David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

How to see the source of the universe

If one does not know the writing and scholarship of David Bentley Hart, he fits into a strange place in religious studies. He has published much on Eastern Orthodoxy and the especially the notion of theōsis, in which I have been attempting to engage in a non-Orthodox (and non-orthodox) way. He is a reader who I have to read very closely and then listen to his lectures to make sure I’m interpreting what he is stating correctly. It’s not that his writing is unintelligible, but it is to a degree in which the eloquence and precision of language meets in a realm I seldom experience in academic writing. The same is true throughout his work, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, which he calls a work of metaphysics rather than a work of theology. Here he wishes to do two things: 1) to dispense of atheism, not to ridicule atheists, but to show how it is an impossible situation and that the “God” of the atheist is not the God that we are really talking about. 2) He seeks to define God in a “classical” fashion drawing from the traditions of South and East Asia, Islam, as well as Judaism and Christianity. So in this sense, many of those who argue against the existence of God, the atheists, and those who are verbal apologists for God, many Evangelics, are left not knowing what to do. This includes naturalists and deists who see God as not separate from nature. Hart explains:

“The human longing for God or the transcendent runs very deep—perhaps far too deep to be trusted, but also too deep to treat as mere primitive folly—and it has produced much good and much evil in human history.”

Hart is deeply aware of his work in that it is a supremely good endeavor to mine what God must be like through the classical traditions and testify that this is the “ultimate” and “primordial” reality in which we all seek, and “apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever.”

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

If the reader is aware of the Hinduism, the subtitle “Being, Consciousness, Bliss” comes from both the Upanishads and the Bhaktic traditions. In Sanskrit: सच्चिदानन्द, Sat-cit-ānanda or also taken as separate words, sat, chi and ananda, stand for "being", "consciousness" and "bliss” This is an expression of Brahman or the ultimate underlying reality of the universe. All things flow from this reality and return to this reality. These are ways in which God could be understood for the person, and what the notion of God points to. In Sufism as well as Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa affirm these expression of the divine. Even though Hart has come to agree with the argument of thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas who seek to assert that if one sees the world as contingent, that is dependent on causes, then there must be “unconditional being” that holds all these contingencies together. In short, Hart would describe God as

“a God who is the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all could exist.”

But Hart wants to also move toward an “experience of God” and not just ways in which we can talk about God. This is because I can argue with Hart if the notion of “omnipotence” is truly classical since the idea that God “could do anything God wants” is a self-contradictory argument, but for Hart this is not the point. The point is that how perceive God through our human consciousness and therefore find a sense of being and bliss. This is the anchor in which Hart wants to tether us. If we don’t have that point of ultimate and primordial being, then we don’t have anything to tie our own being, consciousness, and bliss to.

Hart wants the reader to think of God not as a commutation of all being, consciousness, and bliss, but rather that God “is the indivisible and always transcendent actuality out of which all things receive their immanent actuality in every possible respect.” Here, Hart invokes, the 20th century, South Asian, philosopher of Advaita Vedanta, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, to say that if we reduce God into a category of existence that we can comprehend would be akin to atheism. God is simply not something among other things, but the being in which all things derive. Again, he is not doing theology as a saying some about God, but rather doing metaphysics, saying something about the ultimate reality in which God relates to and that many of the classical traditions are seeking to situate how we think of God.

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The most fascinating part of Hart’s treatment is the when he asserts the where the terminus of our desires come:

“In this world, the desirable is always desirable in respect of some yet more elementary and comprehensive need or yearning. All concretely limited aspirations of the will are sustained within formally limitless aspirations of the will.”

Our desires and therefore need for happiness all have a source of bliss. For this reason, Hart ends the with contemplative prayer (for more on this, please see my article on Byung-Chul Han’s Vita Contemplativa). The way to experience this prayer is this mediative way. If one wants to see God through the universe that God created then it is incumbent on the person to set their minds, hearts, and bodies toward that direction. Hart paraphrases a monk he met on Mount Athos:

“contemplative prayer is the art of seeing reality as it truly is; and, if one has not yet acquired the ability to see God in all things, one should not imagine that one will be able to see God in himself.” So, if one does not take time to set one’s being on this awareness, then it will be difficult to respect one’s self and others. Again, Hart’s philosophy must be entangled in this practice, since how else can a person experience God? Not through purchasing more ice lattes (the experience of bliss is limited).

Takeaways:

1.    One cannot be a fundamentalist in any sense and any religious tradition and appreciate this sense expressing God.

2.    Atheism, naturalism (physicalism or materialism) is a non logical conclusion given the ultimate reality of the universe. This is not however an argument on designed. If it is then it falls back into a removed notion of an engineer, designer, demiurge god. It has to be something deeper and more meaningful than this.

3.    Hart is not advocating an apologetical approach to his reasoning. He is not doing what a theologian like William Lane Craig is trying to do, argue for God through pure reason then retreat to a kind of “theistic personalism” to limit God to contingent necessities. He is simply drawing from the many traditions across this planet and saying, “Look, these traditions experienced God in these similar ways and their experiences pointed to something greater. Can’t we just acknowledge this and talk about God in this way? It’s both intelligible and reasonable.”

4.    This sense of that which is deeper and more meaningful is what gives humans “being, conscious, and bliss.” God is the source in which these realities come to human beings.

5.    Lastly, this article can be seen as part II, to the article article on Sapiens in which I talk about the evolution of the species and how we form narratives around fictions in order to survive. If humans start with the experience of God and work their way to understanding the ultimate reality of the universe, then this could be a fiction that we could all get behind so that we don’t annihilate each other in one way or another. It is not to say that there needs to be one religion or one faith. It is just to say that all of us contemplate, in whatever way they wish, the nature of reality, rather than seeing ourselves as somehow separate from each other, then we can form a shared narrative based on each person’s experiences. But this would require an openness and empathy that is an affront to the rivalries and dogmatism that we are facing in this country and others. Of course, this is extremely reasonable and, therefore, difficult to do.