A+ DBH
David Bentley Hart has a new essay in the latest issue of Commonweal, and it’s a corker. It’s Hart in full form, but in his sober (rather than his exuberant or polemical) mode: considerate, charitable, open-handed, wide-angled, just, critical, and constructive. Just what the doctor ordered, in other words.
Ostensibly a review of a translation of a new book by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, it opens up into a diagnosis of Christendom’s exhaustion in the early third millennium after Christ, a rejection of certain nostalgic paths “forward” (i.e., backward), and an alternative vision for the future of the faith after secular modernity. (It’s surprisingly Hegelian!) I imagine it’s a preview of his forthcoming book, due early next year, titled Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. Here’s an excerpt from the essay:
So, again, given these realities, what ought Christians to do?
Certainly, what they should not do is indulge in sickly nostalgias and resentments, or soothe their distempers with infantile restorationist fantasies. History’s immanent critique has exposed too many of the old illusions for what they were, and there can be no innocent return to structures of power whose hypocrisies have been so clearly revealed. There are any number of reasons, for instance, for dismissing the current vogue of right-wing Catholic “integralism”: its imbecile flights of fancy regarding an imperial papacy; its essentially early-modern model of ecclesial absolutism; its devotion to a picture of Christian social and political order that could not be any less “integralist” or any more “extrinsicist” and authoritarian in its mechanisms; the disturbingly palpable element of sadomasochistic reverie in its endorsement of various extreme forms of coercion, subjugation, violence, and exclusion; the total absence of the actual ethos of Christ from its aims; its eerie similarity to a convention of Star Trek enthusiasts gravely discussing strategies for really establishing a United Federation of Planets. But the greatest reason for holding the whole movement in contempt is that it is nothing more than a resentful effort to reenact the very history of failure whose consequences it wants to correct. Secularity was not imposed upon the Christian world by some adventitious hostile force. It simply is the old Christendom in its terminal phase.
Well then. There’s no one quite like Hart (as I’ve written before). Go read the rest.
