Book Review of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, David Bentley Hart, New Haven & London: Yale Divinity Press, 2009, 253pp.
Surprisingly enough, this book is not really preoccupied with atheists (neo-atheists): a singularly boring lot when it comes to their commentaries on religion.
The author explains: “What I have written is at most a ‘historical essay,’ at no point free of bias, and intended principally as an apologia for a particular understanding of the effect of Christianity upon the development of civilization (p. ix).”The author says his own “beliefs” are immaterial in what he presents, though he unabashedly is Christian. With candour he says,
To be honest, my affection for institutional Christianity as a whole is rarely more than tepid; and there are numerous forms of Christian belief and practice for which I would be hard pressed to muster a kind word from the depths of my heart, and the rejection of which by the atheist or sceptic strikes me as perfectly laudable (p. x).”
The book looks centrally at the first four or five centuries of the church “and the story of how Christendom was born out of the culture of late antiquity (p. x).” He continues:
My chief ambition in writing it is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting: how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues (p. xi).
The author calls such nothing short of a complete “revolution”:
a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good (p. xi).
This revolution far outstrips anything else in the history of the West, yet was so unlikely an achievement.
The negative side of Hart’s argument, he acknowledges, is the rejection of the ideology of modernity in particular “of the myth of ‘the Enlightenment’ (p. xi).” He explains such ideology as the rejection of “irrational” religion in favour of critical reason. Quite the contrary: “the ‘Age of Reason’ was in many significant ways the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value (p. xii).” He indicts modernity for its inflexible dogmatisms in every sphere of human endeavour including the sciences, seeing a flight to numerous fundamentalisms. Furthermore, the modern secular state has manifested in its very nature excessive barbarisms far worse than any of Christendom.
Hart does not hold back: