David Bentley Hart - Nihilism and Freedom: Is There a Difference?

David Bentley Hart

Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua2bSSO1iV8&t=42s

The title of the lecture I believe tbat I provided was “Nihilism and Freedom: Is There a
Difference?” or something. I didn’t mean that to be purely an ironic title or a snide title. There is
a genuine point behind that, there is a genuine question.

Let me begin by breaking with my script and relate to you an anecdote that set me off on
a course of reflection some years ago when I was teaching at the University of Virginia. Very
talented undergraduates at Virginia are allowed to live on The Lawn, that is, the part of the
college that was built in Mr Jefferson’s day. It’s a high honour. It’s not a great convenience
because that part of the college was built before indoor plumbing. But the best and the brightest
end up there.

And a few years ago a very talented young man committed suicide on The Lawn, in his
rooms, hanged himself. And no-one could figure out why but a friend of mine who knew several
of his friends, and it soon emerged over time, that not only were some of them aware that he
intended to kill himself but that they had made no effort to prevent him from doing so. And
when asked why they said, “well, it was his choice. We had to respect his choice, that was the
way he chose to go.”

Now, I don’t know if this anecdote tells us anything about modern times or not, but I do
know that the question that that story raised for me then, and does now, is: at what point did it
become plausible for not one, but three or four, reasonably bright young men simply to stand
aside and let a friend of theirs to kill himself on the grounds that his choice was to kill himself.
And that there’s no higher value, no greater concern that should be invoked. So, that’s the
beginning of my reflections.

The other things I want to say, starting from that anecdote (and I hope to fill it out later)
is that when I use the term Nihilism, I am not using it as an opprobrious term. I want first and
foremost to clarify that. I am using it in a very, purely technical sense, for the most part devoid

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of any intentional connotations, any intention of deprecation. It is, especially in Continental
Philosophy today, there are those who quite happily identify themselves as nihilists. Gianni
Vattimo still uses that term for himself. And all he means by that is that he has, as a matter of
intellectual honesty and as a matter of principle come to believe that there is no transcendent
structure to reality, there is no eternal or transcendent order of truths, to which the philosopher
or anyone else has access, that whatever ethics we live by, whatever values we hold dear,
they’re generated immanently within the world as part of the economy of culture, as part of the
sheer fortuity of history. And for Vattimo, this in itself, nihilism is quite possibly the most
peaceful intellectual condition possible. Because it’s a style of thought that once it fully realises
itself as nihilism, once it fully relinquishes the desire to grasp the eternal principles by which we
should live, by which the world should be governed, or by which we should understand the
nature of truth, once it has relinquished the desire to master the Real by force, as he would put
it, by fixing in mind and then in action, those eternal, unchanging truths by which all reality
should be governed, it is able simply to let the world be ‘world’.

It is potentially that style of thought which, because it doesn’t presume that it has any
higher truth that ought to be imposed on other people, it can become the form of thought that
truly liberates us from our history of violence, our history of greed, our history of cruelty. So,
simply said, what nihilism is in a technical sense is the rejection of any source of objective truth,
meaning, or value independent of the self or the world. It is a condition of conscious
disenchantment in which every metaphysical discourse and every religious claim has been
abandoned. One of the benign uses of the word ‘nihilism’ was offered by Martin Heidegger: he
said, what would be a realised nihilism? A nihilism that has gone beyond the metaphysical urge
to master reality and control it. It would be to “allow the world to world in its worlding”. It
doesn’t sound any better in German actually.

For Heidegger, (for those of you who have or haven’t ready him it doesn’t really matter),
for Heidegger, what is reality ultimately? It is simply the coming into presence of being. Things
come into being, waver for a time in the openness of the world, and disappear again. The
‘pathology’ of Metaphysics that he denounces continuously in his work, the thing that he thinks
leads ultimately to a bad kind of nihilism, which I’ll discuss in a moment, starts for him very
early in the history of Western thought. It starts for him in the time of Plato when Plato,
confronted by the mystery of the world, by the mystery of its coming into being and passing
away, decided that to understand it he had to grasp the world under the form of eternal and
unchanging principles. So, he turned away from the world and its worlding, he turned away
from the simple event of the world around him, toward eternal ideas. And though that if he
could capture those ideas (this is Heidegger’s narrative), in so doing he would capture the

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mystery of being at the same time. He would grasp the unshaken foundation of reality and
achieve a kind of mastery over truth.

And for Heigdegger, the whole history of Western thought, Pagan and Christian – and I’d
say Jewish except the Jews don’t appear in Heidegger’s thought. It would be embarrassing for
him if they did given his political history, but the whole history of this tradition is one or
another of a series of successive attempts to grasp reality under the forms of one or another set
of changeless principles. It might be ideas, it might be a particular understanding of act and
potency, it might be under the form of God – the Christian metaphysics that understands God as
the supreme being who, in his changeless eternity, grounds and establishes the truth and reality
of the changing world below.

But what’s been lost for Heidegger all along the way is the true mystery of being. The
true mystery of being is not something eternal, it’s not something changeless, it’s not something
that the mind or the will can master. It is this inexpressible mystery of the event. This
inexpressible mystery of all things coming into being and passing away. And for Heidegger the
bad nihilism at which we’ve arrived, the most nihilistic nihilism possible is the nihilism of the
modern age, the age of technology in which this desire to master the world by force has actually
become a concrete, technological mastery of the world in which everything has been reduced to
a bare interplay of power and resources. That is, the power of the individual to master the
world, and the world itself is simply so much matter, so much material, so many resources to be
mastered.

So, are we following this so far? We have arrived at a moment in history in which, due to
this long Western tradition, we are now unable to think of reality in terms other than what is
available for our use and how we can dominate it and exploit it. And within that reality,
everything – everything is lost. Just one of his most famous . . . a little passage from one of his
works: Die Frage nach der Technik (The Question Concerning Technology) he says in this age in
which we represent we represent the world as nothing but a bare coherence of cause and effect,
the efficient cause, the power to make and the power to possess, even God loses all that is
exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance. In the light of this causality God just sinks
to the level of a cause, causa efficiens. He then becomes, even in theology, the God of the
philosophers, namely of those who define what happens in the world only in terms of the
causality of mastery, of making, of exploitation, and of force.”1
1
See The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated and with an Introduction by William Lovit.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1977) p.26. where the translation of this passage of Heidegger is rendered thus: . . . where
everything that presences exhibits itself in the light of a cause-effect coherence, even God can, for representational
thinking, lose all that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance. In the light of causality, God can sink to
the level of a cause, of causa efficiens. He then becomes, even in theology, the god of the philosophers, namely, of those
who define the unconcealed and the concealed in terms of the causality of making, without ever considering the
essential origin of this causality.

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 Alright. I think, obviously, to some extent . . . to some extent I want to endorse the
Heideggerian history of thought and say that there’s some truth in it. But another way of
defining nihilism, then, (and I’ll get back to Heidegger later) would be ‘The Age of Freedom’
understood in a very specific way. That is. . . How do we understand freedom now? Usually as
the unobstructed power of choice.

Now, in some sense, something like that, the power to choose, the power to determine
ourselves is part of any coherent definition of freedom. But, for the most part, as moderns, as
persons who live within the language and practices and habits of thought of modernity, that’s all
that freedom is. That’s the highest expression of freedom. And it might be for all I know, but let’s
just situate ourselves historically. We believe, more or less unreflectively – even those of us who
are formally Christian, or Jews, or believing pagans or whatever – that the world necessarily
becomes more free the kore it is emancipated from whatever constraints it suffers. And over the
course of time as we’ve seen, just as a fact of history, this means that even what at one time
were cherished restraints of the will, things we thought were indispensable over time come to
seem onerous. Because they are just so many obstacles thrown up before us in the exercise of
our will.

And I think this is an uncontentious assertion. I mean, the whole history of modern
political, economic and social doctrine is to a large degree the long, laborious history of Western
culture’s departure from a certain Classical and Christian view of freedom that worked very
differently. And, of course, the ascendency of the language of ‘rights’ over other understandings
of social freedom. Which again, I’m not saying this is such a bad thing, I’m just saying that this is
where we are.

And in a society that really believes, that truly, honestly believes, that the highest good . .
. a culture that believes that this is the highest model of freedom must at some level subtly
advocate and embrace a very particular moral metaphysics. That is, that ultimately there really
is no value higher than choice. There is no transcendent ‘good’ ordering desire toward a higher
end. Desire should be free to propose, or seize, or accept or reject, to want or not want, but it
certainly shouldn’t necessarily be free to ‘obey’. That would be a kind of sedition. The highest
model of freedom we’re all likely to recognise I think at times is that of the good consumer. I
mean, we’re free to the degree that we can . . . you know, the number of different brands of
bread we can but. I can purchase fifty seven different brands of bread and therefore I am free –
and not in a trivial sense.

At the end of modernity this is where we stand. We are free to make ourselves what we
wish to be. If we were not free in that sense we would not be free at all.

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 Now, when I say that this is a break with an earlier understanding of freedom I mean
that in Classical terms, in pagan or Christian terms, up until a very identifiable point in modern
history, in early modern history (or late medieval history if you like), freedom was the ability to
flourish as the kind of being one was. Freedom was principally the ability to attain the
ontological good by which one’s nature would reach fulfilment. This could be human excellence.
This could be the contemplation of God. This could be charity. But freedom in this sense meant
that the movement of the will was posterior in importance, but also posterior effectively, to the
object of its intentions. It was something that was moved or wakened by a desire for some
proper τελος, some proper end that guided and determined it, and was only free to the degree
that it achieved that τελος. It was not free because it chose, it was free because it chose well. It
was free when it was not prevented from realising the good towards which its nature was
oriented, towards which our nature was oriented. To choose falsely, through ignorance or
maleficence or corrupted longing, would not be considered a manifestation of freedom. That
would just be slavery to the imperfect, the deficient, or the literally subhuman.

That antique understanding of freedom that . . . and I don’t want to be specific but this is
as true of Stoicism as of Platonic philosophies, Aristotelian, middle Platonic thought, late
Platonic thought, Christian thought in its patristic and medieval variants. There are no figures in
that tradition that you can point to who break with this rule so to speak. Whatever separates us
fgrom that end which fulfils our nature – even if it’s our own choices – is a form of bondage. We
are not free because we can choose, we are free if we choose well. And so I’m sorry to repeat it.

And to choose well we ever more clearly have to the good, the ‘Sun’ of the good to use
the platonic language. And yet, to see more clearly we must choose well. And the more we are
emancipated from illusion, the more our will is informed by the good, the more our perfect our
vision becomes, and the less there really is to choose. And the highest state of freedom would be
a state of freedom in which there’s no choice, because we’ve realised the perfect flourishing of
our nature in union with the First Good towards which we are united. Augustine, for instance,
said that the freedom from which we began in creation was the freedom not to sin but the
highest freedom of all would be the inability to sin – because the full, the true, the inherent
goodness of the human will and its desire for God would be so perfectly realised that it would
adhere to the good.

Or a great father that I prefer, actually, on these metaphysical issues – Maximus the
Confessor – said the same thing. That in us as finite beings, we have two motions of the will: one
is the natural motion of our will which can never be extinguished which is towards the good,
which is towards God. But by that motion is sets free all other motions of the will and the will

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also has what he calls a gnomic or a deliberative function. And to be truly free one’s gnomic will,
one’s ability to deliberate, has to be in perfect harmony with the nature that defines us.

Now, again, I’m not offering these definitions so that I can then begin to inveigh against
modernity. I mean, I’m quite happy to do that but that’s not my purpose. Because my real
question, because anyone can see where the limitations in the language of freedom either model
lie. That I prefer the older model simply has to do, perhaps, with confessional allegiances, but I
also like to think that there’s some degree of thought involved in that. But I’ll explain that later.

What principally I want to know, that question I asked is first, how it is that we moved
from one model of freedom to the other – why we did – and, is it the case that that other model
of freedom, if it is freedom as such, means that to be consistent in our understanding of what it
is to be free means that also have to be consistently nihilistic in our metaphysics. We have to . . .
can we be free in the modern sense until we have done what we must do and killed God?
Because, in the second view, this more modern view of freedom, Nature is a confining concept.
Nature – to speak of realising human nature – means that there is some sort of thing we ought to
be. To speak of the good, our natural desire for the ontological good, is to suggest that there is
an eternal standard and an eternal order to which our will has to correspond. If that’s contrary
to our understanding of freedom, then truly to be consistent in our belief in freedom as modern
persons must we, either implicitly but also explicitly I would think, do away with God, the good,
nature as such?

Let me point out, there’s a reason why there seems to be a question worth asking
because the truth of the history of freedom, the liberation of the will from the notion of a
transcendent order, some of us might think has been for the most part a happy history. A history
that set us free from antique prejudices, from confining social practices and all that. But it’s also,
I think we can agree, a history that has led to other things as well. Because if – this is true of the
will – if the will really is free to the degree that it determines itself, then it is not bound to a
notion of nature, if it is not bound to a prior eternal order of the good to which it’s called, there
is also no, there’s absolutely no rule and no way for predicting what the employment of that
freedom will be.

And there’s no reason why anyone should assume that the uses of freedom should be
confined simply to one’s individual self-realisation. It’s quite possible that someone might think
instead that perhaps now that we’ve seized this moment, now that we’ve experienced the
history of liberation and been set free from God and from the metaphysical presuppositions that
went along with that, it’s time now recreate humanity. To seize the future. To make the future
what we will.

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 Because, you know, why shouldn’t this be true? If the myth of the modern age is that
true freedom is the power of the will over nature – that is, the priority of will to nature, the
power to make ourselves what we are and that we are at liberty to do this – it also becomes
possible to think of this as a kind of imperative. And it’s perfectly logical that some – we’ve seen
this in the twentieth century – that some should think it a noble calling to reshape the clay of
humankind into something stronger and better and more rational and more efficient and more
perfect.

Now the ambition to refashion humanity in its very essence of social, political, economic
or moral-psychological was inconceivable when human beings were regarded as creatures. But
with the disappearance of the transcendent it becomes possible to will a human future
conformed to whatever ideals we choose to embrace. The sheer . . . and there is no way of
determining what those ideals should be. I mean, the sheer ruthlessness of much of post-
Christian idealism in some sense arises from the very same concept of freedom at the heart of
modern Western individualism and our very comfortable and wealthy liberalism. I mean, the
savagery of triumphant Jacobinism, classical socialist eugenics at the turn of the last century or
the Nazi movement, Stalinism – these were all the grand utopian projects of the modern age that
have spilled such oceans of human blood – are no less the result of the Enlightenment, of the
modern myth of liberation, than all the liberal democratic state and the capitalist culture we
enjoy. I think just to deny that is to blind ourselves to a very obvious reality.

But again, my question is how do we arrive at this point. That’s just my explanation of
why it’s a pertinent question. The most enchanting narrative about the end of metaphysics, or
the death of God, or the eclipse of the highest value that the modern age produced are those of
Nietzsche and Heidegger. They’re the ones, at least, that are the most haunting when you
encounter them. Nietzsche’s account is cruder in some ways. It’s also the more exhilarating. For
him, we have arrived at the age of nihilism, at the age in which there are no higher values, the
age in which the will has been set free for good or ill, principally as a result of a certain kind of
disease called Christianity which, through its otherworldliness and through its ethics of pity and
compassion, and through so many other things, robbed this world of its glory and imparted its
spiritual frailty to all of us.

It also, however (and this is where Nietzsche’s sort of interesting), it’s just the nature of
Christianity because of its pitiless hatred of the terrestrial world, as Nietzsche would see it, its
hatred of the flesh, its hatred of finite reality, conceives within itself this harsh and destructive,
ascetical desire for absolute truth. As I said at the beginning when we were talking about
Heidegger, Christianity always has within it this lust for mastering all of reality by seizing hold
of the ultimate principle. And as with Plato (at least in Heidegger’s narrative), that principle is

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all the more real, and all the more substantial, and all the more believable, the less it has to do
with this world – the more unlike reality it is, the more lifeless and dead it is. And this pitiless
desire for ultimate truth is, he believes, ultimately leads to a world devoid of the sacred, devoid
of the gods.

He says that this happens in two stages: first, Christianity does away with all the gods of
the nations by which peoples in the past asserted their vitality as peoples, asserted their
strength and their highest ideals, by concentrating the sacred in this one more or less
anonymous otherworldly essence – the absolute and infinite God – and then, Christian culture in
its ceaseless and pitiless pursuit of ultimate truth went so far as to discover that this God was a
myth and killed him in turn. And now the world has been deprived of all values.

Now, for Nietzsche this is both good and bad. I mean, he’s not someone who pines
nostalgically for the days of the gods of Greece. But for him it means that we are in a condition in
which the future is at once promising and threatening. It’s threatening in the sense that when
we’ve reached this stage and we have no transcendent aspirations anymore it is quite possible
that we will simply degenerate into a species of insects – accomplishing nothing great, doing
nothing worth remembering, simply living in a state of perpetual self-satisfaction.

The other possibility, of course, is that once we have discovered that transcendent
aspirations, desires for God, desires for an eternal order of truth are illusory and ultimately
destructive we can will a future, through the sheer exercise of the will we can will a future. For
him this willing of the future comes under the sign of the ‘Overman’, the Übermensch; that which
is beyond the human. Rather than longing for, desiring, orienting our lives toward the
transcendent God, we should now, through a long Western history of being disenchanted, the
only way we can recover from the nihilism of this sort of insect-like existence is through a
mighty exercise of the will. And the first thing that that requires is the re-valuation of all values
– most especially dispensing with the poison, the toxin of Christian compassion.

Now Heidegger, Heidegger is different. He, rather than seeing nihilism as Christianity’s
corruption . . . of course Nietzsche also placed part of the blame on Plato. Heidegger is very
much a disciple of Nietzsche in many respects. But Heidegger is more interesting. Simply
because, for him, Christianity is not this catastrophic event in Western history that precipitates
us towards nihilism. Rather, for him, this is just the pathology of all metaphysical thought as
such, all desire for the transcendent as such.

As I said at the beginning, for Heidegger, what Philosophy is . . . and for him that means
what culture is, because as far as he’s concerned philosophers are the ones who more or less
stand at the centre of culture. They don’t just express the culture around them, in some sense

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they are the culture of their times and it’s from reading – the old joke about Heidegger is that
the whole history of humanity for Heidegger consists in a hundred and five books written in
Greek, or German – and there’s some truth to that. Some of them were written in French but
those were the bad ones, and Latin.

Confronted by the mystery of the world in its ‘worlding’, unwilling simply to accept that
there are no names, there are no words, there are no concepts by which we can perfectly grasp
this, instead of standing back peacefully and piously as he believed certain of the oldest Greek
philosophers (as those who came before Socrates) did, and simply allow the world to show itself
to us as an event and to come to utterance in our poetry and in the artifact that we make,
Metaphysics initiates this history of trying to master reality.

But, every attempt is a failure – and a success. It’s a success because every attempt to
master reality, whether it’s Platonism, or Stoicism, or Christian metaphysics of the Greek
fathers, or later Latin medieval theology in its different forms, or modern metaphysics and the
death of metaphysics and the rebirth of metaphysics that happens between Descartes and Hegel
– or anything thereafter – any of those philosophies, all of those attempts to grasp the mystery
of being remind us of the mystery of being, they remind us that being is something other than
simply an object in our world. But it misconstrues them, every time. It tries to capture the
mystery of being by turning it into an artefact of reason, turning it into an object of the will. And
in some doing it both keeps us aware of the mystery – Philosophy always does that – it keeps us
aware of the mystery of being and at the same time blinds us to the mystery.

And so each of these regimes of thought, each of these styles of thought and the cultures
that attend them, rise and fall. But where they ultimately end for him in the history of the West
is, as I said, in the Age of Technology. Because we’ve now, for him, arrived at the period of
consummate risk. Christianity was the boldest metaphysical strategy of all, says Heidegger, the
attempt to ground all of being in a supreme Being and to make that supreme Being, Being itself.
God is, at once the supreme Being and the fullness of being. With the slow and progressive
collapse of the Christian synthesis we end up, now, in the age of what calls realised nihilism.

Now, I see a lot actually to recommend both these stories. But I just want to alter the
genealogy slightly. Nietzsche’s is too catastrophic. Nietzsche exaggerates the degree to which
Christianity is, or Christian metaphysics uniquely elevates – well, there’s a certain bad strain in
Greek thought as well but Christianity is uniquely destructive of the history of Western
metaphysics and leads ultimately to nihilism. Heidegger somewhat exaggerates, though, the
continuity of this tradition. And for reasons I’m not going to go into here because I’ve talked to
long . . . I would argue that in point of fact the Christian metaphysical tradition breaks – and I’m

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going to agree with Heidegger, yes, there is implicit in the whole metaphysical tradition of the
West something that naturally lead towards where we are now. But a lot of other things are
present in that tradition as well, and the uniquely Christian expression of this, I believe, for any
number of reasons, does not fit the model and in a sense was an interruption of this history.

But I have to say this: the sobering thing I think that anyone cognisant of the history of
Western thought has to acknowledge is that the special, at least intellectual forces, (I’m saying
nothing about cultural or economic conditions), but the intellectual forces that led us to our
modern understanding of freedom, and to either an implicit or an explicit nihilism, were
generated within Christian theology – that the history of Christian theology is directly
responsible, in some sense, for where we are now.

Now, again, this theology may have been shaped and formed by other things, by certain
cultural or economic realities of the late middle ages and early modernity, but nonetheless what
I’ve been calling nihilism does not consist in this event at some point in which suddenly a great
number of human beings decided to reject the Christian God. That’s not what happened. There
wasn’t just one day when suddenly we stopped believing or stopped behaving as if we believed.
Rather, the idea of the Christian God had already to some degree become nihilistic.

Throughout most of theological history, let me just reiterate, one said of God’s freedom
that it consists in the liberty of the divine nature from any limitation or constraint. This is
actually the definition that Augustine gives, that Gregory of Nyssa gives – that God can do no
evil. Precisely because he’s perfectly free. He cannot fail to be what he is: infinite goodness itself.
The ability to choose evil would be a defect in God, a limitation or distortion in his nature. Now,
for whatever reason, and wherever one wants to locate it, there arose first during the late
scholastic period a theological movement that incorporated. first of all, what we generally call
voluntarism. The idea that, if nothing else, it places an unprecedented emphasis upon God’s will,
his sovereign will, as being the first attribute, the highest attribute, the most primary attribute
in God – but will to the exclusion of nature, will as prior to nature, will as higher than nature.

There’s a history. The reason this happened, and there are certain scholastics – Henry of
Ghent and others – who are responding to a certain sort of heretical Islamic scholasticism that
had come through Spain, especially through the thought of Avicenna. But for whatever reason,
slowly the idea emerged that in order properly to assert God’s omnipotence; properly, piously
to pay due and reverential respect to God’s divinity, it was necessary to say that his will in some
sense was absolute as regards even good and evil. And this becomes quite explicit in a thinker
like William of Occam, a late scholastic, or Thomas Bradwardine, both of whom said that God
does not command that which is good, that which is good is good because God commands it.

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That is, his will is not obedient to his nature as God, his will does not follow from his divine
goodness, and the good that he requires of is not something with which we are by nature
continuous or necessarily leads to our union with God. Rather, the good, the divine law, is an
expression of the divine will and to say less than that and to suggest that God’s will could even
be constrained by God’s nature would be somehow to diminish the freedom of God.

This is a radically different notion of freedom, and it happens within Christian thought.
And by the period of early modernity in Western theology at least (by this point my Eastern
Orthodoxy allows me to claim no complicity with any of my theological forebears in this history)
it is simply the case that this is the God that we’re talking about even when the language that’s
being used seems to say otherwise.

I’m at a Dominican college this year. I don’t know how many of you may have heard of
the De Auxiliis controversy. This is an argument between in late 16 th century and early 17th
century, between Jesuits and Dominicans, the Molinists and the Banezian Thomists. They all
think that they’re interpreting Thomas Aquinas: that’s disputable. But what’s interesting if one
goes back to read these documents is that at some level all of them presume that the issue that
is most important in theology is to defend God’s absolute freedom from any constraint in the
employment of his will.2

One side, the Banezians, the Thomists, the Dominicans, the people who like burning
people as I like to call them. They still do I’ve discovered. They just don’t get as many
opportunities. I’ve met a few Dominicans this year who always keep a book of matches under
their robes in case the opportunity . . . certainly, they wouldn’t mind throwing the occasional
Eastern Orthodox on the grill.

Let me give you an example. The Banezian interpretation of Thomas, and it’s in keeping
with some of Thomas, but it’s a very limited reading, is firmly predestinarian. They knew that
from the earlier, in some sense the earlier Catholic tradition they had to say that God was not
the cause of evil and that God really does create free creatures. And yet, at the same time, by the
period of the late sixteenth century, it is impossible for them to say this coherently. Because the
way in which the Banezian tradition explains how God creates free people but nonetheless is
not challenged in his omnipotence over all creation is that he . . . permits evil but that his
permission of evil isn’t that he just lets it happen, he eternally permissible decrees evil. So that,
whatever sin you commit, God has eternally permissibly decreed infallibly that you will commit,
but it’s a permission – it’s not God forcing you (except that it is).

2
See Lawrence Feingold, “Sufficient and Efficacious Grace” Lecture 9

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 And whatever good you do, that too has been eternally decreed, and both actions are
actions that are only possible because God exercises something called a premotio physica upon
your will, that is, a physical premotion. He’s not just ‘the good’ calling you to himself, he is the
efficient physical force driving your will towards one and/or the other. And he has eternally
decreed what you . . . but you’re free. The reason you’re free – this kind of works (if you don’t
think about it, it works at least) – the reason you’re free (sorry to be making fun of Dominicans
but it’s become a habit this year) – the reason you’re free is because freedom is the logical
condition of whatever you do not having been conditioned by your prior, proximate cause. That
means, in the world of finite causes, OK, what you choose to do is not determined by what just
happened a moment ago. You’re still free. But, nonetheless, you will do what God forces you to
do by his pemotio physica but God, you see, isn’t working through the causes behind you, he’s
working from above. And so, and this is a phrase I’ve heard from a Thomist recently who’s in
this tradition and thinks it’s a grand tradition, that will is free because it is not causally
determined by any temporal sequence of events. It’s free because it’s eternally predetermined
to do what it does.

Alright. They have arguments that almost make this sound like it works, but they’re
actually very bad arguments. But why am I making an issue of this? It’s because we’ve arrives at
a point in Western history in which, and it’s no coincidence that this is also the time – the birth
of modern science was being made possible by the mechanical philosophy. For those of you who
don’t know what that means: in the vaguest, most general sense, it just means that rather than
in the old Aristotelian, classical, or Christian medieval sense, thinking in terms various kinds of
causality. A Final cause – the end towards which anything develops, and Formal cause – the
form that impresses itself, Material and Efficient . . . Everything has been just reduced to the idea
of an efficient cause. All of reality is understood principally in terms of that efficient force, that
power, that force that makes things happen.

And within this environment that only way that you can say that God is omnipotent is to
say that he acts as an absolutely, overwhelming, irresistible, efficient force that guides, that
determines everything that happens. Moreover, and this is the important thing in this tradition,
the Banezians were also fiercely insistent that God could have created any world he wanted –
nthere ios no reason that he created this world rather than another, because there are an
infinite number of possible worlds, all of them would be infinitely inferior to God so there’s no
best of all possible worlds – and he has from eternity determined and forced to come about,
through the use of this premotia physica, the salvation of a few and the damnation of most not
on the basis of anything inherent in the creature. Right. It’s ante praevisa meritans, it’s before
any foreknowledge he might have of the character or actions of the creature. He has determined

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this from eternity solely that his sovereignty might be displayed. That his power – Banez doesn’t
say ‘sovereignty’, he says ‘goodness’, and that goodness means to be displayed both in the mercy
of an unmerited redemption and in the eternal ferocity of a fully merited damnation. And you
need these orders of damnation and salvation for the full, glorious spectacle of God’s power to
be visible.

This is happening in Catholic Theology, it’s also happening in Protestant Theology. I

don’t need to tell you, I would think, that similar language is to be found in the Calvinist
tradition without the premotia physica but . . . and in the Lutheran tradition. This is the modern
Christian God in the West to a very real degree. Not for everyone.

It’s also the God that people have now heard about because of the printing press. You
know, throughout most of history, in the West as in the East, Christians have been semi-
pelagians. That is, they believe that everything comes from God but they have to do good world
to be saved. This is what most Christians have believed down the ages. There was no printing
press. Most medieval Christians, most ancient Christians were largely . . . especially medieval
Christians because the theological preaching was iffy throughout most of its history –
apparently from what we can deduce. In the age of the printing press, this God, the God who
seems first and foremost to be a God of sovereign will, a God who fits very well into the age of
the mechanical philosophy, this God gives us a model of what freedom is, and what freedom is,
is the spontaneous freedom of the will to decide and to do and to act.

And if that’s what freedom is for God then in some sense that’s what freedom must be
for us. It’s a natural process that over the years this image of divine freedom will migrate to the
human and become an image of human freedom. What is it to be free? It is the freedom of sheer
sovereignty: the sovereignty of the nation state, the sovereignty of the individual, the
sovereignty of the property owner, what have you. Sovereignty. Power of the will. Not
obedience to one’s nature, not desire for the good but, first and foremost, the unpremised
spontaneous employment of the power of the will. And if that’s what freedom is then God is the
ultimate rival to our freedom. God, rather than being the infinite source of the good that sets us
free (as he would be in the more antique notion of freedom), rather than God being that eternal
good that sets us free for itself, that gives us a nature and sets us free from our own ignorance
and vice and cruelty and violence, God is now just the biggest individual around. And he is our
enemy.

But not only does he give us the model of freedom. He is, and forgive me for putting this
so bluntly, he also happens to b evil. Because if that’s how predestination works, if it is this
causal force directly determining all things for the display of sovereignty, then he’s a God

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beyond good and evil. He is a God totally beyond good and evil. And to be beyond good and evil
is simply to be evil. And over the course of time we should one continue to believe in such a God.
Such a God should die. The death of God, the slow retreat of faith seems to me to be almost a
thing desirable by contrast.

You know, it seems like an odd place to be leading to but . . . I’m very nearly the end. You
might be very disappointed at this point. This is a bit where it’s going to sound really nasty ,
awful . . .

Heidegger, of whom I’ve often said very mixed things about – let’s put it that way . . . I’ve
been reading Heidegger for twenty years or more and I think that there are certain phrases in
Heidegger that I’ve listened to and I’ve said, ‘yeah, that’s kind of true.’ But I didn’t what to hear
them from Heidegger. Because, you know, he wasn’t a Christian, or at least he had been. He was
baptised, and he was buried as a Catholic. But he also wasn’t an atheist. He hated vulgar atheism
too. He just believed we were in an age when it was impossible to talk intelligently about God
because the idea of God had been so corrupted in being just pure causality, pure force, being just
the kind of God I’ve just ben describing to you.

He despaired over much of the ability to talk about God, but quite right in believing that
most of the language we use about God is inherently corrupted in the modern age. And he said,
one of the most famous – and it has often been lampooned (I’ve done it myself so I can’t . . . ) –
he’s talking about how modern philosophy from Descartes onward thinks of God just as sheer
causality to the point where God is defined as causa sui, self-causing, cause of himself, causa
efficiens, pure efficient causality. This is the God, he says, from whom all holiness and mystery
and transcendence has been stolen away. And he says . . . in this light of causality he is reduced
simply to cause . The cause is causa sui, and this is the right name for the God of Philosophy.

Zu diesem Gott [i. e. the God of metaphysics] kann der Mensch weder
beten, noch kann er ihm opfern. Vor der Causa sui kann der Mensch
weder aus Scheu ins Knie fallen, noch kann er vor diesem Gott
musizieren und tanzen. [Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god.
Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he
play music and dance before this god.] 3

3
Heidegger, Martin. Identität und Differenz. (Pfullingen: Verlag Gü nther Neske, 1957), pp. 64-65. Published in English
as Identity and Difference. Translated and with an Introduction by Joan Stambaugh. (New York: Harper & Row, 1969),
p.72

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 And maybe the godless thinking that must abandon this God is perhaps closer to the
truly divine God. Maybe, he says, this godless thinking is more open to him than ontotheologic –
that’s his name for metaphysics, but specifically from the period of Descartes onwards. He
doesn’t say actually that of medieval philosophy. Maybe it is freer, for him, more open for him,
freier fruhling(?) – it’s a very powerful line.

But I have to say - this is an odd place to draw to a close, but you asked me to explain
why I’m fascinated by him . . . This is not a brief for atheism but I will say this much: it’s sort of a
charitable understanding, a hope, charitably, to understand. I do think that the modern
understanding of freedom , which is the result of Theology at some level, is inherently nihilistic
– I think it must be. But, I also think that nihilism in the sense of rejection of belief of God has
happened in Western culture because of certain corruptions within Western culture so
destructive and so profoundly wrong that, in some sense, atheism is a preferable alternative.
And its possible that the West being for the most part being the only sort of religiously atheist
culture in development (in Western Europe especially – it actually turns out most Europeans
believe in God is some sense, but I mean just rejecting this history of Christian belief), that even
in that atheism there is a trace of a more original conscience. The atheism, so-called, of the early
Christians who rejected idolatries, who rejected gods of power, and gods of the nations, and
gods who were not worthy of worship.

And like Heidegger I don’t just want to sit around and see what God will show himself.
But I have to say, just as a charitable interpretation of this history and why I find this in one
dimension of this so fascinating, is that it may be that the charitable Christian approach to this
culture of nihilism that has been created by the failure of Christian civilisation and Christian
thought and Christian practice, should also be seen as a period in which, if it’s taken as a form of
asceticism, as a relinquishing of false understandings of God and false desire for the ‘God of
standards’ – that’as not enough. It could also be seen as the possibility of learning slowly again
to remember the God whom St Paul proclaimed as the enemy of the principalities and powers
and dominions and thrones, the enemy of unjust rule and . . .

I think I’ll stop there because I think I’ve gone way past the time I should.

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