“The Covenant of Light (excerpts)”: David Hart

Nietzsche has bequeathed Christian thought a most beautiful gift, a needed anamnesis of itself — of its strangeness. His critique is a great camera obscura that brings into vivid and concentrated focus the aesthetic scandal of Christianity’s origins, the great offense this new faith gave the gods of antiquity, and everything about it that pagan wisdom could neither comprehend nor abide: a God who goes about in the dust of exodus for love of a race intransigent in its particularity; who apparels himself in common human nature, in the form of a servant; who brings good news to those who suffer and victory to those who are as nothing; who dies like a slave and outcast without resistance; who penetrates the very depths of hell in pursuit of those he loves; and who persists even after death not as a hero lifted up to Olympian glories, but in the company of peasants, breaking bread with them and offering them the solace of his wounds …

… Theology must go further than even Nietzsche’s most stentorian invective reaches, to recover a still more radical sense of its own “perversity,” and so a deeper knowledge of its own understanding of infinity, beauty, truth. . . .

It must, in short, recover an adequate sense of a certain “Christian interruption.”

For there was, within the history of Western philosophy, in the midst of its achievements and failures, a singular interruption, the arrival of a discourse of truth in which every principle of necessity became subordinate to the higher principle of gratuity. Christian thought, and its long history of metaphysical speculation, did not occur as just another episode in the genealogy of nihilism; it was in fact so profound a disruption of many of the most basic premises of philosophy, and so audacious a rescue of many of philosophy’s truths from the impotent embrace of mere metaphysical ambition, that it is doubtful yet that philosophy understands what happened to it, or why now it cannot be anything but an ever more self-tormenting denial of that interruption.

The Jewish language of creation … in truth introduced into Western thought the radically new idea that an infinite freedom is the “principle” of the world’s being, and for the first time opened up the possibility of a genuine reflection upon the “ontico-ontological” difference [i.e. the difference between ‘beings’ and ‘being’].

And the Christian understanding of God as Trinity … for the first time confronted Western thought with a genuine discourse of transcendence, of an ontological truth whose “identity” is not completed by any ontic order of descent and ascent. The event of being, for beings, is a gift in an absolute sense, into whose mysteries no scala naturae by itself grants us proper entry. And if the world is without necessity … but is more originally gratuity … then transcendental reflection may be able to grasp many things, but by its own power it can accomplish neither the limits nor the contents of what is …

… Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason,” but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as a gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational”—indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail—and cannot be truly known if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything, one must first love, and having known one must finally delight; only this “corresponds” to the trinitarian love and delight that creates. The truth of being is the whole of being, in its event, groundless, and so in its every detail revelatory of the light that grants it …

… This is the true sense in which theology is part of the history of nihilism: it leaves nothing good behind for philosophy to claim as its own, it steals all the most powerful instruments of philosophical heuristics for its own uses … and so makes it inevitable that, in the wake of theology’s cultural influence, philosophy must advance itself ever more openly as a struggle against light, an ever more vehement refusal of the generosity of the given …

… And in truth, Western theology made its own, quite substantial contributions to modern “nihilism”: when nominalism largely severed the perceptible world from the analogical index of divine transcendence … and when the nominalists, or those of the factio occamista who followed them, succeeded in shattering the unity of faith and reason, and so the compact between theology and philosophy (or as, in an Occamist moment, Luther phrased it, “that whore”), both were rendered blind.

In the curious agonies of modernity, once being’s beauty, its poetic coherency, no longer enjoyed proper welcome, it became for some (both Catholic and Protestant) more or less axiomatic that faith, to be faith, must be blind; but then reason, to be reason, must be so as well … Revelation, rather than an elevation and glorification of natural knowledge … became a rupture of experience, an alien word, a paradox …

… But whatever the confusions theology subjected itself to at the birth of modernity, Christian thought’s betrayal of itself was every bit as grave a diminishment of philosophy; if theology was subjected to the abysmal sublimity of a god of absolute arbitrary will, philosophy was delivered into the hands of his lesser twin, an equally featureless, equally merciless god: the transcendental ego.

The tradition of Christian thought, in radicalizing the eternal beauty of ancient philosophical longing, and in summoning philosophical eros toward a far more transcendent end, left the world groundless in itself and so, in a manner of speaking, gilded the glory of the world with the additional aura of wonderful gratuity and fortuity; the shining—the phanein—of the phenomena now belonged to another story, and could no longer provide irrefragable evidence of reason’s ability to gain possession of the world’s principles. To detach itself from theology, then, and to discover an order of evidences not rendered unstable by the history of its obviously quite successful employment within the discourse of divine transcendence, philosophy had to find for itself another ground. And this could be accomplished only by way of an initial refusal of the world in its immediacy, with all its astonishing allure and terror, and all its inconsistent apparency; this simple but absolute moment of rejection, inverting the order of truth, moving truth from the world in its appearing to the subject in its perceiving, secured reason’s “freedom” perhaps, but also unveiled with extraordinary suddenness that “nihilistic” terminus that Heidegger saw … as having been … determined in the eidetic science of Platonism …

… [After Descartes] the trustworthiness of the world could be secured for reflection only within the citadel of subjective certitude, as an act of will. The transcendental turn in philosophy was a turn to instrumental reason as foundation; the truth of the world could no longer be certified by the phanein of what gives itself to thought, but only by the ajudications of the hidden artificer of rational order: the ego. Understanding, now indiscerptibly joined to the power of the will to negate and establish, could not now be understanding of a prior givenness, but only a reduction of the exterior to what is answerable to and so manipulable by reason …

… If Copernicus overthrew the commonsense geocentrism of ancient cosmology by advancing the heliocentric thesis, displacing the center from “here” to “there,” Kant … enacted at the transcendental level an entirely contrary motion, reestablishing the order of knowledge by moving the axis of truth from the “sun of the good” to the solid, imperturbable fundamentum inconcussum of the subjectum … Now the phenomena would revolve around the unyielding earth of apperception; again, we would stand at the center.

Perhaps, given the often irreversible forces of historical contigency, all of this was an unavoidable development in Western philosophy; but purely from the perspective of philosophical necessity, it was never a critical destiny for thought as such … To discover, as Kant did, how much is known before it is known, how much is presumed a priori in every posterior act of knowledge, is not necessarily to have determined how consciousness constitutes the world … any more than it is to discover how much of my knowing and how much of the known transcend the consciousness they shape; indeed, such a discovery more properly, with fewer metaphysical leaps of logic than Kant’s epistemology requires, merely declares again, even more emphatically, that all being and knowing is the work of an irreducible givenness … What the transcendental ego can understand is so much more limited than the reality visible to the soul …

… Before modern subjectivity had fully evolved and emerged from the waters, a person was indeed conceived of as a living soul, swimming in the deeps, participating in the being of the world, inseparable from the element he or she inhabited and knew; and the soul, rather than the sterile abstraction of the ego, was an entire and unified spiritual and corporeal reality … And what was lost when the soul was forsaken for the self … is the world that the soul could at once dwell in and reflect within itself … In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or “adequate” a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic …

… If it seems that, in using such language, I am merely advocating a return to philosophical naivete, making a theological virtue out of a truculent impatience with modern thought’s critical rigor, and attempting to represent rhapsody as reason, I can only say that it is not until one adequately recognizes the degree of sheer faith than inheres every employment of reason that one can turn again to recognize what degree of rationality is or is not present in any given act of faith. It is true that I want to defend a theological reappropriation of what I have called the “covenant of light”—a trust in the evidence of the given, an understanding of knowledge as an effect of the eros stirred by the gift of the world’s truth—but this is because (among other things) I wish to see modern theology free itself from any superstitious adherence to the arid dogmatisms of transcendental logic (modern or postmodern).

I believe that what, in part, I mean to advocate is simply a phenomenology liberated from transcendental stricture: beginning from the phenomenological presuppositions that being is what shows itself, and that the event of the phenomenon and the event of perception are inseparable, I wish nonetheless to say that only a transcendental prejudice would dictate in advance that one may not see (or indeed does not see) in the event of manifestation and in the simultaneity of phenomenon and perception a light that exceeds them as an ever more eminent phenomenality: not only the hidden faces of a given object, or the lovely dynamism of visible and invisible in presentation, but the descending incandescence and clarity of the infinite coincidence of all that grants world and knower one to the other.

This is not to say that one can simply deduce Christian metaphysics from empirical perception, obviously; but it is to insist that such a metaphysics is scarcely the founding of the visible in the simply invisible, of the immanent in a merely posited transcendence: rather it is a way of seeing that refuses to see more—or less—than what is given. It is a passage to the infinite that does not depart from the beautiful to pass through the paradox of the sublime toward the featureless abyss of otherness available only to reason, but one that attempts to advance into the beautiful forever, finding the world ever more fully even as one enters into its transcendent truth …

… Why is it, after all, that one can speak meaningfully and intelligibly of beauty, in any instance of experience, though one is not referring to any discrete object alongside the object of attention? How is it that one may say that a thing is beautiful and another recognize the truth or error of the remark, understanding in either case what has been said? It is, I want to say, because beauty—which is no thing among things—is being itself, the movement of being’s disclosure, the eloquence by which everything, properly and charitably regarded, says infinitely more than itself …

… The experience of the beautiful is the sudden intimation of the fortuity of necessity, of the contingency of a thing’s integrity; it is an awe that awakens one to the difference of being from beings, of “existence” from “essence,” allowing one to see within the very concord, within their difference, of any phenomenon and its event a fittingness that is also grace … And this mysterious coherence of the wholly fitting and utterly gratuitous urges reflection toward the proportion of their harmony: toward, that is, the infinity where “essence” and “existence” coincide as the ontological peace of both a primordial belonging and an original gift. Thus the experience of beauty is a knowledge of creatureliness and a hunger that can never have done with the things of earth. It is also an insatiable hunger for God …

… Again, Christ (God’s full and everlasting Word) is a persuasion, a form—incalculably various in the facets he shows—offered outward to the world as the real shape of creation, the true grammar of being … His beauty, if grasped, is the true story of being, told from before the foundations of the world to the end of time. But this means that Christ must have real aesthetic force; he must be able to appear not as a docetic phantom, nor even as only an impossible possibility, but as a real and appealing form of being, a way of dwelling among others, a kind of practice. It is not enough to say Christ “happened”: he must be available to vision, as a concrete shape and motion that it is still possible to extend, to compose variations upon, to reappropriate and rearticulate: in Christ, in the practice of Christ as a real style—a real presence—within history, one must be able to taste and see that the Lord is good.

“The Covenant of Light” is the final section of the first part of Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.