What I Learned From a Dog in Turin

And thoughts on the fracturing of the Global Anglican Communion

What I Learned from a Dog in Turin

Alright not quite a real dog exactly (or maybe it was) but David Bentley Hart’s Roland in my second reading of Roland in Moonlight. I read this whilst I was on a retreat in a monastery in the hills above Turin, accompanied by the sound of perpetually burbling streams and the sight of misty clouds gently resting upon the crests of the mountains.

Roland in Moonlight is about many things but the main feature that I want to emphasise is the phenomenological framework of the canine, Roland.¹ Roland has an immediate apprehension of spiritual reality and is thus able to critique what I might call the “machine picture” of late modern Western humanity. This is the picture of reality that Western people have been inculcated into almost, I think, through osmosis. It is our culturally shared phenomenology, that is our “social imaginary”, to use Charles Taylor’s phrase. We see the world in this way - as essentially dead matter in motion - not because it really is that way but because our perceptive faculties filter out anything that might preclude such a “reading” of things. At one point in the story (actually at several points) Roland is said to have observed fairies dancing in the forest. When questioned about this by Hart (who is the narrator of the story) Roland says essentially what I just have and goes on to make the point that, given that humans filter out everything that does not confirm the machine picture of reality, we actually have no idea whether there might be fairies living in the forest. We’ve lost our capacity to see anything beyond the material, and so, who knows?