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Kevin Hart, "Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
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- [00:01]
Professor Kevin Hart
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
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Greenlight Advertiser
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Professor Kevin Hart
And breathe.
- [00:17]
Greenlight Advertiser
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
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Interviewer / Host
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to this new episode in the New Books Network. Today, we are thrilled and delighted to welcome Professor Kevin Hart to the podcast. Professor Hart is the Joe Ray Wright University Distinguished professor at Duke Divinity School. He has a secondary appointment in the Department of English, and he's written many books over many years. He was one of the earliest scholars to investigate the relationship between theology and deconstruction as far back as 1989 with his trespass of the Sign. I was fortunate enough to study with Professor Hart as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, first in a reading class on T.S. eliot's Four Quartets, and then later at a conference on the work of Jean Luc Marion Counter Experiences, which was later published as a book. When I left to study at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I would see Professor Hart at conferences through the Lewman Christie Institute. After serving in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Professor Hart has recently moved to Duke, and that's where he lives now, in Durham. I commend Professor Hart's work to our listeners and especially his newest works. He's got a few here. The book that we're going to be looking at today is Lands of Likeness for a Poetics of Contemplation, University of Chicago Press, 2023. And Professor Hart actually has two other books currently out there on the topic of contemplation. The second is On Contemplation, Columbia University Press. And then there's a third small little book called Contemplation and Kingdom, I think, from St. Augustine's Press in South Bend, Indiana. So welcome, Professor Hart. I'm so glad to see you. Thank you.
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Professor Kevin Hart
It's a delight to be here.
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Interviewer / Host
So the, the, the. The book Lands of Likeness for Poetics of Contemplation. It's, it is the fruit of the Gifford Lectures. And so maybe we could start by. You could just explain to us the genesis of the book. Maybe start with the title, Lands of Likeness and what that means and what a Poetics of Contemplation is. And then maybe talk just about what the Gifford Lectures are and what the experience was for you in producing those lectures.
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Professor Kevin Hart
Sure. Well, the Gifford Lectures is a very distinguished lecture series held at one or another of the great universities of Scotland, and it goes back well over 100 years. Now, Lord Gifford established the lectures and required that each lecturer talk on natural theology, that's to say, not revealed theology. It's a great honor to be asked to give the Gifford Lectures. And I. Well remember when I received the email about them, I was in bed and I turned over, it must have been five or six in the morning, and I checked my phone and there was a message asking me to give the lectures. I thought, wow, that's wonderful. And I went promptly back to sleep for another hour. And then when I woke up, I thought, my, what am I going to have to do? Because I don't really work that much in natural theology. I'm a theologian and I work basically in systematic theology and theology and literature. But the theology that I deal with is mostly based upon revelation. And indeed I have a particular interest in mysticism. So I thought about this for quite some time as to how I could faithfully give the lectures with regard to natural theology. And I hit upon the idea of something that had long interested me, namely contemplation. Contemplation is something which occurs within philosophy and thus in the natural world and also in the world of the sacred. And I thought that in order to make sure that I remain more or less in natural theology, that I would look at something which hasn't been done much of anyway, and that is looking at contemplative reading, particularly of poetry. And as you know, I've got a long standing interest in poetry and how to read it. And I wanted to look at ways in which we do read poems more contemplatively rather than. Rather than in a distinct linear fashion. When I thought of how to organize this, I was struck by an expression in a homily of Ashard of St. Victor. Ashard of St. Victor is a 12th century canon regular. And he has a wonderful sermon on the anniversary of St. Augustine. Augustine, as you know, has a pregnant phrase in the Confessions, the land of unlikeness, that when he was practicing his acts of contemplation according to Neoplatonic models, he would find that he failed and he would fall back into what he said was the land of unlikeness. And Ashard has an extraordinary sermon on this where he talks about how when we are contemplating in the name of Christ, we pass through the lands of likeness, we become more and more like that which we are contemplating, namely Christ. And I thought, this is interesting. And I found other expressions which made me complicate that title. So the poems, in many ways, because they're all about metaphors and similes, are themselves lands of likeness. What is a poem? It's saying X is Y or X is like Y many times over. So each poem is itself a land of likeness. So I managed to twin the contemplative element in poetry with the poetics of it. Poetics simply means how something is composed. And I became very interested in the ways in which poets compose their poems and how we're asked to read them, not necessarily in a linear or political manner, but in a more contemplative way. So it was a great delight to write the book. I started, more or less in the middle, writing on Wallace Stevens, who I knew well, and Wallace Stevens himself had been interested in the act of contemplation in terms of natural theology. He wasn't at that time a Christian, and so he worked on contemplative poetics. And then it was easy to go from there to other poets that I wanted to talk about and also look at counter examples.
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Interviewer / Host
So just to circle back to the Glasgow Lectures, there's this phrase. So the first Gifford Lectures. Sorry, The Gifford Lectures were given in Glasgow in 1888 by the great religious comparativist Max Mueller. Right. And the. The subject line for the Lectures is to. Is for thinkers like yourself, important thinkers, to address the subject of, quote, natural theology in the widest sense of the term. And it seems like contemplation has a way for you of connecting seemingly disparate things. Right. So there's this notion of lands of likeness, which I guess I still need to. I wish I understood better, but I mean, when I compare. When you compare the work, the reading that you do in the Christian tradition, to, say, the modern poets, that seems to be very unlike. It seems to be quite. The topics or the thematics seem to be quite different. So it's not one thing per se, right? This notion of contemplation, it can be any number of different things, right?
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Professor Kevin Hart
What you're circling around is an important aspect of the book and of the Lectures themselves. When I was growing up as a graduate student and junior lecturer and all, there was something called the hermeneutics of suspicion, which was very dominant. It's an expression that comes from Paul Ricoeur in his book on Freud, and it's blossomed in many ways in the academy, particularly in literature departments that the hermeneutic of suspicion is that we should act suspiciously with respect to the surface of a text, that there will be attempts to fool us in the text, that the texts are secretly or not so secretly warped over by questions of class, power, gender, and so forth. And this has generated several generations of students who approach a novel or a poem or a play with a suspicious attitude, thinking that it's always about something other than it is. It seemed to me that while this has certainly got value, there's no question of it, that it's not generally how we read outside the academy, and it's not in tune with the general tendency of reading over the centuries. And so I tried to oppose the hermeneutic of suspicion with what I called the. The hermeneutic of contemplation. So whereas the hermeneutic of suspicion was based on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as the three great masters of suspicion, as Ricoeur calls them, I proposed that we look rather at other writers, that we look at Coleridge, Schopenhauer and Hussel, each of whom develops an account of contemplation. Now, as you can imagine, Coleridge and Schopenhauer and Husserl are not Christian thinkers primarily. They're not religious thinkers primarily. They're all philosophical thinkers or literary thinkers, in Coleridge's case. But it seemed to me that you could develop from those thinkers what I called a hermeneutic of contemplation, which had various features. One is that we don't try to look through the poem to find some hidden kernel of oppressive meaning, that we look at it and see the openness that the poet has to any one of a number of things which might be entirely secular, or they might be religious. And once I started to do this, it became fascinating for me to look at the ways in which this happens, variously with how Stevens writes is rather different from how Ammons writes, rather different from, say, Geoffrey Hill writes, and so on. And I engaged in a process of trying to distinguish contemplation from something that was very close to it in certain respects, namely, fascination. Whereas contemplation is an opening to something where there's an experience of freedom. In fascination, we're constrained in particular ways. If I'm fascinated by something, I can't lift my eyes from the page. If I'm fascinated by a scene, I find it difficult to move my eyes away. That's not really the case with contemplation. And so I engaged in a history of fascination as well as contemplation.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah. So when you shift to the modern. And it's interesting that you said that you started writing with Walt Stevens kind of in the middle of the book. So the beginning of the book is sort of focused on the history of the concept of contemplation in the history of theology and in Neoplatonism and then into the medieval period. And then midway through the book, you cut over to start engaging these poets. You mentioned Stevens. There's also Hopkins, Ammons, and then Jeffrey Hill, I think, are the main actors. And you. You identify three maybe new traditions, I don't know, that emerge in the modern or three new moments. There's the moment of consideration as opposed to contemplation. And consideration seems to have some kind of naturalistic impulse, kind of focused on the natural world. There's this issue of fascination. And you. You kind of draw out the notion of attunement or of stimung or of the. The attitude, the feeling of this fascination which has certain liberatory effects, maybe, but as you said, it has certain challenges. And then phenomenology. Yes. So maybe. And maybe you could comment just on the notion of consideration and then how that relates to phenomenology.
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Professor Kevin Hart
Okay. Well, consideratio is a notion which was elaborated by Bernard of clairvaux in the 12th century. And the idea is a very simple one, that one reflects upon one's responsibilities to those for whom one has a duty of concern. One's children, if one's a teacher, one's students, and so on. Then one reflects upon one's duty of concern with one's peers, one's wife or husband, one's friends, one's colleagues, and then those who are placed in a position above you, going all the way up to God. And this is a way of engaging in 360 degrees reflection, much like a kind of reflection before one would venture into the sacrament of reconciliation. So a very important kind of prayer. Now, when I was looking at this material, it struck me that in the Romantic period in particular, but also beforehand, there is an entire poetry of consideration which is not quite contemplation. It doesn't go up to the heights. And it merely is looking at. Considering particular things, often quite discrete things. In fact, one of the surprises in doing this was to find how much of a poetry of consideration is concerned with snails. Tom Gunn's poem Considering the Snail is a perfect example of this. So I was able to look at this more modest poetry of consideration which appears in late Romantic writing and in modernist poetry, and separate that from the poetry of Contemplation on the one hand, and the poetry of fascination on the other.
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Interviewer / Host
And so consideration. So it's a concern really with the. I mean, the poets seem to be very concerned with the natural world. Right. And with the sort of the modern subject, like a subject that's released in some ways from the. From the strictures of tradition and of the sorts of things from. From whence this topic of contemplation first emerged. Right. And so there's an. I think you use the word of a counterexample, Right. That we're in the realm of counterexample, I think, is what you say at some point. Right. And it's a diagnostic. Right. Because you're trying to. I think you're trying to draw out something from these poets that can serve as meaningful or as helpful. Right. For practitioners of this contemplation. And so it's just interesting that these Romantic poets have this focus on the natural world. You cite Carlisle at some point as talking about a natural supernaturalism.
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Professor Kevin Hart
Yes.
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Interviewer / Host
And so this gets back to the topic of the Gifford Lectures, right. Is that natural theology? Right. Like looking for traces. Of what? Of God or of divinity in nature, but in the widest sense of the term. And you. You spent a lot of time talking about this poem, Circles by Ammons, which I hadn't. I hadn't read or I have not read or heard of prior to this book. But, you know, this notion of an incluse like this all inclusive something, right, that's being meditated on in the. In the natural. In the most natural sense of the word. And yes, you know, it brings to mind Emerson circles or again, Steven's notion of the harmonium. But like, yeah, I guess I'm just kind of curious about what you think you could find there or what you could draw out or whether or not this is. Maybe this is just a disciplinary kind of situation where, you know, you're cutting across the disciplines between philosophy, theology and then literature in this case. But what do the poets give us to think or give us? Like, what do they provide us with with regard to this natural theology?
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Professor Kevin Hart
Right. Well, one thing that occurred to me early on is that contemplation is not something which originates in religion. It's not something which originates in Christianity. If we go back to the ancient Greeks, we find that they're very interested in contemplation, but they call it natural contemplation, what we would call looking at nature and examining nature. So with Ammons, who doesn't really have much religious interest or theological depth in his poem Sphere. But it is, as I try to argue, a poem about natural contemplation. He studied science at Wake Forest, just down the road from where I am. And the poem is in many ways a scientific poem about looking at the earth from the moon. So it's from 1972, I think, when we got the first images of how the earth looks in the darkness of space seen from the moon. That's the sphere that he sees. And of course it encompasses all life, all natural life, and it's revolving very slowly. And the poem itself revolves, in fact quite quickly and takes in everything, absolutely everything. This, it seemed to me, was capturing in its own way something that you can see in other modes of contemplation, namely the aim to say everything. The French have an expression toute dire to say everything in a poem which you can do in a couple of ways. You can do it in highly compacted lyrics which are over determined with meaning. A poem by Paul Celan, for example, or Stephane Mallame. But you can also do it in an expansive poem. Pour Claudel would be an example. Or very long novels which go through the Romantic period and the 19th century as well. The three volume novel where you try to say absolutely everything you can think of much earlier. Think of Clarissa. Clarissa tries to say everything possible about this woman, Clarissa. So in some ways it struck me that AR Ammon's poem Sphere is trying to say absolutely everything that he can about this sphere, the earth and his particular relation with it. So it's an act of natural contemplation.
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Interviewer / Host
But of course it's also just a poem, right? It's just words on a page at the same time. So this gets, and I'm sort of curious on your methodological grounding here because as you said, you're a systematic theologian. You had previously wrote in the, was it 2013 or something? 2014, the kingdoms of God book, which is a more strictly speaking theological text, I would say. But you're, you're, you're touching on something really interesting here, right, which is that, so you have this, you have this background in theology, you're a systematic theologian. You're, you're, you're very well trained, you're a practitioner of phenomenology, which actually I want to talk to you a bit more to you about. But, but you're also a reader of poems. And you're also, I forgot to mention in the, in the bio, you're also a poet. Yeah, a very, a very accomplished poet. And so, you know, the poem is a It's words on a page. It gives us some intuition maybe of a wider world that we can contemplate. But if you contrast these secular or modern poets with the Christian tradition on the one hand, or phenomenology on the other, each of these three traditions are doing something quite different, one from the next. Right. I mean, and I think it is interesting that you draw out the pre Christian kind of contemplative tradition there. But if we just look at phenomenology, as far as I read or understand phenomenology, and it's like Husserlian form, or maybe. I mean, I guess Heidegger has a turn to poetry at the end of his. Later on, in his later writings. But you focus on Husserl. It's a transcendental philosophy. Right. And there. There isn't. He's not reading poetry per se. Right. But he's concerned with something that maybe the poets give us access to somehow.
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Professor Kevin Hart
Yes, yes. Okay. So Husserl is a transcendental phenomenologist, as you said. And what he's concerned with, if we step back a couple of steps, he's concerned for us to make a kind of. And what he calls a reduction, so that we're led away from the thesis of the natural attitude. The thesis of the natural attitude is always trying to tell us that intentional objects are only objects of intention. Okay. He's against that. He wants us to suspend that thesis so that we can look at the world and see that all objects of intention are intentional objects. That's to say, it's impossible for us to see the correlation of noesis and noema in everything. He says that in order to do that we have to adopt the phenomenological attitude, which is, as he says, the attitude of contemplation, and that the philosopher is the person who can will himself into the phenomenological attitude and adopt an entirely contemplative attitude to the world. This is really interesting. If we think in terms of metaphilosophy, that's to say, what does philosophy do? What does philosophy do best? We get a whole series of different answers. Some people say that what philosophy does best is critique, namely the Kantian position. Or what philosophy does best is dialectic, basically Hegel, and then diagonally, various forms of Marxism. Or what philosophy does best is analysis, contemporary analytic philosophy. The metaphilosophy of Husserl is contemplation. So when you are reading Husserl, you don't find much by way of argumentation, you don't find much by way of dialectic or critique. What you do find is a kind of philosophy which invites us to form an attitude of contemplation of the world so that the world reveals itself more fully and in more color. Now, early on, when he was devising these ideas, his brother in law, a poet, came to stay with him. This is 1905. And he left him a book of his little plays, which Husserl read. And he wrote a really remarkable letter, never translated into English, saying. Just before he started to lecture on the reduction, he said, poets and phenomenologists are kin. The poet wants to engage in and reduction and see the world as a series of intentional objects. But the poet stops at the level of psychology, and the philosopher goes on to an epistemic level. So that's the difference between the philosopher and the poet. But both adopt a contemplative attitude to the world. So this is one reason why I have a long chapter on Husserl in the book, trying to argue as concisely as possible that phenomenology, properly understood, is concerned with contemplation.
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Interviewer / Host
And you say it's also intrinsically hermeneutical in the sense that phenomenology is always performing some type of interpretation of things based on. On the stance of the person who's contemplating. Right?
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Professor Kevin Hart
Yes. I mean, we always have this sense that we are the subject looking at a particular object from a particular perspective. Of course, as Husserl goes on to point out, that is sometimes an illusion that we do have intersubjective construction going on in our minds as soon as we speak, as we are now. We're drawing upon an immense heritage of how other people have used the English language and have come up with different concepts. And so there is an intersubjective phenomenology which is bound up with my subjective response to the world, and also a generative phenomenology with the many heritages going back all the way to the beginning of the birth of the English language.
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Interviewer / Host
And you also mentioned the role of the living body and the fact that we are embodied creatures living in a world. And so there's always this. You speak of a mixed life. I don't know if that applies correctly to phenomenology. But essentially this notion that we're intertwined one with another and with natural language. And so there's this whole working out of really what the position is from which this contemplation springs. And so, just for our listeners, like the. The reduction in phenomenology. Professor Hart made a distinction here between the epoch, which is a form of suspending one's belief or attachment to something on the one hand. And then the. And then the reduction, maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, is once that suspension of belief is affected, there's this effort, you might say, to return to the things themselves. And so the reduction is supposed to reconduct us, so to speak, to something. Yeah.
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Professor Kevin Hart
So the epoch is the suspension of the thesis of the natural attitude, which is, as it were, putting common sense in brackets. Once we do that, we can, according to Husserl, be led back reduction to the transcendental dimension of. Of our consciousness. And we can imaginatively revolve everything. This is quite interesting because Husserl is one of those philosophers who has a very, very high regard for the imagination, something some philosophers want to push away, but he thinks it's essential for our engagement with the world to get a clear idea. We have to revolve every possibility of something that we receive. Imaginative variation is what he calls it. So there is a kind of poetry, as it were, in the midst of his philosophy, in the contemplative philosophy, that reduction is only one mode of reduction. It seems to me. That's what Husserl argues in other work that I've done. In one of the books you've already mentioned, Kingdoms of God, and in the book I'm finishing now called Phenomenology of the Christian, I argue that Jesus of Nazareth also performs a particular kind of reduction, and this appears in the book as well, that Jesus is very concerned in the Gospels, it seems to me, to engage in an. That we suspend the common sense attitude to the world, which was rather different in the first century than in our own times. And then we can be led back from a hardened notion of the world with Roman power and Jewish concerns of the Sanhedrin, in brooking a particular relationship with Rome, with issues of the Pax Romano, the quid pro quo, and many another thing, to find what he calls the kingdom. So with Husserl, the reduction is going within, into transcendental consciousness. For Jesus of Nazareth, rather, the reduction is going from the world as we experience it in daily life to what he calls the kingdom. And only in the kingdom, once we secure that vantage point, can we actually see where God should be in our daily lives.
- [31:13]
Interviewer / Host
That's really helpful. I'm glad that you're still developing that concept. I was wondering where the kingdom was in this text because I. I know that that's a topic that you've been studying the. The Greek word for that Is Basilia. Right.
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Professor Kevin Hart
Yes. Yeah.
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Interviewer / Host
And that. That's where we get the word basilica or cathedral. Right?
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Professor Kevin Hart
Right. That's right.
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Interviewer / Host
So. But so just to. Just to kind of circle on this, on what we've just been talking about. So in the same way that phenomenology reconducts us back to something, through this process of suspending our belief in the natural attitude and returning to the things themselves, so too the poets and the theologians reconduct us each in their own way, to something unique. Right. Or is that. And in the poet's case, is it just the poem that. I mean, what. What is. What are we. What is Stevens giving us? Or what does Amons give us in the poem that we wouldn't have otherwise? Yeah.
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Professor Kevin Hart
Think of the. The long poem by Stevens that I talk about most in the book, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. What he's concerned with there, from the very moment, the first moment of the poem is he says, begin ephebe. He's trying to get us back to an original position before our concepts have been formed. This is what in phenomenology we call the pre given. Most of our lives are lived in a pre given world, the pre given life world of America, with its political divisions of Republican and Democrat, and with the inherited assumptions we have about how to live, including how to live as a Christian. But what phenomenology asks us to do, and what I think good poetry asks us to do, is to go from the pre given to the given to get to a stage where we can receive the world understood very generally and not in pre given categories, so we can see it freshly. One of the poems I talk about in the book is Gerard Manley Hopkins wonderful poem, the Windhofer. And if you think about that poem, if Hopkins were to have written that in a pre given mode, in the mode of what Husserl calls the natural attitude or common sense, what could he have said, woke up this morning and saw a kestrel in the sky? Something like that. But he doesn't remain at the level of the pre given. He actually attends to the bird in a highly complicated and insistent manner and gives us that extraordinary poem about the bird, and the bird being like an Ignatian saint. So we get a rush of different attitudes, which gives us the world, the Hopkinsian world, in just 14 lines.
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Interviewer / Host
And so there's a certain spiritual discipline that's required to be a phenomenologist or to be a poet or to be a theologian. Right?
- [34:21]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yes. I think each of us in our own ways has a kind of asceticism that we have to practice, that we have to engage in a mental discipline, a spiritual exercise, if you like, which takes us from the pre given to the given. And that will vary for each particular person. It will also vary if one's doing it in a religious manner or in a non religious manner.
- [34:47]
Interviewer / Host
So it's interesting, in the first chapter you talk about contemplation and you contrast it with, as far as I could tell, you contrast it contrasted contemplation with apologetics and theology and with sort of analytical or just straight argumentative, logical logic chopping, you might say, in the philosophical tradition. And, and your, and your point there is essentially that contemplation allows the Christian in this case to know certain things that that mere argument doesn't allow for per se. And so you talk about Christ, you talk about the meaning of God, you talk about the kingdom, and you, you bring in readings from the New Testament to kind of support this view. I thought that was interesting. Could you, could you just comment on that? I don't, I don't want to, I'm not trying to dismiss apologetics or argument.
- [35:39]
Professor Kevin Hart
But yeah, apologetics and argument have their, have their place and I, I was brought up in the tradition of analytic philosophy and I learned many good things and I wouldn't want it to have gone otherwise. However, historically there's been a shift and the shift itself is worth remarking. You like. I like most people we encounter, our friends and family and sometimes students who say, how do you know there's a God and what they want is a proof. And analytic philosophy going all the way back to the 11th century and has got halfway decent proof for this, which have been remarkably made much, much, much more sophisticated in the last 20 years with modal logic and such things. So I don't think any of these proofs work myself, but they're very interesting. One reason they don't work is they won't tell us anything about the Father of Jesus of Nazareth. They will tell us maybe about that than which nothing greater can be conceived which we might in the world of natural theology call God. But you can't fall in love with that. You can only fall in love with the Father of Jesus if you're a Christian. The tradition, however, has not relied ultimately upon analytic proofs for the existence of God, even though from the 11th century and the 12th century on they've been a part of it. Rather, people have said that it is the practice of contemplation which ultimately gives you certitude about God, if when you are a younger person or just entering a serious relationship with your religion, you have doubts about this and that, then traditionally what you would be advised to do is to practice contemplatio. In the act of contemplatio, God is acting upon you and it's said, will give you the kind of certitude that you lack by practice. So certitude about God's existence, God's plan for us and everything else comes in and through the act of practical prayer, not in the act of proof. So modernity has flipped that and made prayer utterly subjective. But that's not generally what Christianity has argued. I wanted to some extent to bring some of that back.
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Interviewer / Host
Yeah, I taught apologetics last year and I have to say the sum effect of all of the proofs, so Peter Kreeft has collected a lot of these in a Handbook of Catholic apologetics. And the sum effect of the proofs in the context of prayer can be quite powerful and persuasive and it does give students and young people who are trying to find their way something to chew on. You might say it does.
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Professor Kevin Hart
But this, Anselm, the ontological argument is in the form of a prayer. So this hyper analytic and very beautiful proof for the existence of God occurs in the framework of, of a prayer. That itself is interesting.
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Interviewer / Host
It is. And he was a monk. Saint Anselm was a monk.
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Professor Kevin Hart
He was a monk.
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Interviewer / Host
So this, this relates to the Greek word for the contemplative life, the bios theoreticos. And one thing I found interesting is that the Greek word for contemplation is theoria, which. Right, sounds like theory or theoretical, which sounds abstract somehow. So you, you contrast the contemplative life with the active life. You look at the way in which the early monastic tradition, the Chris, certain Christian believers were practicing this contemplative life and, and they found validation for that in the ancient Greco Roman tradition. But what, in what sense is the contemplative life, a theoretical life?
- [39:47]
Professor Kevin Hart
Well, as it was developed from the Greeks through the Romans and through the, the early Christian church, the person who goes into a particular religious order, contemplative order, Carthusian or Cistercian for example, will be engaged for part of the day in contemplative prayer in theoria, as it is in the Greek East. But also it's not just prayer, it's study. So the study of scripture, the study of the church fathers, or any particular form of study is also contemplative. Now, in that world, the person who's in a monastery is away from the people. They're not helping firsthand, the sick and the poor. So they're just taken away out of the world. It's their prayer and their study which is important. That is the contemplative life, the practical life is much more common. That's where you're in the world helping people as a teacher, as a lawyer, as a doctor, as a mother in one of many, many ways. It's difficult often to find time in that life for prayer, particularly contemplative prayer. It's not impossible, but. But it is very difficult. And then there's the other life, which a number of us practice, I certainly do, which is the mixed life. So part of my week is devoted to reading and writing. Another part of my week is spent teaching and giving lectures around America on what I do. And of course, I have a family, so I'm involved there. So it's an interesting thing in the tradition. I talk about this in the book a little. Which is the highest vocation. Before the 13th century, there was a consensus that the highest vocation was the contemplative life. The God had chosen a few great spiritual athletes, as it were, for his own to be in constant prayer and study and have no relationship with the world. Aquilus, however, puts it rather differently. He says, the highest vocation is the mixed life, since you learn things in your study, you become closer to God in your prayer, and then you can share that with others, with your students, with your family, with. With your church or whatever. And so the mixed life becomes, paradoxically, the highest form of life, because it.
- [42:40]
Interviewer / Host
Incorporates both the inner work and the outer work, you might say.
- [42:46]
Professor Kevin Hart
Exactly. One of the models that I really admire is the 12th century, one of the School of St. Victor just outside Paris, that the Victorines, Richard of St. Victor, Ashard of St. Victor, who I've just been talking about, they were in the monastery as canons regular, engaged in theology in the celebration of the Holy Office and the Mass. But they also left the monastery to attend to the sick and to help the poor. So they were living the mixed life as canons regular. And that, I think, is a distant model for how the church can be today.
- [43:30]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah, you mentioned the Neoplatonic tradition and how it informs Christian theology. And essentially this notion of exit and return, of going out and coming back, which Bernie Begin would always talk about with regard to history of mysticism, when you turn to. And so is ascent in theology. You cite St. Paul. Strive more eagerly, eagerly strive more eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts. And then you also cite, as Richard of St Victor citing Exodus, see that you make them in the context of the ark of Moses according to the pattern shown you on the mountain. And then. But. But when you get to the poets, there's this move maybe away from this drive for simplicity or unity or ascent in the sense of rising above oneself. Right. To contemplate something transcendent that's outside of oneself or. Or beyond the. What one can know in the strict sense of our everyday way of thinking, to kind of contemplate with the poets the. The. The plural form, sort of explosion of things. You might say, that's part of the. The natural world. And I think here of Walt Whitman and this notion of the song of oneself and the sort of the collecting of all of the different fragments of things that are manifest in the world. So I just wonder if that was this notion of ascending and then descending, of being within oneself and then moving outside of oneself and then. And then sort of like within the context of contemplation, whether you can see the poets as an extension of this in the sense that you cite Simone Weil in the context of the need for roots. But I think Simone we is also good. And I also think CS Lewis is pretty good at this, at. At talking about the particularities or the uniqueness of the things themselves and. And whether or not the poets are. Enable us to see that difference better somehow.
- [45:27]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yes.
- [45:27]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah.
- [45:28]
Professor Kevin Hart
Well, let me talk with respect to a couple of chapters that I devote to Geoffrey Hill, the. The English poet who died maybe about 10 years ago. He has a wonderful long poem called the Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy, which is based upon Charles Peguy's own drama called the Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc. The poem looks at this complicated and cantankerous man's career. It's a very unusual long poem, because who does that? And Peggy, in many ways, was a committed socialist, utterly secular. And then he had a conversion to being Catholic and became a committed Catholic. Equally cantankerous. And Hill is concerned to see what. What the mystery of his love was. He insists it's a mystery which is right. Love is always a mystery. And so he doesn't discount that Peguy, as a socialist, loved people. That's what animates great socialists, that they love people, ordinary people, and their hearts are seared because they see people, ordinary people are broken and exploited. So that requires great love. When he became Catholic, that didn't go away. But he also opened up a love for God and a different Quality of love for other people. And as the poem goes through talking about Peguy and not hiding his limitations as a human being, which were very considerable, he stops at one moment and he says, let us contemplate the radical soul. And that, it seemed to me, was the central statement of the poem. If we were to find just one, that he's trying to find a position where he can contemplate and be fair to do justice to all the complexities of Peggy. One individual person who was a remarkable man and to understand what the mystery was of his love. Not that he was a left wing intellectual or a right wing intellectual, not that he was secular or Catholic, but that he had all of that. And that only if we step back and look at him from a different vantage point, can we take all of that in and do justice to it.
- [48:14]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah. In the context of the radical soul, maybe you can situate me here, but you speak of a conservative radicalism and the notion of broken hierarchies, is that right?
- [48:22]
Professor Kevin Hart
That's right, yeah. Well, these are Geoffrey Hill's ideas that in many ways he's attracted to the idea of conservative radicals, namely those who want to conserve the past and what's good in. In it, but can do so only by adopting radical positions either in religion or in politics. So you find people in the 19th century in Britain who were concerned with this kind of radical conservativism that they would be concerned to conserve everything good in the British tradition, but not at the expense of exploiting the working class, far from it. They wanted to enliven the working class and treasure and honor the working class and raise people up. In some ways, certain liberals were concerned with this and certain Tories also.
- [49:23]
Interviewer / Host
And in the context of Joan of Arc, it's a question of moving from spirituality or mysticism into this kind of surprising political manifestation. Right. Of.
- [49:34]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yes, yes. Well, there's another example of a radical soul, I suppose that there she's a simple country girl, she has visions and they enable her to do something which would have been extraordinary, that she goes to the King and identifies the King in a crowd of people and leads his army against the British with very considerable success until she's betrayed by the King, who does nothing from the English. Yeah.
- [50:04]
Interviewer / Host
You say she's motivated to give her food to the hungry and to the poor and to fight the British to go to war with Britain. You mentioned that all poems think in some way or in certain degrees, and that the way that. And how a poem is written or how it's presented affects Its reception and the history of that reception. Is that just like a. Is that a turn of phrase? Is that a phrase? Is that just an obvious statement? Or is there something more there that you're trying to communicate?
- [50:36]
Professor Kevin Hart
I think that it's not simply the case that poems. The poet has thought and put his or her thoughts on the page. If we think of poems in that way, we're engaging in some kind of archive, trying to find the intentions of the authority. And sometimes we treat poems as though they're theorems, trying to prove something in that way which is rather limited. Rather, I think that the best poems and all the best art generally is still thinking on the page. So if I read a poem by Wallace Stevens when I was 20, I gather what the poem was thinking at the time. But now when I read it, I see extra depths, things that I had not noticed before, that I've had to have lived for a few years in order to see. So the poem still seems to be active. I like to think of poems not as things, even though they do have a thingly quality on the page. The poems are rather events, singular events that we encounter at particular times and that change us in different ways when we read them. So I remember when we were studying Four Quartets together. I'm sure for each of us now, if we go back and read it, we will find things in that remarkable poem which we didn't notice all those years ago. And the poem itself still seems to be thinking. It's still an event which we can encounter the. But a different one that we encountered all those years ago.
- [52:16]
Interviewer / Host
And does it help to be a writer of poems to understand that event? I mean, the thing I appreciated about the class in Elliott is we spent the entire semester, which. That's. What is that? Four and a half months or something? Maybe five months.
- [52:29]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yeah, I think it's 15 weeks in that event. Yeah.
- [52:32]
Interviewer / Host
Just reading the poem and. Yeah, you mentioned snails. And this notion of just moving very slowly through something as enabling one to become more receptive to this event of meaning or whatever the poem is presenting. So does it help to be able to write a poem?
- [52:50]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yes. I think there's two things. If you do write a poem, then you do get a certain advantage to some degree. It's a disadvantage as well because you're looking from your own particular practice and that can obscure the virtues of other poets. So you write your poems, you have stakes in what poetry is, what poetry can do. And at times, especially when one is starting out, that excludes a lot of other Poetry, you've got to be open to that too. The other side of it is in how we read, whether we're poets or not. I'm a great proponent of what Nietzsche calls slow reading. In the preface to his book Daybreak, which is a very beautiful work, he says that he wants to be a teacher of slow reading and of reading with one's fingertips, leaving doors and windows open as one reads, just moving very slowly through the text. And the idea of reading with one's fingertips, with extreme sensitivity, with things not being closed down preformatted is a marvelous image. That's how we should read everything, I think, not just poetry. We read philosophy that way and theology. We read prayers that way. If we're not reading slowly, the chances are we're not really reading at all.
- [54:21]
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- [54:51]
Interviewer / Host
The most mysterious things I think in your book is this discussion of the templum and this notion of the poem as a type of structure or templum or temple. And you, you refer to, I mean, so animals figure in your book throughout birds and snails. But you refer to this ancient practice of auguries wherein a priest or a prophet would be in this tower with four open, four sides open on each side, and based on the movement of the birds would interpret the signs of the times. You might say. Yes, and I was thinking about that in the context of the poem. Like the poem is a structure, but I guess and there's a certain receptivity and there's a certain way in which the spirit can move through the poem. But what's up with all these birds?
- [55:44]
Professor Kevin Hart
Well, in ancient Rome, Cicero was one of these very small college of augurs. And when the senate was pondering particular action, like to go to war against particular people, they would ask the augurs to see if they had good signs. So they would collect around the north end of the forum and draw imaginatively a rectangle in the sky. And they would see which birds approached it from which angles. So if an eagle, Jupiter's bird came in, that was a very propitious sign. If an owl came in, that was a bad sign. And then they would report back to the Senate saying that there were good signs for a victory or for good winter crops or good spring crops. And the Senate would act accordingly. The Romans were very superstitious people. They carried around in battle a crate of chickens which they called the sacred chickens. And they would consult the chickens before each battle. If the chickens ate, it was a good sign. If the chickens didn't eat, it was a bad sign. And they would delay a battle, sometimes for days. There's many interesting stories about that. Now, it seemed to me that the word templum is at the very base of what we call temples and also contemplation. The person who is contemplative was thought to look into the heavens, into the skies. But also, with regard to modern poetry, it seemed to me, and I say this, I think right at the end, that the poem itself often is like a rectangle which has come down from the sky and is itself a little land of likeness, where every stanza, every line sometimes is saying X is like Y. And so we're getting a myriad comparisons and identities in each poem. So even in entirely secular poems, they still are lands of likeness and still have this relationship to the ancient templum.
- [58:05]
Interviewer / Host
One of the topics that you drew out in Kingdoms of God that reappear here briefly that I really like is your reading of Augustine on. I think it's on his. In his reading of Genesis on evening versus morning knowledge.
- [58:18]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yes, yes. One of my favorite bits.
- [58:21]
Interviewer / Host
Could you explain that to us? And just also, how do we practice that? And what difference does it make?
- [58:27]
Professor Kevin Hart
Sure. And Augustine was a wonderful reader, but he had some knowledge lacking, like all of us. So when he's interpreting the opening of Genesis in one of his five commentaries on Genesis, the literal commentary on Genesis, he pauses and says, why is it that God says there was evening and. And there was morning one day? Because we think naturally that days go from morning to evening. Now, he didn't realize at the time that for the Jewish people, the day starts in the evening. That's what Genesis is concerned with. So he comes up with another explanation which is really charming in its own way. He says, well, obviously this is to do with angelic cognition, that when God was creating, first of all, he gave the angels the knowledge of what you and I would call scientific knowledge of reality, the chemistry, the math, the physics of reality. And that's what he called evening knowledge. And of course, the Angels were very impressed. Who wouldn't be? But then afterwards, he showed them that everything he had created was utterly suffused with his love. And then when the angels saw that, they fell down on their knees in adoration. And that's what he called morning knowledge. And for Augustine, as for Aquinas, and for many of us, the whole aim of life is not to denigrate evening knowledge, which certainly has its purposes, but not to denigrate morning knowledge either to make us aware perpetually of passing from evening knowledge to the possibility of morning knowledge, or, as I like to say, from world to kingdom. That, I think, is how Jesus sees that we pass from world to kingdom, as we've been talking about before. So we can see different modalities of that same shift, which is a kind of conversion of the gaze, as Husserl would call it. Namely, it's possible for each of us to shift how we view reality from hardened, pre given, restricted notions to an openness to what is given to us. If one is secular, then what is given to us is. Is simply the world in all of its beauty and all of its variety. If one is Christian, one sees that the gift is a supernatural one, is one which is just suffused with love.
- [61:23]
Interviewer / Host
You also bring into the conversation a semblance of contemplation with certain modern atheist thinkers. And you mentioned Jacques Derrida and. But I think even more poignantly Maurice Blanchot and this notion of the possibility of the impossible. Bland show. And really a meditation along the lines of Heidegger. And then in a different way, Levinas on death and on finitude and on the other. Yeah. So what do the atheists give us to think?
- [61:58]
Professor Kevin Hart
Okay, I think the atheists are very interesting. And in that progression that you just pointed out, which is really coming from, say, Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, that they're concerned with picking up something which again goes back to ancient Rome, which is fascination. In ancient Roman society, it was thought, and still is thought in some parts of the Third World that the eye beam is active, and so you get the evil eye. A good deal of what went on when people believed in witches was to do with the evil eye. An old woman who lived at the border of a town would look at a young woman malignly and make her sick. So in ancient Rome, people wore amulets called fascinants. So people would look at the amulet, not at the young girl's face or the young boy's face. And the amulets were usually a phallus. When A general came into Rome in a triumph because he was frightened of all of the envious looks at him because he was having his moment of glory. A large phallus was put underneath the chariot, so people looked at that, not at his face. When the emperor in the Colosseum was at the games, he always stood next to a deformed person. So people would look at the deformed person and be fascinated by him or her and not at the emperor. So the emperor could deflect all of the gazes. Now, what happens with Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, is that they become fascinated by the nothingness which is behind the world. There's a wonderful remark by Paul Valery which captures this. He says, God made the world out of nothing, but sometimes the nothingness shows through. And I think with Blanchot, in his endless quest to uncover nihilism of what he calls the outside, and with Derrida, with his profound interest in what he calls la difference, the condition of presencing and absencing, which he thinks undergirds all of our discourse, that they are fascinated by these things, and in some ways they. That prevents them to some extent from contemplating the world. So it's as though a tradition from phenomenology can lead to contemplation, but it can also, a deviant version of it can lead to fascination.
- [64:55]
Interviewer / Host
Final question. So you mentioned a certain paradox that's involved in the Catholic way of life, because you talk about the sacramental system. Yes, the system of the sacraments. I don't know if that's the right way of talking about it, but essentially that the Church allows us to participate in sanctifying grace through receptions, through reception, first of baptism, and then later through communion and reconciliation. And that this. This grace that we receive through the work of the Church and the sacraments is essential somehow for the practice of contemplation, because love, the priority of love, then informs the work of the intellect. But you mentioned this.
- [65:36]
Professor Kevin Hart
This. This.
- [65:37]
Interviewer / Host
This sort of curious element, which is that in order to receive that grace sufficiently, one must be sufficiently penitent, or. What was the right word? Willing or able, you might say, to. To confess those things that require healing in our lives and. And no one's capable really of. Of perfect penitence. This is something C.S. lewis says in Mere Christianity, that Christ is the perfect penitent in some ways.
- [66:05]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yeah.
- [66:05]
Interviewer / Host
So I wonder if you could comment just on the Catholic nature of your work here and how that relates.
- [66:12]
Professor Kevin Hart
I mean, I think the teaching is pretty straightforward, that there must be a conversion and the conversion takes place at first, but by a reformation of one's moral life, you try to overcome the preoccupation we all have with the self. And so we start to attend to neighbor as well as God. What is Christianity? Christianity is love of God, love of neighbor. And so we must move away from the centrality of the I, the self. And once we start to do that, we begin to take steps towards habitual grace and sanctifying grace. If we're receiving the sacraments. Now, the Church obviously encourages this is what the Church is there to do. But there's also a moment when it doubts it. Let me give you an example. If it's the case that through mental prayer or contemplation one can gain unity with God, then the Church, at particular times in its history, begins to wonder if people are going to avail themselves of the sacraments. Because if you're gaining unity with God simply by contemplative prayer, it might be that you don't need recourse to the sacraments. Now, this has been the case in what we call the crisis of quietism in the late 17th century, 18th century, with Madame Guyon and others. The Church became very, very worried about these sorts of contemplatives who might not need what the Church offers. And so it adopted a highly critical attitude to them, sometimes with reason, sometimes not with reason. And it extended this particularly into convents of nuns engaged in contemplative prayer, women rather than men, for the reasons which are very disreputable. The women were thought to have weaker minds than men. So a woman who engaged in contemplative prayer might well be led off the tracks. And so contemplative prayer, mental prayer, was de emphasized in the Church and replaced with meditation, particularly with Ignatian models of meditation. And that lasted until the very end of the 19th century. And then there was an explosion of interest in contemplative works. Evelyn Underhill and many another person at the time. And in fact, Four Quartets is a kind of consequence of that movement. So the Church has had a doubled attitude. On the one hand, it wants to encourage people to engage in contemplation. On the other hand, it is wary lest that remove one from the hierarchical surveillance of the Church and especially from the system of sacraments.
- [69:37]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah, I think the modern turn to the particular and to the sort of the proliferation of all of those particularities of natural life is interesting. And I think at some point you draw a parallel between that attention to the real or that attention to the particular and the Work of Christ. And I think you mentioned the individuality of Christ. And it's just funny because I. This, this weekend actually, we discovered that I have a great, great, great great grandfather just north of here in Michigan named Voltaire Spalding. And we went to find his. We went to find his grave. And I was really struck by it. So it says, penitent Voltaire Spalding is an Anglican preacher. And it says, died August 28th AD 1886. And then the big letters with no, with. With no hope of salvation in heaven.
- [70:32]
Professor Kevin Hart
Wow.
- [70:33]
Interviewer / Host
And then below it in smaller letters and I haven't. This is all, this is all reported online. We, we, we found this, we found a sign. But the, the, the tomb is covered, the tombstone is covered by snow. It says, accept through the kindliness and mercy of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. And I thought that was really powerful, like this notion of the impossibility, so to speak. And you know, you've mentioned before with Yo Ying Fink and the. That the question of what motivates the reduction.
- [71:03]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yes.
- [71:04]
Interviewer / Host
How do we negotiate this limit situation, right. Where we're taking a step back from the world and we're ascending or, you know, we're, we're trying to attend to the things themselves and just this need for grace and sort of the impossibility of it in some ways as being constitutive or important somehow for this work. And I think the sum effect of all of the voices that you bring into this room, into the book is something along those lines. Right. Which is that there is this historical tradition, there is this ascent to the one and then back to the many. And then there's certain disciplines that come through that, the attention that one develops by way of that practice. But at the end of the day, the singularity of the person of Christ has some kind of important role to play in our salvation and in the transformation that all of these things seem to be pointing to somehow, as it's a way of kind of redeeming or pulling it together. So I don't know if you have anything. I mean, that's just sort of an aside. But given that you're working on epidemiology of the Christ, I thought maybe that would be relevant.
- [72:08]
Professor Kevin Hart
Yes. Well, in the phenomenology of the Christ, the expression is ambiguous, as you'd appreciate. On the one hand, Jesus is a phenomenon, an absolutely singular phenomenon that erupts into the Middle eastern world about 2,000 years ago. But also I'm concerned in that book by close readings of parts of the Gospels to show how he engages in a phenomenology himself, which is taken up in various ways by the Gospel writers. So if one reads the New Testament in Greek, you'll see that it is really to do with light and with manifestation and with the movement from the world to the kingdom. With reductio, it's concerned with Ipuke. As soon as Jesus starts to tell a parable, he just suspends the thesis of the natural attitude and strange things.
- [73:06]
Interviewer / Host
Oh, right, the parable, Right, Yeah.
- [73:08]
Professor Kevin Hart
So throughout the Gospels we're finding a kind of proto phenomenological language and phenomenological discourse, but it's not there so that we can completely translated into Husserlian terms because Jesus is doing something slightly different. But without Husserl, bless him, we would never be able to perceive what was going on in the New Testament, it seems to me.
- [73:40]
Interviewer / Host
Kevin Hart, thank you so much for meeting with us today.
- [73:43]
Professor Kevin Hart
My pleasure, absolutely. Thank you.