You Are Gods Quotes

“within the common call of the beautiful upward into the empyrean, another call is issued, summoning us to that deeper and more mysterious beauty that persists even when all pleasing form has fallen away, and all that remains are the living faces of the abject and broken, “hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“God who is the beginningless beginning to God who is the endless end.9 One sees God, then, under the form of a certain rapture of the mind, and thus discovers that the intellect cannot find true satisfaction in anything that it wholly understands, any more than it could in something that it understands not at all; rather, it must always seek “illud quod non intelligendo intelligit”: “that which it understands through not understanding.”10 And so, then, it is only within God’s own infinite movement of love that any rational desire exists, coming from and going toward the infinite that gives it being.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“There is no abiding difference within the one gift of both creation and deification; there is only grace all the way down and nature all the way up, and “pure nature”—like pure potency or pure nothingness—is a remainder concept of the most vacuous kind: the name of something that in itself could never be anything at all. Creation, incarnation, salvation, deification: in God, these are one gracious act, one absolute divine vocation to the creature to become what he has called it to become.26”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Orthodox Christology, after all, insists not merely that there is no conflict or rivalry between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, nor merely that they are capable of harmonious accord with one another. Rather, it asserts that humanity is so naturally compatible with divinity that the Son can be both fully divine and fully human at once without separation or confusion, in one agent whose actions are all therefore at once fully human and fully divine.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“God became human so that humans should become God. Only the God who is always already human can become human.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“there is one thing on which all the great Orthodox theologians of the last century were agreed, despite all their differences from one another, it was that the entire problem of grace and nature (which was known to them almost exclusively from Thomist sources, many of them French) was a false dilemma created by an inept reading of Paul and by a catastrophic division into discrete categories of what should never have been divided. There is only χάρις, which is at once that which is freely given, the delight taken in the gift, and the thanksgiving offered up for it; and all those things that a distorted theology converts into oppositions or dialectical contraries or saltations—grace and nature, creation and deification, nature and supernature—are in fact only differing vantages upon, or continuously varying intensities within, a single transcendent act, a single immanent mystery. I”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“The eternal Yes of God to the creature is always already the creature’s eternal Yes to its creator, for the latter exists only within the eternal Yes of the Father to his own image in the Son, in the delight of the Spirit; and this is the Son’s Yes to the will of the Father; and this is also the Spirit’s eternal Yes to the Father’s full expression in the Son; and, in the end, these are all one and the same Yes.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Christianity,” in fact—which is not really one thing, in any event, but only a loose designation for a diverse set of beliefs and practices and cultural forms and numerous often incongruous religions, comprised within a single but nonetheless porous hermeneutical and historical “set”—is only one limited trajectory within history’s universal narrative of divine incarnation and creaturely deification, superior in some ways to alternative trajectories, vastly inferior in many others.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“All things are created in their last end, and if they were not already fully reconciled to God and in full spiritual and ontological union with him they would never come into existence.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“The union of creation with God is both the most ultimate and most original of creaturely truths; divinization, though it be the consummation of creation in time, is the beginning of creation in eternity, and it can be neither without being the other.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Every living tradition derives its authority from some initiating moment of awakening or discovery that can never be forgotten or altered; and yet, no less essentially, that initial moment is validated only in and by the richness, capaciousness, and perdurability of the historical developments to which it continually gives rise.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Calvin’s idiotic theology of substitutionary atonement.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“It seems to me that in the theological appropriation of Hegel’s thought a certain Protestant enthusiasm reaches a febrile pitch, a rapt delight in divine sovereignty so total that it sees even the devil as only one of God’s innumerable masks.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Seen from one angle, the most problematic characteristic of the Hegelian system is its unrelieved providential optimism. An absolute dualism, of course, is a very grim thing indeed; but a narrative monism unqualified by any hint of true gnostic detachment, irony, sedition, or doubt—by any proper sense, that is, that the fashion of this world is horribly out of joint, that we are prisoners of delusion, that not every evil can be accounted for as part of divine necessity—turns out to be at least as monstrous. It leads to”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Christian aesthetics: the eye of charity, which relentlessly but joyously finds beauty even where we should not expect it, and even among the despised and rejected—the vision of love that invites and compels us to find the whole glory of Being in the brokenness and humility of a crucified slave—this new depth of vision, this new apprehension of the inexhaustible scope of divine glory, this perfect unity of kenosis and plerosis, of consummate weakness and omnipotence.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“What transforms the merely accomplished into the revelatory is this invisible nimbus of utter gratuity.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Even God could not create a rational will not oriented toward deifying union with himself, any more than he could create a square circle, a married bachelor, a two-dimensional cube, or a morally and intellectually competent supporter of Donald Trump.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“What is worth dwelling upon is how beautifully Nicholas demonstrates that there is no such thing as rational desire that is not a desire for the infinity of God in himself, and so no natural impulse of a truly rational will that is not already—and even more originally—supernatural.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“A certain concern for the facts may arise from a devotion to Truth; but sometimes facts are the lies this world tells about the true nature of reality, and so to speak those facts is to serve the father of lies rather than God.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Only by a prudential ordering of ends in a hierarchy of relative priority can we, in any instant, remain faithful to all the proper ends of our nature. So there are times when, say, a dedication to the Good must in some ways inhibit a dedication to a truth, or at least qualify it under the form of a dissimulation, precisely so that we can serve Truth (which is also Goodness) as such. Sometimes, if we are devoted to Truth, we must deceive. After all, if Truth is most essentially an ontological reality—a name for Being and so for God—then its nature cannot simply be a matter of a correspondence between words and facts. In a fallen reality, there are times when the facts of the matter are ontological untruths, because they are privations of the Good.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“it is never the case that any transcendental value reveals itself in absolute isolation from all others; where the Good is present, so also in some measure are the Beautiful and True; and so on for each of them. And each is more itself the more perfectly it coincides in actuality with each of the others,”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“Ideally, we should live lives in which the good, true, and beautiful are as nearly reintegrated into a single style of existence as possible; but the ideal is rarely attainable. From moment to moment, we are confronted by conflicting transcendental vocations, and moral prudence consists in nothing other than choosing which among them must, in any given instant, assume the station of the dominant value.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“In God, the True, Good, and Beautiful are all one and the same splendor of the real, one and the same perfect act of being.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“concede that Truth and fact are both conceptually and ontologically distinct, and that at times our words can serve the former only by taking leave of the latter?”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“For it is that beauty that will be our final judge; in its light we shall at last see him as he is, and thereby also see ourselves for what we are.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“the judgment that beauty passes upon us when we expose ourselves to its deeper, divine truths. In a sense, we come seeking to find ourselves addressed by God’s beauty, by everything in it that exposes what is lacking in us, by that in it that condemns us, because this same encounter also makes possible the grace of forgiveness, of transformation, of resurrection. We should at least know, having come in this attitude of worship, that we enter into that place not merely to see beauty, but to be seen by it.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“purely idealist metaphysics of the beautiful can point in only one direction, away from the world toward the simple and transcendent source of all beauty; but Christian thought, with its Trinitarian premise, must follow the path of beauty outward into the world, even into states of utter privation, even into states of deformity that still cannot conquer the radiant form of God.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“The story of the Son’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection is not the story of a divine masquerade, of a king who goes forth in self-divestment simply to return to the estate he has abandoned, like the protagonist in The Song of the Pearl, losing himself in the far country and then finding his true self again only in his return to his distant demesne. The Son goes forth because going forth is always already who he is as the one who reveals God, because all wealth and all poverty are already encompassed in his eternal life of receiving and pouring out, his infinitely accomplished bliss and love: he is the God he is in his very divestment and in his glory, both at once, as the same thing, inseparably.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“In much of the gospel of John, it has often been noted, eschatology becomes almost perfectly immanent. In its pages, Christ passes through history as a light that reveals all things for what they are; and it is our reaction to him—our ability or inability to recognize that light—that shows us ourselves.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

“And so, in the moment when beauty finds us, and its fortuity intimates to us something like the greater mystery of the fortuity of Being itself, we find ourselves under a verdict, but also under injunction. At once, we are made aware of what we are and of what we should be, as well as of the enormous distance between the two.”
― David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature