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Best Book I’ve Read All Year

I was going to wait till I finished the book to write this post, but inasmuch as I’m about to plunge into my own book-tour craziness, I fear that I won’t get finished with the book in question in time to write a thoughtful post before I come to the end of my own tour. […]

I was going to wait till I finished the book to write this post, but inasmuch as I’m about to plunge into my own book-tour craziness, I fear that I won’t get finished with the book in question in time to write a thoughtful post before I come to the end of my own tour. So, here goes.

A good friend of mine is a university professor who went through a years-long crisis in which he pretty much lost his Catholic faith. This past Lent, he experienced a wonderful rebirth of religious conviction and feeling. It wasn’t a sudden thing, but it really crystallized this past spring. When I asked him about it, he told me that the Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart’s book Atheist Delusions was key in challenging many of the things he, as a philosophically informed and culturally engaged intellectual, thought he knew about historical Christianity. The book made a big difference for my friend, in bringing him back to the belief and practice of his Christian faith, and he highly recommended it to me.

Though I like Hart’s work, I hadn’t read this book because the title made me think it was a Christian version of the bomb-throwing polemics we get from the Ditchkins side. That was dumb of me; Hart is far too sophisticated a thinker to have tossed off something like that. And yet, I stayed away from the book … until my friend said, in effect, you’ve got to read this! 

I bought it from Kindle earlier this week, and though I’m not quite halfway through it, I can tell that the Hart book is probably the best thing I’ve read all year. It’s not a polemic, exactly, but a work of interpretive cultural history. What he does is take the assumptions so many contemporaries — even many contemporary Christians — make about the world before Christianity, and the world Christianity brought into being, and demolish them with clear prose and muscular argument. From what I can tell so far, Atheist Delusions basically says: “What you think you know about Christianity and the West is wrong.”

But not just that. For example:

To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing. This is not to say it is to have no beliefs: the truly  modern person may believe in almost anything, or even perhaps in everything, so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in the nothing — or better, in nothingness as such. Modernity’s highest ideal — its special understanding of personal autonomy — requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arise no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose. We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom. This is our primal ideology. In the most unadorned terms possible, the ethos of modernity is — to be perfectly precise — nihilism.

This word is not, I want immediately to urge, a term of abuse, and I do not employ it dismissively or contemptuously. There are today a number of quite morally earnest philosophers (especially in continental Europe) who are perfectly content to identify themselves as nihilists, because they understand nihilism to be no more than the rejection fo any idea of an ultimate source of truth transcendent of the self or the world — a rejection, that is, not of the various objective truths that can be identified within the world but of the notion that there is some total or eternal Truth beyond the world, governing reality and defining the good, the true, or the beautiful for all of us here below. As such, some would argue, nihilism is potentially the most peaceful and pluralistic of intellectual conditions, precisely because it presumes no system of beliefs that ought to be imposed upon others and no single correct path to truth that others ought to be made to tread. To be truly nihilist, in this sense of the word, is simply to have ben set free from subservience to creeds, or to religious fantasy, or to any form of moral or cultural absolutism, and so ideally to have relinquished every desire to control one’s fellows.

And:

A God beyond us or a stable human nature within us would confine our decisions within certain inescapable channels; and so at some, usually unconscious level — whatever else we may believe — we stake ourselves entirely upon the absence of either. Those of us who now, in the latter days of modernity, are truest to the wisdom and ethos of our age place ourselves not at the disposal of God, or the gods, or the Good, but before an abyss, over which presides the empty power of our isolated wills, whose decisions are their own moral index. This is what it means to have become perfect consumers: the original nothingness of the will gives itself shape by the use it makes of the nothingness of the world — and thus we are free.

I think this is deeply true, and deeply insightful. I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that this is typical of the book’s focus, most of which — it seems so far — is based on a critical examination of the myths we take for granted today about how Christianity supposedly affected the Western world.

I can’t deliver a complete judgment about Atheist Delusions yet, because I’m barely even halfway through it. But so far, it’s a tremendous book, and I can sense why it affected my college professor friend so powerfully. I’m sure I’ll finish it either this weekend or on the plane to NYC next week, but I’m not sure I’ll have the time or the focus to give it the attention it deserves in a post. I’m putting this up because this book is too good to let slip by. Shame on me for not reading it sooner because I found the title off-putting.

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