David Bentley Hart: belief

Transcript context

…Heidegger, whom you understand quite well. Well, he’s one of them, yes, the philosophers I’ve worked with. I have to admit, this question comes a little out of left field, but with me, I never know which aspect of my work someone might be interested in at a given moment. With Heidegger, it’s a very ambiguous figure, of course, but he certainly was — putting aside his own incredible moral defects. For those who don’t know, he was a member, for a while, of the Nazi Party, as much out of cowardice as anything else, but I think out of — early on, at least — some degree of sympathy. But when he wasn’t being evil, he was a very reflective philosopher on how we have arrived at what he considered an age of nihilism, an age that values the will to power over physical environment above all other things, without any sense of the mystery of being, the piety of not trying to grasp and control and reduce all of reality to instrumentality and utility. He tells a very powerful story about the genealogy of Western nihilism, how we arrived at what he calls the age of technology, in which everything is simply a project of the will, and the whole of the world is nothing but a reserve of resources to be exploited for the purpose of acquisition and for the purposes of the will. Now, I don’t agree with the whole story, but as I say, it makes one think about the genealogy of the way we see the world and see the world as desacralized and disenchanted. Much of the appeal, I suppose, of Eastern Orthodoxy to me in my youth was precisely that it was a Christian tradition that emphasized precisely the sense of the cosmic mystery of Christ and the cosmic mystery of the revelation of God in all things, and put this great emphasis on the notion that the heart of Christian thought is the idea of deification, of union with God, of the whole creation renewed in some unimaginable ways, so that — a very popular image goes — so that the whole universe is like a burning bush shining with the glory of God, but not consumed. I would say that if there’s any connection there — and since no one’s ever asked me this before, I’m not sure there is — but if there is, then you can see how someone who takes seriously the genealogy of nihilism that someone like Heidegger unfolds might be drawn to, among Christian traditions, a very robust depiction of a glorified reality in which the entire cosmos participates in the sacred mystery. You mentioned questions out of left field. Who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970?…

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