A few years ago during a conversation with my friend, a Roman Catholic priest, our conversation turned to Thomas Aquinas. This priest, of the traditionally inclined sort typically all-too-happy to embrace Thomism against the tides of modernity, offered a thoughtful critique of the state of contemporary theology. The church, he contended, no longer produced universal thinkers like Aquinas who could integrate numerous disciplines into an all-encompassing theological and philosophical framework. While appreciative of the work of contemporary Dominicans to elevate and reinvigorate Aquinas, my friend argued there was also a dearth of fresh thinking.
In all of my reading, I have found David Bentley Hart to be one of the few contemporary Christian theologians and philosophers who could provide an answer to the yearning for new ideas articulated by my Thomism-appreciating friend. I first found Hart as an undergraduate. His book The Experience of God was formative in my return to the Christian faith. My college roommate and I used to laugh over his wryest takedowns of lazy philosophical materialism. To be clear, I am not one to approach Hart uncritically; his soteriological writings are fascinating but not unimpeachable. That said, when it comes to devastating critiques of a materialist worldview and, on top of that, offering a compelling alternative narrative, Hart is second to none. Enter his latest book, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life.
But first, I must confess to breaking a personal rule. I am generally loath to concentrate reviews solely on the beginning or end of a book. It conjures images of the procrastinating student rushing to both start and finish a report the night before it is due. With Hart, and this book in particular, there are countless byways to unpack, and as the review came together, I found myself gravitating to the bookends of the text.
That aside, I would like to start by highlighting Hart’s trademark sardonic wit. In the introduction, he writes, “Many of the more finely granular inquiries in Anglophone philosophy of mind do not really interest me, I should also admit, mostly because I am convinced they are intrinsically uninteresting…. I honor those who labor in those fields, I suppose, but I do not believe the harvest will ever come.”
Hart continues by critiquing the thoroughly modern “prejudice” that matter is “governed by purely mechanistic and non-mental laws” as “far and away the most implausible notion on offer.” He adds, “Otherwise seemingly sane and intelligent persons regularly advance arguments that, but for their deep and fervent faith in materialist picture of nature, they would undoubtedly recognize as absurd and circular.” At the risk of being self-indulgent, I will add one more: Arguing that too many philosophers of mind reject evidence in order to maintain their theory, he writes, “This speaks of a problem far worse than mere intellectual indolence; it is the effect of a tragic captivity of reason to an arid dogmatism.”
The essential argument of this book is that “mind cannot be reduced to purely material causes.” In making this case, Hart also rejects a Cartesian dualism in which there is an alienation between mechanical nature and the soul. Letting Hart speak, he argues that “life is itself the pervasive ‘organic’ logic of the material order from the first, not emerging from that order but instead creating, governing, forming, and quickening it from within.”
Notably, and perhaps to the chagrin of contemporary scholastics and analytic philosophers, Hart fleshes out his argument in the form of a Platonic dialogue. The reader is transported to a conversation among Psyche, Eros, Hermes, and Hephaistos, the latter representing the mechanistic worldview. To Hart’s credit, he subjects his own perspective to withering critique through the voice of Hephaistos.
As the conversation among these gods winds down, Hart spells out the nihilistic consequences of the mechanistic view of nature. There is much to explore but this quote sums it up:
No doubt, in its dawn, this reduction of lived existence to the dialectic between an objectively meaningless cosmos and a subjectively self-creating will must have felt like a kind of emancipation; but it has always also been the metaphysical accomplice of a project of setting loose the will to power, now unencumbered by any sense of anything inviolable or sacred, or any sense of the self’s dependency upon a higher order of truth…. It was inevitable, really, that in time the mechanistic method should mutate into—or, perhaps, be revealed as—a metaphysics as well, and an ideology, and a program not merely for investigating nature as if it were a machine, but also for actually transforming the world—nature, but also culture, politics, economics, and everything else—into a machine.
There are grave consequences for social and political order when man is reduced to a machine. In such a nihilistic and mechanistic framework, it becomes a virtue to fix man in the image of whoever has the power to do so. When man is viewed as machine, his brokenness is not sin that needs the grace of a Savior, but whatever departs from the in-vogue philosophies and fads of the moment. The origins of totalitarianism and progressivism lay within such a worldview.
Yet I would be remiss to conclude this review on a dark note, for the vision Hart articulates of a world in which mind and life are irreducible to material causes alone ought to stir an oft-forgotten virtue: that of wonder. Hart, through the voice of Psyche, observes that man has a “natural longing for communion with the world” and, until recently, could hardly conceive that reality could be indifferent. Psyche continues, “For most of their history, they had naturally viewed all of cosmic nature as the residence of mysterious and vital intelligences—gods and nymphs, daemons and elves, phantoms and goblins, and every other kind of nature spirit or preternatural agency.”
Absent such an enchanted world, man feels alone and abandoned, yet for the past few centuries we have authored an “ever deepening self-exile.” Yet our underlying dissatisfaction with a purely material, cold, and dead world is revealed, Hart argues, in our search for alien life elsewhere in the universe, in the belief that machines could become sentient, and in the creation of a metaverse for virtual interaction.
In our drive to control and manipulate creation by reducing it to a mechanistic and materialistic framework, we have consigned wonder to the province of derision and mere fairy tales. Yet it seems to me that Hart has provided the intellectual firepower for childlike wonder as more mature than grown-up disenchantment.
