David Bentley Hart

In 2022, David Bentley Hart, theologian and philosopher who identifies with the Eastern Orthodox tradition, shared briefly about an ‘indescribable’ past experience of his own on Mount Athos.

‘I was in this state of spiritual despair, and I also had an encounter. …So I understand both the difficulty of explaining it and the impossibility of forgetting it, at once, and how it can change your life. But it doesn’t come as a set of instructions. It sure as hell didn’t turn me into a saint but did actually make me realize that the spiritual dimension of reality is reality.’

Recognizing from an early age ‘a profound sense of some mystery lying beyond nature’, he describes himself as being an ‘irreligious Christian’ by which he means:

 ‘…the faith of someone -myself, that is – who has little or no natural aptitude for religious sentiment, enthusiasm, devotion, or ritual observance. … I have come to accept that I am a thoroughly secular man who happens to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.’

For Hart, the personality of Jesus as presented in the Gospels reveals the character of God. This is Jesus whose central concern is for the most abject, the poorest, and most wretched. Hart says, it is this strange and uncanny Jesus who has captured his imagination and continues to do so. And it is the Bible that allows for personal revelation of this. To open ourselves to experience of God requires liberating ourselves from all the cultural and personal baggage, and all that obscures our remembering and wakefulness to what Hart calls ‘the mystery of being.’

‘God, according to all the great spiritual traditions, cannot be comprehended by the finite mind but can nevertheless be known in an intimate encounter with his presence – one that requires considerable discipline of the mind and will to achieve, but one also implicit in all ordinary experience (if only one is attentive enough to notice).’

Hart says our suspicion about trusting our personal experience is part of the contemporary scepticism of anything that can’t be proved by science, yet we can hold onto an inner subjective certainty – such as ‘this is what I feel’ ‘this is what happened to me’. Our direct experience of reality has to be taken into account: it’s something we come to rely on. For example:

‘… if one feels a firm conviction that one has entered into real communion with the presence of God when praying, those who dismiss such convictions as emotional delusions have no rational arguments on their side. Knowledge of any reality is to be sought out in terms appropriate to the kind of reality it is.’

In our search for experience of God:

‘… one is seeking an ever deeper communion with a reality that at once exceeds and underlies all other experiences…. One is placed in the presence of God in every moment, and can find him even in the depths of the mind’s own act of seeking.’