BOOKS: "The Experience of God"

Simon Kidd reviews the book "The Experience of God" by David Bentley Hart:

"The Experience of God is divided into three main parts, with a preceding ten-page ‘Introduction’ detailing David Bentley Hart’s motive for writing it. He explains that recent heated debates about the existence of God indicate a fundamental confusion about the subject. In some ways the book is a challenge to atheists to be clear about what it is that they don’t believe, a task DBH has undertaken at greater length in his 2009 Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, also published by Yale.

"This is a book of philosophy, rather than theology, and at its core is the tradition of ‘classical theism’. Stemming from Plato and Aristotle, this tradition was developed in the early Christian centuries by the ‘Fathers of the Church’ as well as pagans like Plotinus, reaching its apogee in the writings of the medieval philosopher-theologians of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Apart from the ‘Religions of the Book’, DBH says that the definition of God that he is offering is one that can be found in ‘Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, various late antique paganisms [and] even applies in many respects to various Mahayana formulations of, say, the Buddha Consciousness or the Buddha Nature, or even to the earliest Buddhist conception of the Unconditioned, or to certain aspects of the Tao’ (4). This universalism is also captured in the book’s subtitle, since ‘being, consciousness, bliss’ are translations of the Sanskrit ‘sat, chit, ananda’, which are usually combined into the portmanteau ‘Satchitananda’ (with variant spellings), a term referring to the ultimate reality, Brahman (see Wikipedia: ‘Satchitananda’). The Sanskrit terms are used explicitly in Part Two.

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