God's beauty: the aesthetics of faith

The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.

By David Bentley Hart. Eerdmans, 462 pp., $45.00.

DAVID BENTLEY HART is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy with a recent Ph.D. in theology from the University of Virginia. This volume, his first book, is a much-revised form of his dissertation. Given the scope of its references and sheer intellectual flair, I can think of no more brilliant work by an American theologian in the past ten years--a remarkable beginning for a theological career. But be forewarned--this is tough going, distinctly not the book to take to the beach.

Three thinkers seem Hart's most important influences: John Milbank, Gregory of Nyssa and Hans Urs yon Balthasar. Let me use the occasion of this review to try to explain aspects of the work of three very complex theologians and then talk about how Hart ties them together.

Milbank, an English philosophical theologian about to move back to Britain after several years of teaching at me university of Virginia, stands at the center of a self-conscious theological movement called "radical orthodoxy" (its adherents have their own book series, their own Web site and a passion for self-promotion). In his 1990 book Theology and Social Theory (also brilliant, also difficult) Milbank offered a new account of how to make a ease for Christianity in a postmodern world.

The Enlightenment, he argued, is over and done with. Starting around the 17th century, many philosophers, scientists, political theorists and even theologians dreamt of proving their conclusions so decisively that no reasonable person could ever doubt them again. Lots of intellectuals these days no longer think that's possible. This conclusion need not imply radical relativism. Truth--the truth--can still be out there. But all our arguments for what we believe the truth to be (even in science or math) rest inevitably on some set of assumptions, some perspective, with which other reasonable folk might not agree. Our arguments therefore need to involve persuasion and rhetorical strategy; we can't prove we're right. Accepting that turn to the rhetorical is one definition of what it means to be post-Enlightenment or postmodern.

Ever since Nietzsche's version of postmodernism, Milbank's argument continues, many philosophers have concluded that truth is a matter of power. If everyone has a different story to tell, and no one can prove the truth of their story, then the only way to establish something as true is to have enough power (enough brute force or enough rhetorical skill) to impose your idea of truth on everyone else. As Nietzsche put it, truth is the lie socially agreed upon.

That conclusion not only shapes a great deal of recent philosophy, but also pervades our society more widely. Even a generation or two ago, arguments for social justice characteristically began with Enlightenment appeals to reason: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal ..." These days, at least in academic circles, they more often begin with power: "You whites can no longer ignore us people of color; we have more power now ..." (The fact that appeals to power often come from the advocates of groups without much power is one of the paradoxes of current leftist thought, but that is a topic for another time.)

Milbank's bold claim is this: These post-Nietzschean philosophers assert that truth (socially accepted truth, the only kind there is) is to be decided only as a struggle among competing powers. They treat that analysis as if it were simply an objective account of how things are. But, given their own assumptions, it is just a story too, potentially one among others. Milbank offers a Christian counterstory.

Christianity, he says, declares that the world is ultimately not about power but about love. The God who is ultimately the beginning and end of all things is not a tyrant at the top of a hierarchy but a community of three mutually loving persons. The world that God created is made for peace, not violence, and so violence is always a distortion of the true nature of things. Thus the Nietzschean story of how things are is really only a story of how things have become distorted. Christianity's story of love and peace is the truer story. Not, of course, that this is something we can prove. Rather, Milbank offers a rhetorical argument in its favor--the only way a good postmodernist will try to persuade anyone of anything.

Hart follows his example, with two principal differences. First, Milbank paints with a broad brush; he tends to say that nearly everyone since Nietzsche has been wrong in the same way. Hart too drinks that nearly all Continental philosophers following Nietzsche have been wrong, but he believes they have been wrong in a host of different ways. His examinations of those particular errors contribute to both the book's brilliance and its difficulty. Second, where Milbank's hero in Theology and Social Theory was Augustine--more recently he focuses on Aquinas--Hart, standing in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, appeals more often to Gregory of Nyssa.