You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

by David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart offers an intense and thorough reflection upon the issue of the supernatural in Christian theology and doctrine. In recent years, the theological―and, more specifically, Roman Catholic―question of the supernatural has made an astonishing return from seeming oblivion. David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods presents a series of meditations on the vexed theological question of the relation of nature and supernature. In its merely controversial aspect, the book is intended most directly as a rejection of a certain Thomistic construal of that relation, as well as an argument in favor of a model of nature and supernature at once more Eastern and patristic, and also more in keeping with the healthier currents of mediaeval and modern Catholic thought. In its more constructive and confessedly radical aspects, the book makes a vigorous case for the all-but-complete eradication of every qualitative, ontological, or logical distinction between the natural and the supernatural in the life of spiritual creatures. It advances a radically monistic vision of Christian metaphysics but does so wholly on the basis of credal orthodoxy. Hart, one of the most widely read theologians in America today, presents a bold gesture of resistance to the recent revival of what used to be called “two-tier Thomism,” especially in the Anglophone theological world. In this astute exercise in classical Christian orthodoxy, Hart takes the metaphysics of participation, high Trinitarianism, Christology, and the soteriological language of theosis to their inevitable logical conclusions. You Are Gods will provoke many readers interested in theological metaphysics. The book also offers a vision of Christian thought that draws on traditions (such as Vedanta) from which Christian philosophers and theologians, biblical scholars, and religious studies scholars still have a great deal to learn.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy, Religion, Christianity, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Essays

158 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2022

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 4 out of 5]

Who Should Read This Book- Theology nerds.

What’s the Big Takeaway - Creation is in the process of being completed, as God calls creation out of nothingness towards the fullness of divinity. God infuses all creation with his presence, God makes all and all is being made into complete union with God (one day, at the end which is the beginning, God will be all in all and all will be with God).

And a Quote - “We are nothing but created gods coming to be, becoming God in God, able to become divine only becuase, in some sense, we are divine from the very first” (34).

David Bentley Hart was certainly busy during the pandemic as this is the third book he’s had published in the last few months. This is the one I was most looking forward to reading when I saw what they were about. After reading all three, it is certainly the most difficult as it is the most philosophical and theological.

For me, the fifth essay exemplifies one aspect of what makes this sort of book difficult. It is titled, “God’s Kaleidoscope: Some Questions for Cyril O’Regan.” Who is Cyril O’Regan? In the introduction Hart tells us that O’Regan is one of the great Anglophone Catholic scholars of our time and this essay is in honor of him. Fair enough. Perhaps its my personal preference, but in the context of this book I wish this essay had been edited to not really mention O’Regan. I’d bet the average reader of this book is not familiar with O’Regan and the essay at times reads like half a conversation. Not knowing the other half, its distracting.

So what makes this book difficult is that these essays are sort of disconnected. It is up to the reader to tie it together, to figure out how each essay complements the others. These essays do all revolve around the same themes - nature and supernature, God’s plan for the cosmos, theosis. My personal preference would have been a bit more editing to make them less essays on the same theme and more chapters building on each other.

But my personal preference means little for this is the book Hart wrote. In the introduction Hart ends by presenting five premises “to elucidate the perspective from which this book is written”:

“1. The sole sufficient natural end of all spiritual creatures is the supernatural, and grace is nothing but the necessary liberation of all creatures for their natural ends.
2. Nature stands in relation to supernature as (in Aristotelian terms) prime matter to form. Nature in itself has no real existence and can have none; it is entirely an ontological patience before the formal causality of supernature, and only as grace can nature possess any actuality at all.
3. No spiritual creature could fail to achieve its naturally supernatural end unless God himself were the direct moral cause of evil in that creature, which is impossible. Conversely, God saves creatures by removing extrinsic, physical (that is, non-moral) impediments to their natural union with him.
4. God became human so that humans should become God. Only the God who is always already human can become human. Only a humanity that is always already divine can become God.
5. God is all that is. Whatever is not God exists as becoming divine, and as such is God in the mode of what is other than God. But God is not ‘the other’ of anything” (xvii-xviii).

The other thing that makes this book difficult is simply the subject matter. To begin to grasp it, the reader needs some understanding of theology and even a bit of philosophy. While not as daunting as Hart’s Beauty of the Infinite, it is certainly more challenging than Experience of God or That All Shall Be Saved. With that caveat, it is definitely worth the effort.

The first essay, “Waking the Gods” argues that theosis is the natural end of reason. As opposed to a sharp divide between nature and supernature, Hart argues all finite existence is already potentially infinite. He writes, “we can become only what we are” (11). Any desire of finite things points to a greater desire towards infinite things; our desires exist on a continuum that ends in God’s fullness. There is no distinction between desiring natural things and supernatural things.

Sometimes Christians talk about divine and human as two opposite things. In this, they describe the incarnation as God crossing a huge boundary and becoming something totally opposed to God. Hart, in line with the early church theologians, helps us see this is just wrong:

“Orthodox Christology, after all, insists not merely that there is no conflict or rivalry between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, nor merely that they are capable of harmonious accord with one another. Rather, it asserts that humanity is so naturally compatible with divinity that the Son can be both fully divine and fully human at once without separation or confusion, in one agent whose actions are all therefore at once fully human and fully divine” (18).

The second essay shows that Nicholas of Cusa’s writings on infinite desire demonstrate the same thing: “Nicholas demonstrates that tehre is no such thing as a rational desire that is not a desire for teh infinity of God himself” (31). It was this chapter that led me to purchase a book of the works of Nicholas of Cusa. Hart ends this chapter with this beautiful sentence:

“We are nothing but created gods coming to be, becoming God in God, able to become divine only becuase, in some sense, we are divine from the very first” (34).

The third essay, “That Judgment Whereby You Judge”, which touches on God’s simplicity. In God, Truth and Beauty and Goodness are all the same. Because of this, when we experience beauty we find ourselves being judged by it. When we oppose Beauty and Truth the hardening of our heart is its own punishment. The Beauty that judges us is seen in the incarnation:

“Even in Christ’s dereliction, God’s infinity is made manifest: in the agony of Gethsemane, in going into the region of death, which lies over against God in enmity towards him and his creation, Christ shows that the divine infinity surpasses all separations, the divine beauty suffuses all distances; and the resurrection shows that the Son traverses the infinite as the infinite gift, never ceasing to be the true form of God: the ‘excess’ of his infinity remains beauty, even as it spills over and erases all boundaries” (47).

In the light of this beauty we shall see God as God is and see ourselves as we truly are (50)

This is getting long. The fourth essay is on our words and God’s truth. Here Hart brings up Kant’s moral argument that lying is always wrong, even if lying would save others. Hart argues for a moral theory in light of God’s truth which can be a prudence to keep silent, and lie if necessary, to protect others (the illustration here is lying to Nazis to protect the Jew sheltering in an attic). The fifth essay is the response to Cyril O’Regan which is about God and modernity and Hegel and all sorts of other juicy stuff. The sixth essay, “The Chiasmus”, is a sort of summary, if that’s what you want, where Hart presents his clearest arguments for theosis. Essentially, if God is God in Trinity as Christian theology teaches, than all creation is moving from nothingness towards divinity. All is from God, all moves towards God (and all will be saved).

Overall, this is a great book for readers of theology. I may never become Eastern Orthodox, but I am relatively convinced that theosis - humans becoming god as God is all in all - is the ultimate end of the gospel and God’s plan for the cosmos.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 5 out of 5]

You Are Gods is a series of six essays, each previously standing alone, reflecting on what may variously be termed the “natural supernatural”, the divine-humanity, or the chiasmic mutual inherence of divine and created nature. The stream of thought germinating these essays was prompted in large part by the recent reemergence of the “manualist” or “two-tier Thomist” account of the relation between nature and grace.

An early-modern product of Baroque Thomism—incidentally foreign to the thought of Aquinas himself, let alone to that of the patristic tradition as a whole—the manualist school is characterized by the dictum that “grace is extrinsic to the nature of the creature”. It posits that human nature, conceived in a solely immanent frame, is capable of fulfilling its natural ends and satiating its rational desire apart from any realization of, or even desire for, union with God. The operation of grace, whereby the elect are “lifted up” out of this self-sufficient natural order and into the beatific empyrean, is a wholly adventitious superaddition imparted by God to the rational creature in an act of voluntaristic whimsy. To put it more stupidly, a person could, in this picture, achieve a perfect 4.0 GPA in the school of existence, living in the complete and impeccable satiety of his innermost desires, finding unencumbered rest for his cor inquietum, without ever having the slightest curiosity about any dimension of reality beyond the bare, phenomenal facts of his surroundings. The salvation and deification of his soul; his direct, experiential ascent into the infinite Source of everything that is, would simply be extra credit.

Manualism runs parallel with the tendency within Thomism to view the fall as a descent from a gracious, exceptional superelevation into a natural order of ignorance and corruption; in stark contrast with the traditional understanding of the fall as a descent from a natural state of grace into an unnatural and illusory condition with the accidental features of suffering and death. It is, at bottom, an attempt to carve out a conceptual space in which nature exists for its own sake, operating under its own rules and pursuing its own autotelic ends. In this, it is complicit with the modern secular project; bizarrely so, when one considers that many of its adherents are self-styled “traditionalist” Catholics who imagine themselves to be agents of rebellion against modern decadence.

Hart seems somewhat at a loss to explain the appeal of the manualist revival, persisting as it does even in the face of withering philosophical and theological critique. Personally, I think it has something to do with a dimly-grasped awareness in our time, not only within academic circles but also in the broader society, of a violent disjointedness between, to borrow Sergii Bulgakov’s favored duality, hypostasis and nature: that is, between one’s personal self-realization as an “I”—or the “subjective” agency by which one experiences that self-realization—on the one hand, and the natural, “given”, “objective” content through which hypostasis realizes itself, on the other.

While the entire premodern Christian tradition understood both that nature does not exist extrahypostatically, since its end (and beginning) is to be “spiritualized” by the self-realization (which is also, at its core, theosis) of the human hypostasis, and that hypostasis disconnected from nature would be nothing more than an empty, phantasmic abstraction, devoid of any element of objectivity; the prevailing zeitgeist seems to be radically bifurcated between the natural and hypostatic principles, understanding them as antagonistic and even mutually-exclusive. We are torn, as John Milbank once tweeted, between transhumanism (hypostasis without nature) and posthumanism (nature without hypostasis); between those who would insist that nature does not exist in se but only within an “artificial” nexus of language, bearing no “objective” content but wholly “subjectivized” by the self-making self, and those who would subordinate hypostatic consciousness to nature, stripping the personal (spiritual) self of the ability to inhabit any world except “the world as it is”.

In a misguided effort to “rescue” nature, the neo-manualists are fleeing from the anti-natures of postmodernism, virtualism, and their lovechild, “wokeism” (which Bruno Maçães astutely identifies as a virtualist “metaverse” of its own, in which players create an avatar for themselves and play a reputational video game with strict rules of conduct) for the confines of an ultimately anti-humanist realm of natura pura. Fearing the obliteration of nature, they essentialize nature even in its fallenness, putting a stamp of divine approbation on even the ugliest and cruelest features of postlapsarian life.

In A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose’s survey of influential figures on the radical right, Rose says the following about Julius Evola:

“Evola did not live in hopeful anticipation of a better world after this one—the dream of heaven he called a ‘hallucination.’ He wished for a world after liberalism where holiness was again experienced in the otherwise cruel necessities of today. Both Christianity and liberalism teach us to see such necessities as things to be reformed and in need of redemption.”

This reassertion of “cruel necessities” is a pervasive feature of our contemporary situation, reflected perhaps most troublingly in the embrasure of various ethnic and national tribalisms that rightly oppose the negative, superficial, deracinating, and solely immanentist ideology of liberal globalism, but do so with an equally immanentist posthumanism that attaches itself to tribal identities equally devoid of moral or metaphysical substance. The perceived antagonism between the natural and the hypostatic dimensions of consciousness may be the result of their being “flattened out” onto a single, purely immanent plane, where they fight a bitter war over a narrow conceptual space rather than mirroring chiastically the divine perichoresis (two words I learned from reading this book, if you couldn’t tell). Liberal-democracy is a sterile, materialistic simulacrum of classical theism’s linkage between the immanent and the transcendent. Democracy is the positive, “immanent” element, and liberalism is the negative, abstract, ideological, “transcendent” element. Since the two elements are increasingly at odds with one another, the task of political theology is to recover the immanent dimension and preserve it from ideological erasure, while also articulating a transcendent vision that is more substantive than that of liberalism.

Hart addresses this “ontologization of fallenness” not only in the form of two-tier Thomism, but also in the form of Hegelian theology, which (apparently, since my knowledge of Hegel is limited to the notion that there is something called weltgeist and it once rode through Jena on horseback) understands the full sweep of history, in its repletion of genocides, plagues, and child murders, as a necessary process, somehow intrinsic to the divine nature, through which Geist discovers itself.

Answering the former, Hart draws on Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and Nicholas of Cusa to demonstrate that, as spiritual creatures created ex nihilo and called eternally from nothingness to the infinite consummation of our infinite ground and object, the final object of our intentionality or rational desire can only correspond to its infinite source and end. “By its very nature,�� Hart notes, “spiritual desire can never be formally teleologically finite, as the finite cannot be its own index of rational desirability.” Our conception, appraisal, and judgement of any contingent object of intentionality is only possible because that object is already silhouetted against a precognized transcendent horizon. We can approach nature only across the interval of the supernatural; and since God is the ground of our own being—His Spirit the essence of our own, breathed into us from the first—the end of our desire can only be the infinite nature of God Himself. Indeed, as Nicholas of Cusa says, “Were God not infinite, he would not be the end for desire.” “To exist as a spiritual creature,” Hart concludes, “is simply to have heard and (from the very first instant) responded to this total vocation. Creation is already deification—is, in fact, theogony.” We are, in Maximus’s formulation, created gods coming to be.

Answering the latter, Hart fascinatingly turns Cyril O’Regan’s interpretation of Hegelianism as a modern Gnosticism on its head, understanding Hegel’s system instead as an attempt at the complete extirpation of any inaccessibly transcendent order of divinity, a complete “stringing out” of the divine life within “secular” history. “Gnosticism”, as a theological category, is a far more nebulous concept than is commonly understood. Indeed, it proves difficult to disentangle “Gnosticism” from certain prominent assumptions of the Pauline or Johannine writings; such as Paul’s belief that the cosmos is captive to malevolent angelic archons through which the Son of Man, the Father’s protogonos withheld from the beginning of time, has passed, effecting the spiritual liberation of the world; or John’s understanding of the Father as the inaccessible and inexhaustible fount of divinity, utterly incomprehensible in Himself, and only manifested insofar as the fullness of His glory is reflected in His Logos.

The systems of thought we would typically characterize as Gnostic, like the Valentinian or Sethian sects, were in certain respects more syntactically and conceptually similar to the New Testament writers than are the modern schools of, say, Augustinianism, Lutheranism (via Jakob Böhme), Calvinism, or Thomism. The former held some part of the divine depths in reserve from the creation, preserving its innocence from earthly corruption and misery; while the latter, through an increasingly explicit voluntarism, made God in some sense the author of evil in the interest of demonstrating His absolute “sovereignty”. Where Gnosticism parted from orthodox Christianity was in taking the distinction between the divine Monad and creation to such an extreme that the latter was taken to have no relation to the former.

“The Chiasmus”, the final essay in this collection, is a profound and beautifully-written contribution to Christian metaphysics to which I couldn’t possibly do justice in this review (not that I’ve done justice to any of the other essays), aside from presenting a few scattered thoughts and quotations. A chiasmus is a repetition of words or constructs in an inverted order: to use a lazy example, “when the going gets tough, the tough gets going.” It is analogous to the way in which a mirror reflects light. The essay is a meditation on how each of the three hypostases, in their internal perichoresis, is invertedly reflected in the God-in-the-mode-of-becoming-God of creation:

“[The] ‘course’ of glory in the Godhead—the taxis of the divine being—impresses its own reflex in our specular [i.e., “mirror-like”] natures, almost under the form of an inversion of the light (as is proper for a mirror), so that God’s own loving ‘return’ to himself [through the Logos, “the eternal reality of God’s manifestation of his own essence to himself, and therefore the eternal act whereby God is God”, in the Spirit] is our integration into him. Everything—being, power, creation, holiness, love, truth, faith—flows from the Father, through the Son, to the Spirit, and is restored by the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father.”

The economic outpouring of the Father though the Son and to the Spirit is repeated, in inverted form, in the soul: “that ideal surface where two depths are reconciled, or where one depth creates another,” as the creaturely Spirit (“created spirit” is a misnomer, since the distinction between the Holy Spirit and our personal spirit is more modal or perspectival than ontological) ascends, analogously, from the more “external” to the more “internal” aspects of the soul, effecting a return-to-self on the part of the creature that in turn reflects God’s eternal return to Himself “within his eternal circle of glory,”; which is also, due to the God-breathed nature of Spirit—its ultimate ontological identity with God—an ascent into the divine infinitude. Gregory of Nyssa analogizes the three dimensions of Christian life—action, word, and thought—with the Spirit, the Son, and the Father, respectively. The Spirit meets us in practical life and ascends through our words and into our thoughts, conforming our animate depths to our “brightening surfaces,” just as the depths of the Father’s infinitude are fully and eternally reflected by the Son (with no “surfeit” of the Father over the Son, as Hart puts it) in the blissful consummation of the Spirit:

“God’s Spirit is the fullness of the divine life, while the spirit of the creature has its beginning and its existence only in the return of that fullness to its fountainhead. The creature’s ascent to God is already situated within God’s eternal return to himself, as a participating modality of God’s kenosis and plerosis, both in the exitus and reditus of creation and in the trinitarian processions. If the divine Spirit is the consummation in delight of the Father’s knowledge of himself in the Son, so finite spirit exists as having been ever called to seek the unity of the Logos and the Father—of intelligibility and Being—in the satiety of that very same eternal bond of love or bond of glory.”

The advent of the Son of God in “historical” time is “the chiasmus at the center of creation, the very place where creation occurs as an eternal act of God.” It is where the inward unity of the immanent and the transcendent are revealed as an eternal reality; the “infinitely condensed juncture” or “chiastic point of indistinction wherein all things ‘consist’”. The Incarnation is the Ur-reality, the infinite “condensation” of Being (somewhat like the universe before the Big Bang), containing the all-universal content that no single religious or intellectual tradition can fully “unfold”. It is the very identity of “the God who pours himself forth in creation, even to the point of identity with one historical man, and who draws all creation out of nothingness to himself, even to the point of identity with the ‘all in all’.” If humanity were not united with divinity from eternity in the incarnate Logos, “humanity would have no existence, since it would have no final cause.”

Because of the “’ever greater’ transcendence of the divine over the finite,” the “infinite qualitative difference” between the divine and human, Christ can truly be the God-man, uniting the divine and human natures in Himself without becoming a “monstrosity”, a hybrid, or a paradox. Christ embodies both the utter excess of the infinite over the finite, while simultaneously demonstrating the “perfect fittingness of the divine image to its archetype. For the perfect man is also God of God: not a fabulous demigod, but human in the fullest sense because divine in the fullest sense.” The more one becomes human, a purified image, the more one is “lifted up” into the infinite glory of the divine archetype; thus Christ may be—must be—perfect God and perfect man.

Hence, there can be no separation between the “synoptic” Christ and the “Johannine” Christ:

“Christ is, at one and the same time and in the very same life and actions, both the prophet proclaiming the Kingdom, pronouncing the displeasure of God upon the wealthy, the cruel, the violent, the hypocritical, and all who neglect mercy, always situated within human history and culture and moving inexorably toward the eminently human destiny of the cross, and thereby in every moment of his story expressing the longing of creation for its God—and also the divine savior who descends into this cosmos from the divine Aeon as a conqueror, in perfect contrariety to the Archon and archons of this age and to the logic of fallen history, constituting in his person the impenetrable enigma of the eternal within time, the light of judgment by which all secret things are exposed, the truth that transcends every historical instant, ever place, every limited association, the one whose every human action and word is always already pervaded and transfigured by the eschatological light of the accomplished resurrection, of the Last Day and the Age to Come, and of the divine ‘destiny’ of eternal life in the Aeon ‘above.’”

No comment would suffice for this lengthy pericope of the book’s final section, so I simply present it for your reading pleasure:

“The inmost reality of the spirit in each of us…is nothing but that act of joyous accord with and ecstatic ascent into God. This is what Maximus identifies as our ‘natural will,’ which is nothing but our absolute preoccupation with the supernatural end intrinsic to our very being, more primordial and more ultimate than the transient and finite preoccupations of the psychological ego. In the eternal act of creation, God’s will that the creature be is always already the will of the spirit within the creature to assent to that eternal vocation, because that assent exists within the divine Spirit’s eternal response to the Father; every creaturely spirit freely wills its own existence only as a created inflection of God’s eternal ‘I AM’ in the mystery of the Trinity. The creaturely spirit’s freedom is, in its essence, the freedom of the Holy Spirit within the divine life. The eternal Yes of God to the creature is always already the creature’s eternal Yes to its creator, for the latter exists only within the eternal Yes of the Father to his own image in the Son, in the delight of the Spirit; and this is the Son’s Yes to the will of the Father; and this is also the Spirit’s eternal Yes to the Father’s full expression in the Son; and, in the end, these are all one and the same Yes.”

[Avery Amstutz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a bit scattered. His takedown of Thomist thought on nature and super-nature was thorough and compelling. His discussion on aesthetics and ethics was insightful. And they were plenty of random little quips to keep it interesting.

Here is one of those Hartisms

"The failure to see the face of Christ in the poor and infirm and refugees and prisoners is the soul's condemnation.
For instance if impoverished and terrified refugees say should arrive by the thousands and our southern borders bearing their children with them driven from their homes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras by monstrous violence and hopeless poverty, much of it the long unfolding consequence of our own barbaric policies in Central America.
And then our degenerate dropsical orange goblin of a president and the little hoard of oleaginous fascists who slid out of the spiritual sewer by his side, react by imprisoning the adult asylum seekers and abducting and caging their children, subjecting all of them to the most abominable psychological torture degradation and despair, in order to terrify other refugees who might also come seeking shelter; here we need not doubt for a moment that according to the words of Christ these persons have revealed themselves as damned at this moment."

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep and dense, sometimes perplexing, but usually interesting, and often fascinating.
It was all I could do to just try to understand his ideas. Subjecting them to any evaluative analysis is beyond my ken. But I would appreciate someone in his theological/philosophical realm taking up some of the challenges he throws down.


Scriptor Ignotus wrote a very worthwhile summary/review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Gavin McGhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Point 3 in “The Chiasmus” was both a dazzling insight and a beautiful synthesis. The fact that Christian Platonism can be distilled, synthesized and reiterated in so many ways is both bewildering and sensational.

This is an excellent collection of essays on the subject (a subject of which is I am new to). I say it is excellent because of the obvious (quoted in the commentary on the back cover of the book) skill Hart has as an essayist. Harts writing is engaging and relatively easy to follow. Some sections, because of the repertoire of figures he engages with, will require a second reading however. Harts engagement with other contemporary and semi-contemporary figures is often presented as if it is on a treadmill; quick, to the point (which can be helpful) but for a rookie like myself, I recommend pushing through, because the the closing essay feels like a stage for Hart and his metaphysical rigour to shine. He does confess at one point in a challenging essay: “to this point, I have been pursuing my topic in a somewhat elliptical and errant matter”, so I am convinced of his self-awareness as a rhetorician.

The entirety of the book perhaps reflects the third essay. It is the beauty of the act of God as God, impressing on us a willingness and a confidence to see the world as a an abiding incarnation. This to me is the only possible way to render ‘hope’ not as a personal ‘self-help’ tool but as a work of the spirit; a consequence of the only ‘real thing’: the Trinity.

Point 32 in the Chiasmus was very intriguing! Bulgakov is a titan and I’m excited to do a deep dive!

[Andrew Talbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The least noteworthy of DBH’s works, to my mind. The first and last articles are certainly the the best, but the former is beautifully thomist while he asserts indifference to Thomas while the latter is simply (and mostly) beautiful.

Pia Fraus is a mess of ideas and dismissive of many without engaging. Though he takes a shot at Thomas again for endorsing torture in cases of heresy, he fails to note his champion, Maximus, had his hand and tongue removed at the instigation of the archbishop of Constantinople and the emperor. Bonhoeffer is more interesting and thought-provoking on the idea of truth and deception when the lives of innocents are at stake (and he’s wrong about thomists here as well). The prioritization of transcendentals in the moment is also odd, but venturing into territory too deep for me at present.

Geist’s Kaleidoscope has interesting moments, but Hart rarely engages with any other scholar of Gnosticism (e.g. Pagels) in the article and his off-hand dismissal of Newman, as well as the entire omission of work done on the hermeneutics of doctrine and reception history is disappointing.

Read Beauty of the Infinite.

[Christian Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of essays is DBH at his best. The prolific writer covers an array of issues pertaining to the ontology of God and of man that provide a deeper insight into the variations of the Christian tradition. Of course, this work is full of his critical and polemical jabs, but would it be a DBH work if it weren’t?

[Cougar · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fabulous read. In a little over 100 pages, topics such as the judgment of beauty, the rational will's infinite desire, and the silence of God are touched upon in a conglomeration of essays. It does get complex for slowbois like myself, especially when Hart refers to the ideas of philosophers like Hegel, whom I have not read. Probably gonna reread in the future after more laborious study.

[Solomon Svehla · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly brilliant work.

[Jason Morrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

We need a goth DBH

[Derek Kreider · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great but deep book to get you thinking. I want to come back to this again when I have more time to reflect on the will and theosis.

[Samuel G. Parkison · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yikes

[Matthew J. Winbow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart begins with five propositions that form the basis of the book:
1. The sole sufficient natural end of all spiritual creatures is the supernatural, and grace is nothing but the necessary liberation of all creatures for their natural ends.
2. Nature stands in relation to supernature as (in Aristotelian terms) prime matter to form. Nature in itself has no real existence and can have none; it is entirely an ontological patiency before the formal causality of supernature, and only as grace can nature possess any actuality at all.
3. No spiritual creature could fail to achieve its naturally supernatural end unless God himself were the direct moral cause of evil in that creature, which is impossible. Conversely, God saves creatures by removing extrinsic, physical (that is, non-moral) impediments to their natural union with him.
4. God became human so that humans should become God. Only the God who is always already human can become human. Only a humanity that is always already divine can become God.
5. God is all that is. Whatever is not God exists as becoming divine, and as such is God in the mode of what is other than God. But God is not “the other” of anything.

Hart is as always brilliant! Like anything he writes, it is not for the faint-hearted. We are treated to many excellent quotations such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464) “Quod nisi deus esset infinitus, non foret finis desidere”: “Were God not infinite, he could not be an end for desire.”

My favourite chapter was the last “6. The Chiasmus”. It begins with an untranslated quotation in German from the Dominican Meister Eckhart (1260 – 1328) that says in English “The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me. My eye and God’s eye, this is one eye and one seeing and one knowing and one loving.”

As always, Hart has some harsh words for the Reformed: “A strictly Reformed theology of, say, penal substitutionary atonement is infinitely more remote from the Logos who has become incarnate in created nature and history than is, for instance, the bodhisattva ideal unfolded in the Lotus Sutra and the Bodhicaryavatara; indeed, the latter in some very real sense attests, under the veil of the unfamiliar, to the truth made present in Christ, while the former is totally antithetical to that truth and therefore pure falsehood.” Speaking of the metaphysics of Hinduism and classical Vedanta he writes that “Sri Ramakrishna’s understanding of the nature of an avatara is truer to the gospel than is Calvin’s bifurcated Christology.” I think those insults are meant to hurt!

He writes “The church is simply a corporate and historical expression of Christ’s affirmation that “You are gods.” [John 10:34] What is true of him is true of us, even though we exist as the created (rather than uncreated) subjects of that truth, and in our created (rather than uncreated, which is to say inmost) nature participate in that godhead rather than impart it. Still, even so, there is an “infinite destiny” implicit in that created experience: that final indistinction, when “I shall know even as I am known.”

Hart as always is open to using gnostic language to make his point: “The vocation of rational freedom is, so to speak, to gather up the sparks of the Shekinah that were lost in the breaking of the vessels, or to aid in the rescue of the lost Sophia; spirit (neshamah) is always called to a homeland that belonged to it before it ever “entered” this world (this being the indubitable truth preserved in “gnosticism”); and yet that homeland was never lost or forsaken in any chronological past, some moment “before” sublunary time as one event in a sequence of discrete events. The fall is a decline from the eternal end in which the creature was created, from which every spiritual creature has departed in failing to embrace its only possible last end within the conditions of time. But even this is possible only by virtue of that which remains forever unfallen within the creature: the natural will that longs and seeks only its own divine fulfillment, the transcendental ecstasy of every spirit in its quest to be united to its source and end—to be embraced within the eternal Logos and thereby translated into union with the fountainhead of all that is, the Father.”

I really appreciated this thought and it goes back to Origen (185 – 253), and how his writings were later misread. This section is so important! “…that homeland was never lost or forsaken in any chronological past, some moment “before” sublunary time as one event in a sequence of discrete events. The fall is a decline from the eternal end in which the creature was created, from which every spiritual creature has departed in failing to embrace its only possible last end within the conditions of time.” Origen was accused later of preaching “the fabulous preexistence of souls” because later readers would misunderstand this exact point! History is known in light of the end! God will be All in All.

One of the endorsements on the back of the book is by John Behr and I wish Hart would have entered into dialogue with some of Behr’s work within this volume. I am particularly thinking of Behr’s work “John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel” and his histories “The Way to Nicaea” and “The Nicene Faith”. As Behr is keen to point out, the starting point for all theology is the “one Lord Jesus Christ” the Risen Crucified One. We do not begin with “God the Son” or a “Divine Logos” but with the “one Lord Jesus Christ”.

In the words of John Behr, “in and through the Passion, the one Lord Jesus Christ becomes, as human, that which he, as God, always is.” As a result of this transformation we no longer know Jesus according to fleshly categories (height, weight, ethnicity, etc.) but now only know him as the Logos of God.

The ancient theologians often used the analogy of iron and fire. The properties by which we identify a piece of iron (cold, hard, etc.) are replaced by the properties of the fire (hot, fluid, etc.).

In the same way, the “one Lord Jesus Christ” by ascending into heaven remains that which he is, as a man, becomes that which he (the same one), as God, always is, the eternal Logos of God. God, like the fire, remains unchanged but is now embodied, though the body is no longer measured by the space and time dimensions of our world.

Hart echoes this point says “The union of creation with God is both the most ultimate and most original of creaturely truths; divinization, though it be the consummation of creation in time, is the beginning of creation in eternity, and it can be neither without being the other. And nothing can exist that is not always already, in eternity, divinized, plunged ecstatically into the fire of the divine life.”

As Paul writes “For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” Romans 8:29 (WEB)

Our destiny as followers of Christ is that we will be like him. That he is the first of many brothers and sisters.

“…he has granted to us his precious and exceedingly great promises; that through these you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust.” 2 Peter 1:4 (WEB)

“…and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” Romans 8:17 (WEB)

We will “become partakers of the divine nature” and will be “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ”.

This is accomplished because the “one Lord Jesus Christ” is as the Nicene Creed says “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God… Being of one substance with the Father” It wasn’t a second class divinity who appeared in the flesh but the very fire of God! Homoousios!

As Paul writes in Ephesians 2:6 (NIV) “And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,” In one sense Paul can speak of us as already seated with Christ, we are already reigning with him!

As always with Hart, this is a challenging and engaging read and well worth your time.

[John Chaffee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this is another book by DBH that has caused me to have to rethink everything. A thin book physically, but a thick one theologically. Honestly, I agree with DBH, “Will Christianity ever find its way to America?”

[Greg Zorko · Rating 4 out of 5]

I understood maybe 15% of this but he's such a good writer that it was still pretty fun.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quoting his main points:

“The sole sufficient natural end of all spiritual creatures is the supernatural, and grace is nothing but the necessary liberation of all creatures for their natural ends.

Nature stands in relation to supernature as (in Aristotelian terms) prime matter to form. Nature in itself has no real existence and can have none; it is entirely an ontological patiency before the formal causality of supernature, and only as grace can nature possess any actuality at all.

No spiritual creature could fail to achieve its naturally supernatural end unless God himself were the direct moral cause of evil in that creature, which is impossible. Conversely, God saves creatures by removing extrinsic, physical (that is, non-moral) impediments to their natural union with him.

God became human so that humans should become God. Only the God who is always already human can become human. Only a humanity that is always already divine can become God.’’

God is all that is. Whatever is not God exists as becoming divine, and as such is God in the mode of what is other than God. But God is not “the other” of anything.’’

[Claudiu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eclectic, provocative, but nonetheless rooted in sound dogmatics and metaphysics. Nobody applies neo-platonic thought to post-patristic theology with as much elegance as Hart does. Of course he is just as inflammatory and aesthetics-driven as always, but this time with two new ingredients: high trinitarianism and kenosis. Throw in some Hegelian discourse on God’s loss of innocence as defense against the return of Gnosticism, a tour of Kant’s superior ethics compared to the Augustinian/Thomist one and you can already smell the orthodoxy in the room.

Not recommended as introductory reading on Hart, but still one of his less polarizing writings.

[jt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult to review, as the book includes a number of disjointed texts and essays, all of which together possess a somewhat overarching theme hinted at in the title. Fortunately, I find most of the arguments persuasive and found the last chapter, “the Chiasmus” something worth rereading.

[Stian Ødegård · Rating 4 out of 5]

bra!

[Stacy · Rating 2 out of 5]

In general, I'm a fan of Hart's, though I'm not sure I'm intelligent enough or educated enough to read him. Nevertheless, every few years, I tackle another one of his books. Being able to communicate simply has never been his strengths. There are so many times when he leaves in foreign phrases. Sometimes, this makes sense, given the phrase. Other times, however, once I learned the meaning of the phrase, I was annoyed to discover that the foreign language did nothing to heighten the meaning of the sentence, so there was no rational reason to leave it untranslated. I often wonder if his editors have actually read his books.

In this book, even more so than in "All Shall Be Saved," Hart sounds like John Piper making a case for 'Christian hedonism,' as Piper calls it. Both men teach a type of irresistible grace, only Hart is less ready to admit it, reframing the the irresistible as 'freedom' (which he doesn't define as choice, but as the unblocked journey towards one's end -- the 'unblocked' part being what makes it 'freedom').

The book that made me first admire Hart was "Beauty of the Infinite" so it comes as no surprise that it's in his essay on beauty that he shines. There is a qualitative difference in his essays in which he is defending universalism and in his essays on beauty. In the former, he writes like a philosopher, and in the latter, he writes like a theologian.

[Jenny Webb · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods argues that humanity’s true destiny is deification: not an added “supernature” but the fulfillment of who we already are. He dismantles the old Catholic distinction between nature and grace, insisting that creation has only one end—union with God. Flowing from this is his uncompromising universalism: if God is love and freedom means becoming what we were made to be, then all creatures will be reconciled to God.

For readers in Mormon studies, there’s both familiarity and tension here. Hart’s talk of deification resonates with Mormon teachings on human exaltation, yet his metaphysical collapse of nature and grace leaves no room for the distinctive Mormon narrative of covenant and embodied practice. Mormons might find his rhetoric thrilling but also bracingly foreign: Hart writes as if theosis is a cosmic inevitability, not a drama worked out in community, ritual, and covenant faithfulness.

This is not a pastoral book or a scriptural commentary but a philosophical-theological manifesto. I found it both exhilarating and exasperating, so it was doing what it was designed to do I suppose. For Mormon Studies it’s not a conversation partner so much as a challenge—an invitation to articulate why the Mormon vision of grace and theosis takes a different path (or ask if it does).

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As stated in the title, we humans are gods and it is inherent and possible for us to transcend our natural condition into a supernatural one. The alternative - rejected here - is that God predestines some humans and pulls only them through grace from the natural to the supernatural condition. In this second alternative, there is nothing godly left in us after the fall. The theological and metaphysical foundations for this book were laid in “The Experience of God”, and there are plenty of remains from the recent “Tradition and Apocalypse” book. In a general way, Hart wants to undo most of the Aristotelian aspect of Christianity introduced by Thomas Aquinas and later promoted by Catholics and Protestants, and to return to the more Platonic and primitive version of Christianity still promoted by the Eastern Orthodox theology. There is way too much confrontation with Hegel and German Idealism in this book. These six essays are rather disjointed and each one focuses on a related, but different topic.

[Joseph Sverker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly not an easy read. Hart is a creative writer with a vocabulary one can simply dream of. At times it becomes a little challenging to both keep track of the intellectual argument as well as the linguistic equilibrism. Anyway, Hart critiques what he calls a two-tier understanding of the relationship between the natural and the supernature. He thinks that supernature cannot be something that is an add-on to the natural. Rather the natural is in unity with the supernature. Grace and nature, or law (can't remember now if he speaks about the law) are not to be polarised. There are much to ponder further upon in this book. The discussion about the Good, the True and the Beautiful is helpful as I see it. Hart has an interesting take on the moral dilemma of if one is to lie in order to save life based on that discussion. If I remember correctly he argues that since we live in a world where there is a split between truth, goodness and beauty we cannot expect to be able to be true and good at the same time. Sometimes it might be necessary to be untrue in order to be good.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of wonderful essays, some more or less academic (rather impenetrable at points in the beginning) than others. Altogether quite brilliant.

Of course the real star of the show is the final essay- The Chiasmus: The Created Supernatural and the Natural Divine. This is perhaps one of the greatest works of any that I’ve read from Hart, something of Bulgakov, Maximus, Nicholas of Cusa, and Eckhart among others (perhaps some Hegel although he’s dealt with in exhaustive detail in the previous penultimate essay). In this essay Hart somewhat masterfully lays out a rigorous Sophianic description of the created world becoming uncreated through the free condescension of the uncreated to the created. Or something to that effect. Truly beautiful, although I’m sure I could afford to reread. This was, in retrospect, a poor choice for an audiobook. This reading would benefit greatly from patient deliberation and tracking of references and footnotes.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

In these essays David Bentley Heart show different aspects of how God's creation is something he has released from nothingness - and how we to are part of this divination, and on our way into becoming, as we are part of God - because all being is part of God. Kind of. There are lots of more clarifying paragraphs to get from the book, and you do not have to agree in order to find the idea facinating. It is not the mos commonly held views, and it borders to a kind of gnosticism that is also discussed, but mostly it is something that is found within the mystical tradition. All these things are touched upon in valrious ways, and event if the book was dense and difficult, I still think i managed to get enough out of it in order to understand these issues deeper.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has had a profound impact on my approaches to spirituality, but it's not necessarily an easy one to recommend to others.

A previous reviewer noted that the book often feels like 'half a conversation,' and that's not wrong. The better part of my experience with these essays was the 'half of a different conversation' that I had in my own head as my attention latched on to different moments in Hart's meditations.

Human experience is so big. Hart has helped me to understand more completely the ways in which the thing we call The Human and the things we call Divine can be understood better together than separately.

Grateful to have read this one.

[Fraser Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

DBH goes after the classical distinction between nature and supernature, arguing that such a distinction is ultimately incoherent. If such distinction is erased, the only logical conclusion is that all of created reality already always divine. For Hart, the language of Nicaea of the fully human and fully God formulation about Christ encapsulates this truth.

Though Hart's argument is persuasive, I am hesitant to go with him where he goes with it. At this moment, I can't fully articulate my disagreement with him. I will have to continue to think about it until I can fully articulate it. The closest counter-argument I can come up with is that, Hart collapses revelation to metaphysics.

[Jérémie Cascales · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book but reserved for lay theologians, Hart writes as if the readers have already knowledge of the subject.
This book explore the idea of « Theosis » or « deification » grounded in the Orthodoxe theology. A theology well known from the Church Fathers, seeing the human being already divine and living to unblinding itself of the obstacles to see its divinity. Of course all of this is reflected from the Trinity, transcendance and immanence, and also through its infra-relation as being three in one.

Great book to dig into deep Orthodox theology on Human, God, and the Trinity

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hart, for those familiar, both works within and pushes beyond the great tradition of Christianity. Like the other books of his I have read, his primary foil is Thomism. Ultimately, though thought-provoking, my main misgivings with this work is that he seems to elide the creator-creature distinction with his argument that the inner aspect of the human being is actually God's very Spirit and thus it is eternal. Hart is always worth reading, especially since he is such a clear writer and provocative thinker, but he is not always worth following.

[Lukas Merrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - 4 ⭐️

DBH makes me think… really hard, and that alone is worth the time spent reading his work. You Are Gods is a collection of essays that explore his theological monism in great depth. I don’t agree with every way in which his theology plays out, but I do appreciate how he stays consistent in his logic.

The chapter on aesthetics was absolutely beautiful (pun intended) and there were a few others that have affected the way I think about my own theological positions. All in all, I’m glad I read this collection, but it wasn’t Hart’s strongest work to date.