David Bentley Hart on the fall of humans, the reality of spiritual powers and principalities, and how spiritual consciousness creates the world we share

Transcriptions from Recent Recordings

Here is Hart with a summary of creation and the human fall (from a October 16, 2023 interview with Tony Golsby-Smith):

This [view of the fall by Bulgakov as an event that occurred outside of history] was actually a fairly common way of thinking, and in Origen it's explicit, but it becomes less so in later centuries, in part because of the odium that became attached to Origen’s name. But for the ancient world, in which the early centuries of Christianity took shape, there is a distinction between time as we know it, chronos, and the eon, the sort of heavenly eternity that's the fullness of time. And God is beyond even that. God is beyond all ages. You find these formulations in John of Damascus, making this set: chronos, eon, and then the empyrean or eonian beyond ages. For Origen, clearly, the fall didn't really happen in historical time. This time of history and nature that we know has always been one of death and disease and violence. He didn't know the history of evolution, but it wouldn't have surprised him because all the church fathers of the Origenian tradition talked about God creating by creating rational seeds of nature that developed autonomously into life. There's a kind of sense that the six days of creation are actually a natural process that led to the appearance of humanity. So they wouldn't have been appalled to learn that we descended from primates, and yet they still believed in the fall because they thought that this was a different frame of time in which spiritual natures were called from nothingness to union with God. Maximus too says, talking from the perspective of time, that creation and fall are more or less simultaneous, but he means from our perspective. All of creation is called out of nothingness to union with God, but this is in this other frame of time—the way in which we freely assent to our existence in God as spiritual beings. And that's Bulgakov, obviously, that free assent that, in a sense, is implicit in Origen. But we turned away to the whole history of cosmic violence. And of course Maximus is the one who writes about this at the greatest length. The whole history of cosmic violence is the result of our failure—the failure of the priestly mediation of our natures joining heaven to earth, joining earth to paradise, joining the created to the divine, joining with perfect harmony between man and woman, between humanity and animal creation. All of this is shattered from the first, in the perspective of eternity. Paul talks about the division of heaven from earth, man from woman, creation from paradise. All these cosmic divisions are healed in Christ, and, at the consummation of all things, will be perfectly reconciled. But until we see that, we don't really see the creation that God actually fashions in eternity—the real creation of which this world is now a shadow on the way to becoming divine.

And there is more here transcribed from some of the Q&A during “David Bentley Hart on Suffering” lecture (hosted by Gospel Conversations and posted on August 28, 2023). They not only hosted Hart on a recent trip to Australia but also recorded three wonderful conversations between Tony Golsby-Smith and Hart in 2021. At the bottom, I have also included a very short transcription from an interview that Hart gave to Meredith Lake with ABC Radio National’s “Soul Search” podcast while on this same trip in Australia. This brief passage at the end covers, in just one sentence, much of what Hart lays out here:

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Q: You make a very compassionate case for how we should react to evil in the world. But I feel—unless I've missed it—there's nothing there about why the evil should be there in the first place. Couldn't God have made a world which is just as noble just as beautiful just as meaningful without so much evil at least?

Hart: I would think so, yes, but I assume that the venture of creation—here I’m going to sound like Bulgakov if that's okay—is the calling into being of spiritual creation from nothingness into an infinite ascent into union with God. Right? That's the picture that I think we Eastern Christians certainly presume. Calling spiritual creatures into being is calling free natures—not libertarianly free in the banal sense but free nonetheless—they have to ascent to what they are in order to be spiritual beings and to ascend. Even God does not have the power to create a free spiritual nature in a predetermined state. Even God cannot create a dramatist persona and say, “This is free.” There must be, for a true spiritual nature, a created nature, an absolute past in non-being and an absolute future in the infinity of God. And that means a freedom that is not determinate even though it is determined towards an ultimate end that cannot be avoided. The ultimate end is theosis, union with God, glorification of creation. But there are as many paths there to as there are spiritual natures, as many heavens and hells as there are souls along the way to that final consummation. And the story that Christians have been taught to believe is that, in that act, God handed over the realm of what Thomas calls secondary causality to free spiritual natures that are not yet complete but that are becoming God.

I hope that language doesn't shock anyone. I know there are a lot of reformed people in Sydney.

[We can try] saying, well, God could create an infinite number of worlds, but there's only one way to create a free spiritual nature.

Q: Thanks. Could you just help me understand what you just said.

Hart: No, no. That's asking too much.

Q: I'm sure the fault is at my end. Have you just applied the free will defense, which applies to people and the evil that people do, to what people call natural evil (well maybe you don't call it that) but have you just applied that to natural evil and said that there are free spirits in the New Testament cosmology that have certain powers of secondary causality, and it's basically the same argument but applied to the spiritual realm?

Hart: The Christian story, whether it's plausible or not, is that humanity... (Somehow, well I mean we've mentioned Maximus earlier. Bit of a fraught issue with all the Copts in the room to bring up Maximus, but it's the same faith. There were just a few little disagreements about terminology and about hands and tongues and things. But I’m sorry.) You know, that humanity occupied this position in the cosmic liturgy, the wholeness of creation, that is a priestly and mediatorial role between physical, animal, vegital creation and spiritual creation and that the fall of humanity which did not occur within time as we know it (I mean, the story of the Garden of Eden is a myth), but it's a myth that for Christians points to an estrangement that had devastating consequences not just for us but for all of creation. That is the Christian story. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. I mean I can't prove it.

But the claim has always been, for Christians, the claim in the New Testament is—under this present evil—this cosmos (that is, under the archon of this cosmos) is not creation as God intended it but creation as enslaved to death. And death doesn't just mean the expiration which I hope, you know, to avoid as long as possible of my individual person. It means an ontological condition. Everything is shattered and torn asunder and involved in mortality which is pain and suffering and estrangement. That is the Christian story: that spiritual creation actually determines the reality of physical, of natural creation. That’s why Paul says the glorification of creation comes through the creation that's revealed in the sons of glory. The restoration of the human and of all the powers, I mean Paul has a very clear cosmology of not just human spiritual creation but you know rather mutinous or incompetent angels, not the way later theology talked about fallen angels, Lucifer (I mean there are evil spirits too involved, but it's a different, I don’t want to get into second temple Judaism [for more about what Hart means, see “When Did Angels Become Demons?” by Dale Martin in the Journal of Biblical Literature (Vol. 129, No. 4: WINTER 2010, pp. 657-677) which has been recommended elsewhere by Hart]), but anyway the point is that for Paul the whole thing has been deranged and disordered and in Christ has been restored and, in the end, the ultimate end of all things is finally to achieve the true story that God is telling in creation which is the union of all things with God in divine glory and in which we have a part to play, [in] which spiritual creation has a part to play, as a kind of cosmic priesthood. I mean, I don't know of any other version of Christianity.

Q: Just riffing on the same question really. So going back to the beginning of your reading, and you're talking about all the different gods of all the different peoples. Are you in a sense suggesting those gods exist and that they are responsible for the tsunami?

Hart: No, that was pure poetry, but exquisite don't you think? But I do believe there are spiritual powers and principalities and things like that, but no I mean they may have some responsibilities. I don't know if you've got little demons down there at the tectonic plates... [Laugher] I don’t know what the mechanisms are. I don't think you need that to say that all of creation is in the power... to say that the physical corruption of death—which dominates all things which is the reality we know, which in one sense is very real but in another sense is an illusion, it's not the true face of creation—includes spiritual dimensions. If I were to give a place to those other gods, it would be a good one. To be honest, I don't hold with this notion of condemning other faiths as heathen and pagan. They're just different ways of understanding God that may get some things wrong and some things right. Bodhisattvas are very good fellas. After all, they take the vow that they themselves will not enter into final bliss until all other beings enter before them. So I would never speak ill of Kṣitigarbha or Amitābha or any of the others. I kind of like them.

Do I believe that there are fallen spirits other than human beings? Yeah, I do. I don't understand them; I don’t know much about them. But I find that very plausible. I just sometimes feel, if nothing else, that there really is a spirit of, you know, when we find ourselves in situations that seem to exceed... where there is a sort of spiritual evil in our experience that exceeds simple, causal explanations like, say, Donald Trump, it seems perfectly rational to posit a dimension of spiritual evil with incredibly bad taste and hairstyle.

...Christianity isn't deism. It has a very dark view of the present situation of things.

Q: You believe [Sergei] Bulgakov is the greatest theologian of the 20th century. You might explain how he came to faith at the death of his child.

Hart: [Bulgakov] came from a family that included very famous bishops and priests. The  Bulgakov family is a very distinguished one. He is a distant cousin of the great Mikhail Bulgakov, the great novelist of, you know, The Master and Margarita, The White Guard, and all that. He always sort of hovered on it, but he was also a firm Marxist at one time. He was a brilliant economic philosopher. But he lost a son, and it was at his funeral, the funeral of his son, that he had this sudden visionary experience of his son transfigured in the glory of Christ. He knew it was not an emotional, not a psychological experience, that the veil had parted for a moment. Thereafter, he became... Yes, I think he's the greatest theologian of the 20th century, also perhaps the greatest Eastern Christian thinker since the time of Maximus, which means the greatest Christian thinker since the time of Maximus. Well no, there's some Western figures I like too: Nicholas of Cusa and the Rhineland mystics... Yeah, that's the curious thing, at the moment of utmost grief, he thought he'd been vouch-safed the knowledge that this grief is a transient prelude to a beauty and a glory that we cannot imagine but of which we can catch a glimpse by the grace of the Holy Spirit. ...It's more than interesting, it's deeply moving.

Q: Can you explain to people how he died?

Hart: Well, now, this is how people will start thinking I'm superstitious... But no, it's true on his deathbed... Bulgakov was a controversial figure in the Orthodox church because you always have unimaginative Philistines in every communion... But on his deathbed, there were a dozen different people who saw him transfigured. I mean, even two of his atheist friends ceased being atheists when they saw how he died, I mean, literally radiating light from his face and seeming to be 30 years younger and to be more beautiful. I didn't see it, but a dozen people were there, and all of them reported the same thing including those who—though his friends (they were part of the Russian Parisian community)—had never been believers until that moment.

Q: Even before this lecture, I've always been a little bit confused about the fall because I try to keep one foot in theology and one foot in science as much as possible. It seems that the nature of this world, that the predator and the prey, predates any conceivable time in history where we can say Adam was here and it was perfect and then the fall happened. You said it's a myth that didn't happen in time, but then that leaves some of us a little bit confused about how it happened. And this is related to it, was the fall intentional? Was the fall part of God's plan in order to create spiritual beings? I understand from this lecture that no is the answer. It's probably the doing of evil.

Hart: Okay, I'm an Origenist. No, I don't believe that there is any period in cosmic history of an unfallen creation. I mean history is a continuum. Of course, in the ancient world—this is how church fathers like Maximus (and I would say Gregory too, I think it's clear from De hominis opificio his book On the Making of Humanity)—they tended to think in three kinds of time. There's chronos which of course for Platonism is the moving image of the aeon, that's the second level. The aeon is the fullness of time in a kind of spiritual dimension or what we would call the angelic age or the angelic aevum. Then there's the eternity of God beyond all ages. And I think that it's clear that for, say, Gregory and many of the church fathers—certainly for Maximus—the fall is something that happens not in time as we know it. The time as we know it is the fallen result of a fall in the spiritual realm of the aeon. That's how, if there was a fall, that's where [and] when: there, not before or after, but in a different frame of time altogether, time not as a shadowy succession of momentary reflections of the fullness that can never be fully embodied at any given instant, that's chronos, the moving image of the aeon, which is the fullness. So it certainly wouldn't be in conflict with rigorous science. In terms of scientific fact, the world, the best we can say, is 4.5 billion years old. Human beings evolved from lower primates. That clearly is where we come from in terms of the physical history of natural beings, but our spiritual history lies elsewhere.

Anyway, is that sufficient? I mean, I understand the fall not as something that happened in time. Now of course you remember from Maximus, the fall is instantaneous. The moment of creation is when the fall happens. Because of course, sub specie aeternitatis, time is a succession for us, but from the vantage of eternity all things are at one moment. So from Maximus the fall and creation are simultaneous. You know, our spiritual nature at once already rebels even in freely assenting to its own creation. But that's all speculative. It's true, but speculative. I do think that, if there's any meaning to the Christian language of the fall, that's what its meaning has to be. Although I've known, again, (I’m always complain about Thomists but that's what they're there for) Thomist who will say that this order of creation, this world as we know it, is the creation that God intends but then humankind was created in a kind of special bubble that's outside of the continuum of death. And they try to reconcile this with the fact of hominid evolution by saying that at some magic instant God infused a rational soul in two primates within a gene pool and then they had the choice to be elevated out of nature into a state of supernature. To me, I don't know what to make of that except that it is silly, but maybe what I'm saying sounds just as absurd to some. But whatever the case, I think, if the language of the fall has any meaning, it's not about something that happened in time. It's something about how time as we know it came to be.

Q: The comeback to the free will defense is often, well, won't we have free will in heaven, so here’s a good possible world where you have free will and no suffering. So why didn’t God just fast forward and create heaven in the first place?

Hart: For the reasons I just gave. First of all, I'm not sure what free will in heaven would be other than absolute union with God, true freedom being the freedom of a nature to flourish in its uttermost end, which would be union with God right? But you cannot be a free spiritual agent, that cannot be the case, if you're created already in a condition of psychological identity. Somewhere in the constitution—the structure of your being as a creature—there has to be a real emergence from nothingness towards the infinity of God. Otherwise, you really are just a puppet. You can call it freedom if you want, but it's a freedom that's posited in you as a psychological condition of an identity that's been imposed. You do not become the spiritual person you are, you are simply that character in the drama. So no, I would say that that couldn't possibly be the case. Again, freedom I don't take to be the trivial condition of the ability to deliberate and make specific individual choices. Freedom, as I understand it, is the absolute orientation of the natural will to the good and the power of the deliberative will within us to become ever more transparent to that true natural ground of freedom and therefore evermore transparent to the presence of God. Hamlet is not free, and the kind of freedom you're talking about would be a little different from the kind of freedom we fictively imagine for Hamlet.

Q: You were talking about, towards the end of your talk, that Christians are permitted to hate evil. ...I would imagine that, for someone experiencing suffering, that would be a very frustrating mystery to live with.

Hart: No. I don't think so. I nearly died in quite a lot of pain back in 2014. I came very close to suicide in fact. If I had thought that this was part of God's plan and that it had some sort of dialectical significance beyond me, as the suffering being I was, I would have despised God. It was the knowledge that this is not what I was called to be as a creature and that I would be liberated from this. People, you know, have to believe the suffering has meaning... Really? Does that make you feel better about Auschwitz? Yeah, it had a purpose. Well, no it didn't. You know, it is pure nihil, pure nothingness, pure negation of the good.

Q: I still kind of get to the end of the story, the picture you painted tonight, and I'm wondering, “Where's God?”

Hart: I take it God is the one who's overthrowing these things [evil powers] in Christ and to whom we’re being drawn through the shadows of this world and becoming the spiritual beings who we are. I'm not sure what it is that's missing there.

Q: Okay, so doesn't that then make it this progression to infinity, making evil a necessary part of the world in order to have that progression?

Hart: No. It's just that that’s the contingent fact of what it is that we've done with our freedom, but it doesn't make it necessary. That something is the case, that something is a possibility within the case, is not the same thing as saying it's a metaphysical necessity that, in and of itself, has a positive meaning. I mean, it may not be satisfactory, but it's not a small distinction to say that there is entailed within the reality of spiritual creation the possibility of evil and then saying, differently, not entailed but necessarily the creation of spiritual reality requires the positive supplement of evil. I'm perfectly happy to say that, no, there's no need for the fall, there's no need for death, there's no need for cancer, but there is a need for the possibility of the misuse of spiritual freedom and that spiritual freedom is not just a personal liberty. It is a powerful thing. It shapes the reality we inhabit, that it is spiritual consciousness that creates the world we share and that we, as one in a body of death, are actual creators of this condition of estrangement but nowhere in there is there a metaphysical or a logical necessity. There might be a nomological necessity if you care about boring distinctions of modality of necessity and contingency, and I do because you can baffle people with language like that, and they think you're very clever. But nowhere in there is there a metaphysical necessity, but there's the necessity of a possibility.

Q: Being Orthodox, quite a lot of the ascetical literature talks about accepting everything from the hand of God, being thankful for suffering, that kind of thing. How would you reconcile that with this view of hating suffering?

Hart: Well, first of all, I think some of the ascetical literature is lousy. Just because a saintly person wrote it doesn't mean it's always right in the way it's articulated. But it's perfectly possible to see God providentially bringing spiritual fruits out of evil. I mean, that's not a contradiction. You know, Macrina on her death bed accepting God's grace and mercy and love in this and accepting the suffering without hating God or without resenting others. Providentially, there's a spiritual progress in that and spiritual fruit. But again, there's a difference between providential work because providence is real for Christians, that God really is working within the realm of secondary causality, but that's very different from saying that, ontologically, the suffering is good or that, metaphysically, it's a necessary condition of being a spiritual being, a spiritual creature. But also, yeah, you do also get a certain amount of pious claptrap in the spiritual tradition.

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Finally, from a second recent recording with Hart, we have a sentence below that I think is the most succinct statement by him on the concept of an atemporal or meta-historical human fall. He made this point during an interview with Meredith Lake on ABC Radio National’s “Soul Search” podcast released on August 31, 2023:

“For Paul, the issue is that the whole universe—by some kind of prehistory that we can only speak of symbolically, a kind of spiritual prehistory—something has gone terrifically wrong, and we are bound to death ...and trapped in a body of pain, a mortal body.”

Hart, by the way, has said elsewhere that the best written exposition of the atemporal fall by a modern theologian is in The Bride of the Lamb by Sergius Bulgakov (although it is also a widespread concept among several of the early church fathers and can also be found in other Christian thinkers over the centuries).

The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise