By David Bentley Hart, October 2003
It is true of Aristotle too: the dialectic of act and potency that, for sublunary beings, is inseparable from decay and death, or the scale of essences by which all things—especially various classes of persons—are assigned their places in the natural and social order. Stoicism offers an obvious example: a vision of the universe as a fated, eternally repeated divine and cosmic history, a world in which finite forms must constantly perish simply in order to make room for others, and which in its entirety is always consumed in a final ecpyrosis (which makes a sacrificial pyre, so to speak, of the whole universe). And Neoplatonism furnishes the most poignant example, inasmuch as its monism merely inverts earlier Platonism’s dualism and only magnifies the melancholy.
Not only is the mutable world separated from its divine principle—the One—by intervals of emanation that descend in ever greater alienation from their source, but because the highest truth is the secret identity between the human mind and the One, the labor of philosophy is one of escape: all multiplicity, change, particularity, every feature of the living world, is not only accidental to this formless identity, but a kind of falsehood, and to recover the truth that dwells within, one must detach oneself from what lies without, including the sundry incidentals of one’s individual existence; truth is oblivion of the flesh, a pure nothingness, to attain which one must sacrifice the world.
In any event, the purpose behind these indefensibly broad pronouncements—however elliptically pursued—is to aid in recalling how shatteringly subversive Christianity was of so many of the certitudes of the world it entered, and how profoundly its exclusive fidelity to the God of Christ transformed that world. This is, of course, no more than we should expect, if we take the New Testament’s Paschal triumphalism to heart: “Now is the judgment of this world, now will the prince of this world be cast out” (John 12:31); “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33); he is “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion” and all things are put “under his feet” (Ephesians 1:21-2); “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15); “he led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8); and so on. Still, we can largely absorb Scripture’s talk of the defeat of the devil, the angels of the nations, and the powers of the air, and yet fail to recognize how radically the Gospels reinterpreted (or, as Nietzsche would say, “transvalued”) everything in the light of Easter.
The example of this I find most striking is the account John’s Gospel gives of the dialogue between Christ and Pilate (John 18:28-19:12). Nietzsche, the quixotic champion of the old standards, thought jesting Pilate’s “What is truth?” to be the only moment of actual nobility in the New Testament, the wry taunt of an acerbic ironist unimpressed by the pathetic fantasies of a deranged peasant. But one need not share Nietzsche’s sympathies to take his point; one can certainly see what is at stake when Christ, scourged and mocked, is brought before Pilate a second time: the latter’s “Whence art thou?” has about it something of a demand for a pedigree, which might at least lend some credibility to the claims Christ makes for himself; for want of which, Pilate can do little other than pronounce his truth: “I have power to crucify thee” (which, to be fair, would under most circumstances be an incontrovertible argument).
~David B. Hart, “Christ and Nothing,” First Things, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/10/christ-and-nothing, Submitted by John Bonadeo.
David B. Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian. The original version of this article was delivered as a lecture at a conference on the Ten Commandments held at St. Olaf’s College in Northfield, Minnesota, June 15-17, under the joint sponsorship of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology and the Society for Ecumenical Anglican Doctrine. Submitted by John Bonadeo.
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