Hart, “You Are Gods,” Chapter Three: “That Judgment Whereby You Judge: Beauty and Discernment”

Hart, “You Are Gods,” Chapter Three: “That Judgment Whereby You Judge: Beauty and Discernment”

*Note: If you choose to comment, please keep it brief (no more than 100 words), addressed to me, on topic, civil and respectful (not hostile or argumentative), and devoid of links or photos.*

In my opinion, for whatever it’s worth, Chapter Three of David Bentley Hart’s collection of essays entitled “You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature” is the best of the first four (including the Introduction), but it steps aside from the main line of his argument so far and delves into the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. He argues against Immanuel Kant and other philosophers who he believes wrongly separated the two.

It seems to me this chapter can be summed up in the following way: The human experience of beauty, the truly beautiful, is a revelation of God that cannot be explained by appeal to mere “taste.” Some things just are really beautiful and some things just are not really beautiful. But when we encounter true beauty and have that sort of numinous experience of awe in the “face” of it, we know intuitively that it is a signal of something divine both in the universe and in us. Only real “philistines” do not experience true beauty where it manifests itself—through a painting, a poem, a musical composition, a sunset, etc.

In addition, Hart argues that when we experience true beauty, we do not so much judge it as it judges us. “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.” (44)

Then comes the sermon.

Hart argues that true beauty, the most beautiful of beauties, shines forth from the cross of Jesus Christ and the mercy and grace of God revealed there. And we recognize it as the beauty of love revealed in lowliness. “Even in Christ’s dereliction, God’s infinity is made manifest.” (47) “The Father’s power is manifest most profoundly in the Son’s ‘kenosis’ because that power is the infinite peace of an eternal venture of love, the divine ecstasy whose fullness is the joy of an eternal self-outpouring.” (48)

This reminds me very much of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The whole chapter does.

Right in the middle of this chapter, this essay, Hart gets very political. He argues that “In Matthew’s gospel, one’s failure to recognize Christ as the true face of the Father, the one who comes from above, is one’s damnation, here and now. … one’s failure to recognize the face of Christ—and therefore the face of God—in the abject and oppressed, the suffering and disenfranchised, is the revelation that one has chosen hell as one’s home.” (45)

Then! He goes on a rant about “our foul, degenerate, vicious, contemptible, worthless, brutishly stupid sociopath and dropsical orange goblin of a president and the little horde of oleaginous fascists who slithered out of the spiritual sewer by his side….” (45-6) He calls “our fellow-citizens” who support the separation of children from their parents at our southern border “children of the devil, who have chosen the side of the goats rather than the sheep.” (46)

This was written in October, 2018.

To settle some doubts, in this chapter/essay Hart identifies himself as an “unregenerate Neoplatonist.” (37)

If you can get past the first section of the chapter, which is philosophical in nature, you will be at least rewarded by the sublime rhetoric and, I hope, by the central message of the chapter which is Christological as well as anthropological and metaphysical. Beauty if real; it is not merely “in the eye of the beholder,” and for Christians, anyway, it is most beautifully revealed in the crucified God (not Hart’s words but Moltmann’s) and in the faces of those hungry, thirsty, and homeless ones he told his followers to feed, clothe and shelter.