David Bentley Hart - The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

David Bentley Hart

Hunc Librum Insolitum atque Inusitatum Solicandidae et Patricio Nuncupo

The Violence of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Violence

A Dogmatica Minora

Persuasion, the Tyranny of Twilight, and the Language of Peace

This book had its first life more than seven years ago, in the very different form of an academic dissertation; and, while it has developed and diverged considerably from that more callow original, between its infant and adult selves there remains a continuity of identity and purpose. Hence I should first thank those advisors and committee members who oversaw and collaborated in its birth: Larry Bouchard, Eugene Rogers, Robert Wilken, and John Yiannias (who is also my son's godfather). All, by their encouragements and discouragements, approbations and critical cautions, aided me in refining my argument and disciplining my method (to such degree, that is, as I am capable of discipline).

I wish also to thank the friends whose comments upon the text, at various stages of its incubation, and whose conversations with me concerning many and myriad things were of inestimable help in shaping this book: John Betz, Joseph Harder, T. Stuart Hinchliffe, R. Trent Pomplun, Brian Sholl, and Alfred Turnipseed. To this company I should add John Milbank, who - even at those times when we have been arguing over one thing or another-has been indefatigable in his generosity to me and my work.

And I owe no small measure of gratitude to a number of scholars who, through conversation and debate during a particularly crucial year, unwittingly aided me in the preparation of this book's final draft: Martin Bieler, Brian Daley, Paul Griffiths, Reinhard Hiitter, P. Travis Kroeker, R. R. Reno, Philip Rolnick, Janet Soskice, and Carver Yu. Robert Jenson was especially patient and good-humored in allowing me to argue with him over my differences with him regarding how one should understand the relation between the immanent and economic trinities (vide infra). Other names should no doubt be added to this list, but mine is a memory often culpably feeble.

I should add a special thanks to Bill Eerdmans for generously undertak ing the publication of this book. His press - having emerged over the years as the most impressively diverse, ambitious, and catholic in the English-speaking theological world - scarcely needed the addition of a long and eccentric book by a scholar of small note to adorn its catalogue; and, given that the economics of theological publishing more and more forces publishing houses to insist on ever more compact and marketable texts, his sympathy for my project and willingness to grant it print and covers evoke my sincerest gratitude.

Finally, all thanks and love to my wife Solwyn for her longanimity in living with a husband whose fits of scholarly abstraction all too frequently distract him from more needful things and produce very little in the way of material advantage. And all thanks and love to Patrick too, whose arrival in my life midway between the completion of this book's first and last versions granted me the extreme privilege of receiving the world anew through his eyes, thus confirming me in my certainty that the intuition that initially prompted this project was indeed an intuition of the truth.

The rather prosaic question that initially prompted this long, elliptical essay in theological aesthetics, stated most simply, was this: Is the beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism inevitably appeals, and upon which it depends, theologically defensible? Admittedly, at first, such a question might appear at best merely marginal, at worst somewhat precious; but, granted a second glance, it opens out upon the entire Christian tradition as a question that implicitly accompanies the tradition's every proclamation of itself. Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the "peace which passes understanding" to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. The earliest confession of Christian faith - K6ploS 'Irlaous - meant nothing less radical than that Christ's peace, having suffered upon the cross the decisive rejection of the powers of this world, had been raised up by God as the true form of human existence: an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history, because God's final judgment had already befallen the world in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth. It is only as the offer of this peace within time, as a real and available practice, that the Christian evangel (and, in particular, the claim that Christ crucified has been raised from the dead) has any meaning at all; only if the form of Christ can be lived out in the community of the church is the confession of the church true; only if Christ can be practiced is Jesus Lord. No matter how often the subsequent history of the church belied this confession, it is this presence within time of an eschatological and divine peace, really incarnate in the person of Jesus and forever imparted to the body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, that remains the very essence of the church's evangelical appeal to the world at large, and of the salvation it proclaims.

A certain current within contemporary philosophy, however, asserts that violence is - simply enough - inescapable: wherever Nietzsche's narrative of the will to power has been absorbed into the grammar of philosophical reflection, and given rise to a particular practice of critical suspicion, a profound prejudice has taken root to the effect that every discourse is reducible to a strategy of power, and every rhetorical transaction to an instance of an original violence. From this vantage a rhetoric of peace is, by definition, duplicity; subjected to a thorough critique, genealogy, or deconstruction, evangelical rhetoric can undoubtedly be shown to conceal within itself the most insatiable appetite for control; the gesture by which the church offers Christ to the world, and bears witness to God's love for creation, is in reality an aggression, the ingratiating embassy of an omnivorous empire. Of course, if power's pathos were indeed the hidden wellspring of every act of persuasion, Christianity, as it conceives of itself, would be an impossible presence within history: the church as the earnest of the "peaceable kingdom" could never communicate itself in a way that would not contradict its own evangel, and the "city of peace" that the church tries (or at any rate claims) to be could never actually take shape, except mendaciously, as a dissimulation of power's arcane operations behind an apparent renunciation of power (such, at least, is Nietzsche's accusation in The Genealogy of Morals). What this book interrogates, then, is the difference between two narratives: one that finds the grammar of violence inscribed upon the foundation stone of every institution and hidden within the syntax of every rhetoric, and another that claims that within history a way of reconciliation has been opened up that leads beyond, and ultimately overcomes, all violence.