A Roland Colonnade by David Bentley Hart

WHEN asked to write a column for a cats-protection charity’s monthly newsletter as from our cat, Episcopuss, I jumped at the chance. He turned out to have very decided opinions about what was going on locally, nationally, politically, and culturally, plus theological and spiritual insights communicated with the common touch possessed by a philosophical feline with his ears close to the ground.

Some time later, I discovered that Episcopuss had a canine equivalent. David Bentley Hart’s dog, Roland, was revealed by his two-leg to be even more intellectually savvy when they sat together musing on the mysteries of physics and metaphysics, science and psychology, religion and relationships.

Also, as with Episcopuss, Roland’s musings originally featured as regular contributions to a journal, collated into Hart’s wonderful Roland by Moonlight (Books, 25 June 2021). This latest collection has been added as a posthumous tribute to a family’s beloved companion, interlocutor, and guide.

An introduction explains how Roland became such a key contributor to Hart’s polymathic authorship, and a doda reflects on the loss of such a dearly loved friend. In between, a “colonnade”, i.e. a sequence of Roland’s columns, features his first six and his final seven conversations with his all-too-human friend.

First up is a trenchant assault on materialist accounts of consciousness, followed by a pithy demolition of Freudian psychology as a deterministic negation of free will. A deep dive into Eastern philosophy explores the possibility of life after death — and whether dogs qualify. Roland’s reflections on dreams, and “the secret soul” complete the set. Wisdom from the East is very much to the fore.

The second set of columns begins with Roland on causality: a teleological take on reality calculated to provoke Richard Dawkins to apoplexy. It concludes with one of Great Aloysius’s poems, which were such a feature of Roland by Moonlight.

Next comes his verdict on the internet — “Your society simply has no hope of surviving such a technology” — followed by a series of linked pieces on the intentionality of evolution, the nature of time, modernity and “the acceleration of experience” (time flies), and the principle of sufficient reason. Given the recent growth in books on analytic philosophy and theology (Church Times Books, passim), Roland’s verdict that it is “a way of avoiding thinking” is particularly challenging. He agrees with Hart that “the notion of God as a deliberating subject literally choosing among alternatives as a matter of preference is a silly and degrading way of thinking about God.”

He proceeds to reinforce the Thomist view that “reality’s existence cannot account for its existence, and so there must be an ontological cause that doesn’t fall within the series of purely contingent truths.” So God is necessary — and “not a thing among other things”.

There can be no doubt that Roland is a super-intelligent creature, and it is not easy to keep up with his train of thought, notwithstanding his interlocutor’s repeated requests for elucidation. But as he observes, rather smugly, “the simian brain works at a somewhat slower rate of rotation than does the canine!”

Meanwhile, it is reassuring to think that Roland and Episcopuss are now united in eternally gnawing away at mere humanity’s bones of contention.

The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.

A Roland Colonnade
David Bentley Hart
Angelico Press £27
(979-8-89280-129-4)
Church Times Bookshop £24.30