To someone for whom the twentieth-century philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Marion are unknown gods, reading D. B. Hart can be a bit daunting. My mother called it the intellectual equivalent of riding a seat-less mountain bike. Convinced as I am that there is every bit as much pleasure as there is pain in the travail through Hart's body of work (I make no such claim for the mountain-bike analogy), it is incumbent upon me to offer a helpful hint for the novice embarking on reading his work.
Hart is first and foremost an aesthete. In his estimation, the greatest crimes are those committed against art; ugliness and sin are (in his Platonic mind) categorically coterminous. For Hart, the profundity and gravitas of his subjects merit and are enhanced by the most elegant and particular language. His work may appear disjointedly grandiose and tedious, but it does serve his narrative and artistic end. Reading Hart is labor intensive to be sure, but a little mental gymnastics every now and then is good for us. (Consider the people who refuse to engage in them, such as reality-television personalities, and persevere!)
The Devil and Pierre Gernet is Hart's first published collection of short stories, though "stories" is a rather misleading term. In the "Author's Apologia," he confesses that they more appropriately fall within the category of "fiction of ideas" rather than "ripping good yarns." His intention isn't to write a resounding affirmation of the human experience, but rather to explore some of our common philosophical/theological ideas and examine the emotions and senses that inform the experiences that shape them.
"The Devil and Pierre Gernet" is the longest and most entertaining of the stories: a demon recounts to his human companion the romantic history and poetry of a French fin de siècle writer named Pierre Gernet as an example of one who almost attained (what the demon considers to be) a full realization of his humanity. "The House of Apollo" is historical fiction involving the young Roman Emperor Julian, who arrives in Antioch for the feast of Apollo to find the temple deserted. Antioch has become a cradle of "the Galilean superstition," and the Greeks have forsaken their patron (and his moral imperatives) for Christ and his gospel. The remaining hierophant of the temple has been assured of the futility of continued worship by the visions he's received of the gods' natural recession into eternity because of the incarnation of the one true God. "A Voice from the Emerald World" is a collection of a father's poignant reminiscences of his dead child, born from his solitary reflections in the garden where they played and from conversations with his detested colleague (a Dominican friar) on the fate of unbaptized children. "The Ivory Gate" is an exposition of the nature of dreams, told through the voice of a dying man who has never married, for love of the woman who has constantly visited him in his dreams since his youth. "The Other" is the
story of a sophisticated, learned dilettante yearning for companionship.
Although the stories bear no connection to one another, they are united in their singular beauty of depth and expression, the unparalleled elegance of Hart's prose, and their crystallization of some of the most poignant emotions born from the protagonists' confrontations with life's most difficult questions. What does it mean to be "alive"? If the moral imperatives of natural religion are universal in their affirmations and rejections, is the fate of their arbiters universal as well? How does one reconcile the beneficence of God (who will not spare his own Son for his people) with his justice, which will not permit the ubiquitous stain of rebellion in Adam's sons (even the smallest and most defenseless) in his presence? What is the nature of the world to which we are called’are our dreams its minor intrusions, the flashes of dawn's rays into the ever-darkening twilight? How can sensual experience continue to hold such sway over us when our yearning for intimate communion with kindred souls is ever present and its satiation never fully achieved?
For Hart, the primacy of these questions demands an elegance of style and precision of expression that is both exhilarating and infuriating (I was one-third of the way through the book before I caved in and bought the dictionary.com app for my iPhone). His prose is sui generis, incomparable in its beauty and unparalleled in form and diction. His characters (except the father in "A Voice from the Emerald World") are not likable, smacking of arrogant intellectual pretension and making gods of their bellies. But their experiences resound with our own, and we may be inclined to greater empathy as we see how even the most sublime philosophers are (in a very loose sense) speechless before the great mysteries of human life.
