The Doors of the Sea

David Bentley Hart - The Doors of the Sea

I recently listened to the audiobook of David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea. I read this book a couple of times several years ago and it essentially constitutes Hart’s view on the problem of evil - namely, how a good and omnipotent God can allow the manifest suffering and death that we see all around us in the natural and human world. Part of the power of this short book is in the imaginative and rhetorical force of Hart’s prose, so to summarise its contents in any way is a little crude, but I’m going to do it anyway:

• Firstly, there is no “explanation” for the existence of suffering and death that renders it both understandable and purposeful. Attempts to try and provide these are inevitably crass and sub-Christian.

• Second, the articulation of the problem of evil in its common form is fundamentally Christian, even when put forward by atheists and unbelievers. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of non-Christian religions and philosophies do not have the same problem because they believe in a different kind of God and a different kind of natural order and because they have a different conception of the interaction between the two

• Thirdly, since suffering and evil cannot be explained away, they must be rejected as pointless and temporary blights upon the goodness of God’s creation. God can turn everything to good but this does not somehow justify or necessitate the existence of evil and pain.

• Fourthly, the way that the problem of evil strikes a person is dependent upon that person’s spiritual state: one can, like Ivan Karamazov, rebel against the cosmic order over which God presides and refuse to see any final reconciliation that could adequately account for the suffering of children, or one can, like the Elder Zosima and Thomas Traherne, cultivate a spiritual vision of the heavenly glory of creation that hovers beneath our surface apprehensions of natural and animal life. Both of these viewpoints are, in their own ways, credible, but what is not credible is the explaining away of the problem of evil through neat theodicies that minimise it significance or which depict God as a cruelly malevolent megalomaniac who purchases his glory at the expense of illimitable human and animal suffering.

• Fifthly, the New Testament speaks of a limited dualism by which God grants to his creatures - both angelic and human - autonomy enough to rebel against, or to obey, his will. The ultimate good that God intends is to vanquish all rebellion to his purposes at the eschatological consummation of all things. Creation can be seen as, in this sense, an echo of paradise and a delightful foretaste of its final state of heavenly bliss.

• Sixthly, this vision of a limited dualism inherent within the order of creation is not subject to the same kind of criticism espoused by critics such as Ivan Karamazov. This is because, for Ivan, his imaginary Christian interlocutor says that God somehow needs or wills evil and suffering to bring about his greater purposes. Hart says that this is the fundamental mistake of such theodicies: suffering and evil are the work of wills operating contrary to the will of God - again, both angelic and human - and not in accordance with God’s will in order to bring about a greater good than would otherwise have been. This is the result of autonomous rebellion against God and the latter will turn such rebellion to his purposes but this is a very different thing to saying that his wills all such rebellion - and even in some sense causes it - in the first place.

• Additionally, God cannot will evil, even in a temporary or transitional sense, because God is absolutely free in the realisation of his own nature which is total goodness and love. He cannot be untrue to this nature because this would be to limit his freedom. To imply that he wills any evil at all (let alone all evil that ever occurs) is to imply a deviation from his nature.

• As a result of this, evil cannot be a part of creation since God created everything out of nothing. Therefore evil can only be understood as a privatio boni (a privation of goodness) meaning that it is always a parasitic twisting of the goodness of something else, born in the will of a creature.

  

  What is new for me in all of this is the striking thought that the problem of evil is really an issue of spiritual vision. The book contains some stunning passages on this theme: that, with the cultivation of the “eye of charity”, we can recover a vision of the world as an epiphany of divine wonder, an echo of the Edenic Paradise from which we have fallen and a proleptic foretaste of the eschatological glory that awaits us.