The beginning of all serious thought, all reflection upon the world that is not merely calculative or applicative, begins in a moment of unsettling or delighted surprise. Not, that is, a simple twinge of curiosity or bafflement regarding some fact out there not yet in one’s possession; if anything, it is the sudden awareness that no mere fact can possibly be an adequate explanation of the mystery in which one finds oneself immersed at every moment. It is the astonishing recollection of something one has forgotten only because it is always present. A primordial agitation of the of the mind and will. An abiding amazement that lies just below the surface of conscious thought, and that only in very rare instances breaks through into ordinary awareness… It may be that, when we are small children, before we have learned how to forget the obvious, we know this wonder in a more constant, innocent and luminous way because we are still trustingly open to the shear inexplicable givenness of the world.
I was very excited when I found this book. I thought “Yay! Someone has found a way to explain what I’ve been trying to say for 40 years.” And, it is a good book — very well written and on target with a lot of points. I think I was asking/expecting too much.
It’s a long understood problem that you can’t explain or describe the experience of God — aka, a mystical experience. I’ve written a bunch of posts on this. It’s really not fair that I thought the author could do this, but I was hopeful!
The book elicits nods from people who already know what the author is talking about, but it’s unclear if it will change any minds on the subject. As Louis Armstrong is quoted as saying when asked what jazz is: “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
I think that one of the moments in the book that comes closest to the ability to explain the experience of God is this very well written section:
The sleeper, as he ascends from his dream toward the morning’s light, may momentarily drift back again more deeply into the illusory world, or half illusory world, from which he trying to emerge. He continues to hear his name called, but still lingers at the boundary between sleep and a waking consciousness. For a time, the figures of his dream retain a certain ghostly clarity, even as they have begun to melt away before the realities they symbolize, as though the dream were reluctant to release him. In a few moments, however, his eyes open, and the fantasy entirely fades. The tower vanishes amid the soft ringing of the wind chimes. The wind blown valley dissolves beneath the billowing of white cotton curtains stirred by the breeze. The mummer of the reeds along the river’s bank becomes the rsutling of the leaves below the sill. And the voice that seemed so strange and faintly dreadful is all at once familiar and inviting. In the more vivid light of the waking world, he knows he has returned to a reality far richer and more coherent than the one he has left behind. Having, however, passed through distinct levels of awareness in his assent from the twilight in that valley to the radiance of this morning, he might momentarily wonder whether even now he is entirely awake. Or whether there remains a still greater wakefulness, a still fuller light to which he might yet rise.
If I am to quibble about one issue with the book, I would say that I don’t really understand why the author is so focused on attacking deism. It’s always seemed to me that deism can be seen as a baby step away from atheism, and thus can be helpful.
Definitely it is worth a read. If you want to get the book, here is a link (note that I might get a small bit of compensation from your purchase through this link).
From the Amazon description:
Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion “God” frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths.
Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”: being, consciousness, and bliss the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points.
Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine.