Tag Archives: Roland

First Letters Between Sita and Roland

Roland in Moonlight by David Bentley Hart divulged that Roland W. Hart is engaged in a substantial volume of online research and collaboration—finding email to be a helpful medium for a dog. He has read all of the reviews written for the book so far, including my own which Roland considered to be a touching account of one reader’s elementary grasp of a basic motif within the work.

Astoundingly, I know this because I received an email from Roland myself a few nights ago just as I was closing up some transcription work from a recent online conversation with David Bentley Hart. There, in the glow of my screen was a name that had me reading with bated breath. Roland deemed me a fitting trustee for the first instance of the online distribution of a rather remarkable correspondence that he thought the public might appreciate. Having, of course, first checked with his fellow correspondent and learned that she approved the idea, Roland has shared with me a couple of recent letters between he and Sita Cutsinger that the readers of Roland in Moonlight might appreciate.

For those not familiar with Sita, she is the friend and companion of professor and author James Cutsinger who Sita lost to cancer just over a year ago. James and David had some overlap of scholarly and personal interests and enjoyed a few events and meals together. Sita first wrote to Roland about a month ago, and this has precipitated a warm exchange of letters since, although they have never had the pleasure of meeting in person.

Their idea is that some of their letters might be shared with editors who have some familiarity with the issues raised so that portions might be provided to the human readers of David and James, in case these humans should find encouragement or companionship in their reflections.

Roland’s email made it clear to me that they hope to find multiple editors for this task, so please be on the lookout for an email of your own and please be prompt in sharing its contents with the rest of us. But now, without further introduction, here are the two letters, that I received to pass along:

March 6, 2021

Dear Roland,

I’ve just completed the reading of David’s memoir from your recent years together. As you know, I lost James a little over a year ago, so this tender and precious book came at a good time for me.

While you and I have never met, I hope that you might share my sense of our mutual companionship as already having some ground in reality. This is my feeling by virtue of David and James having enjoyed being together in person on several occasions. To be direct, correspondence with you would be a consolation to me in my last years without James. Moreover, in offering any friendship and encouragement to you, I hope that I might also represent the legacy of James in some small way as he so appreciated David’s work and as you are such a support and guide to David in his continued work. It would comfort me both to find a friend in you and to think that my friendship might be a support to you in your support to one who was so dear to James.

Before sharing the reflections that came to mind for me while reading Roland in Moonlight, I wished to mention that I have just ordered your first volume of haiku and that I look forward to reading your own work as well before long.

As one further aside before addressing some of the topics that I so look forward to considering with you, it seems prudent to directly address a difference that somewhat publicly distinguished the two men under our care. I speak, of course, of their divergent responses to the work of Frithjof Schuon. As you know, James has written of him that, “as for our personal relationship, I shall simply say that Frithjof Schuon is one of the greatest men I have ever known, and I am profoundly grateful to have had his friendship.”

In stark contrast, David has shared with a nephew of his that he finds Frithjof distasteful. As his nephew has phrased it on David’s behalf: “he finds Schuon pretty icky, as he does a lot of the earlier Perennialists.” Putting his assessment even more bluntly, David’s oldest brother has recently described Frithjof as “a first-class bullshitter” within the same forum.

I understand, of course, the revulsion at the Nazi associations of some other thinkers in this same traditionalist school of perennialism, but those closest to Frithjof found no such associations with his own thought.

In the even more sensitive matter of the allegations brought against Frithjof in 1991 and subsequently dropped as baseless, I will simply note that James described Frithjof as “one of the greatest men I have ever known” within an essay published in 2002. This essay by James was included within the book Every Branch in Me alongside an essay by Frithjof (as well as a host of his fellow traditionalists). Coming ten years after Frithjof’s public ordeal, it is clear where James stood on the matter of Frithjof’s integrity and character despite these scandalous accusations.

James wrote that “the mystery of Christ” was a kind of “key to Schuon’s entire approach to the world’s religions.” Quoting Frithjof several times, James further noted:

“All genuine religions are Christian”; or again, “every truth is necessarily manifested in terms of Christ and on His model,” for “there is no truth nor wisdom that does not come from Christ.” Now of course what he means is that “the other religions are ‘Christian’ inasmuch as they have the universal Christ, who is the Word that inspires all Revelation.” Schuon is not saying, in other words, that in order to be a true Muslim or Hindu, one must identify the man Jesus with God; but then, as we have seen, neither should the discerning Christian acquiesce in so simple an equation. God and man have been united in Jesus Christ, but unless we choose to be heretics, the Christian tradition forbids us to think that the manhood in question was merely that of a historical individual, or that the Divinity was that of the pure Absolute. Rather we ourselves are that man in our essential humanity, and the God who assumed us into Himself was the Divine Logos or Word, in and through whom the inaccessible Essence makes Itself known to all.

I find nothing in these conclusions to conflict in any way with the writings of your David. If anything, they are ideas that David himself has shared in other forums and that lie near and dear to the heart of all David’s scholarly and theological work.

James delighted in these ways in which Frithjof showed how traditional Christian dogma regarding the incarnation was, in fact, a sustainer of the core truths within all the great religious traditions of human history. James also loved David’s work and would, no doubt, have most thoroughly enjoyed Roland in Moonlight. In all earnestness, I feel confident that James continues reading books such as these even in the more immediate presence of God. As James reads, he will feel himself even further vindicated by David’s call for humans to “believe everything at once” and to refuse to “relinquish any dimension of anything that [we] find appealing or admirable… or beautiful” (326). James loved these ideas as well and advocated for them boldly and tirelessly throughout his life.

For my own part, I was struck by David’s insistence that humans must “draw some kind of working distinction between the perpetually valid symbol and the historically novel event.” David understands that dogs are not so bound by human history, and that we are more free to take hold directly of the valid symbol. Nonetheless, I cannot help but think that James was more ready to share in our enjoyment of the symbol itself without being constrained by historical particularities. James was, dare I suggest it, a better student of us dogs in this regard.

I will await your reply with eager confidence in your kindness.

Most Sincerely Yours,

Sita

March 12, 2021

Dear Sita,

Your letter reached me quickly and was relayed promptly to me by David who has (only very slowly) grown most reliable in this regard. (If you might excuse a quick aside, how do you handle this delicate matter with your people? They are far from consistent in recognizing that letters addressed to me are in fact for me.)

It was with great sadness that I learned of having lost James at so young an age for a man. He was a rare gift to the world and a man whose work I loved to read. While we know that he must, most certainly, be continuing to read, it is a loss to us that he can no longer reply with material of his own—speaking to us openly within this veil of tears where we remain. Finding this photo online of you two together was a joy to me.

You must also have found comfort in the reference to your love for each other from the note announcing his passing. I was moved to learn that James started each day with “a hike in his beloved Hitchcock Woods with his canine companion, Sita—whom he named after the heroine of the Hindu epic poem, the Ramayana.”

I agree with you that the many loves shared between David and James give to you and I a wealth of topics in which we might also delight together. It was tactful of you, certainly, to raise the only substantial difference between them of which I am aware. While I cannot speak for David, of course, I will respond with a few thoughts of my own that come to mind on this matter in response to what you shared. While I do love to tease David for his inability to acknowledge his heart’s journey into Hinduism, I do appreciate that David sees a distinction between what a human can accept and what a dog can accept. Speaking in generalities, dogs are more open to all truths than humans can be.

For example, David has been considering for some time the extent to which all humans must now be moderns—even David himself who is such a harsh critic of modernity. Humans live enmeshed within a shared or collective destiny inside of which they must move and the constraints of which they must honor in their daily choices and routines. David recognizes that each human age has its own peculiar evils that must be faced and called out but that also cannot be ultimately undone except by the vision of another age or another time—one that is more real than this current fickle time in which we live.

These constraints apply to human religion which is always nothing but a roiling stream of contending ideas, images and practices on the one hand and yet also a potential witness to the beauty and love of God on the other. While loudly proclaiming his love for the fullness of this diverse witness across the ages, David also seems to have a kind of abiding suspicion of any attempt to claim that humans can too closely identify or define the nature of the common ground or live out their lives within any kind of pure synthesis. Dogs, of course, do not share all of these same constraints. Our more immediate openness to the reality and beauty in the creation surrounding us leaves us dogs able to enjoy the witnesses of various human cultures without the modesty and reserve that must attend the more damaged and fragile spirits of humanity. Humans must, I think, make more difficult choices than dogs because they are constrained by certain limitations peculiar to them.

In these matters, I suspect that James was really not so different from David. My own hunch is that their primary difference was in the ways in which they each chose to bestow their generosity. James offered his generosity directly to Frithjof Schuon out of appreciation for the precision and insight of his thought, from which James had benefited so deeply. David, for his part, offered his generosity to the plight of modern man who cannot be asked to “return” to some kind of abstract and ideal synthesis of ancient insights and practices as the solution to their current plight. For humans to suggest such a solution, I humbly submit, so easily becomes something dangerously close to an act of hubris or control. Nonetheless, it is not for me to judge regarding whether or not Frithjof offered any such false hopes in his own care of others. Regardless, Jame and David, clearly held to a common ground here within the limitations of their own personal lives. They likely would not have been in such different places regarding Frithjof and the traditionalists had they had more time to consider these matters together. Each might have moved toward each other in their own ways I suspect. However, they no doubt found other matters even more delightful to consider together, and likely never thought to focus upon this possible point of contention amid all of their shared joys.

In a similar way, your initiation of this correspondence with me opens up vistas of joyful reflection that I’m confident we will be able to enjoy. Many thoughts beg to be expressed, but I quiet them now as I consider that this letter has already grown long.

I look forward to your next letter with gratitude bursting already—a greening seed in pungent soil.

Warmly Yours,

Roland

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)…

The Last Fruits of Humanity

“Auntie Miriam, will you hold my hand?”

Hearing his quiet question, she took his small hand, squeezing gently in response to the pressure of his fingers against hers. Glancing down at him, she saw the pain that she knew so well tightening the dark skin on his face. He remained attentive, however, to the movements of the censor and the robes in the half light before them. Their priest made his circuit around the interior of the stone church, casting the golden incense bowl toward them as he passed, jouncing the bells on its chains with a lively cadence amid the slow voices of the others chanting prayers around them.

After the vespers service, Miriam walked with her husband, her nephew and her own children back to their home. A breeze stirred the fronds in the date palms that lined the path, filling the evening with a deep rasping sound that lay loudly over the softer rustle of the rice in the fields on either side of the road. She could smell the incense from the church in the hair of the child who she carried.

Her nephew Isaac spoke again. “Can I see my father tonight?”

“No. It is too late. You must get dinner and get to bed. You can see him in the morning. Sarah can walk with you. You know how she loves the river trail. She will be glad to go with you.”

“Do you think father will be alive when we wake up?”

“Yes, Isaac, he ate the rice and quinoa with relish that we brought to him today. He was strong. I’m sure that he will be glad to see you in the morning.”

They covered the short way that remained with no more conversation. As Isaac and the other children eat their noodles and peanut sauce with roasted cauliflower, Isaac asked, “Did you know that when you held my hand in church, my mother stood behind us and held both our hands?”

“No, Isaac, I did not see or feel her, but thank you for telling me. She is with me often when I am working in the garden. We loved to work together there as children.”

“Can we pray to my mother again before I go to bed?”

“Yes, of course. It was kind of Sarah to write that icon of your mother last week. We live in such a blessed time to have all of those who die recognized so quickly as saints. You know, children, that for the thousands of years of human history before us, only a very few who we lost were recognized as saints.”

“Yes,” Sarah replied. “I cannot think how difficult it would have been to live in a world where almost no one knew of God’s love and care.”

As the children finished their meals and washed their utensils, Miriam took each aside to dispense their evening medications, log their temperatures and take their last blood samples for the day. She loaded the samples for the automated analysis and recorded all of her activity on a screen so that the doctor could pull this data and confirm the next day’s dosages for each child. Every human life in their community was carefully monitored and preserved amid the onslaught of physiological and genetic damage that had long ago left most of the earth barren. Their community was the last of several that had held out for many centuries in carefully constructed and maintained biospheres within the most protected and favorable locations on the planet. These final human communities had enjoyed digital communications with each other from their physically isolated locations where they had each supported the final colonies of any biological life upon their devastated planet. Everything outside of these last pockets of plant and animal life was a wasteland of toxic oceans and stormswept deserts, and now their biosphere was the last one with any humans still left alive.

“Saint Esther, mother, pray to God for us. Be with father tonight and keep him with me until the morning. I ask that I might see him again tomorrow before he goes to be with you.” Isaac, four years old, stood praying aloud with Miriam and his cousins before the corner where a host of handmade icons, the faces of saints new and old, were arranged with care in rolling ranks over two small tables and up over the surface of both walls. Each halo flickered in the light of the candle as the wooden surfaces—of so many sizes and shapes—held the quiet presences before the family at the close of this day.

Sarah awoke before her cousin and spoke to him quietly. “Wake up, Isaac. The sun is up, and we should be getting ready for our walk to see your father.”

It was a privilege to spend time walking and caring for Isaac instead of her regular studies and chores, and Sarah was clearly excited and glad to be helping. She gently hurried Isaac as he washed and dressed. Then she got the boy fed and helped with his medicines. Isaac’s father, Ishmael, was close to death, which came to everyone now not long after the age of thirty. His wife, Esther, had died two years earlier, only a couple years after the birth of their one child, Isaac.

Sarah walked just behind Isaac on the trail following their great river. It was beautifully fashioned along the old bed of the Blue Nile (T’ik’uri Ābayi in Amharic) although a little smaller than the natural original. Upstream of their biosphere, there was a massive purification plant that handled the incoming water and a great drainage system that diverted the remainder of the polluted waters around them. The coursing water that they walked beside now was the last clean stretch of river on the planet. Sarah knew that its life-filled waters came at great cost and that they only flowed like this for the short stretch of its journey through the biosphere that preserved them. Sarah loved this river. She was named for Amma Sarah who had lived long ago beside the Nile River. Sarah knew that, during many decades spent in prayer and in teaching the great men who came to learn from her, Amma Sarah never once allowed herself to look over the river’s shimmering surface. She kept this discipline out of love for the river so that the river could become a help to strengthen her focus on its own beautiful Maker. As Miriam stood by the Nile telling this story to Sarah when she was small, Miriam had added that Amma Sarah’s abstinence made even more sense in the light of her young daughter’s wonder at the story.

“Isaac, have you heard how the Nile River far below us used to flood with seasonal rains and how the river up above us flows through many treacherous gorges, some more than 5000 feet deep?”

“Yes, Sarah. I have looked at the pictures of the beautiful fields that it once watered far below us and also of the fearsome gorges through which it rushes high above us. It is incredible to have this gentle river here with us now.”

“I sometimes imagine what it would have been like to feel real rain and to see a river rolling over its banks, carrying away trees, great rocks and even homes in its terrible current. She was a mighty goddess or god—giving and taking lives. Here we have just a beautiful portion of one glistening arm. Even in death, it is still lovely and still gives life to a thousand fishes, frogs, dragonflies and other dancing creatures. Our river is attended even now by her most devoted Naiads and other nymphs who play within and beside her laughing current. What will this deity be like, Isaac, one day, in full life again?”

“I don’t understand everything you say,” Isaac answered. “But she is beautiful. Maybe I will ask my father today about the life of rivers.”

“On my eighth name day, Uncle Ishmael gave me a copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and he read his favorite passages aloud to me in that next year. It is from American, from a great river near the fifth-to-last biosphere. Your father reads so well.”

The children paused here at the same time, both knowing that a tree with massive roots grew out over a bend in the river bank. This made a wonderful place to sit, watching the sun and shade play on the riverbed below the little fishes. Taking off their sandals, they let their feet into the water, making new shadows on the sand and pebbles and bringing the little fish to nibble at their toes. Even a freshwater crab slipped out from under a stone to see what the fish had found. In only a few moments, however, Sarah pulled an extra napkin out from their lunch satchel to dry their feet and finish their journey.

Isaac’s father was asleep when they arrived, but the nurse said that he had eaten a little breakfast. Almost as soon as they sat down to wait, the nurse came to say that Ishmael had awoken and was glad to hear of his visitors.

As Isaac climbed onto the bed beside him, Ishmael asked if his son wanted a story. Sarah held the book, and Ishmael turned the pages while he read. It was a story of Saint Krestos Samra, a princess who became a nun from the people who had lived in this land long ago. This picture book was about the time when Krestos Samra saw Christ and immediately begged him to pardon everyone who had ever lived:

“If your crucifixion happened for their sake, pardon all those who have died, from Abel up to now and in eternity, O Lord! Truly, you are merciful, slow to be angered, given to compassion, and righteous. There is no other God than you, you are all-powerful, and nothing is impossible for you; the entire earth does not even fill your hands.”

Hearing this bold request, Christ had summoned the Archangel Michael to guide Krestos Samra into Sheol so that she might preach there herself. Michael’s power in the brilliant pictures was like fire leaping off of each page. Isaac pointed to a great wing stretched over the top of two pages with many-colored feathers above a coffee-dark and potent arm. Ishmael smiled at his son’s delight.

“Do you like those powerful colors?”

“Yes!”

“This is a book I drew for you last month when I first learned that the doctor would have me keep to my bed.”

Returning to the story, he read: “The number of souls who escaped on the wings of Saint Michael and on my own wings was over one hundred thousand. I was delighted when I saw how happy those souls were. I frolicked among them just like a young calf; I was like a horse that races in the king’s presence.”

Isaac laughed at the beautiful words and drawings in his father’s book and at his father’s strong, joyful voice as he read. It was a story that Isaac and Sarah had heard before, but Ishmael’s book brought them into the story again, like it was their first time.

As he finished reading, Ishmael pushed other books aside so that Sarah could place Isaac’s book on a table near the bed.

“Father, will others come also to carry all of the souls out of Sheol on their mighty wings?”

“That is what we pray, Isaac. And that is the will of Christ in his death, giving himself for the life of the world, to feed and sustain us in this place of death. That is why we pray for each person who has died before us, asking God to have mercy on us all. The world has seen so much death, Isaac. Do you know how many have lived before us now—before all of us now living here in our little scattering of villages under this last biosphere beside our beautiful Nile?”

“No, father. How many?”

“Probably over two hundred billion, Isaac. Do you know how many more that is than the one hundred thousand that Krestos Samra and Michael carried out on their mighty wings?”

“Is it twenty thousand times more, father?”

“Yes! Are you only four years old? That is excellent arithmetic, Isaac! So, yes, if there are twenty thousand like Krestos Samra, then her wish will be fulfilled.”

“What is that book on your table, father, with a dog on the cover?”

Sarah picked it up, smiling at the dog as she opened the book.

“That is the work of a great American sage from just before the first great burning of fossil fuels. It is a series of visions in which the sage dialogues with his dog, Roland.”

Sarah asked, “Can I look at it, Uncle Ishmael?”

“Yes, of course. It is a beautiful book. I’ve finished it recently. You may take it home with you.”

“Thank you, Uncle. I will start it and see if I want to bring it home with me now. I know that books and paper are as precious as wood. Is it true that the gold and gems on the Gospel Book used to be more precious than the paper and wood of its pages and cover?”

“Yes, we were able to keep a great store house of gold, precious metal and other stones, far more than we need. But plant products such as wood and paper have been very precious for many centuries. For most of human history, however, trees and plants were plentiful while precious metals and stones were rare because they were difficult to mine from deep in the earth and to refine with hot furnaces.”

Sarah moved to a couch near the bed where she read as Isaac continued talking with his father.

“Are you in pain, today, Father?”

“Yes, Isaac. It is hard most days now. How is your pain?”

They remained together quietly for a time, rubbing each other’s backs to ease the pain that was a part of every day for all of those now living.

“Will I see you tomorrow, father? Auntie Miriam has told me that the doctor thinks you cannot live for much longer.”

“You have grown old and wise, already, Isaac, and you are right. I don’t know how much longer we can be together. I heard from your aunt that you recently went to stand with those who pray beside the great glass windows, looking out over the vast poisoned desert of our home, to pray with them for our lost planet, for all its dead and even for the devils wandering witless through its trackless wastes. That is brave of you, Isaac. I never stood with them until much older. You, however, may need to be very brave, my child, as you grow to be a man. You know that I will always hold you in prayer before God’s throne even when you have had to kiss me one last time and lay my body in the ground. And you know that our pain and our fear is the pain and fear of all those who came before us, stored up and held now by us. Like Christ, we carry the sins of the whole world. We know something of what our loving Lord knew upon the cross. We must forgive them and know that—even alone and abandoned—we dwell in the love of Christ, our Creator and our brother who has entered into abandonment and death to be with us, and even there, at the end, we find the life of God.”

Ishmael paused to look at Isaac, to caress his hands and to kiss his forehead.

“You know, Isaac, that it is growing more and more difficult for us to reach adulthood and for children to be born. Our doctors expect that we are close to the last generation of children and that some of our children now may be among the last humans to live and to pray upon this earth. I have been so blessed to have you, as my son and to have your mother, Esther, as my wife. I pray now for those who come after me, for you and your companions who may face the very end together. Remember me in your prayers, and remember whoever remains of those who have not yet been taken up from out of Sheol by the power of Christ and the loving prayers of his saints. I will hold you and all those with you in my prayers before God as you labor to maintain this biosphere in the last years of life upon this beautiful but wasted home.”

Ishmael grew quiet again, his fingers softly massaging the hair on Isaac’s head.

“Father, may I ask the nurse here and Auntie Miriam if I may stay here at the hospital with you?”

“Yes, son, I think you are old enough to walk the path yourself to complete your lessons during the day at the school and to return here at night to be with me. You know that I cannot let you miss your lessons and your chores too often, but I will speak to your aunt and the nurse here about you spending the nights here with me.”

Father and son did not speak again until Sarah said that it was time to go. She had decided to take her uncle up on his offer to lend her the book Roland in Moonlight. Together, she and Isaac kissed Ismael goodbye and made their way back down the river path, toward home and school, in time for their afternoon lessons.

Epilogue

God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and God created man, in the image of God created He him.” Accordingly, the Image of God, which we behold in universal humanity, had its consummation then.

…[God] saw, “Who knows all things” even “before they be,” comprehending them in His knowledge, how great in number humanity will be in the sum of its individuals.

…[When] the full complement of human nature has reached the limit of the pre-determined measure, because there is no longer anything to be made up in the way of increase to the number of souls, [Paul] teaches us that the change in existing things will take place in an instant of time.

On the Making of Man by Saint Gregory of Nyssa

Notes with some related reading:

Photo: Tis Abay (or Blue Nile Falls), Ethiopia

and occasionally even knows itself as conjuring the world out of a more primordial, more timeless dreaming

“You know, yokan always makes me think of Tanizaki. You’ve read Tanizaki, of course?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t mean the fiction. Have you read In Praise of Shadows?”

“Several times.”

“So you’ll recall where he talks about eating yokan as being like eating shadows, or something like that—how he calls it a quintessentially Japanese candy precisely because it’s so… well, so tenebrous, I suppose one might say. Because of its dark translucency. The way it lies on a dark dish all but invisibly in a dim room, and the way it melts on the tongue like a sweet shadow… or like a shadow of sweetness, it’s so mild. I don’t recall the exact wording, so perhaps I should read it again.”

“I recall it,” I said. “I love that book. I love the way Japanese culture has always been able to aestheticize everything… even violent death.”

“It’s so true,” he said. “And Tanizaki is right too. There’s a special Japanese virtuosity of the umbratilous, the nebulous, the… softly shadowed. It’s a sign of true refinement to be able to love shadowy spaces… liminal intervals… places of transition. There’s a tacit metaphysics there too, in that aesthetic sensitivity to the dim and crepuscular, and to the moments and spaces of fluid indistinction… the junctures where possibility briefly overwhelms actuality, where anything might emerge, where the mystery of being announces itself in the as yet undisclosed next moment. It speaks of the sheer fortuity of all of the world’s beautiful transformations. Dreams overwhelming waking thoughts. Unseen presences overwhelming visible absences. lt’s—how can a poor dog say it without lapsing into ecstatic gibberish?—it’s that lovely floating experience of suspense on the threshold of existence, where it seems anything might come into being. Twilight consciousness. And there’s a lovely metaphysical fragility there too, isn’t there? A sustained precariousness, as though at any moment the world might melt into potentiality again. Which is itself another revelation of the wonderful needlessness of the gift of being.” He heaved an especially deep sigh and his smile became distinctly melancholy. “In the modern world, flooded as it is at all times by shrill, brittle electric incandescences, lit by the leprous white glow of computer screens, we desperately need more shadows… more love of shadow as such. We need those places and moments in which the mind sees nameless things moving in the obscurity, in the dusk, and occasionally even knows itself as conjuring the world out of a more primordial, more timeless dreaming.” He fell silent, his eyes turned downward. It was many moments before I spoke.

“I think you found a way to say it very well. You always do. I know exactly what you mean— even if I couldn’t rephrase it in any way intelligible to myself.”

Roland in Moonlight by David Bentley Hart. Pages 320-322.

Roland in Moonlight: Generosity Amid the Hellscape of Modernity

Roland in Moonlight (cover)
Image of the book cover.

Roland has earned a place in my heart that I expect will be with me still as I face my own death and even beyond. While I am unabashedly rhapsodic about Roland in Moonlight, I easily acknowledge that some will find plenty to hate in this book. For example, there were hundreds of new words for me (as well as a few rich political diatribes). Regarding the big words, within the book’s last pages, when Roland uses the term “xeric regions,” David remarks that this is “exactly the word.” Roland quips, “At least, exactly the word that you or I would choose to use. In my case, out of precision; in yours, out of pretentiousness.” (352) This teasing and adoration of words goes in both directions. Earlier in the story, David mentions to Roland that “your appetite for classical neologisms is worse than mine” (204).

This is an expansive book, but Roland easily holds together its many narratives and its sweeping discourses. David Bentley Hart experiences the death of both his parents over the course of this story as they lived with him and his family in their final years. Even after sharing a few reflections following the death of his mother, however, David returns quickly to his dog and reminds us that “this is Roland’s book” (314). Remarkably, the story introduces us to Roland’s larger-than-life persona while still enjoying him as most definitely a dog. To name only a very few of his many accomplishments, Roland hires a troupe of Shakespearean players to perform a masque for David late at night in a forest glade behind the house (69), cares for David during a prolonged illness by writing up and submitting David’s application for a fellowship with the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies (122), and publishes multiple volumes of his own haiku (287). Despite all this (and much more), Roland’s warm sides, his ever-present tongue, and his keen nose are tangible realities on virtually every page and throughout many sleepless nights.

Although Roland defies a properly fictional status, it is technically correct to describe this book as a compelling memoir in which all the normal trials and joys of life are shared with two fictional characters—one very much alive and the other among the honored dead. David’s great uncle Aloysius Bentley (1895-1987), has a storied life, and even this life is brought to David by his faithful dog. Roland spends much of his time meticulously organizing, editing and publishing this great uncle’s private papers. Reflecting near the end of the book on what Roland has brought to light regarding Aloyius, David concludes: “Every person’s inner life is a mystery to everyone else, even those who know him or her most intimately—which would be the greatest of tragedies if it were a limitation of our natures that should prove final and immutable, rather than one that we have some cause to hope will one day—on the other side of the veil or through the looking-glass—fall away” (347).

Although Roland’s late-night conversations with David span many topics (from artificial intelligence to Freudian psychology and quantum physics), these two return most regularly to the religious, the metaphysical and the contemplative. A strong theme emerges that is very close to the point made by C. S. Lewis in his essay “Is Theism Important? A Reply” from the Socratic Digest (1952):

When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, “Would that she were.” For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is, essentially, the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian men of our own day differ from his as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin. The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with the writers of the New Statesman; and those writers would of course agree with me.

David and Roland take a very similar thesis and develop it together brilliantly over the course of their exquisite conversations. Some Christians (along with devout believers of various other ancient faiths) may be offended by the doctrinal speculations indulged by Roland and David. As an American Evangelical myself—a happy convert to Orthodoxy it is true but coming increasingly to recognize that I will always be, to some real and good extent, an Evangelical—I can easily relate to these concerns. However, for any who might share them, I counsel patience here.

For one thing, dogs clearly do not have the same religious needs as humans. In this book, we learn many details from the entire mythic and religious history of dogs, including their own original sin (involving open car windows and bacon) as well as the origin of their generous condescension to abide with and to help humankind in our abject moral and physical poverty. Roland says to David, “As for your sin—your original sin—I can’t speak to it. It was already something established in your natures before your kind and mine first truly met” (190). In part, the religious speculations between David and Roland should be read in the clarifying light of this difference between dog and man. Even more fundamentally, however, this book’s theological theme is in response to this claim by Roland:

And so, in an age of unbelief, everyone is an unbeliever to some degree. Belief now requires a decision, and a tacit application of will that never for a moment relents. That’s why the fiercest forms of faith in the modern world are actually just inverted forms of faithlessness—forms of desperation masquerading as faith. Arch-traditionalism, I mean, and of course fundamentalism, which are in fact manifestations of a morbidly impoverished power of belief, a faith wasted away by inanition and hardened by desiccation, and of a frantic attempt to hold onto relics or remains that one mistakes for living possibilities. …Well, the regress is infinite. It’s simply the case now that almost everyone of your race today—in the modern world, I mean—even the most devout and convinced of them, is more profoundly an infidel. Real, guileless faith in the divinity that shows itself in the evident forms of creation has become catastrophically attenuated, like the fading scent of a chipmunk on the porch after two days of rain. And that’s a tragic condition to be in, because the divine dimension is real, and is moreover the deepest truth of your own natures. To be estranged from it is to be shattered within yourselves… to become something less than machines… fragments of machines… a heap of springs and sprockets. (328).

If Roland’s assessment of our current situation is bleak, his expectations for our future are even far worse:

There was a time, again, when your kind was much better able to see the gods—the angels, deified mortals, spirits, fairies, what have you—than now you are. Not because there was a stabler and more open causeway between the two hemispheres of your brains or anything like that, but because there was a wider, more richly populated open causeway between your souls and the cosmos. And those gods—or what have you—were also mirrors of what you are, as spiritual beings, there above. I don’t mean they were Feuerbachian projections, figments of alienation or anything of that sort, but rather that they came more easily into full sensuous manifestation so long as human beings were in a state of what Barfield called ‘original participation.’ Unlike him, however, I don’t believe that your kind’s estrangement from that original, more vividly theophanic world is simply a temporary stage—a kind of probationary process—on the way to a post-critical ‘final participation.’ It would be nice to imagine that that’s the case, but I fear that the reality will be one of continuing, deepening estrangement, an ever more precipitate descent toward total spiritual eclipse, and toward a final, enduring darkness in which the true light of spirit has been all but extinguished. Then you’ll be worse than mere savages. You’ll be a race of nihilists. You may even… you may even forsake your moral tutelage by dogs.

To this dire prophecy, David only responds, in a faint voice: “Don’t suggest that. It’s a horrible thought. Hell on earth.” (327)

It is because of such horrors, that David gradually comes to agree with Roland about the primary need to treasure every great truth and beauty from the many ancient contemplative traditions of humankind. Throughout the book, Roland insists that David is secretly a Hindu, and Roland will never allow David to finish any of his sentences in protest against this claim. Eventually, as the two are considering several stories of glorious revelations from various other faiths, Roland declares: “You believe everything. You despise doctrinaire religious certitudes, not—as is common for your kind in this age—out of skepticism or incredulity, but out of a superabundance of belief” (322). David concedes substantially, but not entirely, to Roland:

It’s true, as you say, that I can believe everything at once, though I suspect that it’s a choice I make principally on account of my unwillingness to relinquish any dimension of anything that I find appealing or admirable… or beautiful. Not for my kind, at least. We have to draw some kind of working distinction between the perpetually valid symbol and the historically novel event. (326)

David is holding on, just barely, to the uniques of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. As a child of American Evangelicalism, I cannot resist the temptation to provide a prooftext at this point. Compare David’s “unwillingness to relinquish any dimension of anything that I find appealing or admirable… or beautiful” to Philippians 4:8. In Hart’s own translation of this verse, we read: “As to the rest, brothers, whatever things are true, whatever grand, whatever right, whatever pure, whatever lovely, whatever of good repute—if there be any virtue and be any praise—ponder these things.”

For the Christian reader, there is a surprising return, in the last pages, to the fundamentals of the Christian faith. I cannot recall any other place where David Bentley Hart has written about Mary who is uniquely the Mother of God. In the final pages of this book, however, we ponder the mystery of Mary saying yes to God as she takes a last breath before the angel’s “glory and immensity of presence” knowing that “all depends upon this fleeting / Instant, wherein all of eternity / Lies hidden, hanging in suspense upon / One spoken word.” As she gazes upward in this moment: “The weight of silence grows. / Between her and his dreadful glory looms / Time’s fullness: all its empires and its wars, / Its deaths, its countless hopes and countless dooms.” (339) To reflect more upon the full context of these poetic lines would give too much away, and I do not want to steal anything from the unfolding of this book to each blessed reader.

However, I will also note that, alongside this deeply Christian meditation, we have another poem reflecting on the waking of the child Maitreya (348), a promised bodhisattva who currently waits in the Tuṣita Heaven. This heaven is also where Roland once resided, as we learn very early in the story (29).

My reflections here have become sadly dominated by theological and religious questions, but I want to return, in closing, to what is at the heart of this story. It is a generosity of spirit on the part of Roland Hart, who is clearly a profound help and guide to David. In his typical mix of profound yet deeply intimate, Roland shares this summary of his philosophy with David as they gaze out at a sunset together early on in the story:

It certainly seems reasonable to say that being is manifestation, that real substance is revelation, that to exist is to be perceptible, conceivable, knowable—and that, moreover, to exist fully is to be manifest to consciousness. …Every act of conscious, unified, intentional mind is necessarily dependent upon infinite mind—which is to say, God. …Experience of the ‘natural’ proves to be ‘super-natural’ knowledge. …We see one and the same world, you and I, because our spirits are looking not at sensations but at reality, and the physical transaction between the world and our optic apparatus is just the occasion for an act of discovery and unveiling that is, in reality, an event of direct spiritual communion. (157)

There is so much more that I want to say about this book, but it should wait. I will close by noting that this story moves through four parts, named for four homes that come to mark stages in the family’s journey from an edenic forest, through a hellish city and finally back to a modest garden haven. Each chapter is numbered simply with roman numerals so that the larger structure is not obstructed. In the end, Roland prepares David for a final farewell that David anticipates with tearstained face as they sit together upon the grass of Mama’s garden (to use Roland’s name for David’s wife). This closing account of a great sea voyage, shared by two persons who love each other, is worth the price of this volume. Buy yourself a paper copy now. You’ll not regret it.

the past is in some sense changing with every new conformation of the cosmos in thought

“Ah,” I said, sinking back onto my pillows, “that seems like it would be a hard sell among modern physicists.”

“I’m not interested in being a salesman,” said Roland. “My interest isn’t scientific, after all. I’m just as happy to call that interval between infinite actuality and infinite potentiality the realm of Fairy, or the Dreamtime. I do wonder, though, whether the actualization of a world in the conventional consciousness of any given age might have a retroactive effect. Whether the past is in some sense changing with every new conformation of the cosmos in thought. Or perhaps, it might be better to say, whether the past as we know it, and as it connects to the conventional picture of the present, is changing. I mean, we know that in a sense entanglement is as much a temporal as a spatial inseparability and…” His voice trailed away.

From Roland in Moonlight by David Bentley Hart..
From the back cover of Roland in Moonlight.

we see one and the same world, you and I, because our spirits are looking not at sensations but at reality

Roland, David’s beloved dog, shares this summary of his philosophy with David early on in David Bentley Hart’s new book Roland in Moonlight:

It certainly seems reasonable to say that being is manifestation, that real substance is revelation, that to exist is to be perceptible, conceivable, knowable—and that, moreover, to exist fully is to be manifest to consciousness. …It is only as an intelligible order, as a coherent phenomenon, that anything is anything at all, whether an elementary particle or a universe. …We must believe that being in itself is pure intelligibility. …Every act of conscious, unified, intentional mind is necessarily dependent upon infinite mind—which is to say, God. …Experience of the ‘natural’ proves to be ‘super-natural’ knowledge.

And here is Roland, a little later, commenting on vision as he watches the sunset with Hart:

It’s also possible that the qualitative consciousness that attends your physical visual sensations in this world isn’t really a feat of constructive representation—a symbolic translation of stimuli into a private picture of a world that exists only within your skull—but is instead actually a direct communion in the ontological and noetic forms of things, and that we see one and the same world, you and I, because our spirits are looking not at sensations but at reality, and the physical transaction between the world and our optic apparatus is just the occasion for an act of discovery and unveiling that is, in reality, an event of direct spiritual communion.

then it happened in some other world, some other kind of time

Roland (David Bentley Hart’s beloved dog) speaking to Hart (in the new book Roland in Moonlight):

“I’ll tell you the whole story of our two peoples one day,” he said. “As for your sin—your original sin—I can’t speak to it. It was already something established in your natures before your kind and mine first truly met. I know the myths, of course—the Eden myth and the other tales from around the world of the loss of an original beatitude or innocence. But, even if that’s something that actually happened rather than an allegory about something that’s always happening in your kind, then it happened in some other world, some other kind of time. As for this world—this fallen world, this aftermath of that other world—here, in this world, it may be that your feeling of original sin also consists largely in a kind of oblivious memory of your organic past… an ineffable ache of conscience that’s really a kind of organic recollection of all the phylogenic misery and slaughter and blood-soaked attritions by which your species climbed its way out of the mire of purely biochemical existence. Long before your species had even appeared in the world of chronos, the world of the time of death, you were gestating in the womb of nature as a mere stochastic organic possibility, an only remotely likely final issue of incalculable ages of violence. And you bear that lineage and that whole physical history as a kind of ontological guilt, a stain deeply imbrued in every cell in your body—written in every strand of your DNA. Every one of you is Cain, the mark of your immemorial guilt indelibly inscribed on each mitochondrion and every cell-wall… Ah, well, so it goes. A delicate blue flower springs up atop a noisome midden, and its fragile, incandescent beauty dazzles us, and we forget all the purulence and waste and dissolution and ceaseless decay from which its exquisite, transient charm was born. That evanescent flicker of enchantment inveigles and beguiles us. But deep down in the cellars of your cerebral cortices your reptile brain still lurks—a serpent, so to speak, perhaps the Serpent of Eden himself—and all the later concrescences of your modular brain are compounded upon that ineradicable ophidian core. And it knows. It remembers, in its cold, cruel, scaly way. And you, of course, my friend, are no blue flower.”

“…Anyway, I wasn’t trying to be a philosopher, or even to tell a complete story. That organic history is only an echo of the spiritual history that preceded it. Your still more original original sin was your departure from the pleroma in the divine aeon through an act of self-assertion—which is to say, your departure from the Dreaming in the wrong way, at the wrong moment. And that’s a fall that happened to all of you as one and to each of you as individuals.”