David Bentley Hart and Jacques Maritain on Natural and Supernatural

 The Chiasmus: The Created Supernatural and the Natural Divine (essay from 'You are Gods' by David Bentley Hart.

D.B.H. begins by finding in the natural order what might be considered to be propaduetic to the divine.  In the Platonic and Aristotelian onto-epistemology there is a surpassing of the apparent division between subject and object.  It is in this that he comes close to the non-duality of Advaita Vedanta which he admits as an influence which guides him past the Natural/Supernatural dyad beloved by the Thomist manualists that he impugns with all the scintillating nay coruscating invective that he commands.  All good fun until someone loses an eye.

Jacques Maritain in his ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ :

“To admit in any degree whatsoever, even in simplest inchoative form, a genuine experience of the depths of God's being on the natural level would necessarily mean either to confuse our natural intellectuality (specified by being in general) with our intellectuality as it flows from grace and is specified by the Divine Essence itself; or to confuse the presence of God's immensity (whereby God is present in all things in virtue of his created efficiency) with His holy indwelling (whereby He is present in a special way, as object, in souls that are in the state of grace); or, again, to muddle up in the same hybrid concept, the wisdom of the natural order (metaphysical wisdom), and the infused gift of wisdom; or, finally, to attribute to the natural love of God what belongs exclusively to supernatural charity.”

As I mentioned Hart finds an entry point into complete realisation of the divine through experience.  ‘There is no other door to that awareness’ (Sankara)

In WWF terms regard me as the midget compadre that runs into the ring and kicks the referee on the shin.

Hart begins as Aristotle does with the sense of wonder. Out of that comes inquiry.  I may as well admit that he sends me to the dictionary betimes.  What’s chiasmus?  The general drift seems to be the repetition of the general in the particular or something.  Anyways he begins with an advaitic note by a laying out of the aporetic:

“We are accustomed, here in modernity’s evening twilight, to conceive of our knowledge of the world principally as a regime of representation, according to which sensory intuitions are transformed into symbolic images by some kind of neurological and perceptual metabolism, and then subjected to whatever formal conceptual determinations our transcendental apperception and apparatus of perception might permit....

Knowledge, then, consists in no more than a kind of cognitive allegory of and logical deduction about Being, because Being in itself possesses an occult adversity or resistance to being known....

The more rational assumption, however, is that so implausible a liaison between absolutely incommensurable spheres of reality is impossible, and that in fact mind and world must belong to one another from the first, as flowing from and continuously participating in a single source that is at once ontological and gnoseological, and in which the ontological and the gnoseological are one and the same.”

Here Hart is moving towards an epistemology that is like that of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra’s ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’.  He calls it perceptuality/perceptability.  What we know is the object itself as it is by virtue of the mental modification/vritti or in Thomist terms the ‘conversio ad phantasmata’(?).

“Only in the transcendence of form over the formed—whether the latter be a material substrate or the intentionality of the mind—can there be a place of true indistinction between the being of an object and the knowledge of that object. Only in form—only in the informing cause of both an object’s finite existence and the act of understanding that takes that object in— can the secret and most primordial impulse of all philosophy realize its end.”

Maritain denies the knowledge of God via connaturality to those wholly dependent on the natural order.  Though that experience by mystics of Islam and Vedanta may be sublime it suffers from the  disability of being stuck in the natural domain. 

“There are Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, and other schools of mystics. But the mystical experience to which they lay claim does not proceed from theological faith. There must, therefore, be a natural mystical experience.”

Hart counters the two tier view on which this judgment is based.  The first sentences of this citation is an objection:

“Surely the temporal is, from the perspective of the finite, contingent. But, from the perspective of the eternal life of God, God’s manifestation of himself to himself is never without his manifestation in creation, and so creation is eternally present within the eternal act whereby God is God.”

Where Hart causes the complaint ‘but this is pantheism’ arises from utterances like this:

“ Our being in God and God’s being in us are both also and more originally God’s being as God”

“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”

Pantheism is an all-purpose dismissal which is never analysed.  Is it the atheistic pantheism of Hegel or Spinoza or something else maybe a doctrine that the world is divine.  To follow that through logically it would mean the Cosmos was uncreated which is very like the ‘ajativada’ of Gaudapada (unborn).  Hart uses a Trinitarian perspective, whereby the Cosmos is an emanation from the boundless creativity of the Father.  There is nothing necessary about creation but the connection is through the unity of being.

“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”

Hart’s essay is of course ‘per speculum in aenigmate’.  The ambhibological words which swim in two oceans are used to advance his speculations.  Deep meditations here and natation outside the flags.

Natural born adepts

For this further reason, one should not on the strength of mere logic challenge something that has to be known from the Vedas. For reasoning, that has no Vedic foundation and springs from the mere imagination of persons, lacks conclusiveness. For man’s conjecture has no limits. Thus it is seen that an argument discovered by adepts with great effort is falsified by other adepts; and an argument hit upon by the latter is proved to be hollow by still others. So nobody can rely on any argument as conclusive, for human intellect differs. If, however, the reasoning of somebody having wide fame, say for instance, Kapila or someone else, be relied on under the belief that this must be conclusive, even so it surely remains inconclusive, inasmuch as people, whose greatness is well recognised and who are the initiators of scriptures (or schools of thought) - for instance, Kapila, Kanada, and others - are seen to have divergent views.

(B.S.B. II.i.11)

It is to be noted that the Vedantin states the important ground rule for this challenge to reasoning; it only applies to those items of knowledge that can only be known from the Vedas. His imaginary interlocutor, with the generic title of the opponent demurs but does not take this stricture into account. He says that the excellence of reasoning is its self correction or constant overcoming of the mistakes of the past. In any case reasoning must be resorted to in the study of the proper import of disputed meanings in the Vedas themselves.

The Vedantin admits that these points are valid to a certain degree.

To this (we Vedantins say): “Even so there is no getting away from the defect.” Although reasoning may be noticed to have finality in some contexts, still in the present context it cannot possibly get any immunity from the charge of being inconclusive; for this extremely sublime subject matter, concerned with the reality of the cause of the Universe and leading to the goal of liberation, cannot even be guessed without the help of the Vedas. An we said that It cannot be known either through perception, being devoid of form etc., or through inference etc., being devoid of the grounds of inference etc.

.....That content of knowledge is said to be the most real since it ever remains the same; and in the world, the knowledge of that kind is said to be right knowledge, as for instance, the knowledge about fire that it is hot. This being the case, people should have no divergence when they have true knowledge, whereas the difference among people who knowledge is based on reasoning is well known from their mutual opposition. For it is a patent fact of experience, that when a logician asserts, “This indeed is the true knowledge”, it is upset by somebody else. And what is established by the latter is disproved by still another. How can any knowledge, arising from reasoning, be correct, when its content has no fixity of form?
........It is also not possible to assemble all the logicians of past, present, and future at the same place and time, whereby to arrive at a single idea, having the same form and content, so as to be the right knowledge. But since the Vedas are eternal and a source of knowledge, they can reasonably reveal as their subject-matter something which is (well established and) unchanging; and the knowledge arising from the Upanisads is alone the true knowledge.

Forgive the long citation but sometimes it seems better to take the risk of being boring to give a proper representation of a view. Shankara wrote in the 9th. C. and his aim was to preserve the final authority of the Vedas in matters that were beyond perception. This also included the code of everyday behaviour which was known as the dharmasastras and was based on the Vedas. Lacking the benefit of evolutionary psychology these codes of conduct were able to stagger along from milennia to millenia. Without the Vedas (cognate with vid/vision), there is left the power of reasoning which in dilemmas could lead to rationalising whatever it is you desire. The ingenuity of Western Philosophers and Bio-Ethicists employed on the subject of abortion is not found in the dharmasastras. It has always been regarded as a grave sin and those who represent that attitude as the sole property of Catholics, Orthodox and ‘fundies’ are simply wrong. It is obvious that an individual guided by their own natural light will not automatically see this. There is so to speak a natural law, a dharma, but it is not something that can be reliably discovered by anybody in good faith applying their native reason. Only those who are enlightened and at one with changeless truth can discern dharmic action in any circumstance.

Interestingly this rejection of the discernment of natural law through the unaided use of reason has been stated with emphasis by the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart in his typically trenchant manner.
is-ought and nature's laws
What appears to be the convergence between natural law and a particular perspective on ethics is no more than the overshadowing of the fact of Christianity. Nature and reason without the illumination of the Christ event would point in no obvious direction. Some Thomists affect to find this baffling.

Professor Hart also seems to be sceptical about the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas as being strict proofs of the existence of God. It is said that a salient difference between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity is that the Orthodox missed the Enlightenment class. One does get the impression that Catholic thinkers require proofs and reasons to keep the holy rollers and snake handlers at a distance.

A counter might be that it is only men of good will who are connatural with the good that are capable of discerning the natural law. That brings in an extra-rational element, connaturality and the variability of persons and cultures. It is natural wisdom cf:connaturality and wisdom
but it is doubtful whether it will give a universal clear and authoritative guide for action.