Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 341 crucial points some of the historical circumstances of its disclosure. For instance, we need to see such things as how a concern both for the transcendence of God and for human nature as an integral object of salvation come together in the Cappadocian rejection of Apollinarianism. Or again, we need to see how the Cappadocian distinction between hypostasis and nature, just by itself, was an open invitation to Nestorianism. It is this sort of analysis-in-history (which of course cannot be conveyed in any convincing form in a book review) that gives us to understand why the Church's doctrinal formulae had to be articulated as they were and why such articulation remains meaningful and true, and not an antecedently constructed "conceptual realist theory of common sense." Saying as much on behalf of historical-critical inquiry, which is also to be deployed in reading St. Thomas, is not by any means to endorse the twentiethcentury depreciation and even vilification of the Thomist commentatorial tradition undertaken by Gilson, Chenu, and de Lubac. There are likely rehabilitations to be made there, too, and such work is already apace. I think of Romanus Cessario and Lawrence Feingold. What I want to say is that we can have it all; we can have everything-the objectivity and stability of dogma, defended in metaphysical depth as it of course needs to be today; knowledge of the historical conditions of the manifestation and expression of dogmatic truth and so of the fatedness of its appearance; and appreciation of the traditions, both magisterial and theological, that have preserved and deepened our hold on dogma and the understanding of dogma. It's not just that we can have everything, however; today, we need to have everything. The remarks in the last half of this review are not meant to be critical of Nichols, but I hope are an example of the kind of engagement his book will provoke, since he has in every way shown himself to be once again "in the service of Catholic thought." Saint Meinrad Archabbey Saint Meinrad, Indiana GUY MANSINI, O.S.B. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. By DAVID BENTLEY HART. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 253. $28.00 (cloth). ISBN 9780300111903. In his Pensees, the seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal admonishes his readers to avoid any untoward atheist-bashing: "Pity the atheists who are searching. Aren't they unhappy enough already? Revile those who boast about it." In his latest book, Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart never mentions Pascal in his brilliant dissection and diagnosis of the atheist soul; but 342 BOOK REVIEWS the spirit of this great apologist for Christianity pervades Hart's brilliant tour de force, a sober and deeply pessimistic depiction of the dreariness infecting our post-Christian civilization. Like Pascal, Hart admires some enemies of Christianity, above all the pagan emperorJulian the Apostate (331-63), who was raised a Christian but abandoned the religion of his childhood and tried to restore paganism in the Roman empire; and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who also abandoned the Christianity of his childhood for a belief in a godless universe bereft of meaning. "Of all the emperors in the Constantinian line," says Hart, "Julian alone stands free of any suspicion of bad faith." And Nietzsche, whom Hart calls "the most prescient philosopher of nihilism," correctly foresaw a post-Christian world dominated by what he called the Last Men: a race of self-absorbed narcissists sunk in banality and self-congratulation. As Hart observes, Nietzsche was entirely accurate in his predictions: "Contemporary culture does after all seem to excel at depressing mediocrity and comfortable conventionality, egoistic precocity and mass idiocy." On the other side of the ledger, there are those braggart atheists whose books now crowd the bestseller lists. On them Hart is withering. Richard Dawkins, for example, concludes his most important book, The Blind Watchmaker, with this philosophical whopper: "Natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence." To which Hart deftly replies: "Even the simplest of things, and even the most basic of principles, must first of all be, and nothing within the universe of contingent things (not even the...