I’ve just started reading David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. The purpose of this book is stated in the first chapter like this:

“…I also believe there are certain common forms of experience so fundamental to human rationality that, without them, we could not think or speak at all….All I want to do in the pages that follow is to attempt to explain, as lucidly as I can, how traditional understandings of God illuminate and are illuminated by those experiences.”

I heard Hart talking about his book on the Mars Hill Audio Journal, and it thrilled my philosopher’s soul. Because the man can be a little hard to follow when he’s speaking quickly and extemporaneously — and I am not a good auditory learner — I am even more delighted in the book.

I can’t wait to share one gem of a thought from the introduction:

“God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever.”