David Bentley Hart (born February 1965) is an American fiction author, essayist, cultural commentator, philosopher, religious studies scholar, and theologian. Reviewers have commented on Hart's baroque prose and provocative rhetoric in over one thousand essays, reviews, and papers as well as twenty-four books (including translations). From a predominantly Anglican family background, Hart became Eastern Orthodox when he was twenty-one. His academic works focus on Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Indian and East Asian religion, Asian languages, classics, and literature as well as a New Testament translation. Books with wider audiences include The Doors of the Sea, Atheist Delusions, That All Shall Be Saved, Roland in Moonlight, and All Things Are Full of Gods.
Born and raised in Maryland, Hart regularly references his family roots and the Baltimore Orioles in his writing. Hart graduated with a BA in interdisciplinary study from the University of Maryland, completed an MPhil in theology at Cambridge University, and then a PhD in religious studies at the University of Virginia. Hart received the Templeton Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study in 2015.
Hart's translation of the New Testament was published in 2017 with a second edition in 2023. Five of his books have received awards or book of the year recognitions. Hart has written essays on diverse topics such as art, baseball, literature, consciousness, the problem of evil, apocatastasis, theosis, fairies, film, and politics. Hart maintains a subscription newsletter called Leaves in the Wind that features original essays and conversations with other thinkers.
Early life
Hart notes that most of his ancestors lived in Maryland for generations since their arrival there in 1634.[1][2][3] Born in Howard County and graduating from Wilde Lake High School in 1982 with classes in Latin and Greek, Hart was a National Merit Scholar.[4] Hart grew up with two older brothers and writes that this "has always made me feel more like a creature of the 1960's and early 1970's than do some of my friends of roughly my age."[5]
Hart writes that "regional pride dictated that the tender souls of schoolchildren be regularly exposed to the works of H. L. Mencken" and that this shaped his own writing style so that he would spend his life "striving to suppress my assassin's smile while heaping one elaborately vituperative subordinate clause atop another."[6] Outside the high school curriculum, Hart took up French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and modern Greek. At the University of Maryland, Hart studied classics, history, world literature, religious studies and philosophy while also learning to read Chinese and Sanskrit. As a teenager, Hart started to read the early church fathers along with contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians, converting to Orthodoxy at the age of twenty-one.[7][8]
Hart has authored twenty books and produced two translated works. The New Testament: A Translation was published in 2017 with Yale University Press[15][16][17][18] and a second edition in 2023.[19] His translation in collaboration with John R. Betz of Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm by Erich Przywara was published in 2014 by Eerdmans.[20] Hart's academic books include The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003), The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale, 2013),[21]The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Eerdmans, 2017), That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale, 2019), Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (Notre Dame, 2020),[22]Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Baker, 2022),[23] and You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (Notre Dame, 2022).[24]
In April and May of 2024, Hart delivered the Stanton lectures at the University of Cambridge with presentations across five days entitled "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monist Christology".
[25][26] Hart's book All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life from Yale University Press released in August of 2024.[27]
Ed Simon writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2022 said that "Hart is often difficult for some people to categorize" with his "thousands of essays, reviews, and papers" but that "what's agreed upon is that he's wide-ranging and deeply read in his seemingly limitless interests, and loquacious in his refreshingly baroque prose style" as well as "the rare theologian" who can "poetically invoke" beauty with descriptions of color and light.[33] Simon also quoted as "an evaluation with merit" the claim by Matthew Walther that Hart is "our greatest living essayist."[34] Hart's style has been praised for "its thought and humor and spleen"[35] and called "extremely rude."[36] Martyn Wendell Jones has said of Hart's style that, while it may "constantly verge on the immoderate" and rarely "make a point squarely without infusing a bit of accelerant," what might be seen as "needless indulgence" is also "an act of generosity toward his readership" because "his maximalist impulses ...enable him to consistently generate interest on the level of his individual sentences."[37] His essays often mix humor and critical commentary as with "A Person You Flee at Parties: Donald and the Devil" (about Donald Trump from May 6, 2011, for First Things).[38] Hart's essays sometimes explored the boundaries between different religious traditions as with "Saint Sakyamuni" (2009)[39] or the boundaries of orthodoxy as with "Saint Origen" (2015).[40]
David Bentley Hart and Roland, the title character in Roland in Moonlight (2021)
In 2012, The Devil and Pierre Gernet, a collection of his fiction, was released by Eerdmans.[41] Two of his books, A Splendid Wickedness in 2016 and The Dream-Child's Progress in 2017, are collections devoted to popular and literary essays that also include several short stories. His short stories have been described as "Borgesian" and are elaborate metaphysical fables, full of wordplay, allusion, and structural puzzles.[42] Hart added two books to his fiction works in 2021: Roland in Moonlight and Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale).[43][44][45] His book Roland in Moonlight has a largely autobiographical framework while consisting primarily of dialogs with his dog Roland as well as accounts of his fictional great uncle Aloysius Bentley (1895–1987). Hart had written previously about both Roland and Aloysius in essays for First Things, with two about Aloysius 2011 and six about Roland from 2014 to 2016. Reviewing Roland in Moonlight for a review in Church Times, John Saxbee (former Bishop of Lincoln) wrote that "sometimes, a book defies description or, rather, refuses to settle into a conventional genre" and compared Roland in Moonlight to Sophie's World meets Alice through the Looking-Glass or Don Quixote meets The Wind in the Willows.[46]
Reception
Hart's first major work, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), an adaptation of his doctoral thesis, received acclaim from the theologians John Milbank, Janet Soskice, Paul J. Griffiths, and Reinhard Hütter. William Placher said of the book, "I can think of no more brilliant work by an American theologian in the past ten years."[47]Geoffrey Wainwright said, "This magnificent and demanding volume should establish David Bentley Hart, around the world no less than in North America, as one of his generation's leading theologians."[48] In 2020, Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest was named Best Religion Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly[49] as well as winning Gold in the 2020 INDIES with Foreword Magazine.[50] In 2011, Hart's book Atheist Delusions was awarded the Michael Ramsey Prize in Theology by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.[51][52] It was also praised by the agnostic philosopher Anthony Kenny in The Times Literary Supplement: "He exposes his opponents' errors of fact or logic with ruthless precision."[53]Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Guardian in January 2014, praised Hart's book The Experience of God as "the one theology book all atheists really should read."[54]You Are Gods won Gold in the 2022 INDIES with Foreword Magazine for the Religion (Adult Nonfiction) category.[55]
Roland in Moonlight was chosen by A. N. Wilson as his November 2021 "Book of the Year" for the Times Literary Supplement. Wilson described this "dialogue with the author's dog Roland, who turns out to be a philosopher of mind, with a particular bee in his bonnet about the inadequacy of materialist explanations for 'consciousness'" as "probably the dottiest book of the year" while noting that "I KEEP returning to it."[56][57] In 2022, the Catholic Media Association awarded a first place prize to Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale) in the category of "Escapism" for authors from other traditions.[58][59]
In addition to these accolades, Hart has been criticized by some scholars including N. T. Wright,[60][61][62][63]Peter Leithart,[64][65]Edward Feser,[66] and others, especially after his 2019 publication of That All Shall Be Saved.[67][68][69][70][71][72][73] Other Christian scholars praised the book including Robert Louis Wilken who wrote that "Hart shows why most Christian thinking about eternal damnation is unbiblical" and John Behr who described the book as "a brilliant treatment—exegetically, theologically, and philosophically—of the promise that, in the end, all will indeed be saved, and exposing the inadequacy—above all moral—of claims to the contrary."[74] Archbishop Alexander Golitzin of the Orthodox Church in America recorded a public interview on January 14, 2022, in which he named Hart's book That All Shall Be Saved and said that it "draws upon some very prominent and worthy and holy teachers" in the early church who held that the "love of God will ultimately overcome the capacity of the creature to say no to God."[75] In February 2022, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (in collaboration with the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University) invited Hart to deliver a public homily for the Sunday of the Publican & the Pharisee as part of their "Orthodox Scholars Preach" series.[76] In 2017, Hart served on a special commission of Orthodox theologians for the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople to help compose "For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church" and to coauthor the preface.[77]
As an outspoken advocate of classical theism as seen, for example, in his book The Experience of God[83] who is also, more generally, engaged with the schools of continental philosophy, idealism, and neoplatonism,[84] Hart also affirms monism. He said in a November 17, 2020, interview about a pre-release reading of his book You Are Gods that "at the end of the day, I'm a monist as any sane person is" and that "we can play games with it, but any metaphysics that is coherent is ultimately reducible to a monism."[85] In the text of You Are Gods, Hart describes variations of both dualism and monism that he calls grim and monstrous:
An absolute dualism, of course, is a very grim thing indeed; but a narrative monism unqualified by any hint of true gnostic detachment, irony, sedition, or doubt—by any proper sense, that is, that the fashion of this world is horribly out of joint, that we are prisoners of delusion, that not every evil can be accounted for as part of divine necessity—turns out to be at least as monstrous.
During an April 2022 conversation with Hart about You Are Gods, John Milbank said we "agree that in fact neoplatonism and Vedanta and Islamic mysticism are monistic" and "that, actually, an emanationism, a monotheism, these are actually the more monistic visions and that, if we've got all these things in Christianity like Trinity, incarnation, grace and deification and so on, these aren't qualifying monism." Instead, Milbank said that Hart's book You Are Gods shows that Christianity is spelling out or expounding monism and monotheism.[86]Robert Lawrence Kuhn, concludes that Hart "constructs an ultimate unified monism, first by showing that consciousness/mind and being/existence are profoundly inseverable" and then by "taking consciousness and being, already one and the same, and unifying it with God, to become, all together, the ultimate one and the same." Kuhn maintains, however, that "this is not pantheism (or panentheism), but based on Hart's Orthodox Christian convictions, a Christological monism".[87]
Hart's book That All Shall Be Saved was published on September 24, 2019, and makes the case that universalism is the only coherent version of the Christian faith. Although grounded primarily in arguments from Christian metaphysics and moral philosophy, the book also considers biblical exegesis, systematic theology, and historical theology (with extensive references to universalist ideas among Christian patristic figures such as Gregory of Nyssa). Hart, with his characteristic rhetorical provocations, uses terms such as "infernalists" to describe his opponents.[88][89][90] This grounding in Christian metaphysics, insistence on universalism being the only true articulation of the Christian gospel, and use of combative rhetoric all combine to make Hart's case for universalism more uncompromising than most previous Christian arguments, and this has led to the use of the term "hard universalism" to describe Hart's position.[91]
Hart refers to the idea of an atemporal fall (also called meta-historical fall) in his 2005 book The Doors of the Sea as well as in "The Devil's March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations":
The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death.
...It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender.[92]
Hart has recommended Sergei Bulgakov's 1939 book The Bride of the Lamb as the best exposition of an atemporal fall.[93]
More broadly, Hart and commentators have noted many other influences and inspirations (some of whom Hart can also criticize severely in certain respects). Among New Testament authors, Hart most frequently references Paul.[103] Greek fathers most often referenced by Hart include Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, Maximus the Confessor, and Symeon the New Theologian. Among medieval thinkers, Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa are often extolled by Hart, especially in his 2022 book You Are Gods. Among more recent Christian thinkers, Hart has noted a high regard for George MacDonald. Russian religious philosophers such as Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev are often praised by Hart along with Russian literary figures like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Among Indian religious philosophers, Hart has most regularly referenced Ramanuja and Shankara.[104][105]
In an August 2023 interview in The Christian Century, during a series of questions related to German higher criticism and modern theology, Hart said that although the "early church fathers were in many respects historical critical readers, to the degree they could be", Hart himself is not engaging in demythologization along the lines of Paul Tillich or Rudolf Bultmann:
I don't deny the historical reality of the resurrection, or even of the empty tomb. I'm not a modern rationalist. For starters, Tillich was a joke. He couldn't have made it as a philosopher, with his watery, middle-Schelling approach to things, and he wrote these huge, vapid books about a religion that he only barely knew anything about. And Bultmann's attempt to reduce everything down to apocalyptic inner illumination simply because the cosmology of the first century doesn't match the cosmology of the 20th—I mean, it's just the Protestant principle reaching its reductio ad absurdum.[106]
Personal life
Hart is married and has one grown son, Patrick,[107] with whom he co-wrote the children's book The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla (Angelico Press, 2019); his wife is British.[108] He has two brothers: Addison Hodges Hart (also an author)[109][110] and Fr. Robert Hart (rector of Saint Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina).[111]
As of 2022, Hart lives in South Bend, Indiana and is asked to serve and contribute by leaders in his Orthodox tradition such as the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.[112][113] He follows contemporary concerns in Orthodox Christianity such as providing signature number 32 on a "Declaration on the 'Russian World' (Russkii mir) Teaching" criticizing theological justifications for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.[114] During a September 16, 2022, conversation with Rainn Wilson, Hart shared briefly about an "indescribable" past experience of his own on Mount Athos:
I was in this state of spiritual despair, and I also had an encounter. ...So I understand both the difficulty of explaining it and the impossibility of forgetting it, at once, and how it can change your life. But it doesn't come as a set of instructions. It sure as hell didn't turn me into a saint but did actually make me realize that the spiritual dimension of reality is reality.[115]
I'm basically an anarchist and communalist. I believe that all that lilies of the field nonsense that Jesus preached was more than a daydream; and I think the longing for strict social hierarchy ...as an antidote to modernity is simply a longing for a reprise of the same sins that created modernity.[119]
With a few more specifics, Hart wrote on April 3, 2022:
In my heart of hearts, I want to vote for someone whose entire political philosophy is derived from John Ruskin by way of Kenneth Grahame, with lashings of William Cobbett, Gilbert White, and William Morris; failing that, I want to enjoy the luxury of writing in Wendell Berry on every ballot. But the imminent collapse of the civil order of the entire world doth make pragmatists of us all. I long for the day, however, when I can return to my posture of airily insouciant disdain for the whole system and can again cast votes only for hopeless third party candidates with a clear conscience. But I suspect I will die before that day comes.[120]
References
^"Thoughts In and Out of Season 4". Leaves in the Wind (David Bentley Hart). January 15, 2023. Archived from the original on January 20, 2023. Retrieved March 6, 2023. No branch of the clan on either side managed to stretch out very far past the boundaries of Maryland between my forebears' arrival there in 1634 and the late 1970's... Well, apart from the Warfields, that is, on my mother's side, who spread out into Virginia and Pennsylvania, and whose most famous (or infamous) daughter, Wallis, became first Wallis Simpson and then Wallis Duchess of Windsor and who was, in consequence of the latter, indirectly responsible for Elizabeth II's reign of 70 years... But I am getting off track (and generally we do not boast about our distant relation to that particular Nazi-sympathizer).
^"The Greatest Nation on Earth". First Things. September 17, 2010. Archived from the original on December 25, 2022. Retrieved March 6, 2023. My remotest ancestors on this continent settled in Maryland in 1634, as titled freeholders under the sheltering canopy of a royal charter.
^"Addenda et Notanda". Leaves in the Wind (David Bentley Hart). August 26, 2022. Archived from the original on January 13, 2023. Retrieved January 17, 2023. Regional pride dictated that the tender souls of schoolchildren be regularly exposed to the works of H. L. Mencken.
^"Addenda et Notanda". Leaves in the Wind (David Bentley Hart). August 26, 2022. Archived from the original on January 13, 2023. Retrieved January 17, 2023. [Kallistos Ware's] two most famous and influential books came early in his public career: The Orthodox Church (1963) and The Orthodox Way (1979). Neither has ever gone out of print. The latter was especially important to me when I read it in my teens. I had encountered the writings of the Eastern fathers by that point, but had not yet ever heard anyone speak of Orthodoxy in an idiom intelligible to my Anglican ears.
^Hart, David Bentley (April 19, 2023). "public questionings of your connection to Notre Dame". Letter to Jesse J. Hake. I am a collaborative research scholar at ND ...a 'Research Collaborator,' which is an appointment that requires no teaching but that also has no particular benefits beyond use of research resources. ...Feel free to use my description of the post's minimal requirements. You can also say, if you would be kind, that research appointments are not faculty positions and are not intended to last more than a few years.[self-published source]
^Hart, David Bentley (December 19, 2022). "folder with video and audio files from Jesse". Letter to Jesse J. Hake. My fellowship at NDIAS is over. My official position at ND now is as "Collaborative Scholar" in the departments of Theology and German.[self-published source]
^"David Bentley Hart". University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. July 26, 2017. Archived from the original on December 1, 2022. Retrieved January 17, 2023.
^"David Bentley Hart". Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. July 26, 2016. Archived from the original on December 4, 2022. Retrieved January 17, 2023.
^"The Spirit of the Text". Yale University Press. November 3, 2017. Archived from the original on September 30, 2022. Retrieved January 17, 2023.
^"Theological Territories". Notre Dame Press. February 12, 2020. Archived from the original on December 5, 2022. Retrieved January 17, 2023.
^"David Bentley Hart". Baker Academic Press. February 12, 2022. Archived from the original on January 18, 2023. Retrieved January 17, 2023.
^"You Are Gods". Notre Dame Press. April 12, 2022. Archived from the original on December 1, 2022. Retrieved January 17, 2023.
^"Stanton Lectures". University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity. University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on August 15, 2024. Retrieved August 14, 2024.
^"Stanton Lectures". University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity. University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on April 30, 2024. Retrieved August 14, 2024.
^"Leaves in the Wind (YouTube channel)". Leaves in the Wind (YouTube channel of David Bentley Hart). September 16, 2022. Archived from the original on November 27, 2022. Retrieved January 17, 2023.
^Simon, Ed (July 24, 2022). "All Dogs Go to Heaven: David Bentley Hart's Canine Panpsychism". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on December 15, 2022. Retrieved March 13, 2023. Author of thousands of essays, reviews, and papers, as well as 15 books including Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, as well as That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, not to mention an immaculate translation of the New Testament, Hart is often difficult for some people to categorize. What's agreed upon is that he's wide-ranging and deeply read in his seemingly limitless interests, and loquacious in his refreshingly baroque prose style; the rare theologian who can poetically invoke the 'glow of a gibbous moon set high in the sky, shining like a polished white opal on a bed of indigo velvet' or how a 'strong breeze was stirring the leaves in the high trees enclosing the grounds, and was shaking the branches of the lilac and oleander bushes bordering the path to the door ... ripples of silver ... coursing continually through the lawn's broad blades of fescue grass'.
^"A Mind-Bending Translation of the New Testament". The Atlantic. December 10, 2017. Archived from the original on July 29, 2018. Retrieved July 28, 2018. He rehearses this argument in numberless witty variations against whichever non-God ideology happens to slouch beneath his pen. ...Unlike Chesterton—and this is how you know he's an early-21st-century guy, someone with Wi-Fi—Hart is extremely rude.
^"Martyn Wendell Jones – Essay on Two New David Bentley Hart Books". The Englewood Review of Books. October 27, 2017. Archived from the original on July 29, 2018. Retrieved July 29, 2018. This note of self-aware hyperbole points to an essential part of the Hart persona; his writing voice is that of someone confident in his genius to a point of wanton, gleeful provocation. He knows his reader cannot meaningfully oppose him in even his wildest declarations. No one can, when he is writing in the Imperial mode. [From page 2:] The judgments that Hart renders constantly verge on the immoderate, and rarely does he make a point squarely without infusing a bit of accelerant. Under one aspect this habit is a needless indulgence, but under another, it's an act of generosity toward his readership. He has the good sense to pursue his maximalist impulses, knowing that they will lead him into his natural métier and enable him to consistently generate interest on the level of his individual sentences. [From page 3:] His intuition gallops across the range of human thinking and longing, mapped over decades of wild omnidirectional exploration, in search of examples and illustrations. ...His declarations over the history of ideas are cocksure, as full of gusto as his rages and raptures over cultural ephemera.
^"Q & A 1". Leaves in the Wind. October 16, 2021. Archived from the original on March 8, 2023. Retrieved March 8, 2023. Reader: 'Do you really believe in fairies? Have you ever seen any'? Hart: 'Of course I believe in them'.
^David Bentley Hart (2020). "Selkies and Nixies: The Penguin Book of Mermaids". The Lamp: A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc'.' Issue 2. Assumption 2020. pp. 49-50. Quote: "Of course mermaids exist. Or, to be more precise, of course water spirits and magical marine beings of every kind are real and numerous and, in certain circumstances, somewhat dangerous. ...The modern reports of real encounters with mermaids or other water-spirits, such as two from Zimbabwe, one from South Africa, three from northeastern India, and so on ...are so ingenuous, well-attested, and credible that only a brute would refuse to believe them [and] there is a real moral imperative in not dismissing such tales as lies or delusions.
^"The Incoherencies of Hard Universalism". Church Life Journal (from Notre Dame's McGrath Institute for Church Life). October 18, 2022. Archived from the original on January 24, 2023. Retrieved January 28, 2023.
^Hart, David Bentley (2020). "The Devil's March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations". Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press. pp. 79–80. ISBN9780268107178.
^David Bentley Hart (August 31, 2022). "Sensus Plenior I: On gods and mortals". Leaves in the Wind (subscription). Retrieved March 9, 2023. Should we favor the 'atemporal fall' view then? David Bentley Hart (Aug 31, 2022): Well, I certainly do. But the original Eden story isn't about the 'fall' at all, except in the vague sense that it was a mythic aetiology of life's miseries. Second Reader (Sep 2, 2022): Can you briefly describe what you understand or hold the 'atemporal fall' to be? Hart (Sep 2, 2022): No, not briefly. Second Reader (Sep 2, 2022): An extended response would, of course, be satisfactory also! But no, if you are aware of any particularly good reflections on it, I'd be grateful for a reference. Hart (Sep 2, 2022): Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb
