The Experience of God

The first thing to know about David Bentley Hart is that he’s one of the finest prose stylists writing in English today, and also one of the most exasperating. Carl Trueman, writing in Modern Reformation, said Hart is “the equal of Christopher Hitchens as a writer,” and that comparison captures both the dazzling rhetoric and the occasionally overwhelming force of personality. “The Experience of God” is Hart at his best and most characteristic: erudite, passionate, sweeping across traditions, and absolutely certain that nearly everyone else has gotten the question wrong.

The book’s structure is a bold declaration in itself. Hart organizes his argument around the Vedantic triad Sat-Chit-Ananda: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. This is a Christian theologian deliberately using Hindu categories to frame his argument about God, and the message is unmistakable: the deepest insights about ultimate reality are not the property of any single tradition. Hart ranges freely across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, arguing that all these traditions share a common understanding of God as the infinite ground of being, consciousness, and bliss, an understanding that has almost nothing to do with the bearded-man-in-the-sky caricature that both religious fundamentalists and New Atheists seem to assume.

Bryan Hollon, reviewing in Christian Scholar’s Review, called it “a brilliant book; surely Hart’s finest to date.” Michael Robbins in Commonweal called Hart “a phenomenally gifted thinker” and the book “a necessary book in a bad time.” These are not overstatements. Hart’s arguments against both materialist reductionism and naive theism are genuinely powerful, and his insistence that consciousness cannot be explained in purely physical terms is, in the current intellectual climate, both countercultural and compelling.

The criticisms, though, are telling. Robbins flagged what he called “Harold Bloom Syndrome,” meaning excessive repetition. Hart makes the same point, beautifully, over and over. Natan Mladin, writing in The Gospel Coalition, noted the conspicuous absence of the Trinity or Jesus Christ, which is a striking omission for an Orthodox Christian theologian. From the opposite direction, Nathan Hohipuha on Absurd Being argued that Hart’s God is “literally an empty abstraction.” This criticism misses the point, though. For nondual thinkers, the fact that God cannot be reduced to any particular thing is precisely what makes the concept meaningful. Hart’s God is closer to Meister Eckhart’s Godhead or Shankara’s Nirguna Brahman than to any personal deity.

For readers on a nondual path, this book is a treasure. Hart demonstrates with formidable scholarship that the contemplative core of the world’s traditions converges on the same ground, and he does so without flattening the differences between them. The chapter on consciousness alone is worth the price of admission.