Reading List and Tips for Getting Started with David Bentley Hart

Some Help for Would-Be Readers of Hart

David and Roland (a photo shared by the author on November 27, 2021)

This public service note is a fool’s errand, but that’s appropriate if my firm conviction is correct that David Bentley Hart is a bit of a Holy Fool (see here). As with all Holy Fools, of course, Hart would vehemently deny the fact about himself, but I’ll not be so easily dissuaded. If you’re sadly unaware of what a Holy Fool is, read the life of Ji Gong (1133-1209) or read Fools for Christ by Jaroslav Pelikan. But I quickly digress. Because the topics involved (Vedantic philosophy, the history of human thought, the philosophy of mind, literary and stylistic theory, Christian theology, etc.) very far exceed my own capacities, this public service note is a work in progress where I continue to gather ideas from myself and others over time for the best tips and reading lists to recommend for those wanting more background and help as they take up the reading of David Bentley Hart. Toward this end, I will link to this note from my own “About page” so that anyone (including myself) can easily find it in the future. This page currently contains these five parts below:

1. Two lists of articles by Hart with links (providing helpful overviews or entry points to theology and philosophy as well as samples of his work as an essayist and fiction writer).

2. A list of books that various readers of Hart have found especially helpful as introductions to some of the (rather vast) list of topics on which Hart writes.

3. A list of Hart’s own books with brief notes on their content.

4. A list of theology-related books recommended by Hart in November 2015.

5. A highly inadequate glossary of key terms related to Hart’s work.

Articles by Hart selected as helpful overviews or entry points (in two lists)

Hart has published hundreds of essays (close to a thousand by some counts). His career as an essayist also enjoyed a long period of work for a magazine founded by Richard John Neuhaus whom Hart enjoyed (although being criticized by Neuhaus as a little “too pink” in his political leanings. Neuhaus, however, was an expansive thinker and friend, writing essays such as “Will All Be Saved?” (August 2001). At any rate, after the loss of Neuhaus, the magazine and Hart parted ways, and the magazine has since published an extensive list of especially harsh criticisms of Hart. Regardless, I’ll recommend some of these older Hart essays from this magazine with links (while indulging a little joke of my own which I have been told is extremely childish). First, here are a few representative articles from Hart as an essayist and cultural commentator (from over an intentionally long span of time):

• “How to Write English Prose” (January 2023) in The Lamp.

• “What Lies Beyond Capitalism?” (August 2019) in Plough Quarterly.

• Hart has posted the complete text here for an article originally published (2018) in The New York Times as “The New York Yankees are a Moral Abomination.”

• “Saint Origen” (October 2015) in the publication that must not be named.

• “Roland in Moonlight” (June 2014) in the publication that must not be named.

• “A Person You Flee at Parties” (May 2011) in the publication that must not be named.

• “Aloysius Bentley’s Melancholy” (September 2011) in the publication that must not be named.

• “The Secret Commonwealth” (October 2009) in the publication that must not be named.

• “Saint Sakyamuni” (September 2009) in the publication that must not be named.

• “Ecumenical Councils of War” (November 2004) in Touchstone.

Second, here are some select articles by Hart on theology, philosophy, and political theory:

• “Everything you know about the Gospel of Paul is likely wrong” (January 2018) in Aeon.

• “Christ and Nothing” (October 2003) in the publication that must not be named (as well as In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments from Eerdmans, 2008).

• “The Anti-Theology of the Body” (Summer 2005) in The New Atlantis (as well as In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments from Eerdmans, 2008).

• “Tsunami and Theodicy: Myanmar” (May 2008) in the publication that must not be named (as well as In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments from Eerdmans, 2008).

• “God, gods, and Fairies” (June 2013) in the publication that must not be named.

• “Ad Litteram: The complete text” (originally published 2015) in the publication that must not be named (but reposted by Hart on his Leaves in the Wind newsletter August 11, 2022).

• “What is Postmodern Theology?” (originally published 2020) in the book Theological Territories with Notre Dame Press (but reposted by Hart on his Leaves in the Wind newsletter August 21, 2021).

• “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients” (July 2018) in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal.

• “Where the Consonance between Science and Religion Lies” (December 2020) in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal.

• “What we think we know about God” (August 2023) in The Christian Century.

• “Slavery in Gregory of Nyssa as a Wound that We Inflict Upon Christ” with excerpts from Hart’s “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology” from February 2001 in the Scottish Journal of Theology.

• For Hart’s earliest public notes about universalism, see his 2015 comments at the bottom of “Readings in Universalism” from Fr. Aidan Kimel’s Eclectic Orthodoxy blog (or see most of these comments extracted here). He shared these while in the early stages of writing his 2019 book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. (Hart subsequently wrote many essays on this blog, but these were his first interactions there.)

Books that various readers of Hart have found especially helpful as introductions to some of the categories and schools of thought in which Hart engages

• God Matters by Herbert McCabe (1987). Thank you to Aaron Berkowitz for this recommendation.

• Ancient Mediterranean Philosophy: An Introduction by Stephen R. L. Clark (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

• The Bride of the Lamb Sergei Bulgakov translated by Boris Jakim (Eerdmans, 2001). Hart calls Bulgakov “the greatest theologian of the 20th century, also perhaps the greatest Eastern Christian thinker since the time of Maximus,” and this book is the final and summative work in Bulgakov’s prolific lifetime of writing. (Hart has also spoken with awe and joy of Bulgakov’s transfiguration on his deathbed when Bulgakov’s face radiated light for multiple people over a few days. Finally, Hart speaks warmly of several other more recent Orthodox Christian writers including John Meyendorff, Alexander Schmemann, and Kallistos Ware.)

• Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite by Eric D. Perl (State University of New York Press, 2007) as well as Perl’s Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition (although this is out of print and you might want to search for a PDF copy).

• The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity by Anantanand Rambachan (Suny Series in Religious Studies, 2006) is a strong introduction to Vedantic metaphysics (which is a major aspect of Hart’s thought). Thank you to Aaron Berkowitz for this recommendation.

• The Corinthian Body by Dale B. Martin (Yale University Press, 1995). A book recommended by Hart as a source for better understanding Paul’s concept of spiritual embodiment.

• Hart has often noted that Alice in Wonderland and Wind in the Willows are almost sacred scripture for him.

• Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (Routledge, 1998) edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward. Without having been directly involved, Hart shares a lot of common ground with John Milbank and the Christian theological and philosophical school of thought known as radical orthodoxy that Milbank founded.

• In “The Lively God of Robert Jenson” (October 2005) Hart called Robert Jenson the theologian with whom it is “most profitable to struggle.” See Jenson’s Systematic Theology from 1997 for example.

• Hart has written and spoken a lot on the wide topic of Gnosticism, and one book that he recommends as an introduction to this topic is A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism by Simone Pétrement (HarperCollins, 1990).

• See the various book lists (and many other resources) on the wonderful newsletter by David Armstrong at A Perennial Digression for more ideas.

• Hart asked to recommend books on “philosophy of mind” said that “Chalmers’s two large books cover many ideas fetchingly” and that “Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos is a very good introduction.”

A list of Hart’s own books with brief notes on their content

1. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003). This book was an expansion of his doctoral thesis for the University of Virginia (“Beauty, Violence, and Infinity: A Question Concerning Christian Rhetoric” in 1997). It’s a highly technical book covering rhetorical theory, metaphysics, and theology as well as having a writing style that seeks to illustrate the book’s thesis with a concrete example of dense and expansive beauty in the prose itself.

2. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans, 2005). This is my most frequent suggestion for where to start in reading Hart. It’s a short book that has blessed many close friends of mine and been highly recommended by many for whom I have great respect. Hart was asked to write this after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004 that killed an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries. After a brief critique of Voltaire’s 1755 poem “On the Lisbon disaster; or an Examination of the Axiom, ‘All is Well’” along with a survey and rejection of all standard Christian theodicies, Hart considers Ivan’s charge against God in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and shares why it is that Christians should not give any reason or excuse for evil but should only oppose it with the same vehemence as Ivan. This book also briefly mentions the idea of an atemporal human fall and of “fallen time” (see the “Highly inadequate glossary“ below).

3. The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith (Quercus, 2007). Hart’s history of the Christian faith is a readable overview filled with quiet but profound insights into the core dynamics of the church’s story.

4. In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments (Eerdmans, 2008). The first collection of Hart’s most-loved essays. A few of its 21 essays are:

   1. “Christ and Nothing (No Other God)”

   2. “Notes on John Paul II's Pontificate, 2001”

   3. “Religion in America: Ancient and Modern”

   4. “The Pornography Culture”

   5. “The Laughter of the Philosophers”

   6. “Tremors of Doubt”

   7. “Tsunami and Theodicy”

   8. “Where Was God? An Interview with David Bentley Hart by The Christian Century”

   9. “Roland Redivivus”

   10. “The Anti-Theology of the Body”

   11. “Ecumenical War Councils: On Webster and Cole’s The Virtue of War”

   12. “On the Trail of the Snark with Daniel Dennett”

5. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009). This book was awarded the Michael Ramsey Prize in Theology by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. It is basically a history of Christianity, and its subtitle is a far more accurate title than its title. Hart does have a lot of rhetorical slams early on (and sprinkled throughout) regarding the philistine levels of historical and philosophical ignorance on the part of the New Atheists (among whom Hart has said that Christopher Hitchens is the only one whose work deserves any kind of respect). Most of the book, however, is about how it is that Jesus Christ is the only true revolutionary in human history and how this reality shapes human history subsequent to Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. A few passages that stand out especially in my own memory are the story of “Peter’s tears,” a deeply compassionate account of Julian the Apostate, and the concluding meditation on the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the third century.

6. The Devil and Pierre Gernet: Stories (Eerdmans, 2012). Hart’s first book of short stories. Among these stories, I especially loved “The House of Apollo.” (Although still best known for theology, philosophy, and cultural commentary, Hart’s own chief love is now fiction writing, and this is the direction that he intends to take with all of his writing after he delivers The Stanton Lectures in Philosophy of Religion for the 2024 Lent term at the University of Cambridge School of Divinity.)

7. The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale, 2013). This is an expansive introduction to classical theism (and indirectly to Hart’s method of bringing Christianity before the wisdom of various world civilizations to learn more about it’s own claims). Hart has a few more criticisms of the New Atheists in this book but spends most of his time defending a classical understanding of God in relation to the three transcendentals of being, consciousness, and bliss. These three concepts provide an outline for the book and expand on the better-known Greco-Roman transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty. Hart thereby draws on religious traditions outside of Christianity to enrich a shared vision of God. In his New Testament translation, Hart uses “blissful” to translate Christ’s beatitudes. For example: “How blissful those who hunger and thirst for what is right, for they shall feast.”

8. Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm by Erich Przywara and translated by Hart in collaboration with John R. Betz (Eerdmans, 2014). This translation of a technical work connects back to much in The Beauty of the Infinite.

9. A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays (Eerdmans, 2016). This rich collection of 51 stories and essays (with an additional “Coda: C.B. 282”) includes:

   1. “The Gnostic Turn”

   2. “Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (and Christ)”

   3. “Saint Shakyamuni”

   4. “The Secret Commonwealth”

   5. “…Of Hills, Brooks, Standing Lakes, and Groves…”

   6. “Anarcho-Monarchism” [the one essay that Hart has said that he wishes he had never published]

   7. “The Abbot and Aunt Susie”

   8. “The Trouble with Ayn Rand”

   9. “Great-Uncle Aloysius”

   10. “A Splendid Wickedness”

   11. “Aloysius Bentley’s ‘Melancholy’”

   12. “The Priceless Steven Pinker”

   13. “Death the Stranger”

   14. “Through a Gloss, Darkly”

   15. “God and the Mad Hatter”

   16. “Jung's Therapeutic Gnosticism” [one essay that his brother Addison Hodges Hart wishes that his little brother had never written]

   17. “The True Helen” [Hart’s own favorite out of all his own short stories]

   18. “Roland on Consciousness”

   19. “Roland in Moonlight”

   20. “Ad Litteram”

   21. “Roland on Free Will”

10. The Dream-Child's Progress and Other Essays (Angelico, 2017). This collection of 51 stories and essays includes “The True Helen” (Hart’s own personal favorite among his short stories) as well as a “Prelude” to introduce them. Here are a few examples:

    1. “The Dream-Child’s Progress”

    2. “The Music of Eternity”

    3. “The Greatest Nation on Earth”

    4. “A Person You Flee at Parties”

    5. “The Desire of the Nations”

    6. “In Praise of Good Bad Books”

    7. “Therapeutic Superstition”

    8. “Traditio Deformis”

    9. “Saint Origen”

    10. “Habetis Papam”

    11. “The Scholar and the Nymph”

    12. “Mammon Ascendant”

    13. “Christ’s Rabble: The First Christians Were Not Like Us (and a Coda)”

11. The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Eerdmans, 2017). This collection of 20 stories and essays includes:

    1. “The Offering of Names: Metaphysics, Nihilism, and Analogy”

    2. “No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility”

    3. “The Writing of the Kingdom: Thirty-Three Aphorisms toward art Eschatology of the Text”

    4. “The Destiny of Christian Metaphysics: Reflections on the Analogia Entis”

    5. “The Mirror of the Infinite; Gregory of Nyssa and the Vestigia Trinitati”

    6. “The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea”

    7. “Matter, Monism, and Narrative: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Paradise Lost”

    8. “Whole Humanity: Gregory of Nyssa's Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology”

    9. “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of Creatio ex Nihilo”

12. The New Testament: A Translation (Yale, 2017). This project was suggested to Hart by his editor at Yale University Press, and it brought Hart even more prominently into the public eye. It also drew some criticism from fellow New Testament translator N. T. Wright (to which Hart responded here and here and, secondarily, here).

13. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale, 2019). This book has coined the term “hard universalism” or “dogmatic universalism” as Hart argues that the only coherent form of Christianity is universalism. He moves through five or six stages of a largely theological, moral, and metaphysical case for the salvation of every free rational spirit created by God. The book has inspired extremes of delighted supporters and somewhat frenzied criticism. One of the more modest responses is from Archbishop Alexander Golitzin of the Orthodox Church in America who recorded a public interview on January 14, 2022, in which he named That All Shall Be Saved as a book that “draws upon some very prominent and worthy and holy teachers” in the early church who held that the “love of God will ultimately overcome the capacity of the creature to say no to God.” The archbishop went on to clarify, however, that “we can’t teach universal salvation as doctrine, but we can hope for it.” Hart’s book, however, entirely rejects any form of hopeful universalism by making the case that the eternal conscious torment of just one monstrous creature would mean that evil had been victorious over God.

14. The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla coauthored with his son Patrick Robert Hart (Angelico, 2019). Some of compared this children’s picture book to Winnie the Pooh. The poet Michael Robbins writes that “perhaps it is for the best that Agatha Christie, Kenneth Grahame, and Emma Goldman never got around to collaborating, for then there might be a precedent for this charming and impishly subversive tale, its heart as wide as a hundred-acre wood.”

15. Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (Notre Dame, 2020). A collection of 28 more academic essays under five headings. Some of these essays include:

    1. The Gospel According to Melpomene: Reflections on Rowan Williams's The Tragic Imagination

    2. The Devil's March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations

    3. Tradition and Authority: A Vaguely Gnostic Meditation

    4. Should Science Think?

    5. The Illusionist: On Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

    6. Consciousness and Grace: Thoughts on Bernard Lonergan

    7. Orthodoxy in America

    8. Beauty, Being, Kenosis

    9. Paul's Theology Was Rather Different from What We Think

    10. What It Says, Not What It Means

    11. The Spirit of the Text

    12. A Prayer for the Poor

16. Roland In Moonlight (Angelico, 2021). This autobiographical fairy tale reaches back to essays from 2011 and 2014 about “Great Uncle Aloysius” and “Roland in Moonlight” (among several other essays with these same two characters) and threads together a story of Hart’s own life during a period of his own serious illness as well as the loss of both his parents who were living with he and his family. John Saxbee (former Bishop of Lincoln), described Roland in Moonlight as a book that “defies description or, rather, refuses to settle into a conventional genre” and said that “perhaps, here, Sophie’s World meets Alice through the Looking-Glass, or Don Quixote meets The Wind in the Willows.” Many readers consider it Hart’s best work, and Hart himself says that he put everything in this book. It is deeply personal and vulnerable as well as including sophisticated philosophical dialog and a wide range of poetry.

17. Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale) (Angelico, 2021). This novel covers the exciting story of a teenage boy and girl on a quest to save their world. It has wonderful advent themes and pairs well with the story of the wisemen and the star and the Christian season of waiting for Christ’s birth (so start the book in the weeks leading up to Christmas if possible). Hart modeled his story on the Gnostic “Hymn of the Pearl” and includes a full translation of the hymn in portions before each new section of the book. This story has remarkable mythic depictions of the human fall, a demiurge, and the final restoration of all things (apocatastasis).

18. Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Baker Academic, 2022). Living tradition is a “patient practice of critical anamnesis” (a discipline of liturgical recollection) that is a synthesis of the full testimony of earlier generations of the faith enlightened by the light of God’s kingdom. Christ’s revelation is known to us only in a drawing together of human wisdom from all times and places that is guided by a prayerful corporate vision of divine life in Christ (revealed to us from outside of or alongside of or hidden at the heart of each present moment of fallen time). See an extended essay by Hart here that responds to misunderstandings of this book by the Catholic scholar Matthew Levering.

19. You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (Notre Dame, 2022). A collection of six closely related and highly academic essays all arguing that grace is the basis of nature and that all creatures are “God becoming God” in a chiastic participation of creaturely life in the divine nature. (To be chiastic is to have both an outward and an inward flow of movement.) Here are each of the essay titles:

    1. Waking the Gods: Theosis as Reason’s Natural End

    2. The Treasure of Delight: Nicholas of Cusa on Infinite Desire

    3. That Judgment Whereby You Judge: Beauty and Discernment

    4. Pia Fraus: Our Words and God’s Truth

    5. Geist’s Kaleidoscope: Some Questions for Cyril O’Regan

    6. The Chiasmus: The Created Supernatural and the Natural Divine

20. The Mystery of the Green Star (Angelico Press, 2023) by David Bentley Hart and his son Patrick Robert Hart. This second book continues with the characters in The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla from 2019 for readers of this beloved children’s picture book.

21. The New Testament: A Translation, 2nd edition (Yale, 2023). Hart has promised never to issue a 3rd edition, but he did go back and make substantial changes in this 2nd edition where he felt that he had failed on his own part not to hear the words of layered subsequent meanings that have been imposed dogmatically and traditionally upon the text in the subsequent centuries. There is a rumor that Hart will be publishing a translation of the Septuagint Old Testament in coming years.

22. Prisms, Veils: A Book of Fables (Notre Dame, 2024). Hart’s most recent collection of short fiction, clearly establishing him as the American Goethe.

23. All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (Yale, 2024). I have a review of this book forthcoming in The Christian Century, and I will link to that when available.

A list of theology-related books by others that Hart recommended in November 2015

In November 2015, this email from David Bentley Hart to Ben Davis was posted with a recommended reading list for those wanting to “learn more about philosophy and theology and their relationship to one another.”

I assume you want basic guides to metaphysics to begin with. Richard Taylor’s Metaphysics (4th edition) is a good introduction to certain classic questions. Two volumes by E. L. Mascall–He Who Is and Existence and Analogy–are excellent guides to Christian metaphysics in the West, as is W. Norris Clarke’s The One and the Many. Avoid Peter van Inwagen: he’s brilliant at confusing things. Perhaps William Hasker’s Metaphysics is good, but I haven’t read it.

As for theology, always start with the fathers: Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Making of Man and On the Soul and Resurrection, Ps-Dionysius Complete Works (a short volume), Cyril of Alexandria’s On the Unity of Christ, Athanasius On the Incarnation, St Isaac of Ninevah’s treatises (especially the “Second Volume”), Maximus the Confessor’s Chapters on Love and the SVS volume The Cosmic Mystery of Christ. Don’t bother with Augustine until later, because for all his genius he got so much wrong (because he couldn’t read Greek, in large part). For mediaeval and early modern theology, Symeon the New Theologian’s Mystical Discourses (or whatever it’s called in English), Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God, and the Paulist Press volume of Nicholas of Cusa. Thomas Traherne’s Centuries and all three volumes of George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons are indispensable masterpieces. As for modern theologians, Bulgakov’s Bride of the Lamb, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Glory of the Lord, Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Schmemann’s For the Life of the World, part IV of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Henri de Lubac’s Supernatural (currently being translated I believe, but if you read French go ahead), Rowan Williams’ Resurrection (2nd edition).

Highly inadequate glossary of some terms and concepts

1. God and gods: God is not a god, but the gods are God becoming God. (See Hart’s books The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss as well as You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature.)

2. Age: Hart has sometimes translated “eternal” as “of the age.” To understand this requires an understanding of what Paul means by “age” which Hart as described as not only to be understood in chronological terms but also in terms of “above” or “within” or “beyond” so that ages might be understood as stacked hierarchically and not in sequential order.

3. Monism: Hart often says that all rational thought points to an ontological monism. Hart also warns that a “narrative monism” that is “unqualified by any hint of true gnostic detachment, irony, sedition, or doubt—by any proper sense, that is, that the fashion of this world is horribly out of joint, that we are prisoners of delusion, that not every evil can be accounted for as part of divine necessity—turns out to be monstrous” (You Are Gods).

4. Monistic Christology: see this brief introduction.

5. Dualism: Hart writes that “an absolute dualism, of course, is a very grim thing indeed” (You Are Gods). However, Hart also points in many different works of his to the contingent dualism of the New Testament as a critical feature of the Christian vision (a point that is typically shunned by Christian theologians as “Gnostic”). This is closely related to Hart’s concept of the atemporal human fall (see below).

6. Panpsychism: Hart has several times critiqued contemporary panpsychism (while also sounding a little gleeful at the fact that it is a serious contemporary line of thought). Meanwhile, Hart also says that classical panpsychism makes a lot of sense to him. Classically, this is the idea that all things are the result of the life of their souls. On a related note, Hart has also written that “spiritual creation actually determines the reality of physical, of natural creation” (see here). Hart discusses panpsychism with his dog Roland on a couple different occasions in their book Roland in Moonlight.

7. Mind: This is a term so important to Hart that I hesitate to hazard a short statement on it before his forthcoming (2024) book on the topic from Yale University Press. Hart’s 2015 appointment as Templeton Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study was focused on this topic and included a conference on the philosophy of mind. This was also the start of his work on a book about this due out next year. For now, I’ll just note that the Greek term often translated mind is “nous” which is best understood in Greek patristic thought as a capacity for spiritual, holistic, or esemplastic seeing (i.e. a synthesis or bringing together of all the five senses into a unified vision of things).

8. Body: Hart follows the Apostle Paul in speaking of spiritual embodiment in contrast to fleshly embodiment and psychical embodiment. Hart also follows Paul with his insistence that fleshly bodies aren’t substantial enough for the life of God’s kingdom where only spiritual bodies can fully engage. (See Hart’s essay “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients” from July 26, 2018 for example.)

9. Spirit: Hart writes “that in many passages in the New Testament, and especially in some of Paul’s letters, it is impossible to tell whether the author is speaking of human ‘spirit’ or of God’s ‘Spirit.’ At certain crucial junctures, again in Paul’s letters, the absence of a clear distinction seems almost intentional.” (See Hart’s The New Testament: A Translation with Yale University Press under entry 16 in “Translating Certain Words: An Irregular Glossary” for a more extended account of how Hart understands “spirit” as used in the New Testament.)

10. Flesh: Hart takes from the Apostle Paul a very negative understanding of fleshly bodies. “It has become something of a fashion over the past century for theologians to insist almost exclusively on how exuberantly Christianity affirms the material order—the material body especially—as the good creation of God, or on how radically the early Christian view of corporeality supposedly differed from that of more ‘Hellenistic’ or ‘gnostic’ or ‘idealist’ schools of thought. And so sarx is often rendered by some sort of theologically sanitized circumlocution like ‘sinful human nature’ or ‘fallen human nature’ or ‘the mortal body.’ Both this practice and the theological platitudes inspiring it should be eschewed at every juncture. It is true that there is nothing like an absolute dualism in the New Testament, of the sort that would suggest that the physical world is ultimately evil, or that the Age to come will not involve a redemption of the whole created order; but, even so, there is at least a very strong provisional dualism, and when the text speaks of ‘flesh’ in opprobrious terms it is not employing a vague metaphor. …Many early Christians understood the difference between the mortal body and the resurrected body (whether Christ’s or ours) as the difference between a carnal frame and a kind of life that has transcended the flesh (for, as Paul says, ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God’).” (See Hart’s The New Testament: A Translation with Yale University Press under entry 17 in “Translating Certain Words: An Irregular Glossary” for more about how Hart understands “flesh” as used in the New Testament.)

11. Atemporal Fall: This is one of the most challenging ideas mentioned by Hart, and he has not expounded it at length in his own words anywhere. He has written about “fallen time” and other topics related to the atemporal human fall at the most length in The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (2011). Hart also writes in “The Devil’s March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations” from Theological Territories (Notre Dame, 2020, pp. 79–80): “The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death. ...It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the ‘powers’ and ‘principalities’ of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender.” When asked in the comments of his “Sensus Plenior I” essay in his Leaves in the Wind newsletter on August 31, 2022 if we should all “favor the ‘atemporal fall’ view,” Hart replied, “Well, I certainly do.” When asked if he could “briefly describe what you understand or hold the ‘atemporal fall’ to be,” he replied, “No, not briefly.” However, Hart did recommend Sergius Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb as the best place to start in understanding this concept of the human fall. [Note: With a very small bit of input from Hart, I created this Wikipedia article on the topic based on reading about it in Bulgakov and several other sources, and I have also written a series of essays on this topic here.]

12. Participation: When talking about the relationship between this material and fallen world (under the archon of this age) and God’s creation outside of fallen time, Hart will sometime use the term “participation” to describe the way in which everything within this fallen cosmos and each moment within our fallen time is in real contact or relationship with God’s creation (at least at the level of being a seed or a potential no matter how incomplete, fractured, and darkened it might be).

13. Resurrection: Hart insists upon an empty grave for Jesus Christ (while noting that Paul may not have known about it). At the same time, Hart also reiterates often that there was no one unified conceptualization of what had taken place with Christ’s resurrection among the many people who witnessed him alive after his death and burial. Without giving his own opinion or conceptualization, Hart points out that Paul apparently thought of the resurrection as a transfiguration of all flesh into a spiritual embodiment (as all of creation awaits resurrection in Romans 9 for example). Hart has also said that Christians should read books like Francis V. Tiso’s Rainbow Body and Resurrection: Spiritual Attainment, the Dissolution of the Material Body, and the Case of Khenpo A Chö in order to better conceptualize the range of realties that might have been involved with Christ’s resurrection.