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A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays
Incisive essays from a master wordsmith
Why has Don Juan become so passé of late? What’s the trouble with Ayn Rand? How did the Doge of Venice come to venerate the counterfeit remains of Siddhartha Gautama? Why does the Bentley family’s collection of ancestral relics include a bronzed human thumb? And what, exactly, is the story behind Great Uncle Aloysius, who was born a Quaker but died a pagan?
This collection of occasional essays brings us David Bentley Hart at his startlingly clear and deliciously abstruse, coolly wise and burningly witty, fresh and timeless, mystical and concrete — often all at once. Hart’s incisive blend of philosophy, moral theology, and cultural criticism, together with his flair for both the well-told story and the well-turned phrase, is sure to delight.
Why has Don Juan become so passé of late? What’s the trouble with Ayn Rand? How did the Doge of Venice come to venerate the counterfeit remains of Siddhartha Gautama? Why does the Bentley family’s collection of ancestral relics include a bronzed human thumb? And what, exactly, is the story behind Great Uncle Aloysius, who was born a Quaker but died a pagan?
This collection of occasional essays brings us David Bentley Hart at his startlingly clear and deliciously abstruse, coolly wise and burningly witty, fresh and timeless, mystical and concrete — often all at once. Hart’s incisive blend of philosophy, moral theology, and cultural criticism, together with his flair for both the well-told story and the well-turned phrase, is sure to delight.
309 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2016
56 people are currently reading
261 people want to read
About the author
David Bentley Hart
44 books703 followersDavid Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator, is a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He lives in South Bend, IN.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 18, 2016
This collection of essays by David Bentley Hart is full of exceptional pieces: well-written, thoughtful, and interesting. The topics range from Ayn Rand to Baudelaire to Don Quixote. True, they are mostly on subjects in which I am interested but I think even for those without specific interests these essays are worth reading for their philosophical insights and critiques.
Hart’s essays are philosophy, literature, history, science, morals and theology and are fascinating as well as beautifully written. Above all, he exhorts us to pay attention to the world, to truly see what is around and within us, and to be alive to it all.
I want to thank NetGalley, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and David Bentley Hart for the opportunity to read these wonderful essays. I want to now find and read the rest of Hart’s work!
Hart’s essays are philosophy, literature, history, science, morals and theology and are fascinating as well as beautifully written. Above all, he exhorts us to pay attention to the world, to truly see what is around and within us, and to be alive to it all.
I want to thank NetGalley, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and David Bentley Hart for the opportunity to read these wonderful essays. I want to now find and read the rest of Hart’s work!
May 11, 2019
David Bentley Hart is one of my favorite writers. This set is refreshing. I recently read his essays The Hidden and the Manifest which was more pages in about 15 essays. This one is 51 essays! Most are only a few pages. Further, We are Hart venture into other areas as well as providing creativity and humor. By all means, read his heavy theology books! But this set is a delightful and fun read.
Given, in 51 essays a few are...not boring, but just on things I didn’t connect with. Most are brilliant. He touches on a few common themes, such as the impossibility of getting from “is” to “ought”, a proper understanding of God, the failures of modernity and the arrogance of atheism. He also includes three essays where he and his dog converse (his dog is quite smart) as well as other playful imaginings and dreams.
Definitely worth it!
Given, in 51 essays a few are...not boring, but just on things I didn’t connect with. Most are brilliant. He touches on a few common themes, such as the impossibility of getting from “is” to “ought”, a proper understanding of God, the failures of modernity and the arrogance of atheism. He also includes three essays where he and his dog converse (his dog is quite smart) as well as other playful imaginings and dreams.
Definitely worth it!
December 11, 2018
An almost relentlessly fascinating collection of essays by one of the most interesting writers alive.
My favorite essays were the ones on Vladimir Nabakov ("On Butterflies and Being," "Nabakov's Supernatural Secret," and I think one other), natural law ("Is, Ought, and Nature's Laws," "Nature Loves to Hide," "Purpose and Function"), Don Juan ("A Splendid Wickness"), and the Chinese poet T'ae Ch'ien ("The Sanest of Men").
Hart returns constantly--almost every essay, it starts to feel like--to the "mechanistic metaphysics" of most current intellectuals. He's mostly right in his criticism of its proponents, but his harangues get wearisome. He also makes regular references to Aristotelian causality, bemoaning (rightly) the loss of formal and final causes in the West's conceptual arsenal. He also, as always, uses far too many adjectives, but his adjectives are always sharp and piquant (to mix my metaphors).
Hart also has a larger writing vocabulary than anyone else I have ever read. A small sample of the words I encountered, some of which I knew, some of which I had encountered but wouldn't have been able to define, some of which were entirely new to me: farraginous, manitou, vaticinations, sibilant, longanimous, orgulous, gossamer, eclogue, littoral, matrolatrous, rodoun, dishabille, mephitic, onomastic, envoi, incarnadined, paladin, satyriasic, hidalgo, esurience, lissome, adventitious, ennosigaean, argikeraunic, gallimaufry, stertorous, caliginous, oneiric, involucrum, scintilla, patriciate, senescence, argillaceous, oleaginous, umbrageous, parthenogenetic, homology, caesura, holometabolous, degringolade, rachitic, fatidic, psychomachy, flaneur, nacreous.
My second favorite line was this one: "The essence of mental and spiritual health is ... to care deeply about a very few, particularly precious, and intimately familiar things, and to regard the rest of reality with generous indifference" (41). A close third would be this one: "Our culture, with its almost absolute emphasis on the power of acquisition, trains us to be beguiled by the bright and the shrill rather than the lovely and the subtle. That, after all, is the transcendental logic of late modern capitalism the fabrication of innumerable artificial appetites, not the refinement of the few that are natural to us. Late modernity's defining art, advertising, is nothing but a piercingly relentless tutelage in desire for the intrinsically undesirable" (134). And a close fourth would be this one: "It seems obvious to me that Christian culture could never generate any political and social order that, insofar as it employed the mechanisms of state power, would not inevitably bring about its own dissolution.... The translation of Christianity's original apocalyptic ferment into a cultural logic and social order produced a powerful but necessarily unstable alloy" (224). I disagree with what Hart says in that last quotation, but it has the virtue of being provocative.
My favorite quotation would be this one: "The surfeit of the beautiful over the necessary is a revelation of the surfeit of being over beings. It is an enigma written as plainly upon the surface of a twig or a brick as upon the wing of a butterfly; but only the greatest artist or saint has the ability to see it with equal ease in all circumstances. Even if my encounter with that Vanessa atalanta was nothing more than a wildly amusing coincidence, or even if it was one of those exquisitely unanticipated patterns that Nabakov's kindly ghosts weave into the fabric of quotidian existence, the most significant lesson to be learned from it is that--as we all know--every butterly is a Papilio mysteriosus, an emblem and an emissary of being in its infinite familiarity and infinite strangeness, and all things properly contemplated remind us that, of themselves, they cannot be. And yet they are" (10).
My favorite essays were the ones on Vladimir Nabakov ("On Butterflies and Being," "Nabakov's Supernatural Secret," and I think one other), natural law ("Is, Ought, and Nature's Laws," "Nature Loves to Hide," "Purpose and Function"), Don Juan ("A Splendid Wickness"), and the Chinese poet T'ae Ch'ien ("The Sanest of Men").
Hart returns constantly--almost every essay, it starts to feel like--to the "mechanistic metaphysics" of most current intellectuals. He's mostly right in his criticism of its proponents, but his harangues get wearisome. He also makes regular references to Aristotelian causality, bemoaning (rightly) the loss of formal and final causes in the West's conceptual arsenal. He also, as always, uses far too many adjectives, but his adjectives are always sharp and piquant (to mix my metaphors).
Hart also has a larger writing vocabulary than anyone else I have ever read. A small sample of the words I encountered, some of which I knew, some of which I had encountered but wouldn't have been able to define, some of which were entirely new to me: farraginous, manitou, vaticinations, sibilant, longanimous, orgulous, gossamer, eclogue, littoral, matrolatrous, rodoun, dishabille, mephitic, onomastic, envoi, incarnadined, paladin, satyriasic, hidalgo, esurience, lissome, adventitious, ennosigaean, argikeraunic, gallimaufry, stertorous, caliginous, oneiric, involucrum, scintilla, patriciate, senescence, argillaceous, oleaginous, umbrageous, parthenogenetic, homology, caesura, holometabolous, degringolade, rachitic, fatidic, psychomachy, flaneur, nacreous.
My second favorite line was this one: "The essence of mental and spiritual health is ... to care deeply about a very few, particularly precious, and intimately familiar things, and to regard the rest of reality with generous indifference" (41). A close third would be this one: "Our culture, with its almost absolute emphasis on the power of acquisition, trains us to be beguiled by the bright and the shrill rather than the lovely and the subtle. That, after all, is the transcendental logic of late modern capitalism the fabrication of innumerable artificial appetites, not the refinement of the few that are natural to us. Late modernity's defining art, advertising, is nothing but a piercingly relentless tutelage in desire for the intrinsically undesirable" (134). And a close fourth would be this one: "It seems obvious to me that Christian culture could never generate any political and social order that, insofar as it employed the mechanisms of state power, would not inevitably bring about its own dissolution.... The translation of Christianity's original apocalyptic ferment into a cultural logic and social order produced a powerful but necessarily unstable alloy" (224). I disagree with what Hart says in that last quotation, but it has the virtue of being provocative.
My favorite quotation would be this one: "The surfeit of the beautiful over the necessary is a revelation of the surfeit of being over beings. It is an enigma written as plainly upon the surface of a twig or a brick as upon the wing of a butterfly; but only the greatest artist or saint has the ability to see it with equal ease in all circumstances. Even if my encounter with that Vanessa atalanta was nothing more than a wildly amusing coincidence, or even if it was one of those exquisitely unanticipated patterns that Nabakov's kindly ghosts weave into the fabric of quotidian existence, the most significant lesson to be learned from it is that--as we all know--every butterly is a Papilio mysteriosus, an emblem and an emissary of being in its infinite familiarity and infinite strangeness, and all things properly contemplated remind us that, of themselves, they cannot be. And yet they are" (10).
February 7, 2017
This is a somewhat eclectic assortment of writings from David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox Christian theologian. When the essays relate to his subject of expertise, they are excellent. When they don't, he has a tendency to try to force them to do so. A notable, if lighthearted and humorous example, is his exposition on the Pythagorean perfection of baseball. I subscribe more to the pagan ethos of American football, with its quaternal and epistemologically-enclosed field, its circular, Thucydidean historical philosophy, and its subjection of the fortunes of mortal men to those capricious geniuses of human grandeur and folly which the Greeks knew as Hubris and Nemesis, and football fans know as the NFL draft.
But overall, the diamonds are still worth sifting through the rough.
But overall, the diamonds are still worth sifting through the rough.
August 15, 2025
My constant companion in the crepuscular hours of those occasional sleepless nights. His collection(s) of essays are one of the few sumptuous enough to pull me out of the vortex of my own thoughts.
September 20, 2016
Wicked Splendid!
For the reader who writes (or for the writer who reads), certain authors are a gold mine. With a bracing vocabulary, a precision of thought, and a way with a sentence that manages to be both wise and witty, David Bentley Hart has a perspective on the world that requires a careful reading — that is well-rewarded.
In A Splendid Wickedness, a collection of fifty-two occasional essays, I recorded a list of twenty-four completely unfamiliar words, not including all those that I recognized but have only admired from afar. Although I prefer a traditional book to my Kindle for most reading, e-readers might have been invented for this caliber of writing because of their ready access to a dictionary. Since I had to look up my new words the old-fashioned way, I will treat you to my five favorites:
autochthonous — indigenous; formed in the place where it is found
bedizen — to dress or adorn gaudily
sidereal — of our relating to stars or constellations
orgulous — proud
eidetic — marked by extraordinarily accurate and vivid recall
(You’re welcome.)
The journey through A Splendid Wickedness covers terrain as diverse as the virtues of idleness, capital punishment, baseball, book reviews, and a series of philosophical ponderings delivered in a warm and furry tone by Hart’s dog, Roland.
The title track (Essay #23) examines literary characters Don Juan and Don Quixote, and wonders aloud why the figure of Quixote has been “borne aloft by his beautiful and mysterious timelessness,” while Juan has become passé. Swerving from literary to cultural criticism, Hart concludes that because we have, in our time, lost our appreciation for a transcendent good, and because “our culture is not subject to the torments of immutable moral laws,” there can be “no such thing as splendid wickedness, simply because, if we do not see ourselves in the light of the Good beyond being, nothing in our nature can be cast in sufficiently striking relief.”
It is this sort of cogent thinking that shows up in Bent’s thoughts on various topics:
“The wonderful thing about holiness, when you really encounter it, is that it testifies to itself.”
“All that is needed to make even the most outlandish theory seem plausible to the truly doctrinaire materialist is that it come wrapped in the appurtenances of empirical science.”
” . . . the worst fate that could befall America, one far grimmer than the mere loss of some of its fiscal or political supremacy in the world, would be the final triumph of a true cultural secularism.”
Having read straight through all fifty-two essays, my impulse now is to put the book on my nightstand (with Amy Carmichael, Luci Shaw, Madeleine L’Engle, and Elisabeth Elliot) for a slower read — a take-one-weekly-for-a-year-prescription for an infusion of fine writing and sharp thinking.
In my favorite essays, the author shinnies out onto some of the shakier limbs of his family tree, finding there a practicing pagan (complete with sacrifices to Janus on a marble altar); a bronzed, severed left thumb (a relic from a chance amputation in a formal duel); and a metaphysical materialist who was obsessed with death. As for me, my ancestral roots run all gnarly into Northern Maine and the Canadian Maritimes, a people who expressed themselves in ways both understated and forceful. After an aspirated pause, I’m sure they would have pronounced Hart’s book to be “wicked splendid.”
And they would have been correct.
//
This book was provided by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in exchange for my review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
For the reader who writes (or for the writer who reads), certain authors are a gold mine. With a bracing vocabulary, a precision of thought, and a way with a sentence that manages to be both wise and witty, David Bentley Hart has a perspective on the world that requires a careful reading — that is well-rewarded.
In A Splendid Wickedness, a collection of fifty-two occasional essays, I recorded a list of twenty-four completely unfamiliar words, not including all those that I recognized but have only admired from afar. Although I prefer a traditional book to my Kindle for most reading, e-readers might have been invented for this caliber of writing because of their ready access to a dictionary. Since I had to look up my new words the old-fashioned way, I will treat you to my five favorites:
autochthonous — indigenous; formed in the place where it is found
bedizen — to dress or adorn gaudily
sidereal — of our relating to stars or constellations
orgulous — proud
eidetic — marked by extraordinarily accurate and vivid recall
(You’re welcome.)
The journey through A Splendid Wickedness covers terrain as diverse as the virtues of idleness, capital punishment, baseball, book reviews, and a series of philosophical ponderings delivered in a warm and furry tone by Hart’s dog, Roland.
The title track (Essay #23) examines literary characters Don Juan and Don Quixote, and wonders aloud why the figure of Quixote has been “borne aloft by his beautiful and mysterious timelessness,” while Juan has become passé. Swerving from literary to cultural criticism, Hart concludes that because we have, in our time, lost our appreciation for a transcendent good, and because “our culture is not subject to the torments of immutable moral laws,” there can be “no such thing as splendid wickedness, simply because, if we do not see ourselves in the light of the Good beyond being, nothing in our nature can be cast in sufficiently striking relief.”
It is this sort of cogent thinking that shows up in Bent’s thoughts on various topics:
“The wonderful thing about holiness, when you really encounter it, is that it testifies to itself.”
“All that is needed to make even the most outlandish theory seem plausible to the truly doctrinaire materialist is that it come wrapped in the appurtenances of empirical science.”
” . . . the worst fate that could befall America, one far grimmer than the mere loss of some of its fiscal or political supremacy in the world, would be the final triumph of a true cultural secularism.”
Having read straight through all fifty-two essays, my impulse now is to put the book on my nightstand (with Amy Carmichael, Luci Shaw, Madeleine L’Engle, and Elisabeth Elliot) for a slower read — a take-one-weekly-for-a-year-prescription for an infusion of fine writing and sharp thinking.
In my favorite essays, the author shinnies out onto some of the shakier limbs of his family tree, finding there a practicing pagan (complete with sacrifices to Janus on a marble altar); a bronzed, severed left thumb (a relic from a chance amputation in a formal duel); and a metaphysical materialist who was obsessed with death. As for me, my ancestral roots run all gnarly into Northern Maine and the Canadian Maritimes, a people who expressed themselves in ways both understated and forceful. After an aspirated pause, I’m sure they would have pronounced Hart’s book to be “wicked splendid.”
And they would have been correct.
//
This book was provided by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in exchange for my review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
November 12, 2017
Reading DBH is not unlike reading DFW for me. They both exercise my mind by exhilaration, and keep me reading obsessively with their towering reverence for language. Still, I know which of the two I'd much sooner a beer and a conversation with...
(I'll be thinking about and re-reading "America and the Angels of Sacre-Coeur" for a long time).
(I'll be thinking about and re-reading "America and the Angels of Sacre-Coeur" for a long time).
November 23, 2025
Perhaps best known as a theologian, David Bentley Hart here spreads his wings and flies as a polymath essayist. The fifty-two included essays, on anything that has struck Hart's eye or fancy, seem aimed not to win a "public" so much as simply to streak athletically across the heavens, literary, philosophical, or historical, for his own pleasure, secure in his rock-solid intelligence and style, assured that what he offers is too fine a display of sprezzatura to stir up much complaint.
Some of the subjects are obscure, from far-flung eras and cultures, but open-minded readers who relish variety and flights of artistic and intellectual freedom will find much here to admire and enjoy.
Some of the subjects are obscure, from far-flung eras and cultures, but open-minded readers who relish variety and flights of artistic and intellectual freedom will find much here to admire and enjoy.
April 18, 2020
Really enjoyed the variety of essays in this book. Hart covered a variety of subjects in an almost equally varied manner. Each essay is independent of the others making it possible to jump around in the book, and most short enough to make each a refreshing read. Well-written, pleasant, and somewhat easy reading from an author who often writes at a high, academic level.
August 6, 2019
Essays on subjects such as literature, poetry, the emptiness of materialism, and the beauties of the natural world? I'm in.
December 10, 2019
I love this man.
February 23, 2020
I preferred the essays on literature and baseball to those on theology and philosophy. Hart has an amazing vocabulary.
Read
May 12, 2022Didn't read the whole thing so can't rate. Some good essays within. Some are so ruthless that they become comical.
October 4, 2023
If you read this then you'll get to expand your vocabulary with words like "eisegetical" and "phylogeny" and "farraginous" and "frowsy."
January 28, 2023
This collection of essays is seriously good. Whenever I read Hart I find myself wishing that more theologians could write so well. The variety of this collection is a definite strength, with Hart offering brief reflections, humorous personal stories, and sustained takedowns of scientific and philosophical materialism.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews