Roland in Moonlight

by David Bentley Hart

“These materialists say it’s mechanism all the way up—or at least up to some inexact point where some kind of phylogenic or neural alchemy, which we hazily call ‘emergence,’ magically produces consciousness as a kind of tinsel party-crown atop the machine. Nonsense, I say. Nonsense! It’s just the opposite: consciousness and intentionality go all the way down, in varying degrees but continuously.

Really, consciousness is at the ground of everything—it is the ground.

the very notion that the world—that existence—is primarily, essentially, dead matter in random combinations, and that life and consciousness are only thin, vaporous emergent epiphenomena, was not only philosophically wrong, but destructive of everything precious and beautiful and noble. To him the whole of the world was alive at the innermost, most primordial level, and the deepest, most original source of all things is consciousness.

“Yes, that too—if you must. All I mean is that life and mind are one and the same thing, and both are ubiquitous in countless modalities, and so what you perceive is only as limited as your openness to life in its deepest wellsprings—which is to say, spirit.”

consciousness isn’t a property, properly speaking, and certainly not one that can be measured in an aggregated volume, and it doesn’t exist in discrete packets that can be added up into cumulatively more conscious totalities. It’s not a property at all, in fact, but an act, and therefore exists only within

a noetic agency, and always already involves intention and autoaffection and so forth.

“If you believe that everything arises from an infinite act of mind—the rock over there no less than the intelligence in you—then you believe that there’s the presence of a… of an infinite knowing logos within the discrete logos that constitutes each thing as what it is. There’s a depth—even a personal depth, so to speak—in everything, an inner awareness that knows each reality from inside… or from deeper than inside—an act of knowing that’s interior intimo suo. There is one who knows what it’s like to be a rock. And wouldn’t that infinite personal depth have to express itself, almost of necessity, in a finite personal interiority of sorts? Surely the knowledge of what it is to be a rock is already the spirit of the rock as a rock—the rock knowing itself. So isn’t that very knowledge of ‘what it’s like’ already the reality of a finite modality of personal knowledge, a kind of discrete spiritual self? A personal, reflective dimension as the necessarily contracted mode in which the uncontracted infinite act of mind is exemplified in that thing?

And God—the infinite vanishing point, the comprehensive simplicity of Being as infinite spirit—is full of gods.

mind pervades all things: the grasses, flora of every sort, trees, the earth underfoot…

this infinite consciousness, refracted into finite instances and modes of self-reflective awareness and thought, might engender… well, a kind of limitless modal regress. Consciousness might inhere in all sorts of natural totalities, but also in totalities within other conscious totalities, with a corresponding subjectivity appropriate to each—parts as wholes, wholes as parts of other wholes.

Was it because all that blather about the unconscious flatters human beings that they’re the deepest mysteries in creation?

It is only between these two indispensable and enduring extra-natural poles—the unity of the apprehending mind, the transcendental finality of the intending mind—that nature takes shape as a distinct reality, at once infinitely diverse and irreducibly unified. Every movement of the conscious and intending mind toward any finite end is an act at once of recognition, evaluation, judgment, and choice, all of which are possible for the mind by virtue of its own more primordial, more tacit, more unremitting preoccupation with that transcendental horizon that gives all finite things their meanings and their identities for us. All the objects and moments of experience, and all their relations and disjunctions and coordinations and successions, and every meaning, conceptual possibility, or purpose attaching to them are available to the mind only as embraced within and illuminated by that anticipation of the ultimate object of desire (the good, the true, the beautiful…). And that horizon, obviously enough, consists in a set of abstract perfections that are, as absolute objects of the rational will, at once both noetic and ontological. They are, to revert to the terms of a very venerable metaphysical tradition, the “names of God”:

But it is God in himself who is the logical order of all reality, the ground both of the subjective rationality of mind and the objective rationality of being, the transcendent and indwelling Reason or Wisdom by which mind and matter are both informed and in which both participate.

a final coincidence of being and knowing in God or the transcendent ground of all: the experience, that is, of that place where “Hie ist gotes grunt mìn grunt unde mìn grunt gotes grunt” (as Eckhart says), and where nous finds itself at home in its divine source (as Plotinus says), and where one knows God to be at once interior intimo meo and superior summo meo (as Augustine says), and where delimited being (al-wujûd al-muqayyad) returns to its wellspring in the Nondelimited Being (al-wujûd al-mutlaq) of the divine light (as ibn Qunawi says), and where the “secret soul” (ruh sirr) within us is revealed as the eternal breath (ruh) of God, breathed into us in creation. It is here that the unity of mind, in its teleological co-extensiveness with all of reality, meets the unity of being, and we discover that the irreducibility of mind to physical causes and the irreducibility of being to physical events are one and the same irreducibility.

Consciousness is inseparable from intentionality. There’s no purely passive experience.

“As for your sin—your original sin—I can’t speak to it. It was already something established in your natures before your kind and mine first truly met. I know the myths, of course—the Eden myth and the other tales from around the world of the loss of an original beatitude or innocence. But, even if that’s something that actually happened rather than an allegory about something that’s always happening in your kind, then it happened in some other world, some other kind of time. As for this world—this fallen world, this aftermath of that other world—here, in this world, it may be that your feeling of original sin also consists largely in a kind of oblivious memory of your organic past… an ineffable ache of conscience that’s really a kind of organic recollection of all the phylogenic misery and slaughter and blood-soaked attritions by which your species climbed its way out of the mire of purely biochemical existence. Long before your species had even appeared in the world of chronos, the world of the time of death, you were gestating in the womb of nature as a mere stochastic organic possibility, an only remotely likely final issue of incalculable ages of violence.

Every one of you is Cain, the mark of your immemorial guilt indelibly inscribed on each mitochondrion and every cell-wall… Ah, well, so it goes. A delicate blue flower springs up atop a noisome midden, and its fragile, incandescent beauty dazzles us, and we forget all the purulence and waste and dissolution and ceaseless decay from which its exquisite, transient charm was born.

But deep down in the cellars of your cerebral cortices your reptile brain still lurks—a serpent, so to speak, perhaps the serpent of Eden himself—and all the later concrescences of your modular brain are compounded upon that ineradicable ophidian core. And it knows. It remembers, in its cold, cruel, scaly way. And you of course, my friend, are no blue flower.”

That organic history is only an echo of the spiritual history that preceded it. Your still more original original sin was your departure from the pleroma in the divine aeon through an act of self-assertion—which is to say, your departure from the Dreaming in the wrong way, at the wrong moment. And that’s a fall that happened to all of you as one and to each of you as individuals.”

“We’re all like fallen angels in the darkness of this life, forgetful of our heavenly home but still bearing the scars of that terrible… pterotomy.”

“The only consolation is the thought that, if this reality is the product of fallen spiritual consciousness, then we must truly have possessed a divine nature when we were still there above. Only gods could fall quite so far. Still, sometimes one can’t help but cast a jaundiced eye on everything, even the things we know to be good and noble and beautiful. Sometimes we look up at the star-strewn heavens and see the glorious garment of God spread out over our heads, like a sheltering pavilion. But we’d have to be fools not, at other times, to look up at those same stars and see only the vast, encircling walls of our prison-house.

Like, as I say, the gnostics, seeing the celestial spheres as only so many terrifying and malign obstacles to be penetrated and overcome. Or like that fellow Paul from the New Testament, imagining the legions of celestial powers and principalities separating this world from God’s empyrean.

“It’s all a matter of mood, I suppose, but there’s a kind of sensibility—your kind, to be honest—in which sensualist levity and gnostic gravity intermingle and bear a strangely hybrid spiritual fruit.”

On the one hand, you’re an aesthete, acutely devoted to the beauty of this world, almost to the point of hedonism. On the other hand, you suffer from an almost morbid obsession with suffering and death, and the suffering and death of the innocent—of children and animals—in particular. So for you this world is sometimes a radiant symbol of a higher world, a symbol caught for a time in the shadowy trammels of mortality and delusion and sin, but shining brightly amid the darkness even so. At other times, however, it’s simply a sporadically lovely mask dissembling an absolute abyss of elemental violence and idiot fate. Sometimes you see it as the glorious prelude to something unimaginably good, and sometimes as something absolutely alien to the true good from which we’ve all been exiled. You love nature—love creation—but something in you also hates the world.”

It’s curious to me, I have to say, how willfully the religious imagination compounds its sufferings in this world with tales of hells and narakas and states of endless—or, at any rate, aeonian—misery, when this world provides all the hell one could ever need.

‘midnight’s fears’

whatever hells might exist can be at most stations upon the way, the lower paths the wandering spirit must take through the darkness.

Not that that’s not horrifying. To me, the most terrifying picture of all is that of punarbhāva, of ‘re-becoming,’ of the unbreakable fetters of karma forcing us always to begin over, reduced once more to ignorance of all that’s gone before.

At one and the same time, this world’s an order of power and deceit and death, to which the only proper response is wise despair and unremitting rebellion, and also a glorious revelation and foretaste and remembrance of a transcendent source and end. And the only attitude of the will that can carry us through and past the contradiction, or the polarity rather, is militant compassion—charity… karuṇa.

“that Buddhist ‘insubstantialism,’ so to speak, and Vedantic ‘essentialism,’ as it were—that they’re really telling us the same truth: that in all things, and so in each of us, there’s the one unconditioned reality that’s at once infinitely more and immeasurably less than the pitiable little ego in each of us. Love or compassion goes beyond the false self toward the true self, and discovers the latter to be an infinite openness and hospitality to the other. And don’t all the mystical traditions, as well as the moral truths, of all the great faiths attest to this—that the most divine of paths is that of canine devotion and self-sacrificing love? We know it to be so. Hear me, O bhikṣu, there was once…”

And so the gods live on in their full radiance in that other, forgotten, unforgettable past that we all really share, and still know in that now occult dimension of mind that still dreams the potentiality wave— where Odin hanged himself for nine days upon the wind-shaken world-tree Yggdrasil, pierced by his own spear, and where Nachash walked on God’s holy mountain in the stones of fire, and where Adonis slain by