Hart - The experience of God : being, consciousness, bliss

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD

BEING, CONSCIOUSNESS, BLISS

David Bentley Hart

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.

Copyright 2013 by David Bentley Hart. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hart, David Bentley.

The experience of God : being, consciousness, bliss / David Bentley Hart. pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-16684-2 (cloth : alk paper) 1. God. 2. Experience (Religion) I. Title.

BL473.H37 2013

211dc23 2013007118

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Richard Shaker
whose vision of reality often differs
from mine considerably
in gratitude for forty years of
an indispensable friendship

PART ONE
God, Gods, and the World

PART TWO
Being, Consciousness, Bliss

PART THREE
The Reality of God

I owe my greatest thanks to my wife, Solwyn, and my son, Patrick, for their patience with me and with my sporadic work habits and capriciously shifting schedule during the writing of this book.

I must also thank my farseeing and longsuffering editor at Yale University Press, Jennifer Banks, who endured far more delays in the delivery of a final manuscript than I myself would have tolerated, and did so with a grace of manner I could not even attempt to emulate.

To my indefatigable agent Giles Anderson I owe an immense debt of gratitude.

And, finally, I must sincerely thank Roland W. Hart for his friendship, for allowing me to learn from the wisdom with which he approaches all of life, and for his willingness to listen to me on our numerous long walks together through the woods.

This is either an extremely ambitious or an extremely unambitious book. I tend to think it is the latter, but I can imagine how someone might see it quite otherwise. My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word God, or of its equivalents in other tongues, and to do so in fairly slavish obedience to the classical definitions of the divine found in the theological and philosophical schools of most of the major religious traditions. My reason for wanting to do this is that I have come to the conclusion that, while there has been a great deal of public debate about belief in God in recent years (much of it a little petulant, much of it positively ferocious), the concept of God around which the arguments have run their seemingly interminable courses has remained strangely obscure the whole time. The more scrutiny one accords these debates, moreover, the more evident it becomes that often the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing; and I would go as far as to say that on most occasions none of them is talking about God in any coherent sense at all. It is not obvious to me, therefore, that their differences really amount to a meaningful disagreement, as one cannot really have a disagreement without some prior agreement as to what the basic issue of contention is. Perhaps this is not really all that surprising a situation. The fiercest disputes are often prompted by misapprehensions, and some of the most appalling battles in history have been fought by mistake. But I am enough of a romantic to believe that, if something is worth being rude about, it is worth understanding as well.

This book, then, will be primarily a kind of lexicographical exercise, not a work of apologetics, though that is a distinction that cannot be perfectly maintained throughout. Honestly, though, my chief purpose is not to advise atheists on what I think they should believe; I want merely to make sure that they have a clear concept of what it is they claim not to believe. In that sense, I should hope the more amiable sort of atheist might take this book as a well-intended gift. I am not even centrally concerned with traditional proofs of the reality of God, except insofar as they help to explain how the word God functions in the intellectual traditions of the developed religions (by which I mean faiths that include sophisticated and self-critical philosophical and contemplative schools). I shall touch on the essential logic of those proofs where necessary, but shall not devote more attention than necessary to the larger arguments surrounding them. There are many texts that do that already (a few of which are listed at the end of this book), and there is no great need for yet another. By the same token, this will not be a book about theology either, or even about any single religion. The current fashion in belligerent atheism usually involves flinging condemnations around with a kind of gallant extravagance, more or less in the direction of all faiths at once, with little interest in precise aim; I would not want to be any less generous in response.

I know, of course, that there are many persons who object in principle to any fraternization between different religious vocabularies, for various reasonsanxiety for creedal purity, fear that any acknowledgment of commonalities with other faiths might lead souls astray from the one true path, intellectual scruples regarding the contradictory claims made by different traditions, fear of a colonialist domestication of the other, a firm conviction that no religion can be true unless all others are clearly false, and so onbut those sorts of concerns leave me icily unmoved. For one thing, all the major theistic traditions claim that humanity as a whole has a knowledge of God, in some form or another, and that a perfect ignorance of God is impossible for any people (as Paul, for example, affirms in the letter to the Romans). For another, one can insist on absolutely inviolable demarcations between religions at every level only at the price of painfully unrefined accounts of what each tradition teaches. Religions ought never to be treated as though each were a single discrete proposition intended to provide a single exclusive answer to a single exhaustive question. It goes without saying that one generally should not try to dissolve disparate creeds into one another, much less into some vague, syncretistic, doctrinally vacuous spirituality. It should also go without saying, however, that large religious traditions are complex things: sometimes they express themselves in the dream-languages of myth and sacred art, at other times in the solemn circumlocutions of liturgy and praise, at others in the serenity of contemplative prayeror in ethical or sapiential precepts, or in inflexible dogmas, or in exactingly precise and rigorous philosophical systems. In all of these modes they may be making more or less proximate approaches to some dimension of truth; inevitably, however, they must employ many symbols that cannot fully explain the truth in itself, but can only point toward it. It may be that one faith is truer than any other, or contains that ultimate truth to which all faiths aspire in their various ways; but that still would hardly reduce all other religions to mere falsehood. More to the point, no one really acquainted with the metaphysical and spiritual claims of the major theistic faiths can fail to notice that on a host of fundamental philosophical issues, and especially on the issue of how divine transcendence should be understood, the areas of accord are quite vast.