The Experience of God: being, consciousness, bliss

Reviewed by Philip McCosker
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 376pp, £18.99
Tablet bookshop price £17.10
Tel 01420 592974

What on earth do we mean by “God”? David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, public intellectual and controversialist – a kind of Eastern G.K. Chesterton – based in America. He has worked hard in The Experience of God and in earlier books to show that we regu­larly use the word “God” in many – frequently incompatible – ways without realising it, with toxic consequences. We often use “God” when what we mean is “a god”, some etiolated godlet, a creaturely superhero. We have forgotten, or perhaps we never learned, God’s incomparable difference from all creatures. “God” works in ways both like yet radically unlike all other words. Easter, of all times, should remind us of this. 

In Atheist Delusions, which won the Michael Ramsey Prize in 2011, Hart showed that while the new atheists thought they were denying the Christian God with their philosophically and theologically thin diatribes, in fact they hadn’t begun to get to grips with the radically transcendent and immanent God of the Christian Gospel, who is both beyond and within the universe. Feeding off the crude fundamentalisms prevalent in the twentieth century, the new atheists created atheisms to fit. For Hart, crude theism and the atheism which is its shadow both miss the radical nature of the Christian God: in fact, they are both, ironically, forms of atheism.

In his new book, Hart shifts his focus to scientists and the scientistic mindset more broadly – marked in his view by increasingly dogmatic forms of “naturalism” or “materialism” – and traces a similar kind of argument with two differences. This time Christian theology is on the back burner as he charts a more avowedly philosophical course, arguing for a form of theism which he suggests is shared by many religious traditions: not only Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but varieties of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Baha’i too.

Because naturalism limits itself to natural, largely mechanistic causes, it cannot find evidence for God, because God is not that sort of cause – and so it denies God’s existence. Blinkered outlooks foreclose reality. What started as an empirical method for investigating isolated features of reality has become a totalising philosophical theory of reality, or ontology. This has passed into our everyday culture: a philosophy of “seeing is believing”; an ethic that is little more than “tit for tat”.

But if we glimpse the radical nature of God, however fleetingly, resisting the myriad mini-gods on offer, Hart argues that we come to see reality, ourselves and our purpose completely differently. We see reality expansively, as he argues in his three central chapters – on being, consciousness and bliss. In each case, we find that the natural only makes sense within that which is beyond it, the “super-natural” or “hyper-real”.

Hart encourages us to regain our sense of wonder that there is anything whatsoever at all, and to substitute awe for grasping calculation. We need to pay attention to the (infinite) gap between what something is and the fact that things are at all. Naturalism and its variants cannot begin to address that gap because they cannot see beyond their self-imposed limits. Hart argues – with considerable vim – that lenses designed to explore the finite will not pick up the infinite God who is not supersized finitude.

Just as we need to recover a sense of the gratuity of existence beyond its mere fact, so too we need to underline the mystery of our consciousness of it and of anything at all. All our experience comes to us in the first person and cannot be reduced to third-person descriptions. Despite the best efforts of neuro­physiology, an abyss lies between our first- person mental acts and physical causation. Pure mathematics can’t be explained by naturalism. Our every perception of reality is always preceded and perceived by first-person interpretation. As Hart puts it, “the mind interprets reality to have a reality to interpret”. Indeed, all our mental acts have a direction: they are not just brute mechanical calculations, but are situated and directed at some goal. Again, the natural only makes sense within the more-than-natural.

That innate desire and drive of reason is what Hart terms “bliss”. He argues that our every desire for some penultimate beautiful or good thing is driven by a thirst for the ultimate or infinite good. My desire for a holiday or a new car is really a cipher for my love of God – and that is why neither will ever satisfy. In other words, as we engage reality with our minds and wills, we are already situated within a bigger picture. Our apprehension of the contingent is already couched within the absolute. This is also shown up by altruism. The ability to act consciously according to a bigger picture, beyond solely material or physical concerns, means that we can act following a view of reality which is not found within that reality.

At its best, this hugely suggestive book is a lyrical paean to a vital, more capacious understanding of reality, ourselves and God: a timely and gripping invitation to wake up, see the regnant naturalism, and subvert its suffocating hegemony. The text is by turns elegant, curmudgeonly, witty, infuriating, incisive, nostalgic, rhapsodical, explosive, frequently bang on the money – and always stimulating. Hart does a good line in sparkling aphorisms and illuminating paradoxes. But, frustratingly, he frequently resorts to pompous put-down in place of argument. Almost every page contains quotable one-liners. They are pretty well all negative. I lost track of the number of fallacies his interlocutors are accused of (genetic, pleonastic, compositional, pathetic, verificationist are just a few).

Although The Experience of God seems to be intended for the general reader, Hart comes across as a theologians’ theologian and I fear those outside the self-pleasuring academic guild may not get the substance or the jokes. All theologians trying to write supposedly “accessible” books might find watching Channel 4’s Gogglebox instructive. More substantially, Hart’s argument for a retrieval of the classical understanding of God as so transcendent as to be immanent, and a Hopkinsesque view of reality as saturated with God, suggest that Hart’s gleeful bashing of naturalists is not just alienating but a touch perverse. For a Christian theologian with such strong commitments to divine incarnation and immanence in the world (crucially unlike most faiths in this respect), would it not be more fitting to engage with real scientists, creating a more generous, differentiated but joined-up conversation, to see what a close-up investigation of reality might suggest about God’s active presence in the cosmos?