The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics

by David Bentley Hart

Rowan Williams says that David Bentley Hart "can always be relied on to offer a perspective on the Christian faith that is both profound and unexpected." The Hidden and the Manifest, a new collection of this brilliant scholar's work, contains twenty essays by Hart on theology and metaphysics. Spanning Hart's career both topically and over time, these essays cover such subjects as the Orthodox understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice; the metaphysics of Paradise Lost; Christianity, modernity, and freedom; death, final judgment, and the meaning of life; and many more.

Genres: Theology, Essays, Philosophy, Religion, Christianity, Christian, Faith

370 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 12, 2017

About the author

David 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.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book consistently challenged my mind and spoke to my soul. As a series of essays, like any collection of diverse essays, it is uneven. A few of the essays, such as the one on Milton, will be slightly uninteresting for most readers (honestly, unless you're a Milton fanatic, do you care if Milton was a Monist?). That aside, the vast majority of the essays in this collection are brilliant. Further, they do tie together nicely so while you know you are reading different works brought together from different contexts, you still feel a progression.

For me, Hart is most challenging when he writes philosophy. Just thinking about the first 150 pages of The Beauty of the Infinite still makes me sweat. The first essay in this book is easily the most challenging as Hart dives into Heidegger. Once past this first essay, the writing shifts to more theology and is a bit easier going, at least if you're already into theology.

A few big themes emerge here. Hart offers up the best demolition of God understood as primarily power, the God offered by Calvinism, Jansenism and much other theology in the West. This understanding of God flows from the voluntarism of the late middle ages. Prior to this, God was understood to be the ultimate good. Thus, God acts in accordance with his own nature to be good, loving, just etc. Voluntarists saw this as constraining God's freedom. For them, God can do whatever God wants. Much Reformation theology swallowed this understanding and thus we end up with theologians saying God elects a group of people before the beginning of time for salvation while all the rest are created solely for eternal torment. Within this scheme words like "good" and "just" lose all meaning though. Hart argues for an analogical understanding of terms, that the words we use must be similar when applied to God. In other words, torturing millions is not all of a sudden "good" because God does it.

Hart pulls no punches. He has no time for such ideas as God determines everything that ever happens. Hart pushes us to have longer memories, to recognize that there is a whole long tradition of understanding God before voluntarism. Further, he argues that it is precisely this God as power that is rejected by the atheists of the 19th century. And rejecting this God was a good thing as such a God needed to be rejected to clear our pallets and return us to a better view of God.

What better view of God? Hart describes a God of self-giving love. For Hart, the Trinity is central to who God is. Hart describes God as not becoming self-giving love in the incarnation. Rather, the incarnation reveals to us what God has always been like. God then creates not out of necessity but as an extension of this love. We get our being from God, who is Being itself. We are welcomed, through grace, to participate in God's self-giving love. Of course, Hart would argue none of this is new. Its all there in the early church, in people like Gregory of Nyssa and others.

There are a lot of other essays here on topics such as the Eucharist and the relationship of Roman Catholics to Orthodox. The final essay caps off the whole book as Hart adds to his critique of Calvinism by discussing hell. It seems as if Hart says a God who predestines all people to either heaven or hell makes more sense then a God who allows people to freely choose hell. In other words, Hart is not consoled by the free will defense of hell. Of course, the God who predestines some to hell is not loving. But just as a father who allows his insane child to freely run into traffic, a God who allows his children to freely self-destruct is not much loving either. Hart concludes by arguing for universal reconciliation: all people will be made new in Christ. For Hart, this all flows out of a belief in God's self-giving love revealed in Trinity and God's choice to create. I am not sure I am 100% convinced, but I do have to say its the best argument I've heard for this.

The whole thing drives me to want to know God, to want to worship, to want to tell others. God as described by Hart is beautiful and amazing. I am moved to tell people that God is way better than you've ever imagined. God is not a sadistic parent who has to torture people for all eternity to get others to love. God is a loving parent who will keep burning off all that corrupts until we see the beauty and freely embrace. Honestly, it sounds too good to be true. Every bone in my recovering fundamentalist body resists it. Hell has always been the ultimate check on bad behavior, the ultimate threat. I've pretty solidly moved into the annihilation camp - the Bible seems clearly, if taken "literally", to teach that souls apart from God cease to exist. I guess the question I'm at now is, what if that's not how the Bible is meant to be understood? What if theology funnels everything through who God is as revealed in Jesus and we end up with something more beautiful than we can imagine? Hart and others do offer scriptures to support universal reconciliation (a somewhat surprising amount). But still...I grew up with hell as punishment and threat. Just asking such questions would place me in hell, at least according to some Christians.

Yet...what if its true? What if God is more beautiful than you've imagined? To be fair, Hart writes as a theologian and not a preacher. He's Eastern Orthodox so he doesn't have to worry about conservative evangelical backlash. All I can say is maybe we who grew up conservative evangelical need a large does of the sort of theology Hart is writing. Its so much better than many of our own options, from your best life now seeker-sensitive self-help garbage to God loves you but if you reject it then God will torture you in hell for all eternity garbage. I think its worth seeing if God is better than all that.

Now I'm rambling. I'll end by saying, if you're into theology, take the time to dive into Hart. Its not always easy, but its good.

[Paul H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read a few of these essays in PDF or HTML form over the past decade, and it's a relief to have them all in one place. While there isn't much new material here (just a couple shorter essays), this is Hart's first properly academic/scholarly publication since 2003 (!), and thus quite welcome. Somehow he managed to publish three volumes of occasional writings (in his attempt to be Mencken or Chesterton or whoever) before coming out with this volume; still, I'll take what I can get.

Hart is arguably the greatest living theologian (despite his faintly absurd writing style) and much of the material here is first-rate; e.g., "The Myth of Schism" is, I think, the greatest single essay ever written on Catholic-Orthodox relations (and I've read a lot of them). Highly recommended!

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hidden and the Manifest brings together a number of Hart's academic essays from over the years and so demonstrates his intellectual and stylistic range quite well. In fact, one of my favorite parts of reading this collection was to feel how much Hart's writing style matured over the years. The earlier essays, published in the late 1990s and early 2000s, required of me a genuine discipline of the will to read, comprehend, and appreciate - purely on account of their verbal excess, mind you - whereas the latest, published in the last few years, are simply delightful, though still properly challenging in other respects.
For my own interests and theological development, the most valuable essays were those concerned with Trinitarian metaphysics (the eponymous essay, "The Hidden and the Manifest," as well as "The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa and the Vestigia Trinitatis"), divine impassibility or apatheia (specifically, "No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility") and eschatology ("The Whole Humanity: Gregory of Nyssa's Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology," and "God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of Creatio Ex Nihilo," which is Hart's most sustained defense of universal salvation, or apokatastasis, to date). There was much to be gained from the other essays, of course, but it is in these areas that Hart's most important work is done.
Highly recommended to the student of theology.

[Yeshua Branch · Rating 4 out of 5]

DB Hart's collection of essays was all at once a spiritual journey towards a great understanding of God, a crash course in the history of the Church and the ever-changing interpretation of the Scripture, and all around one of the most difficult books I've ever read. Most of his arguments are from the classic Christian stance that God is the ultimate Love and Goodness and that he created the universe not out of some finite desire, but as an infinite outpouring of His love. He goes to greatly complicated philosophical depths to distinguish the difference between "being" as we know it and Being as God existing in all of us infinitely into the past and the future. There are no external forces influencing God, he is not deterministic. Ultimately, Hart appeals to the idea of universal reconciliation to eliminate the logical inconsistency of an all-loving God that could possibly have people eternally tormented.

Some other issues that he touched on that gave me a much stronger ideological understanding as well as a better historical foundation of information include the history of the schism between Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism, an extended explanation of the analogical significance of the Eucharist, presentations of views from opposing theologians such as Milton, Calvin, and Heidegger, meditations on what Hell would actually consist of, and a deep dive on divine impassability. He also has a very informative piece on the relation between the God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit which really helped to clear up some misunderstandings I had regarding the Holy Trinity.

Some of this work was definitely over my head at times, both from a conceptual standpoint as well as Hart's dry, train-of-logic style of diction (and heavy reference of Latin which I only etymologically understood about 10% of). However, the way he presents God is very palatable to me in my current worldview and makes complete sense. This collection is more than the sum of its parts and has absolutely invoked a greater desire in me to continue to find my spiritual path and build a greater relationship with God.

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has to be one of the most interesting and most difficult books I've ever encountered.

[Aeisele · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing collection of essays. DB Hart is probably my favorite theological mind right now, and I love that he is unabashedly committed to classic Christian thought. This collection of some difficult and interesting theological discussions is as good I've read from his since his book, "The Beauty of the Infinite."
A few highlights. His essay "No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility" is an extremely cogent defense of the concept of "apatheia" as it was developed in the church fathers, against those like Moltmann and Eberhard Jungel who see it as an "impersonal" or unloving important from Greek philosophy. For them, God becomes "through suffering passions." Instead, Hart argues that apatheia is actually necessary for love: "love is no primordially a reaction, but the possibility of every action, the transcendent act that makes all ese actual; it is purely positive, sufficient in itself, without the need of any galvanism of the negative to be fully active, vital, and creative" (57). Ultimately "the affirmation of God's impassibility [apatheia] is also an affirmation that God is truly good, that creation is freely worked and freely loved, that evil and violence and all the cruelties of human history enjoy no metaphysical or divine warrant, but stand under the everlasting damnation of the cross: that God simply is the fullness of charity, and so remains as he ever is in creating and redeeming and joining to himself creatures whom he summons into being not out of need, but for the much higher purpose of serving his delight" (69). This is perhaps a crystallization of much of Hart's thinking.
Other highlights include the amazing "The Destiny of Christian Metaphysics: Reflections on the Analogia Entis," "The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa and the Vestigia Trinitatis" (and really - all his essays somehow talk Nyssa), the really incredible "The Whole Humanity: Gregory of Nyssa's Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology," and probably the best defense of universalism I've ever read, "God, Creation, and Evil: the Moral Meaning of Creatio ex Nihilo."
There's so much in here, so much that makes me want to read so much else. His essays are little provocations that spark my theological curiosity and impel me to think more deeply about reality. What else could you ask for?