By David Bentley Hart, October 2003 I wish, that is, to make a point not conspicuously different from Alasdair MacIntyre’s in the first chapter of his After Virtue: in the wake of a morality of the Good, ethics has become a kind of incoherent bricolage. As far as I can tell, homo nihilisticus may often be in several notable respects a far more amiable rogue than homo religiosus, exhibiting a far smaller propensity for breaking
For many people today, remote as they are from a Christianity which seems to them just talk and moralizing, life attains a religious intensity only when they experience beauty: a song pulsating to the rhythm of the blood, struck up by an adolescent to his own guitar accompaniment; a mountain in winter, when the world is transformed by snow, and light seems to radiate gently from the earth; a face, seen in such close-up that
We must not forget that from its beginning Christianity came into contact with a whole range of prehistoric systems of thought, whose influence penetrated the Mediterranean world after Alexander’s expedition, when Greek and Asian civilizations met; sciences of inner reality and underlying causes, animist or pan-psychic beliefs about existence, in which humanity and the cosmos are at one. Indian yoga and Chinese medicine, which even threaten to undermine Marxist historical materialism, are modern examples of
The Love of Enemies The theologians of violence forget the Beatitudes. The theologians of non-violence forget that history consists of tragedies. But amongst the violence of history, it is the duty of Christians to manifest the love of enemies, which is the strength of Christ himself. The love of enemies, exercised in the most extreme circumstances, is the only cure for our political neurosis, the desire to escape one’s own death while projecting it on
‘From now on politics will be our religion’; so wrote Feuerbach, a little before Marx socialized God. And looking now at the emptiness created by industrial civilization, we can see how right he was. With the headlong progress of technology and the development of global civilization, there is a greater need than ever for a sense of purpose, the influence of the Spirit, a new marriage covenant between the human race and the earth. Our
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