Theological Territories

A David Bentley Hart Digest

David Bentley Hart

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780300164299
  9780268100728
• eBook ISBN:
  9780268107192
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Publishers Weekly Best Book in Religion 2020

Foreword Review's INDIES Book of the Year Award, Religion

In Theological Territories, David Bentley Hart, one of America's most eminent contemporary writers on religion, reflects on the state of theology "at the borders" of other fields of discourse—metaphysics, philosophy of mind, science, the arts, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics in particular. The book advances many of Hart's larger theological projects, developing and deepening numerous dimensions of his previous work. Theological Territories constitutes something of a manifesto regarding the manner in which theology should engage other fields of concern and scholarship.

The essays are divided into five sections on the nature of theology, the relations between theology and science, the connections between gospel and culture, literary representations of and engagements with transcendence, and the New Testament. Hart responds to influential books, theologians, philosophers, and poets, including Rowan Williams, Jean-Luc Marion, Tomáš Halík, Sergei Bulgakov, Jennifer Newsome Martin, and David Jones, among others. The twenty-six chapters are drawn from live addresses delivered in various settings. Most of the material has never been printed before, and those parts that have appear here in expanded form. Throughout, these essays show how Hart's mind works with the academic veneer of more formal pieces stripped away. The book will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers interested in the place of theology in the modern world.

PART ONE

Theology and What May Be Said

1

The Gospel
According to Melpomene

Reflections on Rowan Williams’s
The Tragic Imagination

πολλῶν ταμίας Ζεὺς ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ,

πολλὰ δ᾽ ἀέλπτως κραίνουσι θεοί:

καὶ τὰ δοκηθέντ᾽ οὐκ ἐτελέσθη,

τῶν δ᾽ ἀδοκήτων πόρον ηὗρε θεός.

τοιόνδ᾽ ἀπέβη τόδε πρᾶγμα.

—Euripides, Medea

I

The ghastliest performance of Tristan und Isolde I ever attended was at the Metropolitan Opera in March 2008. It was one of that creakingly venerable institution’s rare, touchingly awkward ventures into the avant-garde (of the sort that would have seemed quite innovative in Berlin circa 1934 or 1954), and everything about it was excruciatingly ill-conceived: the sets, the props, the costumes, the precipitously forward-slanting stage floor, even the stage machinery (a malfunction in which created a long delay in the final act by sending the hapless and supine Heldentenor, Gary Lehman sledding down the boards on his pallet to crash headfirst into the prompter’s box). But the most egregious offense came only at the very end, when Isolde (Deborah Voigt) stepped to the front of the stage and sang the Liebestod, quite ravishingly really, and then inexplicably failed to die; the lights simply dimmed and, after a moment’s perplexed silence, polite applause rippled through the audience and only after several seconds swelled to full appreciative exuberance. Not much of a Liebestod at all, at that point, really—more a Liebesangst. Of course, one can somewhat sympathize with the director here. There is something so annoyingly idiotic about the tendency of Wagnerian heroines to keel over dead at the drop of a strong emotion—Isolde, Elizabeth, Elsa, Kundry; apparently, Wagner was under the impression that women have the physical constitutions of houseflies. But I was indignant. As far as I was concerned, having paid the price of admission, I was entitled at opera’s end to one dead soprano. After all, the entire reason for following the sinuous, interweaving currents of all those gorgeous Leitmotiven for four and a half hours, and even for enduring the ordeal of an almost parodically obnoxious production, is the ecstatic release of that intoxicating consummation, when Isolde takes her final leave of both the Tristan chord and life and briefly becomes our psychopomp, leading us along with her down into the shades below and across the dark waters, serenely adrift for a few lingering moments in an opium trance of perfect resignation. Then the lights come up, we gather our things, we go home, and we enjoy uncommonly peaceful dreams. This is how one knows that Wagner’s “music-dramas” were the works of a true tragedian, after all: the infallible mark of the tragic is that it helps one sleep well.

Then again, I take something of an antinomian aesthete’s approach to tragedy. For me, its greatest virtue as an art is more “musical” (in the classical sense) than discursive, and I am suspicious of any didactic reduction of its power to something easily grasped—most especially to a species of moral tutelage (which can be a dangerously protean thing). I tend to think tragedy’s unity as an aesthetic form is almost entirely affective rather than conceptual, consisting in a certain overwhelming mood, and that any attempt to say what tragedy as such means or what lessons we might derive from it is an exercise not so much in objective hermeneutics as in personal testimonial. This is not to say that the great tragedies do not abound in “messages”; many fine things are said by the characters, many incisive aphoristic exchanges challenge us with their piercing insights, many moral depths are sounded. But I assume that all of that is merely part of the decorative design, clothing the architecture of the plot in rich textures and darkly sparkling hues. It is not what tragedy means. Really, as aesthetic experiences go, tragedy is probably among the least intellectual, and this is why it can so often encompass plots of such exorbitant stupidity (of a sort that no well-crafted comedy could tolerate) without the least impairment to its total effect. I assume, moreover, that this effect is largely uniform for all of us, while any lessons we take from the drama are chiefly those we took with us into the theater. Much of the virtuosity of a great tragedian lies in the ability to bedizen obvious truths and silly tales with a grandeur and a pathos far in excess of their native properties. I object to (for instance) the opulent confection of Hegel’s reading of Attic tragedy not because I find its anachronism preposterous or doubt its brilliance or think it “wrong”—what would that mean?—but because I suspect it of philistinism: a crude subordination of the aesthetic to the theoretical, and of something splendidly mysterious to a system of rather ordinary ideas. As understandings of the tragic go, I far prefer the narcotic to the speculative.

And yet, all this said, I have to concede that, in long retrospect, my reaction to Isolde’s impertinent durability that night raises certain questions for me of a distinctly moral nature. Why, out of that whole cosmic cataclysm of a production, should this have been the insult that stung me most deeply? Why, after all, should I have wanted her to die? Hers was hardly a happy life to begin with, what with her dreadful marriage and that final horribly thwarted romance, and it is hard to find an ethically wholesome explanation for the emotional satisfaction that I hoped to derive from watching her killed by a surfeit of love. The curious thing is not that we can take pleasure in tragedy but that this pleasure would be palpably diminished if at the last moment the drama were to reverse itself and end happily. Nor do I think this is simply because we would then think that the drama is not true to life, since that is something we demand of no art and that, blessedly, no art offers us. When I think about it, of all the innumerable lives squandered by tragic drama down the centuries, there is only one whose loss I find totally intolerable: Cordelia’s. And it seems to me clear that the reason for this is that King Lear is a tragedy that somehow exceeds the customary boundaries of the tragic, precisely because right in the middle of its final descent into the darkness it provides an impossible glimpse of an entirely different ending to the story—not, that is, a mere false dawn, a dramatic trick or penultimate twist, one last unanticipated peripety cheaply amplifying the suspense, but rather a sudden radiant interruption of the narrative by a wholly different narrative, one from outside the logic of the play altogether, filled with the eschatological light of another world. As a result, when the inevitable comes, it is simply shattering. That night, one does not sleep well at all.

II

Which brings me to The Tragic Imagination. I have to say, I will read anything by Rowan Williams—or would do if I could read as fast as he writes—because I know that it will be brilliant, subtle, absorbing, and probably right, and that I will profit from it. This is true even in the case of a book, like this one, in which I think I find certain of my own arguments somewhat misrepresented and truncated, and in which a case is made that I think ever so slightly (but ever so persistently) off the mark. But I should also confess that this particular book runs afoul of some of my more stubborn prejudices. It comes perilously close to a genus of literary criticism to which I am temperamentally adverse. Actually, I find quite a lot of art criticism suspect, no doubt on account of a few fairly heathen superstitions on my part regarding some special mana or numinous magic in the arts. I tend to think that all great artistic accomplishments occur on the far side of a mysterious threshold where propositional or analytic discourses fail because they are infinitely inadequate to what lies beyond. Every true work of art is an indissolubly singular event whose intricacies can be approached only by a language in which the most tactful poetic phenomenology—of the delicate and of the sublime and of all the beautiful medians in between—has displaced every form of explanation, whether technical, social, economic, moral, psychological, philosophical, theological, or other. When we try to reduce the work to the lesser languages of those fragmentary disciplines, all we do is retreat from the incomparable to the conventional, and from visions to platitudes. It is rather like attempting to understand the flight of a swallow by attaching anchors to its wings. And, in the case of tragic drama, I am not even sure there is in any meaningful sense a single genre here, comprising the dramas of the Attic Dionysia, Seneca’s storm-wracked banquets of blood, the wild farragoes of Spain’s and England’s Golden Age dramas, the glimmering gloom of France’s, Sarah Kane’s extravaganzas of inadvertently Monty-Pythonesque gore, and so on. The critic’s frequent need to proceed as if there is such a thing can yield formulations of positively vacuous generality. And it seems to me that, in sometimes playing by the rules of that kind of criticism, Williams allows himself to be drawn toward a few of these: for instance, Stanley Cavell’s assertion that tragedy “is about what we know and do not acknowledge” (31). (Well, yes. And no. Sometimes. Rarely ever, really. Often quite the reverse.) Or even, perhaps, Gillian Rose’s fascinating suggestion that “it is the flight from sadness that precipitates tragedy” (35). (Again, yes, occasionally. Often, vaguely speaking. Not quite so often, speaking more precisely.) And, of course, the literary critic in particular is all too likely to invent rationales for the actions of fictional characters, in order to reduce the intractably mercurial poetic illusion of living personality to the banal clinical consistency of psychological character—as in the case of Cavell’s reading of Othello, which Williams accords considerable respect, but which seems to me to involve the ascription of motives to an Othello who somehow exceeds the letter of the text. Othello really exists, however, only as a tissue of words; his entire being consists in 887 lines of verse; Iago is precisely 211 lines more real. The number of equally plausible alternative readings is incalculable.

Misgivings aside, however, the best literary scholarship, of which Williams’s text provides many exemplary passages, is not merely the kind of criticism that I find problematic; and obviously we cannot help but talk about the arts, if only for the sake of a deeper experience of the delight they afford us, and there are certainly better and worse ways of doing this. But none is authoritative or free from arbitrariness. Naturally, we all want the arts we love, like tragic drama, to be elevating, and serious in ways we think important, which for most of us means morally serious. We certainly do not want to imagine, for instance, that a taste for tragedy resembles voyeurism or sadism (though, for some viewers, it probably does) or arises simply from an instinct toward nothingness that the drama allows us to discharge vicariously (although that too, it seems reasonable to suppose, is the case for many). And, so, we choose what to think. To me, it seems obvious that Hegel’s treatment of Attic tragedy has nothing much to do with the arts of ancient Athens and everything to do with his genius in converting all interesting cultural artifacts into motifs illustrative of his own philosophy. Conversely, the reflections of the young Nietzsche (who, curiously, receives not a single mention in Williams’s text) are immeasurably truer to the aesthetic and religious verities of the Dionysia, even if Nietzsche himself later, for philosophical reasons, somewhat distanced himself from The Birth of Tragedy. To Williams, with his pronounced Hegelian sympathies, it seems plausible to entertain the suggestion that “the classical audience is supposed to be learning how to let its own partial rationality be suspended in the excess of the Dionysian liturgy so as to have its dangerously limited certainties challenged, changed, and absorbed in a more solid and ‘lawful’ reasoning” (34). To me, with my very different understanding of the economies of Attic cult, it seems that this is more or less objectively false, an unhistorical imposition of post-Christian notions on a society to which they are irrelevant, and that it might in some ways be truer to say that the chief purpose of the suspended rationality and general amnesty that obtained during the season of Dionysian misrule was to have those “dangerously limited certainties” confirmed and fortified.

Then again, it may be that I find Williams’s understanding of Attic tragedy strange largely because it is so thoroughly a literary interpretation, a treatment principally of texts, abstracted from the historically concrete realities of both the aesthetic form and the religious context of the plays. Not that he entirely ignores these things; but they are fairly secondary concerns in The Tragic Imagination. And, of course, inasmuch as most of the plays still extant have been separated from the rest of the cycles to which they belong, and none of them is still performed within the setting of the civic liturgy of the Dionysia, the literary approach is largely inevitable for us. But the occasional inattention to cultural context allows Williams to make some fairly extraordinary (even perhaps incredible) claims for what Attic tragedy in particular teaches, and for what the genre of tragedy as a whole has the power to reveal to us: the receptive act of silently watching tragedy disabuses us of certain kinds of fantasy, isolates us from forms of false and trivializing solidarity that lead to corporate practices of exclusion and violence, confronts us with intractable human otherness, obliges us to recognize what allows us to listen and respond to others, shows us how to start thinking about what a ‘self’ is, changes us, even perhaps “converts us” (159). Confronted by claims as rapturous and rhapsodic as these, my first impulse is not in fact to dismiss them; Williams is a powerful thinker and is quite capable of discerning his own experience of tragic art. But I have to question the degree to which these are objective observations as opposed to private reactions—not so much truths that tragedy imparts as prior convictions that tragedy provides the unsurpassable occasion for recalling. This latter is no mean thing, of course. One of the most marvelously “prophetic” of great art’s powers is that of apprising us of who we already are. But one must take care scrupulously to distinguish between that power, with its inexhaustibly multifarious consequences, and anything as rigidly definite and uniform in effect as a mere “meaning.”

III

There is a real danger in assuming that one’s moral or metaphysical interpretation of an aesthetic experience is something intrinsic to its object, rather than simply one’s own personal mode of receiving it. And it seems to me that Williams sometimes writes as if this is indeed his assumption, and that consequently he too easily ignores other equally—and sometimes more—plausible interpretations, and that hence, while he is often ingenious in describing what tragedy can reveal, he pays far too little attention to what it can hide. Even so, his is a compelling picture, one that combines a great variety of views with immense virtuosity (even if, to my mind, he accords the Hegelian an unmerited preponderance). He sees tragic art as having, if not a unique, at least a singular power to demystify social violence and to enlarge the moral imagination. For him, as for Hegel, Attic tragedy repeatedly discloses the insubstantiality, contingency, and delusion of the hieratic self-identifications of its characters, the false polarities and conflicts they create by their fiercely sanctimonious partial perspectives, the ruin they visit on the personal and civic orders by their refusal to entertain opposing perspectives, the ways in which their sufferings point toward the universal vantage of a more rational and lawful order, one in which seemingly antithetical visions of the holy are peacefully reconciled. In Medea, for instance, the catastrophic disruption of the fragile social compacts of society, however much of a probation of the negative it may be, aids reflection’s advance toward a true order of justice. Tragedy of every epoch reveals both the necessity and the perilous friability of civil order. It offers us no cure for suffering, but rather healing; by narrating the seemingly unspeakable it shows us that we are not rendered speechless; and, if suffering can be spoken, we can begin again to think, about our self-representations, and about the process of our thinking itself. And to acknowledge, narrate, and transcend the past is to inaugurate mourning. Tragedy informs us, moreover, that the result of seeking to know other minds, and of being governed by the torment of being unable to do so, is frequently destructive. It demands from the audience instead a willing recognition of the real, indissoluble separateness of other persons. It reminds us that we shall always be confronted with suffering we cannot control, and forbids us from denying it by explaining it away as somehow secretly good and just, and disenchants us of any belief that reconciliation cancels out the past. By forcing us to watch the drama silently, prevented from intervening, it convicts us of both our habitual inaction in the face of unjust suffering and our habitual complicity in the disastrous misrecognitions that create it. And so on.

Obviously, it is hard to do justice to a text as rich as Williams’s by attempting to distill it into a single paragraph. I cannot possibly enumerate all the brilliant insights and provocations this book contains. Suffice it to say, the claims are numerous and sometimes grand, and I take issue with none of them. But they too represent only partial perspectives, which should not be allowed to obscure other perspectives. To begin with, it may be true that tragedy tells us that we can speak about suffering and so are not destroyed by it; but it also teaches us to speak in a very particular way—which is to say, beautifully. Williams does address the moral question raised by the practice of casting abysmal misery in exquisite language and grand spectacle, but only briefly; and, on the whole, he devotes very little space to the consideration of tragedy as an aesthetic event. It is possible, after all, that the form of the drama encourages us to speak of unjust suffering too damned well. What else are we to learn from the wild canorous solemnities of Sophocles, or Shakespeare’s elemental organ tones, or the fluent quicksilver gleam and genuinely alarming elegance of Racine’s alexandrines? If I were to guess at what I may have learned from tragedy over the years (and I am a rapt lover of the form), I might have the temerity to believe that the truths Williams says tragedy teaches were largely known to me before I entered the theater, from other, less splendid sources, and that I had to know them already in order to understand what I was seeing as more than a celebration of despair. What, however, I could never have known but for the experience of the drama itself was that all these terrible truths could somehow, by the application of sufficient art, be made beautiful, hypnotic, gorgeously grave, and stupefying. Surely that is more distinctive of tragic drama than any kind of “information” it might provide; why else would the greatest tragedies be also the most ecstatic and darkly melodious poems? And, so, a willfully vulgar skeptic might well ask whether, if it is moral lessons about the sufferings endured by real persons we are seeking, these might not better be imparted by a discourse devoid of the distracting glitter of all those sweet obliquities and swelling sonorities and fluttering embellishments. Perhaps good journalism, purged of artificial pathos and free from the mediations of poetry, might do a far better job at awakening us from our comfortable fantasies and ethical inertias and at forcing us to recognize the concrete particularities of human anguish and the destructive social practices in which we ourselves are involved—the way in which, for instance, a single photograph of a naked child, running in terror and crying out in agony from napalm burns, might alter an entire nation’s consciousness regarding a war it is waging abroad. Granting the emotional power of great tragedy, the cutting edge of its well-honed verse, the grave attentiveness it requires of its audience, if its special purpose were truly moral illumination, one would have to ask what the aesthetic form adds that a direct, unadorned acquaintance with simple facts could not offer. Yes, of course, great art draws us in in a way simple reporting does not. But converting the knowledge of human suffering into an occasion of aesthetic rapture seems an altogether peculiar way to stir the conscience.

Even so, I do not doubt that an encounter with great tragedy can, in many individual cases, be an occasion of moral enlightenment or even of the birth of sympathy. But I do not believe that this is what makes tragedy distinctive as an art. At least, I think it plausible, and considerably more plausible than Williams seems willing to grant, to argue that great tragedy, far from encouraging us to ponder human calamity deeply, instead invites us to cease thinking about it at all, precisely because by the end of the play it has successfully borne us not only beyond all answers but even beyond the desire to ask any quest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. Theology and What May Be Said
• Part Two. The Borderlands of Theology and Science
• Part Three. Gospel and Culture
• Part Four. Literatures of Transcendence
• Part Five. The New Testament
• Index