The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays

by David Bentley Hart

Perhaps at first, remembering the glorious raiments that adorned his limbs when he walked among the sons of God in the stones of fire, Samael or Hillel ben Shahar or Lucifer (call him what you will) might have made an effort to keep up appearances, and played the part of the dandy, and squandered his resources on well-tailored suits, and spent hours a day posing before his pier glass. But by now, surely, like all those children of privilege who lose everything irretrievably, he must have gone entirely to seed, and resigned himself to shapeless polyester-cotton blends and plastic shoes. How then, I asked Ambrose, should one portray the prince of darkness? After a pensive moment, Ambrose replied, “A merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos.”

the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer.

All reasoning begins from a venture of trust whose truthfulness can be ascertained only at the end of the sequence of postulates and predicates and judgments to which it gives rise.

Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, there is a fiduciary moment within every act of reason, which allows for thought’s first movement towards ends beyond itself. It is an implicit trust in an original accord between mind and world, mysterious but indissoluble; and it is one that (protest how we may) makes sense only if we presume some original ontological unity between consciousness and being.

reason arises from an irreducibly fiduciary movement of the will

the unyielding rationalist turns out to be the most irrational fideist of all: one who believes in reason even though there cannot possibly be any reason for that belief.

As late modern persons, we live in a society whose highest values—in every sphere: moral, religious, economic, domestic, cultural, and so on—can loosely be described as “libertarian.” We understand freedom principally as an individual’s sovereign liberty of deliberative and acquisitive choice, and we understand individual desires (so long as they fall within certain minimal legal constraints) either as rights or at least as protected by rights. And we are increasingly disposed to see almost every restriction placed upon the pursuit of those desires as an unreasonable imposition. Our natural economic philosophy, then, is of course “neo-liberal” (or, as it is also called in America, “neo-conservative”) while our natural moral philosophy is voluntarist, individualist, and hedonist (in a not necessarily opprobrious sense).

have never been able to understand those (almost exclusively American) souls who expend such energy both on lamenting the late modern collapse of so many of the moral accords and cultural values and religious aspirations of the past and also on vigorously promoting the very system of material and social practices that made that col-lapse inevitable.

The history of capitalism and the history of secularism are not two accidentally contemporaneous tales, after all; they are the same story told from different vantages. Any dominant material economy is complicit with, and in fact demands, a particular anthropology, ethics, and social vision. And a late capitalist culture, being intrinsically a consumerist economy, of necessity promotes a voluntarist understanding of individual freedom and a purely negative understanding of social and political liberty.

This is what Marx genuinely admired about capitalism: its power to dissolve all the immemorial associations of family, tradition, faith, and affinity, the irresistible dynamism of its dissolution of ancient values, its (to borrow a loathsome phrase) “gales of creative destruction.”

Secularization is simply developed capitalism in its ineluctable cultural manifestation.

Along with this came a new labor system: the end of most of the contractual power of free skilled labor, the death of the artisanal guilds, and the genesis of a mass wage system; one, that is, in which labor became a commodity, different markets could compete against one another for the cheapest, most desperate laborers, and (as the old Marxist plaint has it) both the means of production and the fruit of labor belonged not to the workers but only to the investors (hence the accusation of early generations of socialists, like William Morris and John Ruskin, that capitalism was to be eschewed not because it was a free market system, but because it destroyed the true freedom of the market econo-mies that had begun to appear at the end of the Middle Ages, and concentrated all real economic and contractual liberty in the hands of a very few).

Capitalism has no moral nature at all. The good it yields is not benevolence, the evil is not malice. It is a system that cannot be abused, but only practiced with greater or lesser efficiency. It admits of no other criterion by which to judge its consequences.

the claim that capitalist culture and Christianity are compatible—indeed, that they are not ultimately inimical to one another—seems to me not only self-evidently false, but quaintly (and perhaps perilously) delusional.

Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practice

one thing in remarkably short supply in the New Testament is common sense. The gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism: commands to become as perfect as God in his heaven and to live as insouciantly as the lilies in their field; condemnations of a roving eye as equivalent to adultery and of evil thoughts toward another as equivalent to murder; injunctions to sell all one’s possessions and to give the proceeds to the poor, and demands that one hate one’s parents for the Kingdom’s sake and leave the dead to bury the dead. This extremism is not merely an occasional hyperbolic presence in the texts; it is their entire cultural and spiritual atmosphere.

Property is theft, it seems.

The first, perhaps most crucial thing to understand about the earliest generations of Christians is that they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. They were rabble. They lightly cast off all their prior loyalties and attachments: religion, empire, nation, tribe, even family. Christ, in fact, far from teaching “family values,” was remarkably dismissive of the family. And decent civic order, like social respectability, was apparently of no importance to him. Not only did he not promise his followers worldly success (even success in making things better for others); he told them to hope for a Kingdom not of this world, and promised them that in this world they would win only rejection, persecution, tribulation, and failure. Yet he instructed them also to take no thought for the morrow.