Perhaps it is only fair that after reading Neil Van Leeuwen’s Religion as Make-Believe, I now find myself reading David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (2009). Neither book has an agenda quite as broad as a first glance at the title might suggest.
Atheist Delusions, as Hart sees it, is not a book concerned with proving that atheists in general are deluded, but more specifically that a group known as the New Atheists tell a misleading story about the history of Christianity.
One of the things that makes Hart so fun to read is that he is obviously enjoying himself as he writes, and he does not pull his punches.
This book is in no sense an impartial work of history. Perfect
detachment is impossible for even the soberest of historians, since the
writing of history necessarily demands some sort of narrative of causes
and effects, and is thus necessarily an act of interpretation, which by its
nature can never be wholly free of prejudice. But I am not really a historian, in any event, and I do not even aspire to detachment. In what follows, my prejudices are transparent and unreserved, and my argument is in some respects willfully extreme (or so it might seem). I think it prudent to admit this from the outset, if only to avoid being accused later of having made some pretense of perfect objectivity or neutrality so as to lull the reader into a state of pliant credulity. — Introduction, p. ix.
Hart’s book is now seventeen years old, so it came in a somewhat different cultural time, a time when the term “New Atheists” was fresh, and popular. Here’s Google Trends on the term:
This was the time of the “four horsemen of the New Atheism”: Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. By page four, Hart has named all four of them.
Daniel Dennett’s … Breaking the Spell, has arrived amid … exultant bellowing from the godless. The God Delusion … has just been released by Richard Dawkins, … who–despite his embarassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning–never fails to entrance his eager reader with his rhetorical recklessness. The journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic, has just issued God is Not Great, a book that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method. Over the past few years, Sam Harris’s extravagantly callow attack on all religious belief, The End of Faith, has enjoyed robust sales and the earnest praise of sympathetic reviewers. … And one hardly need mention the extraordinary sales achieved by Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, already a major film and surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate. I could go on.
And, my dear reader, he does go on. He’s quite a bit of fun. But he doesn’t just lob insults at people who disagree with him. There is enough substance to the book that it was picked up by Yale University Press. The book’s Part 1–“Faith, Reason, and Freedom: a View From the Present” runs about twenty-eight pages, and contains plenty more like the quote above.
For me, the book really gets interesting in Part 2–“The Mythology of the Secular Age: Modernity Rewriting of the Christian Past”. Here Hart begins to get into history, starting with the claim that it was Christians who invented the institution of the public hospital and spread it throughout Europe. From this springboard, Hart begins to work on what it means for a society to be Christian, or post-Christian, and argues that the Middle Ages were not quite the period of darkness that they are sometimes in popular caricature.
In loving detail, Hart goes into the good, the bad, and the ugly of Christian-pagan relations in the Roman Empire, and traces the history of both book destruction and preservation over the centuries. The picture he paints is considerably more complicated than pop histories might suggest. He also devotes quite a bit of space to the history of science, in particular of astronomy and its developments before, during, and after the middle ages. Both in the case of astronomy and of science in general, he argues that there is a great deal of continuity between the middle ages and the modern world. Astronomy, of course, will lead the reader to Copernicus and to Galileo, who is often treated as a representative example of institutional Christianity’s hostility to science. Hart argues that what in fact happened to Galileo is more a personal spat between Galileo and the Pope than an example of the Church’s hostility to science qua science.
Summing up the achievements of the Middle Ages in one enormous sentence, Hart says (p. 73):
The abundant production of wrought iron and finally of cast iron; the manufacture of cannon; constant improvements in the technology of mining, such as methods of pumping water, the trolley transport of ore, and more stable mineshafts; the invention and refinement of the windmill; the development of sophisticated earthenware and glass glazing; the flying buttress and the Gothic arch; discoveries in the geometry of refraction and the consequent perfection of magnifying lenses for eyeglasses; the birth and continuous refinement of the mechanical clock; the development of large seafaring vessels with
rudders supported on sternposts and sails so rigged as to allow complete exploitation of the winds; the invention of the magnetic compass—all of these, among many more, were special achievements of Western medieval culture. And no previous culture had ever boasted technological advances of such scope and variety.
It is clear that Hart’s enjoyment of history goes beyond just finding facts to support his thesis. His chapter “Intolerance and Persecution” goes deep into the relations between the Catholic Church and Jews, Cathars, people accused of witchcraft, and heretics. He often argues that many of the sorts of reactionary and violent policies often associated with medieval Christianity are in fact phenomena of the transition to modernity rather than the “dark ages”.
Hart takes a dim view of the secular world, and views much of history as a struggle between Christianity and the state.
It is worthwhile reading.
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