The Orthodox Church has always been culturally creative.

Finally, we must consider the ecological problem. The threat to God’s creation is due to a crisis between the human being and the otherness of the rest of creation. Man does not respect the otherness of what is not human; he tends to absorb it into himself.

This is the cause of the ecological problem. In a desperate attempt to correct this, Man may easily fall into the pagan alternative: to absorb Man into nature. We have to be very careful. Out of its tradition, Orthodoxy is called to offer the right Christian answer to the problem. Nature is the “other” that Man is called to bring into communion with himself, affirming it as “very good” through personal creativity.

This is what happens in the Eucharist where the natural elements of bread and wine are so affirmed that they acquire personal qualities — the Body and Blood of Christ — in the event of the communion of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, in a para-eucharistic way, all forms of true culture and art are ways of treating nature as otherness in communion, and these are the only healthy antidotes to the ecological illness.

the ultimate mystery of evil must also be a personal one

Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism by Alexander Schmemann.

It is not our purpose to outline, even superficially, the Orthodox teaching concerning the Devil. In fact, the Church has never formulated it systematically, in the form of a clear and concise “doctrine.” What is of paramount importance for us, however, is that the Church has always had the experience of the demonic, has always, in plain words, known the Devil. If this direct knowledge has not resulted in a neat and orderly doctrine, it is because of the difficulty, if not impossibility, rationally to define the irrational. And the demonic and, more generally, evil are precisely the reality of the irrational. Some theologians and philosophers, in an attempt to explain and thus to “rationalize” the experience and the existence of evil, explained it as an absence: the absence of good. They compared it, for example, to darkness, which is nothing but the absence of light and which is dispelled when light appears. This theory was subsequently adopted by deists and humanists of all shades and still constitutes an integral part of our modern worldview. Here the remedy against all evil is always seen in “enlightenment” and “education.” For example: explain to teenagers the mechanics of sex, remove the “mystery” and the “taboos,” and they will use it rationally, i.e. well. Multiply the number of schools and man, who is naturally good, will ipso facto live and behave rationally, i.e. well.

Such however is certainly not the understanding of evil in the Bible and in the experience of the Church. Here evil is most emphatically not a mere absence. It is precisely in presence: the presence of something dark, irrational and very real, although the origin of that presence may not be clear and immediately understandable. Thus hatred is not a simple absence of love; it is the presence of a dark power which can indeed be extremely active, clever and even creative. And it is certainly not a result of ignorance. We may know and hate. The more some men knew Christ, saw His light and His goodness, the more they hated Him. This experience of evil as irrational power, as something which truly takes possession of us and directs our acts, has always been the experience of the Church and the experience also of all those who try, be it only a little, to “better” themselves, to oppose “nature” in themselves, to ascend to a more spiritual life.

Our first affirmation then is that there exists a demonic reality: evil as a dark power, as presence and not only absence. But we may go further. For just as there can be no love outside the “lover,” i.e. a person that loves, there can be no hatred outside the “hater,” i.e. a person that hates. And if the ultimate mystery of “goodness” lies in the person, the ultimate mystery of evil must also be a personal one. Behind the dark and irrational presence of evil there must be a person or persons. There must exist a personal world of those who have chosen to hate God, to hate light, to be against. Who are these persons? When, how, and why have they chosen to be against God? To these questions the Church gives no precise answers. The deeper the reality, the less it is presentable in formulas and propositions. Thus the answer is veiled in symbols and images, which tell of an initial rebellion against God within the spiritual world created by God, among angels led into that rebellion by pride. The origin of evil is viewed here not as ignorance and imperfection but, on the contrary, as knowledge and a degree of perfection which makes the temptation of pride possible. Whoever he is, the “Devil” is among the very first and the best creatures of God. He is, so to speak, perfect enough, wise enough, powerful enough, one can almost say divine enough, to know God and not to surrender to Him—to know Him and yet to opt against Him, to desire freedom from Him. But since this freedom is impossible in the love and light which always lead to God and to a free surrender to Him, it must of necessity be fulfilled in negation, hatred and rebellion.

These are, of course, poor words, almost totally inadequate to the horrifying mystery they are trying to express. For we know nothing about that initial catastrophe in the spiritual world—about that hatred against God ignited by pride and that bringing into existence of a strange and evil reality not willed, not created by God. Or rather, we know about it only through our own experience of that reality, through our own experience of evil. This experience indeed is always an experience of fall: of something precious and perfect deviated from and betraying its own nature, of the utterly unnatural character of that fall which yet became an integral and “natural” part of our nature. And when we contemplate evil in ourselves and outside ourselves in the world, how incredibly cheap and superficial appear all rational explanations, all “reductions” of evil to neat and rational theories. If there is one thing we learn from spiritual experience, it is that evil is not to be “explained” but faced and fought. This is the way God dealt with evil. He did not explain it. He sent His Only-Begotten Son to be crucified by all the powers of evil so as to destroy them by His love, faith and obedience.

This then is the way we must also follow. On this way we inescapably meet the Devil at the very moment we make the decision to follow Christ.

born in God’s thoughts

From George MacDonald’s book David Elginbrod. In chapter XIX, Lady Emily muses: “I wish I were you, Margaret.” Margaret answers:

“If I were you, my lady, I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of. For to have been thought about—born in God’s thoughts—and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest, most precious thing in all thinking.”

Note: some concepts and language from George MacDonald here are comparable to what C.S. Lewis has to say in “The Weight of Glory” (see this passage for example).

a person is an irreducible mystery

So Eve, and the ark, and the queen mother give us glimpses of the great reality that is Mary. She, then, must be our goal as we study her types. For she was and she remains a real, living person; and a person is an irreducible mystery, not the sum of his or her symbols. Paul was moved by the way Jesus was foreshadowed in Adam; but Paul was in love with Jesus Christ. So we must come to know and love Mary herself as she is illuminated by her biblical types. This is not something optional for Christians. It is not something ornamental in the gospel.

From Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God by Scott Hahn, pages 90 to 91.