Whatever Does He Mean?

Here is Addison Hodges Hart at his Facebook page today:

The following are a couple of interpretations of what Joyce meant:

"The majority of readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to associate its most famous line, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” with Stephen Dedalus’s intention in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to overcome his past of rigid national and religious tradition."

"Feeling that some "wisdom" is being expected of him in Nestor (and not just sardonic replies), Stephen weighs an answer to the triumphalist version of history that he has been hearing from Deasy: benighted Jews eternally cursed by enlightened Christians, anarchic fenians held at bay by resolute Tories, spendthrift Catholics bested at the bank by thrifty Protestants. His counter-vision is a simple statement of despair: "History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." The metaphor implies that human history is no place to look for enlightenment or justice."

Now, I confess I don't know Addison's intent in posting this meme since he offers no commentary, but a couple of thoughts come to mind:

1) Anyone who follows Mr. Hart on his Facebook page would find it difficult to escape the conclusion that he is a perennialist.  I find little if anything discernably Christian in his posts.  Rather, he seems to embrace the proposition that all religions point back to a universal metaphysical truth which the dogmas of the various religions have occluded, which truth is discerned only by the "wise".  If I am reading him correctly, what he is championing is a modern form of gnosticism;

2) If my interpretation is correct, his religious views seem to be in concert with some of the latest philosophical musings of his brother David Bentley Hart, whose musings have been negatively assessed by a traditional Anglican scholar, Gerald McDermott, and especially those DBH sets forth in his recent book Tradition and Apocalypse.

McDermott:

But in defending his book Tradition and Apocalypse against my “ludicrously inaccurate” review, David Bentley Hart only confirms my accuracy. When he insists that his book “is a defense of tradition” against my charge that he declares the Christian tradition bankrupt, we are tempted to ask which tradition he thinks he is defending. For it is a strange defense of Christian tradition to say that until the apocalypse it is “nothing more than an impenetrable enigma,” that the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” have no “convincing synthesis,” that the so-called “intrinsic unity” of Christian tradition “is an illusion—or even perhaps a lie,” that “the dogmatic content of tradition . . . appears to be full of odd disjunctions and contradictions,” and that “perhaps, of course, the entire tale is an illusion at the end of the day, a fable Christians have told themselves over the centuries in order to carry themselves through the dark places of this world.”

Hart claims to be shocked that I question his regard for the Nicene creedal tradition. He points to his statement that Nicene orthodoxy was “a genuinely rational and perhaps necessary synthesis of the tradition of the past.” But this self-proclaimed champion of Nicaea also says that Nicene Christology lacked “biblical attestation” and that it’s plausible that the Arians were “more faithful to Scripture” than the Fathers at Nicaea. . . .

Hart concludes his denunciation of my review with some revealing statements. He has “never been especially concerned about terms like ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy.’” He “was never a champion of the kind of Christianity” I believe in, creedal orthodoxy. From the first, he has been “a metaphysical monist of the Neoplatonic and Vedantic variety.” In other words, Hart has never been a man of the Church, devoted to its orthodoxy, dedicated to the emerging wisdom of the Christian community and its Great Tradition. He is an independent religious thinker who urges his readers to adopt his own private method of theological interpretation. Toward the end of Tradition and Apocalypse, he tells believers they can liberate themselves by “a peculiarly modern maxim: sapere aude—dare to be wise.” In the end, he implies, the truth about God is something that individuals must figure out for themselves. Hart is a lonely theologian, and he would leave us alone, apart from the Christian community who have thought together about redemption by the God of Israel.

Their brother Fr. Robert Hart will likely denounce the mere report of the evidence as "libel", as is his wont. I have screenshots of his hurling the charge of libel at critics of DBH's That All Shall Be Saved.  Words mean things, however, and when they've been made public, well, one is stuck with John Adams' observation, "Facts are stubborn things."

But maybe I haven't interpreted the facts correctly.  That's for Addison and David to address if they choose to.   That being said, I think McDermott is on DBH like white on rice, and I suspect if he read Addison's views he would draw similar conclusions.