The mysteries of mind

David Bentley Hart has published a gigantic, compendious, exasperating, bombastic masterpiece of a book that every serious ­person should consider reading. It’s the most thorough and rigorous account of the nature of reality to be published in a century. With All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (Yale, 528 pp.), Hart completes his long engagement with the arguments (if they can be called that) of the New Atheists.

The New Atheists, which included Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, defined public debate on religion during the first decade of the 21st century. Their robust confidence and impenetrable minds caused a widespread sensation and served more as a propagandistic bludgeon than as a set of serious arguments. Nonetheless, many people were seduced and led astray by their pretenses to scientific rigor.

Hart was not. Although Hart’s writings explore such lofty questions as the nature of beauty as a transcendental property of being, his natural posture is that of the bare-chested brawler with knuckle-duster raised. While this has often hurt the quality of Hart’s writing and led his thinking in petulant and unorthodox directions, it also led him to publish a now-formidable trilogy of books that take head-on the ideas of the New Atheism. All three are substantial, penetrating, and a rollicking joy to read.

First came Atheist Delusions (2009), which replied to the New Atheists’ claim that religion in general and Christianity in particular had been a cause of violence, bigotry, superstition, and cultural retardation across millennia. Hart’s correction of the historical record was largely successful, but his claims were historical rather than philosophical. He showed that Christianity invented a “revolutionary” conception of the human, in which even the humblest person possesses dignity. We are so far from abandoning this innovation that most of us can’t imagine an alternative. Richard Dawkins’ recent profession to being a “cultural Christian” was, in effect, a belated acknowledgment Hart was right.

In his next book, The Experience of God (2013), Hart professed two aims. The first was to show that, when atheists claim simply to believe in “one fewer” being than Christians do, insofar as they do not believe in God, they reveal their ignorance. Classical Christian theism and the wisdom traditions of the East have never thought of God as one more (very great) being among others. Such were the pagan “gods” believed to be, yes, but God, in contrast, is “ultimate reality” and “primordial reality.” God is not just a being, but the ground of existence itself, the necessary being, whose act of creation is at every moment causing all beings, time among them, to exist. God is the logos who draws the minds of His creatures into that “nuptial unity of mind and world,” thereby constituting knowledge and truth. It may be possible to declare that one does not believe in God, but it is impossible that we could conceive what God’s nonexistence would mean, for God is the condition of our existing and our knowing.

Dismantling theories of mechanistic materialism was the book’s second task, even though materialism is not, Hart says, an intellectually serious position. Materialism leaves us in a twofold absurdity. It’s silly enough to deny the reality of consciousness (along with everything else besides matter), even though consciousness is the most immediate reality we experience. It’s sillier still to proclaim that we can “know” the world is merely material when only a nonmaterial consciousness has the capacity for knowing truth as such. Hart thereby vindicates the necessary reality of God while showing that the New Atheists only ever argue against the existence of “gods.”

But in Hart’s 2013 text there are elegant passages he does not wholly explain. Pure “nature is an unnatural concept,” he writes, before concluding that “all of reality is already embraced in the supernatural.” That God is Being and Consciousness Itself suggests that all creatures with existence and consciousness participate in the divine. Are all living and knowing things therefore, in some sense, gods? All Things Are Full of Gods takes up that question.

Part of the volume recapitulates, sometimes in text that could almost have been cut and pasted from the earlier Experience of God, the arguments against all forms of philosophical materialism and the arguments for the reality of God and spirit. The only justification for this duplication of previously published material is Hart now presents it in the form of a philosophical dialogue.

In the dialogue, the divinized Psyche holds forth over six days with her husband Eros, her companion Hermes, and her antagonist, the unbelieving Hephaistos. This recovery of the ancient philosophical dialogue might seem an odd choice, but it potentially constitutes a transformation and enrichment of philosophical argument in our age.

Moving beyond his earlier insights, Hart explores the reality of mind as the primordial property of nature. Mind is the first reality: Nature is fundamentally thought, and matter is only a particular expression of it. In advancing this argument, he refutes the materialists’ reduction of mind to mere complexified matter. He also rejects the reduction made by many Christians who assume that the world, on the whole, is a machine occupied by those occasional “ghosts” we call human souls.

Hart argues the materialist account of things is insufficient even in regard to the physical world. Mind causes “being” and all its intelligible forms. Mind lies beneath all things, but mind is also omnipresent, forming all things, and present to different degrees in all living things. There is only one God who is the ground of all, but all things are also “full of gods.”

For decades now, Christians have critiqued the “disenchantment” of the modern age for its groveling superstition that the physical sciences are our only means of true knowledge. And yet, they have also often proven incapable of providing a genuine alternative to that materialism. It will not do to stuff God into a few “gaps” in our scientific knowledge of biology, as if the materialist account of the world were otherwise sufficient. The world as such requires mind and spirit as the primary realities causing, among other things, the material portion of the world (a) to be at all and (b) to be intelligible.

Hart’s rigorous and multifaceted argument recovers the classical Christian understanding of nature as already informed by the “supernatural” reality of mind. And it does so in such a thorough and compelling manner that this volume should be the starting place for all future discussions of the reality of God and the plausibility or implausibility of materialist accounts of existence.

—James Matthew Wilson is founding director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston