Robert Lawrence Kuhn (creator of the PBS series Closer to Truth) recently wrote an article called “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications” in which he tried to catalog every “explanation of consciousness” with the ambitious goal of summarizing and organizing “all contemporary theories that are sufficiently distinct with explanations that can surmount an arbitrary hurdle of rationality or conceivability.” David Bentley Hart made Kuhn’s list with the conclusion that Hart “constructs an ultimate unified monism, first by showing that consciousness/mind and being/existence are profoundly inseverable” and then by “taking consciousness and being, already one and the same, and unifying it with God” resulting in what Kuhn maintains “is not pantheism (or panentheism), but based on Hart’s Orthodox Christian convictions, a Christological monism.” Kuhn published this just a few months after Hart gave a series of five lectures at Cambridge University (The Stanton Lectures in April and May of 2024) entitled “The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology” (see
Very interesting. I am now Orthodox, but was quite sympathetic to pantheism for many years, and specifically dual-aspect monism (that Orthodoxy is alright with panentheism made the step far easier). I read a lot of panpsychist philosophy, such as Freya Matthews; but hardly have even dabbled in serious theology. Any such connections are of great interest to me. (And I wonder if other modern/sciencey type people would allow for a Christianity that was actually monistic.)
Hart interacts a good bit with modern science in his new book *All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life* (August 2024). If you have not read them, it sounds like you would appreciate several of Hart's books related to this. He is Orthodox himself (although he grumbles loudly about a good bit within Orthodoxy).
I think once you see the deep compatibility between monotheism (really, theism) and monism, anything else ends up feeling arbitrary. Actually, materialism's aspirations to monism may be its only major advantage over contemporary dualism, since the crudity of its conceptions are balanced by the tidiness of its metaphysics. This, incidentally, is the third place I've seen Kuhn's article mentioned since its publication, so hopefully DBH's views (and even Ed Feser's hylemorphic dualism) will get some serious attention along with it.
Very interesting. I am now Orthodox, but was quite sympathetic to pantheism for many years, and specifically dual-aspect monism (that Orthodoxy is alright with panentheism made the step far easier). I read a lot of panpsychist philosophy, such as Freya Matthews; but hardly have even dabbled in serious theology. Any such connections are of great interest to me. (And I wonder if other modern/sciencey type people would allow for a Christianity that was actually monistic.)
Hart interacts a good bit with modern science in his new book *All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life* (August 2024). If you have not read them, it sounds like you would appreciate several of Hart's books related to this. He is Orthodox himself (although he grumbles loudly about a good bit within Orthodoxy).
I think once you see the deep compatibility between monotheism (really, theism) and monism, anything else ends up feeling arbitrary. Actually, materialism's aspirations to monism may be its only major advantage over contemporary dualism, since the crudity of its conceptions are balanced by the tidiness of its metaphysics. This, incidentally, is the third place I've seen Kuhn's article mentioned since its publication, so hopefully DBH's views (and even Ed Feser's hylemorphic dualism) will get some serious attention along with it.