More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am by Peter Leithart

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite 2017-09-07T00:10:11+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Covenant of Light.

This section concludes Part I of The Beauty of the Infinite , entitled ?Dionysus Against the Crucified.?E With this section, Hart concludes his critique of classical, modern and postmodern thought, and the outlines of the Christian ontology that interrupted the history of metaphysics and that he develops in the ?dogmatica minora?Ethat constitutes the remainder of the book. He describes the phrase used as a title for this section late in the section: the covenant of light is ?a trust in the evidence of the given, an understanding of knowledge as an effect of the eros stirred by the gift of the world?s truth?E(p. 145).

The section begins with a discussion of the interlocking of cosmos, city, and soul in ancient Greek metaphysics. At each level, the ancient Greeks conceived of being and order as the result of a violence that stands against the violence of a formless chaos. The city is a hard-won outpost of order within barbarism; the moderate soul is won by suppressing the violences of excess that threaten personal and political order; the ordered universe is carved violently out of chaos. Metaphysics repeats this violence intellectually: Metaphysics, in the words of Gianni Vattimo, is ?an attempt to mater the real by force,?Ean attempt to bring the world under rational control by collapsing differences into sameness, a totalizing and hence inherently violent project. Even when metaphysics is renounced, ironically, the metaphysical assumptions remain in place; postmoderns renounce the violent maneuvers of metaphysics but find that they can only endure the strife of chaos that appears to be the only alternative. Hart notes that both Dionysus and Apollo assume a dialectic of chaos and order, and thus both stand opposed to the Christian vision of ?the anarchic prodigality of his love.?E

The rhetorical burden of confronting the classical, modern, and postmodern tales of violence is significant, given the real evils of human history. Christians are tempted to salt their eschatology with spices of ?realism?Eto meet the challenge, or to withdraw the peace that the gospel announces out of the world and history into an inviolable realm. This is not a real possibility: ?The Christian claim is also that this protology and this eschatology do not merely stand outside human history, but enter into it decisively in the resurrection of Christ; the peace of God . . . has a real historical shape and presence, a concrete story, one which has entered into human history as a contrary history, the true story God always tells, in which violence has no place but rather stands under judgment as provisional, willful, needless: nonbeing?E(p. 127).

Over several pages, Hart expands on the claim that metaphysics is inherently violent. Metaphysics assumes that difference is ?violence itself,?Eand does so necessarily and by definition because philosophy is a ?discourse of necessity?E(p. 128). Metaphysics can never arrive at a genuine notion of contingency or at a genuine notion of transcendence. A Heraclitean universe is not free, but describes the absolutely necessary conditions of being in the world; chaos is not true contingency. On the other hand, ?even the most etherealizing ?idealism?? treats the absolute as the top of a pyramid of being, ?the spiritual resolution of all the ambiguities of the immanent?E(p. 128-129), which is not true transcendence. The very method of metaphysics requires it to be a discourse of necessity and a discourse of violence: Metaphysics reasons from the experience and phenomena to some ground of existence, and thus must deal in some fashion with the tragic, with mutability, with death. Sacrifice and destruction are thus written into the fabric of things. The form a metaphysics takes depends more on the sensibilities of the metaphysician than of logic or insight. Necessity lies at the core of the metaphysical enterprise because ?it can thrive as a deductive enterprise, able to move from the world to the world?s principles, only insofar as what is, is what must be?E(p. 129). In this sense, Hart is willing to give a nod to Heidegger?s notion that the history of philosophy is a history of nihilism: ?Perhaps in some fateful oblivion of the mystery of being?s event, the search for being?s foundations (the relentless quest for positive truth) commenced, and then proceeded along a path that, in the end, would prove the ruin of all philosophic faith?E(p. 130).

But what this history of nihilism ignores is the Christian interruption, which disturbs the whole enterprise of metaphysics but in so doing redeems metaphysics. In Christianity, difference is not violent; difference pertains to the absolute, the Triune Creator of all things. And the differences and distances of creation are not violent eruptions within being, but gifts that harmonize with the uncreated differences of the Triune Persons. For the same reason, Christianity affirms genuine contingency, the absolute NON-necessity of creation; there is no need for the Triune God to form something ?exterior?Eor ?other?Eto Himself, because there is ?exteriority,?Eotherness, and distance within the Triune fellowship. And because it affirms a genuine contingency, Christianity affirms a genuine Transcendence, an infinite that is not merely a negation of finitude, but an infinite that is fullness of all good and all joy and all being.

But Christianity also brings something never conceived in classical metaphysics: a formed infinite: Christians proclaim ?A God whose very being is love, delight in the glorious radiance of his infinite Image, seen in the boundlessly lovely light of his Spirit, and whose works are then unnecessary but perfectly expressive signs of this delight, fashioned for his pleasure and for the gracious sharing of this joy with creatures for whom he has no need (yet loved even when they were not) is a God of beauty in the fullest imaginable sense. In such a God beauty and the infinite entirely coincide, for the very life of God is one of ?Eto phrase it strangely ?Einfinite form.?E This also means that creation is not merely different from God in the way that multiplicity differs from unity, or shape differs from formlessness, or limit differs from indeterminacy (all of which contrasts are classical ways of describing the difference between the ?absolute?Eand the immanent), but rather the difference between created beauty and its original divine beauty is ?in the analogy between the determinate particularities of the world and that always greater, supereminent determinacy in whose splendor they participate?E(p. 131). Creation does not give shape to a shapeless sublime; creation expresses the specified glory of the God of glory. Creation does not display a multiplicity and difference that is absent in God; but expresses in created form the multiplicity and difference that is always already in the Triune fellowship. Hart expresses it this way: ?the event of the world simply is the occurrence of this analogical interval?Ebetween Creator and creation, ?the space in which beings rise up from nothingness into the light that gives them existence?E(p. 131).

This ontology has immediate epistemological implications. It means, first, that there is no hope of rationally encompassing creation, no possibility of a totalizing metaphysics; for every finite thing exceeds itself and expresses the infinite glory of God. And it means too our knowledge is first of all worship, thanks, awe, and desire before it is rational reflection: ?to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivisitic reconstruction of its ?sufficient reason,?Ebut through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one?s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as a gift, in response to which the most fully ?adequate?Ediscourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing.?E Or, ?the truth of being is ?poetic?Ebefore it is ?rational?E?Eindeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail ?Eand cannot b

e truly known if this order is reverse?E(p. 132).

Faced with this Christian interruption, non-Christian metaphysics can attempt to escape this interruption and this redemption. To reclaim its autonomy after being absorbed into the discourse of Trinitarian Christianity, metaphysics must wage an explicit war against Christianity. Christianity thoroughly spoiled Egypt, and left philosophy with nothing ?pure?Ethat had not been contaminated by theology. The nihilism that is at the heart of the metaphysical enterprise from the beginning must be made more explicit.

Hart notes that theology itself played a role in bringing the inherent nihilism of metaphysics to the surface. Nominalism, he argues, severed the world from analogy, and thereby severed the ties between philosophy and theology. The finite world was no longer seen as a manifestation of infinite glory, as a path leading toward infinite glory. Accompanying this is a retreat from the biblical affirmation of the goodness of creation, and a tendency to construe God as pure will, an arbitrary monarch ?whose acts could, like ours, be indifferently related to his essence, expressing or dissimulating his nature?E(p. 133). Revelation in this system becomes a rupture in creation, rather than a deepening of the light that shines in creation itself. A Platonic melancholy at ?our incarceration in the regio dissimiltudinis?Ewas the result. The logic of incarnation, in which the good creation is transparent to God, and in Christ identical to God, was lost, and instead God came to be conceived as the world?s ?contrary.?E (While my intention is not to critique Hart, I must protest here at his inclusion of Luther and Calvin as examples of this trend.) Standing on opposite sides of the abyss, a ?god of absolute arbitrary will?Efaces human beings made in their image, made, that is, voluntaristically.

Theology contributed to the revolt of metaphysics and the particular shape of that revolt in another way was well. To the evident beauties of the creation, Christianity added the ?additional aura of wonderful gratuity and fortuity?E(p. 134). But Christianity left the world groundless, pure non-necessary gift. Philosophy sought for new ground for itself, and its only option was to retreat from a world that had been rendered perfectly contingent. Truth was thus relocated from the world itself into the subject. The truth of the world could be ascertained only by an act of will and by subjective certitude. Truth was no longer in the appearance of the world as such, but in the go. Understanding was not rooted in a given world that provoked wonder and evoked a search for wisdom; understanding was what could be tested and affirmed by reason. Phenomena exist only in the gaze that establishes them, since they no longer exist in the light of a Creator. In short, ?only a conscious project of immanent reason, independent of any narrative of transcendence that would locate the freedom of truth in the prior givenness of the light, could rescue philosophy from theology?s narrative of being as gift?E(p. 135). In particular, beauty is made useless, reduced to ?the status of subjective impression or ornamental fancy?E(p. 135).

The ultimate upshot of this originally Cartesian move inward to the subject was the Kantian effort to ?collapse the distinction between the infinite and subjectivity altogether?Einto the ?transcendental ego?E(p. 136). Kant attempted to escape the circularity and dialectic of knowledge by positing the reality of an ego beyond the empirical ego, one that would serve as a transcendent cause of knowledge and understanding. Given the assumptions of modern philosophy, this seems the only option. One could not ground knowledge in the world itself, which was no longer a realm of necessity; nor could one posit a ?supereminent unity?Ein which the phenomena and the subject both participate and which ensures their harmony, since this picture depends on ?a mind resigned to a condition of active passivity, a kind of humble surrender to the testimony of a transcendence that, by definition, cannot be delivered over to the certitudes of an autonomous ego?E?Ein short, depends on a metaphysical picture that Kant had ruled out of bounds (p. 137). Hart characterizes Kant?s revolution as a ?Ptolemaic?Eone, in that Kant replaced the ?sun of the good?Eas the center of knowledge and truth with the ?unyielding earth of apperception?E(p. 137).

None of this was logically necessary. The recognition that much of what we know is known before it is known (that ?much is presumed a priori in every posterior act of knowledge?E could be taken as evidence that consciousness constitutes the world; or, it could be taken as a sign that ?all being and knowing the work of an irreducible givenness?E(pp. 137-18). It was not necessary to ground the stability of the subject in subjectivity; it is just as rational to find my stability ?in the constancy of the light that forms ?me?? (p. 137). All that modern philosophy genuine discovered was already available in the Christian account of the soul, and the soul is far ?thicker,?Emore deeply embedded in the world and the body, more capable of uniting inner and outer, than the wispy subject of modern philosophy. Hart?s wonderful description of the soul is worth quoting: ?the soul, rather than the sterile abstraction of an ego, was an entire and unified spiritual and corporeal reality; it was the life and form of the body, encompassing every aspect of human existence, from the nous to the animal functions, uniting reason and sensation, thought and emotion, spirit and flesh, memory and presence, supernatural longing and natural capacity; open before being, a permeable and multiplicity attendance upon the world, it was that in which being showed itself, a logos gathering the light of being into itself, seeing and hearing in the things of the world the logoi of being, allowing them to come to utterance in itself, as words and thought?E(p. 138).

Hart offers a number of telling criticisms of the epistemology implicit in the modern project of metaphysics. He argues, for instance, that the quest for ?subjective certitude?Eis flawed because it demands that our minds be able to adequate a world that is pure gratuity, ?poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic?E(p. 138). Further, all knowledge rests on an act of faith ?in the world?Esuch that we know the world ?only by entrusting ourself to what is more than ourselves?E(p. 138). Further, the modern ego or subject (which Hart sees still at work in Levinas and Derrida) is separated from the world. A true phenomenology would recognize not only that knowledge is always intentional (consciousness is consciousness of a particular thing) but also that ?what is given in any knowledge is not only the ?thing known,?Eas delivered over to the ?knowing mind,?Ebut the entire circle of the event that is being and knowledge (what theology calls the gift of illumination, flowing from the superemninent coincidence of knowledge and being in the Trinity)?E(p. 143). And this ?intention?Eis always ??invited?Eby the splendor of concrete form, already awakened by the aesthetic exteriority of otherness?E(p. 143). Not only are world and knower united in the covenant of light, but truth and beauty. Hart advocates a phenomenology liberated from the limits of transcendentalism in the Kantian sense: ?beginning from the phenomenological presuppositions that being is what shows itself, and that the event of the phenomenon and the event of perception are inseparable, I wish nonetheless to say that only a transcendental prejudice would dictate in advance that one may not see (or indeed does not see) in the even of manifestation and in the simultaneity of phenomenon and perception a light that exceeds them as an ever more eminent phenomenality?E(pp. 145-146). Hart insists that for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, what is seen and heard in the phenomena of creation is ?the creature?s pariticipation in God?E(p. 144).

Clearly, these epistemological claims rest on an
ontological ground, and Hart sketches some of the main lines of the theological ontology that he develops later in the book. The ontology is musical, which treats every created thing as an ?interval, reflection, reciprocally constitutive modulation?Eon the ?shared music of infinite analogical expression?E(p. 144). The history of creation is the light of the Trinity ?unfolding its light in the unity and diversity of beings, composing endless and endlessly coinherent variations on an infinite theme (not, that is, a theme to which the whole is somehow reducible, an ?essential?Emeaning, but a theme in the musical sense, which is itself in its display of supplementation, variation, and difference)?E(p. 144). It is also a rhetorical ontology, seeing every created thing as an unnecessary expression of God, which evokes reflection on, desire for, and delight in the God there expressed. It is an aesthetical ontology, in which all created things display and share in the beauty of the Creator. This beauty is the truth of things that is more basic than the strife of the creation, and thus beauty is not a dissimulation of truth but its healing.

Hart ends with some warnings to theologians who would attempt to accommodate postmodernism?s double critique of Christianity, namely, that it is a totalizing project and that its promise of peace and peaceful persuasion is chimerical: ?Theologians who fall to either side of this critique, either by denying the rhetorical essence of theology or by accepting the postmodern vision of being as a violence from which Christ withdraws, but who nevertheless wish to remain apologists for the faith, are condemned on the one hand to repeat an ever more metaphysical discourse of dialectical ?truth?E(which is fruitless), or on the other hand, to become unworldly, even gnosticizing Christians, seeking to imitate the withdrawal of Christ as a flight to an impossible realm beyond history.?E Hart suggests a ?third way?Ethat ?accepts the irretrievability of purely dialectical ?truth?Ebut still rejects the metaphysical assumptions of postmodernity.?E This third way is the way of theological aesthetics, which denies that there is no truth that is more fundamental than the figural play of God?s rhetoric, the rhetoric of originally peaceful creation, and therefore there is no necessity of force in rhetoric.

As Hart summarizes: ?if the measure of truth is the correspondence of beings not to fixed ideas but to an infinite beauty whose form is the agape freely shared within the Trinity, known by way of participation, by renewing the gesture of that love, and if truth is the peaceful event of being?s limitless difference, as variations on a beauty that infinitely differentiates, rather than an essence toward which dialectic must make an endless selective nisus, then there is no need to answer the Nietzschean critique by any means other than a fuller theological narrative and charitable practice: Christian thought need only show it enulcleates a beauty that is anything but incidental, but which is narrated continuously, necessarily, and coherently throughout its story as rhetoric and as peace?E(p. 151).

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