This is not a full review, but these are simply the thoughts that went through my mind as I read through David B. Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. If you want my conclusion on the book, I’d say that, if you have been following Hart’s career and thought process, his conclusion is not surprising; but it is exciting, at least, if you do agree with him on many of the things he has assumed and argued to be normative before now. My assessment of Hart based on everything I’ve read from him and heard him say is that he is the most consistent Christian Classical Theist I have ever seen, and I have great admiration for this. This does not change with Tradition and Apocalypse. Infact, he continues a thought process that readers of his previously released Roland in Moonlight – what I consider to be his best book – would recognize. From the little I have seen of the later released You are Gods, he takes this even further there.
Hart, in the book, gives his understanding of Newman’s project to defend tradition, ditto for Blondel. I have read neither, and so I will leave the assessment of his accuracy to those who have. But, regardless of Hart’s accuracy here, he is not against them as much as against the positions he sees them as holding, which in the worst forms births the traditionalisms, fideisms, and historicisms – all species of faithlessness – that bedevils faith in our modern age. Here, he is repeating a sentiment expressed in Roland in Moonlight, that “in an age of unbelief, everyone is an unbeliever to some degree”. The positions on tradition he goes against are those that seek to find justification for tradition in the historical record as such and those who seek to reconcile history and dogma by an analysis of the past, in both cases to see the history of our tradition as the inevitable development of some deposit in our founding event in the first century.
Whether Blondel, Newman, the modern traditionalist, or the historicist, they all try to find the substance of tradition’s unity in the past, even if it is, in the case of Blondel — as Hart sees him — a unity reducible to neither the dogmatic pronouncements nor the tumultuous history in which it was birthed. Hart sees them as missing a key insight, an insight that, for me, would be obvious if one was to follow their classical theism better. It is that, whether it is seeing the unity of tradition as akin to a living organism (Newman) or seeing it as a unity irreducible to either dogma or history (Blondel), this unity is teleological. Newman and Blondel, in Hart’s construal, have forgotten a basic Aristotelian cornerstone of the very tradition they defend. This is another insight present in Roland in Moonlight. Using the example of the Self, Roland says “Identity is a kind of eschatology in that view of things. The emergence of the self is a kind of nisus toward the eternal.” In Tradition and Apocalypse, the unity of tradition, its identity, is in eschatology, understood as a final cause, in the Aristotelian sense.
This is where I see Hart’s consistent classical theism as having great benefit. His construal of tradition as united in the eschatological is his ingenious tackling of a problem with tradition as a coherent concept, which is that “It would almost certainly have to possess such plasticity as to be useless: potentially, it could serve as a defense of anything and so, actually, it would provide an effective defense of nothing.” This is what seeing tradition as a unity in the past, whatever form this takes, turns out to be. Instead of the teleological unity in the manner of form, it is made instead to be a substrate, almost like the early modern understanding of prime matter, which can be contorted into whatever shape we would like at any given moment. Of course, we could call this a “unity”, but it wouldn’t be a unity in any way that matters. It would be a contrived and arbitrary sameness.
As a teleological unity, however, tradition’s all-encompassing power of unity is seen as rooted in the object of tradition, for we hand down believed signs of Christ. This is where I see Hart’s Christian classical theism as most consistent, because the understanding of the kingdom as “here, but not yet” is perfectly compatible with basic Aristotelian categories. The kingdom is behind the veil of appearance. It is the Holy of Holies of the heart, behind the veil of matter and time. It is transcendent and immanent. It is the “place” from which creation issues forth eternally as its beginning and end. Christ’s advent in the first century cannot, therefore, confine him to the past. To look towards the Kingdom is to look towards where the past and future meet in eternal present, and for us who live in the fleeting reflection of this eternal present in our own present are supposed to see the unity of tradition here in there. That is, we are supposed to see Tradition as an Apocalypse, the breaking in of the kingdom from eyond that constitutes and reconstitutes our whole temporality. This is where individual concerns and the concerns of the whole body meet without confusion or conflict, for this “place” of eternity for us is none other than Christ Himself, his fullness.
Hart is showing here the strongest flavour of Christocentricity I can imagine – and here I might add, I do not consider “exclusivist” understandings of Christianity Christocentric enough – in that he sees Christ as a “positive unity”. What this means is that he does not consider the unity of Christ as negatively defined against some sort of heresy or “foreign religion”. He sees Christ as the unity of all things. For tradition, it means that we cannot tell in advance what will be encompassed by Christian tradition. Given the chaotic history of Christian Tradition – where even the surest expressions of orthodoxy in one age might become the fiercest heresies in the next, and vice versa – it would be irresponsible to even try to exclude in advance even those things we currently call “heresies” – except, obviously, plainly evil things, like murder, or eternal conscious torment ;). Hart uses the example of Vedanta as a possible philosophical tradition to engage with, and with this, I fully agree, although he may not like that I believe this was one of Frithjof Schuon’s strengths. I also have my own thoughts on what Traditions to engage with (and NOT “plunder”, as Hart emphasized). Some of them already appear on this blog. At least one of those is that I believe that we have not really plumbed the depths of the Neoplatonic synthesis, especially with regard to the Trinity. I’m sure there are others who have similar opinions on Hegel, Spinoza, Mahayana Buddhism, and so on. I see this as a plus. Let us explore and learn. If our hope and our tradition are rooted in Christ himself beyond the Cosmos, then we have nothing to fear. I believe Hart would agree that going on this journey with the aim of subjecting this world to Christianity is a fool’s errand and a betrayal of the Gospel. We might (as in my case) eventually see other traditions as valid and true without having any necessary reference to Christianity.
But, all that is my rambling. I am really excited by what was written in this book. I now have a major way to justify my own journey. This is personal for me, as if one were also to look towards my past in order to find some plastic unity of sameness through all my philosophical and theological positions, the churches I’ve attended, and so on, they’d call me a fraud, or confused. I guess, there is one sense in which I am a fraud, and confused. I am a sinner. I sin, a lot. But, Hart has brought to light what I have known for some time now but haven’t been able to put in words: I move through this theological and philosophical journey at the prompting of my final cause. The God who calls me takes me through everything so that in him all that intellectual labour finds rest. The unity of my journey, of my very self, is eschatological, and I can’t stop just yet.