There is a beautiful garden in perfect bloom, existing somewhere outside of time and place. There, four pagan gods have gathered together for an intense, six-day Platonic symposium about the nature of the mind and the spiritual world (after which they will rest on the seventh day).
This in a nutshell is the setting and the organizational premise, old and new all at once, of David Bentley Hart’s new book, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, explores the philosophy and theology of the mind in a manner that delights, bewilders, confuses, and alarms—sometimes separately and sometimes all at once.
The Archaic Greek philosopher Thales once said, “All things are full of gods.” For Thales, this notion was perfectly compatible with his scientific inquiry into astronomy, mathematics, and more.
The nod to Thales in the book’s title is appropriate. As Hart notes in his introduction in a sentence whose intimidatingly elaborate erudition—and sheer length—captures the style of his prose throughout:
Before the advent and eventual triumph of the mechanical philosophy in early modernity, and then the gradual but more or less total triumph of a materialist metaphysics of nature (even among those who believe in a realm beyond the merely physical), most developed philosophies, East and West alike, presumed that mind or something mindlike, transcendent or immanent or both, was the more original truth of things, pervading, sustaining, and giving existence to all that is.
As Hart recognizes, embracing the supremacy of the mind in all its mysterious glory doesn’t necessarily entail any new theological or philosophical discoveries. Instead, it involves dusting off and recovering something very old—pre-Christian, even. The idea of miracles, the acceptance of supernatural realities, and the need for mediators between gods and normal humans have all been features of human life and belief for millennia.
The Realest Reality
Michael Horton’s new book, Shaman and Sage, which I coincidentally read right before picking up Hart’s volume, is a good companion piece here, as it confirms the longstanding human bend toward the spiritual (but not necessarily religious). Indeed, the extreme contemporary skeptics, so quick to dismiss the reality of anything intangible or invisible, belong squarely in the historical minority. For much of human existence, people were more Thales than Richard Dawkins—seeing no conflict between the world of science and the mysterious unseen all around.
The spiritual state, then, seems to occur more or less naturally. By the end of Hart’s book, nevertheless, I felt that I could best relate to Hephaestus, the pagan metalsmith god Hart casts as the supporter of the material world. Hephaestus’s main conversationalist is Psyche, the goddess of the soul—that is, indeed, what her name literally means. (Also present at Hart’s imagined dialogue but less outspoken are Eros, the god of love and Psyche’s husband, and Hermes, the messenger god.)
It is Psyche who drives Hart’s main argument throughout this volume—that the spiritual and invisible world is true, and it is much more real than the physical and tangible world so ardently championed by modern philosophies. The argument for the latter also usually goes hand in hand with the exclusion of the divine and supernatural. Accordingly, Psyche’s journey to prove the reality of the life of the mind is inextricably connected with her axiom that the divine is everywhere.
As Hart says,
a truly scrupulous phenomenology of mental agency discloses an absolute engagement of the mind in an infinite act of knowing that is nothing less than the source and end of all three of these realities [i.e., life, mind, and language], and indeed of all things; or, to say this more simply, all acts of the mind are participations in the mind of God.
But when I say that I could best relate to Hephaestus by the book’s end, I do not mean that I am wholly persuaded by his materialist stance—that has never fully appealed to me. Rather, I find that, like him, I am lost in all the arguments Psyche (or, rather, Hart) presents. To say that this book broke my brain would be an understatement.
In many ways, All Things Are Full of Gods—brain-breaking tendencies included—is classic Hart. Stunningly twisting Ciceronian sentences, of the sort I have quoted in this review, might span an entire paragraph, enticing the reader with the beauty of their phrasing. Still, it is a beauty that one cannot fully or easily comprehend, as I often realized upon reaching such a one’s end. I understand, I think, the overall premises and arguments of the book; I struggled, however, to understand many individual sentences in full. But then, as Hart notes, language too is a mystery.
The evolution of Hart’s thought and brilliance is on full display, nevertheless, as he continues his decades-long exploration of the divine across traditions, offering in All Things Are Full of Gods a recognizable sequel to such earlier books as Atheist Delusions, The Experience of God, and, to a lesser extent, That All Shall Be Saved.
Here, Hart’s meditation—for this book is more a meditation in dialogue form than any sort of traditional argument—centers around two essential premises that Psyche painstakingly tries to prove by drawing on examples from the past two and a half millennia of philosophy. First, that God and the divine or spiritual world are intensely, palpably real. Second (and most important), that the visible world is not all that there is—in fact, the things unseen are more real.
The mind is greater than the body. As Psyche puts it early in the dialogue, “Whatever the nature of matter may be, the primal reality of all things is mind.” But this idea, Hart is convinced, is not unique to any one tradition; rather, it is universal in premodernity. And so, Psyche concludes, “Ātman is Brahman—which I take to be the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike.”
Such beautiful yet loaded statements are what have previously embroiled Hart in charges of heresy. For instance, he has been accused of universalism (the belief in universal salvation), a stance he seems to defend most vehemently in That All Shall Be Saved. And Hart’s new book contains more than a whiff of what one article criticized as Hart’s “Post-Christian Pantheism.”
Drawing Protestant conclusions
What do we make of it all—the dialogue of four pagan gods about the nature of the divine, about the thinking life, and about the nature of reality and the search for wonder in the modern world? This choice of conversationalists to present Hart’s argument is certainly thought-provoking. But perhaps we overthink this remarkable project and its intended meaning if we focus entirely on the premise of four pagan gods in conversation.
Ultimately, the theme that comes through is that of mystery—a transcendent sort of question without an exact answer. What is the meaning of life, of exploration, and even of our very existence? Psyche’s informed answers to question after question from Hephaestus are kaleidoscopic, expanding into seemingly infinite worlds swirling within, but mainly lead to this conclusion: There is no clear comprehensible answer. The thinking life is wonderfully rich—or at least it can be if we leave ourselves open to endless questions, as Hart encourages.
At the end, I was left with the Protestant Sunday school question: Where is Jesus in all this? In the words of hymnwriter Fanny Crosby, we can proclaim, “Take the world, but give me Jesus”—a statement that can read as a Protestant variation on Hart’s overall argument about spiritual reality surpassing the physical.
But Hart is not a Protestant. And perhaps that is what irks his critics most. For all his brilliance, we cannot fully know Hart’s mind, and so critics guess. I will refrain. But I do know that after reading this book, I can still readily draw Protestant conclusions about the transcendent beauty of the Creator God who has made all things. While I would not agree with Thales in a literal sense—that “all things are full of gods”—I can agree with the God of Genesis through Revelation, whose Word, in Isaiah 6:3, says that “the whole earth is full of his glory.”
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity.
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