Brian Hamilton

D. B. Hart on Natural Law and Natural Reasoning

“I would never—as [James K. A.] Smith clearly would have me do—reject talk of natural law, or even of natural religion. To be perfectly honest, I have not got a ‘dialectical’ bone in my body. I admit that I am skeptical as to how far natural law reasoning can actually go, especially when it is pursued under modern conditions, in which one cannot presume any sort of religio naturalis or habitual pietas of the sort one could presume in reverent pagans. And, certainly, much of the natural law writing done today, by earnest young Thomists especially, is often worse than naive, and ridiculously ambitious in its claims. Still, I believe that God as Creator reveals himself—to use a word to which I am inordinately attached—prodigally. He reveals himself in nature, in human reason, in human culture, in human religions: always now through a veil of sin and death, perhaps, but never unavailingly. When he reveals himself fully in Christ, then, he comes as the light that lighteneth all men, and comes to gather up into himself all the scattered lights—all the primordial intuitions of reason, all the innate longing for truth, all of the joys and sorrows and true pieties, all of the beauty and grandeur of the world—that the fallen order still comprises. And I take Romans 1 or Wisdom 13 as an adequate (though certainly not the sole) scriptural warrant for such a view….

“So, once again to clarify my perspective: To say that one can never escape from language and history, or that one necessarily starts from interests, prejudices, and premises that one cannot simply conjure away, is still not to say that one should abandon a belief in shared human rationality, or a belief in its aptitude for truth. It is to say only that our shared human rationality is always situated in a constellation of concrete particularities, and that its operations are various and complex in nature, and that the affective, the persuasive, the intuitive, the dogmatic, and so forth are all moments within reason’s primary act. Nowhere, I believe, do I advocate a reduction of all theological reflection to rhetoric and aesthetics; I argue only that the inseparability of rhetoric and aesthetics from theology is not only excusable, but entirely proper, and that there is no true form of reasoning is not similarly dependent upon these things.”

— David Bentley Hart, “Response to James K. A. Smith, Lois Malcolm, and Gerard Loughlin,” New Blackfriars 88 (Sept 2007): 612–614.

I heartily recommend this entire exchange, with the three panelists making important points about The Beauty of the Infinite and Hart responding at his most straightforward, most eloquent, and most charitable. He seems to have taken to heart the repeated complaints about his caustic style, and spends much more time here being thankful—but without dulling that edge of those candid critiques which make his writing so refreshing. He does “in large measure concede” that he has on occasion been overly polemical and fierce. More: “I do, of course, regret those moments when my tone becomes ‘wearing.’ But, if I may be frank, what I often find wearing is the faltering, apologetic, restrained, and hesitant tone of much modern theology. It is what I quite shamefully and unfairly tend to think of as ‘the modern Anglican inflection’: the sorrowful diminuendo towards embarrassed silence, by way of prolonged clearings of the throat and an occasional softly whistled tune, as one contemplates changing the subject before anyone is so indiscreet as to venture a firm opinion.”

Like I said: his most straightforward, most eloquent—and mostly charitable.

16 October 2007 |
tags: David Bentley Hart, Natural Law